“The attentive reader may note that I’ve skipped over the years in cabaret and in rock bands…”
PATRON-ONLY CONTENT
This post connects to the page, Why this, why me, why now? Jack looks back on the Philosophilia website—offering my Patreon supporters exclusive deeper insights into the journey that created Philosophilia.
The story begins at the link above, and continues below. Enjoy in any order, but be aware you’re diving in at the deep end here…
The attentive reader may note that I’ve skipped over the years in cabaret and in rock bands, before, during and after the novel-writing: the experimental performances, the striptease, the happenings and the art-madness, and the years running monthly open jam session tiny rhinos—fit, polyamorous, infamous at parties. There is trauma to process here, and it wasn’t from the wild behaviour—quite the contrary. That, I solemnly swear, was salve and salvation.
But I was failing, and failure—again—was too terrible to contemplate.
Trauma came from burning that earnest light too long unseen; how many times can you afford to fail? How many projects are you willing to watch fall short of your hopes before you admit you don’t know how to deliver? How long can you hold the balance between pride and humility while taunted by your own insignificance? When do faith and dedication tip over into obsession and delusion? Is it event-dependent or is there an arbitrary age? Who, or what, the hell are you anyway?
Sick—is what I was, as it turned out. Stress had triggered a genetic predisposition to inflammation on my gut-brain axis, courtesy of certain staple foods. The symptoms included depression, anxiety, brain fog, bloating, and what we’ll just call erratic evacuation. Essential nutrients were not reaching my muscles or my nerves. I upped the veggies, gave up gluten, cut back on dairy and sugar, and things were better for a while. I’ve since, by trial and error, cut all grains from my diet, because it’s the only way for me to avoid the recurrence of symptoms. I’m just another statistic in the western disease paradigm, now under careful and expensive management (meaning when I crave toast I pay $12 for an undersize loaf of bread made from seed flour and root vegetables). It took many years from onset to crisis to diagnosis to beginning to heal.
And it played merry hell with my plans for the music industry. Some days I was so sore and foggy I could hardly get out of bed. The band fell apart. I had omitted to find musicians capable of doing any actual promoting of the band themselves, and I was in no state to do all the legwork. Two bands and an intense duo, talk about divorce: shit broke my heart. It’s a fact I rarely listen to music now, unless I’m dancing, or washing dishes. That saga’s worth a post of its own—and the radical post-Christian revamping of my sex life is worth several. And just to piss off the guardians of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, I’ll do a post about drugs one day too.
But for now let me just gloss the recovery of spirit. Though I called myself an atheist for perhaps a decade, I can’t deny the ineffable. Physics tells us much about the universe but it doesn’t pretend to know everything, and energy—its mutability and diverse means of transmission, its incomprehensible origins, its legendary Einsteinian finiteness—energy is perhaps the original mystery. Is spirit just a kind of energy?
In 1999, I sat on a marble altar amid the ruins of a small temple in an abandoned hilltop town overlooking the Aegean. The temple, or what was left of it, was a white rectangle of marble paving, the size of a good lounge room, bordered by the stumps of fluted marble columns. The moment was quiet, the view panoramic. I was troubled, but this place, though desolate, was peaceful. I did not know the temple had been dedicated to a goddess until I felt a gentle but startlingly insistent surge of feminine energy—warm, joyous, erotic, intense—suffuse me in a minute, even as the marble warmed beneath me. Later I discovered I’d been sitting on Aphrodite’s altar. Don’t let anyone tell you spirit is genderless; they generally mean masculine and it simply isn’t true.
Spirit is rainbow-gendered.