A SERIOUS CONVERSATION WITH MYSELF--Part IX

"Only connect," writes E. M. Forster in Howard's End. “Only connect, the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.”

No coincidence, perhaps, that I find myself thinking about connection on the day that would have been my parents’ wedding anniversary—that still is, indeed, their anniversary, even though they are no longer here to celebrate the occasion. I can celebrate it for them. They were married, through good times and bad, for just about sixty years, and remained devoted to each other until death did them part.

I’m thinking about it, too, as I dip into a book that I received this past weekend as a gift. Called Loving Promises, it’s subtitled “The Master Class for Creating Magnificent Relationship,” and written by a man I met only briefly on our trip to Ojai, but with whom I felt immediate connection—and for a good number of reasons. Richard Matzkin is a long time psychiatric therapist and an artist who has also been the leader of a men’s group and a meditation teacher, all areas that have profoundly affected my own life. The subject of the book is really his love for his own cherished wife but also, importantly a celebration of and manual for not only the loving relationship but, by extension, love itself.

I have not, as yet, read far into the book, but I already know that it looks profoundly into the priority about which I wished to write today: connection. This gift came accompanied by a second one, another book, The Art of Aging: Celebrating the Authentic Aging Self—a book of texts and images of Richard’s sculptures and his wife, Alice’s, paintings, both unsparing and hauntingly beautiful investigations into the human body as it ages. I look forward to delving into each of these books in the coming days.

I picked up on another, related thread in Ojai—a community to which both Ellie and I felt tremendously attracted, in part for the sheer physical beauty of a place long known as a numinous power spot and in part for the creativity and loving connectedness we found amongst the people drawn there for this reason. That other thread is an injunction that has been central to my understanding of both art and life for many years: Tell me who you are. It first came to my attention at an Esalen Institute workshop led by a Huichol Indian shaman, in which I enrolled by the purest chance, after a workshop I was scheduled to lead myself was cancelled for lack of interest. I remember little other than this single story, that Huichol Indians do not, traditionally, give their babies names, as we do. Instead, they ask this question: tell me who you are. Which suggests, of course, that the new arrival came as though from some other planet or some previous existence.

It’s a lovely thought, and one that appealed to me particularly because I realized that this was exactly what I had been trying throughout my life to do as a writer—to tell you who am, and exactly what I ask of other writers, when I read their poems or books, and of artists when I tried to make connection with their work (in my “professional” life, as a reviewer): tell me who you are. I want everything, all four corners of what I have come to believe is the fully developed, integrated human being: intellect, emotion, body, spirit… I long to satisfy that compelling need to be with a fellow being, eye to eye and heart to heart, and to see and be seen both at the same time. This is the kind of moment I aspire to.

I say “aspire to” because too often I fail—for what I excuse as lack of time, or lack of opportunity; because it can feel risky to expose too much of myself. Sometimes literally. The body, after all, is the physical manifestation of the whole person. I look at Alice’s paintings of nude women and Richard’s sculptures of nude men and I see not merely bodies but whole human beings, some of them naked and unashamed, others more vulnerable in their nakedness, all beautiful and deeply human. And I think of the time when I “sat” for a portrait by the artist Don Bachardy and was so moved and challenged by the experience that I actually asked to return to sit naked, thinking to learn something of importance about myself—as indeed I did, under his intense and penetrating gaze. Having lived for much of my life with the body shyness I acquired long ago at boarding school, to expose myself in this way was a true, even a joyful liberation. Bachardy was asking me, in the course of those hours of total, concentrated silence, who are you? And I was able to answer him, in total silence and without reservation.

So there it is: connection. I promise myself to keep reminding myself of its importance, I will keep trying to practice it in my life.