Revolution (6 page)

If you are in Wembley Stadium, though, and Hull have just gone 2–0 up against the favorites, Arsenal, and all about you are thousands of people dressed in yellow and black, the same as you, singing the same songs as you, craving the same outcome as you, there is a synchronicity that takes you out of the self. Where else do we get to cry and pray and laugh and sing in communion these days? Where else do we receive the affirmation that we are connected to one another, that we are not born alone to die alone? In front of our TVs? Staring obediently at the glare of a smartphone? Infuriated in traffic in an aluminum cell?

We are imprisoned within, hypnotized without, denying ourselves access to the internal peace and external harmony. Can we execute the perfect jailbreak when we have become our own jailers?

O
NCE BY CHANCE WHILST IN A CHURCH BASEMENT WITH OTHER
members of an abstinence-based recovery community, I heard coming through the grate an almighty wail from the main church hall.

A sound beyond language both intriguing and disturbing.

I regularly keep the company of other recovering drunks and addicts, as I learn a lot from those with more time clean than me and more still from those with less. People with more time tell me how they continue to cope with an external world that will not submit to their imagined demands and an ego that is defined by its insatiability, this restless demon that forever wants more, that lingers like a tapeworm at the gateway to the soul, devouring and rejecting according to its needs.

From those that stagger in with fumes on their breath, stains on their teeth, and fear in their eyes, I learn the most important lesson, gratitude. Whatever I endure in recovery, I need never again suffer the indignity of active addiction. The despair and hopelessness. The inexhaustible cycle of incremental self-immolation. I am reminded of how far I’ve come, of the miracle that, with help and humility, I can, one day at a time, live free from drugs and alcohol.

Today, though, the racket from the vent enchants me. This perversely seductive din is in need of investigation, so I quietly slip out the back, though I could’ve clanged out in metal wellies with this crescendoing hullabaloo unabating in the next room. There is no interior door that leads me to the source of the siren, so I wander
round the Kensal Green church, a typical church in West London—St. Martin’s or St. something, a few hundred years old or whatever, on a corner in the early evening. As I circumnavigate the unremarkable perimeter the alien choir grows louder and I’m pretty certain I’ve found the right door, so I give it an assertive shove, but it’s locked. I strain to reach, a tiptoed meerkat peer up to the window, high like an apple in a fable, but I can’t see nothing, so I do a first knock. The first knock always quiet; the split intention of getting attention without causing a disturbance; the second knock a little more committal; the third, almost an attempt to split the wood, is the one they hear, the only one they heard, the one I might as well’ve done in the first place; if you’re going to knock, knock.

Within, there is a sparse congregation. Surprisingly small given the discordant requiem of caterwauling. Of the thirty parishioners, all eyes face the front but for a girl aged about nine at the back with a book, at a doll’s house desk, all little like when you go back to your old school.

I try not to look meek, although I wouldn’t mind inheriting the earth, when I walk in; I try to seem, in spite of appearances, like I should be there. At this point, though, it doesn’t matter, because the only person looking is the little girl, and she is super friendly and smiles. The adults, the everybody else, are looking to the front—well, facing the front, because most of them have their eyes closed or rolled back in their heads or facing down at their feet as they sway and incant.

At the front there are three men, I reckon African, I reckon everyone is African—in the room, I mean, not everyone, although if humans all came from Africa originally, then I suppose we all are. If humanity, instead of an object, is an event, then we are. If you watched in fast-frame photography, like a fungus, or a flower opening and shutting, with the sped-up movement of the sun, if you removed the concept of time that applies only to our linear lives, then humanity just sprang up and spread and grew and conquered, then turned in on itself, then what? I suppose that’s where we are now.

Not this lot, though, in Kensal Green. This thirty or so humans
are entranced in some dance. The main man is a shoeless bearded bloke. His hair and beard are gray, so his face looks like it’s pushing through a storm cloud or dirty bubble bath or like when Lenny Henry used to do David Bellamy. He is speaking in tongues. Loudly. The fellas that are with him are too; up there at the front of this modest church hall, unadorned with wooden rows or pulpits or stained glass, much more a place where Scouts would meet up or scones would be sold than a spirit summonsed. There’s another bloke at the side playing a keyboard but you can only hear it intermittently because of the other, far-weightier tunes; unidentifiable lyrics, except once in a while I hear “Jesus,” like a twig floating by in a stream of babble.

Everyone looks poor. The women are mostly seated, occasionally escorted to the front by the equivalent of an altar boy or a verger. Once the women are there, the main man—the bearded preacher—bridles and jabs, spasms and gurns like a pre-ejaculatory James Brown. The younger ones—a fella with a shaved head and an orange polo shirt like a cashier at Halfords might wear, and a bloke who in my head has already been replaced by Carlton from
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
—swoop round each new arrival to the stage area, though let me stress it is not a stage, not raised, distinguished only in that it is nominally the “front.” Intermittently, when a space becomes vacant, the assistants stray into the congregation to recruit another participant. The candidates are seemingly selected on the basis of eye contact, then ushered to the front. There is a pull-down screen with a projection of, I assume, a biblical text, again in an unrecognizable language, again but for the appearance here and there of “Jesus.”

It looks to me to be a patriarchy; the men are dominant. I stand at the back, not knowing quite where to put my hands. I try clasped at the back, like a royal being shown round a former colonial village, then at the front, like a footballer in a wall awaiting a free kick. The little girl, who seems to be the only person there taking any managerial responsibility, sweetly offers me a chair; I tell her I’m okay. Me and her are the only ones not in some degree of reverie.

Bellamy, Orange Shirt, and Carlton are screaming their heads
off. A tall, really tall, man with a shaved head in a long, really long, suit is having a wild time up there, with none of my self-doubt in where to position his hands: They are thrust heavenward, taut, like a Nazi for whom one “sieg heil” is just not enough, a double-barrelled Nazi.

The women sway and jump and shriek. Whilst this is all almost entirely foreign, there is something familiar, like a place in your mouth where food always gets caught. Something I recognize. It is orgiastic. This Christianity with a voodoo twist is on the brink of Dionysian breakdown. Through this ritual, I see the root of ritual. The exorcising of the primal, the men engorged, enraged, the women serpentine and lithe. Only the child excluded. I get on my knees, which a few other people are doing, out of respect but also because I’m beginning to sense that it’s only a matter of time before I’m ushered to the front. I’ve not been taught how to be religious. Religious studies at school doesn’t even begin to cover it. There the world’s greatest faiths and the universe’s swirling mysteries are recited like bus timetables.

No teacher of RE ever said to me: “Beyond the limited realm of the senses, the shallow pool of the known, is a great untamable ocean, and we don’t have a fucking clue what goes on in there.” What we receive through sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch is all we know. We have tools that can enhance that information, we have theories for things that we suspect lie beyond that information, filtered through an apparatus limited once more to those senses. Those senses are limited; the light range we detect is within a narrow spectrum, between infrared light and ultraviolet light; other species see light that we can’t see. In the auditory realm, we hear but a fraction of the sound vibrations; we don’t hear high-pitched frequencies, like dog whistles, and we don’t hear low frequencies like whale song. The world is awash with colors unseen and abuzz with unheard frequencies. Undetected and disregarded. The wise have always known that these inaccessible realms, these dimensions that cannot be breached by our beautifully blunt senses, hold the very codes to our existence, the invisible, electromagnetic foundations upon which our gross reality clumsily rests.

Expressible only through symbol and story, as it can never be known by the innocent mind. The stories are formulas, poems, tools for reflection through which we may access the realm behind the thinking mind, the consciousness beyond knowing and known, the awareness that is not connected to the haphazard data of biography. The awareness that is not prickled and tugged by capricious emotion. The awareness that is aware that it is aware.

In meditation I access it; in yoga I feel it; on drugs it hit me like a hammer—at sixteen, staring into a bathroom mirror on LSD, contrary to instruction (“Don’t look in the mirror, Russ, it’ll fuck your head up.” Mental note: “Look in mirror.”). I saw that my face wasn’t my face at all but a face that I lived behind and was welded to by a billion nerves. I looked into my eyes and saw that there was something looking back at me that was not me, not what I’d taken to be me. The unrefined ocean beyond the shallow pool was cascading through the mirror back at me.

Nature looking at nature. Not me, little ol’ Russ, tossed about on turbulent seas; these distinctions were engineered. On acid, these realizations are absolute. The disobedient brain is whipped into its basket like a yapping hound cowed by Cesar Millan.

When meditating, it is, initially, more tenuous. Let me explain it this way. You know that bloke who tightrope-walks between skyscrapers? No? You want his name? Google it yerself. His great triumph was a walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center—I don’t know the exact date, except it was some time before September 11, 2001. He walks across a thick metal cable strung between the two buildings. Obviously, this requires great training and presence of mind and, might I suggest, a touch of Wu-Wei. The last thing you want when suspended a mile above Manhattan in little ballet slippers is some taunting, recorded voice from your childhood telling you you’re a cunt. More than the incredible bravery of the man and his tenacity and focus, I was interested in how they attached the rope between the two buildings. A helicopter? An elevator? How do you get a metal cable that probably weighs a ton across a 200-foot gap a quarter of a mile in the sky?

What they did was attach a thin piece of very light fishing thread
to an arrow, then they shot the arrow between the two buildings. The thin thread was attached, and then wires, strings, ropes, and cables of gradually increasing thickness were pulled across. It is with increments of this nature that mantra meditation induces a different state of consciousness.

At first when you close your eyes, the mantra is like a thin thread, continually interrupted by other thoughts. A mantra is just a word, a thought vibration, repeated in the mind. At some point in the past, the mind has for some reason taken on the duty of trying to solve every single problem you are having, have had, or might have in the future, which makes it a frenetic and restless device.

There is always something for it to think, always something for it to solve, so whenever I first start to meditate, the mantra is a tiny clear droplet lost in a deluge of sludge. I’m not a person who finds meditation a doddle or to whom yoga comes naturally. To tell you the truth, I find the whole business a bit poncey and contrary to the way I used to see myself. It’s only the fact that I decimated my life by aggressively pursuing the models of living that were most immediately available—eating, wanking, drinking, consuming, getting famous—that I was forced to look at alternatives. Alternatives that you could call spiritual.

I’m not a total idiot: If taking drugs worked, I’d still be doing it; if promiscuous sex was continually fulfilling, I’d’ve carried on; if fame and money were the answer, I’d hurl this laptop out of the window and get on with making movies. They don’t work, in spite of what I was told, and there’s a reason for that, as we’ll discover.

I don’t see myself as a yoga person or a man who meditates and prays and eats well and says “Namaste” or “God bless you.” I became that because I exhausted all other options. There was a point, I’ll admit, when I flung myself full force into an L.A. New Age lifestyle. I’d just got divorced, and a movie I wanted to do well didn’t meet my expectations. My response to this was to stop shaving and start wearing pajamas outdoors.

That is relatively typical behavior for any lunatic; we see them everywhere—twitching, twisting, hollering at their imagined foes. The difference is I was doing it in Hollywood and my pajamas
looked suitably ethnic, so I think I got away with it. Although my mates have subsequently told me they were worried and, thinking about it, they did drop hints like “Trim your beard, you look like a shoe bomber” and “Stop wearing them gap-year trousers, you fuckin’ nut,” but I was immune.

A friend of mine, himself no stranger to mental illness, and that’s putting it lightly—he’s a right fucking fruitcake, living at his mum’s on disability benefits—said to me, “In India if you have a mental breakdown, they don’t build you back up again; they leave you in communion with God.” He then looked up, mimicking, I supposed, an Indian yogi, and raised his hands and eyes skywards as if he were playing a tiny accordion just in front of his hairline. “They say, ‘Ah, he’s in conversation with Brahman now,’ and they revere you. In this country they just give you a bus pass.” He carried on waving his hands and flickering his eyes.