had some fun transcribing my journal from last month, verbatim… truly love to bare my soul or some version of it through written records of my self, even while knowing it’s always partial. enjoy this stream of consciousness that begins with two books I read about finding god in the desert. 🏜️
I read a slim and pretty book (Bitterwater Opera by Nicolette Polek) about a woman who is haunted by a dancer named Marta Becket from the 1960s who created an opera house in the town of Death Valley Junction. Then, Marta appears at the narrator’s house. Then she leaves. Then the narrator goes to stay in a rural house somewhere. Then she leaves. Then she goes to Death Valley Junction to see the opera house. Then she encounters God. Then she leaves.
That’s the second book about encountering God in Death Valley I’ve read in the last two months. I also read a book by Melissa Broder called Death Valley. The tones of the two books couldn’t be more different. Polek’s book is pastoral and hymn-like. Broder’s book is a lot more colloquial and neurotic. But both characters have a profound magical realist awakening moment.
A plot can be very simple. Go places. Leave them. Be lost. Go to the desert. Come to God.
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I’ve been taking chinese herbs prescribed by my acupuncturist. I don’t know what the herbs are. They’re a “proprietary blend” that my acupuncturist made and sold to me. The acupuncture treatments are free with the university health insurance, but the herbs aren’t covered. They’re from the acupuncturist’s “home pharmacy.” She says the herbs are supposed to help with my headaches, fortify me, “clear things out,” and increase heat. Or is it decrease heat?
I remember when she was first doing my intake she noticed that my cheeks flushed while we were talking. I have always been told that I blush easily. She says that it’s a representation of the fire element in my heart and it show that I care about being honest, which is true.
I watch a bumble bee circling a purple flower. The neighbor comes out and says hi as he gets into his car, a blue subaru, a clicking sound comes from a pipe. Bushes bloom fuschia and purple in the yard.
I “should” be happy. I’ve worked through so many things, evolved so much in my relationship with myself, being in the world, with others as a writer. Yet most of the time I am overwhelmed by everything in my environment. In a dream a reiki practitioner tells me that me that my body is running on “survival-based fear,” but it might as well have happened in real life. I feel like a child, a sponge of everything.
The thing about writing is that you keep trying.
You leave traces.
It’s messy and uncertain. Kind of like a whirlwind. Memories come, fully intact, at the strangest moments, but you can’t force them. You need to pay attention to your internal climate. Sometimes you need to write it on paper. Be stranger. Let other people give you permission rather than limit you. Contradict yourself. Believe in God.
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I listen to an interview with the author of the second book about the desert, the quieter one. The author is so quiet in a way that reminded me of someone who I used to date, who I always had to ask to repeat herself because I could barely hear her. But it was that same quality that made me think that everything she had to say was interesting. The author of the book is earnestly Christian. I think her holiness is lost on the conductor of the interview, who mostly talked about himself.
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I randomly remembered when I first learned, it must have been from some alternative medicine practitioner, about the existence of the “third eye,” and I remember walking around Bed Stuy after my shift at the bakery with my roommate and her boyfriend and talking about it.
“Do you ever look through your third eye at someone?” I said to my roommate’s boyfriend.
“Maybe,” he said, but I thought he was just pretending to know what I meant.
“Sometimes I do it to the bodega to the person behind the counter just to surprise them,” I said.
That summer it had always just rained. After my shift I went to the wine bar down the street where they played “world music.” Its owner always came into the bakery and ordered four green juices — people were always coming in there and maxing out, people who exercised, like the guy who came in at 8 every morning when we opened, with a sweatband already damp from a mop of hair, and ordered a quad shot latte. The first time I told him, all of our shots are double shots, that’s just how this particular espresso machine is built, and he was like, I know, give it to me, and I was like, so you’ll be drinking eight shots of espresso basically, and he was like, yeah. Then he downed the coffee, just standing off to the side of the counter, and went back outside to his girlfriend who was waiting out there, I’m not sure why she never came in with him. But the owner of the world music cafe would come in after his runs too, order two green juices and down the hatch. He always wore very short shorts, and he had long grey hair.
The music that they played at the world music cafe reminded me of the cassette tapes that my parents, my New Yorker-reading, Jewish parents would play while I, a child, half-slept in the back of the Subaru.
This idea of the third eye, I must have learned it from a yoga class, from a healer that I went to see, a panoply of healers during my twenty-third year, the year of the emergence of the many aches, pains and confusions. The third eye, an energy, a sight, popping through some third thing at the center of the forehead, you either know what it feels like or you don’t.
I think I might have lost it by now — psychic detritus all around that area, clouded, eyes, forehead, a psychic this summer told me it was because of repressed emotion, but I cry so often, sob even, and it’s especially after a sobbing session that my eyes sting and can’t focus, my two eyes that is, let alone the special third, and the numbness and tingling around that area, the third eye in retreat, the two faulty ones on display.
You’ve always had a lot going on with your eyes, the acupuncturist said, and asked how long it’s been going on. I said at least since 2018 when I started to get the migraines, the year after my grandmother died and I participated in several group acid trips, ascending to some plane with various troupes of curious friends, groups loosely assembled, little concern for set and setting, crazed bacchanal of sensations that often ended with someone crying about something someone had said to them years or months before. And were there problems with your eyes before that, she asks. I don’t remember, I say, that time created such a hinging threshold that I sort of see it as the time my life began, in that it’s when I started to learn about what my body felt like, my body told me what it felt like through the language of pain, before that I did not know I was in my body and/or I did not feel it. I was a mind, a brain, what was that grotesque way that Simone Weil described migraine, the head like a dried apricot skewered on a stick? I don’t know how to describe it because it started to just feel like the way things are.