Trey's Days No. 13

The Path

There was a flame from an oil lamp on the table between two chairs. This little light transformed the otherwise conventional mid-century living room into a chamber of soul searching. Anne had been through a lot. Minister's wife, mother, social worker, ordained minister now retired, it is here that she would share her considerable experience with me.

The session was life changing. She helped me make the decision. If I wanted to go to seminary getting my bachelor's degree was the first step. I would register for some classes and figure out what I'd major in later. There was on that day with the little light and the woman wealthy with experience a sense that something had changed. There was a new path, the path of education and preparation.

Academic advising with the chair of the music department was a mistake. It didn't seem like a mistake, but I emerged a music major. Dr. Choirmaster exclaimed “Major? Major?” and put his head down on his desk. Dr. Choirmaster has sent me to the department chair for advising. He had not imagined I would emerge a music major. “Okay, get ready!” he warned.

Concert choir was easy enough. Community chorus was even easier. Anyone with half a voice can sing in a huge choir, even if it is Handel and Mozart. It was the voice lessons and recitals, the piano lessons and recitals, the aural skills tests and the other classes on top of that that started the anxiety attacks. Standing in the wings, running “See the Raging Flames Arise” from Handel's Joshua in my head, the anxiety was like having an out of body experience. “Can you take it a little faster?” the Bulgarian accompanist asked as we walked out. “I guess” I squeaked meekly.

I crashed and burned. Two lines into the all together too fast Handel aria I looped and forgot the words. “Kristina, we have to stop.” She ignored me and kept on playing. Lost, I turned and tried to sing again. That was my last public performance. It was an unmitigated disaster. After many successes singing and playing, after mastering a gob of theory, after working my ass off, it all lay in the ruins of one disastrous performance. “Major?” Right. Big mistake!

Advising in the philosophy and religious studies department after years of a steady diet of music felt so much more appropriate. Of course. Preparation for seminary or a theology degree would involve philosophy and religious studies. Naturally. Off I went for some more years of classes I mostly loved. Existentialism, Islam, Medical Ethics, Eastern Thought, all wonderful stuff. But something had happened to me in the process of working on this patchwork we call a Liberal Arts degree. All the resolve of that day with the flame lighting a new path had vaporized. The hope of a degree itself had crashed on the rocky shores of a biology class taught by an old school hard ass. And the anxiety of crashing and burning on the shards of “See the Raging Flames Arise” with the Bulgarian racer now followed me everywhere.

“Wanna get high?” the hippie brother beckoned. Well hell yeah. Years of experience taught me how to make that stalking anxiety go away. Relapse held at bay for a while by a fellowship and a program, there comes in the life of every recovering person the moment when there is no human defense. Hell yeah I wanted to get high. I wanted relief, relief from “Major? Major?” Relief from “See the Raging Flames Arise”, relief from the passive bureaucracy of urban public education, but mostly just relief from myself, from my disease, from stalking anxiety that followed me from childhood, stirring my brain chemistry into a perfect storm of confusion and exhaustion.

I escaped with most of my dignity in tact and a zillion hours. I learned a tremendous amount. From Dr. E I got my faith back in Eastern Thought, Philosophy of Religion, and watching him teach. From my friends I found a new kind of fellowship, one of ideas and aspiration. But I had lost the light of that little flame showing me the way to a new path that would take me to the vocation for which my maker had given me great and powerful gifts.

The fellowship that offers a way out was right where I left it. Many of my old brothers were still there. They had saved me a seat. And in that fellowship I found the lamp still burning, the path still illuminated by the light of that one still and steady flame. The gifts are still there and into them has been stoked the logs of learning and even still breathes Spirit to fan the flame. Tomorrow I go to meet one who found his vocation and met his calling, to hear a word of experience. The path stretches out before me still, and still alive and breathing I have a chance. I am starting to see how my experience can benefit others, and alive in my recent memory is the message of Sister Helen Prejean reminding me not to be overwhelmed but to reach out to one in pain. And I have a whole list of names of people in pain who are waiting for me to reach out. The flame still burns, and the path will become visible again as my eyes open, I trust.

Trey's Days No. 12

Sister

I went to see the Dalai Lama. And I did, along with several thousand other folks. What I wasn't expecting was to be blown away by a Catholic nun. Sitting there between the leader of the Tibetans and a great American civil rights leader was a woman who taught me a lesson I've been needing for a while. She taught me how to not be overwhelmed in a world full of unimaginable suffering. She said you do it by reaching out to one person in pain.

Sister Helen Prejean sat between the civil rights leader and the Tibetan god king, an ordinary nun in plain clothes. She spoke plainly. She wore a red scarf and pants. She told of befriending one who had committed an unspeakable crime and another who was the father of one killed in an unspeakable crime. She told with great authority how they both wanted healing and how that healing cannot come from more violence. She told of a killing chamber with a window. Three are invited to watch the killing. There's the state's witness, there's one who is the representative of the victims family, and there's the mother of the one to be killed, her hand pressed against the glass as she watches her son the killer be killed. Nothing gets solved there and the cycle of violence continues.

Not overwhelmed in such a world where the cycle of violence continues unabated she loves each of them one at a time. She listens to them one at a time. She is Jesus for each one of them, one at a time, and walks away strong, sad but strong onto the stage of the Razorback arena before thousands.

As we waited in the afternoon to see His Holiness the Dalai Lama of Tibet again, coming to receive his honorary degree of humane letters from the University of Arkansas, the audience are in their own thoughts. A mother and daughter behind us check their stocks and talk excitedly about Pepsi's recent split. Another wears lama colors, yellow and maroon. The superstitious and the irreverent together waiting to see if the sound system can be fixed so the monologue on a non-violent response to Chinese oppression can be understood better than the morning talk which presumably was on non-violence, although it was anybody's guess since very little of what he said in the morning could be understood; his English fast and bubbly runs together in the giant re-verb of too much amplification, soft fast speaking and a giant echo in a huge domed room. All that way and a year of preparation, to present a god king and scarcely a word he spoke could be understood. Finally some brave anonymous one of the thousands yells “louder!”. But louder was not the answer, maybe slower, clearer, with less reverberation.

The message which could not be heard was that a baby learns love and compassion at her mother's breast. We carry that mother child connection into the world and we can't let it get beat out of us. In a jail cell in a Chinese prison, a monk has the snot beat out of him over and over by a guard whose job it is to be cruel as a matter of course. “My enemy my best teacher” he can almost be understood to say. Can't learn patience from a loving mother, from a Buddha, from your best friend. No. But from a guard who beats the snot out of you on a daily basis as a matter of course because he's just doing his job, you can learn patience. His culture irreparably altered forever, his childhood home raised to the ground, his people systematically oppressed on a daily basis in the country where he was once the god king, he smiles, even laughs. “My enemy my best teacher.”

It was the re-verb that taught me patience on this fateful day. Arising at 4, driving up in the morning, sitting through unintelligible speech all morning, returning hoping for another chance to hear the god king before he goes back to his place of exile, perhaps never to come this close to us again, it was agonizing to see him and hear sound coming out of his mouth and to be able to catch only about every third word. But what we did hear loud and clear is that unimaginable cruelty and suffering on a global scale cannot take away our hope. An ocean of suffering cannot overwhelm us. They taught us with their unintelligible words to love each other one at a time, to reach out to one in pain today, and to bring our love and hope with us, even into a great reverberating stadium full of chatty people checking their stocks, and superstitious groupies wearing the right colors with “spiritual” jewelry. From the god king and the simple sister came a love that cannot be killed, even by all that.

Trey's Day No. 11

Secrets

Wiping his mouth he was sweaty and out of breath. It was obvious something had been going on. Then came the trick out from behind the curtain, zipping his pants. Sam Steward aka Phil Sparrow muttered something to the sailors coming in the door about how he wanted a fly tattooed on his head.

His tattoo shack was in the most dangerous part of Chicago, a part frequented by bikers, rough trade, sailors and misfits, perfect for a genteel patrician professor with a secret life. No one would ever find him here. Tattooing was great cover that got him close to the lower men he craved but rarely found on the campus of the Catholic school where he taught snotty brats. This is the life of the “Secret Historian.”

Teaching in universities through the era of Joseph McCarthy's witch hunt when mail was routinely opened on a variety of pretexts required secrecy if you were homosexual. The inner self that could not be expressed publicly had to find outlets in secret. The difference between Samuel Steward and many thousands of others was that he kept meticulous records in his “Stud File.” This record survives today and is shared now by Justin Spring in his sometimes raunchy tale of a secret life now revealed. What hits home here is the toll that secrecy took, driving Steward to alcoholic drinking and drugging. extreme masochism and what in the end was a lonely life painful to see. It was as true for him as it is for us; we are only as sick as our secrets.

“Exit Through the Gift Shop” exposes the secret life of street artists, finding walls in LA to make their art. London, Paris, New York, train cars, bill boards, all filmed by this crazy Frenchman who came to be known as “Mister Brain Wash”. Recording their secret art and the adrenalin stoked nights of painting and running became a passion that took him all over the world. Sam Steward needing the sweat and danger of toughs, graffiti artists needing to leave their art in dangerous places, radicalize me back to the true authentic self that would be kept secret in a world full of posers, polished polite people and their repression, smiling and thinking to themselves, “Eeeww, what's wrong with him?” But “Mister Brain Wash” and Justin Spring's Sam Steward each in their way make it clear the light of day is necessary for life and dark secrets make us sick.

So re-radicalizing to the un-secret world of Sam Steward's tattoo shack and the rush of secret artists streaking through the night their free gift to give, I breathe in the fresh life giving air of secrets exposed. The “Secret Historian's” story is told so we see how sick secrets make us. “Mister Brain Wash” gives us public auctions gobbling up once secret art for a hundred thousand quid, all to show us the life giving power of the light of day.

Authenticity, real raw reality is a rare thing. So filtered was the world of Joseph McCarthy's 1950s, so cultured and narrow the world of art and self expression that they unwittingly birthed the tortured life of a secret historian and the unbridled exuberance of Mister Brain Wash. An elephant painted red with gold fleurs de lils brought all the stars out for a street art show “Barely Legal” in Los Angeles, and suddenly the art that couldn't make it in the filtered fiber free world of the art show was making all the galleries and auction houses and a vandalized telephone box off a London street brings 100,000 dollars; brilliant!

Unfiltered was Sam Steward's secret world when he became Phil Sparrow, inking flies on heads below the waist, doing a sailor, wiping his mouth as the next customer comes through the door of the gritty shack. Exposed is the secret world of repressed art exploding in the night filmed by Mister Brain Wash and brought to us in the fresh brilliant light of day as we take in “Exit Through the Gift Shop.”

So spray about some authenticity today and let out some Phil Sparrow. Don't exit through the gift shop but find art on a train car, on a wall, in your heart, let it out! We're only as sick as our secrets.