Midwife Crisis, 1b

1. Opening the Door and Peeking In
continuing from August 18, 2008...

After a year of living at ocean's edge, I found myself in a state of enlightenment. Yup. So I decided I could handle anything, and I went off to travel around the world for a year, which turned out to be eight months. I spent the majority of that time in India, where I thought that as soon as I crossed the border, people would run up to me and read my soul and tell me my future. That trip was so intense and mind blowing, it was like tripping on acid 24/7 for 8 months. I got back to the US and couldn't stop laughing for six weeks. Literally. The US was so easy, so beautiful, so clean, so healthy, so politically and economically put together. I think about that every day. It helps me keep my perspective.

I remember stopping in a sprawling village of disintegrating mud brick hovels built into the waste hills and cliffs of the Khyber Pass. It was illegal, and very dangerous even then, to stop in the Pass, but we did anyway. I was hungry and looking for some bread, but the only things for sale in that whole village were opium and bullets. You think we're going to fix Afghanistan and Waziristan? Forget it. I've even abandoned my belief that we should be there.

I remember an old woman on the road in Afghanistan, all dressed in black rags. Her mouth was a withered and toothless hole. I have never seen anyone look so ancient, haggard, mythic. There was a baby tied to her back, wailing and howling. The two were a unit, some kind of spirit, not human or even animal. She was picking dried weeds out of the parched mud crags and stuffing them in her mouth.

I remember a man in Southeast India, plowing a field. I was riding a slow train north to the holy city of Puri (which, it turned out, was packed with starving beggars), coming from Pondicherry, the leper capital of the world, best as I could tell. Pondicherry! Its colonialist-built streets were full of amazingly ancient-looking, 18th century French architecture. Thousands of lepers roamed those masterfully designed streets, with open sores that oozed pus, missing fingers, stumps for hands and feet, disfigured faces without noses and ears. Or they were lying among the intricately carved stone facades, begging or not even trying to beg. I was on a slow train out of there (and I'm still on that train). It was then that I saw a man plowing a field with a single ox and a heavy wooden stick for a plow. The field was flooded. The slurry of mud was gray against a steely sky. The man and the ox were slogging up to their waists in the mud, plowing sludge, slipping, falling, re-emerging from the earth like some chthonic clay beasts emerging from a haunted corner of Middle Earth in Tolkien's imagination.

I couldn't stop laughing when I got back to the US. Oh, how I found I loved this country, yes, the one I once thought was so horrible and depraved! It is horrible and depraved, but only when you have nothing to compare it to.

And not so long after, I met a woman and married her. To quote my buddy Rimbaud, "Long ago, if memory serves, life was a banquet where all hearts were generous, and all wines flowed. One evening I sat beauty down on my knees. I found her bitter and it stabbed me deeply. I lost faith in justice and ran away."

That too was in the late 70's. And I'm still running.

So now the teenagers that surround me see me as an old man. But I don't feel old. And I am at that age where I should have settled my differences and found a straight path. "Oh witches, plowmen, opium dealers, I confer my treasures to you!"

Rimbaud could have said that last line, too. But he didn't live long enough.

Midwife Crisis, 1a

Greg Barker, my fellow seeker thru mountain, forest, and cesspool, came up with a great idea for a book: The Midlife Crisis Manual: What Chicken Soup for the Soul Never Told You. I just call it the midwife crisis manual. Prose! It’s sure a different adventure from poetry. I’ll be posting some excerpts, for your enjoyment and critique.

1. Opening the Door and Peeking In

Allow me a little retrospective, to open this conversation.

I was born in medieval times, and came of age during the Renaissance. That is to say, I was born in 1950. That means I went to university in 1968, when free love, psychedelics, the Vietnam War, and radical counter-cultural behaviors were the yokes we bore, whether we thought them yokes or not. Great times!

Alas, I was heavily yoked, pulling a plow through a concrete earth with a few equally burdened roommates. Yet we lived in a world in which we imagined most everyone else to be carefree.

The War was obviously a yoke, no matter where and which way you plowed. I chose to resist the draft, amidst a veritable blizzard of news excerpts, troubled dreams, and nightmares. I experienced post-traumatic stress syndrome without ever going into combat! When I saw Apocalypse Now for the first time in the late 70's I was blown out of my seat. It was like Coppola had sent a camera crew inside my head and filmed my dreams. I’ve seen it 20 or 30 times since, and it’s still my all-time favorite flick.

But no way do I regret my decision to resist the war. I wanted to blow off my big toe – that would have given me a legitimate and permanent deferment. Not to mention a lifelong limp. But I didn’t own a shotgun, and anyway, I wasn’t that crazy. I chose, instead, to get under-weight. I went on a wicked four month diet, and ended it by eating nothing more than a quarter pound of cottage cheese a day for 17 days, right up to my physical. I became best friends with hunger. I hated him and slugged it out with him and loved him. We’re still on confidential terms. When I got off the scales at the induction center, the grunt that weighed me sneered, “You can start eating again, fucker.”

I could write a novel about those 17 days! But I don’t write novels. Anyway, about six months later, living like a hermit in a cottage by the ocean, I realized I could finally stop hating my body, and allow myself to enjoy food again. I was wearing yokes I didn’t even know about. Welcome to reality.

As for taking drugs and believing in politics that required no reality-checks, someplace else I might talk about those matters. They were a worthy yoke. I learned to live with the political flagellations my friends (and ex-friends) administered. Shoot, I learned to flagellate myself more than they did, trying to figure things out. Now, that’s something to remember: learn more! As my mentor shouted at me nearly every day, “He not busy being born is busy dying.”

to be continued...