The fish in the desert

I went to a psychiatrist once. I was doing something that had become a pattern in my life, and I thought, Well, I should go talk to a psychiatrist. When I got into the room, I asked him, "Do you think that this process could, in any way, damage my creativity?" And he said, "Well, David, I have to be honest: it could." And I shook his hand and left. 

No one would ever guess at the film genius of David Lynch by his writing. He struggles to articulate the concepts he claims bear him such creative fruit, and he fails to inspire.

Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity is likely a genuine effort to explain his creative process, or lack thereof, to aspiring artists. But it doesn't work on paper. Weirdly, Lynch's ideas are much more compelling when shared orally:

Introduction 
Eraserhead 
Suffering
Kubrick 
Keep at it 

I've moved beyond plumbing my own depths for creativity. I'm trying to understand how other people find it, use it. I'm reading about how it works for profit and for fulfilment. Ideas do not come to Lynch in dreams. Rather, he taps into the unified field of consciousness.

********

One morning this week I wake up feeling something graze my left breast. Maybe it was the cat's tail, maybe it was the corner of the bedsheet, but I recall the feeling of the sand insect, what I thought was a scorpion but couldn't possibly have been a scorpion, like sand trickling down my chest but in reverse, creeping upward. 

How lucky it stung my finger after I'd brushed it away, how lucky it hadn't stung me in the heart.

And so I lay in bed, dreamily happy about all my good fortune, on my cloud of a mattress, the good fortune of my job and the satisfaction and rewards it brings, the good fortune to have my family close to me (including, at long last, my mother), the good fortune to have met a man who suits me perfectly, to have taken him as my lover, and I realize it's too good to be true.

It must not be true. Somehow I have fabricated this perfect reality of mine. It stung me in the heart, I am lying in a coma in a Bedouin tent in the Sahara.

This must be why Sa'id keeps texting me. After riding camels and smoking shisha that night in the desert, he is somewhere nearby, trying to coax me out of my coma, while feeding my bliss. "Sa'id" means "happy."

There is no pandemic. My coma mind created it to quarantine me from the world and help me go into myself, to find the pain and expel it.

I have brought my mother to me, to my figurative bedside. In this fever dream, I toiled to pack her belongings and move her to another world. In that house where I grew into myself, I sifted through my own life as much as hers, as I gazed at photos, threw out meaningless school reports and newspaper clippings, fingered longheld but long-forgotten trinkets. (I kept the nugget of fool's gold.)

My friends are increasingly absent. Our paths are diverging. I don't blame them. If my friend were in a coma, after 6 months, I might stop calling too. The intensity of  the communications with my imaginary German lover has also waned, as the likelihood of meeting fades into an impossible future. Of course, he has no idea that I am trapped within my body (always trapped within the body), comatose in the desert.

Instead I am wrapped in a cocoon of bliss. My mind has concocted a near-perfect life, worked through the rage and grief and the at-sea-ness of it all, I have gone into myself and am coming out again in a foreign but familiar place. Can I die of happiness? This is not real.

This feeling of lying in my lover's arms... perhaps they are treating me with sand baths, immersing me in the magic of the Sahara, the desert is my lover.

How lucky it stung my finger after I'd brushed it away, how lucky it hadn't stung me in the heart.