#as a totally unscientific study it would be interesting to see if I open up more or differently with her

[mashupofmylife]

For reasons that I now can't remember, my therapist (who mainly works as a child psychiatrist) and I ended up discussing the fact that I still sleep with stuffed animals. I was not expecting him to end the session by telling me that he expects to see pictures of them (or, for that matter, for him to reveal that he immediately assumed that my bed was completely filled with stuffed animals).

[ruffsficstuffplace]

And The AWRD Goes To... (Part 11)

“Shooting Star…! Shiny Rod…! FUSION…!” Akko cried as she raised both weapons up to the heavens.

Nothing happened.

Akko crossed the two weapons across her chest instead, and closed her eyes. “Oh Shiny Rod, weapon of the super great and awesome and amazing Shiny Chariot, please lend me your power…!” she prayed.

Still nothing.

Akko laid Shooting Star down on the counter in front of her, held the Shiny Rod up to her face with both hands, the light reflecting off some of the jewels making them look like eyes locked with Akko’s own. “Hey Shiny Rod, could you please fuse with Shooting Star again?” she asked, smiling hopefully. “I just want to see just how powerful you two are together, so I can know what not to use, and how much force is too much force. I promise I’ll try not to accidentally kill us all this time!”

On the side, Winter, Ruby, and Diana watched as Akko gave the Shiny Rod puppy dog eyes. The other students in the firing range either ignored them or started laughing.

Diana groaned. “I can’t believe I’m watching this...” she muttered.

“I can’t believe you aren’t more appreciative of this opportunity,” Winter said quietly. “Just think: we’re witnessing, live and right before our eyes, one of the most enduring and enigmatic mysteries of the modern era!”

Akko whined as she started shaking the Shiny Rod. “Come on, Shiny Rod, just this once, please!”

Diana gave Winter a look, Winter ignored her, Ruby stepped up and put a hand on Akko’s shoulder. Akko stopped shaking the Shiny Rod and looked at her.

“You mind if I try and ask for you?” Ruby asked.

Akko nodded and handed it over, sulked over to the side with Diana and Winter as Ruby began to talk to the Shiny Rod. “Hey there, Shiny Rod! Can you please fuse with Shooting Star again? Like Akko said, we just want to know how powerful you are so we don’t accidentally kill our friends or civilians while we’re fighting Grimm.”

There was a brief moment of silence. “Well?” Akko asked.

“It said ‘No.’” Ruby replied.

“But why…?!” Akko whined.

“It said ‘Now’s not the time.’”

“But when is the time? Is it when we’re fighting Grimm?”

“It said, ‘Again, now’s not the time, and yes and no.’”

“And what does it mean by ‘Yes and no?’”

“It said, ‘You’ll find out when it’s time.’”

Akko whined and flailed in frustration.

“I find it rather interesting that only you can converse with the Shiny Rod like that,” Winter said.

Ruby shrugged. “I guess it kinda helps that I’ve always really understood weapons, and you, know, it, uh, ‘talks’ the way it does.”

“Any idea on how it’s ‘beaming ideas and emotions straight to your brain’ since we talked earlier?” Winter asked.

“Well, nothing concrete, since I haven’t been able to examine it at the Forge”--she tensed up as the Shiny Rod began to pulse--“AND I’M TOTALLY NOT GOING TO DO THAT, EVER”--the pulsing stopped--“but I do have a theory now!”

“Mind sharing it?” Winter said as she opened her scroll, prepared to take notes.

“Sure, but I gotta warn you: it’s pretty long and rambly! I haven’t gotten the time to really refine it, or do some long research yet.”

“Ruby, right now, I’ll take whatever leads and information anyone can provide me,” Winter replied. “And honestly, you’re turning out to be a very good source.”

Ruby smiled, before her face turned serious. She took a deep breath and started. “Okay, so… I’m sure of one thing, and one thing only with the Shiny Rod: it’s definitely an ancient artifact, not something made within the last decade, not the last century, possibly even not the last millenia.

“It’s not made of any sort of modern alloys or commonly used traditional materials for weapons like wood and animal bones, nor is its construction and properties consistent with any sort of post or pre-industrial era techniques. So far as I can tell, it doesn’t have any sort of artificial aura amplifiers or dust capacitors I’ve ever seen or heard of, and yet it’s capable of seriously magnifying the effects of modern ammunition made long after its time, presumably through some sort of unique resonance and interaction with Akko’s aura and dust, possibly even the metal of the casing itself and the ignition mechanism, making it far more powerful than anything most dust munitions are capable of, or possibly even through the use of pure dust crystals.

“I hate to sound unscientific, but the only plausible explanation I can find with this weapon was that it was either made from incredibly exotic materials of legend, like the Starlight weapons forged from a giant meteor that crashed somewhere in Mistral in the Dust Age, or mundane materials processed with some technique either lost to time, or so secret that that we’d have a heck of a time trying to find someone who can explain how it was done, kind of like the Bloodborne weapons from the same era.

“Pretty much all of those weapons had some sort of special quality to them, kind of like its own semblance, and a lot of the accounts weren’t afraid to suggest, or just outright claim that they were just as alive as the people who wielded them. The Shiny Rod’s could definitely be its ability to fuse with and amplify the strength of already existing weapons, but I won’t be able to have even the slightest idea of how it’s able to do that so easily and efficiently until I know what it’s made of, what was used to forge it and how, and what it’s capable of.

“However, given that the accounts tend to be holey or super exaggerated, I don’t think we should put too much stock into them, and look for different explanations. I’m actually starting to think that the Shiny Rod’s rejecting people other than me or Akko could be due to some incredibly specific fine-tuning and aura resonance techniques that were made to specifically limit the kinds of people that could wield it, like a super efficient ancient DNA scanner based on aura resonances, and its ‘talking’ could just be unintended interference and disruption of my aura causing minor hallucinations, possibly because of the clearly shock-based security system malfunctioning and causing my nerves and brain cells to misfire.”

Akko, Diana, and Winter all stared blankly at her, some preliminary notes on the third’s scroll before she gave up.

“But hey, like I said, it’s just a theory,” Ruby finished.

“… Ruby, did you happen to write any of that down?” Winter asked.

“Yep!” Ruby said as she pulled out her scroll. “All in here, though I think I gotta give you a guide to decode my notes before you can really use it, or you know… read it.”

“Just send it anyway, please, Ruby, it’s not the first time I’ve had to decrypt unfamiliar code and other people’s handwriting,” Winter replied.

Diana sighed, her shoulders slumping.

“Something wrong, Diana?” Akko asked.

“Yes, but not through anyone’s fault; it just… bothers me that nearly everything about that thing just laughs in the face of all my knowledge, and believe me, I’ve studied most everything there is to know about weapons, Grimm, and huntsmen!”

Winter put her hand on her shoulder. “Don’t get too hung up about it: there’s plenty of other things out there in the world that simply defy explanation.”

“You say that like that’s supposed to be a good thing...” Diana muttered.

“No, it’s not, but it is our reality, and you’d do best to just accept it,” Winter said. “So, seeing as the Shiny Rod won’t be fusing with anyone’s weapons any time soon, and still seems to be intent in keeping its secrets until it’s ‘time,’ any of you girls mind if I go retire to my quarters now?

“It’d be ideal if I get some actual sleep before I’m off to the Celestial Hills.”

“Go right on ahead,” Diana said.

“Sleep tight!” Akko said.

“Bye, Ms. Schnee!” Ruby said, waving.

Winter chuckled. “Please: just call me Winter.” She frowned. “Believe me, last names and proper titles get cumbersome very quickly, when you’re in for the long-haul...” she said as she walked out of the firing range.

“You guys want to clean our weapons together?” Ruby asked. “I totally forgot to even wipe down Crescent Rose last night.”

“I was thinking of prioritizing our academics, but sure: I could use your expertise,” Diana said, before they walked off, talking about who was going to be fetching what from the supplies counter, and if Ruby could examine Gwragedd Annwn’s internal mechanisms again.

Up above in the rafters, their eavesdropper followed after them, steps so quiet and the shots down below so loud you would have barely heard them even if you knew they were there.

Winter opened the door to her room at the Haven Guest House, sighed as she saw Qrow sprawled out on one side of the floor, his flask in one hand and held upright to keep from spilling. She sighed as she stepped inside, decided to make do with the light of the afternoon sun blocked by some heavy curtains.

“Why am I not surprised…?” she muttered as she shut and locked the door behind her.

“You got a lot of experience with your mom,” Qrow slurred, still on the floor. “How is ole Snow, anyway?”

“I have no idea, and frankly, I’ll just wait till she calls me,” Winter said. “It can’t be easy for her, no longer having any of us with her in the house besides Whitley, and who knows how she might react to news that her daughter almost died before she even got accepted.”

“Meh,” Qrow said, raising and swirling his flask around. “She’ll survive, she always does,” he said, before he put the rim to his lips, pouring whiskey into his mouth and all over his face.

Winter sighed again, and shook her head, before she headed to the other side of the room, rolled out one of the mats and sat on it. “Anything interesting happen while I was gone?”

Qrow tilted his flask away from his face, swallowed and coughed for a few moments. “Managed to catch up with you-know-who. She’s happy that it’s finally made a comeback, but is stressing over whether or not she should actually step in and try to help with its new tour—she’s pretty sure it still holds a grudge.

“You?”

“There was a spy in the firing range earlier,” Winter said as she shrugged off her heavy top-coat, folded it up and set it to the side. “Probably wouldn’t have even noticed if it weren’t for these,” she said, pointing to her head just as an ethereal pair of arctic fox ears appeared, twitching and turning around. “I  kind of wish I was born with these things; the world is just so different when you can really hear,” she said as the animal ears disappeared.

“Yeah, I hear systemic oppression and a constant risk for violence and discrimination is so worth being able to hear everything, always, whether you want to or not,” Qrow muttered.

“Which is why I said ‘kind of.’”

Qrow raised his head. “You think it’s from anyone we should be worried about?”

“No—probably just from the pet project.”

Qrow snorted as he laid his head back down. “I didn’t realize something that size was a ‘pet project.’”

Winter chuckled. “Forgive me: getting tangled up in the grand machinations of the gods tends to really change your sense of perspective.”

Knock-knock.

“Excuse me, Ms. Schnee, Mr. Branwen?” one of the Haven maids asked. “Do either of you need anything? Different styles of beds? Tea and food? A private bath and a change of clothes, perhaps?”

“Alcohol!” Qrow said. “They know what I drink, just mention my name, you’ll be fine.”

“Professor Schnee mentioned that, yes, Mr. Branwen. Ms. Schnee?”

“I’m good, thank you.” Winter said.

“As you say, Ms. Schnee. Excuse me, I will take my leave now.”

The fox ears reappeared as Winter listened to the maid as she went down the hallway, made sure she really did go down the stairs and in the direction of the kitchen. Then, she turned to Qrow with a surly expression. “Really, Qrow? Drinking this much so soon before a mission?” she said.

“You know I’m a better huntsman when I’m drunk,” Qrow replied. “Well, drunk-er than usual.”

Winter groaned. “No wonder and you mom got along so well...” she said as she pulled out her scroll, checked her messages. Aside from the usual deluge of general notifications for hunters, important world events, and messages from her contacts both professional and personal, she found that Ruby had already transmitted her notes over to her.

Like she had warned her earlier, it was a giant, unwieldy mess, even if the time-stamps said it was just her entries for that day and yesterday. Ruby seemed to be fond of using a ‘quill’ instead of the default keyboard, and used a bevy of personal shortcuts, codes, and symbols, with not a single legend or guide to be seen anywhere. She sighed and she started scanning it, stopped as she found a sketch of suitcases, and a simple portrait of Weiss, with the nearby words written in plain language.

“Almost blew myself up today! Accidentally fell on Weiss luggage”--there were arrows pointing to the drawings--”which turned out to be full of dust and ammo and SUPER explodey, but it’s okay: she and her friend Akko helped me get up and not blow us all up to kingdom come.”

Winter chuckled. “Hey Qrow, heads-up: looks like your niece mistakenly sent me her diary with her notes about the Shiny Rod.”

“That’s not a mistake, that’s a feature,” Qrow said as he still lay on the floor. “To Ruby, weapon notes are as much a part of her diary as whatever the hell else happened to her that day.”

“Well don’t worry, I won’t read any more into it than I really have to,” Winter said as she continued scrolling, passing over much more detailed, intricate sketches of weapons like Shooting Star, Myrtenaster, and all their components, a doodle of a bird with X’s over its eyes, and details about their repeated run-ins with the Grimm, until she finally found entire pages dedicated to the Shiny Rod.

To her dismay, it seemed Ruby’s lengthy explanation earlier was already collated and edited: her theories, notes, and examinations of the Shiny Rod jumped around from whatever aspect of it caught her eye, her hastily scribbled notes swerving around curving around each other as her numerous trains of thought did their best to avoid collisions.

Winter sighed, and set her scroll aside.

“Can’t figure it out on your own, huh?” Qrow asked. “Don’t worry: no one else back at Sanctum could, either.”

“I’m not giving up!” Winter snapped. “I’m just putting it aside for later…” she yawned. “It’ll be better if I do this with a clear, rested mind.”

“Trust me, Ice Queen, that only makes it worse, because then you realize you still can’t figure it out...” Qrow muttered.

Winter grumbled. “… Hey Qrow? I almost forgot: did she happen to mention that friend of hers? The one that actually studied the Shiny Rod, and tried to figure out what the hell it was supposed to do?”

“She did,” Qrow said. “Good luck trying to find her, though; she didn’t pull a disappearing act, but we don’t know what the hell she’s been up to this past decade, either...”

Winter sighed as she curled up into her futon. “What I wouldn’t give to be able to talk to her, and get her perspective on all this...”

“Careful what you wish for, Winter,” Qrow muttered. “From what she’ll tell me, it really wasn’t an amiable separation...”

Snap.

Croix smiled as she broke apart her chopsticks, watching all the news and bubbles popping up on the scroll giant screen in front of her—official news reports, activity from Haven students’ social media feeds, even the more credible rumour mills out there in Mistral’s vast, sprawling underworld—all with one subject in common:

The Shiny Rod.

Croix hummed to herself as she ate her cup noodles. Behind her, her disc-shaped Aura Units floated about, disassembling equipment, packing it into crates, or running her various experiments and constructs through last-minute, greatly hastened final testing.

It was going to be a hell of a time, relocating her entire laboratory from Atlas, especially with all the weeks if not months of readjusting she had ahead of her. But if there was anything she’d learned from all her years, in a place as big as Mistral, there was always a place to hide, you just had to know where to look.

“I couldn’t believe it when I first heard it, you know?” she muttered. “After so long, why now, why her, why there? But I guess I’m going to find out when we meet again, won’t we, ‘Shiny Rod?’ she laughed. “And this time…

“… You won’t escape again.”

Note: Can you all tell which aspect of Ruby I was REALLY unhappy to find had been relegated to something of a one-off joke?

[ripstocking]

We wait to buzz until 2.21pm, the exact time we have been appointed. Fernando receives us with his usual double pair of glasses covering his forehead. ‘Nothing is true or false, it all depends on the colour of the lenses you look through’, he says. Arrabal is considered one of the most important playwrights alive in France, but in his home country of Spain he is still remembered for a TV episode in which he appeared drunk in front of the cameras. He started drinking when he was 60 years old, so he didn’t have a notion of how much alcohol he could handle. After the program he had to be hospitalised. Maybe because of that, he feels very comfortable in his self-chosen exile in Paris. He was born in 1932, in Melilla; when he was 10 years old he won the Spanish national prize for exceptionally gifted children. During the Spanish Civil War his father stayed faithful to the Republic and was condemned to death, but escaped from a hospital and was never found. Fernando is missing a lung from a tuberculosis operation. He says he actually breathes better like that. In 1955 he moved to Paris, where he met Alejandro Jodorowsky and Roland Topor, with whom he would create the Panic Movement; before that he spent time with the surrealists. His apartment is testimony to such a multiplicity of influences. Fernando Arrabal is not the easiest person to interview. He talks with scattered quotes and references. At the end they somehow make sense, but always taking into account the limitations of the listener. I think some of the references flew over my head, but I did my best to put them together and make some sense: controlling the chaos by letting it be. Wasn’t that the premise of the Panic Movement? How did you sleep? I slept pretty badly actually. And you? I slept well. May I offer you some wine? Let me open a bottle. I see you have a very professional set-up for visits and interviews here—a few bottles of wine and chocolates. I really like interviews, they are good for me. I think out loud and audit myself, sometimes even surprise myself. I may in fact hold some sort of interview world record, because I’ve done a lot. By the way, you have a pretty nice house. Spacious, high ceilings, maybe a little overwhelmingly decorated though. Being an artist is, in part, generating spaces of creation. I like to be surrounded by ordered chaos. You know, most artists, especially playwrights, live in deplorable conditions. André Breton lived in a janitor’s room, Samuel Beckett in a tiny apartment, the list goes on. I’m extremely lucky with this place; almost no artist has an apartment like this. Milan Kundera lives in 60m2, and so does my friend Michel Houellebecq, although he lives on the top floor of a tower with his wife. He can’t move too much now and needs police protection every time he leaves home. He is pissed. I’m lucky I can walk around freely after some of the things I’ve said. I see a tower of chessboards there. What do you think about the fact that machines are beating men at chess? I think it is absolutely normal, we’ve always known that would happen. How about that garrote? That’s a torture machine. You know that’s how the Spaniards condemned to death were executed. Do you want to sit there? Many writers do, some of them have even asked me to kill them with it. Are you ready to die? Do you go to church? Not really, just the Christmas Eve mass. Only once a year? That’s unacceptable. I hope you are at least baptised; otherwise you’ll just hang around in limbo for eternity. The sacred is essential to understand life. The sacrum bone is the closest to the butthole. Sacred and shit have a lot in common, as Dalí insisted. I see a lot of irreverent sacredness in the artwork that hangs on these walls. Like this Last Supper with Beckett, Borges, Wittgenstein, Kafka—and you as Jesus. I have a question about your presence in so many paintings. Is it sheer narcissism? You should stop asking the questions you brought, and stop recording this. OK. I stop the recorder and put my notes aside. Your name is Pau, right? That’s Paul in Catalan. The apostle Paul was like a secretary, a bureaucrat. Each of the gospels is a version of Jesus; you should do the same with this interview, just write your version of me. The gospel writers didn’t follow Jesus with a recorder! But Pau is a weak name, it sounds like a joke, you should change it. Oh yeah? What do you suggest? I like Jordi, George in Catalan. I like the connection with the dragon; he is the dragon that kills the dragon. Or just go with your last name: Guinart. It’s powerful. Mr Guinart. I really like that one. Names are very important. Like Arrabal. Why can’t everybody have a great name like Arrabal? I guess we would all be the same then. Are you satisfied with the life you had as Arrabal? Of course I am. How could I not be? I had the extraordinary privilege of living. Modernity has endowed me with the responsibility of celebrating figures like Benoît Mandelbrot, the great mathematician to whom I recently gave the Prize of Transcendent Satrap. Take into account that when he came up with his theory of fractals, Europe started dividing up, whereas when the Bourbaki group studied set theory, Europe came together—it was the origin of the unification of Germany, Italy, and the union of southern Slavs: Yugoslavia. Isn’t that interesting? Geopoliticians have no idea about that, but these theories do have an influence on reality. You mean that these abstract theories somehow apply to the real world? How about the most important logician since Aristotle: Kurt Gödel? He is an extraordinary figure. His two incompleteness theorems in many ways represent the state of the spirit of the 20th century. Man unable to understand itself. Did you know he believed in ghosts? Many of the greatest men of science believe in angels, demons, and all sorts of unscientific stuff. To me that need for transcendence is utterly fascinating. Do you think that with Gödel humankind definitively gives up on understanding itself through reason and logic? I would use a simpler term to explain that: tohubohu. It’s what preceded creation, which in the Bible is understood as the chaos before God gave order to it. It is chaos with the mathematical rigour of confusion. I’m not sure if I’m following. You mean like a controlled madness? No, we can’t control anything, we can’t even control ourselves. But at least we have maths to try to understand. However, tohubohu is always beyond. ‘Tohu’ is an inhabitable desert, commotion, and agitation before God’s intervention, and ‘bohu’ is the confusion of the moment of creation. Where there’s no confusion, there’s nothing. There’s no point in trying to understand everything. That all sounds very confusing. Is it because you like spreading chaos? Excuse me if I offend you, but I can’t help but see a deliberate Dionysian enactment in your performance. Not so much Dionysus, but Pan. He makes you laugh, but when you turn around he is totally unpredictable. That’s why he creates panic and madness. Dionysus is too round, cyclical, circular, like the seasons. Pan is more confusing, and therefore more interesting. He reconciles contraries with the mathematical rigour of confusion. With the Panic Movement there is something like a rationalised frenzy, controlled by mathematics and logic. Tohubohu. What is pataphysics? It is what is beyond metaphysics, a science of imaginary solutions. A branch of a branch of fantastic literature. According to its founder, Alfred Jarry, the world is an exception to the exception, that is why there can be regularity. Underneath reality there is only chaos. That has to do with Wittgenstein threatening Popper with a poker in Cambridge. We basically try to make sense of chaos. You always refer to Cervantes as your inspiration. Who else has inspired you? Salvador Dalí, Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, Miguel de Unamuno— If you undust any part of Dalí, it is huge. What he says in 1937, ‘38, ‘39—it’s huge! His relationship with sex, for example—people like Unamuno or Valle-Inclán are tiny figures compared with Dalí. How about Pedro Calderón de la Barca or Federico García Lorca? About Lorca, Dalí said the exact precise thing. When Lorca, who was in love with Dalí, read out loud his Romancero Gitano to Luis Buñuel and him, Buñuel, who always told the truth, said the book was horrible. Lorca turned to Dalí with despair, asking him how Buñuel could not like that book when it had been so successful all over Spain. Then Dalí responded with the essential, as usual: this book is not bad, but it lacks trains. It’s like writing a book today without speaking of the internet. He was always so precise! It lacks trains. I see you are very connected with the present. Is that an iPhone 6? Yes. I’m 84 and I try to keep up with the times. But I also handwrite notes on the phone case. I use both analogue and digital. How about the rest of the European tradition? What inspires you? Our civilisation, which is extraordinary, has only created two myths: Faust and Don Juan. The monk Tirso de Molina did a great job with that last one. The world of seduction—Dalí actually wanted me to seduce his wife, Gala. He wasn’t really interested in sex, but in my presence he did very sexual things. Like what? He liked to be surrounded by weird people—mentally, sexually—like Amanda Lear. Dalí paid for Lear to go to Casablanca as a man, and she came back as a woman. But he wanted me to seduce Gala, and I still don’t understand why, because seduction doesn’t really exist. What do you mean? I see it everywhere, especially in literature. Seduction is a lie. The monk Tirso de Molina tells the truth: Don Juan wants to fuck four girls, and in order to do that, he lies to them, but none of them falls in love with him. When other European authors understand that, they copy it, and make it better; one of them is Molière, and the other is Mozart with his opera Don Giovanni. But seduction is still a lie, and thus it is never real. It is a contradiction in itself. How does seduction work in Dalí, if there is anything like that? Dalí was interested in the possibility of an explosion. This is a long story, but worth telling: Gala and Paul Éluard live with Max Ernst and have a love triangle. Éluard sends a letter to Ernst saying that he loves Gala because she is a formidable woman and she incarnates all the Russian spirit, but that he loves him even more. The surrealists, with Breton leading the group, couldn’t stand that. Until the last moment Gala keeps writing letters to Éluard, who has other women, but when he writes back to Gala he ends his letters with things like, ‘I make love to you’ or ‘I penetrate you’. And Dalí doesn’t give a damn about all that, because he is not attracted to Gala per se, but to the bizarre situation that the whole thing generates. He likes the fact that something strange is created, something that can unleash a hurricane at any point, but doesn’t. What he likes is masturbating, and that’s what he talks about in his real biography—the one he wrote when he was 17. Tell me an anecdote about you and Dalí. Once I visited him with five chained women. They were lesbian Maoist revolutionaries and came from Lyon to interpret my play Fando and Lis. I received a call from Dalí saying he wanted to perform a cybernetic work at midnight. When the five women heard it they went wild, they really wanted to come with me. I said, ‘Fine, but we can’t just show up there. It has to be somewhat special; you have to come chained. I’m going to chain you!’ But chaining someone is not as easy as it seems. We had to go to a department store, the Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville, where we bought five metres of chains, and the concierge lent us a few locks. I can imagine Dalí really liking your idea. Of course! He absolutely loved it. He was at the luxurious hotel Le Meurice, where the Nazis had their Kommandantur when they occupied Paris. When we got there, before I even asked, the doorman said, ‘Suite 103’. We went up to the room and Dalí was ecstatic. ‘They are my five slaves!’ he shouted. But I wasn’t sure, so I told him that none of them were at his service, that they wouldn’t do anything against their will. But then one of them took her pants off and said, ‘I want you to slap my butt!’ I was surprised, but decided to just enjoy the spectacle of Dalí hitting her with a nard. As hard as it is to find a nard in Paris. And what happened next? He said the ‘slave’ and I should go to an orgy with him that night. I then said that I was a chaste man and that I wouldn’t get involved. He got even more enthusiastic and assigned me the role of ‘chaste voyeur’. Do you identify with that role? I see you are very interested in sex. How about that painting with a naked man embracing a huge penis? It is very simple: men have a small penis and they wish they had one as big as that. We all wish we were bigger, in every sense. What do you think about life? I am extremely lucky for not having to fight for anything except for dreaming. The time is up. I tell him that I will have to do a lot of hermeneutics in order to write something worth reading. I quote Dalí, ‘Let them talk about me, even if what they say is good’, expecting his complicity. He gives me a dirty look, which I interpret as, ‘Don’t you dare write nonsense for my interview’. I tell him I’ll send him a draft before publishing it—but I won’t, it would be too risky. OK, thank you very much for your time. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you, it’s been my pleasure. I hope I can compose something interesting out of this chaos. You’d better. Otherwise I’ll whip your arse. The interview ends at 3.37pm. The artistic director of an opera and his assistants enter the apartment punctually. They want to propose an adaptation of Fando and Lis. He stares at me with condescendence as I begin to leave. Then he stands up, walks across the whole room and hugs me warmly. He looks up. I see a little child in his playroom: Arrabal as a self-made child.

[nancygduarteus]

Can ‘Darkness Therapy’ Cure What Ails You?

ČELADNÁ, Czech Republic—The Beskid Rehabilitation Center sits on a rolling plot of land in the boomerang-shaped Beskid mountain range, a stretch of the Carpathians reaching from the Czech Republic across Poland and Slovakia, fading into western Ukraine and the Transylvanian Alps. Full of “alternative” therapies, the BRC is the kind of place you might visit if you were feeling fine, but wanted to feel great, or if you were suffering from a low-level chronic ailment that standard Western medicine had failed to resolve. There’s a cryotherapy chamber kept at a brisk -184 degrees Fahrenheit. There’s an open-air “healing pyramid,” a bare-bones wooden-beam structure said to have healing properties. (“Research shows that pyramid energy, thanks to its deeply relaxing effects, harmonizes the psyche,” the website alleges.) And famously, there’s Vila Mátma, or “My Darkness Villa,” where clients spend seven days or longer alone and in complete absence of light.

Many modern-day practitioners of what Czechs now call terapie tmou, or “darkness therapy,” point to a 49-day Tibetan retreat called yang-ti as its most important forebear. In the modern West, the therapy was promulgated in the 1960s by the German anthropologist Holger Kalweit as Dunkeltherapie (literally: “dark therapy”). The concept has particularly taken hold in the Czech Republic, where darkness-therapy centers now can be found across the country to serve a population of just 10.6 million, according to Marek Malůš, a psychologist who researches the technique. Staff at the best-known of these centers, the Vila Mátma at the BRC, say that prospective clientele will now spend two years on its waiting list. On its website, the BRC alleges that darkness therapy is “very effective” in preventing “lifestyle diseases,” including cancer and metabolic disorders, and that it sharpens the senses, stimulates creativity, and most notably, “regenerates the psyche.”

There’s not much to do in the dark, at Vila Mátma or any other darkness-therapy center. And that’s more or less the point. Depending on the facility, clients sleep, exercise, and meditate. They eat and bathe in the dark. They sometimes write, draw, sculpt, or play an instrument, all in total darkness. Without access to their phones or to the internet—or even to a clock or calendar—they tend to spend a lot of time alone with their thoughts, and on occasion chatting with a therapist or “guardian.” Not infrequently, clients report intense audiovisual experiences, most likely vivid dreams or hypnagogic imagery (the sort of micro-dreams you experience in between wakefulness and sleep), which can be pleasantly mind-expanding or downright terrifying. At the BRC, the procedure costs 2,000 Czech Koruna a day, or just under $100, and patients must reserve the one-person facility for a minimum of a week at a time.

Malůš, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Ostrava’s Faculty of Arts, considers darkness therapy a variation of restricted environmental stimulation therapy (REST), the procedure once known as sensory deprivation. (The technique got a rebrand in the early 1980s in order to shake a pervasive connotation with torture and brainwashing.) REST is commonly classified into two categories: flotation REST, familiar to a mass audience thanks to the emergence of commercial saline flotation tanks, and chamber REST, in which a subject usually lies alone on a bed in a dark, quiet room for 24 to 48 hours. In studies, flotation REST has been linked to a host of psychological and physiological benefits, from elevated mood to reduced stress to improved athletic ability and increased creativity, and chamber REST has been linked in a handful of studies to successful habit modification.

Malůš invited Peter Suedfeld, a pioneer of REST research, to visit a few of the facilities in Central Europe several years ago, and the two recently collaborated on a chapter for a book. As Suedfeld explains, however, the extended length of time that people spend in darkness therapy and the fact that they can move freely about the chamber and communicate with therapists make it a markedly different procedure than the one he studied, in which subjects were left in complete isolation. He says he urged Malůš and his colleagues to perform more research, an entreaty he repeated to me over the phone. “I think it’s very interesting,” he said of darkness therapy, “and I wish people would collect data so we know exactly what the effects are.”

I paid a visit to the Beskids on a balmy afternoon this April, to speak with darkness therapy’s proponents and to spend a night in the chamber myself. In his emails prior to our meeting, as well as in person at the BRC, Andrew Alois Urbiš, who runs Vila Mátma, took pains to distinguish himself as a medical professional and to emphasize the villa as an operation run by a team of accredited physicians, rather than the kind of amateurish moneymaking venture he said he sees across the country. Urbiš’s office, however, also indicates an omnivorous appetite for alternative therapies and mystical disciplines: Photos in the entrance hall show him in the BRC cryotherapy chamber and alongside a man he met in Christchurch, New Zealand, whom he calls a “wizard.” A collection of statues behind his desk includes a figurine labeled with acupuncture points and a dark-green statue with a giant phallus. A manual for Vila Mátma staff requires that guardians should have “extensive theoretical knowledge” of a long list of unscientific practices and beliefs, including “basic cosmic laws,” books of the dead, dreaming techniques, quantum mind, shamanism, and fairy tales.

Even in the Czech Republic, where this therapy is particularly popular, few doctors will prescribe their patients a stay at the villa. “In a way, they’re not very inclined toward us, they don’t like us much,” Urbiš says of the greater Czech medical community, “because physicians prefer those chemicals, you know, that medication. But on the other hand, there’s a string of doctors who come here and stay repeatedly.”

Whatever ails you, it seems there’s someone to claim that darkness therapy will cure it. One client suffered from a “very unpleasant” patch of nasal eczema for 20 years, Urbiš alleged, before a week in Vila Mátma supposedly cleared it up. Urbiš’s friend and sometime assistant Karel Černin told me that it was darkness that ultimately relieved him of an infection that several rounds of antibiotics had failed to knock out. And Urbiš himself says that his 50 consecutive days in the villa left him with improved sensory perception. “I started to hear better, my memory was significantly improved, I began to better manage various stressful situations,” he said. His pace of life has slowed down, he said, but his productivity has increased. “And as you can see,” he added, “I was rejuvenated.” (With no basis for comparison, I can confirm that, for a 71-year-old, he seems quite spry.)

There’s also a theory held by Urbiš and others within the community that spending an extended period of time in darkness will raise an individual’s levels of the hormone melatonin, which is linked to sleep regulation and a host of other physiological processes, including cardiovascular functioning, reproductive cycles, and the development of cancer. Malůš and his colleague Pavol Švorc are currently co-piloting a study at the Darkness Therapy Center in Kozlovice, another small town in the Beskids, to measure the effects of the procedure on melatonin and cortisol secretion, the results of which they hope to publish this fall.

Exposure to artificial light at night does indeed suppress the production of melatonin—a consequence of modern life that could, in theory, be avoided during darkness therapy. Existing research into REST procedures, however, shows no evidence to back up the notion that prolonged light restriction boosts the amount of melatonin that the pineal gland might otherwise secrete. For Švorc, the known unknowns in this field of research present an opportunity: “The funny thing is, we don’t know what should we expect,” he says. “Maybe there will be some changes in [melatonin and cortisol] production dynamics, or maybe there will be some changes in the concentrations. We don’t really know because no one did [darkness-therapy] research before."

David Blask, the head of the Laboratory of Chrono-Neuroendocrine Oncology at Tulane University School of Medicine, says the notion that exposure to darkness outside of nighttime could raise melatonin levels is “simply not true.” The internal clock that regulates melatonin rhythm runs autonomously without the need for alternating light and dark, although melatonin secretion can be suppressed by light exposure, and light and dark can synchronize that clock, Blask says. Spending time in total darkness won’t boost the amount of hormone produced by the pineal gland; it will only desynchronize the timing of secretion, so that people who come out of the procedure may experience its peak later or earlier in the day than they would otherwise. “You effectively are having a free-running [unsynchronized] melatonin rhythm, which is not healthy for you” in the long run, Blask says.

The chronobiologist Debra Skene, who studies circadian-rhythm sleep disorders in the blind at the University of Surrey, says that there’s no evidence that blind people produce any more melatonin than sighted people. “The only thing you could say is that when we sleep in our bedrooms, or when we get up to go to the toilet at night, [sighted people] are exposed to artificial light, and we know that that light can suppress your melatonin,” Skene explains. For that reason, people in darkness therapy may produce more melatonin than individuals in their own homes. “But I wouldn’t be putting my money on thinking that the little bit of extra melatonin you get there is really going to have huge health benefits,” Skene says.

In his office at the BRC, Urbiš explained that he needed to put me through a couple of tests to make sure I was fit for the darkness. He pulled up an image of eight different-colored squares on his computer screen and asked me to rank them in order of preference, a test he told me he had devised himself based on Chinese medicine. The results were unfavorable, if not exactly shocking: I work too much, Urbiš said, and I don’t take good enough care of myself. He then showed me a new set of squares, and, though I was careful to choose differently this time, things seemed to go from bad to worse. A pie chart on the screen showed that about 60 percent of my “energy” was consumed by stress (I have “very bad energy business,” Urbiš noted in English). Worse, something traumatic happened in my childhood, or perhaps in utero, that I still hadn’t processed, he said.

Then Urbiš looked at my palm. Was I angry a lot, he wanted to know? I didn’t think so, but Urbiš said my liver was on overdrive, probably working to process all my emotions. He pushed a pen-like instrument into my hand to read the flow of energy along the acupuncture meridians in my body. My living situation was unfavorable. My diet was out of balance. I ate the wrong thing for breakfast. This information was all gathered in order to find out whether I was fit for the villa, so I was surprised when, quite suddenly, Urbiš announced, “So! That would be good. We’ll go to the dark.”

And off we went to the dark.

Not surprisingly, the freestanding Villa Mátma is a no-frills kind of place, but it’s also perfectly cozy. Clients enter the building through a small kitchen area, outfitted with a sink and a shelf where fruit, bottled water, and a hot meal are kept for the client to consume at will. This first room is sealed off from the light by a double set of doors; once a day or so, when a staff member or guardian enters the space bringing fresh food or to visit the client, they ring a bell to alert them to retreat to the main chamber. Inside is a twin bed, a recliner, and an elliptical machine. There’s also a desk, stocked with paper, colored pencils, and a lump of clay. (Urbiš keeps a couple of sculptures made by clients in the darkness in his office.) A narrow hallway leads to a closet, including a lockbox for electronics, a toilet, and a washroom.

A week of sensory restriction, it may go without saying, isn’t for everyone. Vila Mátma’s prospective clientele receive a fairly lengthy list of contraindications, including epilepsy, claustrophobia, and severe hypertension. Some providers are particularly cautious not to admit individuals with a history of psychiatric illnesses. I went in with no medical complaints, but I did carry with me a history of depression and anxiety, which for some providers could disqualify me from the procedure. Suedfeld told me that over the course of his research, he found that only depressed subjects responded poorly to chamber REST. “If I were running a commercial enterprise or a therapeutic enterprise, I would make sure that before people go into this environment they’re in a good mood,” Suedfeld said. “Because to some extent I think the environment is a mood enhancer: Whatever mood you go in with, it will strengthen it.”

Malůš has studied the psychological consequences of darkness therapy since 2011, when it became the subject of his Ph.D. dissertation. Now he oversees University of Ostrava research performed at the commercial Darkness Therapy Center in Kozlovice. His work has indicated that people who undergo the procedure come out of the chamber with significantly lower self-reported levels of depression and anxiety than before the week of REST. But Malůš sees particular promise in the use of darkness therapy as an aid for psychotherapy. “In this condition, the mind is much [calmer],” Malůš explained. “You can concentrate more, you can consider almost everything more clearly.” He said he believes that the unconscious mind can be revealed “spontaneously” in the dark.

According to several people I spoke to who had been through the procedure, it takes a few days to get properly oriented—or disoriented, as it may be—to the dark. Malůš says that on their first day, clients can generally estimate how much time they’ve spent in the chamber, but after going to sleep and waking up for the first time, night and day become indistinguishable. This can be one of the most distressing phases of darkness therapy, Malůš says, and it’s one of the reasons that centers like Vila Mátma ensure someone is available via intercom 24 hours a day to talk to clients.

I wasn’t in the villa long enough to lose track of time completely, but I did stay long enough to feel bored, and then anxious, and then uncomfortably alone with my thought processes. Urbiš and his team brought me into the villa at around 6 in the evening and gave me a tour of the space with the lights on. After a brief test run, they switched off the lights for good and left me until the morning. At first, the darkness felt like a minor annoyance—I kept catching myself reaching out for a light switch, just for an instant, every time I moved from room to room. But I appreciated the chance to zen out, without the burden of email or the torment of the news. I had a nice session on the elliptical, ate the meal that was left for me (rice, carrots, soy sausage) and sang to myself to fill the silence. A Polish friend had recently taught me to make pierogi, and I folded a pile of little dumplings with the clay on the desk.

But moving about the lightproof space came to make me feel vulnerable and fearful, and the darkness itself soon struck me as somewhat sinister. With little else to capture its attention, my mind went to places I normally wouldn’t allow it the time or space to go—what (and who) wasn’t working in my life, what role I was playing in maintaining my own dissatisfaction, how seldom I was willing to go after what I really wanted. Hugging my knees to my chest in the recliner, I got choked up; before I knew it, I was weeping. And then, because there was nothing else to do, I got into bed and waited until the darkness of sleep overtook the darkness of the room.

At 7 the next morning, Urbiš, his assistant Martina Vortelová, Malůš, and Karel Černin opened the door to the villa and called me back to consciousness and into the light. All important life events are celebrated with a meal, Urbiš had told me, so all darkness therapy stays end with a breakfast with the team. Over coffee in the dining room of the BRC, they discussed funding possibilities for the construction of a second villa on the premises and a new raw-food regimen Urbiš wanted to create for clients. And back in his office, Urbiš presented me with a few souvenirs he gives to all his clientele: a certificate confirming my stay, a Vila Mátma refrigerator magnet, and an empty aluminum can. Contents: “Čeladná darkness.”

It wasn’t until later, in the psych department at Ostrava University, that I told Malůš how intense my brief experience had been. In the dark (and with my iPhone under lock and key) it was easy to see how the mind could make worthwhile connections in the absence of distraction—and also possibly drive a person mad.

Malůš told me about a student who took part in one of his studies, a high achiever who exhibited no signs of instability prior to entering the chamber. At first, he began to have what Malůš called “semi-hallucinations” of snakes, visual experiences that he was able to write off as unpleasant but purely imaginary. But over the course of his stay, the visual stimuli grew into increasingly intense bodily experiences. He didn’t share the experience with the researchers until after the study had ended and Malůš performed a series of crisis-intervention psychotherapy sessions with him. “He [didn’t have] the support he needed during the stay; he wasn’t wise enough to quit it, because his ego would suffer,” Malůš recalled. “And then he wasn’t wise enough to continue, even though I told him, ‘Well, I see very clear connections between your life experience, your earlier experience, and those hallucinations.’” Half a year later, he says, the student was still afraid of the dark, traumatized by his experience in the chamber.

Listening to Malůš talk, I couldn’t help but wonder if that kind of gamble was worth it. What Malůš describes is a therapeutic method powerful enough to reveal the unconscious, yet so powerful that it can only be applied with extreme caution. For someone with depression in remission, like me, it could provide a rich opportunity for psychological discovery; for someone suffering from an acute episode, it could make matters worse. Neither Blask nor Skene believed that the procedure was likely to be beneficial on a physiological level, but both conceded that it was unlikely to do healthy people any lasting damage. Psychologically, though, while it may be high-reward, it’s certainly high-risk.

It’s all a bit of a catch-22, and for now, there isn’t enough funding for Ostrava University to conduct research at a facility like the BRC, where subjects would receive the on-call support they need to remain safe for the duration of a study. But the potential is there, Malůš says. At the moment, it’s just hard to see.

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/07/darkness-therapy-czech-republic/564365/?utm_source=feed

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