On Being a Searcher
Reality. Time. Perception. Feeling. Dreams. Visions. Waking nightmares. God. Death. Soma. Sleep. Life. Memories. What are these things and what do they mean?
I remember being 6 or 7 years old and thinking that I was not real, that I was a figment of someone else’s dream. Reality to me seemed limited and limitless – that my actions, thoughts and visual perceptions of the world were the whim or the nightmare of someone else, some unknown person or perhaps even myself. God was outside the equation, because there was so much faith in me that said God existed. Then the thought fluttered in my toddling mind that perhaps this was God’s dream. And I felt ashamed – that God could never think of something so horrible for me, for anyone. Why would God bother? I was a tiny being on a planet in a vast universe that perhaps never really existed.
I remember being 7 or 8 years old and searching in the grass at a small park near the arena for my flea market silver and emerald ring. It was lost and it was like it never existed. Searching in the grass I felt how amorphous and detached life could be – the things, no matter how much you hold on to them, slip away and disappear as if they had never been real. My searching was initial frantic because I knew my mother would be mad, but then it became hysterical looping of memory and time, until the day darkened into evening and I wondered if the ring had ever existed. The grass became surreal in my hands and I became aware of the bugs crawling and the dirt against my fingers. Here was the horror of existence – what was desired never really mattered and the veneer of what was seen barely covered the reality of other things unnoticed and perhaps horrible in their foreign nature.
I remember being 8 or 9 years old and being further a-field in that same park by the arena, in rolling hills that had railroad tie jungle gyms. Minimalist, directed at disciplined physical education and new smelling, the wood was smooth but easily splintered. I wandered out there further than I ever had before and it began to hail. Large misshapen globes of ice suddenly assaulted the low rolling hills from out of a dustbin gray sky. For the first time I could remember, I felt alone, as if no one else had ever existed, yet felt as if I had had this feeling before – this sense of aloneness that blotted out the memories of what had been but had perhaps never really been.
Then it came back to me – being a small child playing with my pets – caterpillars from the apple tree outback that I saved in a shoebox with holes – I was 4 or 5 at the time. So lovely, so many colors, their tiny feet suckering my skin and leaving tiny red trails sometimes on my skin like kisses to me from them. Their fur was soft and sparse; their mouths eagerly accepted the leaves I fed them. I wanted to share my loving creatures with my mother and I came into the kitchen with my box and my pets. My mother screamed, disgusted and made me throw out the box, cleaning the “dirty” bugs off me. She told me they were nasty and made me fear the gossamer nests that the caterpillars built in our apple tree out back. I was not allowed to sit under the tree any longer, which had been a favorite place in the spring and summer. My stories I told the caterpillars were no good now, since my mother taught me fear of them.
And I remember at the same house, learning to write my name, in the cold, squalid sunroom, papers and toys and garbage strewn about. The same house I first smelled apple pie from the sunlit kitchen, the same house I first sculptured castles out of wine corks and champagne cages. The same house I tricked my stepdad into letting me wear a frilly slip and too short skirt to school. I drew on that floor for hours, coloring in Alice and the caterpillar with his hookah. He was tricky and perhaps evil. I watched my sister climb the closet for scissors as she cut her own bangs and ducked as my sister caught my mother’s clog on her forehead. Trips to the hospital included earaches and silence. Peter Pumpkin commercials during Halloween about being safe terrified me as much as Jaws did. And mother’s Aunt Alice died. But I had my own desk – a wooden thing in the corner of the living room. This same room flashed Rose Bowl parades and Twilight Zone marathons on our small TV while mother made cold plates of tuna and Jell-O.
Back further, back to see what was real – I remember the house where I had my Barbie Mobile and grandma gave us crocheted ponchos and berets out of the colors of the Irish flag. Mother fought a lot. Stepdad left for good from there. I had ballet lessons and summer camp. There was the park near the end of the block with the metal elephants in flaking pink paint on springs. You could pretend to seesaw without a friend – you could rock on the elephant from Mars alone. It was made it Paris, so it said on its belly. And down the street someone was having their driveway paved. The smell of bleach from the washing and tar – it made me ill and sleepy.
Back even further to the apartment above the Datsun dealership where my stepdad worked at selling small cars no one wanted. My sister screaming in her crib, the rooms cold and the floors damp. My older brother would boss us around and rush to get outside without us, as he scrambled for the front seat in the car next to mother. Linoleum cracked and musty, the hallway tiny and the stairs dark – and the Portuguese girls who lived below us smelled like fish and soap. I saw Cinderella at the drive in and uttered words that became a teasing phrase until my teens: “just like poor old Cinderella”. I felt her sadness and loneliness. My sister caught her finger in the car door and hated me for it. We released the clutch on the car in the market and rolled out into traffic, thrilled and fearful as mother ran to stop the old blue wreck. And the birthday party for me that had more adults than kids with a photographer talking to me and staring at me in a way that made my skin crawl. Sexy, he said. And the tiny dancer in my cardboard jewelry box spun around while I tried not to be too hungry.
Back to the earliest memories – staring up my at mother’s angry, bloodshot blue eyes and feeling fear. Alternately, staring at up my grandmothers wide blue soft eyes that wrapped me a blanket of comfort and joy. It was like she held me up and out to the world in her arms and let me know I could fly. My mother smelled like yeast and bitter sweat. My grandmother smelled clean and sweet, like gardenias and freshly washed clothes. My mother was bony and hard, her skin cold and hated having her feet touched. My grandmother was warm and cushy, like a comforter of soft clothes stuffed with puffy skin. My mother’s voice was harsh and shrill, full of sarcasm and derision – her impatience and annoyance palpable. My grandmother laughed often, rolling out of her like music, smiled from her eyes down to her hands and exclaimed in joy and giggles about my smile and my hair.
Back to the very first feelings and fears without words – being sick in the hospital with spinal meningitis. I have been told they shaved my head and put an IV in my skull, after the spinal tap and tests. This was after my brother broke his arm and I had a seizure in the emergency room while he had his cast put on. I was a tiny baby – barely a year old, I have been told. My mother told me the doctors had little hope that I would live. She left me in their care, on a bed with my shaved hair around me, my diaper dirty, my skin sweaty and my body aching with pains in my back and my head. My grandmother came straight away from New York to Los Angeles and took me out of that hospital to a hotel across the street. She was angry about the way the doctors and nurses left me on that bed, unattended and sitting in my own shavings and diarrhea-filled diapers, the way my mother wandered about helplessly. My grandmother had me baptized, in fear of me dying. Then she loved me, bathed me, fed me and held me. And I survived – while the room shook around us as a big earthquake hit. I remember thinking the world was ending, before I had an idea the world even existed.
So the world began for me with spinning sickness and clinical fears, while it seemed to be ending at the same time. This always makes me pause and think that this life I have been living is perhaps just the last dreams or thoughts of a child as it dies. And that in living the life that never existed, that even in writing this, that perhaps nothing is real. Does it matter then that I lived or experienced this life? Does it matter that I do things right or wrong or well or horribly? Perhaps this is a Jacob’s Ladder to final destination in my death. There are tangents in my life or nightmares that do not make sense but seem ominous in their disconnection to reality as a through-line.
My phobias – unexplained and perhaps pertinent in their own way – needles, sharks, drowning, nighttime sounds and the person following me. What about that cold feeling that is something other than me in this existence, but not a benevolent being or entity. Perhaps God does not exist or does not care. And my previous certainty of God’s love and hope for me is nothing more than the small part of me from childhood that believed in fairies and goblins and sharks bigger than half the sea that could clamber up on land and become my mother.
I think at times that the horrors of my life decrease with age and this is the result of me dying. As I move further away from my death, life gets less traumatic but filled with more clues that it is not real. Perhaps life is the long practice of giving it over to death or realizing it never existed.
So I have seen movies and read stories that echo this uncertainty of time and reality and wonder if this is just projection on my part or if all of this is some other being’s reality and again, my thoughts were never really mine but the manifestation of another’s subconscious. The nature of memory to me may not seem linear but in fact may be different layers of experience – that all of it exists at the same time and we just perceive it in different levels of understanding.
Reading Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child gave me pause, especially when she speaks about the misdirected premise of 12 step groups and religious distractions to dealing with addiction and childhood trauma. The idea of giving up one’s self and healing to a higher power assumes that the higher power can and is willing to help. As a result, the higher power is the savior and in control of the healing process. It becomes a mysterious realm of spirituality that is not critically assessed for the value of its relativity to the pain of childhood trauma. The attitudes of the healing process based on the higher power assumes modes of loving behavior but does not evaluate the source and truth of the child’s trauma nor does it ask that an honest assessment of the child’s past and present be considered, but a reality of a future based on what is right and good, in the dogma of a particular religion.
So does this mean that God does not exist, or if God exists, does not care about my life or anyone’s life? Where does hope and faith come from – are these constructs of childhood fantasy that one day all things will be right and well and fair in the world? Does embracing the concept of God represent abandoning reason and reality? Does God necessarily represent all that is good or is the concept of God as incomplete as the concept of ourselves? If we reject the bad in us, can we not fully accept the good in us as well? When life becomes a double-sided coin, as in Alice Miller’s book, and we are allowed to deny one part of us and embrace another part of us, is the perception of who we are basically false, since it is the extreme view of who we want to be and who we have been taught to be? If one believes in God, is the concept of reality incomplete and infantile? How does God relate to reality?
I have tried to find ways to prove reality to myself – pain was the initial method. If I feel pain, it must be real. Not so – pain can be imagined or the perception of pain can be distorted. Everyone has the realization that something is more painful if given more importance or panicked about. Conversely, I have had a decrease in pain based on my mental attitude about it.
To prove I am real based on memory and time means there must be a metric and a history to support this. However, memory can be repressed, distorted, misremembered and misreported. Time does not work as a metric because time itself exists in man’s concept of life – we have agreed that time exists and if you say and I say its been 15 minutes, we agree on the concept of 15 minutes, but how to prove that it has actually been fifteen minutes is a dilemma. Does time exist on many levels or not at all? Should we concern ourselves with the constraints of our human concepts of time-based life? Perhaps time exists as a method of sorting all kinds of experience that happens at once or experience that has already occurred but not sorted in our brains.
Ask anyone who has experienced trauma or abuse of any kind and they will tell you of the absence or stretching of time. The mind disconnects from the body and splits reality for the period of the trauma or abuse until it is deemed safe enough to come back to being whole. The trauma stays in the cells of the body but the mind refuses to acknowledge that experience. This is an experience of tangential reality – a place where each human being has a personal black hole and the result sucks energy from the rest of their lives until that black hole of experience is integrated into who they are as a whole being. Is this a form of time travel? Are we distorting the fabric and substance of the universe in this split infinity within ourselves?
In mental illness, one becomes detached from reality, spinning off into a universe and timeline of their own making. Or is this merely perception – what we see as illness is actually mental exploration? Could worlds exist in the mind of a delusional individual and the destruction of that individual’s thought process be more harmful than medicating them into a stupor that in and of itself is a void, a hole in their personal concept of time?
I write this as an exploration of ideas I have struggled with my whole life and have found few interested in speaking with me about them. Is a child crazy to think about these things and is an adult irresponsible for continuing this thought process? Do I have to make decisions about the above or should I continue to explore these ideas, though they terrify me at times? Should I distract myself with daily living, societal achievements, trinkets, toys and pleasures? How easy it would be to slip into the soma lifestyle of soul ignorant dawdling, whether it would be in front of a TV with a can of beer or in the extremes of sexual or drug-induced pleasure. But as my concept of time continues, I would not be able to sustain my chosen ignorance of what it means to be me, to be real, to search for meaning and goodness and a concept of reality and God. It is a difficult task and I hope to find others with whom I can discuss these ideas, who will not run from my sometimes tearful mental spirals into fear and who will not find me to be crazy. That remains to be seen.
Below I have included a list of movies, writings and websites that highlight some of the ideas I am exploring above:
Movies:
La Riviere du hibou (Incident at Owl Creek)
Jacob’s Ladder
Donnie Darko
The Last Temptation of Christ
The Matrix
The World According To Garp
2001: A Space Odyssey
Mulholland Drive
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Blade Runner
Naked Lunch
The Time Machine
Writings:
Ambrose Bierce’s “An Incident at Owl Creek Bridge”
Haruki Murakami’s “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World: A Novel”
Anything by William Gibson, Phillip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegart or Isaac Asimov
The Philosophers: Kant, Nietzsche, Jung, Freud, Hegel, Kafka, etc…
Douglas Adam’s “Hitchhiker” Series
Alice Miller’s “The Drama of the Gifted Child”
Try some Neal Stephenson
Mark Z. Danielewski’s “House of Leaves”
Anything by Stephen Hawking or Carl Sagan
