INSANE IS THE NEW NORMAL: POST TEN

Goddess of the Sierras

WAXWINGS IN SYCAMORES

     Near the bay window, I watched as the waxwings flitted in small flocks from sycamores on the easement to elderberry bushes overhanging the fence. Tails dipped in gold and wings splashed with red, the waxwings, voracious yet skittish, gorged on the berries and darted away at the slightest hint of trouble. The flocks had arrived over a week ago, yet I had not felt inspired to watch them for even a moment, before now. I had only made sure to park my new Prius in the driveway to avoid the rain of brownish purple droppings.
     Having just turned the big Five-O, I no longer felt compelled to pay attention. People and jobs and birds came and went, without the least concern for my heart, so I had decided to master the fine art of detachment, a necessity for any occultist or renegade, and I was practicing even then as I observed the waxwings, the flocks acting with a single mind, the individual birds like loosely joined cells of a larger organism. Then I gazed beyond my modest neighborhood to Clinton Ave., where cars flowed in herds.

Ithuriel's Spears

     When I turned to the front door, the memory of Rebecca’s suicide attempt jarred me again. She had sprawled, convulsing in the doorway and slightly drooling, while neighbors, several of whom I had never seen before, hovered over her. Rebecca’s boyfriend had beaten and kicked the door and screamed her name over and over just after 10:00 p.m., waking me from a light sleep, and then the boyfriend started bleating that she had taken some pills. Jack, their twenty year old neighbor from across the street, awkwardly shook my hand and assured me that Rebecca was going to be okay. “I love you guys. You know that. I’ve been trained as an EMT and I know she’s going to get through this. Your daughter’s going to be okay. I wouldn’t lie to you.” (He had been losing at "Beer Pong" all afternoon and evening.)
     I suddenly wondered if anyone had called 911, then dashed through the living room, searching frantically for the phone, racing back to my daughter’s room, where both house phones often ended up. Her bedroom door locked, I flung myself at the middle, the weakest part, which only cracked a little. “Where the hell is the phone?” I yelled hoarsely as I flew through the house, out the back door to enter her room from the outside. I found the phone on its stand and dashed down the hallway to discover that one of my neighbors had already called 911 on her cell phone, and my wife had also called on one of the house phones that she had found hidden in the couch cushions.
     Jack continued to reassure me, a little too effusively, until the ambulance arrived a few minutes later. The EMT took one look at my daughter and stated flatly, “Oh, yeah, this is what happens.” As the EMTs were loading Rebecca on a stretcher, someone asked me if she was depressed. “No,” was all I could reply, realizing how utterly insensitive and stupid that sounded the second after the word left my mouth. I made an effort to convince the small crowd that she had seemed fine, really, but nobody appeared to listen. The boyfriend sat on the sidewalk in a neighbor’s lawn chair with his head between his legs.

Three of Swords

     Then I dashed back to my bedroom to dress. It was the beginning of fall, and suspecting that we were going to be in the hospital all night, I struggled to find, deep in the closet, a long-sleeved shirt, but none of them fit comfortably. Flustered, I grabbed one and ran out to the ambulance as the EMTs were about to drive away. I asked if I could ride with her; one of the EMTs replied coldly that I could but that they would prefer that I didn’t.
     As if it were my fault. My daughter had not appeared to be the least bit suicidal, ever before in her twenty years. 
     When the receptionist finally allowed us to see her in the ICU, we found her on a stretcher bed in the hallway. One nurse, shifting on a blue, plastic chair, monitored three patients; one, a sixteen year old girl, was sleeping off booze and drugs, the other, an older man, was suffering pains in his chest and arm. Rebecca’s bed was tilted in the upright position. She leaned back, unable to articulate a word, her mouth and eyes wide open. She appeared cognizant of her surroundings, occasionally muttering and pointing down the hallway, but the nurse said she was probably dreaming with her eyes open, which I interpreted as a euphemism for “hallucinating.” 
     “Damn it,” I thought to myself as a waxwing managed to poop on my new car. Why had she tried to kill herself? No explanation would ever suffice. In the hospital, I had stood over her when it was my turn to be in the hallway with her, holding her hand, saying that she was going to be all right over and over, imagining all the negative energy draining out of her body, and her aura filling with light. Around three in the morning, Rebecca pulled me over and kissed me on the cheek with her wide-open mouth, and then she made a sweeping gesture with her hand and mumbled, “I love everything.”
     Several times a day for the past three weeks, I had experienced flashbacks of Rebecca convulsing in the doorway. Rebecca was “having problems” (nothing serious, that I could tell) with her boyfriend, and she worked the drive-through at KFC, but she had never seemed depressed, just uncommunicative, which my wife and I both had considered typical for a twenty-year-old trying to break away from her parents. Impulsive and unpredictable, Rebecca had never hesitated to resort to extreme measures when her emotions got the best of her, but, a suicide attempt, I suspected, was more than mere drama. A cry for help? The ultimate form of manipulation? I feared that we would never know for sure, or to be able to trust her again, in the most basic sense. Shivering, I suspected for a moment that I would never trust appearances of any kind ever again.
   She had run away from home her junior year in high school after ditching class every day for two weeks with her best friend. A promising student in the Gifted and Talented Program, Rebecca had just given up on school without any warning, except for the decrease in hard liquor in the pantry, which I had noticed the day before I figured out that she was ditching. The weekend she ran away, my wife and I followed her cell phone records on the internet, tracking her to her friend’s grandmother’s house, where Rebecca had apparently spent the afternoon. The grandmother explained that Rebecca had told them that she had run away because I had “opened her legs.” Without saying a word, my wife and I got in the car and drove to another friend’s house. Nobody answered the door, but I intuited that she was in the garage, so I banged on the garage door for ten minutes telling her to come out. When I got back in the car, I slumped over the steering wheel, exasperated and exhausted, sleepless for thirty-six hours. My wife wanted to go home to get some rest since there was no sign of her, but I was determined to stay. A few minutes later, Rebecca stumbled out through the back gate and sheepishly got in the car. She was in her pajamas, carrying a pillowcase full of her stuff.
 

Indian Pinks

   The boyfriend, ah, yes, the boyfriend: Thirty years old, out of a job, and apparently with no ambition ever to find one, he and Rebecca lived in the back room of the house. Despite all of Rebecca’s ambitions to improve their living situation, the boyfriend made only the most minimal efforts. He composed “beats” on a "Fantom" keyboard for his rapper friends, who gave him alcohol and weed but rarely paid him. According to Rebecca, he didn’t even care about the music; he just did it to make a few bucks now and then. My wife and I had given him four months to get a job or move out of the house. After he failed to find a job (half-heartedly looking now and then), he cut himself in the shower and ended up in the emergency room. Maybe Rebecca and her boyfriend were both people who, when pushed a little too much, would just give up, but I knew that, if her attempt was serious, there had to be more under the surface, and I knew it because of my own brush with suicide when I was seventeen. 
     I had the feeling that I was partially responsible, even though I had never done anything inappropriate and had never harmed her even when she was being incorrigible. I believed I had always had her best interests at heart even when I was being tough on her.
     I cringed, recalling a moment that had occurred over thirty years before, when I had opened the door for the policeman who would tell me that my father had died. I have never confessed before that I had not acted grief-stricken when the policeman broke the news. It was "their" fault for sending an authoritarian figure to inform people about a tragedy, I had told myself. Fear was the normal reaction to a police encounter, not warm, fuzzy feelings.
     Who could know some people are paid to step into a police uniform, ring the doorbell of a complete stranger, and announce that a person has died? Another failure of management: no one had told me that my dad was surf fishing at Morro Bay, which the policeman had announced as the place of death. My dad was only fifty-six years old and had never suffered a serious illness. I had just turned seventeen. Your father isn't supposed to die when you're seventeen.
     A tiny irony: Up until that moment I was convinced, despite everything, that I would get to know my father. So I said nothing to the policeman, who left no proof that my dad had died and no contact information, and I was almost sure the policeman had laughed a little under his breath while leaving, perhaps because I had not behaved like a normal person, or perhaps from relief that no one had made a scene.

Path 13

     The body at the funeral home pasty, doll-like. I felt guilty that I had experienced no desire to sit with it, or to express anything. The time the body was in the funeral home, however, first laid out in a suit and tie on a single bed, then in a casket, had been my time to grieve. The funeral was over in a flash. A few comfortless words, some out-of-tune music. My family was then whisked away in a limo before witnessing the lowering of the casket into the ground. I had never ridden in a limo before, facing backwards. 
     No one mentioned the funeral afterwards, as though it were a disgrace (maybe I was the disgrace), but I was all right, I remembered thinking, not dying like so many in the starvation holocaust raging on other continents (even though enough food could be produced for everyone). No one in my family had been taken out and shot or hacked to death or tortured or thrown in jail. No one that day had hit me or called me a faggot or singled me out for ridicule. I had attended each class and turned my work in on time.
     I had not talked to a single person that day, like so many other days since the funeral. When I had strolled across the quad to one of my classes, I had noticed a boy who might have once said hello. For a moment I had felt a surge of hope, believing that perhaps I could talk to another person for the first time in weeks, which might lead to an attempt at conversation and then possibly friendship (suddenly impossibly remote). We passed each other without a word, and I thought to myself as I was strolling by the flag pole that I was exuding poison from a horrific purple and black aura that some people, maybe everyone, could sense, possibly even see, but no one would mention. 
     I had thought most people were indifferent to suffering, but now I could see people must have a sixth sense that enabled them to immediately detect suffering in order to avoid it. Maybe my abandonment was not a cruel conspiracy but the result of a highly evolved survival instinct. I would now be for as long as I could foresee without the inner resources or the willingness to become connected to anyone, even if that were possible for any length of time.
     When I got home, the house felt empty again, but not, I remembered thinking, not empty of furniture, as if good furniture was all a family needed. The indifference to absence not my fault. My trophy meaningless, but still in its place. I should feel guilty that I didn't miss anyone--my mother at work until 5:00 p.m. or later, my brother who had just moved away. 
     I stepped into the empty, hot garage and sat down on a ladder and looked around, noticing a rope coiled on the shelf above me. I took the rope down and threw it over a high beam. Since I didn't know any knots except the square knot even though I had once been in the boy scouts, I stood on the ladder and carefully wrapped it around the beam six or seven times, unable to concentrate long enough even to make a knot.
     I sat back down, my shoulders slumping. My mother wouldn't be home for another hour, at least. I couldn't feel anything besides an inability to focus, an inability that I knew I would not be able to overcome in the near future even in the most ideal conditions. 

Fairy Lanterns

     The rope was almost touching the floor, just hanging there, impossible to explain. The existence of reincarnation would make the choice easier, I thought; it would amount to the snuffing of an insignificant incarnation that had become too stupid to bear. I recalled the time I had passed out on the lawn after suffering for many hours from an impossibly severe headache, so severe finally I thought I was dying. I had not risen above my body, experiencing bliss. I had experienced nothingness for however long I had remained unconscious. It could have easily been forever, which didn't mean anything. Nothingness was complete, so complete that there was nothing to recall, not time, not even nothingness.
     My father's ghost, if one existed, had never visited me. No spirit had come to me with comfort and advice. Everything, which was not much after all, apparently, could easily, quickly dissolve into oblivion. I felt nothing, which seemed all wrong since the universe was about to disappear. How strange that the entire universe could disappear, stranger still to think that I had that much control over the universe, and even stranger that I continued to feel nothing. If each conscious entity contains the universe, then the universe dies with each creature. How could the universe really exist if it vanishes after the last conscious entity dies?
     I was not making the kind of sense that my mother or brother or any former friend would understand. Enough. I felt so angry that I stood on the ladder and wrapped the rope around my neck three times, which might just be enough, not that I really wanted to be sure. I hoped that I wasn't going to get this right either, another indication that I would just remain a loser.
     You should make one last try to think of something good, something that might make you want to stay alive, I thought, but could only remember playing water polo at school a few days before. A huge jock, who coincidentally was in my poetry class, had unexpectedly punched me in the face, claiming that I had grabbed his balls in a struggle over the water polo ball.
     "Did you grab his balls?" the coach bellowed.
     "No, I didn't," I replied, surprised at the slight, almost effeminate whine in my voice.
     The coach looked away, whispered to another coach, and then stood silently gazing at me. The bell rang.
     The next day, as I was walking into the gym to dress out, I suddenly realized that I was seven feet behind the jock who had punched me out, so I slowed way down. Another kid, who might not have been aware that I was nearby, called to the jock, "Hey, man, I heard you punched out one of those little faggots yesterday!" and gave the jock a high five.
     I stopped dead in my tracks and then sat down on the bench outside, unable to believe that anyone at school could know. Could my friend have told anyone? Could my parents or my brother have told anyone? My father as a joke had once brought out to show the neighbors my paintings of nudes. The neighbors had laughed at them and when they finally started talking about something else, my father had given me a disgusted look.

One Pestle

     My brother had been present at the discussion, re: Me caught naked with Charles. My father had asked if I was just experimenting. After all, my father remembered being on the farm when he was young and doing things with animals. I had beforehand broken into some vodka my father kept in the garage and couldn't keep from laughing, which I bitterly regretted. My brother could have told his friends, and they could have told their friends, etc.
     My father died a week later. Another irony of fate. Charles contacted me by phone the day after my father died, unaware of the circumstances. Charles asked if I could talk and said the worst was when the campus cops put them into different rooms and one of the phone lines lit up. I was silent. I couldn't help remembering at that moment how I had been unable to find my clothes when knuckles rapped on the fogged-over window of the pickup and then a circle of light moved across the glass. A voice commanded, "Get out of the truck, now. This is the campus police." I had had the most difficult time in the dark finding my clothes and putting them on. The second worst thing: a cop proselytized us. I couldn't move from the office chair by the desk and only stared blankly at the cop, who said that he had seen many people like me who had ended up having terrible things happen to them.
     I broke the news about my father when Charles had stopped talking on the phone for a moment. After a long pause, Charles said, "I better go." I had not heard from Charles again.
     I stepped off the ladder and dangled a few seconds before I felt that I was losing consciousness. I touched a rung of the ladder with my toe, found it briefly, and allowed myself to continue dangling, closing my eyes, surprised that I felt so little pain. Suddenly, I felt a force as if someone were pushing me up, back toward the ladder, and I placed my foot on the bottom rung. As I was unwrapping the rope, I doubted my choice because of an absurd and totally overwhelming urge to jack-off. I gazed out the window to make sure no one was watching.
     The waxwings snapped me back to the present. I could relax the rest of the evening, sipping wine in front of the television, after my ritual. Subbing for a "Fast Track" teacher at a middle school, though, had caused more than a little fatigue. In remedial classes, the vast majority of students were invariably hostile to authority, due, in part, to repeated failures. Even though I ruled with a heavy authoritarian hand in such cases, the students still found ways to undermine and abuse me. I knew all the right threats to keep them quiet, on the whole, but I had to pick my battles with the hard-core incorrigibles. In one class period, a student repeatedly pretended to cough to mask muttered obscenities while another quietly tapped beats on a desk top. In another, a student who sat in the back of the class made crazy hand gestures, all period, some of which were undoubtedly obscene. I turned my back for only a second after the bell rang and felt a sharp pain between my shoulder blades, a pink eraser suddenly hopping around on the floor. I had, nevertheless, managed to survive the day without sending one student to the office. 

     After performing the supreme invoking ritual of the pentagram

Path 14

and the middle pillar exercise, I invoked Isis, Thoth, and Osiris, their combined energies making my body tingle as I stretched out on the bed and slipped into a profound silence. In that timeless trance, I envisioned a golden, equal-armed cross floating in a deep-blue sky, a golden, truncated pyramid appearing beneath it, the cross suddenly surrounded by a bright circle of light. I usually feel nothing at first when I envision archetypal symbols (the feelings grow over time). I cleansed myself mentally with light, got up from the bed, and performed the lesser banishing ritual of the pentagram.
     I sighed, realizing that the only way to be truly free of something was to stop resisting it, to detach from any desire for specific outcomes. Through my spiritual practices, I was beginning to achieve a state of radical innocence, free of attachment and desire. I responded to the phenomenal world from the perspective of my soul; status, power, and money meant almost nothing to me anymore. I had exalted my consciousness beyond my ego to higher mental and spiritual states. The perfect soul, Osiris, had been murdered by Set and resurrected by Isis and Thoth so that now I lived as Horus, the falcon-headed, viewing the world from my higher self. I had become even more isolated, however, since the majority of people, it seemed, had little concern for the soul.
     Taking a sip of wine, I remembered driving by a vineyard recently on my way to work and feeling something that I could not put my finger on. Vines were glowing in the sun, swaying slightly in the breeze, and I suddenly knew the feeling: love. I loved the vineyards and the orchards even though the rich owned them all. I loved them because over the years I had connected with the Goddess, my heart chakra open to the vast, intelligent energy of the living cosmos. Social programming, responsible for the creation of the conditioned self, separated individuals from the Source and warped the life force. Without clearing the aura of negative energies on all levels to experience without distortion the most dynamic, powerful, creative force in the universe, people would continue to twist and pervert that force until the entire planet was destroyed.

Ithuriel's Spears, Lupine, Poppies

      On days like this, I had to force myself to perform the ritual, but I cleaned the ashes from the black tablecloth with a damp paper towel, lit the white candle and the stick of sandalwood incense with a long, wooden match, and pressed the play button on the boom box. The first notes of a Celtic version of "Awesome God" drifted through the room, and my consciousness immediately altered as I performed the Kabalistic Cross and imagined two pillars in the east, one black, one white, with the sun rising between them.
     I closed my eyes and slipped again into a timeless state, my whole being flooded with light. I silently scanned my aura and noticed blackness in my heart chakra, so I mentally drained the negative energy out through a hole in my back. Then I was filled with the most intense white light, and I became only a filament of light myself, the events of my past far away, like stories that I told myself over and over long ago. I was clean. Suddenly I envisioned the artificial elemental that I had created to take me on astral journeys: a fairy woman in a chariot pulled by two griffons, one black, the other light brown. Curious, I thought for a moment. Then I remembered that the elemental I had created was based on the archetype found in the tarot card “The Chariot,” a path on the Tree of Life.

Path 18

     In the chariot pulled by griffons the elemental and I ascended to a dark, raging sea, empty of time. I suddenly envisioned a Tarot card entitled “The Vision of Sorrow,” the Three of Swords. Three swords impaled a strong, red heart, which floated among torn storm-clouds. The heart, strangely, wasn’t bleeding even though all three swords went through and through, one sword straight down, the other two crossing. We were in a spiritual sphere called Binah by the Qabalists, the "sphere" on the Tree of Life which is the root of form, known as the Heavenly Mother, the realm of the Celestial Goddess, the feminine side of the Universal Mind. All form emanated from Her, and that is why I encountered the vision of sorrow: all form was transient; all form must die within a universe constantly renewing itself. The image of the heart in its simplicity was beautiful, and I realized that sometimes the greatest growth and understanding and beauty came from suffering, the suffering and sacrifice which is at the heart of the mystery of life. Then I envisioned the Three of Cups, which showed three women dancing together with raised, golden cups, three muses of the inspired life. Without suffering, there would not be inspiration and beauty, my vision seemed to be saying; without the destruction of form, regeneration could not occur. Suddenly I imagined myself with head of a falcon, one eye the sun, the other the moon. I could not change the past nor anyone else, no matter how much they were suffering, only myself in the present, but the mature response was compassion, no matter how irrational and destructive the behavior, since everything was connected at the most fundamental levels, compassion even for the people who try to destroy you, purposely or through rejection and indifference. Move from sorrow to compassion one degree at a time, if necessary, I thought.

Three of Cups

     I stood up and looked out the bay window at the sycamores on the easement, where the waxwings again were flitting to and fro. Sitting on the curb, a woman was smoking a cigarette. Ten years ago, after we had moved into the house, I had encountered the woman crossing the street as I was driving to the store. Thinking that she might be a neighbor, I smiled and waved at her, and she, overjoyed, smiled and waved back. As weeks passed, I realized that she must be homeless, haunting the neighborhood meth houses, one of which, I learned, had been across the street, several houses down. The meth dealers had moved away after an explosion and fire a few years ago, but the homeless woman returned now and then, sitting on the curb, rocking back and forth. I sighed. Even though I knew how to drain the negative energy from myself, I couldn’t help her. She would resent me or think me crazy if I even tried to show her how to cleanse herself spiritually. I would never know or understand the troubles she had experienced, just as she would never truly understand mine. I would probably never truly understand anyone else’s troubles for that matter. As I began pulling the curtain by hand across the bay window, the flock of waxwings exploded from the tree above the woman, rushing toward the sycamores across the street.