Dreaming in Meaning

So, I met Sarah Schulman. Ilana, Beccah, Michelle, and I met Sarah Schulman, actually, and then we ate Greek omelettes at a diner with her. It was extraordinary, stirring, emotionally exhausting. Just a few weeks ago I’d referred to her as my idol in psychic integrity. And then I met her. We went to see her new play, “Manic Flight Reaction,” at Playwrights Horizons in New York, and afterwards, we clustered around her, expectant, admiring faces tilted towards her, and were barely able to say, “We loved your play!” before she said, “I haven’t eaten – do you want to meet me at the diner in twenty minutes?” I really thought I had slipped tracks into an alternate reality, or was having a waking dream. In fact I didn’t quite believe her until the diner was indeed located where she promised it would be, and she walked through the door and joined us at our booth.

What does it feel like to meet one’s psychic idol? Since you probably haven’t met yours, I will tell you. Meeting your psychic idol is a terrifying prospect. You look to this person to be a model of psychic wholeness and integration, or to be as whole and integrated as you ever want to be. They’re crazy in ways you recognize and capable of achieving mutual recognition, you hope, with you. They make you feel less lonely. Should actually meeting your psychic idol result in a net gain in alienation, psychic distress and tumult is sure to be the result.

I was worried that meeting my psychic idol would feel quite a bit like meeting the raft of psychoanalysts whose couches I’ve recently been sitting on. A modern-day high priest, an analyst can explain yourself and your world to you and holds mystic knowledge, such as the keys to self-love and meaningful engagement with the world. So do Sarah Schulman’s novels, trust me. In the absence of knowing how to fashion meaning from sheer chaos and multiplicity, analysis interspersed with Rat Bohemia seems like the best and least lonely solution. But nothing is lonelier than the solution disproved; the distant, self-involved, self-motivated analyst, the analyst who doesn’t get it. I’ve already discovered this much. So what if Sarah Schulman proved to be motivated by bad faith? What if she, too, wanted to feed her ego, wanted to tell the story her own way? What if she was on an island, alone, deluded, writing off the wrong people? If so, then I could draw no other conclusion than that I was doing the same thing.

She was wearing a black suit jacket and black tapered pants, black shoes, and the same shirt – one with big turquoise and brown and black paisley swirls, with swathes of lace – that she wore in the photograph of herself accompanying the New York Times profile. Her hair is dark brown, soft, thin, long and fluffy. She has a lovely face that gets softer and more sympathetic the longer you look at it. Her hands are small and move directly. She drank a Diet Coke with lemon, and took some of Ilana and Michelle’s french fries. After an hour and a half, her dinner dates, a couple from New Jersey whom she knew from her childhood, arrived, and she left us without fanfare. I liked looking at her best when she wasn’t looking directly at one of us, when she was looking to the side, her mind moving on its own. I’m trying to hold onto her tone of voice, how words sounded as they came out of her mouth.

We sat with her for a long time. She did not seem bored. She remembered all of our names. She asked us questions. Talking with her was easy. I felt like I was interviewing her for a glossy magazine with my four jet-setter best friends. I felt extraordinarily lucky, plucked from the crowds. She said many smart things, some of which I managed to quickly memorize and many more of which are lost forever to the world of that corner diner.

“If we are living in censorious times, then people need to know that.”

“All we can do is tell the story of the emotional and historical dimensions of our condition, and outsiders will always bastardize that.”

***

My other piece of news is our car trip. Five old friends, one old Volvo. Sometimes you look out at your friends and you just can’t believe how damn hilarious, witty, sharp, loving, mature, gorgeous, sexually appealing, centered, conflicted, frightening, lovable, and genius they are, no matter how long your car trip or how clogged the traffic or how squished your limbs are, and this was one of those times.