From: Nikola Chubrich To: Ernst Meyer Subject: hello Date: Mon, 6 Jul 2020 20:55:30 -0400 Dear Dr. Meyer: My intended phone call keeps being delayed. Tonight I am unexpectedly tired, but then today I felt unexpectedly well. It seemed to me that I had turned a corner. I will not put any energy into defending the past, but nor will I be ashamed of it, nor regard it as an illness. I went for a long walk today (did not get much done unfortunately), going in with the feeling that I could handle things. I ended the walk tired and lonely, but hardly hopeless. I feel ready for some sort of literary effort, mostly reading, perhaps a little writing. Would you like to assign something to someone of feeble mind? I was thinking of tackling Paradise Lost, but perhaps that is a bit much for tonight. It is a funny feeling I have: I had been most of all inclined to lightly Google things and skim books I already know well. It is as if I suffer from an exhaustion of the possibility of new learning, or a fear of encountering something deeply meaningful. I felt that way about listening to music (I still don't have any headphones at hand). Or maybe I feared that it wouldn't mean something, even if it was supposed to. It seems a terrible sin for Bach to be meaningless. In reaching out to friends I suffer, I think, from an expectation of expectations. So often I've been an entertainer to my friends, a life of the party, a source of sparkle and vigor. When I don't feel up to providing that, I wish not to be a burden on anyone. And so I go into a cycle of isolation and loneliness. This, you seem to be utterly immune to! You do not fear being alone (or have not admitted to it), nor do you concern yourself with whether your writings will have any impact whatsoever. In my higher-flying days I thought perhaps I would be able to grasp how you do this; or already had; but now the more I am in need of such generalized equanimity, the less I have it. But I am getting a little more confident that I will be able to tackle at least the coming tasks before me, at least for the next few weeks. What the rest of life will be like, I cannot really conceive. But then, does anyone? * As I was sheltering in bed this morning (I have a lot of trouble getting up now: dreams call to me: and in my experiencing, heeding the call gets this process over with quite a bit sooner. I thought once I had it down to five days, but I am going on two months. No matter, I do not think it will be much longer. The dreams will say their piece eventually.), I found myself half-dreaming about Burning Man. A place I don't think you would ever like to go! I myself left that enchanted land, a bacchanalia in sackcloth and ashes, quite ready to take leave of the sexual vulgarity, and the concommitant constantly pounding music. On the drive out I put on Die Frau Ohne Schatten and Four Last Songs, and managed to have some real emotion. I was alone, so I could cry. And yet......there was something wonderful about it all that I was able to re-imagine this morning. To be part of a giant crowd, and move perpetually to music (however primitive the music). The fellowship one has with creatures brutish and beautiful, breaking out of one circle of dancing and into the next. The planar symmetry of the desert, dotted with artful temporary buildings and built works of art. At the center of it all there was a temple. I was astonished the first time I went there to see people more sacredly moved than one sees in actual cathedrals, at least nowadays. All about was sheer paganism; inside the temple----which the last year I went was designed as a hyperbola of revolution, with a lattice of beams----people were sitting silently and sometimes crying. Notes and pictures were tacked to the walls or the central altar, remembrances of people who had died. One night I came there, I sat down next to a half-Japanese woman doing an elaborate although probably not very traditional tea ceremony. She had little pots and cups in front of her under a simple table, was wearing a sort of monastic garb, and would transfer water back and forth between cups. Then she would slowly bow or prostrate herself, and then recommence pouring, however repetitive it might be. I watched her mesmerized for longer than I had managed to hold attention at a church service. All around this temple (which the other year I went was designed like something Balinese), you'd see people in the most outrageous, sometimes half-naked costumes. My own costume the last year was to have been "Zarathustra": I had a peacock robe, and had meant to have a turban, which, however, never made it out of the box it was shipped in, and was in any case somewhat unwieldy. I had an imitation Viking helmet instead, and that completed the ensemble quite nicely, I thought. I had wanted to wire up a little stereo to my robe to play "Also Sprach Zarathustra" when I arrived in someone's camp, but I didn't pull that off; it would have been little use in any case, as I spent much of my time there alone, or volunteering at a tent designed to help people having difficult psychedelic trips. So many people took difficult substances, and then got separated from their friends. It made me somewhat disillusioned with the whole psychedelic culture, but I grew a little un-disillusioned this morning; and that, in my present state of mind, is probably a good thing to do. * I half-dreamt, lying there in bed, some more elaborations of my Russian fantasy. I perceived an immense airship, Diesel-thrumming over the Nevada mountains, large enough to move buildings (though not mountains). It was evening, the first evening of the Burning Man festival, and one airship delivered a palace, the next an opera house, the next an onion-domed church. The palace had a domed garden out back; the church was full of Russian choir music; there were tailor and clothing shops in these buildings, so that visitors could leave behind their immodest costume and dress as people used to for the opera. I remember going to Argentina in 1995, playing in the Teatro Colón with Benjamin Zander. The entire audience wore tails and white tie. It would be nice to see something like that at Burning Man: the counterculture to the counterculture. * The psychiatrist I have been consulting with (I do not wish to say "my" psychiatrist any more than I will speak of "my" medications) rather seemed to be chastising me over the disorder of my life, of so many threads sown that have never drawn together. Must they, though? Might it be enough to have seen aspects of the world? I have been inside the fabled Bohemian Grove; I have been to Burning Man; I have met the builders of the famous or perhaps infamous Biosphere 2; I have made friends (and even a guru of sorts) in India all the way up to the Himalaya; once upon a time, I had, perhaps, the most intense friendship of my life with a Portuguese fisherman from New Bedford. And I never once knew where it would all lead. N.I.C.