the habit of being

There is no saying how the door opens. There is no saying how the wind is sucked out of the world and you with it, through the door, which, as one can see clearly from the other side, was never closed in the first place. One can see clearly, from the other side, that there is no other side. There are no words to describe a change which is not a change from one thing to another, a movement which is no movement at all. But because writing is what I do, I will try to write about this.

The funny thing about enlightenment is that people think it is a state they should strive to achieve. It sounds like a good thing: enlightenment. It sounds like laying down burdens. The problem with this, thinking enlightenment is a good thing, is that you might then suppose that burdens are a bad thing. Everywhere, there are people who want to be enlightened so they can stop suffering… so that they can get rid of the bad stuff and be free. But that is not how it works. Enlightenment is not about getting rid of suffering. Enlightenment is realizing that suffering isn’t something one needs to get rid of.

I think this is very similar to the saying that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. I think an elephant would have an easier time getting through the eye than a person who doesn’t suffer would have attaining enlightenment. A person who doesn’t suffer isn’t alive. Enlightenment, though it requires a kind of death, is a state of extreme alive-ness. Everything is more vivid in THIS, even suffering.

Of course, the other thing about enlightenment, the kingdom of God, or whatever you might call it, is that once you see that you are there, you also see that you were always there. You didn’t have to go through the eye of a needle afterall. All you had to do was open your eyes. This isn’t really something one can attain, because it is impossible to attain something you already have. This is why you can’t find God by looking for him. But this isn’t to say that looking for God or trying not to suffer is bad either. There’s no difference between saying that suffering is a bad state to be in and saying that trying to stop suffering is a bad state to be in. They’re both wrong. The bad state doesn’t really exist. The line between immanence and transcendence doesn’t really exist. THIS isn’t about breaking through barriers, it’s about no longer believing in them.

A lot of people might say they couldn’t be happy, because happiness requires believing in things blindly. Actually, it is being miserable that requires this. You really have to believe that you are trapped, that you are doomed, that you are worthless, that you have nothing to give, to be truly, deeply, miserable. You have to believe it no matter what other people say. You have to believe it even if you can’t prove it. These are the kind of beliefs that are hardest to let go of. Happiness is the absence of beliefs.

To find God is to see that one has been in God from the beginning. There is nothing new. I think another thing a lot of people expect from a big, universal, insight, is that it will be a new thing that changes the world. That’s not really true either. Yes, there can be a sudden, profound shift in how a person experiences the world. But it’s still the same world, and you’re still the same person. Nothing new is added. Everything was already there.

Today I read “Envy” by Kathryn Chetkovich. I was supposed to be doing other things, like studying, writing, laundry, but I haven’t gotten around to those things yet.

Last night I dreamt I went to hear Jonathan Franzen read and wound up sleeping with him. It turned out he had some sort of deformity, but in the end I was still begging him to autograph my copy of The Corrections. I’m sure this means something.

Before that, I was in a black livery cab on the way back to Manhattan from Westport, Connecticut, talking about Joan Didion with an older woman who is more successful that I can ever imagine being. Before that, I was at a birthday party, for another woman who is more successful than I can ever imagine being, considering whether I should make lobster an honorary vegetable for the night, considering that I don’t get invited to lobster bakes at yacht clubs all that often.

The previous night, I was at a dance performance about “girlishness” that was billed as “erotic and grotesque.” It was sortof an interesting concept, but it didn’t come together at all. The best part about it was a survey slipped into the program. One of the questions required me to check off which out of a long list of venues in the City I’d attended performances at over the last 12 months, and I checked off about ten different places, which made me feel great about my life, temporarily.

I feel like there is something seriously wrong with me. I’ve felt this way my entire life. I’ve come to realize it’s a common element of the so-called “artistic temperament,” but I’m left wondering if I would still act the way I sometimes do if I didn’t have this sinking suspicion that I’m innately crazy or immoral or otherwise fucked up. Or is it the fact that my behavior sometimes fails to fall in line with my better judgment that causes the feeling in the first place. Is it really not worth pondering since there’s nothing I can do about it, or is that way of thinking just another symptom?

I’m whitening my teeth at home. You squeeze this sticky bleachy stuff out of a little syringe into these trays that your dentist makes and wear them a couple hours a night. It seems to actually work, though I don’t have that celebrity smile just yet.

1. For a week I watch the bruise on my thigh change colors. Purple plumage to yellow rot to gray afterthought. I got it by running into a stationary car.

2. I go to a dance in a giant glowing swimming pool. I go to a dance in a gleaming theatre. I go twice to the same restaurant. I go once to get espresso in the middle of the night. I go to a staged reading, and, in the dark, a fat woman breaks her chair, falls on the floor, and says “shit.” Then she tries to sit in the chair, which has no seat, again. And she falls, again, and no one can pay attention to the voiceover. When the lights come on and the actress begins to read, an old man says, out loud, I can’t hear a word she’s saying, can you? He gets up and walks slowly down the aisle and across the front row, taking a seat directly under the actress giving her monologue. All of us smirking. Next, we learn that even the most brilliant women write sappy, trite love letters. You can sleep with whomever you want, says Simone to Nelson. I won’t stop you. But as for me, I cannot help but be faithful, all the while spending my life with another man. And the best thing she mentions is that love on holiday is easy, but for a relationship to work you have to be able to continue your writing when he is there.

3. I sit in the tub to write. My notebook and my pen are carefully arranged on the porcelain ledge. The water is too hot. I balance on my ankles, turn on the cold, tiptoe to the faucet in a squat. I will not retreat. I suck in air. I ease the rest of myself into the water, just a centimeter at a time. I wait out the scald, I comfortably lean back, but by that point I am too dizzy to write. I detub without washing.

4. A man with no legs is begging on the 6 in a NY 00 jersey. He holds his coffee can of change in his teeth and drags himself down the aisle on his hands. A man in a suit opens the door between cars for him.

5. Last night, I was up until 3 playing MahJongg solitaire and reading about bipolar disorder.

6. It’s raining out, been raining for days. Drops stick on the window and run races with each other like in the car on the highway. The funny thing about living here is that I haven’t been in a car on a highway in months, maybe a year. Cars and highways are nostalgic memories for me, throwbacks to my childhood.

7. The apartment is cool and messy. R. has arranged scarves on things - on the radiator, on the microwave. She moved the table in the kitchen over a foot to make a “breakfast nook” we never eat in. I pour the goldfish into a flower vase to clean its bowl. I keep it from dying by not calling it a name. The trick is not to invest yourself.

8. Again, I have my mother’s dream - birthing kittens. Only mine are twins and they are Siamese.

9. Our favorite things to say in the lab are “mapped out” and “the full gamit.”

10. A pretty Dutch girl asks me about my photographs, which are taped to a wall. She wants to know what they are about, what they have in common. I mumble, I fluster. Is this you? she asks, pointing to a nude. Yes, I say. A question I can answer. And this? Yes. You know you have a beautiful body she says, and I thank the floor, blushing.

11. It is still pouring, and we are watching the train going by out the window of the Neptune Diner. It’s the subway but it isn’t underground yet out in Queens. The waiter tells me which vegetable sides are fresh and which are from the can. They have cocktails under five dollars but I order a vanilla ice-cream soda. Everything is sea green and there’s a Triton stained-glass window and a nautical stearing wheel and backlit shelves of pie. Our booth is big enough to hold a family, but that is exactly what we’re not. This must be one of those romantic moments he says.

12. I am up at six am, feeling like a Real New Yorker. Not a free square centimeter in my planner this week.