Bruce Wagner - The Empty Chair

By the time it got to the museum, the hard-on was painted over.

Ryder died in December, on a Saturday. That’s a double Saturn. He was born in December too. Not favorable. Gloomy — bitter— cold — saturnine. None of which of course describes my son. Sometimes Ouroboros, the serpent that devours its tail, is a symbol used for Saturn. Ouroboros: the “O” sign. Remember that? The snakehead — or tail — even makes a little bulge in the “O,” changing it to a “Q”—tongue lolling from mouth. Funny, huh? So Saturn devours his son, deflowers his son; Saturn eats his own tail… eats the thing he made, the thing-at-its-beginning, the thing-he-once-was. Everything comes full circle. Or so we like to think.

But wouldn’t it be funny if everything didn’t?

In the months after he died, I dreamt of waves, tall as buildings. Big Sur waves. I was drowning in them, with sick priests floating all around like goblins, or stuck to me like leeches, gobble-gobbling me up, licking my flat tits—

[recites]

And God did not make death

He did not make pain

But the little blind fire

that leaps from one wound into another

knitting the broken bones

and fixing the broken bones

and fixing sins so they cannot be forgotten.

I will obey my nurse who keeps this fire

deep in her wounded breast

for God did not make death—

As I said, Kelly’s living on the edge of her sister’s land, in Calgary.

A cabin; she lives in a cabin.

Her sister worries about her incessantly.

There is a field there, and I’m told she sometimes wanders in it.

But my wife never strays too far from the cabin.

The next story was told to me in the desert of New Mexico, over five days.

Our sessions took place at night, under an ecclesiastical cope of stars. Queenie spent her days submerged in a profusion of journals and diaries (whose keeping was a lifelong habit; she revisited them in order to refresh her memory “so as to maximize our time”). Many of those writings were almost thirty years old. She made use of other source material as well and in the course of the story reveals how she came upon it. I make note of this to help explain what might otherwise be taken for superhuman powers of reflection. That said, she freely admitted she had no qualms extemporizing, if it helped her cause, i.e., advancing the story or to more accurately convey a mood or a message.

Before we begin, there are two things important to note. “Second Guru” actually preceded “First Guru” in the telling. The chronological order of our diptych has been reversed for reasons it is hoped will be clear to the reader at the end. Secondly, the storyteller had been grievously wounded in love, which was why she had taken to the road.

When I came across this formidable woman, she was traveling in an imposing black bus with a full staff and every creature comfort one could imagine (and some that one couldn’t). In a droll tip of the hat to a storied bus of the ’60s, the destination above the windshield read “Father” not “Furthur.” Queenie wore kohl around her eyes and elaborately tailored gypsy dresses that were as dark as her land schooner, with the occasional splash of tie-dyed color: half — Zaha Hadid, half — Stevie Nicks. She said she was in the midst of searching for a lost city that was rumored to have the power to reunite couples that had been separated by calamity, farce — even death.

I hope one day to be reunited with her myself, for maybe that story too will one day ask to be told.

*Passionate love of God

The following interview took place in October 2005 and was redacted in the summer of 2013.

How does a story begin?

With the simplicity of situating it in time — anyhow, that’s one way…

Very well: it wasn’t too long ago, in the fall of 1997. I was living in Manhattan in a triplex penthouse overlooking Central Park, on 110th Street. My humble abode came complete with ballroom, landscaped terraces (one with infinity pool) and a small orchard guarded by a rooftop of gargoyles I’d become quite intimate with, having become one myself. The property belonged to my grandfather — or rather, his investment firm — rumor being it was once in the hands of a shadowy Jewish cabal of financial consultants to the Vatican. I was 47 years old and going through the mother of all depressions. I’d been out to sea too long and washed up on impotent shores. In my youth, I was a voraciously curious girl, an exotic wild child who cut a swath through all manner of New Age modalities. At the time, my mind/body explorations were thorough enough to have banished the need (or desire) to learn anything more. It was my modest opinion that I’d achieved a hard-fought measure of wisdom. Unfortunately, the moment such a thing is impetuously declaimed in one’s youth, even sotto voce , one acquires a nasty virus which lays dormant until awakened by the cue of that sometimes-fatal season, middle age.

I never thought I’d need access to that bewitching witch doctor world again. But there I was, all grown up and fighting for my life. It was heal thyself redux. I plugged in to the corporatized, kickass machine of Self-Help America, encompassing every spiritual, homeopathic, energetic practice known to man, goddess and horse (cf. equine holistic healing ): magnetic therapy, tantric breath work, biofeedback, EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, marathon meditating, fungal scanning, sweat lodging, Adderall XR, Feldenkrais, Tensegrity, DBT, DMT, colloidal silver, craniosacral/chakra detox, Roman Catholicism, Reiki, Kabala and cancer-sniffing dogs, liposuction, ayahuasca, Watsu, What-The-Fuck, Qigong (it’s been good to know you), polarity, ibogaine, candidal querying, Munay-Ki, angel therapy, singing bowls, flushing bowels, benzos and botulinum rejuvenation, Lyme disease dousing, karma purification, cheap Thai massage, Third Eye vortexing, Lamictal, SSRIs, Christian Wholistics, Christian Louboutin, GABA, MDMA, AA, heroin, hypnotherapy, hysterectomy—

Then I ran out of time… or time ran out on me.

Yes, that’s better.

I was jilted by Time.

It was with more than a little fear that I realized help was definitely not on the way. I confined myself to quarters, false messiahs having dwindled to hormone replacement therapy, 450 milligrams of Wellbutrin q.d. and a hundred mgs of Seroquel, PRN.

I read all the books on depression and came to the disgruntled conclusion they were just another venal publishing cycle perennial, always given a clever “fall release” (to capitalize on those legions with SAD — Seasonal Affective Disorder) and gussied up in literary clothing — when the smarmy truth of it is that “blues porn” found its way to the shelves and talkshows with the same calculated predictability as addiction memoirs and diet books. And why shouldn’t it be so? Why did I think the genre was sacrosanct? Still, it rankled. The quality of blues porn always fell so far off the mark. Styron was the pioneer— Darkness Visible became the gold standard and I didn’t like his book, either. The depression mavens just couldn’t be trusted. It was my opinion that what the monks called “the noonday demon” was best served by my own customized definition: