The Many Writings of

Ho ho ho. I wrote the attached piece out on the road last week, when I should have been trying to catch some sleep. Dumb...it's a true story that might go nicely on bc.com.
- Barry.

I floated weightless in the mucid amnion, light filtering through skin and blood, filling my small, liquescent world with an omnipresent, clerestory luminescence. The metered sounds of human hydraulics, pumping and soughing combined with the sweet, comforting sound of my mother absently humming; my first music. I breathed, somehow taking in fluid and air as one nourishment. I waited, serene and warm, for my audience, my invitation to question my guide, my chance to review my contract for this life.

My adult body floated, naked and fetal, in a big stone hot tub, supported by two others as naked as I. They had spent their summer learning the technique of wet rebirthing - helping the scarred and battered to reclaim themselves. I was face down, white ass to the sun, eyes closed, breathing through a snorkel, the clip on my nose my only apparel. All I had to do, they said, was breathe. They were there to make sure I didn't hurt myself or drown. Just keep taking deep, regular breaths, and you'll go deeper than any drug trip, they said. This was to be their gift to me.

Somehow they knew I was stuck. The week before I'd been thrashing and kicking on a therapist's pile of pillows, crying out my fear and frustration, protesting that my life was too hard, my calling too demanding and my talent too limited. I was trying to do the impossible, attempting to surmount the formidable obstacles I thrust in my own path. Life, it seemed, was a malicious prankster, luring me down a series of dead-end streets, mocking my clumsy flailing attempts at art, at relationship.

I don't remember exactly how it came about, the mechanics of how Joyce and Marty invited me to be their guinea pig. Maybe through the shrinks' grapevine-I don't know. There are no accidents. It was, I found out, all in the contract. I had the rare opportunity, in that short aquatic retreat, to re-explore the covenant I'd made before the corporeal me ever took form. Propelled by my own breath, I spiraled down, or maybe out, far past my gestation, my conception, to the Life that precedes life, finding myself in that place that is no place and everywhere all at once. I was with my guide, my angel, conversing in the language of spirit that is music and feelings and thoughts and time and space. It sounds complicated, reduced to words, but it is immensely simple and economic communication, trading essence instead of symbols.

I hadn't wanted to come back to this place, this world. I already knew that much. I didn't want to go through it all again, the pain of being trapped in a body like a prisoner in a cell, his only company being unruly emotions and a messy and disobedient mind, a cell itself destined to rot and die. I came into this life not trailing Blake's clouds of glory, but whining, colicky and very afraid. Not afraid of what might be asked of me, but afraid that, whatever it was, I would find myself unequal to the task. Eventually I would come to believe that life was an elaborate farce with every scene artfully constructed so that, at the oddest, least fortunate, most painful moment, the earth itself would be wrenched from beneath my feet. This I believed as I floated in my microverse, the rasp of my own hoarse breathing coming to me as from a great distance.

"Why am I here?" I asked my guide. "Why did I come back?" The questions emanated from me in a pouty, resentful cloud of self-pity. The response came in waves of sound and sensation, images and colors. The words sound almost trivial in translation, but the revelation, the resolution, the relief they brought me were anything but. "You came back for music and for love," answered my guide. "These you must follow without question or hesitation".

My life, up to that moment, had been a stutter-step of questions and hesitations. I had tried more than once, foolishly, to walk away from my music, my passion, but it clung to me as stubbornly as my shadow. I might as well have tried to walk away from my own soul. In my most recent fit of despair, I had spent a weekend at an upper-management seminar, in the alien world of pinstripes and post-it's, learning corporate-speak and murmuring evasive answers when questioned directly about what I did. I came away feeling like I'd been locked in a vacuum, knowing that I couldn't survive in that world. There was nothing there to nourish me, and I'd starve like a housedog in the winter woods. I could not outdistance my passion but still I doubted myself and resisted my own momentum at every turn.

Working at a 'normal' job had never been an option for me. Once, during a commercial shoot in a huge, mid-Manhattan office space, I glanced at the rows and rows of perfectly aligned desks in the glass-walled enclosure that was our set, and for a brief, vertiginous moment saw instead ranks of headstones, markers of mortality passed, neatly ordered as the military cemetery we frequently drove past when I was a child. The two images, superimposed and interchangeable, spoke death to my spirit. My child's eyes remembered scores of adults, all miserable, who bled forty hours a week, not counting the hours lost in miasmic gridlock, struggling to and from the jobs they hated. They drank away their weekends, cursing their jobs, their lives. It seemed to me, then as now, terribly unjust that, at childhood's end, one should forget joy and fulfillment forever, throw one's life upon the flaming pyre of 9-to-5, and commit spiritual suttee to the accompaniment of the dull tinkle of ice cubes slowly melting in eighty proof anesthetic.

I had seen all that, and yet I still questioned my existence, my ability, even my basic right to occupy even the smallest space in the artistic universe. But here it was, in the plainest and most eloquent of terms; the answer to why I had signed on for another stint. This is why I had re-upped - music and love. Were they separable? Not really, but in the Divine paradox they were somehow delineated as individual entities to be explored and understood, spelunked to a depth I had not had the courage or vision to penetrate. They had been, from my earliest memories and all through my life, the only things I truly valued, the only things that made any sense to me at all in a world of chimerical values and twisted acts I failed to comprehend. Music and love, the numinous physics of the heart and its prime expression. Of course! And all I had to do was stop second-guessing myself, stop getting in my own way. All I had to do was really, truly go for it, nothing held back and so what if there was no safety net, no hedging of bets, nothing in reserve. That was all I had to do, just say yes to my life, to what could be my life.

In that moment of epiphany, my guide, my angel smiled, brilliant as an imploding nova, and spun me back through the delightful miracle of my newly forming body to the bloody screaming hell of my surgical birth, an event I'd done my best to sabotage in the vain hope of not having to repeat the savage lunacy of life on earth. I had contrived to be placenta previa, and wrapped my umbilical cord about my neck in the hope that I would either suffocate or garrote myself before I could draw breath. The emergency Caesarian had thwarted me cruelly, and I now, in this second birthing, had to be both observer and observed. Cut from my mother's gaping belly, thrust into the harsh light, slapped and swaddled, I screamed my sadness and terror until I could scream no more.

They say we don't remember our births. It's not true. Those oldest memories are locked in our cells, in our hearts, in our bones. Once unlocked they come freely, with all the power, trauma and immediacy of events not five minutes past. My body, exhausted from its labor, floated limp and aching in the warm, viscid water.

A slow mingling of sensations, the gradual recollection of my body and senses followed. I tasted blood, and realized that I had bitten almost completely through the snorkel and cut my lips. I became aware of my legs, now curled tightly under me, and slowly extended them until I could feel the stone floor of the tub beneath my feet. Unseen hands gently helped me to stand and held me as I swayed, unsteady, an ungainly newborn streaming water instead of lathered in vernix. The remains of the snorkel were taken away; the clip came off my nose. My eyes slowly opened to a dozen pairs of anxious eyes, the witnesses to my clamoring reentry. Tears streamed down my face, making a strange mosaic of the faces surrounding me and breaking the rays of the late afternoon light into a thousand tiny suns.

"Sing" I said through cracked lips. Awkward silence. "Sing. Please sing to me" I choked. "What would you like us to sing?" Joyce whispered. "Anything, just please sing to me," I begged, my throat raw and hurting. Someone started up a ragged chorus of Happy Birthday, and it filled me with a joy greater than any music I have ever known. "Ok", I said in a shaky and sodden croak when they were finished. "I'll do it." "Do what?" asked Joyce.

They had been attending my body for over two hours, but they couldn't know where I'd gone. Usually, they said, these sessions lasted about twenty or thirty minutes. I had been thrashing, moaning, crooning, talking and yelling for over two hours, and they still looked a little apprehensive. "I'll just go ahead and do what I do," I said. I couldn't summon a more satisfying explanation, coming so soon back to dealing with words. Joyce and Marty shared a quiet, perplexed shrug and helped me to sit on the lip of the hot tub. Someone put a big thick towel around my shoulders. Someone else brought me some tea, but I couldn't hold the cup quite yet, so they held it for me. A couple began playing tennis on the clay court a few yards away, the regular 'pock' of their volleying marking time. The strained quiet that had met my emergence gradually gave way to the sounds of a summer afternoon.

A wonderful lethargy settled over me, and I slowly stumbled into their house, found a quiet corner and fell asleep until after dark. When I finally reappeared, red-eyed and still disoriented from my immersion, the people who were still there regarded me cautiously and asked if I was ok. Evidently I'd put on quite an unexpected show. The afternoon, which had begun in a sort of party atmosphere, had taken on quite a different tone as 'the guy with Marty and Joyce in the hot tub freaked out', as someone said.

Later, Joyce explained to me that, in their training, people usually had warm fuzzy experiences of caring and cuddling, lovingly proffered breasts, peace and security. Leave it to me to be the exception. At several points in the drama they were worried for their own safety, and only their commitment to keep me alive kept them in the tub with me. She showed me the large yellow and purple bruises on her legs where I had kicked her in my wild thrashing, and told me that Marty had a few, too. They had no idea, she told me, that anyone would have the type of seemingly violent ordeal I appeared to have undergone. I smiled and hugged her. I told her that I owed her my life.

Now, when I need to remember why I do what I do, why I endure the disappointments and the discomforts, the travel hell, the continual sense of dislocation, shredding of family ties, financial setbacks and frustrations, lost days, lost sleep, wretched food and even worse coffee, sore feelings and a scumbucket business, it helps to remember why I am here. It doesn't always make it all make sense, but it helps.