10:41 a.m. - 2007-03-22
And It Opened Up My Eyes, I Saw the Sign!
The most extraordinary thing happened to me yesterday, so I am taking a day from my blog back-up to write about it.
The spiritual and the supernatural are very troubling things for me. I grew up non-denominational Christian, in a liberal family that rarely, if ever, went to church. God, for me, was this little picture bible. I really enjoyed it right up until the point where Jesus was crucified. I usually asked to skip over that. But it was nevertheless one of the books that I learned to read on, one of those books that I probably could have recited from memory at age 4. That was God, little more. I prayed to him every night to look after my parents, my grandmother, my pets, and a list of various relatives that kept getting longer and longer until I the day came, and I can't remember that day, when I stopped praying before bed every night.
We started going to church after my mom's divorce, when we moved to Washington DC and the school I went to was attached to a church. It was episcopal, and had an openly gay minister. Nevertheless, this was also the age (9-12) when I started learning about all the screwed up stuff that had, for centuries, and through today, happened in the name of religion. I learned that my mother's friends Judy and Mary were considered sinners by many Christians. I learned about the Spanish Inquisition (I was that kind of kid, what can I say?), and all the wonderful things it did in the name of not only my religion, but my ancestral country; sometimes I think my mother's belief that our family was Jewish is, on some level, a need to believe that our family would never align with the oppressors. God, haha, knows that I didn't want to be aligned with oppressors. So about that time I decided I wasn't a Christian anymore and began exploring other religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, neopaganism. Heaven gave way to the idea of reincarnation, prayer gave way to magic. But the none of this really stuck. I was fascinated by all of it. I'd always been fascinated by the mythologies of Greece and the Vikings, and now it was the religious history of India, China, and the British Isles. It didn't mean that I, at any point, really believed.
Eventually all of this washed out to what I called the universe, a thing something like God that, being infinite, had recreated itself as an almost infinite number of finite beings in order to change, to learn and understand what it is, in itself. I imagined a light surrounded by mirrors, feeding the light back in on itself. It wasn't something that I prayed to. It wasn't something that would hear my voice above everything else and say, "Yes, Notorious RRZ, I will help you."
Because that would be so hugely unfair. There is so much horror in the world that I can't imagine a being that would be able to intervene that could let that go on. And the thing that REALLY drives me nuts is when people are miraculously saved from a situation that has cost the lives of others and said, "Wow, someone was really looking out for me." Really? Well, why did they look out for you and not all those other people who died? You may have gotten stuck in an elevator on the way to the airport and missed the plane, but a hundred people, including the one flying standby who took your seat, died in the crash. Tell me why that makes any sense?
Or, to use a more concrete example: a friend of mine was messing around Southeast Asia in the winter of 2004. She was in Thailand around Christmastime, and had booked a hotel on the beach. When she got there, though, she felt like she didn't want to stay there, that she'd rather be at another hotel further inland. The next day, the tsunami hit. It would be tempting to think that a guardian spirit of some kind was protecting my friend--and if there was, thank you for saving someone so dear to me--but where was that guardian spirit for hundreds of thousands of other people? Economics and politics leaves the world unfair enough. I'd hate to think God was in on that unfairness as well.
I do, however, find plausible the idea that my friend had some sort of psychic flash, some sort of moment of clairvoyance that allowed her to escape. That, to me, is arbitrary enough to feel plausible in an unfair world. Some people might just have different senses that others don't. I believe--I want to believe--in a spiritual world, something that holds the dead, something that has beings the likes of which we don't encounter in the day to day, whether they're called gods or faeries or djinns or spirits. I like to think that, after we die, there's something else. I've had dreams about my grandmother, and I wonder if it might be a visitation, rather than just a memory, although I always think of the famous Laura Kightlinger joke about how there are certain dreams you really, REALLY don't want your grandparents showing up in.
I think my biggest belief, though, is in signs. I like patterns in the chaos, messages that shed new light on the path that I'm taking in life. I remember asking the universe to put a song on the radio if I had a shot, ANY kind of shot, with this one boy, and when I turned on the radio there it was, although after one date I realized that this was someone I never, ever would want to date. I remember being at Tori show in DC, and that outside I heard her sing a song set in DC (this was the Scarlet's Walk tour, where every song corresponded to a part of the country) and one set in Texas, and that the order she played them in would determine if I stayed in DC or went home. Not only did she play them in "Go home!" order, but she sang the song Black Dove, which has the line "I've got to get to Texas." There seemed to be signs in spades telling me to get the Hell out of Berkeley, and the Hell away from a certain boy there. But, with all these signs, there's a big element of how I read them. I'd feel this way regardless, considering that I am well on my way to a graduate degree in English, but I nevertheless felt like I wanted the great big sign to drop out of the sky, a huge piece of stone with words written in fire, "YES, NOTORIOUS RRZ, YOU SHOULD PURSUE A CAREER IN WRITING AND THEATRE!!! IT WILL BRING YOU MUCH HAPPINESS AND INCIDENTALLY WILL PUT YOU IN THE PATH OF AN ATTRACTIVE, INTELLIGENT YOUNG GAY MAN WITH A CRUSH ON YOU WHO LOOKS REMARKABLY LIKE PAUL RUDD!!!"
A few days ago, I was watching a rather mediocre movie called The Exorcism of Emily Rose, mostly because I really love Laura Linney and didn't feel like working. The film concerns a young woman who dies while in the care of a priest. The priest claims that she was possessed by a grand total of six demons, including Lucifer himself. The medical community calls it a case of epilepsy combined with psychosis, and charge the priest with negligent homicide, as he told her to stop taking her medication, resulting in her refusing to eat and in her injuring herself. As the film progresses, the agnostic attorney, played by Laura Linney, begins experiencing supernatural phenomena. She is woken up every night at 3am (according the the priest, this is the ACTUAL witching hour, but whatever) by the smell of something burning, and there are a lot of slamming doors, presumably the infernal version of ding-dong-ditch. Then her star witness freaks out and is hit by a station wagon. An EEEVIL station wagon. All of this is quite dull, but there was one moment that kinda stuck out for me. Laura Linney is telling the priest that she was walking down a snowy street when she sees a glimmer on the ground. She reaches down to find a locket with her initials on it. It wasn't something she'd lost, but it felt like a message to her that she was exactly where she needed to be right now, doing exactly what she needed to do by defending the priest, and defending him not simply by trying to prove misdiagnosis by the medical community, but by actually arguing that demonic possession is real, or at least possible. She winds up losing the case, but the jury recommends time served as the sentence and the judge accepts it, in effect freeing the priest.
I thought, "How great would that be?" Not to, you know, performa botched exorcism and get away with it, but to receive some sort of incontrovertible sign that I was doing the right thing, that I was on the right path. That I was exactly where I needed to be, doing exactly what I needed to do.
A few days ago, after my friends' queer music festival (the upcoming SXSW entry), I was in a really good mood, so I called the Boy in California. I left a message, telling him that I knew that he was busy but that he should give me a call when he could. He called me back yesterday, and not at the best time. I'd just found out that one of my actresses wouldn't be able to do a second show next week, so I had begun looking online for a theatre that could book us for a weekend in April. I hadn't heard back when he called. He was headed to campus, and I was in the middle of a workout, so our conversation wasn't the greatest. At certain points, I thought to myself, "God, this guy is so boring, how on Earth could I have fallen for him." It was to the point where it felt like I was really ready to say goodbye to him, and to say goodbye to Berkeley, as well. But nevertheless, there was something deep inside that was . . . well, I'll quote Mallrats: "What can I say? I love the retard."
I heard back from a theatre that DID have a weekend free in April. I still haven't heard back from all my actresses even now, but KNOCK ON WOOD, I think this might work. Maybe not, we'll see. But I had things to do. I had to go grocery shopping. So I went to Central Market, seeing as it was on the way home from where I was and it would have the various organic things that my roommates prefer. I parked my car--which, it should be noted at this point, has an Ani DiFranco sticker on the back--went inside, and went through the shopping list.
I came back with a loaded cart. I saw my car, and there was something that looked like a flyer wedged in the door handle of my little Mazda. I got closer and recognized that it was some sort of Ani DiFranco flyer; I figured someone had seen my sticker and thought I might like to hear about some sort of new album announcement or tour or something. Then I got up to the door. It wasn't a flyer. It was a CD.
And it wasn't just any CD. See, right before I left Berkeley, my computer was stolen (yes, again). Fortunately, I had the brains to download all my music onto DVDs. There were just two albums I had bought between the last burning session and the theft: both of them were Ani DiFranco CDs. One was her latest album, Reprieve. The other was her live Carnegie Hall show, which had a live version of her song "Educated Guess." This, for me, was very much a song that accompanied my leaving grad school, and leaving behind the Boy. I had first heard it in Austin, and when Ani said the lines, "Plus, I've got this whole new family, and I'm in love with each of them, and I'm on this list called lucky whenever I'm in reach of them" I thought of the people I knew in Austin, and when I went to Berkeley I remember how sad I was that I didn't feel the same way, that I may have made friends but they weren't my family in the same way. I still had a copy on my iPod, and I listened to that a lot when I came back, and I thought of the boy both in the lines "I've got something sweet for you, and I don't care if it is more than you deserve. I've got a lot of love, and a lot of nerve, so baby, watch me while I take this curve" when I thought about how I still wanted him, and the lines, "And I'm learning how to say that I'd be happy either way with your love" when I thought about how being here and doing theatre made me happier than he ever did, which didn't mean that there wasn't still a place in my heart, just that I had things to do and that I couldn't wait for him to do them. I thought about how I wished I'd gotten the song off my iPod before it broke down. I needed that song yesterday.
The CD waiting for me in my car door was the Carnegie Hall show. The CD was in perfect condition. I put it in my car and couldn't believe what had happened.
Because someone had to have parked right near my car, because I had parked facing out so that the bumper sticker wasn't visible if you were just walking to the store. And they had to be in a generous mood, with a CD they didn't want or didn't need, like they somehow had an extra, which when you think about it takes tremendous generosity. And even with all that, they couldn't have known that this was a CD that I loved but didn't have, a CD that I'd been wishing I could listen to even that day. They could have given me any of more than twenty Ani CDs. They gave me the exact one that I would have wanted. There is just too much coincedence in that. It enters into the realm of the miraculous. It was as though someone, somewhere was telling me that I was exactly where I needed to be, doing exactly what I needed to do.
So if I don't get to do the show, I'll be okay. And if I don't ever go back to Berkeley, I'll be okay; I might even be happier. And if I never talk to the Boy again, I'll live with that, too. Maybe the thought of all these coincedences adding up to a sign betrays a monstrous egotism on my part, but maybe I need a little bit of that, if I'm going to do art. Because this event has done the wondrous favor for me of dissolving the voice inside that says everything is explicable and rational, and reminding me of some other voices I've heard over the years. Hamlet said, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Performance artist Deb Margolin, after receiving a wrong-number message on her machine that said, "That simply cannot be," said herself, "Ladies and gentlemen, when you get to be my age, you know that ANYTHING can be." And Lorraine Bracco said, at the end of a very dumb movie that I am nevertheless addicted to called Medicine Man, "You know, life is strange, but down here it seems so very precious."
Now if you'll excuse me, there is some music I was meant to hear. I wish you love, and I wish you magic.
