"Remembering Dying" by Dean Rolston

REMEMBERING

DYING

Dean Ralston

REMEMBERING

Dying

REMEMBERING

Dying

DEAN ROLSTON .

Drawings by Auste Some Serious Business 2017

Remembering Dying by Dean Rolston © 2017 Estate of Dean Rolston Published by Some Serious Business on the occasion of the exhibition Love Among the Ruins, curated by Susan Martin, Maynard Monrow, and Bill Stelling September 10–October 7, 2017 Presented in association with Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project 6 East 1st Street, New York, NY 10001 .

Drawings © 2017 Auste Front and back cover photos: © 2017 Mark Sink Frontispiece portrait: © 2017 Matthew Rolston Page 6: Bruce Connor, Untitled, 1967. Courtesy of the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection.

Special thanks to Jordan Antrim and the team at Howl!: Jane, Ted, Carter, Michelle, and Corinne.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—with prior written permission of Some Serious Business.

Editor: Susan Martin Design: Marika van Adelsberg Copy editor: Jorge Clar ISBN: 978-0-9990398-0-9 Some Serious Business P. O. Box 35 Abiquiu, New Mexico 87510 www.someseriousbusiness.org info@someseriousbusiness.org

TODAY (IS THE GREATEST DAY)

One should always be a little improbable. —WILDE In the musical, theatrical, ambisexual stew which was the New York club scene of the 80s, night crawlers frequenting the murky dives and faux palazzos might pass each other hundreds of times in the night without meeting. Such was the case with Dean and me—two hard-bitten, ebullient, hedonistically-driven culture gluttons—in the same place, at the same time, with an interlocking but finally very different circle of friends. I hung out at the Pyramid Cocktail Lounge, home to deep East Village drag queen theatrics; he was a fixture at Area, the chic, celebrity-filled den of iniquity across town.

I had heard of Dean. It was hard not to. Owner and impresario of the notorious 56 Bleecker Gallery, his name was in the gossip columns. I was a tough bleach blond, No Wave noise junkie, and we met in the middle with a mutual commitment to the burgeoning art and performance scene. We finally met in person at the tail-end last gasp of my club days, as I slouched grudgingly towards sobriety. He was producing a revival of Jackie Curtis’ Glamour, Glory, and Gold at The World; I was the publicist for that turn of the century Polish wedding palace. The Polish girls with blushing cheeks had long ago become grandmothers; their Rococo fantasy at the corner of Avenue C and no man’s land turned into the town’s hottest purveyor of house music and street fashion.

I could not believe my eyes when Dean came to my loft. I’m not sure what I expected, but it was not a small, elegantly dressed man

9 with horn-rimmed glasses and an enormous cranium, full of frivolity on one side and deep thinking on the other. In fact, duality characterizes Dean. A late-night partygoer at the very epicenter of the celebrity whirlwind, he spent every summer of the previous 10 years pursuing a Zen Buddhist practice at Tassajara, in the rugged mountains of the Carmel Valley.

Devil and angel…Like a Robert Mapplethorpe photo, he was equal parts heaven and hell, sublime and profane. Pan is more like it: Dean conducted me and the distinguished motley crew through our respective places, in support of Curtis’ outrageous drawing room comedy. There was Dame Margo Howard-Howard, an aging drag queen whose memoirs, I Was a White Slave in Harlem, recounted her love affair with heroin and Nicky Barnes, the baddest drug dealer in Harlem. Directed by Warhol alumni Taylor Meade, the cast also included John Hayes, Ondine, Penny Arcade, and art critic Gary Indiana among others. The performances were a huge succès d’estime—combining flash, sex, and celebrity in a whole much greater than its parts.

This auspicious beginning opened the door to a friendship I treasure. Dean’s brilliant mind and warm heart broke down the last vestiges of mistrust I had, and within a few months we were planning a trip to Brazil together. This first adventure was followed by others—not the least of which were 5 or 6 trips to New Mexico in an attempt to buy an 800-acre mesa to create “a spa for the creative community.” We had big, crazy dreams.

The recession put the kibosh on our grandiose plans—thank goddess! Along the way, Dean was diagnosed with full-blown AIDS

and moved West to Marin County (warranting an item on Page Six of the New York Post, of course). Living first in the home of the lovely artist Mayumi Oda, he then found a hillside aerie with its own handmade zendo, snuggled in an impeccable garden that just happened to be along the migratory path of the monarch butterfly. As the sun rose, the butterflies felt the warmth—thousands of wings fluttered and flew in clouds among the pines. Leave it to Dean. Perfection was his forte.

Dean in Muir Beach was a revelation. With his companion, Sport, the Rhodesian ridgeback, we passed endless, bliss-filled hours walking the headlands, exchanging books, napping, and creating fabulous meals for an assortment of scintillating guests. Make no mistake about it: Dean had the most fascinating friends imaginable. Distinguished artists, Buddhist luminaries, heiresses, writers, curators, kids just starting their creative lives, seekers, and weirdos of every stripe were drawn to him.

Always a vortex of energy, Dean even turned his illness into a source of insight and invention. Having written a roman à clef about Jean-Michel Basquiat, the quintessential art world rocket who went out in a blaze of glory, he then tackled his own mortality in this series of essays that poignantly and honestly explore his own impending death. When he first showed me the essays, I was taken aback. In spite of my own beginner’s Buddhist practice, I was happy to let death stay deep in its own dark closet.

Dean’s demise was not something I wished to think about. It’s all well and good to philosophize, but please don’t ask me to contemplate losing such a good friend.

10

As I read more, however, I began to appreciate the one-pointed 11 attention he focused on his life and his disease. He edifies the great living expanse of the present moment; the well of understanding to be found in our own suffering. Way back in the beginning of our friendship, Dean turned me on to Steven, a godhead shiatsu master, who I dutifully saw several times before admitting to Dean that at times our sessions were excruciatingly painful. Dean’s response: “Well, Susan, perhaps you should reexamine your relationship to pain.” I wanted to slug him, but now I crack up at the absurdity of it all. Through these essays, I am reexamining my relationship to pain, and the meaning of loss, separation, memory, compassion, and love in a world inured to the conflicts and suffering of so many.

The great contemporary Buddhist master and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us to smile. Though life is filled with suffering, it is also filled with mystery, the blue sky, the ocean’s waves, the flawless flight of the red-tailed hawk. “To suffer is not enough,” he says. Remembering Dying makes me smile. It has been and will always be a symbol of my friend’s sovereignty and agency in the face of death. Like the Buddha’s smile, Dean’s words give me courage—to practice loving-kindness, to actualize joy and compassion, to find peace, to simply go on living. I will not drown in forgetfulness. I will try to remember dying. And in so doing, I will never forget Dean.

SUSAN MARTIN Venice, California September 1993

Chapter One Memento Mori—Notes on Buddhism and AIDS

Three years ago, just as winter was turning into spring, I stood with my friend Cookie Mueller on an elevated companionway above the main reception room of a glittery New York nightclub.

Cookie, who had been ill with AIDS for some time, and in fact had only six months to live, turned to me and said, “You know, getting this disease is the best thing that ever happened to me.”

Knowing Cookie’s flair for the dramatic, I found this statement hard to credit. Now I know just what she meant. When I first became ill with AIDS, I experienced a marked contraction of energy and spirit. It was hard to imagine continuing any rigorous physical activity, including even my long-standing yoga practice, and I was

15

tempted to slip into numbness. But through the good fortune of having excellent teachers, I perceived that I could literally breathe into my illness and be complete in my limitations. While dualistic thinking persuades us that health and illness are opposites, here was a dynamic physiological kōan or paradox—synthesizing seeming opposites by showing the perfect nature of illness—marking a shift from a horizontal view of the world (gathering experience) to a vertical one (going deeper).

So much of what formerly was abstract in my Zen practice now has concrete meaning. For example, I can say empirically that one-pointedness is the antidote to fear, that compassion is the natural outgrowth of embracing one’s own suffering, and that equanimity is healing.

Issan Dorsey, founder of the Hartford

16

Street zendō and its adjunct AIDS hospice in the heart of San Francisco’s Castro—ground zero for the current epidemic—exemplified the way a Buddhist practitioner might die. When he met Zen Master Shunryū Suzuki some 30 years ago, Issan was a barefoot junkie living on the streets of the Tenderloin. Right before his death; he was installed as abbot at Hartford Street and left behind a flourishing hospice and Zen community; both animated, to a large degree, by his personal example of transformation.

The first time I visited Issan at the zendō, we had tea in his austere monk’s room.

Hanging on one wall was a striking vintage photograph of a bosomy young woman in a sweater set and pearls. I questioned him about the picture. It was a portrait of him from a time when he performed a drag act called The Boy Who

17

Looks Like the Girl Who Lives Next Door. The last time I saw Issan was at San Francisco General Hospital. We pushed our beds near each other and held hands while chemotherapy was administered to each of us. He was quite weak and his mind had begun to wander. I was anxious, and the cumulative cocktail of drugs made me irritable and breathless. There was little to say, but Issan’s presence affected me profoundly.

He had a characteristic levity which carried through to his death. Issan radiated sweetness and serenity. After a lifetime of cultivating equanimity and non-attachment, he was steeped in these qualities—they could not fail to communicate themselves. It was a sharp contrast to the precious solemnity which characterizes most death and dying “experts.” His buoyancy reflected the texture of reality as described in Mahayana

18

Buddhist psychology: an interdependent net of mutual awareness that is not at all solid. His acceptance of his illness had an active quality.

One can think of this in terms of daily personal economy. Resignation represents a steady outflow of energy; acceptance a net gain. When my beloved yoga teacher died from AIDS, I felt a moment of the most pure and complete crystalline sadness and was strengthened by the purity of that experience.

The first time I needed to receive chemotherapy, I decided to go to the hospital alone. The Golden Gate Bridge, the blue sky, the raggedy garden around Ward 86, the cold breeze, the other patients—all seemed remarkable to me that day. I was in a state of concentration, like the kind of samadhi you experience at the end of a long meditation retreat. I felt like I was

19

seeing everything for the last time, and it was all marvelous. As it happened, this particular day was Halloween‌in San Francisco. An intravenous line was inserted into my arm by a giant green frog.

Applying the Buddhist practice of paying attention allowed me to perceive my pain and fear in terms of their fragmentary components. At that point, they dissolve into ordinary bits of raw experience. It also liberated deep affection for the people around me, especially the hospital staff. One nurse confirmed that a profound bonding is not unusual under these circumstances. Over and over, I am experiencing boundless kindness and certain individuals in this world are its representatives.

Reb Anderson, the abbot of San Francisco Zen Center, told me that “the study of dying is the proper work of monks.� Of course, it

20

is everyone’s proper work too. But in a religious community we are encouraged, and have the opportunity to study the mystery of life and death.

In 1989, I returned to Zen Center’s Green Gulch Farm, which for a long time had been (along with its monastery Tassajara) my antidote to a fast-track life in Manhattan. Since l love cooking, I applied to work in the kitchen. Green Gulch’s director of the kitchen at the time told me that this sort of work was unsuited to a person with AIDS, because it posted a health danger. This prohibition, probably born of unexamined fear, was irrational and also illegal. It was nearly a full year before the community’s position was stated in writing: “No person shall be prevented from working in the kitchen solely because of being AIDS-infected.” Since that time, my occasional work in the kitchen has been a source of healing.

21

It has allowed me to come together with my Zen family in the practice of literally nurturing ourselves.

I mention this incident in the spirit of “no blame.� Sex and death are challenging topics. If individually or collectively we elect not to acknowledge the shadow side of ourselves, then these feelings begin to ferment. I am choosing not to do this. I believe that members of the Green Gulch community feared both death and AIDS and sought to distance themselves from these issues.

This wish was largely unacknowledged. Fostering this disavowal is not consistent with the clarity and insight we seek to cultivate. This illness is an opportunity to direct attention to the most dynamic problem confronting American Buddhist practice: how to acknowledge the truth about hard things we would rather not face, with psychologi-

22

cal and spiritual maturity, and with compassion.

For most of the last two years, I have lived in a collective household of meditators in Muir Beach, California, nicknamed “Spirit of the Valley.� Set on a stream that washes down through Muir Woods, the house is surrounded by a forest of alders. Though mountains are all around, sometimes the sound of ocean surf travels up the stream.

When I first came here, I shared a wing with a lovely poetess who had a newborn baby named Joshua Tai. He and I coincided wonderfully in our schedules for eating and napping. Bringing together someone at the start of his life with someone perhaps at the end of his was a revelation for us all. It recalls the immemorial practice, now largely lost, of people living in clans, where birth and death are not only visible but visibly connected.

23

In this lovely house across the fields from Green Gulch Farm, the inhabitants have made a studious effort to overcome their fear of AIDS vis-à-vis myself. The result is a magic circle where life, not death, is invited to flourish in an arena of supportive, non-judgmental witnessing.

The Great Fifth-Century mediator’s manual, the Visuddhimagga, teaches that out of the 40 possible contemplative paths, only two are consistently and in every way beneficial: the contemplation of dying and the encouragement of friendliness. Indeed, these two practices seem to spring from a single source.

None of us believes he or she is going to die. In point of fact, however, our death commences at birth and all through the time that remains we “die by inches.” As the Visuddhimagga puts it, “As budding toadstools always come up

24

lifting dust on their tops, so beings are born along with aging and death.”

Having been completed by my failing health to acknowledge that I am dying, I see the world in a vastly different way. Buddhist psychology urges that we recognize that dying is a continuous process, going on all the time—a “perpetual succession of extremely short-lived events.” To recognize this authentically is to experience some form of enlightenment. Like kenshō, it is an experience you can have right now. You are dying.

That is what the Visuddhimagga means when it enjoins the reader to “practice as if your turban were on fire.” In such a case one doesn’t dawdle.

Some branches of Buddhism are characterized by “graveyard” practices. Alexandra David-Néel, for example, offers a particularly grisly account of the Tibetan practice of chod, the

25

ongoing visualization of one’s decomposition.

Ironically, such practices are designed to pacify lustful thoughts which can distract the meditator.

Nevertheless, contemplating my demise head-on has exposed the mutability of the human experience, the entropy inherent in our taking this physical form, and our boundless potential for suffering. If one can begin to think about all this with equanimity, then perhaps one can look at the business of being alive with some calm. The personal experience of suffering unites us with other people: it is the dynamo that generates compassion which, by its nature, is transpersonal.

This same awareness was reinforced when I heard Sogyal Rinpoche, the Tibetan teacher, talk about The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The nature of life and death is not fixed or solid: it is incredibly spacious, fluid, and light. For myself, I refer to this

26

state as “activated not knowing.” It is a state that causes daily experience to become saturated in meaning. And in this way, it does indeed serve as an antidote to suffering, not lust.

At the end of his life, Carl Jung wrote, “Only here, in life on earth, where the opposites clash together, can the general level of consciousness be raised.” Progress comes from resolving seeming opposites, a process we often choose to dramatize as conflict. What sort of understanding can one bring to the condition of being covered in purple lesions, as I am? Or of seeing my friend Cookie lose her mind at age 40, or her husband attached to a respirator for the last year of his life?

To reduce these states merely to “illness,” the opposite of health, obscures a more profound meaning. Chagdud Rinpoche, a Tibetan lama who is also a practicing physician, teaches that the

27

point and privilege of having a human incarnation is to resolve seeming paradoxes. To acknowledge that you are dying is to recognize that you are alive.

Yesterday, I made the rounds of the hospital and took chemotherapy. Today our house is filled with young people. One is writing, one is cleaning, another is cooking, Zach is sleeping.

Outside, the willow tree shows the pale aura of spring green. As the warm wind ruffles the hundred Shinto prayers in the peace tree, somehow it seems like the most natural thing in the world to be writing about dying.

Chapter Two More Notes From a Posthumous Person To be frank, it can be strangely embarrassing, and even trying for friends and family, if you don’t die as planned or expected. The universe, it would seem, has its own surprising schedule for such matters. The anticipation of death—one’s own or the death of others—can inspire the rarest concern and kindness, but it may be impossible to maintain this intensity indefinitely in the face of an ongoing cliffhanger. Even for me—expecting to crash and burn from one week to the next—it is hard always to keep in contemplation the idea that it is possible to be incarnated at one moment and not the next. Then, if one continues living, there is the risk of hard-won insights obtained in anticipation of dying turning into mere words. The habit of being

31

alive is not easily reconsidered.

When the drama of someone’s imminent death is at hand as a catalyst, then it seems to be a different matter. Freud says, “Consideration of the dead, who no longer need it, is dearer to us than the truth, and certainly, for most of us, is dearer also than consideration for the living.” Sustained gentleness and lively attention are exactly what we owe ourselves and each other all through our lives.

Why is this so much harder to manifest than, say, merely behaving well at the deathbed of a friend?

At the least, this reveals how utterly interwoven dying is with living.

At this moment, I am making a retreat at Yaddo, an artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. Roughly 30 artists are in residence on this vast mid-Victorian estate. Sculpted emerald lawns of manicured perfection seem to stretch in every

32

direction—until they end at the border of a forest of huge, ancient conifers. Everyone else is healthy, or so they think. Being for a short while in this ad hoc family of vibrant, creative people—who incessantly play tennis, swim, and ride bikes— painfully discloses my limitations to me. But many other feelings arise too.

The people with whom I selectively discuss my condition are not invariably warm and supportive. A young lady, for example, who is a self-styled seeker, clearly cannot deal with the issue of dying except in the abstract. Then I feel most grateful that circumstances have required me to move from the general to the specific. And whether the news is received well, or not, the fact of communicating puts everyone involved on a footing of sharp honesty. Then, the ambitions and delusions that swirl around in a place such as this

33

seem bittersweet, evanescent, dispensable and even humorous. Our tendency to utterly identify with such concerns makes me sad. Excellent advice expressed in the style of California is, “Don’t get solid behind it.”

In the midst of this lively situation, I continually discover from moment to moment coincidences, ironies and affinities. When I arrive someone says, “How do you do? I am your cousin.

The last time we met you were about five years old.”

The Fairfield Porter book of criticism I’ve looked for in three cities is lying open on the library table.

When I visit the thoroughbred race course next door—the first time I’ve ever been to a track—I, naturally, pick three winners in a row. Each instance seems instructive in a pointed and specific way, saturated with meaning, capable of being a surprising catalyst. This prompts me to ask

34

myself—as I have been doing frequently in the last year—whether I am alive or not. I imagine that I am already in the bardo. All that will be required is a snap of the fingers to make me suddenly realize that this is just a heuristic dream.

I am walking down a long, tree-lined path with sunlight dappling the earth, as a sweet, warm, dry breeze has its way with the leaves overhead. I think, “Wake up! Take that one step in consciousness that reveals all. Don’t be attached to this illusion of incarnation.” But the idea of being a human being is too strong for me. I cannot turn to anyone for confirmation of whether I am alive or dead—they may all be emanations of my karma.

Isn’t this a funny problem?

Recently, I had a hospital procedure called an endoscopy. A tiny fiber optic camera is inserted through the esophagus and into the

35

stomach. Just before the procedure started, I was surrounded by four lovely female technicians.

None of them knew the word dakini, which literally means “skywalker” in Tibetan (it is the name for a usually female angel who looks after people). One said, “Some patients like to watch the procedure on the live TV.” “Heaven forbid,” I replied. For this test, an anesthetic is used which allows the patient to remain half-awake during the procedure—afterwards it produces complete amnesia of those moments.

Tempting to expand the use for such a drug today, treating whole years of one’s adolescence. But here is where it gets really interesting: if you can’t remember an experience, does it have no meaning?

Modern psychoanalysis is predicated on the idea that it is exactly the things that are too traumatic or painful to allow into consciousness that drive us; that have the most meaning. Plato would have

36

it that all knowing is really remembering, that is, bringing into consciousness. But my experience (insofar as I am able to remember it!) leads me to think that we are profoundly affected by material which is repressed or otherwise unavailable in present-time consciousness. This may be another name for karma. That is why, when someone has AIDS dementia or Alzheimer’s, it is easy to keep on loving them. The usual indicia of identity—the continuous reel of memories—may not be a necessary condition for defining a person. It is hard to pinpoint what it is that remains. As with karma, a lingering fragrance is all we can rest our case on. As fall comes on, I’ve been experiencing a reoccurrence of MAI. This malady is very common in people with extremely low t cells, the accepted marker for the deterioration of the immune system and thus for the progression of AIDS. The normal range for a healthy person is

37

800-1200. As of my last test, I registered just 4. I’ve always found myself in some odd percentile. My charming lesbian physician says, “Either you’ve got four outstandingly kick-ass t cells, or there’s more to the immune system than we know.” At any rate, my immune system has not been adequate to withstand this latest onslaught of MAI. The result was high fever, lassitude, and depression. For the first part of this passage, from which I seem to have temporarily recovered on account of a new combination of treatments, I was literally unable to help myself and literally unable to call for help.

It is this kind of isolation that kills people more surely than diseases. What was my investment in concealing my condition? Like everyone else in our culture, I’ve been taught that anything less than full autonomy is demeaning.

It is that formula which successfully kept women

38

and minorities in the subjugated role of needy victim for so long.

To utter the words “I need help” has been one of the most difficult tests of my life. I have been so attached to an idea of my radiant self, that even when I tell people I am wretched, they find it impossible to believe. In some way, even as I say the words “I am ill,” I don’t really want people to believe them. This points to a failure in honesty on my part, happening on a level apart from or parallel to words. It must be a form of protecting others from the horrible truth: I am ill, I will die, so will you. This is an especially peculiar state of affairs for someone who lives in a Zen community.

Although there are many wonderful exceptions, as a collectivity we would prefer not to hear these truths. We ignore them, minimize them, or turn them into abstractions. It’s easy to be in favor of

39

hospice work without ever meeting a dying person. Then we can believe that sitting on the mediation cushion is compassion and that bringing soup to a sick friend is somehow supererogatory.

The more people practice, I sometimes fear, the less in touch they are with simple humanity. When I spent a full hour talking with our abbot recently, he failed to even ask how I was.

Conversely, the newest students seem to relish the consideration of these naked truths. My friend Susie Clymer, a longtime resident of Green Gulch, has been engaged in a long struggle with cancer. Now matters seem to have come to a critical juncture. The talks we’ve had about dying at the breakfast table with your students after pre-dawn zazen have reached a level of animation that is hard to credit before the sun has even come over the hill. These are the concerns that cause

40

people to study Buddhism, but caution is required that practice does not separate us from our original inspiration. That is surely why Shunryū Suzuki Roshi rhapsodized about “Beginner’s Mind.”

Eventually, I did let it be known how knocked out I was. Then a host of dakinis descended, bearing white bean soup and fresh baked bread. I began slowly to revive, and my spirits started to approach their usual Himalayan level. In fact, these dear friends seemed happy to help in spite of their busy days in the kitchen, on the farm, and in the garden. I was astonished and touched. That is how I decriminalized the expression of my own neediness.

Recently, I had the opportunity to spend the day with someone who is and remains one of my uttermost heros: Susan Sontag. Within seconds of meeting for the first time at the airport, the

41

conversation turned to oncology, and only seconds later she said, “Well, whatta ya got?”

The invitation to exchange stories about critical illnesses opened the door to a day of frankness.

Miss Sontag has written extensively and helpfully about cancer (her own) and AIDS (that of her many close friends afflicted). We talked about India, and I told her how much I longed to visit the Buddhist Himalayas. “You must do whatever you really want to do,” she told me several times during the day. Finally, I pointed out that it is not a matter of “wanting” in this case; it is that my immune system would be most unlikely to withstand a season of Indian microbes. It was clear that she had simply not considered the issue. I believe no one cares more deeply about those afflicted with AIDS than she does; perhaps no one has given it more careful, analytical consideration.

42

If there is a moral in this story, it is that even the most passionate partisans have a certain selectivity of vision. In all of us is a mixture of denial and acceptance.

A question I keep asking teachers is, "How do you locate absolute reality?" The consensus is it doesn’t require celestial navigation, just allow yourself to contact something really always there. Recently, after helping prepare dinner in the Green Gulch kitchen, I was walking at sunset in the garden with a friend of mine, Sport, a Rhodesian Ridgeback. I began to feel super charged with current, transparent and lighter than air. Everything around me, every physical and mental stimulus, seemed benevolent and endlessly interesting—even the aesthetic philosophy of Hegel, which the students and I had been talking about at dinner!

This persisted for many hours. When it was over, in

43

spite of 15 years of Buddhist practice in nonattachment, I wanted it back. Those moments, which probably represent the unclouded experience of reality, felt like a marvelous gift. A great deal that I’ve been obliged to take on faith became real during that time. Perhaps many years of practice helped bring about that interlude. But feeling that I was truly on the brink of dying contributed to it too. It was incredibly comforting to think that such a state might precede dying. In that case, the most fearful things would be quite all right; indeed, not only all right, but fascinatingly absorbing.

We have been rebuilding our meditation hall. As a consequence, these mornings we’ve been sitting in a giant tent made of some semitransparent material, which is set up on the lawn between the Tea House and the Zendo.

When we do walking meditation, you

44

feel the uneven, rocky ground beneath the tarp that makes a floor. I arrive long before dawn and settle on my zafu, facing out. As the morning goes on, the hoot of owls gives way to the trills of songbirds. Always, there is the sound of the distant surf. Where before there was only the twinkling of a single lantern in the latticed Tea House window, now the phenomenal world starts to assume its usual shape. Through the semiopaque curtain of the temporary zendo, daylight and fantastic forms, only half-familiar, become visible. Breathing without encumbrance, I watch the shadow play.

This is a nice way to wake up.

Muir Beach 15 September 1992

Chapter Three In My Spare Time I Rehearse My Dying

A lingering illness no longer enjoys the pride of place it was accorded in Victorian times. The heroine of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain goes on and on: we are meant to admire her grace and tenacity. A metaphysical incandescence surrounds the consumptive who becomes more and more beautiful as her life energy ebbs. AIDS, by contrast to this mythology of tuberculosis, is an ugly business. What we admire here is courage and acceptance. The AIDS sufferer becomes more and more repulsive as their illness progresses.

The reason the consumptive was the subject of an enthusiastic cult is ultimately, I submit, that a good amount of time to contemplate one’s death produces wisdom. In Victorian times

47

and earlier, it would seem, the emphasis was on the transformation of the individual through illness and not on the illness itself—on essence and not appearance.

Thus the decision to accord the status of beauty or repulsion on a given condition is ultimately an arbitrary one. In the case of HIV illness, it reflects the moral judgment reached by the culture at large about AIDS and perhaps illness in general. Dorian Gray’s portrait, our tropes about illness, and our archetypes reflect this. “Do you feel good?” “He was struck down by AIDS.” “Evil is only skin deep.” This reflects an idea, common to the far right and the New Age, that when it comes to illness we get what we deserve. And it probably derives from a misunderstood version of postCartesian free will and maybe from magical beliefs elsewhere. These concerns apply in a

48

parallel way to aging and all infirmities. When the “hard body” phase comes to an end, it is succeeded by terror. People are fearful about their bodies.

No one really believes in safe sex. The use of precautions may titillate healthy people; it augments the possibilities for foreplay. So long as the issue of illness remains abstract, ass is well.

But confront a healthy person with someone who frankly says he has AIDS and all bets are off. The healthy person will say he doesn’t think he dances; it is rare for anyone to feel protective when confronted with a (seemingly) concrete danger.

To discuss sex and death in one breath is not welcome in our world. Have sex, then die. It is this conjunction that prompts such irrational terror about AIDS, which is just another terminal condition after all. As activists widely note, the phobia about sex (has there ever been a place or

49

time where sex was less in fashion?) is directly correlated to phobia about AIDS. And yet, curiously, the whole entertainment industry is predicated on exactly this combination. James Bond always fucks at the close of his murderous missions. A close brush with death, extreme danger, a narrow escape; all these experiences, it is often reported, have an erotic consequence. It is as if the contemplation of the loss of life causes a frantic reaching out for just what affirms life.

I have completely lost my libido. In many schools of meditation, the practitioner is encouraged to refrain from sex. Then the issue is perceived in terms of restraining or redirecting personal energy. But that would be an entirely different matter from the one I refer to. Here, choice does not enter the picture. This state resembles a sexual lobotomy—it is as if a faculty

50

usually present has been surgically excised. To the degree that we are sexed objects by the constitution of humanness, that leaves a great, gaping wound.

Here is an overriding image of myself during the decade I spent largely in New York City: I enter a crowded room (say, an art opening, a nightclub in full swing, a meditation session) and survey the likely candidates for fun, situating myself accordingly. Then, when flirtation has reached a high point and the program is over, off I go into the night for another tryst. For a decade, I was compulsive in the pursuit of gorgeous partners—and sometimes I came to love and respect them—but that was not the point. (Indeed, it occurred to me recently that if I were to average out this period of sexual athleticism with the last few years of celibacy, I could still be said to have

51

had an active sex life.)

By contrast, freed from these habitual patterns, the same situations can be a real bore.

How does one get a compass fix on a group, absent the needle of lust? True north in our culture is where lust resides. That is, until other approaches surprisingly present themselves.

Like many people in our culture, I have had an uncomfortable relation to my physicality.

As an adolescent, my back was covered with painful acne. Doctors poked and poulticed for years, to no avail, except to remind me ceaselessly of the problem. For years I always made certain to present my front—no back in a locker room, in an intimate situation, when emerging from the pool.

What people might see of me from behind seemed intensely dangerous; a knife in the back at any moment would not have surprised me. Now I

52

contend with widespread Kaposi spots. “Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.” These conditions both concern the skin, which is what separates us from the rest of the world—the boundary and container of selfhood— and can conceal what is within or express it. Both of these conditions have distanced me painfully from a sense of physical plentitude.

My Kaposi lesions came on violently.

Within months, my face was covered with purple lesions and my eyes almost swollen shut with edema. Hardly the image of a successful, worldly, healthy young man which I had long presented to my audience. Then I had to turn a very different face to the world. Fortunate indeed that I was surrounded by kind people. I was thrust back on more essential feelings in contrast to appearances.

I let it happen. Then, with very aggressive

53

chemotherapy, over a year, my face regained its original appearance. This was a great medical victory, almost without precedent. In Buddhism the teacher asks, “What was your original face before you were born?�

Basically, I have lost the twin stars that triangulate the relation of men to society: image and sexuality. These constitute the X-Y axis for locating ourselves on the map of the culture. And these are the principal forces that hold us in relation to one another. Image pulls others in; lust pulls us out. It is a matter of the physics of commonly accepted relations. What has one left to offer absent these forces? What is left to hold the electrons of personal relations together?

Where does a sense of identity derive from? To come to a lover without lust and image is to arrive naked—with the hope that he or she might help

54

you discover some essential, hidden quality. And indeed something arises which a Buddhist might dub “bare relations.” It is a more essential level of reality and one permeated with affection.

I am floating on my back in the warm water of a peaceful lagoon. A cool breeze strokes my slightly sunburned face. From the shore I hear the ripple of the water on the sand, laughter, wind in the trees. I am effortlessly supported by the fingertips of my non-sero lover; buoyed up into amniotic equilibrium by the kind touch of another. This is an enlightening occasion.

Frankly, I am in a state of incipient terror. In a few weeks, I will accept an invitation to join some very dear friends—P. and A.—on the island of Saba in the Netherlands Antilles for a month of renewal and writing. My friend K. is due to join us. He is a smart young man, a practicing

55

Buddhist, an AIDS activist, and all-around charming. A friend made to order, one would think.

He is also one of the few people I’ve had any, even modest, sexual connection with in recent years.

But at this instant you might think I was preparing for a battle with a foe instead of boating with a pal.

I have many intimate friends. There are people with whom I exchange bodywork, ideas, and emotions. But only in a relationship where one body can rest comfortably entwined with the other is a certain sort of candor possible. This surely recapitulates our childhood experience. What is wanted is really just for someone to say with open arms, “I welcome and accept you as you are.” That is all. I have to think it would be a pity to forego this forever, only because for adults it is restricted to sexual situations.

I notice that to a degree my feelings

56

about being with K. are vestigial—they are not motivated by real time concerns like a functioning libido, but by habit. With this recognition a lot of the anxiety falls away. When lust inspires us (and in the culture of the sexual “conquest” power is necessarily admixed to it), the result is attachment: to ownership, to dominion and to being the ongoing center of attention. Subtract lust and a gust of fresh air can enter—there are many ways of being at home with a friend, it would seem. Could I allow myself to look at this interregnum as a gift? To be free from desire is probably the greatest gift, but freedom from expectation might be even better.

Then, on a good day, one could reside in the present, and that is the best place to hang out.

Jacques Lacan’s philosophy of psychoanalysis is so widely discussed in just this realm that I feel obliged to refer to it. “Lack” is the

57

linchpin of his ontology. It is exactly and only this that defines ego. Romantic love seeks to fill this void by the presence of an Other. That is how infants understand the totality of their experience vis-à -vis the mother and the Law. Oddly, what is at work is precisely the impulse that inspires meditators—to annihilate the distinction between self and other. But the lack of desire (i.e., the lack of a sense of lack) would confound Lacan, who does not have a spiritual vocabulary. The sense of an ample self, and the refutation of the experience of lack, may perhaps mark the beginning of transpersonal relations and spiritual insight.

Muir Beach 19 September 1993

Chapter Four WORLD BETWEEN WORLDS

While I was lolling around a Caribbean beach, my dear friend Doug, who had AIDS but was managing brilliantly, was unexpectedly admitted to the hospital. He was experiencing great pain and was suddenly dead from a blood clot. I learned this by reading about it in a newspaper after my return to the West Coast; no one had notified me. His death had occurred weeks before. This is a disheartening way to learn of a friend’s death.

Sitting in a café, at the precise moment when I completed reading the sentence which respectfully recorded Doug’s death in the San Francisco Examiner, a German painter I know threw his huge body into the chair next to me. I looked up and said, “My friend died.” He blinked,

61

so I knew he’d heard me. And then without missing a beat he said, “By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask you, how much is your rent?” I stared at him for a full minute in unbelieving silence and said “you must excuse me” as I raced off clutching the newspaper. The sacred and the profane are rarely far apart, but never have I seen them brought so close to each other. And, of course, that makes me wonder if they are not, in essence, the same thing.

At first, in relation to Doug’s death, I felt ashamed for a species of unconsciousness: how could the universe change so radically without my knowing it? Was I splashing in the water, telling jokes, or eating a lobster at the very moment Doug was dying? He and I had been very good friends for over 25 years. He produced 250 special events, mostly “tributes,” for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the Oscars). When at

62

last I was able to have a long talk with Doug’s lover, in the midst of our tears, we actually laughed that Doug himself had finally gotten his own tribute, but had to die for it to happen.

Doug’s death plunged me into the most profound grief I’ve yet experienced upon losing a friend to AIDS. Perhaps this particular death encapsulated all the others that had gone before… and those that would follow, including my own. A friend’s death is an experience that can occupy all the space in one’s life; it is of vast dimension and seems to transcend all the usual boundaries.

Buddhists say that reality is organized as a net of spontaneous co-arising in which every event is related to every other event. For this reason, it was inconceivable to me that anyone could have failed to be aware of and touched by Doug’s death.

The idea of death should be way beyond being

63

contained by one mourner; it is our collective job to mourn and it amazes me that we don’t spend all our time in doing just that.

Consider the anomalous irreversibility of death. So odd and arbitrary is this fact that it is almost intolerable to entertain. Death can be seen as like a departure on a trip. People go away on trips all the time, but then they return. If they didn’t return you might say they’d gotten lost, or decided not to come back, or were avoiding you… but you wouldn’t assume they were dead. In life it is uniquely death that has this quality of irreversibility.

I felt deep sadness about Doug’s death.

I entered a nostalgic reverie about the past that turned into a numb despondency. The emergence of despair kept me in bed for days. One thought that occupied me was “surely I am next.” I’ve been

64

sick so much longer than he…why him and not me?

During those days, the universe changed into black and white. I knew I’d never publish anything again, nor have another love affair, nor ever even again arrange flowers to my own satisfaction. But most of all, I’d never see Doug again. Self-doubts arose: “I am a bad Buddhist—I am clinging to my friend.”

After a while, my friends helped me to realize two things. The first was that it is not unnatural to feel strong feelings of grief; what is useful however is the opportunity presented by loss to examine attachment. The best way I’ve discovered to do that is to inhabit utterly the feelings that come up, to go deeper and deeper into them, until ultimately they consume themselves. Buddhists might refer to this as “being” the feelings. The second, which shocked me, was that maybe the universe had not in fact changed radically with Doug’s death. Perhaps

65

it was akin to a fluctuation in the eternal order, like the movement of clouds or waves. If matter can neither be created nor destroyed, why expect less of spirit? Clouds and waves do not pass in and out of being, they simply change manifestations.

It is only one’s consciousness of these alterations that is susceptible to being changed. I did not know of Doug’s death, and then I did know: in that distinction lies a whole education. Oddly, it is Balzac who points out that our planet is covered with two feet of dust constituted from those who have died. It is the entire layer wherein life occurs and food grows. It is so hard to be consoled. I walked along the dirt farm road to Green Gulch Farm. It was a hot dry day. The lower fields were covered with a limitless expanse of bright yellow mustard plants coming up to the height of my shoulders. The flowers moved slightly as if

66

agitated by a hand near their roots, meaningfully.

Small birds flew about perching unsteadily on the tip of the mobile plants and insects were busy everywhere in the field too. There was a whole miniature, lively universe before me of great delight. It was like stumbling into a Van Gogh painting. Quite distinctly, I could feel the currents of energy in the field which that mad painter alone seems to have been able to convey in a work of art. I thought, “It is very good to be incarnated; and it is very good not to be incarnated, both conditions are remarkable.� That was, in fact, an interlude of consolation, which is perhaps as much as we would ever ask for in a world where everyone dies, even you.

In the Caribbean, I at first, nervously pursued a love affair with K., my young Buddhist traveling companion whom I get to see only

67

rarely. He is very skillful at relationships; I am not.

This lucky opportunity allowed me to declare the immobilizing terror I’ve felt about having AIDS and being intimate with someone. While holding hands and talking one night, I confessed that I was convulsed with fear and K. could see that I was shaking uncontrollably. He said, “I see what you mean, but holding hands is not a particularly dangerous practice.� Bringing things back to the present again and again began to liberate me from fixed ideas about what is right and proper for someone ill.

Under the influence of my kind friend, I began to expand. As the container for my emotions expanded to encompass these new feelings, it was as if the corresponding increase in surface meant a thousand new nerve endings, hence possibilities for emotion. Then profound emotions of sadness,

68

joy, and concern were able to manifest themselves in a way that curiously had little to do with me. I thought with piercing regret, “I’ll never get to see K. graduate with his Ph.D., never get to admire his skill in navigating through it all, or have the pleasure of seeing him as a charming old man.”

These thoughts brought me so close to K. that I simultaneously experienced a joy I hadn’t known before or even known about. This is love, I dare say. I felt like an Untouchable whose political status has suddenly been legislatively revised.

Now I was a Touchable—and it was because I had enacted the change for myself. These overlapping fields of joy and sadness, tenderness and regret, while dynamically real to me, also seemed interchangeable in some fashion—it was the distilled purity of these feelings which was meaningful, not their content. The only healing has been to

69

feel them more and more exquisitely until they consume themselves; then one goes on to the next curriculum.

While Doug was dying I was being in love. The net result of bringing into consciousness both of these states was that I found myself driving around San Francisco in my antique Peugeot, weeping copiously while listening to a pop tune, Sunscreem’s “Love U More,” on the radio. This was very embarrassing and wonderful. Thank heaven the residents of San Francisco are so tolerant.

Solidarity with all other beings was the motif that came up. It is such a daunting assignment to be a human being capable of facing and transforming loss. How do we dare to ask so much of each other and ourselves? And how could we ask so much if it were not implied that the answers, whatever they may be, have meaning?

70

Recently, I visited a tiny hospice that is basically funded out of the pocket of a black man named Noah. The benefactor’s brother, Herman, was dying miserably of AIDS in the Tenderloin, San Francisco’s inaptly named red light district.

Noah brought him to a small suburban house in Marin County and took care of him until he died six months later. Now three years have passed and Noah has looked after a dozen people. At last he has a few assistants. The main helper, a lady named Ellen, is so severely crippled from a degenerative spine malady that when she stands up, she is bent forward from the waist at a 90-degree angle. She’s a bundle of energy, however, and filled with good will. A former RN, she is now the principal caregiver in this establishment. She told me the story of a patient who had died the week before in some detail and most passionately. Listening attentively

71

gave me a sense of generosity and was helpful to her too, I think.

The same morning, I spoke to a friend I love dearly. She is the heiress to an old fortune.

She and her handsome young husband went to ski in Telluride early in the winter; they liked it so much they bought a house and have spent the whole season there. When they get weary of downhill they switch to cross country or snowboarding.

Sometimes they take a ski clinic. V. was very keen to tell me the story of their life in Telluride and I was most happy to hear it—again the sense of being an empathic witness to the stories of another.

These people are young, healthy, and very, very rich. After my visit to Noah’s house, I thought, by rights it’s Ellen who should be on extended holiday, and the rich kids who should be taking care of dying people. This supports my theory that

72

it is only through personal suffering that any progress is made—or through the active participation in the suffering of others.

Still later the same day, I attended Lydia Lunch’s class at the Art Institute. Lydia is the dark star of the avant-garde, the self-appointed incarnate representative of the shadow. First famous for creating the seminal band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, her uncompromising, brutal spoken word art is about murder, mayhem, brutality, rape, and other forms of abuse. Someone needs to represent this side of life and Lydia is the one. Her guest speaker that day was Jello Biafra, who started the punk band Dead Kennedys and got into a whole lot of trouble on account of it.

After he told his well-known stories (he’s told them on all the national talk shows) about being persecuted by the L.A. Police and District

73

Attorney, as well as the Christian Right, some of the students enacted their own monologues. One of her student’s was about growing up in the projects, fucking blond whores to get even, and killing other homeboys as a rite of passage to manhood.

After a day of such a dizzying roller coaster ride through disparate universes, I was searching for some unifying theme. And it was, I submit, that everyone needs his or her story to be heard by another. This is completely at one with the ancient Pacific Rim tradition of telling and listening to stories: it is how persons and peoples define themselves vis-Ă -vis each other, how we forge an identity. Which brings us back to that idea of the net of interconnectedness: hearing the incredible diversity of stories on this day of shuttling between worlds made me feel more connected to the strange enterprise of occupying

74

a human form. And the telling of one’s story is exactly what I am doing here.

The sacred and the profane come up together. This is something important to keep in mind with respect to the emerging community of dharma practitioners in America. There is almost without exception a scandal involving the misuse of sexuality, money, or another form of power in every single American spiritual association.

ChĂśgyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who firmly planted Tibetan Kagyu Buddhism in America, was a brilliant teacher able to open doors for many students. As a human being he was often a jerk.

He was alcoholic, abusive, and had his own rather paranoid private army. How can one reconcile the presence of such bad habits with the fact that he was a truly enlightening teacher? And further, if this is true for virtually every recognized teacher,

75

what general lesson comes out of this? It must be that it is the nature of human beings to contain both dimensions—the light and dark, the sacred and profane. No matter how great one’s spiritual proficiency (and perhaps in inverse proportion to it), one must pay attention to the dark side as well as the light.

I wrote above about the noble crippled lady, Ellen, who was the main caregiver at Noah House. There is a sequel. Only a few weeks after my visit a scandal emerged about her. It seems she had been systematically stealing morphine from dying patients. This reminds me of William Burroughs’ little cameo in Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy. As he said laboriously in his deep gravelly voice, “…I think that some junkie nurse has been stepping on my drugs.” Don’t idealize people.

76

In my diary for November 5, 1989, when I really thought the jig was up, I found this Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan quotation: “For a long time I used to think that one should be able to transform suffering into joy. Now I believe that joy is in discovering it’s okay to suffer…it’s part of being human to have little bits and pieces that are cracked.” But this still makes suffering joy, which it is not. If these things were the same, the motive power of human progress would be absent. It is going from one to the other and back again, like the pendulum of a grandfather clock, that enables the refinement of our humanity.

Muir Beach 25 March 1993

Chapter Five Blood Makes Noise (I Can’t Hear You in the Thickening of Fear)

Spring comes so early to West Marin that I’m always taken by surprise. This year, at any rate, I knew from experience that if I returned to Muir Beach at the beginning of March, something special would be happening. I came home to fragrant trees covered in white blossoms, fields of brilliant mustard, bushes of the most improbable violet, and emerald green hills. It was not a scene you would consider recording in black and white. In a way, spring is sadder than fall: the most touchingly exquisite blossoms arrive, are there for just a moment, and then pass into another state of being.

“April is the cruelest month,” says T. S. Eliot.

Spring is simultaneously a celebration of life and a

79

reminder of impermanence. It is a carnival of the transitory.

This season unfolds in a multilayered and complex way. It was just this complexity that struck me when I went on a guided wildflower walk at Green Gulch with Tamara, one of our local botanists. It was of course interesting to hear the marvelous names of the flowers, even in Latin, but the genuine insight was in remembering that there is a complex universe just at hand, through which I stroll every day, and which I hardly notice. This has to do with having a fresh vision. Who would have guessed that a scarlet pimpernel has a magenta heart, or that part of the inside of the iris is called the “keel,� or that larkspur, a name common in these parts, refers to a flower which has an intensity of royal blue touched with purple yet to be captured in a painting (well, maybe in a Rothko)?

80

We gathered one of every species flowering in the valley. This made a bouquet which we offered on the outdoor altar the next morning, at a ceremony in honor of Buddha’s birthday. It is the custom to chant the names of the flowers while making the offering. This sort of everyday incantation is a way of making the ordinary sublime. Here are the charming and funny names of the early spring wildflowers we encountered along just a mile of sunny walk along Spring Valley Road, from Green Gulch to the Headlands overlooking the Pacific: Buttercup Bedstraw

Blackberry

Blue Blossom

Blue Dicks

Blue-Eyed Grass

Bracken Fern

81

Bodiea

California Poppy

Chickweed Columbine

Cow Parsnip

Dwarf Plantain Fennel

Field Madder

Forget-Me-Not

Fringe Cups

Giant Vetch

Hemlock

Hill Lotus

Horsetail

Hound’s Tongue

Larkspur Lupine

82

Manroot

Marin Iris

Marsh Sand Spurry

Milkmaids

Miner’s Lettuce

Mission Bells

Morning Glory

Oceanspray

Red and Yellow Indian Paintbrush

Saxifrage

Scarlet Pimpernel

Sedum

Solomon’s Seal

Sorrel Speedwell

Spring Vetch

Sticky Monkey Flower

Sword Fern

83

Twinberry

Wavy-Leafed Soap Plant

Wild Pea

Wild Radish

Wild Strawberry

Woodland Star

Yarrow

Naming names and making lists are more than just taxonomy; they are uniquely human, affectionate embraces that supply an encompassing relationship between the witness and reality. Language, which William Burroughs calls a “virus from outer space,” is at once the link between people’s direct experience and the very force that makes us separate from one another.

Language is the source of dualism. That is why I like the idea of relating to this list of flowers as a

84

chant or invocation, instead of an arid scientific enumeration.

I came away from the walk thinking of the myriad parallel universes, usually unnoticed by us, which we are able to name to ourselves if we choose. This is a way of making the invisible manifest; it is something that applies equally to forming an acquaintance with the stars, the currents of the weather, and the subtle energies within. As is the case in meditating systematically, it takes rigorous cultivation to be open to noticing and naming the simplest things.

Two close friends chose the springtime to die. I called Terry every day while he was in the hospital in Montreal. He was operated for a CMV biopsy; his kidneys failed and the doctors put him on dialysis. His voice over the telephone sounded like that of a sweet and very young boy. He

85

registered surprise that I called so often and said he was touched by my concern. Then I realized that, after a fashion, I was just calling myself…or at any rate reaching out to the universal part of people that connects all of us in the face of suffering. I praised Terry for his courage in dealing with these hard times and he replied, “It’s not like I have any choice, is it?” I think this marked acceptance rather than resignation, and it turned a rather ordinary person into a hero for me. That has often been the story of AIDS. When I received the news of his death, I was so grateful that we had had a good final conversation, even though it was not conducted in anticipation of his immediate death. Any talk with a friend can always be the last. One should be inspired to notice how fraught with meaning is every exchange, having perhaps repercussions unknowable at present in parallel domains.

86

Will Parker also died. Once again, I learned about the death of a close friend by reading about it in the paper. Will was one of the world’s leading lyric baritones. His rendition of Schubert’s Winterreise and Schumann's Dichterliebe would make the most hard-hearted empiricist weep. He left a legacy, the AIDS Quilt Songbook: original songs he commissioned to mark this apocalyptic era. Words and music are his memorial.

It may be that it is easier to die a lot than a little. At death’s door, experience suggests that an altered state supervenes. I like to imagine that for me this would be a period of focused quiet and fascination with all around me. But there may be an intervening stage where one is not yet ready to say farewell, although death is clearly at the door beckoning. Then the animal within asserts itself with its hungry, selfish desire for life. When I

87

recently thought that I was about to die, a thought induced by a disastrously low hematocrit (which means you don’t have enough red blood cells or hemoglobin to bring oxygen into the blood…a form of hyperanemia…you can’t even walk up the stairs without the heart racing wildly), I found t hat I reacted in panic. Ordinary practice eluded me. Attachment, greed for life, and irritability possessed me. I didn’t like this but also felt powerless to influence it. In considering the end of one’s life, such an impasse seems to invalidate the virtues of practicing Zen or any other mindful form. It is tempting to say that formal practice is bogus if it can’t be helpful in such a situation, but that would be a too hasty conclusion.

Necessity has caused me to study this matter. I have come up with a few practical suggestions. Let go of feeling bad for not practicing

88

zazen. Don’t remain attached to a preconceived idea of emptiness. Steer towards the light as one might in the bardo. Don’t leave loose ends in life.

Practice while well the lessons of spiritual insight.

Then it might be possible to react like Gandhi, who was taken with great suddenness but had the name of God, Ram, on his lips as he died. Above all, practice continually while it is still possible, in order to prepare the consciousness for a time when formal practice is no longer an option—this may condition the experience of panic in a meaningful way.

In many religious traditions (and especially in the Tibetan schools), the moment of death is considered of key importance. It is the crucial moment for purifying and releasing negative karma, and it is the greatest of opportunities for a successful rebirth.

As a result of the declining hematocrit,

89

my doctor recommended a transfusion of whole blood. This would be my third experience with taking in someone else’s literal life force. The last two times were most unpleasant. I had an allergic reaction the first time, with fevers and chills for days and no improvement in energy. The second time, the nurses had trouble finding a good vein—I hate needles. But this last experience went off with great grace. I knew the nurse, a bright-eyed fellow from Newcastle. We concluded, based on the neighborhood from which the blood came, that it had previously belonged to an energetic lesbian firewoman, and that seemed encouraging. Indeed, within 48 hours much of my energy was restored.

What was unusual about this transfusion was that after being alone in a room with two beds for a while, another patient was brought in.

He turned out to be Randy Shilts, whom I’d never

90

met before, the author of And the Band Played On. The staff at Davies Hospital, who are pretty cool cats, snickered at their little joke of putting two “authors” together. I only divined who Randy was because he had to confirm his name out loud, as part of the process of guaranteeing that the blood in question was indeed meant for him.

Randy, about whom I knew virtually nothing at the time, was healing from a collapsed lung. Given his six weeks in the hospital, including two weeks in intensive care, I was filled with admiration for his good spirits and energy. We talked about our writing projects (his book about gays in the military, which he’s been working on for four years, is just about to appear…what good luck we agreed), our mutual doctor, and suicide.

But lying in bed with an intravenous line in your arm can induce a rather dreamy state and neither

91

of us was disposed to a long chat. Then I noticed the sounds of the hospital—a vacuum, a gurney being moved, an IV stand being rolled about, the chitchat of nurses in another room. I noticed the sound of Randy shifting in bed, the rustle of sheets, the occasional concerned query from our friend from Newcastle, the comforting sound of pillows being rearranged. This silence, with its little punctuation marks, was what connected these two strangers far more than the conversation about agents or publications. The depth of the concerns that arise from illness are very different from those that come up around health. This kind of raw, tender simplicity creates an interesting and intrinsically intimate space in which to encounter a new friend: a forum free from the numbing civilities of the expectations or fixed ideas for which we can too easily settle.

Just before this transfusion, I began a

92

new platonic romance. I was weak and irritable, and found myself constantly overextending myself to give my friend Forrest the impression of being a healthy person. Forrest is the first person with AIDS I’ve ever been intimately involved with.

When he told me of his condition it was as if a great weight had dropped away. I didn’t need to explain endlessly my state of health and mind, and I didn’t need to apologize for my impending mortality.

But even with this most empathic friend, the situation brought into bioenergetic collision exactly this conflict between the entropy of illness and the expanding force of new affection. And running through it was the sense of clinging to life in order to push away the fear of dying. It may be that it’s harder to let one’s habits die than to die oneself. Habits seem to be imprinted in every cell of the body and ineradicable. Yet it is possible

93

to make changes, to die to habitual patterns.

Profound changes require real courage and persistence. Perhaps the ability to initiate change represents the fulcrum for revising karma.

In writing about my complete absence of libido in another chapter, I came to realize with some dismay that sex is no longer of much interest to me. Yet I have found myself periodically demanding from my new friend this thing that I don’t even want and wouldn’t know how to use.

I am reminded of the scene in the cult movie The Stepford Wives where an out of control, damaged bimbo automaton repeats in a treacly voice the phrase “Would you like some coffee now?” over and over, while pouring coffee from the pot onto the floor. “Can we make love now? Can we make love now?”

What is good in this, and painful and

94

healing, is that the experience of rejection with my new friend put me in touch with a set of feelings out of my earliest childhood. I astonished myself (and Forrest) when a volcano of rawness shot up into my emotional world. What emerged was a momentary confusion between my childhood memories and the present. I experienced the frantic desire to hold on to that one person who would fulfill all my needs, just as an infant might do. Among other drawbacks, the realization of this wish for total connectedness requires stopping time—it is not the nature of reality to be permanent or dependable. Do you know how to make God laugh? Tell him your plans.

As a child, I was a shuttlecock between my parents. Every time a sense of safety and trust began to crystallize, I would be shifted from one judgmental parent to the other. The feelings that I

95

had just been experiencing were instantly recoded from good to bad. All the intimacy that had been developed would seem to have been for naught and misguided. (This was a lesson in inpermanence which came at a much too early age.) At one moment I could be meaningfully bound to one parent in intimacy and at the next we would be enemies. This is what happens when a friend dies too—all that has gone before seems to have been canceled at one stroke. When these old feelings of uncertainty and abandonment arose in the context of feeling sexually rejected, I wept for a long, long time. I was grieving for my childhood—for the fact that each of us is ultimately on our own—and for the lie that is implicit in libido, which tells us that perfect happiness is attainable. It is not.

Such feelings can literally lodge in the body. Wilhelm Reich proved that we cause painful

96

feelings to be contained somatically, that there is a finite quantity of blocked emotions in each of us. Releasing them suddenly, as through a storm of grief and weeping, can actually accomplish some enduring good. This can be hard on one’s friends, however.

Vajrayana practice, which some people call Tantra (and which has very little to do with sex in spite of the popular association), has been a helpful tool for me in these circumstances. Here the classic idea of the highest level of Tibetan Buddhism is to work directly with feelings as a tool of meditation. The emphasis that Zen places on equanimity is not the main motif in Tantra; it is the exploration of vivid feelings which themselves energize the practice. Tantra can be a difficult and dangerous path to enlightenment. Without guidance, one is liable to fall off the edge directly into

97

strong feelings. The trick is to contact feelings like the grief of rejection, or an infatuation, or the sorrow of deeming oneself unworthy, without identifying them entirely as a part of “us.” It is a way of letting in some air. If the starting point for the examination of attachment is compassion for all beings, then some liberation from the literalness of our emotions is possible. In other words, one wants to cultivate a shift from the usual solipsistic view to a transpersonal one. With this awareness, the illusion of “I” begins to soften and slip away. At that point, the Tantric practitioner is advised to visualize a deity as a model for enlightened behavior. This I take to refer to a symbolic representation of one’s own higher self.

I can’t report a whole lot of success with this so far. But I am having the remarkable experience of bringing strong feelings into

98

awareness during meditation, and then moving them about or shaping , as if they were composed of some malleable material. This is a way of taking a direct hand in the shaping of consciousness. One wonders why merely making something conscious has such a powerful, liberating effect. A Zen text says quite rightly, “Inquiry and Response Come Up Together.”

What is revealed by this practice is a very basic truth: that our attachments are based on mental constructions about the world around us. The precise same circumstances can be an occasion for misery or joy, depending on the story we construct about them. A friend calls every day to inquire about our health. What loyalty and devotion! Or alternatively—how cloying and possessive. The thing-in-itself has not changed, what we bring to it has. Raw experience is

99

probably not charged as either negative or positive. One has the opportunity to shape experience through the dynamic use of mentality or, perhaps even better, by letting go of mentality itself. As we transform ourselves, there is an opportunity to die a little bit every day.

Muir Beach 27 April 1993

101

Chapter Six Time Is of the Essence

I am sick to death of my own story, bone-tired of my pretensions, bored silly with my habits.

Because I have received some praise for this work, I have to turn out more and more pages according to the formula which has accidentally become the motif of this diary. I will do or say anything, it would appear, for praise. As usual there is a drama going on. In this case it happens to be the drama of self-reproach masquerading as enlightenment.

This preachy self-congratulatory trip is called “the stink of Zen� by meditation masters. Giving it a name does not make it go away.

Editors tell me that deathbed insights are a dime a dozen. But this journal is special.

Everyone feels that his or her story is special. How

103

else remain an interested partisan? Why do I have the temerity to suppose that my observations should be of interest to anyone else? Rousseau’s Confessions contain much embarrassing material.

Where does the impulse to share this stuff come from? This is the drama of the gifted child in spades. If all experience is fungible, as Zen would have it, then why single out any particular moment or experience? I have come to doubt the evidence of my own senses.

Lately I have discovered that I often perceive things in the style of Mr. Magoo. Perhaps this is the onset of dementia. I wave to a face in the trees; I see a man in the grocery store patting a child on the head, but it is a head of cabbage; I salute a kitty in the morning, but it is a pair of sneakers.

Nevertheless, I feel obliged to continue philosophizing—that is my job at this instant. I

104

have to produce mannerist drivel in order to feel like I imagine an ordinary person feels: whole, free of fear, loved. By contrast, I feel fantastically fragile and disconnected, even while having putative insights‌a congenital, incurable poseur.

I am hard on myself.

Death is my only true friend, I wrote recently. That is what Rilke said too, and I wonder if he meant it. While it may be true that only death can be depended on; it is not my friend. I confess that I am in terror of even minor changes, let alone this big transformation which is looming continually before me. Because of the death of close friends and my own relentlessly threatening mortality, I feel saturated with thoughts of death and with grief. There is really no time for anything else. Many people must feel this way. AIDS has devastated our ranks, wiped out the best and

105

brightest and others too; it is like a war where all your friends are bombed to smithereens, one by one.

These feelings do not arise at a convenient time. Though it may be a radiant sunny day at the beach outside (as it often is), inside is fog, gloom and despair. I feel beyond consolation.

Here is the mannerist tone again‌. In circulating the pages of these chapters, I am in collaboration with my closest friends, who are my readers. Some friends left tearful messages after reading the last chapter. I could feel that they were moved in a way that at that instant surpassed my own feelings, or so I had imagined. Dying, which is my subject, can be made to seem so ordinary and lacking in surprise by a Zen sleight of hand.

People are really affected by this discussion—that fact nourishes the process on a good day. On a bad

106

day, it merely panders to my dyed-in-the-wool vanity. People are affected because it is taboo in our culture to talk about dying, even in the most exalted spiritual context.

When Sogyal Rinpoche talks about death and dying, it is a turbid abstraction no matter how hard one tries to keep it clear and real. Must I literally die in order to have true wisdom? So it seems.

We feel a sense of freedom for being allowed to discuss dying, especially if it applies only to the speaker. This might resemble Radio Free Europe.

If open discussion is forbidden, the rare authentic statement is truly welcomed by some.

I have grasped that presenting my thoughts in this form is a way of turning pain into a commodity. Fear can then be turned into a product; this is less challenging than the raw emotion which precedes words. Then, like a

107

Regency courtier, I can doff my plumed hat and take a bow. It is a contrivance to soothe the pain of others as they witness my dying, and a way to distance myself from the process. If documenting this awareness has any merit, it would come from making a choice to speak and having the intention to meet truth from one moment to the next.

When a fatality occurs on the street, people immediately congregate to witness the tragedy. They passively observe the event without discussing it with others. This is how we are trained by television, our paradigm of pain-free witnessing. In our culture, we are morbidly concerned with dying but not willing to speak about it, let alone engage it. It is of course a whole different ball game when you are the subject and not the object.

After being in the Green Gulch zendo, I

108

returned home in a trance state. Then I imagined that I was experiencing great clarity. The hallmark of this trance state is that extremely deep abdominal breathing persists for many hours. The breath deepens and slows to one breath per minute. Time slows down. Details stand out. Instantly, there is the desire to turn this unitary experience into this state I walked along our road overlooking the sea.

It was sunset, and the clouds were filled with light and color. Somehow I had never before noticed the steep grade of the road, the clear glass transformers on top of the utility pole among the pine trees, or that yellow nasturtiums exist as well as red and orange. I imagined that I was imminently about to die. “What are the signs to look for?,” an amateur might ask. I need to believe at such moments in the kind of truth that only the body can know—that death is really at hand—but I have been mistaken

109

time after time. Evidently I often tell my friend Pamela that I am “at death’s doorstep.” When she visited me yesterday she asked, at my front door, if this was the very doorstep in question. This shows that advanced Tibetan practitioners, such as Pamela, do have a sense of humor. I laugh.

It is certain that the drugs I take every day affect my experience and the way I value it.

Here is a list of the drugs that I take continually in various combinations:

Biaxin Carnivora Cipro Dapsone Dilaudid Elavil

Epogen

Etoposide

110

Fluoconazol Gluthiomine Lamprene Megesterol Testosterone Zoloft

These words are not intrinsically all that different from the names of wildflowers which I listed in the last chapter. They can convey a magical sense of the thing they refer to as in an incantation. This list of substances is my daily incantation. As far as I can make out, this recipe represents the state of the art for someone with advanced HIV. If I am hyperreactive, delusional , or amusing, it may be because of any given combination in the instant. My doctor says that none of these medications should affect my mood.

111

Doctors should be required to try the drugs they recommend. If that were part of the medical school curriculum, oncologists would not be so cavalier about prescribing substances that can make one truly wretched.

The obvious question is—is it possible to reduce enlightenment to its purely physical constituents? A small amount of one hormone or another affects energy, appearance, and mood.

Where does human identity reside? In our culture, we have a tradition of the pristine individual—the noble savage of the 19th century, or Kaspar Hauser—but our conventional experience of ourselves is shaped by food, drugs, medicine, other people’s expectations, the weather, and so on…in other words, what is popularly called reality. (See a very good discussion of identity vis-à-vis antidepressants in Peter Kramer, M.D.’s Listening

112

to Prozac, to be published by Viking…more than four million people in America are currently taking Prozac.) Ram Dass says that he gave Muktananda a hundred hits of acid in one dose.

Hours later, Muktananda looked at him and said, “Is that all?” For ordinary beings I am forced to conclude that our psychobiology determines how and what we witness. It would help if one could observe impressions without subscribing to them.

Then when things change, one might change also, and also remain the same. I hear the voice of my editor echoing in these pages…I fear I have never had an original thought and only parrot one phrase after another. If the contemplation of my own dying can be the material of so much drama, what would one do with something really interesting?

Herve Guibert undertook a similar study of himself as he was dying. He documented his

113

final days with his own video camera. I was touched and frightened, watching him wandering in his apartment alone, having a massage, undergoing a hospital procedure. At first, one envies his freedom from judging himself. But even this raw material is edited in the camera—one person’s final truth is another’s starting point.

Vimalkirti was a layman, not a monk. In the ear of the historical Buddha, he was respected as the preeminent scholar and practitioner. While conducting business and visiting nightclubs, he was nevertheless consistently enlightened. I often leave the meditation hall and snap back to my habitual way of being, like a rubber band released from its stretch. To bring deep practice out of the meditation hall and into the marketplace is the hardest task I know. Many have tried, including me; few have succeeded. In the face of

114

encountering real genius (circumstances have luckily placed me in the vicinity of Robert Hughes, Tony Kushner, Andrew Harvey, and Philippe Starck in the last 10 days), I am stunned by the paltriness of my own gifts. (Although I felt that I had reached a certain pinnacle in my daily life when I took the opportunity to correct Mr. Hughes’ English usage, which did not offend him.)

Moreover, I noticed that in these spectacular situations, I had more or less given up breathing.

At any rate, the deep breathing of that interlude of grace and awareness, which was so comforting, had given way to shallow, anxious breathing that is not a source of energy. This is how we are trained to withstand the everyday pain that an open, unprotected heart must feel.

When I got home after Mr. Hughes’ lecture, at the end of a long day, I surprised myself

115

by uncharacteristically bursting into tears, weeping uncontrollably for an hour…like a little kid who is overtired. To go from a state of deep quietude to the lively world is something I have not mastered. Maybe only Madonna, Mother Meera, and Gurumayi can do this. The deep slow breath of mediation I preferred to avow makes one wide open to the myriad harsh influences that we usually filter out automatically. When I told my lovely lesbian doctor about this “mood swing,” she asked if such a day had been worth an hour of weeping. “Most certainly,” I said. “So what’s the big deal? It’s a small price to pay for a great day.”

Probably that is the right approach; I should credit myself for the search for skillful means even as my energy dwindles. I remain enfeebled but fascinated.

I am sitting at the computer terminal as an enormous fly circles me. It is the same fly that

116

appears as a reminder of ordinariness in Suzuki Roshi’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind and on an otherwise blank page in Lawrence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman.

I went to college.

After this rich mix of impressions, I stayed at home for an evening. Then I became convinced that I would never wake up the next morning. This idea was very real at the time and became a transitory obsession. Partly it was prompted by the condition of my body, which was in crisis on account of the two previous nights, and partly it was in reaction to a story I had heard.

A fellow whom I saw only from time to time, in a wheelchair at a restaurant owned by some friends, had apparently been a great bon vivant in his salad days. Now he was a wraith due to the ravages of AIDS. He planned a 40th birthday party, masses

117

of people came, but he had died an hour before the party. I began to feel that I was jinxed. My 40th birthday was coming up and a party was planned; I had invited everyone I know. (There was an ancient Celtic superstition that if you praise your child out loud the gods will hear and, being jealous, will take the child away.)

I survived, but the experience of being convinced that I was to die that very night is still real to me. I began to experience my attachments to friends and projects one at a time deep in my gut. I’m not ready to go, I felt.

“But maybe I have already gone,” is a recurrent thought. I often think this because I am attended by endless synchronicities and coincidences. According to our Tibetan master, these are characteristics of the afterlife which they call the bardo. To let go of my attachments, which are

118

contained in the body as well as the mind, would, I imagine, simultaneously allow me to awaken from the dream of life, free me from attachments, and allow me to die.

After a wickedly fun dinner with Andrew Harvey on the eve of my 40th birthday, I made my way home from San Francisco to the beach. It was extremely foggy. Eerie Balinese music played on the car radio. Bright white lights came out of the fog, making rays of light in the mist. It was very easy to convince myself once again that I was in the bardo. To follow the bright white light is the teaching of the traditional Tibetan Book of the Dead. Something restrained me from believing fully in this interpretation of circumstances.

Otherwise, I would have followed the light into an oncoming car. Who is to say that I would not have been enlightened and died in that very moment

119

of contact?

One’s mind trips are endless. At any given moment they can seem so absorbingly real.

Tony Kushner says the mind is “the organ of grief.”

That is where the action is. Each of us is free to value raw experience but usually only in the way we are trained. The amount of personal liberty is tiny; one should size it while possible; before dying.

That is how karma is transformed, that is what grace means. That is why time is of the essence.

Muir Beach 3 June 1993

121

Chapter Seven Time Is Still of the Essence

At the opening of the Venice Biennale on Wednesday, June 9, 1993, I fainted. Even at the time the drama was not lost on me. I stumbled from one exhibition room to another, accompanied by Matthew, my brother, and Ted, his lover.

Just as Matthew will do anything to surround himself with luxury, I will do anything to be the center of attention. I asked if I might sit in an unoccupied chair. The woman in the chair next to it said no; it was occupied. I said, “I’m going to faint” and subsided into the chair. “Please sit down,” said the lady as I collapsed.

We walked slowly back to the Hotel Danieli, where Matthew and Ted were staying (and I was not). Matthew invited me to take a nap in his room and I did. But I felt so unwelcome that after a

123

while I woke up, quietly left and went to the lobby.

I called from the lobby and told Matthew where I was. Then he and Ted got dressed, came down, and left me in the lobby for three hours. Dr. Remen points out that if I had been bleeding to death in the lobby, Matthew would not have behaved this way. I was so gaga that I could not even read a sentence in the book I held in my lap.

It was embarrassing to sit in the lobby, exposed to the curious gaze of waiters and tourists.

I felt like pathetic Dirk Bogarde in Death in Venice.

I felt humiliated, frightened, and‌finally angry.

It is sad that so much suffering seems required for insight.

The main consequence of this arduous day was that for a period of about 12 hours, which felt like an eternity, I lost my short term memory.

It was lapsing for about two seconds. Picking up a pen, I would instantly start to search for my pen.

124

When I did an injection, even as the needle was in my body, I would wonder it if was time to take my medicine. This was hazardous and scary because overdosing was a real possibility. In such circumstances, one has only the breath for company and that at least is comforting. It is curious that in the midst of such an experience a sense of witness consciousness remains. Who could possibly be watching?

If there is only the present, a sense of time is meaningless; without it sequentiality and linearity cannot exist. Fear is pervasive. Is it built into such a situation? Bliss would be an alternative to fear; it may be that we each make a choice early in our lives about whether we are fearful or confident, pessimistic or optimistic, loved or not loved.

After a while, I discovered that although I could not remember anything in the present, 15 minutes after an event I could recollect it perfectly.

125

Thus my confidence began to increase. That was the beginning of my recovery.

All through this frightening period I continued to use language with myself. My mantra was “take an algorithmic approach, thank goodness for the algorithm…” over and over again.

“Algorithm” is an expression from arithmetic which doctors have popularized to mean following a set sequence of steps.

Here is an excursus (which is important to me): Aristotle’s law of the excluded middle is a given in Western thought. A thing cannot be x and also not x at the same time. Is this really true? A. J. Ayer, the author of Language, Truth and Logic, is the leading proponent of logical positivism in our era. No one has insisted more stridently on the verification of Cartesian rationalism and the duality that says a thing is itself and not its opposite. But Professor Ayer had a near death

126

experience; it caused him to take a more openminded view. In the essays collected as The Meaning of Life (1990), he writes about that experience. Here is an excerpt from the final paragraph of the book:

We are told, for example, that there

may be a reversal in the direction of

the arrow of time. This would provide

much stranger possibilities than that

of a rebirth following one’s death.

It would entail that in any given

person’s life a person’s death

preceded his birth. That would

indeed be a shock to common sense.

Blake referred to “fearful symmetry.” That is the essence of damned dualism. There are alternatives—the movement of waves, Romantic music, the rhythm of your heartbeat.

Back in the conventional world of Venice,

127

in spite of the many difficulties I have described above, I succeeded in having an interesting time.

Like Mr. Magoo, I would glide through dangerous situations, imagining myself impervious to danger.

Pediments fall, trees collapse in the path and on I continue, blithely smiling. In point of fact, with my longtime assistant and friend Maynard, we crashed the Art Against AIDS exhibition and cocktail at Peggy Guggenheim’s house on the Grand Canal. Walking in the back door, when one arrives in a water taxi, is a fun way to crash. At the Palazzo Ducale, Richard and I walked through the exit. A furious female guard shouted “Signori!” but we merely continued our stroll. In Venice, no functionary has the time to chase you.

Matthew compelled me to return at the end of seven days in Venice. He did not believe me when I told him my powers of recuperation might surprise him. Thus I got a second wave of jet lag

128

just as I had begun to recover from the first. He bribed me with a one-way business class ticket on Alitalia. Ted was very kind on the trip home but sees me though Matthew’s eyes. Matthew wanted me off his hands and into someone else’s care.

Susan Martin (that superb, radiant, enlightened vixen everyone in the art world worships unconditionally) was kind enough to meet me at LAX in order to help me travel to San Francisco. Once installed on the shuttle, having traveled 12,000 miles in my white clothes without spilling anything on them, Susan upended a cup of coffee on me. So much for dandyism. Steven Barclay was kind enough to meet us at SFO in order to drive us to Muir Beach.

The morning after my arrival at home, Muir Beach was radiantly sunny. I began to indulge fully my obsessive-compulsive love affair with ordering the house. After a month, with the

129

aid of Yolanda and Sal’omi, the house is approaching an agreeable state of cleanliness and order. The compulsion, however, represents my need to order and control at any cost, so as not to feel the fear of disorder.

Then I began to test every relationship in my life to see whether it could be relied upon or not. During this period, I was filled with anger which materialized as grandiosity. Glenn came to visit from Brooklyn. For 12 years we have had a tempestuous romantic friendship. We indulged ourselves by staying at the beautiful and expensive Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur. (This was a great bargain compared to the hotel where Matthew stayed in Venice, which charged $600 per night.) Glenn allowed me to review our past together, to sleep in the same bed with him, to throw things at him in a fury when he wouldn’t fuck. I had not the slightest interest in sex even as I requested it—if he were to

130

have agreed I would have been even less interested.

I seem to love Glenn more than anyone else in my career of serial polygamy.

Venice, Hotel Principe. Friday, June 11, 1993, 10:00 a.m.

After a three-day period, featuring something resembling madness, I am this morning at last returning to some semblance of normality.

For 48 hours, I had acute jet lag compounded by Zoloft withdrawal. MRR and Ted were my main support. The whole business clearly scared them out of their wits. During this interval I could hardly walk, my concentration was so diminished that I couldn’t even read. We all, including me, thought this might be the end.

The Biennale is on a much bigger scale than we had ever imagined. Venice and the Biennale are filled with hordes of people. It is

131

hard to distinguish who is from where. This is Disneyland with art and history as the attractions.

Visitors range from European and American backpackers to the highest of high society.

All these people pass through the lobby of the Hotel Danieli: Yoko with Sean (“Hey Mom!” he shouted up the grand staircase); a local noblewoman, perhaps, in a Chanel hat that would have done Garbo justice; and ghastly fat American tourists.

From the window of the lobby bathroom, I would see the gondolas going by one after another. After two had passed, I was sure that would be the end of them. But they kept on coming, all filled with Japanese tourists. They are exceedingly polite; one has to acknowledge. It is hard to relate Yoko to these people; on the other hand, her Japanese roots are clear to me. And Sean is just like Mayumi’s sons: a half-breed thrasher who is no doubt bombing his tag all over the

132

ancient and crumbling palazzos.

Need I add anything more? I wonder.

The residual of this trip is that I now seem to have access to most of my childhood memories. Lying awake at night, my body convulses and I imagine it reproduces the terror of the fetus in a toxic womb.

I feel like a computer with artificial intelligence.

As I insist on locating and analyzing old and new memories, my intelligence seems to increase exponentially. Can this be true? Is it merely grandiosity and mania? If time is not a mere figment of the imagination, like identity, then perhaps time will tell.

Muir Beach 24 July 1993

fin

BIOGRAPHY

Dean Hunter Rolston was born on May 20, 1953, in Los Angeles, California, the eldest of five siblings. Rolston’s father was a well-known Beverly Hills attorney, specializing in business and contract law. As the first son and first child in his family, Rolston followed in his father’s footsteps by pursuing a law degree. He attended the University of California at Los Angeles, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree. Subsequently, Rolston attended the McGill University Faculty of Law in Montréal, Canada, and received a joint Bachelor of Laws and Bachelor of Civil Law degree.

From early childhood, Rolston was strongly drawn to the culture, customs, and language of France. While in Montréal, he became fluent in French in order to study French Civil and English Common Law. Rolston later traveled to Europe, where he explored France as well as the arts and cultures of other European countries, while continuing to prepare for the bar exam.

Upon finishing his European studies, Rolston moved to New York City, where he completed a Master’s degree in International Taxation at Columbia University, near the top of his class. He practiced law for more than five years at the prestigious New York firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, a so-called “white-shoe” firm, with the eventual goal of joining the practice’s office in Paris.

With a lifelong interest in the arts and dissatisfied with the conservative confines of such a traditional law firm, he delved deeply into the rich cultural life of 1980s New York, and with a group of close friends, he co-founded 56 Bleecker Gallery.

More than simply a gallery, it was an energetic social engine and gathering place for artists, influencers, socialites, and scenemakers—many in the orbit of Andy Warhol. At 56 Bleecker, Rolston and his colleagues discovered and presented the work of groundbreaking artists, many at the earliest stages of their careers.

A deeply spiritual and curious soul, Rolston was also a Buddhist practitioner who spent his summers at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in Carmel Valley, California. For the last four years of his life, he lived in Muir Beach, California.

Rolston passed away on July 20, 1994, and was given a traditional Buddhist funeral (albeit one that began with the playing of The Smashing Pumpkins’ Today), officiated by his beloved friends, the monks and nuns of the San Francisco Zen Center’s Green Gulch Farm.

Dean Rolston 1953 – 1994

Three years ago, just as winter was turning into spring, I stood with my friend Cookie Mueller on an elevated companionway above the main reception room of a glittery New York nightclub.

Cookie, who had been ill with AIDS for some time, and in fact had only six months to live, turned to me and said: “You know, getting this disease is the best thing that ever happened to me...”

Remembering Dying, Chapter One: Memento Mori—Notes on Buddhism and AIDS

someseriousbusiness.org