The Bridge Between Love and Death

There’s the story, then there’s the real story, then there’s the story of how the story came to be told. Then there’s what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.

-Margaret Atwood

Let's say that fiction is a vital component of human existence.

If so, poetry, art, music, dancing, and so forth is all merely part of a natural drive to exalt our limited personal experience beyond what we call real life—the practical parameters of our survival as living, social creatures. Fiction can be created everywhere: putting on makeup, lying to your father, magic tricks, having a crush on a movie star, playing chess. Fiction is ready to come out and play at the least excuse. Fiction is art, it is beauty, it is a wonderful game that everybody wins. Larp (live-action role playing) is literature, except it is created by a group of people in real time instead of by, say, a haggard-looking, brilliant, overcaffeinated, godlike Author who, without involving himself in the convoluted drama of his characters’ lives, creates, peoples, and finally perfects his little world before releasing it into the wilds of the public imagination. In larp, the creator and the beholder are one.

So what do we need fiction for? We need it to fill in the gaps. Even scientists couldn’t do much of anything without theorizing, and nobody could do anything at all without stitching all the bits and pieces of what-we-know-for-sure together with our untested ideas, our wishes, our delusions, or our educated guesses.

The endless procession of marriages between what is true and what is beautiful.

And the one fact of existence that, alone among all others, is surrounded by the widest chasms of unknowability, is that all existence must come to an end.

There are only two views which correspond to the duality that is man: animal and spirit. According to the one the task is to live to enjoy life, and put everything in to this. The other view is: the meaning of life is to die.    

 -Søren Kierkegaard

This year I played two larps about death. The first one, “The White Death”, lasted about an hour. The second game, “Just a Little Loving”, took three days. It wouldn’t be right to compare the two games as equals—while both were extremely important experiences for me, the White Death specifically prepared me to have the incredibly lasting and profound experience I had in Just a Little Loving.

Photograph of an art installation by William Forsythe, photo by Julian Gabriel Richter.

The White Death is about mortality and immortality. It is an abstract, wordless game based on an allegory about a group of settlers trying to set up a community in the mountains, but dying off one by one when winter storms hit. In it, death was a release from suffering and circumscribed consciousness. We all began the game as human beings (miserable, ineffective, and hopelessly restricted to base animal drives), and we were given several props to work with: white balloons, white sugar, and white paper, representing dreams, survival, and faith, respectively. These provided us with a way to develop a relationship to our own death. My character, like all the other “humans”, had a random and unique physical disability, and several meaningless prejudices (mine were a hatred of people taller than me, and an attraction to people with brown eyes). From the beginning of the game, my character had decided that life wasn’t worth living. She clung to her dream and her faith as desperately as the others held onto survival. Standing still in the midst of a cluster of stumbling, moaning humans, she held onto her white balloon gently but persistently.  And when a tall man with blue eyes took it away from her, she began to wail, and then they both wept together, sitting on the floor and rocking back and forth, sharing a single dream between them.

In retrospect, I think this character was about my experience with a dear friend of mine, who had been struggling with depression, addiction, and suicide for a very long time. In many ways, she and I are very much alike, and we became close in the autumn of 2013. Life had been hard to her, and I wanted so much to help, and in order to do that I tried to feel for myself that hopelessness and its drive towards suicide. I saw it could be welcomed as the ultimate release from suffering. A life without hope of real human connection, with only the inevitability of suffering and failure, would truly be unbearable. I liked to think that I would find mere consciousness its own reward, even if life held no warmth or happiness for me, but I found out, in the White Death, that of course this could not be the case. I might beguile myself with empty dreams and unwritten beliefs, but it would be presumptuous to imagine that I could generate all my own happiness. My character wanted to be free of the oppressive, meaningless loneliness of life. And when I was finally drawn into the darkness by the dead, I was freed of my human disabilities and prejudices, and the first human I welcomed into the afterlife was the man who had stolen my dream, because he had sat down next to me and wept, too.

The White Death was a truly hopeless world, and I think that’s exactly what major depressive illness feels like. But the world we live in doesn't have to be meaningless, and depression and addiction are not, in fact, hopeless conditions. My friend remains one of the most wonderful people I have ever met—imaginative, creative, curious, brilliant, and breathtakingly artistic. The world is a more beautiful place because she is still here. The White Death was an immaculate death, one that freed us from our suffering, hopeless, and dying bodies. The living color of the mortal world was to us only an impurity, which would be inexorably subducted beneath the perfect, lifeless, crystalline structure of the snow that covered the blessed dead. I grew less afraid of death after this game, more accepting of it, and, I hope, more understanding and forgiving of the darker side of the human mind that seeks to die.

                Me as Francis, a gay man and professional modern dancer living in New York City. He was age 24 in 1982.

             By contrast, Just a Little Loving was full of life and color. Death was real, but we needed to make the most of whatever time we had left, in order to be together. The very structure of the game was oriented towards living, and even suffering was just another way to interact with others, to deepen a character and add even more meaning to his or her life. Death was not a beautiful release, it was just the end. If you died, your character was gone and a new character would be given to you, with all your former connections effectively destroyed.

And this world wasn’t abstract at all; it was real. New York City, 1982-1984: the specter of AIDS. My character was a young gay man named Francis, who had come from a terrible childhood where he was neglected, abused, and ultimately rejected by his family, but who, in spite of everything, had made a good life for himself. He had a stable relationship and was well-liked among his friends. He had a brilliant dancing career, a close-knit community in the drag scene, and meaningful counseling work at the LGBT Center. When the first rumors of the “gay cancer” arose, he couldn’t run away, as he had from his destructive family life. He had to confront the new danger while remaining devoted to his identity as a gay man and to those he cared about. He had a very fine line to walk between putting himself and his community at risk, and loving the gay community the way he wanted to, using the only the available, insufficient facts about HIV to make such decisions. He lost a great deal to this terrible epidemic, and through no real fault of his own. He lost dear friends, he lost his relationship, and he even lost part of his own identity.

Francis in drag in 1983, with his boyfriend Tony the DJ in back. (photo by Petter Karlsson)

Francis with his "mama" the Queen of Manhattan, watching in front. (photo by Petter Karlsson)

The three days of this larp are really three years—annual 4th of July parties, in 1982, 1983, and 1984, set in Saratoga, NY—and Francis transformed dramatically between that second and third year, when his boyfriend Tony left him without saying goodbye, falling into heroin addiction and HIV, and when the science around AIDS finally produced better prevention data and an HIV test. Francis developed a great deal of courage, and matured from a lighthearted boy, trying to keep the monsters in his past at bay, into a strong young man, more serious about the work and people that matter to him, more generous with his love, and more brave in his vulnerability. On the one hand, he felt he didn't have much more to lose. On the other, further loss would have been devastating. He managed to blend his fierce independence with a beautifully raw emotional intensity. He became strong enough to intentionally lay himself open to being hurt, in pursuit of genuine honesty and generosity towards those he loved.

In the third act Francis tried to give back, not just to the gay community as a whole, which he now did every day in his counseling work at the New York City LGBT Center, but to his friends. Trusting and being trustworthy was both very simple and very frightening. He had an unshakeable belief in those he cared for—the support and love he had to give was always real. This realness was a liability for him, but he took a leap of faith by offering his simple, trustful friendship.

If the community he loved was really going down in flames, than he was going with them, with no regrets. He lit a sky lantern for Reginald with his Club Diamond family, holding hands, helping them let go. He sat with Diane and listened to her romance woes. He kissed Nate, calling him "mama", telling him how beautiful he was. He hugged Marcus and told him he was going to be wonderful up there. He blew kisses to everybody who said hello. He supported his best friend Artie, who always came to him for help and whose loneliness touched him deeply. He promised loyal friendship and assistance to Tony, who finally came to Francis and Artie, apologizing for the way things ended and asking for help getting off drugs and into a better life. He watched every last person at the party seek forgiveness, or resolution, or hope, or redemption, and he felt with them all.

And then he stood up on the stage, and with everyone watching him, sang a love song to Daniel, who had left Club Diamond to work on a cure for AIDS. It was a song without demands or expectations. Francis was offering love without strings attached, without making Daniel have to choose between having a life purpose and living a beautiful life.

Francis dancing with the Club Diamond queens on the last night, 1984. (photo by Petter Karlsson)

"I love you," said Francis, afterwards.

"I'm positive," said Daniel.

And Francis didn't even flinch.

            On the last morning, at the time of the lottery of death, Francis felt absolutely frozen. He thought of Tony, addicted, homeless, and now HIV positive too. He thought of his new relationship with Daniel. He thought of Nate and Walter, his beloved surrogate parents at Club Diamond, both HIV positive. He thought of his dear friend Reginald who he had lost to AIDS the year before. Francis felt like he was looking out of a deep, cold tunnel. In his mind, they had already left him, and he was alone on the grass sobbing, as defenseless as he had once been as an abandoned child. And this time, there was no hiding behind a fortress of ruthless independence, flying free of life's cruelty and insisting that he never needed anything from anybody. He had chosen this community and thus acknowledged his own longing for them.

And it was unspeakably frightening to want something so much.

He walked to the graves, holding the hand of the man he loved, staring at the grass and feeling a million miles away, carrying funeral flowers for as-yet-undetermined fallen comrades, sure that he was about to lose everything and feeling utterly defenseless. He thought, I will die if they die. These people are my life.

He held on to Daniel's hand as if it was the one thing keeping him from drowning.

And then he let Daniel's hand go, and walked among the coffins.

And the names inside did not belong to him or to his dearest friends.

I don't remember exactly what happened next. Maybe he smiled. Maybe he kissed Daniel. Maybe he went to each of his friends and embraced them. Maybe he cried.

I don't think he did any of those things, though—I think he just laid his flowers on the dead, and gently touched the shoulders of those who were mourning, and found Daniel's hand again.

And the funeral song played, and pieces of his heart shattered and flew out to join the bereaved, and Daniel and Francis slow-danced to Dusty Springfield's song "Just a Little Loving", and Daniel said, for the first and last time, "I love you", and the game was over.

The Lacuna

I’ve been meaning to write a thing here for many months, but a Bermuda Triangle of compunctions, scattered attention, and incredible busyness has prevented me from getting anywhere.

I am not exaggerating when I say that this year has been the biggest year of my life. I did two things I never imagined I would even want to do: I got engaged and I applied for a doctoral program. More than a thousand people all over the world now own my artwork, too, the Cheimonette Tarot deck. I get little notes from them from time to time, telling me how much my art means to them. I also moved three or four times, depending on how you count it, made many new friends, lost a few, and recovered from what I can truthfully say was the most terrible time I’ve ever experienced. Trauma is strange. There are these weird phases of confusion, denial, hectic energy, empowerment, terror, depression, and regression. There was also a little anger. I guess for most people, there’s normally a lot of it after a traumatic event, but I find it hard to hold onto anger. It’s so easy for me to see the other sides of a situation, and even when I have been treated unjustly and unkindly, I can see the reasons behind it, and anger quickly fades into sadness and compassion.

Like many things, compassion can work for you and against you. Sometimes both at once.

Today I found out that a wonderful man who I have known since I was 18 years old died last year, almost at the same time my life blew up. I found out because I wrote him to invite him to my wedding. His name was George Hudson, and he was the head of the English department at Colgate University. He led a student group to Japan every year, and had wanted to take me to see the Japanese gardens. He led tours over the Swiss Alps for the Smithsonian. He was in the John Donne Society. He had a son he loved. He was a big, avuncular man with a beard, who regularly made the 3-hour drive to take me out to dinner when I went to Cornell for graduate school. I wrote him about my relationship problems, my confusion about what to do with my life, my adventures, everything. He saw me grow up. He was always interested in what I had to say, and he believed in my abilities as a writer and as an artist. I really, really loved him, and it hurts so much that I never got to say goodbye.

Today some friends of mine had a baby, and another friend announced her pregnancy. A landscape architecture firm I interviewed at in 2010 just called up out of the blue and offered me a job. Mikolaj and I are talking about when to have children, and my beloved father, who has had too little happiness in his life, is 85 years old, and I am 35 years old, and sometimes I have this cold, twisted feeling in my middle that it’s too late for me, somehow, to find all this happiness: my life partner, my life’s profession, my future, but I have.

2014.

In the beginning, I lived nowhere.

I slept in the beds and guest-beds of friends.

I had a home, but I couldn’t go back there anymore, and by the New Year I knew it.

People I had trusted and loved had hurt me very badly indeed.

And no matter how I tried, it seemed there was nothing I could do to avoid hurting them when I left.

I was feeling strong and brave, but I wasn’t sleeping.

I had been within shouting distance of having a nervous breakdown.

Months later, when I had a place to live, I slept.

I could do nothing. I hardly knew who I was. I laid in bed staring at the steel ceiling.

We travelled. We went to Sweden, Copenhagen, and Amsterdam.

We travelled to New Hampshire to visit my best friend.

We moved into a tiny room in an artist’s warehouse together.

We travelled to Australia.

We travelled to Germany, Ireland, England, and New York.

We signed a lease on a beautiful apartment in Palo Alto together.

Somewhere in there we got engaged, and my parents, to my great amazement, were overjoyed.

I’d always been proudly independent, but I knew I needed help. I needed a relationship I could rely on. I needed to do something meaningful with my knowledge, talents, and energy. These things crystallized around me with extraordinary, almost unbelievable rapidity. In almost no time at all, my whole life had transformed.

The hunger for experience is strong. It carries us to the far corners of the universe, if we let it.

Are we running away from happiness, and don’t know it? Maybe it’s not really happiness if we run towards it.

The flight from the familiar world can last a long time.

Sooner or later, we run up against danger. I had always felt like nothing could really hurt me. Like, not really. Not lastingly, anyway. I had gone to a middle school where I was bullied and emotionally abused by the teachers. I had had my brushes with death and heartbreak. Each time I had recovered myself with amazing resilience. Last year, I came up against something that seriously hurt me. I am not okay. I will be okay, and I know it, but for a while, it broke me as nothing had ever done before.

In the belly of the Whale, Jonah lifted up his voice in despair.

That empty darkness of the wishing well is a lacuna, where stars might be born, where life might at any moment arise from the black, primordial sea.

The thing about trauma is that it overlays itself with your own terrible past. Trauma makes the monsters even more terrible than they really are, and however you have learned to cope with deep wounds is what you’re stuck with. If you’re lucky, you make it through with your wits about you. Overlaid trauma is actually kind of useful, because then you get to heal all your wounds at once.  One way or another, eventually, after a much longer time than you wanted, the monster’s shell breaks, and you look inside and find,

nothing.

There are no monsters.

The whale is really a lacuna, and it can suddenly bloom with life, or it can swallow you whole. Or both, in my case.

In a way, the emptiness is its own kind of monster.

And if no life blooms there, get the hell away. You’re not a god, after all. Let it go.

Thank you for liking my stupid English essays, Professor Hudson. I wish I could knock on your office door one last time, and tell you how my life turned upside down in 2014. I wish you could come to my wedding, and welcome me into the world of Stuffy People Who Have Doctoral Degrees with your wisdom and your good humor, and tell me stories about your Bernese Mountain Dog and your amazing son and your life’s adventures.

It is better to be free than to be happy, we said, and experience is its own reward.

Thank you. I am going to miss you so much.

“For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself.”

—Viktor Frankl, a psychologist and an Auschwitz survivor, who lost everything it is possible for a person to lose. “Man’s Search for Meaning”

The Sonorous Sea

“We understand more than we know.”

― Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

Attractor 1: The Destruction of the Universe. December 2013

At New Year’s (a most bone-shaking, wonderful, terrible New Years, cold and bright and homeless and alone), I had my art, but I didn’t have much of anything else. I don’t think there has ever before been a time when I had less of an idea of what my life would look like in the future. Even what my life would look like the next week.

I decided on New Year’s day that I wanted to make more art this year, and maybe have a gallery show, and see where it all took me. And that was it. I really couldn't figure out what else there was for me to want.

There was this one time, back in 2003, after a little group of British kids and I had just gotten our divemaster’s license, when we rode out on a big rickety speedboat from the dive shop in Roatan, Honduras, where we had been working. In the late afternoon we were out in the open ocean, and we suited up and jumped in, dropping down to 140 feet and remaining there for eight minutes, the no-decompression limit. Just because we could.

There’s nothing at all to see at 140 feet in the open ocean. You can’t even tell which way is up. That’s what I felt like on the morning of January 1st. It sounds rather romantic— exciting and terrifying, but it wasn’t really either of those things. It just felt like the sea—featureless, impersonal, and entirely out of my control.

Mapping the Cognitive Loop with Micah Scott

As it seemed like a rather brilliant time to be halfway around the world, this spring I went on two major trips—one to Europe (Copenhagen, Sweden, Holland), and the other to Australia. Long plane flights, as it turns out, are as useful for figuring out your whole life as are cars (as long as you’re talking out loud to yourself and it’s 4 am and over 100 miles from anywhere recognizable). Anyway, on the 16-hour flight to Australia, I thought about art. Then I thought, as simple as you please, of therapy.

Art. Therapy.

So now, a month later, I’m taking online classes in general psychology and statistics. I’m studying for the GRE general test and will take the GRE subject test in psychology this November. I’m applying for work at the Creative Wellness Center in Berkeley, which runs programs for adults recovering from mental illness, with a focus on art and other creative therapies.

The upshot is, I’ll be applying to the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology-Stanford Consortium Psy.D. program later this year. I honestly never thought I’d ever go back to school—as much as I love learning, I was afraid of being buried away in academia for the rest of my life. The Psy.D. doctorate, however, is a program designed for people who want to be practicing clinical psychologists, rather than research academics. I am now interested in much bigger things than art therapy. I want to use art and other creative therapies, ecological stewardship and the healing effects of plants, animals, and natural environments, and many other techniques, for helping people cope with depression, social anxiety, addiction, mental illness, etc. There have been so many in my life who have had heartbreaking struggles with mental health, and I know I can’t just romp in like Superman and save everyone, but maybe I can help add to the tools we all have to make things better for ourselves, and help those who are struggling learn how to use those resources.

"Open Heart", by Micah Scott and Eden

So much of my art is about those tools, and about wanting to share them with other people. This year my dear friend Micah Scott and I started work on an idea we had last fall in New York, of imagining and creating a piece of artwork together (we’ve put together a Tumblr of the work we've done, called The Crystal and the Chaos Demon), in which we learned a lot about ourselves and each other, about collaborative problem-solving and cooperative aesthetics and so much more. We gave (and still give) each other a lot of inspiration, and I really have her to thank for the outpouring of artwork and creative imagination that occupied my life last winter, when I had so little else. I hope to have a gallery show of our work together this year.

My monstrous Kickstarter, which changed so many things in my life and sent my art so much further out into the world than I had ever imagined possible, is almost complete. The Cheimonette Tarot decks (all 2500 of them) are shipping soon. I got an overwhelming response to this project; people from all over the world wanted to buy my deck, and others continue to send me messages about how much my art and writing mean to them. I wanted this deck to be a tool for people's imagination, as a bank of partially defined but coherent symbology that they could use to describe themselves and the world they live in. It's not divination I believe in, but the cognitive poetry of random chance combined with the narrative structures of human meaning. We are little factories of meaning, we humans, and we knit the universe around us into stories, as part of the daily work of survival.

Attractor 2: Bird. January 2014.

I adore the idea of using my art to help people. I love that my artwork has shunted me into a direction of learning and service to others. I also think that a career in psychology will make me a better artist, a better partner, a better daughter, a better friend, and even a better mother, should I become one. I can use the skills I learn to help people all over the world and here at home. I can go back to Israel/Palestine, and serve Palestinians and Jews in crisis, and perhaps help to make the horrible situation over there a little better for those having to live through it, for those with the least power to create peace.

Mikolaj in Rotterdam, Netherlands

In the middle of the dark winter, my partner Mikolaj and I began to forge a relationship. It wasn’t at all a time when either of us would have expected such a thing to happen, but it did happen. It was like a lighthouse. It was something that was always there for me to hold onto if I wanted. Even though I didn’t hold on very much at that time, it was so infinitely uplifting that I knew I could.  

I'm.. happy. Life is suddenly and without warning replete with adventure and safety, kindness and mutual support and love.

For the first time I can really see into the future—five years, ten, twenty, and more. From the inability to see beyond a week, my horizons have opened up into the far distance. It's like flying.

My room at Godspeed

Today, I’m writing this from a beautiful little bi-level room at the warehouse named Godspeed in Emeryville, the same warehouse where I landed a sublet when I came to the end of my 2.5-month stretch of couchsurfing, frightened and tired and desperate to be someplace I had a right to be. Godspeed invited me to be a permanent housemate in April, and at the beginning of May, I moved into the most darling room, made of wood salvage, with a skylight and a ladder, and smoke purple and moss green walls, and golden brown curtains, rug and bedspread. It kind of looks like the sort of room a tree fairy would live in, if that tree fairy was overly fond of books and boots, owned a small array of electronic devices, and had hobbies like motorcycles and MIG welding.

In the way that being on a boat haunts your body for days, rocking you in the waves of past memories, in the way the hushing sound of the sea creeps into your mind beneath the voices of memory and thought, smoothing out the edges and gently agitating every notion into softness and sand, time has finally lingered in my life. Time doesn't, in fact, dull memory, or sap the agility of my mind. It's only made everything fit.

If you sit still and listen, there will always be a story. The world around you will become a mirror and tell you who you are. This is frequently a terrifying experience, but it's really true: all you have to do is listen.

And speaking of stories, here's a thing by Dave Eggers, a talented writer who I nevertheless do not like. Like a ruby buried in the mud, it sits within a largely worthless story, in which Eggers commits the unforgivable crime of making his characters deliberately uninteresting. He won't let it alone, incessantly reminding us that the outcome of the plot does not matter, that his two pathetic characters themselves do not matter. Buried in this stupid little story, "The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water" (a warning all in itself), is one of the most beautiful passages of prose I have ever read. Here it is:

GOD: I own you like I own the caves.
THE OCEAN: Not a chance. No comparison.
GOD: I made you. I could tame you.
THE OCEAN: At one time, maybe. But not now.
GOD: I will come to you, freeze you, break you.
THE OCEAN: I will spread myself like wings. I am a billion tiny feathers. You have no idea what's happened to me.

The Little Room in the Tower

It’s been a while since I posted, and longer since I posted anything personal. The last few months have been some of the most difficult of my adult life. It would not be right to go into too much detail here, but suffice it to say that it consisted of a wintertime compression chamber of family disasters, heartbreak, the death of a friend, trauma, career upheaval, leaving my beloved warehome and living for several months on the kindness of my friends. I don't mean to sound overly dramatic here; I know that there is a huge and terrible world of worse things that could have happened, and I have been, and continue to be, very fortunate. However, I cannot honestly say that it wasn't all that bad. It was. I could have gotten through these past months without the support and generosity of my friends, but I am so unbelievably glad I didn’t have to. You all know who you are: thank you times one hundred thousand, with my whole heart. I always thought that an apocalypse would be explosive and full of energy, like the Big Bang or like the beginning of life. Beginnings hurt too—you are so very vulnerable, and in a sense, each beginning is entirely new. In a fundamental way, past experience doesn’t roll over. You have to build it all right from the ground, all over again.

The end of the world, as it turns out, can be very quiet and still. The explosions towards the end are harbingers of the world's demise, but ultimately, everything just freezes out. The end of the world is an artic tundra wasteland. Trauma can be like that: quiet and still and exhausted. There is really nothing left, nothing to orient yourself or build on. Nothing. You have to figure out where and who you even are before you can do anything else.

Of course, my own apocalypse was something I had taken part in, especially the career, heartbreak, and living situation stuff. It wasn't a natural disaster, a thing that happens outside of human control (people running screaming from their homes as clouds of burning smoke pour from the city). Much of the former life I had before so much collapsed was something I had helped to set in motion and worked hard to build. As the months progressed, though, it felt like a floodplain riverbed in a monsoon, as though natural forces had indeed taken over after all. I could see where the river was headed, and all I could do was try to keep ahead of it so I didn’t drown.

The nice thing about a disaster is that it leaves many of the strongest parts behind: the foundations, the well-made buildings, the best salvage, the most resilient materials, the toughest trees, those who were clever or prepared or just plain lucky. The things left behind always mean something. You can read the ruins like a book, and you can build a whole new world out of them.

So that’s what I’m trying to do.  Art has always been at the foundation of my identity, so I am trying to forge a new career, one that synthesizes my interests in math, ecology, cities, literature, mythology, and philosophy. I’m not couchsurfing with friends any more, I’ve got a sublet in a wonderful warehouse in Emeryville full of excellent people: artists, hackers, leaders, organizers, craftspeople, all talented, inspiring folks who have made me feel welcome and at home. It’s a good place to be while I work on figuring out where to live long-term.

I really want a home, as it turns out. I want a place where I can work and live with a handful of friends who are interested in sharing living space, making art, and doing other kinds of creative work in which they find real value. I want to build friendships and partnerships that are about trust and inspiration and adventure and collaborative work and shared ideals and mutual support. I want to bring comfort and happiness to my family without compromising who I am, or the ambitions I have for my life.

Towers are symbols of human ambition and achievement. They are frequently torn down by natural disasters and human frailty, but we keep on building them. The risk of danger at the top of a tower is not the same as the danger at the bottom of a wishing well (sitting alone in the dark, in the dust, quiet and safe and dying of thirst). Towers, being as they are the human effort to reach beyond the capabilities of our minds and our mortality and the shortness of our lives, carry the risk of immortality. If you turn into a bird in that room at the top, you can’t turn back. You can never really go back (always the blessing and the tragedy of mortal existence, rolled into one).

So here’s to home, and to the human condition: mostly a matter of negotiating what to build on the forgiving surface of the earth and what to build inside myself. I’m still doing the best I can.

The Great Ineffable

In July of 2012 I went to Portugal to give a talk on Occupy Wall Street and public spaces in the United States at an international conference about cities and social justice, at the University of Coimbra. (I have my friend Ella to thank for this entire endeavor—not everyone can manage to generate so much inspiration in me from such a minimum of in-person friendship, but Ella has truly wondrous talents in this regard.) My talk there did not go especially well. The skills I have developed over the years for public speaking come and go, and, in the clutches of a tremendous undertow of heartbreak, loneliness, existential crises, and politics, my confidence rolled merrily out to sea with the tide. All in all, it was probably okay.

The conference was replete with people backed by large institutions, and I was the only one I knew who wrote a paper independently. Perhaps my shy speech went over with the rest of the group in the way of Van Gogh's lousy table manners or Wagner's appalling romantic life.

"Well, she's an artist, after all!"

I can only hope.

Coimbra

Before visiting the tiny little medieval town of Coimbra (Portugal's old capital, and at present a hotbed of abstract science and impassioned student anarchists, to my great delight), I spent four days in Lisbon. I had a lot to think about, and Lisbon, with its beautiful buildings spanning more than a thousand years (Lisbon is also one of the most cheerily colorful cities in Europe: baroque buildings in soft easter egg colors, red roofing, elaborate painted tiles, and Lisbon's special mosaic Portuguese pavement all contribute to the riot of complex visual noise, subsiding abruptly into peaceful monotony when your eye reaches the mouth of the Tagus river), was ideal for the sea wave-gazing, bonfire-gazing, train window-gazing, aquarium fish-gazing impulses I have when I have a lot on my mind.

Watching the world go by, and watching its constituent parts describing the internal architecture of the great natural entities: oxygen, water, the vernacular growth of cities and townships, the melt and swell of geological landscape sculpture, the role of the ego in a larger world (the fish moving ever so slightly with the surge, building on the current like a dancer uses the movement of her partner to execute a high kick or rotation), is an ideal blank canvas for thinking. Order is forever in love with chaos.

Lisbon

I'd wander the streets of Lisbon all day long with my sketchbook, listening to the sounds of the city, daydreaming, drawing and writing down whatever came to mind, but mostly letting my mind wander while I trudged up and down the steep cobbled streets and alleyways of the city.

I seemed to grow smaller during the day, as though my mental hurricane dried up in the powerful heat of the summer sun. I let all the terrible thoughts fly out of me, like a tower filled with blackbirds against a hot, white sky. At night, I filled my mind back up with books. One of the books I read was "Just Kids", Patti Smith's story of her life-long relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. It was the best love-story I've ever read. Patti and Robert made an enormous amount of art together, and supported each other through incredibly hard times. They went through phases of sharing absolutely everything together, and growing apart and into solitude or the lives of others. They remained inseparable in so many ways, but also seemed, almost effortlessly, to avoid the mistake so many make in love: mistaking the beloved for yourself.

“Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed. It leads to each other. We become ourselves.”

Total intimacy, total freedom. The most beautiful thing in the whole world.

"The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It's the artist's responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation.”

Sao Domingos

This book articulated what I had always believed about my life's work and about human connection. The fact that I have never loved Patti Smith's music (though I have always respected it) merely added to this feeling of oceanic solidarity; if I can find such a treasure in a gift that is not meant for me, than I am more intimately connected with the world than I had dared to hope.

Alone in my guesthouse room, jumbled among the rooftops and jutting chimneys, with the moon hanging low in the sky and the fantastic heat of the summer nights, I felt something like relief, like salvation, like happiness, although I was not yet happy. Nobody could tell me any longer that what I wanted did not exist. Slowly, the strictures surrounding my identity were crumbling away. It was a process that began in the years after middle school, and accelerated when I met my present community. It is an ongoing process today.

Last week my friend Conor shot and killed himself. He was not a very close friend, but he was a friend, and he was a part of my community, my chosen family. There was this one night that Conor got pretty drunk and needed a place to stay overnight, and I was happy to be able to lend him my bedroom. I could tell that things were hard for him, and it felt like such a huge gift for me, to be able to do something for him. I was so happy to be a part of his safety net. It reminded me that I was, for the first time in my life, part of a community. It reminded me that I wasn't alone. Every time I saw him at a party, I tried to edge my way into a conversation with him to see how he was doing. Although Conor so tragically did not survive this depression, the fact that he did reach out felt like a gift, and one that included me. Conor's depression took so much away from him: his sense of intimacy (though it was there for him all along), and his freedom (which was, heartbreakingly invisibly, within his reach too).

I don't really feel that we, Conor's friends and community, failed Conor. I wish more than anything that there had been something to prevent him from that last and final fall—a serendipitous situation, a friend in the right place at the right time, a windfall of rationality and common sense, blind luck, anything—but ultimately I think that we belong only to ourselves. I wish he could have seen that it was going to get better, or felt (as I feel) that life was an irresistible adventure, even in the midst of terrible suffering, and that he couldn't help but stick around to find out what happened next.

The End

To all those (my smart, sarcastic, jolly friend Luke, my sweet friend Conor, my artist-dancer role model Lisa, my Russian bear of a childhood friend Dima) in my life who have taken their own lives, and to the many more who have been tempted or who have tried, please reach out. You are alone and you are not alone. You belong to yourself but you are surrounded, inundated, by a fine, filamented web of love and generosity, which will reach out to you if you can only find out how to reach out to it. Keep trying, please, and hold on.

I miss you so much.

Eden