Helen Zuman - Mating in Captivity - A Memoir

I’VE SEWN THIS TEXT FROM the frayed cloth of memory, striving, per Tristine Rainer’s advice, to “tell the whole truth with love.”

The following are pseudonyms: Eile, Zylem, Karma, Estero, Rebel, Dymion, Prophet, Lyrik, Toba, Eave, Cayta, Zeta, Shure, Loria, Swan, Kro, Owen, Teal, Rayel, Luya, Jayd, Zar, Donna, Taridon, Riven, Blayz, Vera, Rave, Mar, Rook, Amory, Tarrow, Eric, Lysis, Noi, Dylan, Elfdancer, Mason, Ethik, Leah, Adam, and Hunter.

I SPENT MOST OF MY twenties trapped in a story. Here it is:

You—all of you—belong to the Deathculture. You wake up, paste on fake smiles, scurry off to “work” for your corporate masters, raping the earth. You hate this, but you’re stuck. You need the cash. For what? McMansions, gadgets, drugs—substitutes for love.

I belong to Zendik. We’re starting a revolution. We live on a farm and do lots of art. We work together, support each other. Tell the truth. You’ve gotta follow our lead—if we’re gonna save the earth.

I know—it’s hard. Out there you don’t dare get straight, even with your mate. You might lose your shield. Your one ally in your fight to survive. Real love takes a tribe—led by the first couple in history to do away with lies.

I’ll never leave Zendik. If I did, I’d die—in soul, if not in body. And I’d despise myself, for betraying all life.

In other words, I joined a cult. The year was 1999; I was twenty-two. But I didn’t say, “I joined a cult” till 2005—more than six years later.

No one knowingly joins a cult, and no one in a cult would call it that. We join, we commit to communes, new religions, personal-growth programs, temples, revolutions. Saying, “I joined a cult” comes later, if ever. It means releasing stories we doubt we can live without. Stories that give us purpose. Stories we can’t see as stories, so long as they absorb us.

When I left Zendik, in 2004, I took its trap with me; I was doomed, I thought, unless I returned. What finally freed me was the only thing that ever frees anyone from mythocaptivity: a more compelling story.

I BEGAN SPINNING A FANTASY about Zendik mating the night I arrived.

Cross-legged on the living room floor, a metal bowl nestled in my lap, I watched a short, round woman with buoyant ringlets burst in from the kitchen, bowl in hand. Another woman called to her, across the room, “Are you having a date tonight?”

Between them lay a sea of Zendiks; maybe two-thirds of the Farm’s sixty-plus members filled every chair, couch, and patch of rug. The lemon scent of Murphy’s Oil fused with the glow of standing lamps to bathe us in resinous incandescence.

Forks clanged against stainless steel. Chatter rolled past me like delicate thunder.

The short woman nodded, her face erupting in a joyous grin. I felt a prick of envy. It must be so lovely, I thought, to go out for dinner and a movie with a guy you like, then return, in cricket-quiet, to this cozy old farmhouse. Never mind that none of the handful of dates I’d been on—all as a teenager in New York City—had involved dinner and a movie. This was Polk County, North Carolina. The sticks. People here must mimic the mating behavior of characters in Sweet Valley High books and Archie comics. I wondered why the woman going on the date had gotten food for herself. Wouldn’t she be eating out, with her boyfriend?

I took another bite of brown rice and pinto beans, topped with fresh salsa. I snapped off the sweet white stem of a leaf of romaine. I was eating the same food as the others. But the bowl I ate from, the fork I ate with, set me apart. They warned that Zendik warmed as you pushed toward the center. I was at the outer rim. I would have to earn my way in.

Minutes earlier, a graceful young woman named Eile had shown me to the shelves where bowls, plates, mugs, spoons, forks, and knives were stored. I was to pick one of each and mark it with my name, in felt-tip pen on masking tape. “You’ll be on quarantine for ten days,” she said, “which means you can’t cook or wash dishes or eat from the same dishes we eat from.”

“Okay,” I said, feeling as though I’d just broken out in sores only I couldn’t see. No commune I’d visited before Zendik had placed me on quarantine. Eile shrugged in apology. “It’s just that we live so close to each other,” she said. “If one of us comes down with a bug, everybody gets it.”

I folded the rest of the romaine leaf into my mouth. Eile joined me on the floor. “So, how’d you find out about Zendik?” she asked.

“I saw it in The Communities Directory .” The Directory was an encyclopedia of well over a thousand groups, most in North America and devoted to homesteading. I’d ordered it the previous winter and pored over it in my Harvard dorm room. The next spring, just before graduation, I’d won a $13,500 travel grant to spend a year visiting some of these communities.

My grant proposal wasn’t the first stage in a master plan. I had no master plan—only a couple tropisms: away from school and jobs, toward being outside and touching what was alive. After eighteen years in classrooms, I yearned to put my body to work, as something more than a dolly for my brain. To learn sources of food, water, warmth, and shelter, beyond “the supermarket,” “the tap,” “the furnace,” and “the landlord.” I sought a story broader and sweatier than the one I’d grown up in. Touring villages rooted in the back-to-the-land movement seemed like a good start.

By the time I arrived at Zendik, on October 26, 1999, I’d stepped into a few communal stories, none strong enough to hold me for long. I’d spent three weeks at the Reevis Mountain School of Self-Reliance in the Superstition Mountains near Roosevelt, Arizona, where the ruling couple seemed pleased with their seclusion and the only other intern left before I did. A day and two nights at Alpha Farm in Deadwood, Oregon, where I was told to sit in the garden and give it my “love energy” (subtext: we’re overwhelmed by our own chaos; we can’t help you with yours). A night at the San Francisco Zen Center’s Green Gulch Farm in Muir Beach, California, whose dense fog of patience made me wonder where people buried their snarls, their irritations, their hatreds—and where, if I lived there, I would bury mine. Back home in Brooklyn, I’d taken the ferry to Staten Island for Friday-night dinner at Ganas, where most of the men were pale or gray-haired and the aim of the full-group mealtime discussion—an example, I was told, of “feedback therapy”—seemed to be to elicit bewildered, angry tears from the two women at the center of the ring. Soon after that, I’d sold myself on visiting Zendik—using its Directory listing, its fledgling website, and a phone conversation with Zylem, the veteran Zendik in charge of recruiting. Then I’d boarded a Greyhound bus to Hendersonville, North Carolina. A couple of Zendiks had retrieved me from the depot after completing the Farm’s weekly shopping. I was loosely planning on staying two weeks.

When I mentioned The Communities Directory , Eile’s eyes lit up. “Really?” she said. “Me too! But I think we’re the only ones. Most people showed up because of the magazine.”