Doctors

Minimalist Week. Day 5.

Minimalist Week: A series in which I prove how clever, right or the genuine article I am in short and topical writings.

---Preface

Since this is Minimalist Week, for my relieved audience a small piece of topical writing in Section 1. But seeing as I am on a tight schedule related to my artistic project and do not want to bleed anyone for votes with multiple postings on a day, I have to attach a longer (no less topical) piece aswell, in Section 2.

Section 1.

There are two new shops in my neighbourhood. Or rather, where there were shops, there are now two doctors. Dr. Dawn and Dr. Beryl. That is what it says on the shop windows. I am growing old, I know. It was all a bit… bemusing.

Doctor Dawn is a naturopath, whose window text shows her expertise to lie in colonic hydrotherapy (a kind of irrigation), detox (including foot-detox, cupping, and liver cleansing, each with their unique benefits) and matrix regeneration therapy (really old: no clue what that is). On her site, we read she is also a junior medical doctor finishing her medical studies. (Doesn’t that come with a gruelling internship anymore? Or can you set up shop straight away and learn on your own and evaluate by yourself?) Dr. Beryl, a little farther down the road, is a beautician. I don’t know what to expect from either: one too much of a shop; the other too much of a doctor. I am confused in this world. But this soul still wants to know about your different lives. Still listening and looking at everything.

Are we calling anyone a doctor nowadays? Faust and Phil on a par? The Germans and their Herr Dr. add to the confusion....
Does it make us feel safer to know we are talking to a doctor? Is that why I keep on doctoring for people?

Anecdote

When I still knew one or two people, I placed an incidental hand on a one of these people’s shoulder blade, leaning in to put down her coffee and virtually jumped to feel lumps of glowing hot coals amidst taught towing cable. The trapezius was a sheet of metal warped around the contorted rhomboid, and the levator scapulae was on the point of snapping. I let her know it seemed to me, she felt a little knotted up. Was she tense?

On the contrary, she had fallen in love. Everything was coming up roses, at last. I was delighted to hear it but didn’t trust it for a minute. That back of hers did not feel like it was in love. “I think this is the one,” she beamed intending to mean it.
“But….” I prompted without result.
“But nothing. Not buts at all… “ she clearly had it engrained in her head.

I am not against anyone having their dream for as long as they can hold it but I am terrible when it comes to keeping the truth to myself. I like to name things. It is almost a compulsion. A lime, an oak, a cottoneaster, a philodendron, a C, a G, a Bflat minor, calcium phosphate, calcium fluoride, calcium sulfide, calcium carbonate, and so too the pain she was holding onto.
“What pain?!”she tittered away lightly. “It’s love. It’s gone to my head….and got stuck in my back.” She began massaging her shoulder with little kneading pinches and moving her head from side to side in the attempt to ease the strain, but almost afraid to mobilise too much. It was impossible to deny it now. So she inquired now with more interest “What pain?”

I explained this pain needn't contradict that she had found someone to love. But she hadn’t fallen “in love”, that state that is like perfect pitch, not anything in and of itself, but a harmonic ground from which to begin to harmonise all things. Furthermore her locked muscles were telling her that she was doing over-time in holding on to all her old hurt and trauma.

Disgruntled but bemused, she took a sip of coffee, as if to sponsor the call to reason. “Why would I do that?”
“Because you are afraid. You are holding onto your suit of armour, a mailcoat of hurts and fears, with all your might. It's what you know, and you feel in need of protection. His arsenal you don't know yet. Better safe than sorry. But that is to start from a point of defence. Love should be surrender. Not of one's own will; on the contrary: you fortify that all the more in the name of love. You open. And you take in. If he doesn't know how, there is no point relaxing into love. I can put some arnica and lavender on it for you, if you like. Maybe some sandlewood to raise your energy out of HQ- head.”

She smirked familiar with my two minds regards our control station. I reiterated my frequent advice to “Consult the jewel in the crown" with a self-mocking "Om mani padme hum", fetching my kit of essential oils down from the shelf already.
“Maybe you have good reason to have some doubts,” I wished to endorse her wise body.
But she ignored this and blithely called me the herb lady. "I'll have some chamomile tea, before I see him again, alright, Herb Lady?" She chuckled.

"Would you like any oil?” I asked tentatively before opening my box to let out a fragrant air of promise and invitation; the lavender mountains, the jatamansi anointing of feet, the atlas cedar with its enormous carrying power.

She declined. “No, I’m fine. I slept in a draught. He’s not used to sleeping with a woman, anymore, so he hoggs all the covers. By morning I’m stiff all over.”
I demurely put my box back on the shelf. Was it a good thing that he was out of such practice? A selective soul? A concentrated soul? Or was he, maybe jaded by one night stands and happy to confuse love with cuddle factor? Was this more than a one-night stand stuck on repeat?

What did I know? I cared, I saw, I know, but to diagnose is taking it too far. I am not a doctor. What goes on in a surgery must stay in a surgery or it is to become haughty interference over morning coffee.

I thought we were done with him, till she thought of a punchline to add on to how stiff she was every morning, lately. “But so is he!”
The momentary glimpse at her own reservations were giggled away.
I smiled a little wearily. Quite right, at least, that it wasn’t love.

---

Section 2.

an extraction from:

There Comes A Time When Nothing Much More At All Can Be Said Anymore

There once was a man named Q. who had very humble origins, somewhere in el quinto pino (or a ceiba tree) in the Amazon rainforest. This was a place of mutual relationships (the prostitutes and the loggers) and chemical defense (the forest part). He was born to a Sao Paolan prostitute and a Maori who had come to seek his fortune in peanut farming. His mother, too, had travelled a great distance to this logging town, and this propensity for travel is hereby noted.

We never hear of Maake again; she seems to have left him, rather than he her. Maake was a great deal older; which helps Q. later, to justify his obstinate opposition of his daughter's choice in her husband, until she is 21. (Yes, she knew she would marry him from the age of 9.) This man called L. is not only the best friend of her mother (if not something infinitely more complicated) but also more than 40 years her senior. Yes 40. And no, there was no valid reason for protesting, since it was a most intimate soul connection, between a Zeus too large for his temple and the soul who chose to be born into his presence. Q. could see (unlike the others, really see) how predestined it was; but this doesn’t have to convene with your personal preference; of how you would rather like it; with altogether less death, less inevitable solitude, less sharing of lovers.

His mother sees her chance to leave the Brazilian hell hole and her job behind by accepting the offer of another farmer, a young stud, to accompany him to L.A. Since this soon was recognised to be the worst decision of this man’s life (the forest bewitches you), we shall leave that episode there. K. can’t have minded much, for she was in the States and that was all that had mattered.

We join Q. again when his mother signs him up with a modelling agency. He was a most photogenetic baby and perfectly cute and innocent at age 5 when he starred in shampoo commercials. He remained a much sought after face on the books till age 9, when he taught himself to pout and look surly, which was not a look the 80’s wanted in young children, especially not in the bath.

In the meantime, his mother had become the companion of a down-and-out business man, living off his hedged savings. Q. calls him Heff when he speaks about him as a teen, for the yellow satin robe he walked around in perpetually; he means to refer to his mother as little more than Heff’s exclusive playgirl, besides. He can’t remember them not stoned or lounging semi-naked, by the pool, which turned ever more into a piss yellow, peaty pond as the years went by, the savings shrank, and the addictions became heavier. Q did enjoy urinating in that pool, he will admit stone-faced.

Bad Areas of L.A.Map

As a teen he became a loner but made friends with a Mexican-immigrant Vietnam vet with one leg and one (opposing) arm left, who ran a hot-dog stand on the border of where one good district turned bad (the double whammy catchment zone, he called it). In retrospect, the guy had to have been off his face on the spirits he was keeping in the old red, plastic ketchup bottles, all the time;but for Q. he made better after-school company than Heff or K. on “Tutti-Frutti”, “Speed-Balls” and “Triple V’s”‡.

His other companions were the guinea-pigs, which he discovered at the bottom of a derelict garden he had gained access to by slipping through the delapidated fence. There was an old man living in the crumbling villa to which the garden belonged, but after a couple of antagonistic encounters from afar, through the ever-closed double-glazed sliding doors, he left Q. to take care of the rodents. They were in dire need of veterinary attention, either to curb their numbers or see to their wounds, overgrown teeth and curly toe nails. Q. soon had their dietary deficiencies taken under control and he remained their keeper for a couple of years, before the relative fortunate happenstance of the old man dying and the animals being taken away (hopefully to a good home), and Q.’s first major appearance in a movie.

Q. finished highschool while shooting the film and it more or less passed him by that he had turned into a teenage idol. The film was a short lived, small summer holiday box office success, but it got him noticed by the producers that mattered and they started finding him work.

Used to the modelling business, he let himself be slotted into parts, which required very little acting talent. He started earning big bucks on B-films in the nineties. He was well aware of this and kept his focus on that. At age 19 he became besotted with Cynthia, a starlet of a similar acting callibre, about seven years older. He liked being under her wing, and didn’t mind being taught the ins and outs of the sexual pleasures of a woman. Sadly, she soon had him on Vodka as a daily drink to boost morale. She herself was a cocaine addict as well as an alcoholic. Q. would now say that he was well aware of having hit the self-destruct button.

Seers offer running commentary on the steps they have to take.

At 21, he and Cynthia were heading out for a photoshoot with Elle for a piece on child actors surviving all the way into adulthood. He would be the example for the first stage; she the one for those in decline. Cynthia wanted them to be photographed together, but Q.’s manager needed him to present as free and single. “Hooked up bores, available attracts.”

As always, she was high on coke and pre-drinking before lunch, and hazzardly driving them up to the location in her pink convertible, she was looking for a fight, Q. found better to avoid. “You never say anything!” were her last words, needing his affirmation of their relationship even if it meant a breech in contract that required him to stay single until 23. She wanted them to become engaged. Q. was, in fact, just about to say something, when their car crashed.

Cynthia died upon impact. Q. was knocked unconscious but had no futher injuries other than a deep slash on his chest which left a scar and a crack in his shinbone which recoverd soon. The aftermath of this tragic accident was, nonetheless, to change the course of his life 180 degrees. After a month of recovering in a private clinic in L.A. – partly to detox (although the accident had instantly dislodged the alcoholism from him) but mainly to avoid the papparazzi, who were only small, part-time free-lancers, by the second week after the accident, but maybe even more uncouth than the bigger pros. They were onto him like flies to honey until Q. left for England. The one thing he must have inherited from his mother had to have been that travelling blood.

Here he was hardly known at all, and his fame soon faded into oblivion while he spent almost a year at a private sanatorium with acute chronic dysphoria, as they described his condition which had for its main symptom total muteness. Then one day, he packed his things and said, “I’m leaving now,” and he left.

He went to the London Film Academy to study directing; and that was what he was doing when P. Zima met him on a terrace in Münich and asked him to make a short video of him, while he was waiting anyway to get the permission to film in the City Hall.

The video got shot in P.’s hotel room and the tape was kept at a notary’s office, until after his death it would be sent to Q. (although Q. had no notion of this then).

Three years passed and the video was sent to Frankfurt, where Q was temporarily based in a firm producing promotional films for corporate businesses. On the side, he made a couple of documentaries and had developed into a sound engineer. He was starting to produce indie bands and singer-song-writer talent. P. had mentioned his life-and-death partner (he called her that) had also sung. At first, Q. assumed this man was looking for a producer for his lady friend. But then he saw; not the debonair man in his Italian high grade wool suit, or the years of hard knocks and passing through doors as if like a ghost, but the love.

The short video…. message, can we call it? A ruse of ruminations and last words, came with instructions to drive to Antwerp, and hand it to P.s true wife (if not legally so). Borders, divisions did not exist for Q. anymore. Not between Germany and Belgium, not between one job and another. He got into his orange hatchback Volvo C30 which we see drive up to THOTH, the house on the hill, and parked under the atlas cedar, from which he and A., Zima’s wife, would take a cone of seeds with them to Valais, where they would build a chalet of distinction, they called Perlesvaux.

The point is. Q. walked into my study in the first week of December 2003.

That is when I started writing down his story, as the above sums up in a small part. I was told to be very precise about certain details and fact-check them so that a precise time line and location map would be formed (where necessary). As the story grew, the novel became ever more impossible and it turned into an engineering job. What is the construction I have been asked to build? Asked by whom? Well, I’ll give it to the unbelievers, by the voices in my head. I am in good company: today, a book fell on my foot by Juan José Millás, "Desde la sombra", and his character Lobo, too, has meaningful questions tossed his way by his Sergio O’Kane (like what fish would you prefer to be: a shark or a sardine?).

What I learned from this 15 year project it what myth is and how it is made.
It is not metaphor or confabulation. There Comes is not a fairy tale. It is a way of seeing put into words. It explores the very act of creation. Of configuration and transfiguration. The love it takes. The death it has to defy.
Myth is the choice we make in seeing what we see. The choice to see the light which can only be seen in the colours that the eye can filter. And the world keeps dodging and burning.

It takes an insane dedication which will be taken for insanity in itself. I understand better the meaning and need of being occult.
Also, the elevation it requires to see clealy and neither divorce yourself from what you know (I will remain the controller of my own words, thank you very much) nor muddle it with what you know people would like to hear, you end up on a daily roller-coaster. You can’t do highs without coming back down. In the mean time, I don’t have a shed to go down to at 9 in the morning and step back out of for dinner time. I never had the luxury of writing a novel. I am just a scribe, observing what is. As a creative writer, I try to make the most of that duty imposed upon me.

Q. soon left me after he explored and researched all he could for a couple of years.
Then I was stuck with the formidable Dr. Zima himself. A taciturn man, who pays fools no attention. Our relations have been strained. His final parting, however, broke something in me. A comfortable shutter that let the light stay out as I so dosed. Now it lets through a constant shining, as azure as the light from his eyes. Talk about eye-strain.

---

footnotes:

‡ * slang for resp. cocain, heroine and cocaine, Vicodin-Vodka-Valium.

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-*- If you have been confused by what has been so minimalist about this week, I blame you not.
For me it has been all about reducing large, overarching themes into anecdotal anchor points.
Is there anything minimal about a thunderbolt USB flash drive? Each piece of writing is a drive (not a file).