DEEP TISSUE

“Love begins and love ends.” So are the lyrics to “PJ In the Streets...” from Xiu Xiu’s The Air Force. The record’s cover depicts Christ Crowned with Thorns, an Italian Renaissance tempera and gold leaf painting by Fra Angelico (1438-1439). The painter, a Dominican friar, purportedly wept as he painted his divine subjects. As I consider this lyric from “PJ in the Streets…,” I pose questions: Does real love end? Or is that which we frequently call love an imaginary, a fake? If we’re deluded by imaginary love, what deludes us? Do our own doomed repetitions serve as spectacles propping up the turbulence of our lives to which we’ve grown accustomed? And if real love is endless, per 1 Corinthians 13, what does forever feel like?

In the car, I am or was eating popcorn emblazoned with a cartoon Buddha, the religious deity who abandoned his wife and child to seek enlightenment under the Bodhi tree. I resent the Buddha’s story but miss the mise-en-scène of Zen Mountain Monastery, where I sat interminable sesshins before the world shut down. A monastery is quiet; the mind is very loud. In the grocery store, I opt for self-checkout so I don’t have to speak. It is or was a hot day. The car where I am or was eating popcorn is a sports car I was borrowing that I did not know was opulent. I don’t care much for cars. They have four wheels and are made of metal. I recently wrote the introduction to a book published by Fence about a car killing my friend. I have not driven since. 

 

—I have two different [meditation practices]. One is spiritually based, and one is more physically based. I had an unusual religious upbringing. My mom grew up an athiest but became religious after she had children, and my dad grew up a hardcore Catholic, and as people who grow up in hardcore Catholic environments often do, he turned away from that as he got older, and he became interested in… He was a hippie, so Eastern types of philosophy. I did not have a good childhood, but one thing that my parents did was that they set spirituality and religion out for us as an option to find some refuge in. It was never something that was compulsory, but it was something that could be turned to in whatever form made some kind of sense. And for that reason, spirituality is something that has remained a positive part of my life. But because it was amorphous, my quote-unquote practice is also fairly amorphous. There was a period where my dad and I were both going to this quasi-Hindu Christian church called Ananda. A lot of my meditation practice and spirituality is based on some things that I learned there. This was a long time ago—in my early 20s. But it stuck with me. [Ananda promotes] a very open conception about what god could possibly be, or not be. It’s borderline agnosticism, but I sort of … I guess the idea is to basically have no idea what’s going on, but to believe there is possibly something going on, and feel contentment in not-knowing. The other [meditation practice] is just to calm down when I’m stressing out. I had this one therapist who said, “Breathe in on the syllable ‘re,’ breathe out on the syllable ‘lax.’ Re-lax, relax.” It’s actually really good. It distracts me from whatever’s going on. I’m surprised at how effective it is. And anytime I’m doing any sort of spiritually-based meditation, I sometimes feel a certain amount of pressure to do it right. Which is just me. I know it has nothing to do with any positive spirits that are floating around. 

 

In Hudson, a bat arrives—or is it a bird? It comes at night while I am sleeping, a few days after I conduct my interview for this essay, but before August 16th, the day I become a table. I hear the bat’s wings flutter, circumnavigating my sleep, and at first I think it is the oversized Maine Coon cat for whose well-being I am currently responsible.

I am afraid of the bat, whose dark, quick, frenetic presence activates my fight-or-flight response. The morning of its appearance, I flee to the couch at 5:00am and research so-called pests. Despite the fact these animals are not inherently vexing, language renders them as such. And although my fantasy has always been that I’m a rigorous critical thinker and lover of animals, I am leaving messages on pest control services’ voicemail systems and chatting with strangers on message boards about how to rid the house of this creature.

This is not my first time encountering a bat. The other time was in Fall 2019 at Zen Mountain Monastery, during an aforementioned sesshin retreat. Upon returning home from the retreat, I wrote:

 

During a silent meditation retreat, I was washing a window when a bat flew in. I screamed—something everyone wants to do during a silent meditation retreat. Was the bat a living bat, or a dead rat? Its body descended onto the floor.

 

I placed a garbage can atop the creature—a living bat, not a dead rat—and found the monk who finds me when I hide.

This is a moment in which to note there are three characters in this story. These characters are also thoughts: the living bat, the monk, and Claire.

The monk lifted the garbage can from atop the living bat and took the bat into his palms. “It's okay,” the monk said to the bat. He opened the window. “Be careful with your little wing,” he said.

The monk gently placed the bat onto the windowsill. My anxiety continued to loom. For weeks, I continued to think about this interaction: the bat as a thought in need; the monk as a model of care, tenderness, soothing, stillness amidst fear. A new way to think.

After I finished cleaning the window, I taped a sign to it: A bat lives outside this window. Please proceed with care.

 

The night after the bat arrives, a friend spends the night. We chase the bat with a broom. The bat can hear, but it can’t see. Then another friend comes to town and spends the night too, though this occasion is unplanned. He is married and wears a wedding band. This is prior to August 16, 2021. I spend most of my other nights with the oversized Maine Coon, Noodle. It is simple to wake up with her. She makes biscuits on my chest and never fails to show affection. 

I will always be nicer to the cat than I am to you is a lyric on a Xiu Xiu record called Dear God, I Hate Myself, reissued by Kill Rock Stars at the end of July. I think about this lyric a lot because it speaks to my participation in a life partnership circa 2010, in which I did not know how to be alone and therefore couldn’t be together. Meanwhile, the house for which I am sitting, owned by a pair of married architects, is decorated with twin flame ephemera.

All good things happen in twos. All bad things are split in two, too. 

Why are there always two of everything, I ask.

Why are there always two?

—There are two authors whom I’ve re-read. Maybe ten years ago I was obsessed with [Yukio] Mishima. The same thing with Elfriede Jelinek. I might try to re-read her again. And it’s very corny for any sort of, like, white artsy person to say, but I re-read Cormac McCarthy a lot. 

—I thought you were going to say Infinite Jest.

[laughter]

—The darkness and extraordinary turns of phrase never does not give me pause when I read them. And Edward P. Jones I read and re-read a lot. He hasn’t written that many books, but … this is corny also, but they’re just remarkably beautiful. It’s an astounding level of insight and delicacy to them, and subtlety also, which is the opposite of Cormac McCarthy. Those are probably the only two people I’ve been lately reading and re-reading. Oh, there’s this book of Werner Herzog interviews—he just gives an interview about every movie he’s ever did. It’s called Herzog on Herzog. And there’s a David Lynch book called Lynch on Lynch. They just talk about the process of making all of their works. I’ve re-read those a few times, whenever I feel stuck. They’re inspiration totems for me when I’m feeling stuck. They’ve persevered and not quit.

—Do you read poetry?

—I read haikus. I really love Ingeborg Bachmann. I read her a bit. My bandmate Angela got me into her. I guess I re-read Joyce Carol Oates also. The tetralogy she did … I forget what it’s called. I reread that twice. I went through a period last year of reading a lot of … I got a couple volumes of Victorian poetry. I’d never read anything like that at all. I was pleasantly taken. They stand the test of time for a reason.

—What haiku would you recommend to people?

—There’s one volume called Japanese Death Poems which, speaking of Zen, is a volume of the last number of haiku that a number of different monks wrote right before they died. I can’t remember the term for it, but there’s a term for that specific type of haiku, your last thoughts before you die. Otherwise, just all the really typical superstars from Japan from 300 years ago: a lot of modern haiku I think is kind of lame, but I would recommend going to the source. If anybody reads haiku, this is like saying your favorite band is the Beatles, but there’s a guy named Basho. He’s the Beatles of haiku. 

 

 

It is a few days before the so-called massage therapist—in October, my psychoanalyst points out how I keep calling this man a massage therapist, as if he is a licensed professional, which he is not—transforms me into a table. He has a generic male name, and as I walk to the spa, I think to myself, I hope he’s not a creep. The thought is prescient. In the waiting area, I drink a glass of water and stare at my bare feet.

 

/ 

 

On the recommendation of one of my psychotherapists—I have two; they are different and know about each other; one went on tour with Xiu Xiu 10 years ago—I use New York State’s Office of the Professions database to look up the generically named man I keep calling a massage therapist. Unsurprisingly, I learn he was unlicensed at the time of the assault. Although he has already lost his job at the bourgeois spa, I decide to move forward with filing a state-level complaint. I make this decision following ample reflection and the encouragement of other people. Subsequently, in late October, when I am recounting what happened for a New York State prosecutor, I am asked to indicate whether I was lying face down on the table, and to re-describe the entire experience in specific detail. 

The table has turned: I am now the interviewee. Despite the fact the prosecutor represents my case, a power dynamic is at play. I am afraid I will be perceived by him as not telling the truth; I feel self-conscious and thereby want to control how I am perceived; I don’t want to come off as controlling because I don’t regard myself as a controlling person. And I want to tell the truth and do, but my emotions flare, my words fragment, my narrative breaks. Yes, I have had myriad massages by male massage therapists, I say. At home, I get bodywork at least once a week. And how can you lie down on yourself, I want to ask. But the prosecutor does not understand that I am now a table! So instead, I pose the following question: When he is contacted by the state, will the generically named man have access to my full name? 

We will need to use your full name in case he gets cute with us, he tells me. To jog his memory.

 

—Do you have any favorite children’s books?

—My mom was really good about that, and my dad was in the music business and they were hippies, so a lot of their friends were involved in music or the arts and crafts movement, or were writers also. And when I was quite young, I was into Dungeons and Dragons and was reading a bunch of dwarfs and swords kind of books. But when I was in the 5th grade, my mom—it’s a classic—gave me Catcher in the Rye. 

—That’s an early age to get Catcher in the Rye.

—It was pretty young. But she gave it to me as part of a series of books about young people in chaos. One was Catcher in the Rye, the other was LOTF, and this other one was Butterfly Revolution, which is sort of like Lord of the Flies. And no one really prompted me to read them, but I think—I don’t know if it was a matter of shutting things out, but I felt quite possessed to read them. I remember reading them in class a few times, and my teacher telling me to stop reading them. A couple years after that, I think a friend of my mom’s gave me ten novels by John Steinbeck. And I felt because I had them and because she was an interesting person I obligatorily went through all of them. Come to think of it, I have read Grapes of Wrath a couple of times. And often make jokes about John …? 

—Oh and then—this is so dorky—my mom got me some encyclopedias. I read encyclopedias, like, every night before going to sleep. 

—Do you remember what they were?

—They were the normal Encyclopedia Britannica. I would just pick a volume and go through it. I slept in a bunk bed, and encyclopedias are heavy. When I was done, I would always drop it on the floor, and it would slap on the ground, and I’d always hear my brother who slept below me. But yeah, I read the encyclopedias a lot.

—I did not come to them myself. It wasn’t because I was seeing them. They were given to me by adults, and because an adult gave it to me, I felt I had to get into it. I’m glad I did. I’m sure–speaking of the subconscious, while my synapsis were being formed, they wired themselves in there, and hopefully did some good. 

—My nephew is in the seventh grade, and I did mail him Catcher in the Rye with a note describing the things I just described to you, and got absolutely no response from him at all.

—You never spoke to him again? He ghosted you?

—He totally ghosted me. I thought it was a special thing because it was a special thing for me. Uninterested.

 

In late August, I made the following attempt at crafting an introduction for this essay. It reads like the introduction of a VICE article. I feel ashamed of it and am therefore including it here: 

 

I’m talking to Jamie Stewart while sitting on the floor of a brick Federal Townhouse owned by a pair of married architects in Hudson, NY. Where I am sitting is also where I sit for thrice-weekly psychoanalysis sessions that take place via Zoom, the corporate networking tool Stewart and I are also using to talk, albeit without our faces. “Like prehistoric people,” he says.

The carpet is white and the wooden coffee table where my laptop is stationed is low to the ground. There is one piano, two pale blue chairs, four staghorn ferns. And I too am duplicated. Something I do not yet know is that my substitute psychotherapist for the month (my psychoanalyst is on vacation) went on tour with Stewart.

Prior to our conversation, I misconstrue its scheduled time, having confused Pacific Coast and Eastern Standard Time in an email. Therefore, when I arrive early and our conversation is not for another hour, I bide time by 1) brainstorming questions I don’t actually ask; and 2) by practicing 25 minutes of Zazen while facing the Victorian home’s backyard, which contains ten trees planted by the architects.

Stewart arrives at our interview wearing a textual avatar whose letterforms I won’t relay here, suffice to say I have a tattoo on my chest of the wingéd creature to which said avatar alludes. His voice sounds like his voice sounds in the podcasts to which I listened while conducting research for this essay, for I cannot attempt—which is to say, I cannot essay—without a deep-dive. But I also can’t help but feel finicky, meticulous, tightly wound. The word interview comes from the French entrevue, from s'entrevoir ‘see each other’, from voir ‘to see’, on the pattern of vue ‘a view’. How can I see anything if I’m exerting control, trying to do a perfect job? Will my ego ever get out of the way? How can I listen to see?

 

I ask Jamie Stewart if he’s ever been to a monastery

I ask Jamie Stewart what books he read as a child

I ask Jamie Stewart how he’s feeling

I ask Jamie Stewart how his class went

I ask Jamie Stewart about his meditation practices

I was not planning to ask this question, I say

Did your nephew ghost you?

I feel self-conscious

Jamie says one exercise a therapist taught him is to breathe in on re and breathe out on lax

It works, he says, and I try it

I ask Jamie Stewart about his writing routine, and he explains he writes for 90 minutes a day after doing vocal warm-ups

I ask Jamie Stewart if he’s read any minimalist or concrete poetry from the late 1960s and 1970s

Late 70s minimalist artwork is my jam, he says

One month later, I visit a show he collaborated on in New York City. Poetry is projected onto the walls

Lighthearted, intelligent, encouraging, open-hearted, curious, shy

Descriptors I write down re: JS

 

Jamie Stewart is writing a book about sexual foolishness, and is thinking about his patterns of behavior. He says the book he is writing is not fixing him, but it’s carving out a space to feel “rather free of himself.” I ask what this means.

“In no way has it led to any growth or change,” he says. “I think when Ian mentioned to me about wanting to add some elements of reflection [to the book], I mentioned to him that in none of these things do I feel like I became a better person. What I meant by being free from them is that a lot of them have to do with me having treated people quite badly, or having been treated quite badly, and some of it is about very unsafe situations and childhood abuse. And all of that—and forgive this word—all of that energy had been very present in my subconscious thought, and sometimes very present in my conscious thought. I was surprised that by having written them all out... It’s sort of a square way to put it, but they just bothered me less. I think having given them some sort of concrete form, I in a way set them outside of my internal emotional pressure chamber. That doesn’t usually happen with me when I work on songs.”

When Jamie describes his art and life practices, he frequently invokes terminology that feels tethered to Catholicism. A few times, he alludes to not being fixed or better. A few times, he used the word guilt. He describes feeling free from oneself, and also a lack of freedom. In my mind, the idea that one can be fixed implies a hierarchy into which we are indoctrinated as practitioners of faith: god will fix us, because god will bind us. Actual growth, perhaps, comes from recognizing that one cannot be fixed, and that one’s mind is one’s mind, the mind with which one has to live. Those who are worth keeping learn to live with it too. This recognition and this living-with perhaps make the mind a little more translucent: see-through. Can we behold the mind both as an amethyst and as shrink (ha) wrap? Can we wrap the amethyst in shrink wrap and, like Laura Palmer, call it dead?

About his book-in-progress, Stewart says: “It’s much more fleshed out and a more present and linear process than working on songs. So it’s been essentially a relief. It’s not like I feel that in having written it I am free for any guilt I should feel for having done some shitty things, or free from any long-term hurts that I will probably have for the rest of my life, but I think I feel free from the constant presence of those feelings, even if they were at a low boil in the back of my mind.”

 

/

 

In the days following August 16, 2021, I take amphetamine salts that have been prescribed to me as an experiment in attention. The implosive past few months have made it very hard to concentrate. I am new to amphetamine salts and don’t realize I can split the pills in half, so I ingest entire doses and research and write with a newfound sense of lyrical focus. I possess no appetite. After hours of concentration, I go running at the gym—more work—and sit alone in a gendered steam room. I feel safe in the steam room, where I keep my naked body wrapped in a towel in order to feel held by something. I can feel my heart beat, and it feels too hot to think. One day, after taking a long shower, I read on the Internet that I should not sit in a steam room after ingesting amphetamine salts. So too does it seem I should not experiment with amphetamine salts in the wake of an event that has left my body feeling disconnected from and frightened of itself. Fairly quickly, I decide I shouldn’t take amphetamine salts at all. But when I return to Brooklyn, I keep them displayed in my bathroom for weeks as a reminder of survival.

 

—I’m going to ask a sort of open-ended question. You said the book’s not working toward a sense of redemption or recovery, necessarily. In an interview, you used an interesting phrase about “feeling free of yourself” as you wrote these pieces. I’m wondering if you could say more about that: the sort of freedom from oneself that comes from writing, or from not clinging to one’s mistakes, and how this freedom is different from recovery. [pause] Does that question make sense?

—In no way has it led to any growth or change. I think when [Ian Bonaparte] mentioned to me about wanting to add some elements of reflection in it, I mentioned to him that in none of these things do I feel like I became a better person. What I meant by being free from them is that a lot of them have to do with me having treated people quite badly, or having been treated quite badly, and some of it is about very unsafe situations and childhood abuse. And all of that—and forgive this word—all of that energy had been very present in my subconscious thought, and sometimes very present in my conscious thought. I was surprised that by having written them all out... It’s sort of a square way to put it, but they just bothered me less. It’s not like I thought about them and I learned anything. I think having given them some sort of concrete form, I in a way set them outside of my internal emotional pressure chamber. That doesn’t usually happen with me when I work on songs. It’s much more fleshed out and a more present and linear process than working on songs. So it’s been essentially a relief. It’s not like I feel that in having written it I am free from any guilt I should feel for having done some shitty things, or free from any long-term hurts that I will probably have for the rest of my life, but I think I feel free from the constant presence of those feelings, even if they were at a low boil in the back of my mind. Basically [the book] starts from the time I was about five and ends when I was about 40. Throughout that time, for some reason a lot of really crazy things happened to me in the sexual realm, and I participated in a lot of crazy things, most of them not great, although still funny to me. So I think just having that be inside of me all the time and kind of picking away at decisions I would make or my general feelings—having that be attenuated to a surprisingly large degree—that’s where the feeling free of myself statement came from. 

I’m writing an essay called “Deep Tissue.” 

Define tissue.

Tissue is a group of cells that possess a similar structure and function together as a unit.

My essay grapples with trying to write about a book I’ve never read about sexuality and childhood abuse, and with my own self-destructive sexual patterns, and with a sexual assault that took place as I was trying to write the essay. It weaves together interior monologue, art writing, and an interview with a musician I conducted in August 2021. 

It doesn’t sound like it was as bad as it could’ve been.

I’m worried it’s terrible.