malkah ascends the chariot

Someone called Malkah a mystic the other day. But I don't think so. Just because she romps around with letters of the Hebrew aleph-bet... Just because she's more comfortable in the cosmic... Just because she can't hold a pshat conversation, even about a movie like say Little Shop of Horrors (or a TV series like BSG)... Just because she sees people acting out letters of the Tetragrammaton and taking them on as archetypes... All that and more does not a mystic make.

Malkah once asked her mother, Mrs Tzaddik, what she had wanted for her when she grew up. It was a question Malkah had just never thought to ask before, but now was curious as hell. Ask it now or never. Mrs Tzaddik was not going to be long for this world.

"How could I have wanted anything for you?" Mrs Tzaddik told her, voice raised in operatic frenzy.  "You took drugs in the '60s!"

Ah. And there it was. No achievement was ever going to be good enough for Mrs Tzaddik, was it? Malkah took drugs in the '60s.  And actually, thereafter as well.

Malkah was calm about Mrs Tzaddik's outburst. As she was calm about just about everything. Equanimity was her primary practice.

She said, "Ma, everyone took drugs in the '60s." It was just a fact.

But Mrs Tzaddik was too steamed up in the tragedy of her own disappointment to hear it. And she didn't like facts.

I want to say "what happened in the '60s stays in the '60s" but you and I both know that's just not true. Berkeley in the '60s, and San Francisco in those days engaged a generation to see beyond the veil. And this was not just about pretty colors on the wall, or politics, or what the music really means. Malkah and her generation weren't just lying around reading Carlos Castaneda all day. They were also reading folks like Thomas Kuhn. The '60s were paradigm-shattering.

Now Malkah had been raised on storybook tales of how the Hebrew letters searched desperately for the Queen of Heaven, aka the Sabbath Bride, aka the Shekhinah, who had disappeared from the world. The letters were alive in those books when she was a child. And that didn't change. It was pure animism. She was raised with a living alphabet. Hebrew at her school was in the morning—vibrant, exciting, and alive. English was in the afternoons—dead as a door nail, just making words and nothing more. The English letters didn't run off trying to bring the Shekhinah back to Earth so that the world could be healed. They told baseball scores.

Something much later led her back to the tales of her childhood. The tales her father had told her. She needed to rethink them. Malkah discovered that these were no mere children's stories made up by imaginative children's authors. Instead, they were rooted in baudy ancient stories and serious medieval texts about the birth of God and the emergence of pre-biblical Creations. In other words, they were 'raw data,' and 'primary sources.'

And what those tales did was make Durkheim extremely dull. Durkheim, yes. But not Weber. Weber was all about charismatic figures rather than statistics.

Don't get me wrong.  LSD did not make Malkah religious or anything. God forbid. No. It just made her a better academic. It made her take those mystical texts seriously—as treatises on the miracles of grammar, ancient languages, and the formation of words.

Malkah became a better academic. She had fun with the material. And then she got out there and made something of herself. And Mrs Tzaddik was confused. Proud (sometimes), but grudgingly so. You can't possibly do well if you took drugs in the '60s.  Right?

So. On this election day, my vote's for Malkah's-no-mystic. She's just a product of her times. She seeks the whole above the particular. She privileges ancient tales over current events. And she loves the letters of the aleph-bet because they're still opening doors to the mysteries of Creation.

Along with Scientific American.

zipping through the life cycle — a sufi parable

Nothing like your firstborn's wedding to put the reality principle front and center, life cycle-wise. Ten seconds ago I was giving birth. Ten seconds from now I'll be under a pile of dirt, or small particles blowing in the wind. Pop! We appear. Poof! We're gone. This, says Tylor (that would be Sir Edward) is why human folk invented religion. We can handle the pop! a tad better than we can handle the poof! We won't accept exiting the stage... It's not just an American thing.

There's an old Sufi tale about a young man praying to God.

"Allah!" he calls out, what is next?" he implores. "I see my youth, but what is to become of me?"

I'm paraphrasing, of course.

There is a rope, not just any rope, but the rope of life. And Allah gives him the next bit, and he examines his next moment. He's older now, with small children of his own. His work is not unexpected. Okay, got it, he thinks. Now I know this moment, but what's the next?

"Allah!" he calls out again. "Take pity on me. I must know what comes next!"

And Allah, the Compassionate, feeds out the next bit of rope. And the man now has labored some years. He's gotten quite good at his trade. His children thrive, perhaps. He cannot see. And so, he asks the Compassionate One once again. And once again, Allah feeds him a bit more of the rope of life.

And now he is mature, at least in the chronological sense, if not in his heart, for he still has not understood the consequences of his own unreasonable demands.

And he pleads with the Almighty for the next, and the next and the next. And Allah the Compassionate, feeds out the rope again and again.

And he reaches at last, the end of the rope and it is frayed, and he himself is ancient and hobbled, and suffering the pain of his very last days.

"More rope!" he calls out to Allah, the Merciful One.

But there is no more rope.

And he finds that he has gone through his rope in the blink of an eye. And used up his life not in living but in seeking the next moment. And his life has passed him by in a flash.

Poof! He is gone.

And I think of this tale all the time. And tell myself, slow down! And for the most part, life is mundane enough to feel slow. And I can spend time in my spot on the rope without moving. And I can see the intricacy of the woven strands that comprise the larger umbilicus that binds me along that supernal time-line. And I use words like 'supernal' and 'bind' and 'umbilicus' to describe my piece of rope. And I attempt to wax lyrical, and fail. Attempt not to move along the trajectory of the rope at all, but stay, stay put right here in this spot. Examine it. Savor it!

And the years pass, and I live them. And they're good. And the body aches a little here and there. It expands more than it contracts. It fatigues a bit faster. It sags, it stoops, it just plain hurts.

And the joy comes in smaller and smaller packets. The smell of the soil. The eyes of a wolf. The purr. The wind. A really good sentence on a paper I have to grade.

And I've slowed time. I've asked for no more rope. I'll hang out right here, thank you very much. This moment — every moment — is this lovely gift.

And the children are little. And I do for them. Because the rope is so short!

And the children are growing. And I do for them. Because the rope is so short!

And the children are grown. And I do for them. Because the rope is so short!

And what does the eldest child go off and do? Ah! He's let out the rope a little bit more. Time has ceased to stop.

Synchronicity.

The Compassionate One allowed me to savor the rope, and I held on to that lovely spot with all my might. And then the rope is suddenly yanked. All at once. Death of a parent. The caring for another parent. Marriage of a son. Retirement (of sorts). New status. New roles.

A new spot on the rope. And I hang on to savor it.

I think my way is just as wrong as the man who zipped right through the whole of his life in the blink of an eye. For what I want is to stay put at each stage — any stage at all — and just taste it, and smell it. And hold on.

And it doesn't work that way, does it?

So does the rope pass smoothly through our fingers? Or in fits and starts? Or are there many ways to pass through that rope? Or is the image completely wrong? Too linear. Maybe our lives aren't like rope at all. Maybe they're dendritic charts. The roots of trees. Grains of sand upon the shore. Sunrise, sunset. Mythical time that just stands still in mythical space.

I never liked linear imagery much. Maybe just let go the rope, and drift, or float. The Little Prince comes to mind at once. He refuses the rope. He rises in the end. Or does he die? Nonlinear space, nonlinear time.

Tylor said we invented 'souls' this way, in our need to make sense of 'it' all. An animate universe, we never have to exit. No rope. Nothing but eternity ... to savor.

fritz wasser and the magic stroke

This is how I remember him: He was very very tall and angular. His zygomatic stuck out sharp enough to hurt somebody. I think of him with blue blue eyes. He was skinny, with skinny clothes, pencil-thin pants, and he wore a sear-sucker jacket. He had a short short flat top of fine brown hair. Everything was very very. His sports car was an angular little convertible. I want to say it was a Mercedes, but it wasn't, was it? For all the sharpness of the angles I remember, my memory actually sucks.

I want to say it was 1962, but it wasn't. Maybe 1960. At the most, 1961. I was in Junior High School. In, of all places on the planet Earth, Oakland, California. A very scary place called McChesney Junior High. Where girls got into fights before or after school, wearing their blue gym clothes backwards so the snaps wouldn't just rip open with the first grab and throw. Where the blonde school bully wore razor blades in her hair. Girl fights were notorious for hair grabbing. But no one was gonna grab hers. I'm actually still scared of her. I can tell: I remember her name.

I don't know how I ended up in that little hellhole of a universe. There was the torment of the girl fights, and the fainting lessons in the girls' bathrooms, the slam-books, and sadistic teachers. The words lurid and leering come to mind when I think about that place. There were some truly terrible teachers there. But the kids didn't make it easy, either. At the end of the school year, there was the annual 'race riot' — that's what the kids called it. It took place, as most of the fights did at the time, in the parking lot of Temple Beth Jacob, a block or two away. And who won the annual race riot depended on which side the "Mexicans" took. It was all very friendly, as I recall, with no real animosity, just another excuse to fight. Welcome to Oakland.

Into all this came Mr. Fritz Wasser.

I mean, how the hell did he end up there? What was he doing there? With his perfectly scraped angular chin, and his perfect little sports car? He could have been anywhere, couldn't he? How the hell did he end up there? I never really asked that question before. I wish I could ask it in earnest. Track him down, and say, why?

Fritz Wasser was the new art teacher. And he introduced us to different mediums (not media) that I don't remember at all. All I remember was watercolor.

Watercolor is a very very difficult medium. It takes tremendous control with the brush, attention to just how much liquid there is on the brush, just exactly how the colors are mixed, and how not to wreck your watercolor paper by waterlogging it. Mr. Wasser explained and demonstrated how fickle was the art of watercolor, and just how much control it took. It was a lesson in focused attention.

I looked down at my white white paper, dipped my brush first in the water (carefully wiping off the excess) and then in a few colors together. I made a stroke on the page. And another. And another. Repeat the process.

And she emerged.

I had no idea what I was doing. But there she was, in three-quarter view. She had long, wavy tangled dark hair writhing like snakes. Alabaster skin, and a faint blush on her cheek. I gasped.

Mr. Wasser walked over to my table and looked down at my paper. He said nothing, but he took my brush, dipped it deftly into god only knows what substance, and drew one stroke on my painting — and bam, she came to life! She was fully fully animate, and I fell head over heels in love. She was perfect. and I never forgot her. And I often wondered what happened to that Junior High piece of paper that washed away the violence of my school. Where had she disappeared to?

* * * * *

It was a dark night, but with the pale moon shining through her window. She had been ill and needed her sleep, and I knew I needed to be very still. Me, and my insomnia. And so I sat up quietly, and just watched the shadows in the room filter through her lace curtains. I was on the inside, trapped there on this shelf of a bed. If I got up I'd have to climb over her, I'd wake her, and she had been ill... And so I sat there, and stared into the night.

And there she was, lying next to me — my painting, all come to life. That same Medusa hair, same nose, same blush upon her cheek. For all I know, she had a fever. For all I know, I didn't see color at all in the moonlight. It wasn't the first vision I had, looking into her face. And it wasn't the last, either. But I do know that that night my watercolor returned in full blush and brush stroke.

I had fallen in love with her first time round just about exactly when she was getting herself born. Sometime in those months, this beautiful creature came into the world — and I was already smitten with her image.

My mom remembers it differently. She says that her birth exactly coincides with my infant sister's death. And that that's why I love her. For if my sister had lived and grown and thrived, Tina is exactly what my mother would have expected. A Medusa beauty, who could sing, and paint, and think and reason. As smart as a whip, with a wicked lip. A Capricorn. A Caprican. A stickler for details and for delight.

It's not like I can say I dreamed her up. Or conjured her. Or drew her. Oh wait, that last one I can indeed claim. I did, I drew her in all senses of the word. And as I drew her, I was drawn.

But it was Mr. Wasser brought her to life.

And that's what made me decide not to be an artist. Because that genius stroke of his animistic brush was something I knew I could never achieve. No painting I ever made since came to life the way she did. I knew I'd never have that magic stroke.

Instead, I created the old fashioned way: I procreated. And what beauties I brought forth! But that doesn't make me an artist.

Or does it?

I've made my son. I've made my daughter. And when I was a child, my watercolor.

Seeing you last night brought it all back. And so, I throw into the universe (wherever he might be), belated thanks to Mr. Fritz Wasser and to the art he helped me see.