Waking Down into Singularity

This morning, waking up in a strange bed, I had twe thoughts right after my eyes opened. The first was the realization that when I have been sharing my pain with Nancy, a little part of me has been wanting to punish her with it.
"Here, look what you've done, you short-sighted pretender! Suffer along with me, you deserve it."

Along with that realization came the certainty that it has to stop. It's not fair to Nancy, of course. But it's also untrue to me. If I use my pain to punish her, I'm not really feeling it. In fact, I'm diluting and perverting my experience. That's not who I am.

My second thought was that I couldn't remember if that was hypnogogic or hypnopompic. I think it's
-pompic.

My third thought is that there's something key-like here. If I'm angry with her, I will tell her. When it hurts, I'll tell her. But I can't heal if I don't own the whole damn ugly stinking thing. And my goal is to come out of this a whole man. I can almost see that state of being, even from here. It's in the distance, and I can see it.

I still feel why Nancy thinks she has to leave and I want her to have the man she wants, the relationship she wants. I'm also still not ready to say that her decision was good: (visual words come to mind-short-sighted, blind, myopic.)

Whatever goodness her decision might have for her, it's only a disaster for me if I don't take it on with my strength instead of with the weakling move of punishing her with my pain. I have what it takes to get through this in a way that will make me like myself, and that starts now.

We Both Feel Sad

So, I've been demoted.

A few weeks ago, I was a partner. Now, I'm a friend.

I haven't exactly been kicked out, but I've been shown the open door. Everything is in halves: maybe we'll make love sometimes, maybe we won't. What does it mean to be a friend when you're in love?
It means trying to cherish your beloveds distance from you. It means having an acre of love and a tabletop to put it on.

Tonight, we're not sleeping together for the first time in a long time. Nancy calls and says she's sad.
I'm sad too, but it's not the same sad. She's doing something that needs to be done and she's sad because she knows it hurts me and because she's going to miss the goodness between us. I'm sad because I think this is a waste and waste is ugly. I hate wasting beauty, I hate wasting goodness.

I want her to have what she wants to have. I do. And so, I'll do all the right things, take myself out the open door, not hang around or act as if I had some right to be near her. I'll protect my heart, I'll cry, but I won't burst in.

I'll even try to be a friend. I will, and I can't imagine what will happen on the day she tells me there's another man. I should probably arm myself: go online, be charming. But I think it would be another waste.
I'll take the opportunity to feel the pain of this. I'll medicate judiciously: creativity and good food, maybe some art and music. But mostly I'll just feel the pain and see what comes of it.

The bright side? You mean there's a bright side? Well, maybe. I've been wanting to do some deep diving into my self. I don't want to do it for someone else and I don't want it to be too closely supervised by my lover. This needs to be me alone doing the work with a therapist, or two therapists and a guru and a counselor and a facilitator and maybe even a personal trainer. In a certain world, it would be a good thing that nancy dumped me. I just don't happen to live in that world yet.

It's not the booby prize-being able to do this growth work now, but I wish...oh, you can guess what i wish.
---

The worst part is going to bed. I could play with the pain downstairs, but I dread getting into bed.
So I've medicated by staying up-watching youtube videos- now I am drunk with fatigue.

I used to Drink and Now I Don't

The end of my love affair with wine and beer wasn't terribly dramatic. The diagnosis wasn't pointing toward doom, it was pointing toward discomfort. The best cure? Take antacids and stop drinking coffee, wine and beer.

I tapered off. Wine wasn't much fun since my bout with throat cancer so I was only saying goodbye to beer. I ran through my stock at about one-quarter my usual rate. I have beer twice a week now, just one. I drink it with dinner and I drink it with reverence for the sheer generosity of the taste of it.

The first few days were weird. Kind of like when your dog dies or your best friend moves to California. All the usual beer times were empty-nothing to do. My friend the buzz was gone too. I felt sad in a low-key way and I stared at my water glass at dinner as if it were a cruel joke.
Then I got used to it. I made up the calories with ice cream and I contracted my diet away from the things that called for beer. In a few weeks it became the new normal and then something odd happened.

Some underground well of energy got tapped. It came out in the form of picture-making. I was seized by passions for making collages, drawings, illustrations of things that nobody had asked me to illustrate. My hard drive became cluttered, my computer slowed down. Files built up, sometimes two a day.
The same flood that brought the pictures carried off some diffidence that had characterized my relationship to my work. I started sending stuff out: pictures, poems, requests for reviews. And the universe, as my sweetheart says, seems to be answering my call.
Since I stopped drinking beer, I've had a book published, lined up two exhibits, gotten hungry and more curious about my world. Life is OK, sometimes it's good and occasionally it's filled with love and greatness.
---

And something's lost. To pretend that there's no loss would be to imagine that everything I learned and did was just medicine. In fact, wine and beer put me in contact with the truth about civilization, with some vaultingly beautiful tastes and with some very interesting people.
I hope to hold the loss as both real and surmountable. I plan to tell the truth about it. Finally,
if my experience and my truth can stimulate someone to a larger vision of themselves and the world,
I'll drink to that.

I Used to Drink

I have a life long romance with wine and maybe a half-life love affair with beer. My uncle Alex Anguert introduced me to French wine when I was ten or eleven. He also taught me to play chess and be kind to ladies. He and I were the only wine-lovers in our family and I can't say when the sense of being bigger than the stifling little life we had left off and my raw admiration for the taste of wine began.

I didn't have a sweet tooth, ever. As a six-year old, I loved raw rhubarb, and I drank strong tea. I loved big, earthy tastes and fat creamy ones. The crisp fat on a skillet-cooked lamb chop, grilled mushrooms, well-cooked bacon baked in custard with lots of black pepper and stinky cheese were my childhood treats.

So I was over Manischevitz and into scratchy Bordeaux by the time of becoming a bar-mitzvah. I liked the smell of smoked fish and smoky whisky. And I liked the way my different preferences made me feel: they made me feel special, they set me apart.
There was more. My sense of taste was a private, walled-off place where the grown-ups couldn't get me. Their truth didn't matter in there, I knew what I knew.
--
Now, in another person's narrative, this would be the place where the foundation of meaning in my life begins. I'd start a career in the kitchen, I'd open my first restaurant when I'm 15, leave home a year later and apprentice myself to André Soltner. It would be the beginning of the Gourmet Hero Journey. But that's not how it went.

In fact, my love of wine led me to a wonderful side-effect: the buzz. It's funny how we try to diminish the meaning of the effect of a glass or two with a simple little almost onamotopoeic word: buzz. It was so much more than a buzz, that first bloom of a wine head. It was distance in a world that was too close, it was privacy in a world that was so invasive. I could leave town with my wine and they couldn't get to me. By the time I was sixteen and off to college, the deal was sealed: I could calibrate how much 'they' could get to me, I could tune my brain.

The instrument wasn't perfect and I made a lot of misjudgments, but overall, it worked. Better yet, wine was a tool that grew in usefulness the more I knew it. A glass of wine became medicine for lots of ills: boredom, lonliness, longing for meaning, anxiety. It became the natural companion of sociability.
At this point, a lot of people would stop. I took it further. I discovered a world in which wine was the object of admiration. Sort of like fancy handbags in the suburbs or muscle cars in Alabama. To know wine was to be part of a world, and what a world it was. The people who loved wine looked and felt like the family I wished I had. They were interested in things and they were capable of becoming interested in new things. They respected knowledge, they respected taste. I felt at home for the first time.
And then I went deeper. I found out that beer is as old as civilization, that the turn from hunting and gathering food to producing it is intimately tied up with the discovery of brewing. I learned that the act of brewing made water supplies safe at the same time that increasing population density made water unsafe. Places that brewed (or made wine) were healthier than those that didn't.
There was more, lots more. The organization of medeival breweries provided (along with shipbuilding) a model for the industrial revolution.

--

So wine, and later its more complicated cousin beer, came to be a hobby, a religion, a clubhouse, a textbook, a friend. As time went on, my world and its got closer. Most importantly, wine became an answer to a whole lot of questions. Was I bored? How about a glass of wine? Was I purposeless? Lonely? Sad?
I wrote The New Short Course in Beer. I taught classes, I got invited to Europe. I gave tastings and I visited wineries.
In some tiny circles I was the beer guy. It was an identity.
Like any other religion, wine had its anti-christs. There were the flaming prohibitionists: the Baptists and the Moslems. But there were also the cerebrally-eviscerated middle-class Jews and the buzzed-down budweiser heads. When I started to teach wine classes at university,
there were priggish and provincial academics. Wine-love came with its built-in friends and, conveniently, with built-in enemies too.
One week in 1981, I tasted Saison Dupont and Chimay Blue. I made a new friend and I wrote The Short Course in Beer. In a few years, wine and beer became my friends, my clubhouse, my flag, my allegiance.
Wine and beer were something I drank and something that medicated my cares. Then it became an identity: something I was.More to the point, they were a source of meaning in my life. I was that wine guy, then I was that beer guy and I really enjoyed that.

There was enough to know that not everybody knew it. That world was attractive enough that people wanted to know more. The folks who already knew were an attractive crowd: they spoke languages, cooked good, gave parties. I felt at home.
---

Now that's gone. Just as I expected it would, some doctor came along and said my drinking days were over. So what? That is, so what happens when a love affair and an identity mask die? Who am I?

Stay tuned.

nancy my dear,

i can really see how my way of being leaves you feeling un- or under-related to. frankly, i have no idea of how to grow out of it. i  really think it's a shame that you are involved with a man whose stature doesn't match yours.

for instance: in the rich mandel instance, i recall my own feeling of insecurity at the table that night and my sense of estrangement from all the confidence-in-vulnerability that i felt around me. what could i have done about that? i don't know. would i be different now? i don't really know that either.

for instance: with dave and marsha i can imagine that sometime or other i might feel free to address the crowded atmosphere and insert myself into their show, but when i think back to that night, i can't see myself being very different (maybe it's a version of not going where i'm not wanted)

for instance: when you respond to my enthusiasm about a vista by saying 'how is it different from any other view?' it recalls to me your equation of walmart and the woods. it says to me that the thing that's putting me in touch with the sublime is really not special, in fact not worthy of admiring.

and i hear it this way even after reading what you wrote. how is it different from any other view? doesn't make me feel related to, it makes me feel like you took my enthusiasm and used it to begin an argument for some philosophical point.

i don't want to talk about filing cabinets, i want to argue: i don't want to tell you that i understand how you could ask that,i don't naturally turn to 'nancy, i felt misperceived' i want to tell you that you got it wrong.

and when i replay it in my mind, even with the most loving will in the world, i can't see it much differently.

on the other hand:

when i think back to wellfleet, i can see myself being more concerned for you and therefore more aware of the wind.

when i think back to vernick, i can imagine being in a studier place with the waitress.

when i think back to tango, i remember our do-over and i see it differently because i have some new information.

when i think about dave and ally,i think i felt shy.  i think i could have prepared my thoughts beforehand so that i would have felt sturdier and therefore spoken up.

---

---

taking in everything, i can see why you would be disappointed. i see that my limited filing categories and response-ability make it hard for you to be my friend. it is largely on me and it makes me very sad. i see too how this limits your sense of possibilities for us going forward. 

perhaps i've been too optimistic in thinking about a future without offering you the necessary personal infrastructure. i certainly accept your reticence and dampened curiosity as inevitable sequilae to my limited filing space.

so what shall we do? i would hate to lose you and to give up the vision i have of the mutual healing and creative doing we might experience. l love you.  but i also won't hang around (won't be where i'm not wanted) and be a pest if you are feeling pessimistic. i thought we were making progress. perhaps you do too. maybe my pessimistic take on your letter is a pure projection and in itself an example of the limited filing categories of which you complain. i don't know how to read your energy about this, so:

i am here for you to make it better if you want to take it one instance at a time. i'm willing to look at myself because i know that you'll do the same. i love you and i also recognize that for you, this may be a case where love is not enough.

holding you tenderly in my heart, lev

-------------

ps. on the matter of 'people who like wine and beer....' i think i'd like to discuss that in front of lance

we're missing each other here and i think those words have aroused something that we could take a look at.

The Irony Angel

Every couple of weeks, the woman i'm in love with tells me that we're just too different, that she worries about our future. The night before last, she said it again with emphasis. we can't be partners, we have different paradigms.
now the truth is that we slept together that night and last night too. but this morning i told her that these ruptures make me physically sick: that just as she worries about our 'incongruity' giving her cancer, i see our ruptures working on my heart.
she explained again about all the ways in which we are different. she went over every incident of my handling something in a less friendly, less relational way than she would have. she says i'm 'sub-social' and what's worse, i blame my sub-sociability on others. i don't chat because x doesn't seem interested, i make a sharp response to what i see as rudeness.
these episodes are the mythic tales that form her perception of me. they have changed in her re-telling. changes in myth are interesting, they reflect the shifting social basket in which they're held. what makes me sad and sick is that the changes don't seem to me to reflect any growth on my part. all of her re-tellings instead seem like adding another course of bricks to the wall between us.

she also tells me again how difficult it is to be with a man whose main energies are not directed to personal growth. i see myself as an advocate for her feelings and i see how it would look that way to her. i also hear the tone of her description getting darker and darker. she says that maybe we can't be together at all, she wonders if we could be friends, not partners, not lovers.

and what i'm hearing is that she's already made up her mind. maybe she doesn't admit it to herself, but she sounds like someone planning the kindest, gentlest break-up in the history of  love. she promises to let up on the relentless barrage of earnestness that sounds so angry and tests the limits of my growing residence in my own self. even the quality of her voice has become softer, less strident.
--
so: back to me.

i ask her for a reprieve. i say 'let's explore these differences for a fixed period' i suggest that we talk for a few weeks-'til new year's day. i ask for her co-operation in my pursuit of non-defensiveness. i ask her to be as skilled with me as she is with her clients. i remind her that she has a lot to gain and grow from being with me (she thinks of me mostly as entertainment, not education)
at the moment of asking her to take her time with this separation, i'm thinking 'if i can persuade her to support my growth, she'll see that the gap between us is narrowing'. it feels to me that if she gives us a chance, we have a chance.
but i'm also thinking that this is a shot at some personal growth that doesn't come along often. suppose i just assume that we're not going to make it. suppose i use the next two weeks as a growth intensive. how can i do this knowing that the outcome is going to involve a heartbreak? how can i not do this?

so there's the Irony Angel-i have to keep my head about me and my guts inside while going through a tragic loss. the payoff will be attaining that state of non-defensive, loving being that i'm being faulted now for not having. my lover, who is no longer invested in the long-term with me has become kinder. one possible outcome is that i will become who i want to be and who she says she wants me to be and lose her at the same time.
and my poor twillow? she will think herself better off, she will certainly be more at peace

here's why i hate the irony angel:
•in order to endure the next two weeks, i will have to act as if i didn't know this is the end and acting inauthentically in order to acheive authenticity is the self-defeating instruction of all time.
•twillow may leave me authentic and authentically in mourning for our love: i may end up loveable and without a love.

so: here it is my dear. i'm greedy to continue the work i started at hoffman, i'm hungry to be my self,
to find a calm center from which to reach out to the world. if i pursue that in the hope of keeping you in my life, then i'm not really pursuing it, i'm pursuing you-which is self-defeating. so i have to calm my yearning for an 'us' in order to find my 'me'. and if i calm myself by assuming that you and i are done, then i may be fulfilling my own prophecy, acting inauthentically in the process and doing myself the second-greatest damage imaginable.

what i need to say to you is this: i want to be me. that's primary. and one thing that 'me' wants is 'us'. i am torn. part of me needs to pretend that we're finished in order to pursue my hoffman mission without giving it the secondary job of keeping our relationship alive. and an authentic part of me is so sick at the thought of losing you that it's hard to imagine standing in that space and functioning as a seeker.
ps. maybe that's the key. maybe i have to be in the misery to be true to myself. maybe i just have to shut up and do it anyway. wish me luck.

A Reservation Concerning Complete Openness and Truth

Be it known:

that i am irrevocably placing the following restriction on the Agreement Concerning Complete Openness and Truth that exists between me and one Dr. Nancy Dreyfus.

i hold in perpetuity the right to keep certain secrets. to wit:

•any considerations, preparations, experiences, feeling, thoughts relating to a surprise delight for said Dr. Dreyfus are my privileged territory.

•any humorous reservations i hold about her high seriousness that soften such seriousness' landing without diluting its importance may be taken as an internal higher counsel.

•any pissy, pedantic thoughts that arise in the course of our conversations shall be kept in a playroom of their own where like can frolic with like.