Changing the Subject

by Stephen-Paul Martin

  The thought of my teacher brought me back to the present, the canyon of trees bending ever so slightly in the breeze. I looked at my new watch and saw that it was three o’clock on the dot. I heard the screech of a hawk, gliding in circles fifty feet above me. I always love watching these birds ride the updrafts and downdrafts, searching for prey, though it occurred to me that if I were a rabbit or mouse that mesmerizing motion might mean death. The circles were getting smaller and smaller, closer and closer. Then the hawk dove straight down, driving its flashing beak into my forehead, thrusting and thrashing its way into my head and neck and chest, replacing me in my body. I felt like the dot of an i released and climbing into the sky, riding the updrafts and downdrafts, scanning the ground for a meal, until I saw my body fifty feet below, looking up and watching me with my outspread wings in the circling sky, with each turn gliding lower and lower, then diving and driving a flashing beak into my forehead, thrusting and thrashing back into my body, stumbling at first, pausing to make sure everything was in place, then walking as quickly as possible, driven by a savage thirst. I took a short cut out of the canyon, stopped at the first convenience store I could find, bought a Coke, and drank it in ten seconds. Then I went home and stared at the floor for several hours, until I felt normal. But for the next two weeks, at precisely 3 p.m., I felt wings in my head and blinding pain in my forehead, as if the universe were violently struggling to rip open my third eye.

  I found this feeling especially unnerving when I tried to meditate. I felt like a blank piece of paper trying to stop someone from making an illustration. I had nothing in theory against illustrations, but the similarity between illustration in the sense of making a picture and illustration in the sense of presenting an example began to upset me. I didn’t want to be an example of anything. I didn’t want to be part of a pattern emerging, with connections forming themselves to turn recent events into a narrative or discussion, a schematic picture that would then be a means of making sense of future events, forcing them to take the shape of meaning, domesticating the unknown. I remembered my teacher repeatedly asking me what I made of what was happening. I had taken his words in their customary sense, not examining the implications of the word making, not realizing that he was asking me to question my need to make anything, reminding me that all experience is unconsciously edited, arranged according to patterns built into our organs of perception. My goal in Zen meditation was to become aware of those patterns, to watch them as they came from the blank wall I was facing, and over time to make them less automatic, less unconscious. I knew that I would never leave them behind entirely. But it did seem possible to diminish my attachment to them, to become aware of them before they shaped my thought and behavior.

  Indeed, this was already happening. Slowly over the past ten years, I’d been learning not to identify myself with the person I’d always told myself I was. From a Buddhist perspective, the right things were happening, even though I kept getting in my own way, falling back from time to time into predictable self-constructions. Progress was always unsteady, incremental. After all, I’d spent years developing an elaborate picture of myself, at times employing whatever professional help I could afford. Now that picture was being erased, and I felt like a crude enclosure made of cinder blocks and fake wood paneling, ten square feet of shade in a desert that kept getting hotter and larger. Of course, the figurative terms I was using were misleading, spatializing a transformation that had no spatial dimension. I needed to be patient, not so eager to put things into words.

  But things without words were like the moon becoming an amoeba, a simile that lost an i to become a smile, a face that haunted my sleep for weeks. I wasn’t in the grip of recurring dreams. The stories in which the face appeared were always different, apparently told by someone who couldn’t or wouldn’t stop changing the subject, as if the subject was change itself, though I saw the same face each night, knew it wasn’t mine, and knew that when I woke up I wouldn’t know whose face it was. Over time, the face became less distinct, until one night it was only a set of teeth, gleaming and receding, making the dark seem deeper and darker. I wanted to see how far it would go, to see how deep the darkness was, but the daily paper thumped at my neighbor’s door, and I woke up in time to look out the window and see the paperboy rushing away, dropping the pile of papers under his arm, stopping to pick them up, then dashing around the corner, leaving his hat in the air behind him.

  I often page through my neighbor’s paper because I don’t want to bother buying one myself. She sleeps until noon, and I get up at least an hour before dawn, so my habit of reading her paper outside her door, glancing at a few top news stories and getting the weather, never prevents her from finding her paper right where she expects it to be. But now, as I flipped through the pages, I noticed a small article about a group of standing stones discovered three days before on a Baja peninsula cliff, two hundred miles southeast of San Diego. According to the article, the stones were more than ten thousand years old, and similar in size and arrangement to Stonehenge, though at least five thousand years older. Since it seemed like an important discovery, I couldn’t see why it wasn’t front-page news. Had the archaeologists that discovered it made sure it was downplayed in the papers, wanting to avoid the consequences of publicity?

  I’d been to that part of the Baja several times, and it’s essentially uninhabited, a great place to be by yourself and watch dolphins play in the waves. So I got in my car and drove south. Once I got past the noise and congestion of the northern Baja cities, the ocean views were spectacular. The sunrise behind the mountains, spreading its colors over the changing shapes of purple clouds, was so lovely that I almost drove off the road several times. I thought about how I seemed to be caught in a sequence of strange events leading me to some definite conclusion, as if the universe were trying to show me something. I remembered that one of my closest friends had been led to join a satanic cult through a similar sequence of events, all in some way involving the number ten. I’d always thought he’d gone mad. But when I heard that he’d secretly been one of BITE’s founding members and one of the chief architects of the plan to kill President Bush, I gained a new respect for devil worship.

  The newspaper story had not disclosed the stones’ exact location, but once my odometer told me that I’d gone two hundred miles, I turned off onto a small dirt road that wound between coastal hills and finally ended up near a cliff overlooking the sea. I left my car and walked south along a narrow trail. Fifteen minutes later, the path cut between two hills and opened into a large clearing. There, about fifteen feet from the edge of a cliff, were the stones I was looking for.

  The papers had mentioned Stonehenge, and the similarity was impossible to miss. I’d been to Stonehenge thirty years before, in my early twenties, and though I’d been disappointed by the mob of tourists I’d had to contend with, the stones had made a strong impression on me. Now I had my own private Stonehenge. I knew of course that within a few months, the hills would be blasted away, the path would be enlarged and paved, a parking lot would be built, publicity campaigns would be launched, and the place would become just one more tourist attraction, complete with chartered busses, t-shirts, and colorful brochures. Any sacred or mysterious feeling about the place would be destroyed, absorbed into the busy noise of mainstream information. But for now the place was mine. The moment was perfect. The stones towered above me, transfigured by the morning light, which came in gold and silver bursts through cracks in surging clouds, flashing on the sea, the sound of waves one hundred feet below. I wanted to be in a trance, to feel myself dissolving into the stones, the solid pattern of energy in each individual stone and the patterns of energy all the stones made as a group, positioned in precise relation to each other and in relation to the place, the meeting point of land and sea.

  I was familiar with the theories about Stonehenge—as a place where human sacrifice had been performed, as a cultural center, as an astronomical observatory, as a Neolithic calendar, as a hu
ge image visible to inter-planetary beings approaching from the sky. But as I sifted through these possibilities, convinced that the best way to think about Stonehenge was as a repository of misconceptions, I remembered that I wasn’t at Stonehenge, that the place I was visiting had not yet been assimilated into the narratives of human understanding. Despite its close resemblance to the famous stones in southern England, it may have served a very different purpose. I knew experts would speculate that the similarity between the two sites indicated that the same people had built them for the same reason, that southern England and the Baja peninsula had been populated by the same ancient culture, and that the stones had been taken from the same sacred mountain, establishing sites of magic power on opposite sides of the world. I thought I could feel the sacred current passing through the center of the earth, connecting me with another version of myself standing in southern England, wondering why the present moment felt like it was somewhere else. But this possibility faded in the gathering suspicion that it was only the meditative embrace of my gaze that was keeping the scene together, that with any lapse in my attention the place would crumble, darting off like startled fish in a thousand different directions.

  This feeling quickly passed. The flashing sea, the erratic brilliance of the sky, the stillness of the stones, the accumulation of uncertainties—all combined to give the scene the evocative power of a painting in a gallery being looked at by several people, all of them quite moved and eager to talk about their feelings, which would have been fine, except that such discussions often become fierce arguments, and I didn’t want anyone else’s thoughts right now, especially not in the form of an intellectual debate. I wanted my own impressions, my own raw connection with the scene. So I turned and quickly walked back to my car, driving north.

  But apparently I’d already stayed too long. The stones had become a gallery picture, a reflection of the people observing it, fading into a discussion they were having in a dim café, and as everyone kept changing the subject the picture was forgotten, leaving me with a blank space that was quickly filled with the impression of having taken a lovely drive up and down the Baja coastal road, looking in vain for a great restaurant a friend had recommended, a small place overlooking the sea, where the owner’s husband was a powerful shaman, as well as being a legendary cook of Mexican breakfasts.

  During the late sixties, hippies and anthropologists began to hold shamans in great esteem, rejecting the Euro-western mindset that had made shamans appear to be psychotics, trapped in delusional states filled with hallucinated encounters with spirits and the underworld. With the New Age movement of the 1980s, shamanism became fashionable. It was often assumed that all Native Americans were shamans, and people took weekend workshops at holistic centers, hoping to become shamans themselves. The New Age soon got old, but mainstream interest in shamanism continued. I knew this from my own professional experience, since the year before I’d made good money editing and producing a book called Shamanism for Dummies. In fact, I was still living off the sizeable sum I’d been paid for that assignment, the most I’d ever made in my fifteen years as a freelance editor.

  I don’t mean to make shamanism itself sound fake. But there’s something dubious about the assumption that an esoteric discipline like shamanism can be truly understood outside of its cultural context. I had similar questions about Zen, which may have been why I’d never been fully convinced by my own involvement with it, or even by my American teacher’s practice, despite the fact that he’d studied with well-known Japanese masters and had been meditating for more than forty years. The question was simple: What kind of spiritual authenticity was possible in a country dominated by shallow consumer ecstasies, a country where power-hungry people like Donald Trump, Steve Jobs, and Rupert Murdoch were called visionaries and sixty million people could decide that a dangerous clown like George W. Bush was not only a serious Christian but a good national leader? In such a degraded context, it seemed to me that sacred experience was possible only among individuals who had disciplined themselves to resist the contamination of mass imagery and information, creating media-free zones for themselves in their minds and hearts and homes. How many people in America could even begin to fit this description?

  Among my friends I could think of only two. One of them was now in jail, facing what I assumed would be a life sentence, since he proudly acknowledged his part in trying to cleanse the nation of President Bush. The other friend had called me from New York a week before, announcing that he not only wanted but needed to visit me, a guy who had reached the age of sixty without ever holding a full-time job. He’d gotten rid of his first name because he liked being called Moon, his family name, and most people who knew him would have agreed that he was driven by lunar tendencies. He’d spent most of his adult life writing one long poem, an endless series of juxtaposed fragments written in response to an ancient book he’d found in his grandfather’s attic. I’d seen the book several times. On each page was a woodcut featuring a mythic animal of some kind—a unicorn, manticore, gryphon, or one of many other strange creatures whose names I didn’t know. The book apparently did more for Moon than it did for me. My interest was mainly in its age and the role it had played in his grandfather’s life. But there was no publication information of any kind, no way to tell how old it was, and Moon had no recollection of his grandfather ever reading it. He didn’t know how it ended up in the attic.

  But the book was indispensable for his poem. Each of Moon’s fragments was a response to one of the book’s pages, not a description or commentary, but rather an improvisation based on the energy Moon took from the image. Why did images that struck me as having only historical value generate such powerful verbal moments for him? There was no way to know. But the evidence was incontestable. Moon’s poem was more than mere poetry. It was language in its most visionary sense, conjuring its own worlds, refusing to subordinate itself to the so-called realistic task of describing or addressing what people had been trained to call society or nature. Though Moon had made no careerist moves to keep in touch with any of the poetry scenes that surrounded him on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, anyone who’d seen fragments of his epic knew that it was as challenging and strange as any innovative text of the early twenty-first century. Yet in some ways it felt as old as The Epic of Gilgamesh.

  I wanted to keep thinking about Gilgamesh, the incantatory depiction of his ten-day journey into the mountain at the end of the world. But people were honking at me. My driving was apparently worse than usual, and I told myself to concentrate on the road. Fortunately, I’d already crossed the border and wasn’t far from my apartment. As I parked in front of the small building I lived in, I noticed the newsboy’s hat, still suspended in the air where he’d left it behind ten hours before. This reminded me of the article I’d read that morning, and I was trapped between vague recollections—the standing stones and my failed attempts to find the shaman’s restaurant—memories that both seemed uncertain, precisely the feeling Moon claimed he received from the images in his magic book.

  I went inside and looked at the calendar on my kitchen wall, where I’d made a note of Moon’s arrival later that week. It was more than a social visit, he’d assured me over the phone, claiming that his poem had led him to realize that there was someone he had to meet in the desert east of San Diego. Part of me was amused by this cryptic mission. It sounded so theatrical, as if Moon thought of himself as a Biblical prophet responding to commands from the great beyond. But another part of me was moved by Moon’s dedication. Here he was—a sixty-year-old man—hitchhiking three thousand miles from New York City, all because of what words on a page were telling him!

  He arrived in the middle of the night and collapsed without a word on my living room sofa. I couldn’t wake him until sundown the following day. When he finally got up his eyes were filled with fire, and he quickly explained that he’d needed the sleep not just because he was exhausted, but because it would have been dangerous to open his eyes before his drea
ming was completed. Without asking me how I was or what my plans were, he insisted that we had to leave at dawn the following day. I knew better than to argue with him. But when he told me I should meditate all night in preparation, I had to say something.

  I tried to sound casual: Listen, Moon, the meditation I do doesn’t prepare me for anything. If anything, it’s a way of making sure I’m not prepared.

  He said: What good does it do you to be unprepared?

  I said: What good does it do you to read poetry you’re not prepared to understand? If you’re not prepared, you can have a real reaction.

  He said: Fine. But you need to do something to gather and focus your energy. You’re going to need everything you’ve got in the desert tomorrow.

  When I asked him why, he shrugged and asked me to get him a glass of water. Then he asked me about the book on shamanism someone had apparently told him I’d written. I quickly explained that it was just an editing job I’d done for money. He gave me a strange look, somewhere between contempt and amazement, then said he needed to take a walk by himself and quickly left. At first I was baffled. Was it really so terrible that I’d done some editing work to pay my bills? Then I remembered stories Moon’s ex-girlfriend had told me about the years he’d spent in Mexico in the early seventies, right before he moved to New York and began his poem. Apparently he’d had contact with a Huichol shaman in the central Mexican highlands and had been clinically insane when he came to New York, lapsing into extended bouts of laughter for no apparent reason. The poem had been his way of putting his mind back together. Maybe that explained the look he’d given me. Maybe he’d been shocked that someone could calmly make money off something that had driven him out of his mind. But when he came back two hours later he showed no signs of hostility. Instead he asked me about my Zen practice, seemed interested in the answers I gave him, then said he felt tired and needed to go back to sleep.