Steve Katz - The Compleat Memoirrhoids - 137.n

“That little Arab. He’s done alright for himself,” Marisa says. We sit on the floor watching the young women belly dance around our Sufi teacher. Marisa is Spanish, so her take on Arabs is tempered by her country’s history. Adnan grew up in Baghdad, and loves to wax nostalgic about warm summer nights, and sleeping on the roof as the scents of bougainvillea and lavender waft across the city. He leads his Sufi group through a system he calls “shattari,” which essentially means to learn by doing. For that reason I am attracted to his practice. Any spiritual revelation for me has to come through a source preliterate. Words are too entangling, though sounds, syllables, can penetrate.

Despite some ironic distance, Marisa is an earnest participant. She is a great professional dancer from Barcelona, capable of ecstatic movement, of dancing herself out of her mind. The practice is complicated and varied. Adnan is the ultimate camp activities counselor. We follow him through calisthenics, belly dance, whirling, drumming, chanting, games, walks into the woods, improv and skits, prayer. It is all done to the lilts and rhythms of Arab music — Oum Khalsoum, Fairuz, Koranic chanting. Adnan is a small man with an unimaginably strong and supple body. He can do a thousand push-ups or sit-ups without fatigue. When he plays his doumbek he can drum a whole roomful of followers into trance. It’s addictive. People beg him to pick up his drum. His abilities transcend Marisa’s prejudices. They totally obliterate mine.

For his summer workshop this year, Adnan has rented a former Jewish boy’s camp in Fleishmanns, New York. On the walls next to the bunks the boys inked graffiti in Hebrew. Stars of David are carved into the bedsteads. The place is ripe for a Sufi intrusion. Days of the workshop are divided into two sessions, with two or three hour breaks in the afternoon. You are encouraged to eat only once a day, at around midnight. People often cheat, and rush off in the interim for pizza. The rupture of routine accounts partially, perhaps, for experiences I had that I’ll never reconcile with my daily life. I usually keep the fast, and Marisa does too. Although we rarely get together in New York City, I always feel a kinship when Marisa is there, the experience enhanced by her reinforcement.

Sometimes the evening session involves a talk, or a presentation by one of the participants. This evening session is all movement done to a tape of strings and voices stretching syllables of the Koran through mysterious melismatic curves. Adnan on the platform is dressed in loose pants and wife-beater undershirt and at first seems to be leading us in slow belly-dance. We all move in imitation of his supple grace. We wind our hips around, bend our torsos, wave our arms. It is an undersea forest waving in the currents, a knot of hibernating snakes waking up. Hours pass in this moving meditation. Adnan is imperceptibly slowing his movement down. At a certain point I notice he has lifted his arm only a few inches in the last fifteen minutes. We are trying to keep up with him, and are failing. What is this slowness? Adnan’s eyes drift upwards in his skull, showing only whites. He is in a trance into which it seems you can’t follow him. How can anyone move so slowly? The women most dedicated to him, whom Marisa calls his harem, are already frying onions in the kitchen. The dissonance and temptation that scent creates is painful. I am raging with hunger. Feed these people, Adnan, I mutter. Just get the damned arm up where it’s going and feed your people. Hurry up. We get the point. Arm goes up. That’s good. Get it up there and let’s eat. Your people are hungry. We haven’t eaten since yesterday midnight. Fucking get the arm where it’s going and give us food.

Suddenly, when I am practically blind with anger, something happens. I don’t understand how or why. Something within my chest bursts open, like a sudden blooming. A flower within my breast spontaneously tears open and light and love pours out. Marisa can see something is going on with me, and she grabs my arm as if to hold me down. I love Marisa. I love all the people in the room, the ones I know, the ones I hardly know. I love all the Jewish boy campers who preceded us in this place. I love Marisa’s tight grip on my arm. I love the floors the walls the ceiling the stage. I love Adnan who is hardly visible now. I love myself, each molecule of self that flows with ease into the molecules of other. Everything in the perceptual world I love, and everything imperceptible as well. Every atom every quark of every atom. The feeling floods out of my breast as if a spigot has opened to release a gusher of love. I want to dance with every particle of being that surrounds us. This is the ambrosial flood. This is the honeyed road from my open heart.

Nonetheless the scent of onions frying penetrates my bliss. I follow the crowd I love into the dining hall. The session is over, except I am riding this tsunami of love. My heart chakra has opened. Heart chakra. I never believed in, never trusted the new-age eastern gobble-de-gook, but here I am witness to a truth, here I am surfing in the curl of love. Suddenly I panic. Can I shut this down? Clamp the spigot? I’m returning to New York in a day. This won’t play on the subway. It could get me big hurt. Can I love New York down to the last bullet? I look at Marisa. She understands; at least, I think she does. In front of me is a plate of dates, eggs, and onions. I take a forkful. With this taste the flowering slowly retracts into my chest. These feelings do a slow fade. It happened, and now it is done. Will it ever happen again? It is frightening to think that it can. At some point without warning, quick as a breath when you come up from a dive, and even in contradiction to what you are feeling at the time, heart can spontaneously open.

Hers was a grey-blue plaid skirt, with cross-hatchings of pale rust and lemon and rose. The skirt was ankle length, wool, tight-fitting around a trim figure. That figure, a girl, captured me, her shapely ankles, the butt a sweet protrusion, small, high breasts in a beige cashmere sweater. She could have been a dancer. She wore dusty rose Capezios. Her ash blonde hair cascaded down below her shoulder blades, her face pale, oval, with high cheek bones, grey eyes, full pursed lips. Her name was… Maybe she told me her name. I don’t remember the name.

These dances were held in the gym of Washington Irving High School, an all girls school, sister school to my all boys Stuyvesant. The gym was lit as if for a basketball game, music piped in over crackling P.A. speakers. Only the girls way over there danced at first, with each other. The boys rough-housed a little, and shot imaginary baskets at the hoops that had been hoisted to the ceiling. We glanced over at the girls as if they lurked on the other side of some impenetrable border in another country, and we didn’t yet have passports. For me, however, riding in the constant curl of the testosterone wave, even a room as cold and contrary to romance as this gym could turn into a garden of sensual possibilities. I could not get my eyes off that supple pulse of flesh in the plaid skirt dancing gracefully with another girl.

Most of the guys were acting as if the girls weren’t there, and seemed to deny they had come to this dance to meet girls. I don’t know how I broke loose to cross the gap into the chattering, giggling territory of the girls. A few other guys followed me across the border. Someone had dimmed the lights. We were ready to dance. My plaid skirt actually smiled at me, and extended her arms when I asked her to dance. We did a modest lindy to a Count Basie “Two O’clock Jump,” then a close fox-trot to Vic Damone singing “Blue Moon.” Plaid skirt and I rode the music together, her hips pressed into my hips, our knees and thighs caressing, the palms of our hands sweating into each other, her other hand lying lightly on my shoulder, occasionally brushing across my neck, my other hand feeling the channel of her supple spine through the cashmere. It was as unbearable as an idea of heaven. An erection came out and pressed against her thigh. I was afraid to offend. Did an erection get you thrown out of the dance? I tried to back it off her flesh, but she stayed with me, pressed it with her thigh, almost as if she didn’t notice. But she noticed. She probably could feel how weak it made me, and enjoyed that.