In Session 12
The Lay Psychiatrist toughens up his butting
I worked the head bag today. Head butting should not come as a surprise knockout to you, but to your target. The first time I tried it I was about six. I had seen a man on television win a fight by using his head. I connected the abstract concept of using your head with the literal head butting. I knocked myself out by using the wrong spot. You want to hit off to one side or the other.
I use a bag of stones to toughen up my forehead. It’s a bag made of human skin I won in a card came in Afghanistan. Once a week I work out on the bag to toughen up my butting. I was banging my head on the rocks when the clients came through the door. It was the old couple who’d left happy the first time, but it didn’t last.
I was struck at how handsome a woman the old yogini was, and how complete she was in her tastes and refinement. “You cast me as a prop,” she said. “You don’t recognize me any more than he does. It’s true that I am afraid when someone says they love me. It’s like being asked to donate a kidney. But I need relationship from a relationship.”
The man seemed to recede into the background and I realized he was practicing the ancient martial art of depressive anxiety. Controlling and increasing the anxiety’s momentum produces a nervous, heady, mental energy, which can cut through neuronal connections like a butter knife.
These are old people. They sometimes fight for consciousness against the unrelenting pressure of gravity and they have to rage against the dying of the light. It spills over. They have to keep showing up on the street or they will be put in storage. They all know that. They have to get energy to keep the light alive, and the only energy available is in the shadow. What they rejected as not themselves now has power of life and death over them.
The ego has become an insufferable boor.
The woman continued talking though I had been distracted by the man’s psychic weaponry. The Way of the Duck requires prowess in the air as well as on the surfaces, and beneath them. Land, air and sea have to work together if you intend to slam your head into a bag of rocks. The action rises from the psyche, which animates the muscles. I was not hearing the words but I was seeing Margarita. “He doesn’t listen,” she was saying. “And then he uses the excuse that men are different, and don’t care about relationships.”
The Master seemed to be returning from a different reality, he had lost substance for a moment but quickly rematerialized. “I didn’t say I don’t care about relationships,” he said. As he talked his right hand swam around him in the air, like an agitated fish. “I said women are all about relationship, and men want excitement in an affair.”
“Excitement?” Margarita expostulated. “Excitement? Did Nelson Rockefeller teach you nothing? You’re already having conjugal visits with the afterlife.”
That got my attention.
“What do you mean by conjugal visits with the afterlife?”
“Tell him,” Margarita said.
“I’m practicing having sex after I’m dead, just in case there’s any chance of it.”
“All he thinks about is sex, even if he’s dead. Consider the vanity of this man.”
“The orgasm connects us to the creative vibration of life itself,” the Master said. “Where else would you look for reunification with it? But as the life grows longer, so does the orgasm, until it has lost the habit of dying every goddamned time it’s born. It becomes instead a steady connection to the source vibration, and tunes to it.”
“What that looks like down on the ground,” said Margarita, “is that he gets hard off and on but can’t sustain an erection.”
“Just because you’ve never seen Japan doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist,” said the Master.
“Let’s get back to the central issue,” I said, addressing Margarita, “which is that you think the Master, here, should be more lady like.” The Master nodded agreement with this assessment, eagerly seizing the high ground.
“Exactly right,” he said. “It’s happened to every man that he’s come back from visiting a friend, and his wife asks, ‘How are his wife and children,’ and he has to admit, ‘The subject didn’t come up.’”
“I’m sorry,” Margarita said, “but that’s bullshit, being rude and inattentive to a woman and then saying, ‘That’s how men are.’ It’s how rude and inattentive men are, and what I think I can’t surmount in this instance is a class issue. This is not a refined man. He’s vulgar and mean.”
“I have my own refinement,” the Master defended, cut to the bone.
“What had happened between the happy acceptance of everything and taking out the trash?” I thought. The Master turned to Margarita and spoke with measured sincerity.
“My mind is a playground, and I was wanting you to play with me in unlimited space, where nothing is true, everything is permitted, and imagination can fly like a bird.” He let loose a sudden, overpowering vibration.
“What are you doing?” I asked, but I knew what he was doing. He was trying to show her something out of this world. She wasn’t interested in what’s out of this world. “I saw a dinner plate, in Bombay,” I said. “A woman was sitting in full lotus meditation in the center, her palms up. A man was standing in her palms, his head reaching upward into the outer rim of the plate.”
My phone chimed.
“Ah, the hour, she is up.”
