Legend has it that the Buddha spent a night in a grotto high in the Himalayas. Assuming his position for meditation, the Buddha fell into an unearthly trance. A bat flew out of the grotto. A pebble skittered toward the edge of the cave and fell to the fathoms below. And the world was disturbed forever.
Legend also has it that both the bat and the pebble were each meditating and the Buddha fell to his death to the abyss below.
And what is to be believed?
This summer has been the winter of my discontent. I live in Henderson, Nevada, an unimpressive gated community with a pool and rows of attached townhouses and random patches of Latinos who apparently show up irregularly to prune shrubs, mow what small grass lots there are and to use blowers to gather everything except leaves. I got “lost” today with my wife, Jane, and told her to just drive and she drove to the outskirts of some sere suburban tract out in the sticks and stones until a sign told us there was no more road. I looked at the mountain to my far left, not imposing, just big and gruffy, like a bulldog in repose and then to the crustacean-like scabrous mess of another to my right and realized what an intimidating country this still is. This endless continent reminded me of the impact it must have had on the first mountain men and later on the settlers. In broad daylight I was stunned by this geographical expression, this knotty imposition. I felt in my continuing binge of anxious despair I could drive all the way out here in darkest night for there are no street lights and I could get out of my car, leave my keys, and wander into the endless desert tracts that lay before me. The next day or the next I would be discovered somewhere out there in the outback of this vast continent, no longer a wandering Jew. All this came to mind to the self-imposed background sound track of some nondescript Indian playing syncopated tunes on his panpipe, the kind you hear in gift shops throughout the Southwest.
I had imposed upon Jane to just get lost as a concerted way to allay the recent tidal flows of anxiety caused by weeks of agonizing spinal agony (spinal stenosis) and the concomitant medications which disoriented me. I was losing who I was, temporal as that is. Irritability, insomnia, watching dawn come up while watching the hands of the clock move, feeling weird and woolly by the Ativan I was taking, plus an opiate-painkiller and a muscle relaxant all combined to form a kind of mild break within myself. I began to cry.
I wept in Nevada which is the moon to me, this urban man. Anomie is the atmosphere here. One feels as disparate as the scree one kicks up on the hard scrabble earth in these parts, partner. I believe to feel such anxiety brought about by illness cannot be consoled by spacious skies, wide horizons and hardened hills and aberrant arroyos. I could dwell in urban isolation ironically because terrible as it is it does not compel you to see yourself so alone, like a pale rider on a ridge. So today when I saw this godforsaken end of the road place, the “end,” I joked out loud that this might be a very good place to just get out and wander off and die, for it is the land of no more.
Of late I have come to the parameters of who I am. I have become cowardly, living in dread as the haunting of the next anxiety attack looms somewhere in me. I feel very alone which assuredly is significantly different to being lonely. I feel as if I am losing my grip on who I am. Anxiety does that to one and the very pills to ease it do that as well, for they are easily addictive. They only compound the anxiety of having to take pills to begin with.
As each day ends I have begun to dread the coming of darkness for it reminds me of the night that lies ahead – watching TV, restless, computing, reading this and that, all coming together by a very palpable feeling of being unnerved, as I am writhing with a snake who has no clear malice for me yet threads in a reptilian way an anacondan grasp about myself. I am inhabited by a demon and I really have no tools to cope with it. You don’t cope with anxiety for it overwhelms the mud levees that you mistakenly believe will hold it back
The writing of this essay in itself creates anxiety as if I dwell too much on the experience itself I will bring it back again, magical thinking with a real grounding in reality. Fear will not be shackled by me. I am feeling as if I am an emotional and psychological archipelago, these past few days, a constellation of many islands rather than the sustained mass of a continent.
The ride out to the desert edge was an intellectual kind of suicide in the making. It was here I would come to move deeply into the velvet folds of the desert night sky. The ride also was an hopeful expulsion of the dybbuk within, feebly trying to exorcise my anxiety which had grandiosely, inordinately chosen to consume my mind for days on end.
I have been crumbled if not crushed by this physical and psychological anguish at 72, something that should have been dealt with decades ago – when I was in better health to mentally fight back. I have been humbled if not abased by feeling how very few people there are to reach out to for comfort, any comfort, a word, a nod, a hello on the phone, all a consequence of my entire failed existence from childhood on to acquire and sustain friendships. At my funeral there will be fewer than five, if I am “lucky.” An observation that in no way is maudlin but a truthful sadness of a kind, solely a fabrication of who I am and the life I have made for myself. I have been humbled by things I dare not mention here, for they make me shameful; I feel the intense remorse of someone who has failed twice as a father. I lament the losses of my life, particularly Rochelle who I was married to for 29 years until her death in 1999. And what probably humbles me the most in very agonizing ways are the associations, memories and reminiscences of all these years I have lived which swamp me with their inconclusive and indeterminate consequences, as if half lived, half devoured, left incomplete, mold on cheese unintended to and forgotten.
I think of that mountain, an argument struggling toward the sky. and the other less noble hill to my right and the gravel and scrub that spread out before me that afternoon and I imagine if I were there now in the dark desert cold how ominous in experience it would be for me as if a screaming, rampaging id descended from the eminence that loomed above. Perhaps before this in terror I would cast myself in fear to the ground and grasp my arms about myself and pose, in stillness, as a petrified homunculus. The horror of the long night into the break of desert dawn might be the spell that might bring me to the end or in some way may ease my anxiety, give me the dim realization that I might need and welcome a return to a kind of stable self, once more. The fever might break, in short. Perhaps I should drive now in the dark and speed in sheer terror to the precipice I had seen in the most vivid daylight. Perhaps.
For a person who has spent his life trying to control the fats and fluids within, trying to order life, being focused and purposed, this assault of illness has taken it mostly away. There is no prosthesis for this event. Like newly placed gelatin placed in the refrigerator, I am still mostly unsettled. So I quiver, quaver and shake mentally trying to adhere somewhere in that chilling soup, as if eggs are being cracked open into my skull, sloshing about, much scrabbled. I can’t find me. I lost control these past few summer weeks. And I run the risk again and again, and I am very frightened man at this moment. I can send out no search teams for myself. I wouldn’t know where to search.
It is beyond the pale, as it has been for me of late, to experience a quasi panic attack. The hidebound veneers of myself, like terraced adobe tile roofs here in Nevada, are slipping off, have slipped off in several places, shattering upon the pavement. The integument which I thought sound does not seem to hold. I am slippery to my very self, unsure. Anxiety that I experience has done this to me. The fear of losing one’s self, like death itself, the final loss of control, of being swamped and inundated by experience itself and the sensate world all about is numbing, maddening – ultimately terrifying.
Desperately I write to ground myself, to stake out a center to hold fast. The hope is that I hold on to what I know as myself as I am impaled by the swarm of hiving bees which is anxiety personified, that I overcome in some fashion the tremors which roll in at moments like murderous rats underfoot. In short, I see myself as shaky, I am shaky, uncomfortably so. I am aware of it. Sureness has fled, as if I cannot grasp a door knob with regardless certainty, just a common reality of daily living. I frighten myself, weak man I have become. Without control fear and fright enter.
The swarming anxiety attack that has immobilized me for several days of late broke something in me because I now feel battered. I am vigilant and helpless before the next assault, like the castle guard who shouts “Who goes there?” Words, at least for me, cannot ever contain what it is like in this situation. Perhaps a rough analogy might serve to give it gravitas so that some other human being might understand.
If I sat as a patient before a therapist, better still, before a caring human person willing to hear me out, chair to chair, I would express what I feel, what I am experiencing moment to moment and what I am emotionally enduring. And in return, I would need this if I were to attain any solace at all.
I would not want advice, the lowest rung in human communication. I would not necessarily want to be listened to, although that is ameliorative no doubt. The listening I would need, in fact require, is the kind that that listens without words, beneath the surface. I do not want my own thoughts and reflecting reflected back to me. What I would want to know or sense from the other if at all imaginable or feasible is that I could place my vulnerable, palpable and beating heart in the other’s lap in all possible safety.
When anxiety is assaultive as it is here, I need sanctuary. I want to swing from the belfry rafters of Notre Dame like deaf Quasimodo only feeling the peals of the bells through his flesh. It is this kind of resonance I would want to have from any other. For me talk is not sufficient. My peculiar, special and idiosyncratic anxiety, mine alone, begs for consolation.
Of late each night dread befalls me as the memory of the last anxious states did to me. Even writing about it makes me queasy, but I sense that writing is one way of establishing control in my life, so I persevere. This past Sunday morning I awoke at 5 A.M. mildly reassured that I had gotten through another night without anxiety medication, which I have been informed should be taken as needed. Sometimes, oftentimes, I need to hear medical advice at least three or four times because anxiety itself precludes my registering it in a rational way. I am so blocked and closed I cannot hear or take in. I know when this is happening but knowing does not help me lower my anxiety so that I can absorb that which would be rationally good for me to understand.
Legend has it.
