Day 172 Dialogue

Marc was arrested February 5th, 2004, and after a weekend in the West Hollywood Jail, sent downtown to Twin Towers. On Monday the 9th he was charged with sale of methamphetamine and document fraud, and denied bail. The next day, during Medical Intake, he admitted to being depressed, and was put on suicide watch for 8 days. He was put alone in a glass-doored cell, given a heavy apron to wear, and was allowed nothing but three meals a day. No showers, no calls, no toothbrush, no reading material. He even had to request toilet paper as needed, and the commode had to be flushed with a key but the guard. Without his glasses he could not see the small T.V. across the room, which would have made little difference, in any case, because the cell was practically soundproof, except for the near constant banging and moaning he could hear from the other inmate in the unit.

Soon after the experience, Mark sent home this letter.

Dialogue

Stupidly , when asked if I had any thoughts of suicide, I imagined that it would get some sympathy for me from the judge if it was marked in my docket if I said yes. I thought it would be much less likely that I would be sent to prison if I said yes, trying to paint a picture in the judge’s mind of the poor AIDS patient who would refused to take his meds if sent to prison and die. Instead, what the intake coordinator heard was that I was an immediate suicide risk, and quickly enough I found myself in solitary for a week. No matter how much you try to plead with the errant C.O. who comes by, or with the nurse who brings you your meds, you are stuck there for the duration, until the psych comes as scheduled and you reassure her you are quite sane and can go into the general population.

Ironically, if you weren’t suicidal when you got to the cell, it wasn’t long after you got there that you were. The sense of isolation and loneliness is intense, the despair overwhelming. But for me the greatest privation, by far, was the lack of information. They didn’t tell me how long I would be there, or what the procedures were for getting out. And I could not for the life of me understand why I could not have any reading material. I find out later that some inmates had been known to attempt suffocating themselves by stuffing the pages of a book down their throat. For my part, I would have killed for even a newspaper, particularly as it was in the middle of the 2004 primary campaign and I followed the news religiously. (Yes, a drug dealer who read the New York Times every day).

The second greatest privation was not having a toothbrush. Thank God one can’t smell one’s own bad breath, but it must have been something.

As my body was my adjusting to life without meth, I blessedly slept a great deal. But inevitably, there were 14 hours a day where I was conscious, and there was absolutely nothing to do. After the third day, I started to rip up my milk carton, and eventually made chess pieces out of it. But I soon discovered beating yourself at chess provides zero satisfaction, though oddly, you can feel worse for losing to yourself.

I soon discovered my only tool for amusement was my brain. I constructed a routine soon enough. Pacing for a half-an hour or so (it was all guesswork, no clocks were visible), singing show tunes to myself for a while, doing 3 sets of 100 push-ups, eating, napping staring out the small window for what seemed like hours, willing myself to be in the cars I could see on the distant freeway. I was of course acutely aware of the mess I had made of my life, and riven with guilt about the torment I knew my family was going through.

Though I had unquestionably hit bottom, I wasn’t depressed in the classic sense, though. There was no where to look but up, and in retrospect I am glad this was how my jail experience began. Everything later was better than that week, and I appreciated that much more every improvement in my conditions as it occurred. And the few kindnesses shown me by one C.O. in particular, who allowed me to take a shower and make two phone calls, I shall never forget.

Around the fourth day, I started talking to myself. I invented a personage, and pretended I was him being interviewed by a young author trying to capture his life story. My invention’s name was Horace Pendergast III, and he was born in Shreveport, Louisiana in 1886. His mother was a Southern Belle, his father was a Hungarian traveling salesman. He lost a cherished elder brother in 1904, and went on to become a professor of English at Emerson University. He had a younger sister who was a bohemian in Greenwich Village in the 20s, and had a lover who was a painter and an alcoholic with whom he summered in Provincetown in the 30’s and 40’s. He died in 1956. (I imagined the role of Horace to be played by Tom Hanks, by the way).

Sometime soon after, I was attempting to meditate, and the eerie white-walled atmosphere and sensory deprivation of the cell led me to wonder if this might be an opportunity for me to communicate with “the other side.” Admittedly, as has just been shown with the Pendergast saga, I have quite an imagination. So I very much doubt the following was actually communicated to me by my Uncle Roger, my mother’s beloved older brother who died in 1960 at the tender age of 38, leaving 5 children behind (among them Lucie and Henri) and a grieving wife, Anne-Marie. (I was 2 at the time, and have long wondered what effect it may have had on me to see my mother cry every day for a year, by her own account)..

All I know is that I asked my Uncle questions, and heard myself answering them, out loud, for him. Was he actually speaking through me? I doubt it, but what came out was certainly nothing I had ever even thought about.

Marc: Tell me about death, What do you do? Do you see Luke [my deceased brother] and Papa [my deceased Dad] for example? Do you watch us? Do you have emotions?

Roger: Describing “the other side” to you is paramount to describing music to one born congenitally deaf, or color to one born congenitally blind. Your best understanding will fall short of my best explanation. But I will attempt, because you ask.

When death occurs, the soul does indeed leave the body. With the body, it leaves behind all that which is corporeal, including emotions, except the part of emotions that are not physical in nature but metaphysical. Love is experienced almost entirely physically by the living being but in death it is experienced entirely metaphysically and the human entity can but imagine this.

However there are human traits that cross between the physical and metaphysical. They may have a basis in the physical, but once manifested become metaphysical. Curiosity is such a trait. Imagination is another. Memory is another. These are not emotions. They are modes by which continuity is maintained between different states of being, including life and death.

The soul does indeed continue on a journey into other beings. Where it finishes , if ever, I cannot tell you because I am only at one level removed from where you are, and my soul is only accorded the information is this “capable” of experiencing.

Marc: When does “the soul” enter another body?

Roger: The soul remains as it is until the earthly death of the last person who has a living memory of you. When that person dies, the soul will enter immediately into the body of another. Until then, it is your memory- the memory of anyone who was alive when you were who had an experience of you -that keeps the soul from entering the next state. Lets say in my case, if Lucie dies at 90, hence in 2048, my soul will enter into the body of a newborn. All of my experience will be karmically matched to the needs of the souls of my new parents and also determined by the astrological moment that would occur upon the death of Lucie. This process is beyond an earthly capacity to completely understand. This is as it should be, because some of the mysteries of the universe are meant to remain mysteries. They are at least still to me.

This process is actually somewhat mechanical in nature. The soul cannot progress unless it is released and no one can forget a memory. But my soul, for example, is not “held back” or “impatient.” No soul experiences human emotions such as regret or desire after dying. These are energies that are a function of living entities' attachment to life. When the link is severed these energies dissipate. What does remain, however, are the metaphysical properties of curiosity and imagination, and a metaphysical love entirely detached from the struggle to live--hence entirely painless for the “dead” soul.

The dead do not, per se, exhibit any influence over the living. To do so would require the energy of emotion, which we no longer have access to. But we do watch, observe with some curiosity and interest, but no judgment or emotion whatsoever.

We are able to imagine how we would have felt had we remained alive, as we retain our memory. I can tell you that had I lived, I most certainly would have wanted a great deal more for Henri. That I would have most certainly stayed very much in love with Anne-Marie, That I would have rejoiced in watching the blossoming of Françoise, [his younger sister] and that I would have learned English and landed a visiting professorship in the United States to be close to Simone [his sister, my mother]. But I am incapable of any sentiment of regret or pain that this did not occur. This is the gift death brings to the dead. Whatever the pain of the living, they remain alive. Those who take their own life are granted the same “relief” as the dead who do not kill themselves. Those who live with great suffering and do not kill themselves are in essence saying that even the most painful existence has gratifications that only life can offer.

But the sentiments or activities ascribed to the dead by the living are indeed “real.” They simply occur on an astral plane. They exist in the imagination of the living during waking states and in dreams during a nocturnal state. These are not illusions, they are real. Just as real as memory. So when you, Marc, imagine myself, your father and your brother drinking weekly in a cafe and your father drinking to his heart’s delight and never getting drunk or your brother working on a fabulous computer and myself devouring Mirelle's [his daughter—a philosopher] work and trying to synthesize it with my own, all that is real. But real as dreams and memories are real. (Often memories fade, or alter with time, the memory is no less real even when if it is inaccurate or even imagined. The modes of imagination/dreams/memory constitute the bridge between death and life and what you call ghosts and past lives and communication between the living and the dead.)

The love I retain for my family and friends is a metaphysical love. It is unlike human “emotional “ love,” but the link between human and metaphysical love is parental love, and maternal love is the most like metaphysical love. It is the means by which one achieves immortality of sorts, going in the direction of time that extends into the future. The love passed down through generations from parent to child is a vertical love, whereas romantic love is a horizontal love

The love of a father, Aunt, Uncle etc. can be just as powerful but it has to travel a slightly longer distance than that from mother to child and this is not a function of childbirth, because a child’s Karmic destiny is linked equally to that of the birth mother and the adoptive mother.

Marc: So I can tell Maman and Anne-Marie and Mireille and Henri etc etc that your are there observing?

Roger: If they imagine me to be, than I am. In the sense that my soul, through the power of the imagination. can indulge in a holographic projection of any activity. This I can observe along with them, as a measure of my own curiosity, which is a metaphysical, not an earth bound property.

Marc: I have imagined you learning English and wonderful trips with you.

Roger: They have all happened. I have “watched” your projection of a particularly stimulating rapport between your mother, Claudine and I when you imagine me visiting you in England after the death of Luke. All of these things have occurred in the astral place of the imagination. As have all the fantasies of my wife and children as to what life would have been like if I had lived.

Mark: Much as this dialogue

Roger: Much as this dialogue

MCO 2004