enravel-blog

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Truth + performance

The void, the god question. Is truth what I am, or what I want to be? 

Am I performing what I am, or am I performing what I want to be, or what I want people to see me as? 

How am I not myself? The ways I view myself through other people. 

Fade in: 

Hair fall in eyes staring at screen popping rainbow flag from familiar stranger. Time passes by scrolling stopped at a private page. A channel she used to watch has changed. Apparently. But how true is he? I mean are they? If an evolution is in fits and starts of trying on aspirations, there will be pauses or backsliding. Do the performances occur in the backslides, between one truth and reaching for the next? How does performance serve evolution? 

[enravel-blog]

Your Suffering Does Not Isolate You

Your suffering is your bridge. Many people have suffered before you, many people are suffering around you, and always will. And all you can do is bring, hopefully, a little light into that suffering. Enough light so the person who is suffering can begin to comprehend her suffering. And begin to live with it, and begin to change it. 

JAMES BALDWIN

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surprise bow

I’ve always thought of child’s pose just as the curled fetus in the womb. In that folded position you feel a sense of surrender, the way you might experience if you lived inside of another body and depended on it entirely for life. It’s peaceful to be in a room full of people in womb state.

I did a child’s pose this morning after meditating, and felt gratitude. I felt my forehead on the floor creating a bow. Child’s pose is a bow! And what is a prayer, if not a reminder to put my mind in this position, if at any time today I stop being grateful. I saw a connection between childhood and god—surrender.

I saw how that can sometimes be twisted into religion. Maybe religion happens when god starts feeling separate, outside of the body. When the gratitude is for something other than that which you are wholly part of.

I joined a slavic women’s ensemble recently, to learn to use my voice. I’ve never sung before. This week in rehearsal for Kaval Sfiri, a four-part song with plenty of dissonance, the woman leading us said—you have to stop listening to the other voices so you can hear your own. If you can’t sing your own part, you can’t make the piece.

It’s like that.

[enravel-blog]

naked mom

Mary Catherine Bateson, who had the uncommon fortune of being raised by two legendary anthropologists, has said that home is a place where learning is possible.

I had the uncommon fortune of being raised by a Pennsylvania woman who walked around the house naked. My mom liked to be cool and topless when she blow-dried her hair with the bathroom door open. She didn’t run from the shower or wear a robe or towel. She walked stark. No room required clothes more than another, and so in every room her body was part of our home: it was wide-hipped, tan, with a rose tattoo on the left back wing and cellulite creeks on the thighs.

How many times did I watch her pull on underwear, cotton over soft dark hair? Scratch her ribcage and scrunch her nose after taking off her bra? Slip a waffled or silk nightie down over her nipples? 12 times around the sun around her belly. My early education of the female body was totally without armor. Her nakedness was no more a spectacle in our apartment than the act of pouring cereal or brushing teeth.

I was nearly a teenager when she began dating someone, and he and I were sitting in the living room when she walked through bare chested. It was a shining horror. Incredulous, baffled, embarrassed, mystified, he made a gory accident out of her freeskating body. He introduced us to “mixed company” and “appropriate.” I wish I knew how she felt that moment, naked in her space as it changed around her, constricted by new boundaries. I wonder if she was cold. She scoffed and sauced him, but I don’t remember her body uncovered much longer after that. 

They have two children, nearly teenagers. I like to tell them about the days when mom was naked and reaching into the fridge or answering the phone. When I got to see her belly shake when she laughed. Incredulous, baffled, embarrassed, mystified, they stare out at me through fences. Those little anthropologists in their swathed rooms. I wish there was a body in their home. I wish they’d known her earlier. To make up for it, I like to tell them about their own crownings, how I watched their little dark heads push out of her. Oh they hate it. I like to tell them about the natural miracle of her vagina. I even write it in their birthday cards as a reminder, since they never learned for themselves. 

[enravel-blog]

bras

There was a trampoline at my first high school party. I was twelve. The young give under my bent knees released me airborne, bare feet carving back at the satiny catch before grass. I had the whole place to myself. Everyone else was too old for trampolines. 

I galloped the ring, tossed on purpose, throwing straddles. The wind made my hair feel beautiful against my face. I was at the top of a tall hill, suburb sweeping out beneath me. It was early summer. I was wearing green khaki shorts that came to my fingertips, the measurement my school used for girls, and a maroon cotton tank. I thought of nothing under it but softness. Maybe the ripple of light flesh close to bone, a slight sense of lifting in the jump. Otherwise no thought. On a raised deck two teenagers in conversation about matters of the world looked down. You know, when you are in a performance you haven’t auditioned for?  Cast, I smiled for them, bouncing. This was the moment I’d be noticed by the party. He was laughing, turning, telling her something with a check mark of pity between his eyebrows, and she said back to him, “she’s little, she doesn’t need a bra.” I knew then why an aunt had recently said they were two bee stings. Suddenly, stuck and hot, they radiated the way pain does. 

[enravel-blog]

meanwhile, in salt lake: who will mummify whom?

We take our coffee in the mummification room. Ron, a professorial salesman, regally crosses one leg over the other. He’s a harmless but incendiary sexagenarian, an up-rolled-sleeves raconteur.  His silent counterpart Bernie is a bit younger, swathed in an army-green sweater the size of a dirigible and palming loose change somewhere inside of it. There’s a hidden slink of ten nickels while a thick chemistry slides down my throat. Ron says, “That formula you smell is our trade secret. It has an extremely small molecule. If I put a drop on your finger you’ll taste it within 30 seconds.” I resist the deep urge to request a sample. The pair seems capable of soft-selling me my own death.

Next door in the pyramid, Montu, newly dead, calls out from the altar. His blue parrot body is tucked into a Tupperware container with a motion-sensing device, which has a recording of him saying his own name. Ofrenda, cage trinkets and birdseed, earthly glees he left behind, are laid out. White plush carpets the 27-foot-high copper pyramid oriented true north next to a highway underpass. The vaulted ceiling is a galaxy of vaguely Egyptian icons. There are white leather sofas and, to my delight and fear, a Panasonic camera on tripod next to a steel pasteurization tank.

Ron and Bernie are going to mummify Montu when he’s procedurally ready for transference. His future state dots the room in a collection of dignified mummiform pets, including a standard gold poodle, a Doberman named Butch, and several stray cats.

How sure, we have to wonder, are Ron and Bernie, leaning over the long table to start each fresh evisceration, that a neighbor isn’t missing a calico? They seem like the kind of folks who might embalm anything that strolls past the live peacock in the yard.

I send my friend the pyramid’s address. If I don’t circle back this afternoon, she could go ahead and call over to the Salt Lake City authorities, tell them I had an appointment at Summum.

Like name suggests, Ron and Bernie practice the sum total of all religions. As Ron leans back in a rolling office chair and constellates dogma across continents, languages, time—he’s clearly spent whole days in certain Santa Monica bookstores— he takes luxurious nasal in-breaths between string theorizing Greco-Roman archetypes and meditation rituals. He scatter plots the mechanics of all beliefs about consciousness onto one another in a very logical story of the impossibility of their singularity. In Hermeticism, all religions flower from one true theology. As above, so below, and back again. With Ron as guide I envision the flagship Summums at the mouth of the new age, gathered round a dish of lavender crystals, asking what comes first. They’re asking how to revere and shatter a charge simultaneously. Bernie has yet to speak, while Ron is wrapping up somewhere near Joseph Campbell and pure math. 

In the mummification room (where Montu will join us shortly) pet bodies wait with looped rubber hoses and neat rows of metal tools. This chrysalis lab of lanolin, gauze and resin, down the street from a Panera and the Church of Latter Day Saints, is also where Bernie keeps the books. Summum requests and accepts donations, in the several thousands, for pet mummification services. 

“Let me show you something,” Ron says, as we cross the yard and he hand-cranks open a garage door on the pyramid. June light falls onto Corky Ra's fifteen-hundred-pound gold sarcophagus. “We mummified him ourselves,” Bernie says nostalgically of Summum’s founder. We gaze at the towering Corky and Ron moves an empty wine bottle behind the sofa.

“Corky could walk through walls. His favorite word was consider,” Ron begins, the word in his mouth like a macaroon. We sit in the comfortable leather sofas and Bernie takes a corner of the pyramid. Ron would have made an excellent academic or bible peddler. 

Romanticism, idolizing the hero, leads to nationalism. To borders, walls.

“In 1975, Corky was doing his relaxations in his basement den when a sound, which came for several months as a ringing in his ears, began to move to the center of his mind. The next thing he knew he was transported to a pyramid and was speaking with divine extracelestial beings, totally different mind you from extraterrestrials, who expressed soundlessly to him that they were the Summa, the highest Individuals who exist on all planes within the different universes that are going on right now.”

In a first-person zine Corky later penned about the encounter, he writes: “I had never seen such extremely attractive people before.” See Corky sprawled in astral gel on a clay floor, jetlagged from interdimensional flight, entranced by androgynous cheekbones. Divine lips are delivering seven ancient principles to an anxious Mormon.

“No, no no, the Mormon church was definitely not happy with master Corky,” Ron says. At the word master I scan the room. “But he had to break from them. He was the appointed catalyst, the new Moses. A messenger comes along every so often when the brew is just right, and they of course then have to take the hero’s journey.”

When he got back to his basement Corky rewrote the Kybalion, an existing 1908 text hinging on the idea that everything happens as a result of one’s mental state. He kept the book’s main principles: vibration (everything is in motion), the rhythm in motion swings between opposites (to every cause an effect), and gender is a mental state not connected to physical sex. The only thing he added, based on what the Summa told him, was the principle of Creation: nothing and possibility come in and out of bond infinite times in a finite moment.

“Montu, hi Montu!” the dead bird calls out. Bernie is walking past the altar to join us on the frothy penthouse sofa, where I’ve spread my belongings into a purposeful moat around my body. I take the break in Ron’s portraiture to admire the milk silo and video setup.

“The camera is for Summum TV. We broadcast meditations on the internet,” Ron says without elaboration. “And we use the tank to ferment wine, which becomes nectars, or publications of consciousness. We imbue them with different meditative vibrations, like sexual ecstasy and such, the way the Catholic church transmutes wine with the blood of Christ and then they can give it to children, to anybody, and not get into trouble.”

Ron and Bernie don’t keep membership records, but based on the number of wine nectars they’ve distributed, they assume about 250,000 people have received Summum.

Bernie, like the night-blooming cereus sometimes called Christ in the Manger or Princess of the Night, opens now.

“I consider Corky a contemporary of Buddha or Jesus, or Osho, any of these masters. He was hard. He wouldn’t cut you any slack. He would call you out, get way down in there to the motivations going on behind the things we do. Corky took honesty to a level that most people couldn’t deal with.”

I ask him to tell me about the first time they met.

“I was coming out of a screening of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and there was a business card on my windshield with a note that said, I’ve been in touch with advanced beings and I present on it at the University of Utah.” 

“Corky believed that the mummification process is crucial to stewarding the transference of the spirit when the body retires. When you’re going to make a journey, you can prepare for that journey, like arrangements for a trip. You’re going to find yourself in very weird surroundings when you die. But if you are being mummified, people are going to be communicating to you, saying, ‘You’ve passed away. You’ll be seeing weird things now, but just relax, be calm. We’re going to read to you your spiritual will, something you wrote when you were alive. It will help guide you. We’re going to be taking care of you.’ And the preserved body is very important. It guides you from this address to the next one.”

Ron, who was a ski buddy of Corky’s, adds, “Plus your spirit can come back to that body any time for information. If I take your body down to the crematorium”— he mentions his day-job as a funeral director--“if I burn your body up, it’s gone. It makes it a little bit more difficult.” 

In the eighties, when grooming in general reached new heights, Corky was conditioning Ron for mortuary school in California. To date, Corky is the only human that Summum has mummified.

“When Ron and I are mummified, Corky says he’ll be there on the other side to help with the transition,” Bernie says.

Who will mummify whom?

“We’ll mummify each other,” they both say.

Mathematically, two quantities are in the Golden Ratio if their ratio is the same as the ratio of their sum to the larger of the two quantities. Everyone in the pyramid is calculating. We come in and out of bond infinite times. It begins to feel like a lovers’ spat.

“Who knows though honestly, I’m the oldest out of everybody, I’m the ancient dog around here,” Ron says, and Bernie starts in, “I mean you never know what can happen, I could get hit by a bus or whatever. As long as I’m not smooshed all over the place and you have something to work with.”

“What-ever. Either way,” Ron says generously, “at some point in time we’ll all die, and there will be a choice. It’s each individual soul’s right to take their boat wherever they want. Creation is going to give you your heart’s desire, it doesn’t really matter what it is, but at some point you won’t have desires, and you’re able to walk away from this life and move on down the river.”

We’re standing in front of the altar. Montu’s batteries are on the fritz, as if he’s gotten the message and has moved on. 

Ron says, “Anyway, that’s an old story Corky told us a long time ago.”