Here We Go Again

Time is an experience – and a songsation

Before we get into it, I wanted to share a piece I wrote for the excellent

Cracks in Postmodernity

— called “Stop Asking the Friends Cast to Confront Structural Racism. It’s about editing the past and reconciling with horror. I had a blast writing it. You can read it here, and be sure to subscribe to Cracks in Pomo (he’s a genius). Now, onto the show…

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“Among the Maya, there is a 260 day calendar called the tzolk’in, composed of 20 days or nawales that repeat over 13 months. The Maya conceive of each of these days as a living being and that when a particular nawal returns it is the same nawal. Czech anthropologist Gabriela Jurosz-Landa writes in Transcendant Wisdom of the Maya that the Maya she trained with do not count time ‘to distinguish Monday from Tuesday but mostly to count back (or forward) to determine the specific quality of a day and its corresponding event in the past, present or future.’ Jorosz-Landa observes that a temporal framework where each of these twenty days it he same day puts one in a very different relationship with both the ‘past’ and the ‘future’ in that both remain immanent in a way…”
-Gordon White, Ani.Mystic: Encounters with a Living Cosmos

Is it just me, or have the walls felt thinner lately — like if I close my eyes or walk down a certain side street, I’ll end up in 1998, or 2011, or 2032? One hit of a joint and I’m facing my eight year-old self, tucking him in and administering healing. In those trans-dimensional apartment rentals, all selves — including the very hot me’s to come — may interact in care and compassion.

But it’s not always so sweet in this Venus retrograde. Everyone feels like a shadow of a past violation. Any encounter with a man can slap me through time and space, landing me flat on my ass, at the pit of my primordial abandonment. I’ve been in recovery for a few years now, and was in therapy for plenty more before, but no matter how much I learn about trigger states, flashbacks and feeling it all over again, nothing can prepare you for it, for hitting some poker-hot flash of despair, some vivid humiliation, setting you fetal while you’re in the Bryant Park Whole Foods.

On account of my sun-Pluto opposition (like Nietzche’s and Amber Heard’s), I’m prone to decisive, commanding declarations: the suffering is completed! The metamorphosis aced! The old me is dead! I’m ready to move on! But there’s always the fear that it’ll come back. Reading about the Mayan understanding of time, I understand this mode of processing to be rather cold, and capitalist.

What I mean to say is: I don’t think we deal in a linear fashion. We might not get over it. Maybe it is all cyclical. Maybe we’re supposed to live through it over and over again. Lately, in the face of heartbreak, I’ve considered: Perhaps I wasn’t abandoned, but am abandoned, am being abandoned, am accessing the abandonment. Maybe that’s one of my nawales to return to over and over again.

Of course, if there is one space in which linear time dissolves, one day which is a door through all ages, it’s Saturday, and it’s on the dance floor. Here, there and beyond, I’ve taken to the floor and become the world dancer, the immortal, eternal, radiant being I discovered myself to be, at Glam-ou-Rama, when I was 18 years old.

In the blast radius of the retrograde, I’ve felt the dance of the dance escalate and elevate; I’ve fallen in love with a new stranger every week for the last two months. The contact is cinematic, the chemistry is spectacular, and then the reality is a disappointment. He’s a textbook narcissist, I’m a figment of his imagination, he adjusts the mirror so we can fuck in front of it, one of us ices the other out. I can see the cycle, but that does not mean I have broken from it.

2011, me, thin for some reason. The Glam-ou-Rama Tropicana Party, at the Block in Tel Aviv. Born this Way was only two months old. When they’d play “Americano,” every gay would clap at just the right moment — on cue.

There have been other returns this year: going back to LA, where I lived during the early Obama years, and visiting my community there. And despite so much love, I could feel only death, and the ashen remains of an old life. And then there’s been the return to Tel Aviv, a city I’ve experienced so many ways at so many ages — 18 and naive, 24 and lost, 26 and stoned, 28 and shattered — and now, 33, as if I’ve only just begun. I was born here, but my natural progression was broken when I was taken away. Now I’m doing it again. I’m entering this nawal, this day, anew.

2018, Kips Bay, with Melis.

It’s not lost on me that five years ago, Melissa and I went to see Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again, in IMAX, on opening night, on mushrooms, at the AMC of Kips Bay. It was five years ago that we discovered our friendship, and the film of our lives.

There is no text quite like Mamma Mia Here We Go Again. It is no mere sequel, but a psychedelic, Mayan-inflected retelling of the Mamma Mia lore — we meet Meryl Streep’s younger self (ecstatically and triumphantly brought to life by Lily James) and voyage with her as she fucks her way from Paris to Greece, over one blissful summer.

But before you call it a prequel, consider the ending, in which Lily James gives birth to her daughter, who becomes adult Amanda Seyfried, who duets with the now-dead Meryl Streep, appearing as a ghost/spirit/reflection, leading up to a disco dissolution of time, space and reality, in which the casts of two timelines sing “Super Trouper” together at Cher’s command. Multiverse theory is small potatoes compared to this.

I think I’m getting to the point here. I’ve long thought of the Scream franchise — my favorite — as the only true invocation of ongoing trauma. It’s never over. It always comes back. You just get better and harder and smarter to face it. But then, there’s Scream 3, the masterpiece in a trilogy of masterpieces, the killings of which take place on a movie set based on the events of Scream. Which is to say: Sidney must step through a make-believe set of her childhood home, literally walking over an artificial reproduction of her trauma.

Is this the way? If we must reenter the same nawal, and experience our story over and over again, could we do it with new actors, new versions, new songs?

I got sick this week, from a combination of too much partying, construction next door waking me up every day at 7am, and an overpowering air conditioner unit in my room (my Polish grandmother, who would rather boil alive in a mediterranean swamp than turn on the AC, is laughing at me from her throne in the underworld). Anyways, being sick gave me the excuse to finally watch the new season of And Just Like That (inspired by the mesmerizing New Yorker piece on SJP, and, of course, Melissa Rich’s podcast).

It’s been a beautiful and surreal viewing experience. I feel like we’re back to where we were supposed to be, two movies and that questionable season finale ago, and we’re also somewhere completely uncharted. The recently-added characters, who last season felt like ciphers, are now alive and exciting. I stare at Sarah Jessica Parker, in all her expressive, mutable majesty, and am awed. When I gaze at her face, I feel like I’m on acid. She’s spectacular. I was watching this show when I was 13, dreaming of being 32. Now I’m 32, in a portal to 56. Watching it makes me feel optimistic.

I think there’s a world in which Sarah Jessica Parker could feel consigned to Carrie, cursed and bound to the legacy of a character who means so much to so many — just as Carrie Fisher knew she was, to Princess Leia. But I suspect that SJP is a wise one, a master, because she has elected to return, over and over again, sometimes failing, but inevitably perfecting, getting closer to some truth with every retrograde and resurrection.

I may be cast in the role I’m set to play, at least partially. I am changing faster than ever, becoming something new, learning strange magics, speaking a language most of my friends back in the states can’t understand. And yet, I may never get over it, recover all my memories, enter into a relationship, live free from the past. Because, apparently, it isn’t the past. It’s a day in the calendar. It’s heartbreak, and it is bound to recur.

The nawal doesn’t really change, but perhaps the actors in it do. Ghostface will always return. So will the abandonment, the sting of pain, the shock that this all happened to us, and that I’m back here again, acting it out. But I am the actor, and, possibly, the executive producer. I have to believe that with each nawal, I can come closer to peace, or acceptance, and, perhaps one day, mastery.

This retrograde has only a few weeks left. I will see what’s on the other side. I will come to know all 20 of my days. That’s a promise.