Posted on by Matt Thomas

Final Reflections on My Time With Isobel

Epigraph:

I wrote all night
Like the fire of my words could burn a hole up to heaven
I don’t write all night burning holes up to heaven no more

Phosphorescent

Note:These reflections were written in March 2019, in the immediate aftermath of a personal experience that destabilized me more than anything I had previously encountered. They were never intended for publication and have not been revised.I’m sharing them now as a record of that moment—not as a finished account, but as a document of what it felt like to be inside it: heightened, contradictory, and often unclear even to myself.

I have written at length about my experiences with the woman I am calling Isobel. You can find the narrative series here, here, and here. You can also find the play I wrote about this time here.

3/28/19:

I went too far.  I cannot tell if I went too far on purpose; certainly I pushed and pushed until I came to the end of the line.  Like an explorer bent on reaching the furthest possible point, I pushed my mind and body until they could take no more.  Now, the wind has gone out of my sails, for how long I cannot say.  Perhaps for a long time.  Yet I am not at peace, not yet, not now.  “I came so far for beauty/ I left so much behind.”  

Why was it that I had to roam so far out?  What was I running from?  Why did I lock my heart up so tightly that it had to explode in order to feel?  Was there a point at which I could have taken another turn, or was it all slated to occur just as it did?  You can ask why forever and get nowhere.  This I know.

So I met a woman and this shook me up.  She shook me up.  She wasn’t trying to, but she did.  My carefully balanced psyche, assembled and jury-rigged over decades, came apart in a matter of days.  Anything could have happened, and by the grace of god I was able to retain some kind of governing function, however weak, which helped me stay safe.  Over seven weeks everything that could be thrown at me was.  I was under massive physical and psychological strain and only my years of amateur study of consciousness and the unconsciousness saved me from succumbing entirely.  If I could do it over again (a terrifying notion), I would do almost nothing the same.  However, I understand why I made the choices I did.  There is little point, really, in interrogating the choices that we made in the light of the circumstances that were in place.  Things were, and I reacted to them as I did.  There is no getting around this.  

Still, I made every mistake in the book.  A classic mid-life crisis.  Stereo-fucking-typical, scripted to the t.  The funny thing is, I knew all about the blueprint and it still happened.  “My Dinner with Andre” was a foundation text.  I’d read Jung and James Hollis on midlife, extensively.  Paradoxically perhaps, the very knowledge of the blueprint may have helped bring the symptoms into being.  Or not, maybe I was semi-consciously gathering resources with the implicit foreknowledge that one day they would be needed.  Either way, advance information about the terrain only allowed me to stay on my feet—it did not allow me to change course.  

I was a Gemini warrior on a private quest, one unseeable from the outside and barely even discernible to myself.  So many windmills, so much striving for the grail.  To what end?  A window seat—a temporary sinacure—and a chance to draw breath at sea level.  That’s about it.  Can I learn to live as it seems others do, with a little less metaphysical strum und drang, present in the world of the senses, just living?  I don’t know what it is like not to live in my head and don’t remember when I started living this way.  What I know now though it, it’s a trap.  A mire.  An maze with no exit.  A road to nowhere.

In five years time will this all seem to have been necessary—just part of the process of being a human?  God I hope so.  That’s what the literature says—the final stage is acceptance.  How I am doing with that?  I accept that what happened happened.  I accept that I made choices that made sense in the moment.  I accept that that my personality was in large part a construct and that I am better off without a lot of it.  And, I accept the possibility of a silver lining somewhere down the line.  The magnitude of the experience and its ripple effects, these are things I am still coming to terms with.

I have seen some things that many will never see.  Beautiful and fantastic things, awful things.  As a result, I am shaken and somewhat unsteady.  That’ll happen when you stray too close to the light.  But those things are not mine—they do not belong to me.  They have their own location, their own zone, at the edges of the known.  I was granted, or gained, access to a sliver of another realm, yet I do not know how deep or how wide that realm is.  Right now it is enough to know that it is there, more than enough.  Both climbers and divers may feel sick when returning to sea level.  I don’t know if I have been climbing or diving or, somehow, both, and in the end it does not matter.  Leonard Cohen’s ladies man dies again and again throughout the ages.  “It’s like a visit to the moon or to that other star/ I guess you’d go for nothing/ if you really want to go that far.”  I didn’t want to go that far, not really, but I did anyway.  

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3/29/19:

Why did I give up on my job?  Because let’s face it, I gave up.  Let’s get some things out in the open.  I managed my energy very poorly for a long time.  I was using shortcuts and papering over energetic issues to keep going at the pace I was working.  For the last three or four years I was also withdrawing bit by bit—taking more half days off, shrugging more off, and putting off longer term planning that was necessary for the program.  I was basically exhausted on an energetic level and this led to taking more time for myself and spending too much money just to get a space to reset—to feel something.  

What was it that was so exhausting?  As I’ve spoken about to many, the constant pushing of the stone uphill, the constant battle to get needs listened to, was certainly tiring.  The feeling that it was really just me, a middle man, at the top of a huge operation and I didn’t have the tools or the power to do the things I needed to.  The feeling that there were so many program areas that were not as good as they could be.  The growing gap in my marriage which allowed me to seek feeling connections recklessly and a little randomly.  

After a while, my psyche was being held together by string, by a thread.  I was carrying deep wounds from the past which I hardly knew existed, had hardly ever looked at.  I was an unitegrated personality in many ways and have no real root here in Japan.  The sense of being included in an extended family that existed when I met my wife was long gone.  My dream life was giving me warnings and maybe I could have done something with them.  I was primed for a crack-up.  

What was it about Elodie that enraptured me so entirely?  I think it was the combination and sexuality and motherliness, her openness, her painful past which she was so open about, and some kind of deep inherent similarity that we both felt, and proceeded to blow out of all proportion.  And she wanted to spend every minute with me!  I was around the bend about her within a day.  There are funny parts to the story—man I knew I was in trouble.  That’s why I was listening to the Mendoza Line non-stop.  “Mistakes were made tonight” indeed.  I recognized that I was right on the edge and programmed myself not to step over it on the conference.  And then I got on the plane and proceeded to step right off the cliff in another way.  Long term, I guess it was a better cliff but how I thought I was in the right frame of mind to make that kind of decision, I’ll never understand.  The correct move I made was to put people around me to keep me safe.  The mistake I made was to recruit them into my plan to leave my job when I should have sought advice and depended on them to guide my decisions.

I feel like I want to say this—school leadership was poor.  My decision to leave was not a direct result of the lack of leadership; it was a result of a massive energy change/ charge that took my system by storm and caused me to lose all perspective.  However, the energy issues were in many ways a result of stress and repression of anger and frustration over how things were being handled, both over the short and the longer term.  The issues were deep—still today my body is not right.  I’m fragile, I’m weak, I’m a shell of my former self.  

“This is the new not normal”—I’m listening to the new Lambchop album.  It’s good of course, but kind of all sounds the same.  That’s OK though.  How can I get used to this new not normal at this office?  There is nothing to do.  Maybe that will change, and maybe I can make it change.  Right now I am the definition of a clock-watcher.  I know I put myself in this position and I’ll endure, but at what cost?  Something needs to change, but I know I can’t push myself back into a bunch of old patterns even if I could.  Maybe I was acting like an INTP—maybe feeling was the most buried function of all.  This is probable.  

My damage is deep, generational.  If I am right in imagining that for some bizarre reason I had a role to play in clearing up or shouldering this burden and sort of resolving it, well that’s something I did.  I certainly felt this way last fall, and that sense, that notion is still present.  And now what?  I am not special just because I have begun to own up to my damage.  The best thing I can do now is to pass on as little as I can to my son—to be as present as I can with him as often as I can.  

I also need to extend my working lifespan.  This is a priority, and I need to be realistic about this.  However, I’ve been stressing myself out to figure this out like today and that I can’t do.  My priorities have to be: i) to minimize spending and pay the bills; ii) to cut way back on drinking; iii) to network and think positively about the future little by little.  Anything can come.  Tell yourself, anything can come.  Anything can come.  

FIN        

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3/30/19:

There is no point in trying to write well right now.  I am writing just to pass the time and continue to process my guilt and my heartache.  The sense that somehow I was wired wrong is persistent, despite people who care about me trying to tell me otherwise.  I mean, I have not been practical, have not made ordered decisions about securing my life and that of my family.  I have made ordered decisions in so many other areas, not this one.  How could that even be?  I have no real answer to this—magical thinking, arrogance, the feeling that I could somehow tread water forever. I don’t know.

Ann wrote that I might have a form of PTSD from the collision with Elodie.  This rings true.  Meeting her shook up my mind and body at a core level.  The ideas of animating archetypes are not just ideas.  They are real.  When Elodie and I fell into one another, I lost all sense of self.  I wanted to give everything and anything to her, falling over myself to do so, to explain, to unburden myself.  She was attracted and fascinated by some of this, but was also overwhelmed by the extent and speed of it all.  On my end, I was overwhelmed too, overwhelmed by the depth of the attraction and how far I fell into her.  We talked, and I could not figure out was this an ascent or a descent.  So strange that it could be both.  It was more a trip into the infinite.  A trip for sure.  I exited London and I was undone.  I was terrified and thought I was bulletproof at the same time.  I should have leaned more into the terror—I should have slowed down and assessed.  This I did not do.

Calling Lynn and getting the idea of the kundalini was helpful.  This was another juncture I could have turned for the better—tried to get grounded in a more appropriate way.  Like the runner I once was, I just thought I could run the energy to ground.  In the end I did, too late and with too much cost.  So here I sit in a purgatory of my own making, bereft.  Is this what I was destined to have to deal with—the emptiness, the total lack of self without the worldly tasks that were set me?  I am having new thoughts—thoughts about the break up of extended families and that this is one of the core problems in modern life, perhaps the core one.  Loneliness is probably an epidemic, almost certainly.  

For a moment there was music, there was dance and movement, there was sexual confidence, there was bravodo.  No longer.  Why can’t those feelings, those urges, be regulated and controlled?  I suppose they can, with practice.  Apply myself, that’s something I’ve always had difficulty doing toward a skill.  Variety seeking—always on the lookout to change direction.  How boring.  

I know I need to focus on my health, but how can I do that with these days stretching in front of me like this?  I am in a tough situation.  This is a fact.  I can’t write my way out of this.  What am I supposed to be learning?  What is it even possible to learn here?  Patience, humility?  Patience for what, for reinstatement to the culture that pushed me over the edge?  I read about principles under stress in Australia and no one wanting the job.  I can understand why.  I never wanted to be that high up either—really didn’t.  I only accepted it because I was apparently the best person.  What could have been different?  I did all I could to delegate, well, I tried.  I felt guilt over my classes being below-par, could not stop working on the weekend, got worn down.  

There has to be a silver lining.  Well, one is the conference lifestyle is over.  That had to end, and an end was forced on me.  That’s a net positive.  I may be able to address my habits.  This is going to be super hard because of the sleep and because I gain pleasure from the pub.  Can I keep the pub and drop the rest?  That has to be the goal.  

Dedication:

For Elodie. I love you.

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Note: If you liked this piece, you may also like the pieces below which also take up the difficulties of modern romance.

Simona
Mariko
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Scenes from Hamilton College II: Freshman Year Continued (with cameos from Honey, the Print Shop, and Billy Bragg)

Note: In Part I of this series I wrote about my freshman year at Hamilton, focusing on two friends, Ian and Jake. Part II will branch out and cover a fairly wide, and somewhat random, set of memories.

Epigraph:

I had an uncle who once played for Red Star Belgrade
He said some things are really best left unspoken
But I prefer it all to be out in the open

Billy Bragg

I have already written quite a bit about the characters who lived in the North Dorm freshman year at Hamilton, however there are a few more to cover. First were the first floor stoners. Basmo was a stoner, and he lived on my side of the dorm, but on the other side of the first floor lived the hardcore stoners. This consisted of a quad of guys whose names I don’t totally recall, but one was Peter Kimber, and who got baked at all waking hours and played Roger Waters’ Amused to Death solo on repeat. Next to them, in a double I believe, lived Keys. Keys’ actual name was Caleb, but everyone called him Keys because of the six to eight keys he had dangling from around his neck at all times. What on earth did he need all those keys for? One for the dorm, maybe one for a car (although he should not have been driving at all because he was the single biggest stoner in the dorm and perhaps on campus), what else? I can’t imagine.

Keys and I were not that close, but I did see a lot of him because we had the same job, which was in the school print shop. I don’t know if print shops still exist in the same form in this digital age, but back then the print shop was busy as. We held the campus down. There were two slightly older women who worked at the print shop full-time and three of us students helping out. The full-timers were Sally and Deb. Deb was the boss, and she was kind of motherly and kind to the students. Sally was nice too, but she could be tough. She would bark at us when we made mistakes, which was often because we were running large machines that would glitch pretty frequently. Sally was both the little sister to Deb and also the enforcer. I liked them both, even though Deb ended up firing me, which I’ll get to later.

So Keys would come in lit every day and sort of fumble through his work, which consisted mostly of stapling and collating. I was trusted more than Keys, with good reason, so I ran the machines, but I also did stapling and collating. We printed things for professors, menus for the dining halls, the school newsletter, and a bunch of other stuff. The third student was a girl whose name I don’t recall, and she was a super-hardcore feminist. Everything in the world that was wrong was men’s fault, and it was her only topic. She didn’t seem to dislike me so much as just want to lecture Keys and I all through work, which usually lasted two to three hours in the afternoon, about the ills of men. I was, and am, up for a little feminist theory but Keys was no help and I don’t even think he noticed her, so it was kind of just me and her. Serious feminism and collating are, perhaps, not best paired.

I didn’t originally want the print shop job. I needed work, and there was kind of an intake for all working students where you put your first choice. I put library, but didn’t get the gig. John Innes put audio/video and he got it, which meant he often had to get up early to set up videos for professor’s classes. I would not have been good at that. The print shop was more my speed, but eventually it got really repetitive and I started skipping work more and more. I would go walk in the woods behind campus, or just drink coffee with about a half cup of honey and hang around after class. I also improved as a student through the year, and took my English classes pretty seriously so I was spending more time in the library, although still not sleeping much.

My money situation was tight, although not as bad as it would later be during my junior year abroad in New Zealand where it was super tight. I had a little income from the print shop and my parents sent a small allowance once in a while, but I usually didn’t have more than about 15 bucks in my pocket at any one time. What money I did have went mostly to CDs, as many as I could afford. I had a dining hall pass, but the dining hall food was not really my style so I mostly lived on toast and coffee with honey. Then at night people would order pizza from a local shop, but that was too expensive for me so I would get “friend dough.” Fried dough is just what it sounds like–deep friend pizza dough with powdered sugar, and it cost about $1.50 for a big box. Not the best diet, but it was what I could afford.

One time the father of one of my classmates from high school visited for some reason; he must have been in the area. We met for lunch, and when he left he handed me $100 bucks. This was a serious windfall, and I immediately blew it on CDs, perhaps Neil Young’s Harvest Moon and others. My CD collection, although no rival to Ian’s was slowly increasing and I liked it.

Back in the dorm, in addition to the guys I have discussed, there were also girls, who lived on the second and fourth floor. I got to know the girls directly above us on the second floor pretty well, although not many of the others in the dorm. Among these was Rochelle, who was the girl I was closest to. Rochelle was, I think, from New York, and when she arrived on campus she made a big deal about having a boyfriend. This didn’t last long however, and although I didn’t want her to be my girlfriend I did like hanging out with her. She kind of mothered me a bit though, which I wasn’t so into, because I was going to do what I was going to do. I still have her contact, and I believe she might even read this piece! I think I also met Marie Bishko freshman year, and Marie is someone I thought was really cool.

I don’t really remember any us North guys hooking up with the second floor girls, but it must of happened. Another incident which occurred around this time had to do with my roommate B. and his girlfriend from high school. Like Rochelle, and even more so, he made a big deal of his girlfriend and told us all kind of semi-salacious details. Then one day he told us she was coming to visit and he wanted the three of us in the quad to go to a hotel for a night. I told him sure, if you pay, but he said no. He was dead serious but we told him to forget it, so sure enough she arrived and they hooked up while we all pretended to sleep. That only happened once, thankfully, and it still strikes me as pretty odd. He later broke up with her and fell in love with a Jewish girl, but that didn’t last either because he wasn’t Jewish.

I mentioned in Part I that Jake pledged the fraternity Sig. Ian and John Slack also pledged, Chi Psi (I had to Google the spelling). I spent some time at Chi Psi as well as, where I was alleged to sit on the steps in my trench coat, but I preferred Sig. There was another frat called Deke, and that was where the wildest, and the worst parties were. At Deke there was copious amounts of Milwaukee’s Best (the fabled Beast) and jungle juice. The parties were terrible, but there was a pool table which was a bonus. I didn’t drink much at college, mostly because I had no money, but I did drink some at Deke, with exactly the results you would imagine. I believe it was at Deke where Marc Campbell pulled off his famous pacification move. I didn’t pledge a frat, and I was and remain glad I didn’t. Greek life wasn’t for me.

One guy who I believe lived in North was called Gabe. Gabe was super popular at first in freshman year, and he played guitar on the grass outside the dorm. He was pretty good and he would play “Sexuality” by Billy Bragg which was surprisingly popular in 1992. People, including girls, would flock around him, but over time something seemed to happen to Gabe. He ran for class president and lost to a guy called Kerry who was African American. Kerry lived down the hill in a different part of campus, and he ran really hard for the job. I think Gabe’s ran mostly on a music ticket, and although he got a lot of votes I think he came in second. He may have taken this hard, because he kind of faded into the background, or maybe he just changed up his action. I think I voted, but may have voted for Kerry.

As I mentioned, Jake and I saw less of one another once he started pledging, however we still saw each other in English class and in the English building. We overlapped professors, although he knew some I did not. The two best professors in the English department were George Balkhe and Fred Wagner. Balkhe was still in his prime, maybe late 50’s, whereas Wagner was older and I believe in a semi-emeritus role. I wasn’t even sure I ever took a class from Wagner, but it’s been confirmed that I did, Modern British and American Drama, which makes sense. I didn’t much like 20th century American plays, as plays are mostly blueprints anyway. In any case, Mr. Wagner knew me early in the year because Balkhe praised my reading knowledge to him. Jake and I would go to Wagner’s house, also down the hill toward the town of Clinton (the closest town to Hamilton, about a 15 minute walk), and I recall once we played him the song “Marlene Dietrich’s Favorite Poem” by Peter Murphy, formerly of Bauhaus, with Peter Murphy murmuring “sad-eyed pearl and drop lips…”

Peter Murphy is super underrated by the way, and Wagner liked the song, which just showed how cool he was.

I took a few classes with Balkhe, and we studied poems, and novels–typical choices mostly. I enjoyed these and read most of them, even Faulkner who is really dense. For the ones I didn’t I just faked it. Like I said, Balkhe thought I was amazing because on the first day of class he asked for a list of books we had read and I listed like 200. These were mostly Agatha Christie and John LeCarre and such, but I guess it was good enough. Balhke liked the singer Donovan and the song “Mellow Yellow.”

Electrical banana
Is gonna be a sudden craze

(I later saw Donovan at a new age convention in Boston when I was visiting Ian after college, which I will recount later).

Wagner and Balkhe are both passed away now, so rest in peace to two great English teachers and mentors.

That’s about all I have on freshman year. The last thing is about the featured image for this post, which is the album cover for Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy. I have written about The Pogues quite a bit, but the album I listened to most freshman year was Oh Mercy. After geology class had a break before lunch and would go back and semi-sleep to Oh Mercy. The quad was always empty at that time of day, and this was the best rest I would get. The album still makes me sleepy to this day, and features excellent production from the famed producer Daniel Lanois. So thank you Bob and Daniel.

Dedication: For Fred. And for George–I hope you are enjoying a little electrical banana up there in heaven.

to be continued…