Everything Everywhere All at Once: NYC with My Mom and My Homie
Okay, so I went home to see my mother in The Bristal Assisted Living in Lynnwood, Long Island, bringing Matzah, and on my birthday no less! But this VERY JEWISH WOMAN of all-but-near 92-years-of-age had by now lost her religion--and, also, it seemed, her neurosis.
She emerged from The Bistro, where the women guzzle coffee, to see her children, her eldest, Douglas, and her youngest, Daniel, looking happy. Apparently, the stroke she suffered 8 years ago, and that spirited her to The Bristal, gave her a new outlook on life. She emerged from the near-death experience as one might from a mushroom trip: aware of something beautiful both within and beyond. She has been more than delighted to reside in The Bristal with other near-deaf and near-blind limping crones who love each other but do not remember each other’s names.
Penny (for that is her name, derived from “Peninah”) may have lost her vast memory (or more accurately, her sharp specificity). She also may have lost her Jewish mother tongue. But her cognitive decline did not sand away her irony nor wit. By no means. She could still cast shade at the mention of a familiar member about whom she had less that cheery feelings, such as her husband (my father, Lenny). She used her feeling function to express satisfaction not in the form of gossip, but just her simple truth. But for the most part, she emanated the reduction of anxiety. She expressed joy at being with her two boys for the short time they would be together, me and my younger brother Daniel. She would also tolerate me filming her for an extended interview, as I am embarking on my new social media career. This must be our last meeting, but there are no guarantees in life!
Of course, at various times, the old-style neurosis would emerge: Love as Worry. She would ask me ten times if I would remember to have breakfast in the morning, and did I take my keys, and did I have my wallet, and had I eaten, and, by the way, did I have the money for her? When I responded that she was “hocking” me (annoying me), or that she should “nischt gegedadah” (don’t worry), and that she should not “fadrai her head” (not bother herself with petty manners) or if I answered “gornischt” (or zilch) to her question about whether a member in the family had money or not, she looked at me as if I were speaking a foreign language. When I asked if she had gone to a Seder, she shrugged her shoulders and when I asked if the Rabbi had come, she answered, with her thick Bronx drawl, “she was a woman.”
I really had to agree with a long standing conversation I had been having with myself for a long time, that religion no longer provides the answers about meaning for a lot of us. Better existential self-study (done in therapy or in some other form of rigorous self study that doesn’t allow you to get away with your own bullshit) can lead one, or so it seems to me, especially after this trip, into the larger meanings of identity/anti-identity and life/death. How do we manage our contradictions? How do we handle the regret we feel for clinging so long to one form of life, where we might just have chosen another path? I am sure I might have been a singer had my parents not traipsed backstage and suggested I was meant to be a scholar. Were they all so wrong? Why sometimes does it feel as if NOTHING matters? And why does it feel sometimes that EVERYTHING matters?
There are days of ennui and then, BAM!, we remember what it’s like to LOVE ALL OVER AGAIN, or to feel forgiveness, or experience gratitude, or, to notice, as never before, the shifting of moods that helps us move from the shock of hatred to the shock of acceptance for this feeling, and then the work of metabolism begins. What happened? How were we disappointed? Was an early trauma triggered? Were we truly betrayed or did the other person suffer in their own way too or just shut down. The feeling is the start for the journey, not the end-in-and-of-itself.
Why do this work? What if we just momentary pieces of stardust? Or have we been rocks all along sitting side-by-side in our eternal discourse, as only rocks do? Without giving too much away, the movie is all about the question as to why work so hard at love when we might as well just wanted into The Bagel and experience not what Freud called the “Love Drive,” but the “Death Drive,” (which is also called the Nirvana Principle. Meaning and Nihilism as two sides to the same coin?
Ultimately, my trip to NYC, and also the movie, might indicate that we do, in fact, dwell in many different universes. Don’t our dreams say as much? We could learn about these other worlds, the movie says, if we bear the melancholy of lost love and transform those sad and dejected feelings into the energy needed to hyper jump into the next stage of evolution, or devolution. Feeling is all. Feeling is a road.
Speaking of roads not taken, I also thought it might be a good idea to bring Payton back to NYC. My friend of these past 4 years hails from Los Angeles. He first came to NYC two years ago. We had a more traditional tourist experience. This time, in honor of my birthday, he took control of the wheel. We entered into the hyper space of sci-fiction or action-figure animation. He managed to make the rented Enterprise BMW fly over the West Side Highway, the FDR, speeding through the Midtown Tunnel, touching upon all the major bridges at breakneck speed, traveling the circumference of this great island, into New Jersey, into Staten Island, while late April sent pouring rain, even trekking to the root of where Little Dougie first began his journey of understanding and love-lost in the Grand Concourse and then in the dreadful hell-hole 140 Alcott Place in Co-Op City of The Bronx (memories flooding me of suffering those dreadful hip operations, the Bar Mitzvah, the “yes” to Columbia). All this culminated, with Payton taking the car into a DONUT SPIN, I kid you not, in the empty shopping Mall of Section 5 of Co-Op City. I experienced a form of The Bagel by being taken for a ride in a Donut.
If you have never been in a donut, it’s like falling from the sky, while remaining on the ground. But if we accept the challenge, the throwing of the body to one side of the car, and then to the other, and follow our hearts, we are taught that it is possible to live many different lives in the same lifetime, and to be accompanied by many different types of people. One can be more than a therapist, or a poet, or a performer or a musician or a cook, or an athlete, a son, a homie, a friend. One can be more than a “mother” or a “son,” more than even “gay” or “straight.”
I know I am not supposed to say these things. I am a person who has fought all my life for identity.
But explain to me this conundrum: Of course, our identities are who we are. But we must come from a greater unity that I reckon we can feel in our stardust. So we have the relations we have, and we also have the Bagel. We often chose the relations over The Bagel. That is our humanity, but that is not the only answer.
This not not as dualistic as it sounds. People are in a very difficult state. But people are also waking up. Even the dying process is also an opening up. Who knows what those observing us are saying about how we are observing ourselves? One could only imagine someone saying, in another realm, “nischt gegedadah.” One day we may be a stone reflecting back on how we do or in a Donut.
-Dr.Doug