swell 🌊

and breaking it down

Hey Y’all,

I’d wanted to email you on Friday the 13th, but today is my sister Renée’s birthday so maybe just as lucky, if one day shy of St. Patrick’s Day. ☘️

Thank you to my new subscribers. One of you I don’t think I’ve met bought a founding subscription on Christmas Day, so I was really touched by that.

Not to state the obvious, but life is strange.

I’ve had a couple friends tell me I should write about my kundalini experiences. So I’ve done that. At least part one.

There’s a story by Lydia Davis called “Break It Down”, also about trying to quantify the unquantifiable, which is really all language ever does. I’ve put a recording of me reading that behind the paywall.

Funny little coincidence: I went back and reread the Yiyun Li story I mention in my own writing, and there’s a part in it that chimes with the Lydia Davis story; in the former a man has calculated that his wife, if she stays with him to become his heir, will have made eight thousand dollars each time she has sex with him.

This is an image derived from one of cardiac muscle fibers.

An Abbreviated Spiritual History (Part One)

Kneeling, alone, praying a decade of the rosary for penance, God is not the priest in the confessional I have saved my innermost secrets from, but the light falling through the stained glass onto the pews. Not a He, but not an it either.

God is sound too, the piano all of creation.

I reach out, hands cupped for the heavenly host, then try to suspend all but the one belief that it is Christ’s flesh on the roof of my mouth, but fail, my only sin that I have consumed books first and can only come as close as metaphor.

It’s more sane to marry God than a man, get right to the source, but the Sisters of the Dominican Order smell like must, an old suitcase. I’ve heard they have to cut all their hair off. The one who’s my teacher goes by the name Antoninus, wears nineteenth-century shoes curling up at the toes. I can see a layer of down on her face, the skin not covered in habit. A clot of black rosary beads hangs heavy-looking from her belt.

What were the saints like as people?

Am I allowed to ask that question?

…

Purification rites, golden calves.

…

Two loves breaking internally, spectacularly, not three years apart, losing the plot.

God is a ghost, an idea.

…

I float around Manhattan, a misguided ascetic, eating only Honeycrisp apples and bars on the Atkins line, in a rut of reifying the sky, my idea of church a big gay preacher on Chrystie Street, Sundays at the preordained time, flanked by trapeze dancers distributing cubes of flesh-colored gelatin to a parish of artists singing and embracing their weirdness together.

On a normal day I have nothing to do, I wander into a costume shop off of Kenmare, where a man in a dress observing me in yoga leggings tells me about the place next door called Golden Bridge. He tells me he’s seen celebrities go in there. A yoga studio for people who really have found out the world is not where it’s at. I sign up for a class, a woman named Gro who issued from the Northern Lights commands me to kick my own buttocks, and the plug there does not come unstopped, but I do notice it.

I don’t try this shame enema again for several months, until a sign on Broadway just north of Union Square beckons, 30 days for $30.

Kundalini, it turns out, is the yoga for bad-kneed masochist types looking to run a marathon while sitting down. The tradition for me. I show up every day, the seeker of seekers.

These yogis wear only white, turbans. They huff rarefied laughing gas and sip a proprietary blend of chai tea trademarked by their guru Yogi Bhajan. They have Indian names such as Angad, who will remember mine for years after I stop frequenting Kundalini Yoga East. During my thirty-day trial, she asks if magical things are happening yet. They are.

If I hold my arms out as though I am being nailed to a cross, breathing Breath of Fire for as long as humanly possible, shaking, and then for much longer, I can see a prism opening up my epiphoric eyes, God returned to me in the colored light.

God and me, me and God, a-are one, we chant.

…

I move to London, marry a Muslim who once believed in trying to convert people to Islam, and begin, in the area of the sex chakra, to experience strange symptoms, by which I mean thrusting my pelvis at the buttoned-up cosmopolites flowing from the British Library to St Pancras International and vice versa. Continuous major musculature spasms the movement disorder specialists at Great Ormond Street diagnose: “benign truncal tic”.

I keep running into the first kundalini teacher I meet here. At a coffee shop in Islington, Sivaroshan. On the train in South Kensington, the opposite side of town, what do you know, Sivaroshan. Then a fire burns down the Camden Stables yoga studio, and I don’t see him for a while.

…

A white-bearded teacher whose name sounds like Merlin scratches his head at me after a kundalini class. Minus the scat and swirling hot-pink pupils, I am Mr. Toad of The Wind in the Willows seeing a car for the first time. Bouncing on my meditation cushion like my sacrum is an engine harnessing the power of many horses. The wizardly man has seen a lot of things in his years, but none like my locomotive stillness. He knows someone who might have, though.

An osteopath accessed through a secret garden in Finchley Road & Frognal, whose examination I submit myself to, sort of. “Rest your head,” the elfin man urges, seeing through my act of repose. I surrender to his padded table the full weight of my skull. Let go. He slips his palms under my tailbone, which jumps like I’m being repeatedly stabbed in the glutes, pronouncing finally, “It’s dead here.”

Dead.

But there’s something I can do. “Focus on the tail,” he tells me. So I do. I focus on the tail and the spasms vanish, at least for a while.

…

A yogi I hadn’t met from the New York City community has by chance set up London’s only center for kundalini next to my art studio. Of course I’m a regular and thinking about training as a teacher, but have just read White Bird in a Golden Cage: My Life with Yogi Bhajan, have just found out that Yogi Bhajan was a big. Fat. Rapist. Premka, who was his secretary (did he dream his legacy would escape unspoiled, when she ceased taking his dictation?), writes in her memoir about it, about how the Yogi failed at being a good man. I read further, an independent report finding manifold other sexual abuse allegations against the dead guru highly credible. The Yogi has been dethroned, the teacher trainer tries to reassure me, but I can’t stomach having to look at his face all over the instruction manuals.

…

If you see something that looks very, very beautiful, but if you kept your eye on that and looked and looked and looked, the beauty would disappear from it, because the eye is exhaustible. But the beauty that you see within the mind, it really never disappears. Now the inexhaustibles, they go on forever, that’s reality.

They go on without change. But anything that is exhaustible is not real.

— Agnes Martin

…

Somewhere in the sky over Finland, on my way to “show” an aural collage I made for an exhibition in Stockholm, it starts—somehow being tens of thousands of feet above the Earth’s crust heightens the randomness of it—the pain in my right ear. Yiyun Li’s voice quivering like ink from a quill pen through my earbuds, reading her short story “Hello, Goodbye”, tears streaming down my cheeks.

Fabrication of Self. That’s the name of the exhibition in Stockholm.

I’ve pulled on a thread. I just don’t know it yet.

On Swedish soil, I find out I can only hear out of my left ear. Then hearing out of my right ear returns, but as if through a hard light filter, the sounds at once bleached and jagged. My head is a tumble dryer they exit a shell of themselves when I speak, for the most part still banging around in the drum on the spin cycle, concussed. Whatever content I have to impart withers in the shadow of this effect, which I hear as some bruised metadiscourse on my stuckness, my thwarted expression.

Steroids, horse medicine, draconian diets to chase the free radicals away.

A clinician holding up my suctioned out earwax like some unholy candle.

Nasal endoscopy.

Inside a smooth white tunnel, sounds like tranquilizer darts rapidly firing, lulling me into a trance. I want the magnetic resonance imagery to reveal the culprit of my suffering, a tumor of coagulated belief, but nothing shows up on the scan.

I want modern medicine to shift my paradigm of materialism.

“Eustachian tube dysfunction”, the doctors echo one another. Just fancy otorhinolaryngological speak for no real treatment or prognosis.

Thoughts of it ending. Thoughts of ending it.

I get on my knees. Make me a channel of your peace. Beg. God, if you’re out there… All that.

I get on the Internet, which was invented to make me feel less alone. I learn kundalini is so powerful it once plucked a young poker player from a red felt Vegas casino table, landed him in his parents’ basement believing himself beyond the pale. Now he serves the collective good, pumping out videos through YouTube such as “Purging Terror from the Guts of My Being”, beads of sweat on his face, wild-eyed at what Mother Gaia has shown him. Your pain is a gift he tells us, his subscribers.

Blessure, the French word for wound, sounds so like the English word blessing, which derives from the Old English one, bloedsian, meaning to consecrate with blood.

My pain comes to anoint me before dawn, searing, like the punishment for some heinous crime down the chimney of my ear. Where have you been? I pull it in close, opening a door I pass through.

Wake up, open a drawer, and a tank top—electric blue, the color of an unobscured sky—jumps out at me. I put it on. Go into an online yoga class, camera off so I can write down anything that comes to me during class and the teacher won’t see it. The teacher begins to read from a text about the throat chakra. She says the color of the throat chakra is blue. She reads some words as if she could see my notebook. There they are in my own handwriting, staring up at me from the page: symbols and correspondence.

…

I sit on park benches, doing nothing. People pass by, walking their dogs. I’ve been on my own leash, I laugh, loud enough for them to hear. As if I had any control over anything ever. All this time, making Sisyphean rocks out of matter. Making things up.

I see like I’m on hallucinogens. So why do I feel like I’m snapping out of a hallucination.

…

My friend and I are in a coffee shop, when a young man comes in, tapping my friend on the shoulder, asking him to call him an ambulance. The man asks in a French accent, but it seems the reason he is asking is not because he is unfamiliar with the protocols in England, but because he is under the influence of something, maybe a psychedelic, which has transposed him so from the quotidian reality that he is unable to navigate it and this, along with seeing it without the usual dampers on its flagrant insanity, is causing a panic response in him. I have a feeling the man might regret having asked my friend to call him an ambulance once it arrives, a sense that whatever is going on with him, it won’t be helped by an ambulance but will pass if I can only help ground him, lend him a sense of safety. So I stall, looking into his eyes and asking if he’s sure he wants my friend to call him an ambulance, trying to get a sense of what’s going on with him and if an ambulance is really needed. Genuinely probing, but thankfully I don’t have to do this for very long. A friend of the man’s arrives and takes over. No ambulance is called and that’s a relief for my friend, too. I go back to being with my friend but he is not my friend as before. He is wearing a brown faux-fur bucket hat I want to reach out and touch but know I can’t, or shouldn’t. It’s transforming him into a gentle bipedal bear, with the beige backdrop of the coffee shop where we find ourselves bringing him absolutely forward. I have to focus very hard on staying with what he is saying because he is speaking, talking about his life, and the words are suddenly liberated, just sounds unbound by any linguistic canon. Soon it will be my turn to speak and I may not have the faculties to explain why I have not been able to keep up with what he’s been saying. It’s all beginning to take on a staggering complexity so I may be nowhere near able to articulate: “I fell down a spiral staircase in the eyes of that man I lay at the bottom of in a puddle of him and me, discovering us not even to be separate let alone strangers, and as a result can only feel what he is feeling now, which is an acid trip.”

…

The “benign truncal tic” has climbed my spine to my upper vertebrae, and resumed its antics carrying more and more the hallmarks of Satanic exploitation. If you saw me on the street, you might cross the street. You might cross yourself, Father, Son, Holy Spirit. I move like a Seventies picture of demonic possession instilling fear in a generation of youth, lurching like any minute my head will swivel all 365 degrees around, come fully unhinged and roll off my shoulders in a pool of pale green light.

That, or I am prostrating myself at the feet of God in everyone.

…

I have maybe never been to church without it being my mother’s idea (unless the Mass was in French and then I could be somewhere French was spoken, already knowing what was being said), but on this particular Sunday morning have a strong inclination to go. I Google Map the nearest Catholic church.

The priest is in the middle of his homily by the time I arrive, meaning the Mass is already halfway over. His speech is deep jewel-toned blue and sloughs off the dead skin like Mediterranean salt. His arm extends to the one painting in that church, a multistorey depiction of the Prodigal Son, the son like one of the pigs he’s been feeding because he’s been such a bad Jew, a bad son of God, the son crawling on all fours back to his biological father, whose pardon he begs, lest he start to grow hooves and a curly tail. This is what the priest is talking about, in so many words, when I come in. Everyone is sitting at this point in the Mass and I am walking down the church aisle, trying not to draw attention to myself. Too late. The priest’s eyes have landed on me and, still with his arm extended to the painting, we form a triangle, a Dot to Dot, with the third line from the painting to me not a hard one to draw, not a hard connection to make. I am trying not to draw attention to myself but too late, I was born with skin the color of a red light, translucent with accents of rosacea. The heads of the congregation are turning now, just as the priest proclaims, “Some of us have had wild and wonderful experiences.” I find a space in the broken lines of bodies in pews and sit in it. My sunglasses are still on but hiding my most likely bloodshot eyes tears start to form in before long.

Would you believe me if I told you Jesus was in that place? I don’t blame you, but he was. At some point Jesus comes in and does that thing he did to the merchants in the temple, turning over the tables and sending the coins flying. Wiping all the gilded iconography, the symbology like an amber grime from my vision.

And you know what’s left underneath that.

But just in case there is still doubt, I am presented with a mirror on my way out: a woman, her arm in the crook of another’s. She is wearing dark glasses.

…

Now I have to tell you something: I can’t call on metaphor, or claim to be speaking literally about any of this.

I can feel my DNA.

No, scratch that. I can feel two ropes of energy moving in a helix, picking up speed inside my skull.

In a treatment room at a yoga center, Sivaroshan kneeling beside me, untangling my karmic threads. I feel a clamp on the back of my neck where an animal would be taken by the scruff, because that is what I am, a human animal, until I’m not any longer.

Not even a luminous being, but light itself. Shapeless, gold.

…

The voice of Angelo Dilullo, bamboo wind chimes, rushing water, synth looping behind it. “What if?” he is asking. What if I let go of everything. What would happen then?

This is what happens. The thought I am everything passes through, I sit back in my chair and by “my chair” I mean the maw of the universe, which is inside me. The mouth of a volcano made of smooth wet sand, a pristine geological subwoofer absorbing me into the sound of black. So I am swallowing myself. And throwing myself up. My lower back aches and I’m nauseous because I’m giving birth but not in the sense of having a baby.

The next day I do some stretches, lie down on the floor and stretch into the space until I fill it, am just the space. A diamond flickers behind my eyelids but I am more the diamond than my eyelids. I’ve seen this before, just earlier writing words on the surface of a pool. You know how a pool looks, lit by the sun?

I can only tell you that the angels descend on me that night. I have to call them the hands of God because the force they use feels a mere step down from omnipotent. I’ve never been subject to such force by an earthly being. Such extreme chiropractics. They tug on my head like they’re trying to decapitate me, their knees in my Trapezius muscles for a good grip. They have my ankles too, pulling me in opposite directions as if to make room in me for something.