Motohiro Hayakawa
“I’m spreading sugar-syrup on corpse parts!” Daniel shouts over timers going off, knives clacking, tureens bubbling, doors slamming, carts rattling. “Just for you!” His face bathed in sweat, one lens of his glasses cracked, chef’s coat smeared with blood. He’s basting chicken breasts with thick golden glop. I give him a hug, turn starboard and see a recipe card ignite on the stove. Denise throws the flaming paper trailing ash into the sink as Amber runs past with what looks like an excised bladder—lemonade concentrate. Grace gives me a slice of watermelon; Mukesh hands me a spoonful of chutney. And so the day begins.
I love my colleagues, my job, my life. Not every minute, but more often than not. How did this happen?
In “All Good Sex is Body Horror,” Becca Rothfeld writes, “the very essence of transformative experience is that we cannot predict how it will transform us.” This week I had written in my notebook, “even if it were possible, I don’t want to imagine a perfect life, glue pictures of that imagined life to a vision board, and ‘manifest’ its components. I want to watch life unfold, unknown and unknowable before the instant it arises. Like how I didn’t find my family at an ecovillage as planned, but in a college cafeteria.”
I gave Daniel The Spell of the Sensuous for his birthday. In one of our evening talks, he told me there was a period in which he transitioned from timers and recipes to listening, smelling, tasting, touching. He hears something sizzle or smells the intensification of its fragrance. From these sense experiences he develops a felt sense of how long something bakes or cooks, and at what temperature.
“The apparently autonomous, mental dimension originally opened by the alphabet—the ability to interact with our own signs in utter abstraction from our earthly surroundings—has today blossomed into a vast, cognitive realm, a horizonless expanse of virtual interactions and encounters. Our reflective intellects inhabit a global field of information, pondering the latest scenario for the origin of the universe as we absently fork food into our mouths, composing presentations for the next board meeting while we sip our coffee or cappuccino, clicking on the computer and slipping into cyberspace in order to network with other bodiless minds, exchanging information about gene sequences and military coups, ‘conferencing’ to solve global environmental problems while oblivious to the moon rising above the rooftops. Our nervous system synapsed to the terminal, we do not notice that the chorus of frogs by the nearby stream has dwindled, this year, to a solitary voice, and that the song sparrows no longer return to the trees.”1
This passage may move you to tears as it did me, but the marsh beyond my window contains an early spring cacophony of birds and frogs. In the years and godforsaken years it has taken to untangle the whys and wherefores of my own personal poverty, despair, and confusion, I arrive at: get as close to the world as you can, with as much love as you can.
“We don’t get paid twenty dollars an hour to be that eloquent!” Riley yells while filling the mop bucket. He’s a 21-year-old self-proclaimed redneck (Northern rednecks are ‘quieter,’ he explains), and an absolute riot. “We don’t get paid twenty dollars an hour to be that funny!” I yell back, brandishing a melted spatula.
Henry is smoking a cigarette as we wait for his dad to pick us up. I tell him about a video I watched in which participants ask questions of a diagnosed sociopath. The sociopath seems frankly more reflective than most people, having overcome addiction and prison time, wanting to give his son a supportive environment to counteract the genetic component of a personality disorder. Henry says half the people he met in prison had more clarity of thought than anyone on the outside. I’ve been writing on these themes for a while—and I do want to be of service to you with more linear insights and broader scope of topics—but this has been my extended and unwitting education in ‘the last shall be first.’ I feel like I’m on the other side of something, and even someone—someone I used to be.
I have this tired, pale and jowly, aging winter face, and I can’t pay my bills, like really can’t afford to keep the phone on, just got an insufficient funds email, and my job ends when the semester ends, falls right off a cliff. I have a 14-page Section 8 application to fill out. My bathroom needs cleaning. The sink is full of dishes. The rashes on my arms itch and burn. But look at the letter I received:
“Jennifer, you are a wonderful writer. Your newsletters are a joy to read. You are doing what you want to do and because of that you will succeed. You include, encompass, in a few pieces, wretchedness, wry humor, thoughtful alternative points of view, erudite references, vivid imagery and glimpses of character, gratitude to the spheres, much else, and wind up with something like, ‘fun as you go!’ Simply wonderful.”
Do you know who wrote this? My dad. My literal father. How many years did I wish I had a parent who would send money, give advice, or even call once a decade? Instead I have a parent who accepts and comprehends me better than I accept or comprehend myself. I am astonished by how love can rewrite the past by way of the present, and I believe good art, good psychoanalysis—even good romance or good religion—wields this power.
As our youth—and therefore our marketability as exploitable labor and seductiveness as sexual personae—fades; as the years pass and we can’t resolve the great mysteries of money, markets, or ATS-compatible resumes; as we recognize our ambitions as hollow in the face of the machinic Goliaths of systems of greed and violence: a small room at the end of a hallway, and, in it, an easel.
In other words, if you feel you’ve lost everything, or you never even found the things to be lost, behold the spinning gem inside—yes, pure being! But for those of us less perfected than Ramana Maharshi: the art practice! I’m repeating myself like any proper lunatic. But we can build safety inside ourselves, lay plaster and floorboards, hang pictures, roll out carpets—and there’s the plush sanctuary nestled amongst our wet and heaving organs, stairway of ribs, beam of clavicle.
I watch a YouTube video titled “It’s Not Working for a Reason,” subtitled, “a higher energy is trying to do something.”
“Q: But is God really the doer of all the actions I perform?
A: The present difficulty is that man thinks he is the doer. But it is a mistake. It is the higher power which does everything and man is only a tool. If he accepts that position he is free from troubles, otherwise he courts them. Take, for instance, the sculpted figure at the base of a gopuram [temple tower], which is made to appear as if it is bearing the burden of the tower on its shoulder. Its posture and look are a picture of great strain which gives the impression that it is bearing the weight of the tower. But think. The tower is built on the earth and it rests on its foundations. The figure is a part of the tower, but it is made to look as if it is bearing the weight of the tower. Is it not funny? So also is the man who takes on himself the sense of doing.”2
Make your bed or don’t, as you wish. Go vegan or eat a steak. But for God’s sake (and you are none other than an iteration of God), spend five minutes a day entering the portal inside you that leads to the cosmos.
Gratitude to the spheres! Fun as you go!
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˚ · . analog letters: 459 Boiceville Rd., Brooktondale, NY 14817
(If I may indulge in a moment of sentimentality: paid subscribers, old and new, your generosity bought me reprieve from tuna salad and industrial fruit—for which I bow deeply. Thank you.)
Here are some of my favorite newsletters of the past little while.
Adrian Shirk’s catalog of resources:
Fierce and articulate defense of the working class and condemnation of the rental market:
A unique thought experiment for activists:
And wisdom from the contemplative tradition:
The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, David Abram
Be As You Are: the Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi, ed. David Godman