He stands outside of a large brownstone building amidst the shops of an upscale neighborhood north of Chicago. He had walked past the shops on his way from the Highland park L stop, looking for the address as noisy Sheridan Avenue traffic rushed by him. Seeing the building, he had approached the entryway but felt a sudden rush of anguish when the anxiety that had been emerging in him since morning flooded his awareness. Sensations of the pavement, the brick building that loomed before him, and the heavy automobiles at high speeds – each sensation set off a shooting chill in his legs and chest. His body tightened and a burning, acidic feeling arose in his stomach. He had stopped outside the building to collect himself and wait for the anguishing state to pass.
He sits down at the end of a brushed canvas sofa and sinks into it just to the point where it feels that he is down a bit too low and will have to pull up out of it with more effort than he should. It is comfortable, though, and he lets his eyes move around the room as there are no other people there. A broad ottoman stands in front of a large and plush chair that is situated across from the sofa at the other corner of the waiting room. It is covered with a small Persian rug with warm colors that appeal to him and so he rests his eyes there further. Its designs are beautiful, deep and textured blues mingled with soft gold and a deep, blood red. “Peacock’s blood,” he thinks, remembering the color’s name, which he had heard a shop owner use once in describing yet another carpet drawn from a stack that line the inside of a tiny stall in the bazaar. “Peacock’s blood,” he thought again, and as he studied the rug for a moment it appeared to him as though all the geometric and winding designs moved through the foundation of deep red. He thought of the flowers and stems of a Turkish Ebru design, soaked into a piece of parchment that is gently laid down over an intentional arrangement of color that literally floats in water. He followed the course of one pattern in the rug from the edge toward the center. But the path was interrupted by the bright glossy yellow spine of magazine at the bottom of a stack of reading material, one of three, placed on the ottoman. On top of one of the stacks is copy of Beautiful Homes, the cover of which features an immaculate three story home at the edge of well manicured lawn through which a stone trail, flanked by roses and stumpy metallic yard lights, runs to gazebo at the near side of the lawn, overlooking the house next door. Losing interest, his eyes passed over the room. The two large and firmly planted chairs, a small mahogany table astride the wall, warmly ornamented with two tiny lamps astride a dark wood picture frame. But the image in the picture immediately strikes him as discontinuous; abstract and vague forms of deep colors on a dark background – not the miniature European shops that one might expect in such tidy environment,nor the standard mallard. The discontinuity moved him to reflection. “The colors,” he thinks, “not splashed on. They emerge from it. Analysts always seem to decorate their homes with paintings in primary colors.” He feels amused by this thought and this gives way to a sense of hope. His energies move from seeing and his eyes lower softly to rest on his knees and hands. The magazines; “who reads these magazines?” In his thoughts comes an image of a young man in suit and tie, perched at the edge of the big chair, scanning the pages of Sports Illustrated without really taking them in.
The distance, the distance beween the mag and the reader, empty space, no real connection.
What kind of people do come here, he wonders, and his thoughts move to his own reasons.
He sits in the couch with right leg crossed over left so that his right foot extends in front and off to the left side. His hands rest in his lap. He wears a pair of brown canvas trousers with thick seams and extra pockets on pant legs that revealed a history of hard travel in the their frayed ends that give way to brown leather shoes, recently polished over once again to cover the white patches of wear but failing to compensate for the fact that the soul of one of them is cracked from one side to the other in the heel. Above the trousers he wears an all white shirt with sleeves rolled to under the elbows and front undone by only one button. The shirt is more thin and delicate that suits the trousers. And overall hewould present a rather elegant and somewhat rugged figure with were it not for the fact that he is sunken into the couchfar enough to give the impression that he is hiding inside it and looking out at the room.
At the corner is a door to the consulting room. From behind it he becomes aware of the slightly audible sound of a woman’s voice. He cannot hear her words but listens to the soft sound which flows in brief passages, slows and pauses, then continues. It is a comforting sound, occasionally punctuated by the deep and sharper voice -- the analyst, he presumes. He begins to notice that the voices merge in and out of another stream of sound. It is, he realizes, a concerto, a Bach concerto for harpsichord and strings, emanating from a small disc player underneath a mahogany credenza that stands at the opposite wall, just pat the small stacks of glossy magazines atop the Peacock blood Persian. He feels the pleasing structure and pulse of the concerto and his eyes follow the legs of the credenza, up to where the lines of the shiny dark wood curl into plant-like designs. He hates such sinewy furniture which seems overly delicate and fragile to him. Much as he has always hated the plucky and constipated sound of the harpsichord. But Bach is a beautiful, flowing tapestry, of which the harpsichord is only one, unfortunate but tolerable strand. Above the plucky side table are two small carved wood frames painted in gold and surrounding colorful images. He strains to see them and quite suddenly and to his surprise he recognizes them as miniature Indian paintings.
This is enough to draw him up and out of the sofa and over to the paintings. He looks at each and discovers that they are a northern style and depict episodes from the mythology of Lord Krishna and his erotic play as a young man with the cow herdesses in the countryside of Vrindavana. Michael feels a sense of astonishment. Not that the paintings are so unusual, but that they are hanging here ina therapists office seems to bring two of his worlds together unexpectedly. In one, Krishna is in his erotic pose known as tribhanga or “three angles,” for he stands bent at one knee and then at the hip, and he plays his flute with head cocked to one side (the third bend); and yet Krishna is also perfectly entwined with his adoring lover Radha, such that it is difficult to tell where one begins and the other ends. It is in a moving, dancing image of unity, male and female. In the other, Krishna dances with Radha at the center of a great circle of girls – “gopis” or cowherdesses, in the countryside. The gopis dance too, and each one dances with Krishna himself because, miraculously, he becomes many Krishnas so that he may dance with all and then steal away to a private place with each to fulfill her desires. Michael knows these images from a thousand chay stalls, village dwellings and city shops over the past few years. His surprise to find Krishna in this analyst’s waiting room in Chicago then turns to a feeling of comfort, perhaps a touch of hope that this man, who seems to have some awareness of the other world from which Michael just came, might understand him. “His wife probably decorated this room,” he then thinks, dismissing the feeling and turning back to re-enter the sofa. For a few moments he imagines a late middle aged woman with tightly cut grayish blonde hair and a woolen heliotrope skirt suit noticing the paintings at a consignment shop in Highland Park and asking the storeowner, who is identical to her, “where dothesecome from . . .” – but the fantasy evaporates when he hears movement in the adjoining room and the voices become louder as their sources move toward the door. Michael turns back to the paintings since he cannot make it into the couch before the voices reach the door. He hears the door open and the voices emerge. They speak their goodbyes softly. He imagines the woman walking through the room but doesn’t seeher, as all he sees is Lord Krishna, dancing with the gopis. In the moment he imagines her in heliotrope. But is she middle aged? Is she crying? Something about the man’s voice begins to dawn on him. “Are you Mr. Jonathan?” the man then says in a friendly and distinctively Indian accent. Michael turns and there, standing at the door way to his office, is a late middle aged Indian man. “You are doctor Timblo?” said Michael, not fully able to conceal his surprise. “I am,” said Timblo, who smiles slightly, noting Michael’s reaction. “Would you like to come in?”
The doctor is an Indian, a man who came to America for medical school and then stayed, entering psychoanalytic training. His mother is still alive but his father passed away many years ago, quite unexpectedly from complications during a routine surgery. The father had been an executive in the tobacco industry and was a patron of the arts, especially classical Indian music.
He enters the office and sits down in a large, leather chair, facing another one, identical to it. The man sits down. “Why are you here?” he asked. Michael began, “Well, I’ve been away. India, mainly, doing research for my dissertation. But I’ve also spent a lot of time in Hong Kong and London, and also in Hawaii for a while.” “Okay,” said the analyst, “but why are you here?” Michael pauses for a moment and then says, “Well, in a way, I don’t really know. . . I mean, I don’t know where my life is.” “I’ve come to this town when I accepted the position in anthropology at Bard. But in a way I’m not really here yet. I’m starting a new part of my life but I’m not really present, I don’t really here for the beginning. “Where are you?” asks the man. “Well I’m not sure that I am in any place in particular. I mean, it’s been such a whirlwind, these last few years, I just need to set down and take stock. I’m in twenty different places, well, five at last, and I feel like I need to pull them together, or resolve them or something. It seems like my life has been divided out into five different parts, like musical chords from separate melodies, and I want each one to somehow resolve into the others, or harmonize, or make a sequence that fits together, I’m not sure, really. If it were possible to do this, I could go on to the next ‘movement,’ you know, develop the composition, because then it would be possible to bring the past into the present, move it forward. . . This is all vague, I know.” “That’s alright, but tell, how do you imagine the composition might develop, where will it go?” Michael looks at the red and yellow thread tied around his wrist and he senses that he is in the fourteenth century temple of Kedarnath, where the pujari, the temple priest, tied the thread during a worship ceremony to Lord Shiva. He is steeped in a cacophony of sounds, in Sanskrit chant, voices singing devotion to the god, bells. He recalls the thick smell of sandalwood and senses the smooth surface of the stone as a mixture of water, milk, and butter runs over it. “I can’t say, really. I guess I just don’t want to lose any of it.” “You don’t want to lose any of the composition,” said the man. “No, well yes, I sometimes feel as though I’ve stepped from one room into another and left my life behind, except it’s not just one room, it’s many. In any one of them, there are things that are vibrant, that I love and understand, that are important to me, that are parts of me, in a way. It’s a though in each room I am a certain way, then I step into another and I’m another way.”
“What does it feel like to be in so many rooms?” He asks. “It’s like watching a film of your life, you know, not being in it.” “And what does that feel like?” the Indian doctor persists. Michael pauses again and then says slowly, as though trying out the words, “like being behind a glass, being nowhere. I can be with someone, somebody I really care about, or a place that know or love, but I can’t be with them . . . or in that place. It’s like being alone. Like floating in space.” Timblo wonders about Michaels reference to not being able to be with someone -- is it someone in particular? – but he registers this question for later and instead he says, “you feel alone, isolated. from others.” Michael responds, “yes, and sometimes it’s more than isolation or loneliness. I can feel desperate, even terrified. Not all the time, but in waves, ones that rise up slowly and cover me for a while,then recede. If I’m in it and I’m with somebody, even talking on the phone to someone, and yet feel like I am in a distant place, unreachable, like that person cannot know me or what I am suffering. So I am alone in that.” Timblo sits with both feet on the floor, leaning forward slightlyinto Michael’s words, listening as they wash over him, sensing their impression on him. He hears the words ‘alone in that’ again in his mind and wonders. Desperation, terror, alone in that. But desperation or terror from what? He wonders, alone in what? He looks at Michael and his face forms into a slightly quizzical expression as he formulates the question, but Michael responds, seeing that the doctor hears that there is something more.” “I don’t know if I can put this into words” he says, and pauses. Timblo is silent. “In my worst moments, it’s not really the isolation that I feel, or at least that’s not what I think of. I don’t think of anything. I feel something beyond words or thoughts, something searing or, I don’t know, crushing maybe.” He pauses again. “I don’t feel suddenly like I’m dying or can’t breath, and it’s not like I’m stuck in a small space and can’t get out. None of that, really.” He looks at Timblo’s face and their eyes meet. A moment of uncertainty in Michael, who wonders how what he is going to say will seem to the man. Michael senses the familiar form of Indian eyes, which are large and oval shaped, a deep olive-brown in color. Rimmed by fields of black and grey bushy eyebrows, Timblo’ eyes seems almost expansive in the moment. They convey presence of mind but no effort at discernment or analysis, only receptivity.
“Density,” says Michael. “Sometimes I feel the sheer mass of things, their concreteness, their thickness. Something can feel so compressed, so . . . impossibly dense, and this feels intolerable, painful. And I can’t really explain why. It’s as though things are immovable or vast. But the things themselves are not always so. I’ve felt this while sitting and reading in one of those old British houses in the Himalayan hills, the houses that have such thick walls and he windows are all sort of recessed in them. The sense just came on and I feel it in me, an invasive sensation of, I don’t know, being crushed maybe, but not really . . . like imploding or being erased, obliterated. And as I say it can come on when I am near other things. I felt this way once when I was sitting on a concrete bench in Hyde Park, and from heavy pillars inside a mosque, or by the columns at the entry to a cathedral or a temple in India. I’ve even felt it from the trees on the footpath to my research village. I sit down with my assistant for a rest on the trail and looking at one of the old banyan trees, it suddenly feels so compressed to me. A searing anxiety comes up in me and yet there is absolutely nowhere to go, no way to escape it. I’ve managed through dangerous situations, either natural ones while I’ve been hiking, or social dangers, like the unrest and rioting in Mussoorie or the police charges in Dehra Dun. But this feeling, this anxiety, I can feel that there is absolutely no way out and that there is no way to figure a way out, no strategy, because . . .” he pauses, wondering exactly how totally deranged he must seem, and is, to this Indian man, who probably grew up around banyan trees and never once felt disturbed by their thickness. “. . . because this feeling is not about ideas. It’s not about thoughts or words, like I said. It’s not about anything.” Timblo finds himself about to ask what it is about, but catches himself. Michael continues, now more animated because the words are flowing and at least point toward what he wants to describe. “I’ve felt something like this in open spaces!” he says “where an open field like a cricket pitch or the expansive interior of a cathedral feels like it has mass, like the distance from one end to the other somehow has mass and weight. Getting from one end to the other seems impossible, and the image of the space, when it forms in my mind, gives me a jolt, that inescapable . . . sense.” Michael has begun to feel the sensations he is describing. His brows are furrowed and his shoulders gathered in, his face is tense but vibrant. He pauses, inhales and then blows out a quickbreath, at the same dropping his head and so that he looks to the floor. His breath is still for a moment. He raises his eyebrows, forming an expression that reflects both a clarifying thought and his resignation to it. He raises his eyes again to see in Timblo’s that his listener is still there. “In a way,” he says, “sometimes time has this quality of density. When I think about the future, I mean even when I think about the next few days or hours, I can have this sense of a kind of impenetrable mass between now and then. And I can feel a sudden chill, or sometimes a sick feeling or a pit in my stomach, but mainly it seems intolerable. And wrestling with this sense is exhausting. . . .” Michael is silent for a while. Timblo says nothing but stays focused on Michael and sits with the atmosphere of anguish that Michael’s words and expressions have created in the room. “The fact of the matter,” says Michael, after some time, “is that the only really dense thing around here is me,” he smiles slightly. “I’m the thick one.”