When I lived in London, I became obsessed with cooking. I was obsessed with cooking because I was anorexic. I was anorexic because I had given birth to a child and had just given her up for adoption. I was all of nineteen. I had no time to be anorexic or be a cook as I was building props for a theatre and staying out late hanging out with an old man named Gerald who always wore a trenchcoat and read tarot cards in hotel lobbies. I think he was homeless. As I have realized recently, most of the people I hung out with in London were old enough to be my grandparents. I can’t tell you why things happened this way, but I would wander around and look in people’s eyes, and I didn’t connect with a lot of young folks. I would wander through markets and late night cafes, and take notes, compulsively, and when I got hungry, I would go to the Hare Krishna temple and eat Indian food. Nothing comes for free, of course: The longer you eat free food (I went there at least three times a week) prepared by religious folk, the stronger grow their demands that you pay attention to the platitudes, attitudes, myth-whiffs that come with the meal. And so I slowly but surely heard the life stories of each and every thirty-something Krishna-monk, mostly ex-skinheads, punks, burnouts, addicts, and kids who came from abusive homes. They would bashfully eat their desserts, the sweetened-burned-milk-balls that in texture and size were exactly like honey-flavored testicles, and while chewing these milk balls, slowly, tenderly, they would tell me their stories of being raped or hurt or hurting others in a million ways. These guys, beneath their imported indian scarves and ill-fitting slippers, they had been SO BROKEN that they needed a religion to erase their memories, literally wipe the slate clean. I thought of their conversion this way: Identity bankrupcy. Religion as suicide. One of the last times I ate with the boys, I ended up going to their ceremony afterwards. Indian families (not lily-whites at all) filled a room with sleepy eyes and toddlers in tow, and from what I recall, there was chanting and a lot of swaying back and forth to a tambourine as if we were all on roofies. It was mind-numbingly dull for me, despite the details I drank in. I knew I had reached the end of the free meal ticket, coz I would now be expected to go to these foot-drag-a-thons every other day to earn my keep. As I left the temple, I thought of one of the most amusing Hare Krishna beliefs: That whatever you are thinking about at the moment of your death will directly influence the body you reincarnate into. In other words, if you die with “base desires,” or demeaning imagery on your mind, you will likely be reborn as an armadillo, or maybe an earthworm. On the other hand, if you die while chanting the name of your god, you may break the incarnation cycle altogether, and ascend to some misty sluice of heavenly bliss, like a breadbasket in an amber-scented ether that stretches on for eternity. I was laughing to myself when leaving the temple for the last time, already missing the sad monks with their shattered eyes and scarred foreheads. I was thinking this: What if there was a man who died while watching a fly clamber on the back of a turd. He would be wheezing his last breath and watching the fly’s iridescent body glistening in the afternoon sun. And this dying man watching the fly…would he spend his next life as a fly, or as a startlingly self-conscious turd?
Posted on: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 23:45:58 +0000
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