Introduction:
Why on earth should I be writing about me? Who wants to read my life story, for heaven’s sake? It’s only what I have to say about all of us that matters, not who or what I was before I learned what makes us tick! Or what I’ve strangely become. But I’m writing it anyway. Reluctantly, clueless as to why and with no idea of what I’m supposed to put in here or leave out. Under orders from whatever it is that’s moving me around this life’s chessboard, I’m churning it out despite an inner discomfort that borders on pain. I keep asking, “Do I have to?” and keep on getting yeses so strong I can’t distrust them. The pendulum I use to get answers from my mysterious motivator doesn’t just wag meekly from side to side in the usual “uh-huh” fashion, it swings away like the boldest kid in town on an inner tube hanging from the old oak tree.
I just tried it again and even gave it my strongest personal-power push, with which I can generally make it go back and forth, sideways, or shiver to a complete standstill at will. And I still couldn’t budge it from that darned “Yes, darn it!” arc. In my old life, my former “normal” one as a writer, I’d made a good start on the middle volume of what was to be a humorous autobiographical trilogy. Done Erma Bombeck style, the opening salvo, covering my husbands-and-lovers years, was titled “Happily Never After: or Help! My Glass Slipper Broke & My Prince Turned Into A Frog!” It was unavoidably complete with all-holds-bared sex scenes and had adulterated Aesop’s fable morals at the end of each chapter. As a mainstream writer, it was an appropriate thing to do.
But, now I’m a philosopher. Sort of. More philosopher-like than anything else, anyway. And we’re not supposed to write about ourselves, are we? Besides, I’ve turned into kind of a generic sentient being, a non-specific-person charged with observing the human race at a proper distance. Which is what I’ve been doing now for about 5 years. As such, it seems to me that I don’t have any relevance as a member of any particular species and no importance whatsoever. So...why’m I being made to bring up all the dumb details of a dumb, not-aware-yet life, even if it was way ‘n beyond, beyond-ordinary? Who’ll give a darn??? If you, who are at this very moment reading this, are not either a close relative or a former husband or lover seeking only to find the sue-able bits, I’ll eat the first chapter raw. Well... allright, I’ll be very, very, very surprised.
This feels like I’m making myself out to be important enough for folks to want to know about. That doesn’t feel good. It doesn’t feel right. For some reason, I was yanked out of the “real” life I used to live and plopped down in one that seems to be a melange of scenarios out of L. Ron Hubbard, Jules Verne, the Book of Mormon and Art Buchwald. With a little Edgar Cayce thrown in for the heck of it. It’s fine with me, no complaints. But that’s why I’m having trouble with this life story stuff. I gave up all attachments, ownership of anything at all, having a home anywhere, and even all 7-kid/14-grandkid family connections in order to follow what feels to me like “the GOOD source in the universe”. In a serious, real-life twist to a classic line from that classic Hollywood comedy, like the Blues Brothers, “I’m on a mission from God!”... and she’s not who you think He is. Others call it “Yahweh” or “God” or “Allah” or “Christ” or whatever. I call it “mother”. Having divested myself of my old-life, with all of its wants, goals, etc., I can’t figure out why I should now be meant to drag it all up again. And put it into print no less, when nobody’s likely to read it.
But, since I also gave up having to have answers, I’m doing it anyway. It’s more likely that you, the reader(s?), will find out the reason, than I. Maybe this is one of those things that’ll be discovered only long after I’m dead and gone. Maybe by then, the work I was led to do will be read. If you and those who come after you are lucky, maybe it will even be heeded and followed. That does not seem likely to me at this point, but one never knows, does one? All I know is, I’m supposed to be boring someone with tales of my old self and the incredible, mind-boggling story of what and “who” I became. I will do my utmost to make it as un-boring as possible.
[To all still alive who figure in this saga, my apologies for exposing your identity, but it wouldn’t be true if I used fake names, places & so on. Truth is truth. What you will find here is only my view of it. May you all find your “purpose” as I did.]
maia
Poitiers, France
24 Avril 2001
maia who?
[ma.i.a: 1. Eldest of the Pleiades, who were daughters of the Titan Atlas, son of Uranus and his mother/wife Gaia, she who is the deistic personification of the earth.
2. Brightest of 7 stars in the Pleiades group. Greek: Great Mother, little mother, midwife. Also witch. Maya in Hindi: goddess personifying the power that creates phenomena, breath of life, illusion]
How’d I get to be “maia”? Good question. It was weird. That’s all I can think of to call all this. “WEIRD”. In capital letters, quotation marks, full-color Day-Glo neon! Weird things happened. All kinds of weird stuff just kept sort of popping up, dropping in my lap... and into my head. It still does! Whatever’s going on, it’s not over yet. Whatever’s fiddling around with me is still at it. Full-time. I’m not sure when it all started. The most notable, rememberable kick-off event though, was the “Money Train” thing horror... thing’s not bad enough. Proabably no one but me noticed. Or remembers, even if they did spend a few seconds reacting to the story. Bear with me if I ramble a bit, it’s kinda hard not to, this far down the road. It was back in late ‘94 or early ‘95.
A stupid, idiotic, sophomoric, moronic, (get the point?) second-rate flick, it had a mostly unknown cast headed by Woody Harrelson, who’s mostly known for being able to replicate Larry Flynt, the “Hustler” creep. Tells you something ‘bout Woody, huh? Anyway, in this dumb cops-gone-wrong epic, the goal was to rip off the NYC subway car that picks up all the ticket change ($37 million or so). Standard stuff. What wasn’t so standard was a little side bit they threw in as a bonus for the bored. In it, this “real” baddie (the other bad guys being good-guys-only-gone-a-little-bad), an ingenious small-change artist, had a handy-dandy little device hidden under his cruddy bum garb, that spouted lighter fluid on demand. Neat, huh?
Yeah, a real brainstorm. Well, what he does is threaten the subway ticketseller with instant immolation (having a lit Zippo at the ready) if she doesn’t shove the day’s take through the side door STAT (that’s hospital-ese for NOW). He pulls this gimmick twice in the course of our saga. Second time around, the booth goes up in flames. Since it’s one of the heroine-cops on stake-out inside, not just your humble, everyday working stiff, she escapes, naturally. Just a short bit, really. Some comic relief between racing trains, cars, helicopters aloft, flatfeet on foot, etc. But...
You know how it is. Monkey see, monkey do. And some ape did. One week afer the NY Times’ double-page-spread-touted premiere in the Big Apple, a poor hard-working, under-paid, Brooklyn branch subway ticketseller who wasn’t a hero/heroine in anyone’s over-budget Hollywood dream scheme got torched just like in the movie. With one big difference. It was for real. No one hollered, “Cut!” in time to keep him from being barbequed over 80% of his body. You know what the worst part was? He lived. If you can call what he was reduced to, living. (Where do I come in? And maia? Hold on, we’ll get there.)
I heard about it just like anyone who watches the news once in a while, even though I was living in Seattle then. Like everyone else, I cried, “Oh, no! How awful!” And went on living my half-and-half life. Half great, half lousy, thanks to another long story I won’t go into right now. I’d been “making a new life” for myself and my youngest of 7, my youngest daughter of 6. She was well embedded in the ballet company of her choice there and I was setting up the writer’s studio of my dreams in our tall, skinny, little “tree house” that had a great view of Lake Washington from its plethora of decks and window-walls.
I had an agent who loved my work, one finished novel, another well along, a super screenplay, a book of triple-x-rated short stories, a humorous auto-biographical epic in the works and sundry other stuff poised to take both publishing and picture worlds by storm. I loved to write. If I couldn’t write, I couldn’t live. All who read my stuff loved it, so some of it would eventually have gone somewhere. If not to the top, at least “out there”. Then one day or night, there on the news was the “Money Train” story again. It was a short side item, one of those they just read, with a tiny little inset picture up in the corner. I’d have missed it, if I blinked. One of those weird things I guess, that I didn’t. The man had died. That’s all it was. Just that little news-worthy follow-up and a quick gloss-over of the film’s “alleged” connection to what was done to him to make him die.
It hit me so hard, I couldn’t understand why they didn’t make more of it. For over 6 months that man had suffered the agonies of Hell, his family suffering most of it right along with him. It took him over half a year to die, while all of them no doubt were praying every second of that time that he’d be allowed to. All because some bleeping screenwriter thought it would be a bleeping-cool idea to have that bleeping- awful scene in that bleeping movie! As sobs of sorrow for the victims tore into me, a tsunami-sized wave of rage aimed at all who had anything to do with that flick hit. But... right in its wake, came shame.
While cursing the writers, producers, director, actors, even everybody who bought a ticket and saw the thing, I suddenly realized I couldn’t be a part of that any more. I had been, hadn’t I? I went to movies and bought books with various kinds of violence in them. The stuff I wrote had not-so-nice stuff in it, even if it was to make a point that showed good winning out over evil. I realized that day that no one pays attention to the good stuff. All they remember is the bad. That’s what they get off on. No matter how much good-aimed stuff I could load my work with and I always did, the parts that would impress my fellow humans would be the most “inhuman” ones. They didn’t want to learn how to be better. They wanted to go on vicariously enjoying being worse!
I think I cried for hours. I remember wandering into that “perfect” writer’s studio I’d just put the finishing touches on and looking at all the work I had sitting there in various stages of sale-readiness. Running my eyes over the hundreds of books on all aspects of human history and behavior that I’d been amassing for some reason I wasn’t quite aware of. I thought about that man and his family and what they all went through for the sake of other people’s “entertainment” and wanted to scream, “You all killed him!” to the whole bleeping world. And I knew I’d been one of those “all”. And I knew I could never write another word of commercial fiction as long as I lived. As I looked at all the work I’d loved writing, that I’d looked forward to sharing with the world, it was as if it was someone else’s.
It was as if I’d looked at my much beloved children one day and suddenly they didn’t seem to be mine anymore. As if they couldn’t be mine. As if it wouldn’t be right if they were. I had to leave all my book-children. My terrific movie-I-dreamed child. My still-gestating play babies. All my wordy offspring that hadn’t taken their first steps yet. It seemed to me I’d be committing some crime, some sin against good in the universe if I went on doing what I did best, what I was happiest doing. There was a deep-down “knowledge” all at once, that I had to leave the world that could make things like that happen. I had to go out in the “nowhere” and try to figure out why we are the way we are.
I knew as if I’d always known, even though it just came to me then, that for some reason, I was meant to find out what makes humans act so inhumanly toward each other. To find out why no one even seemed to care enough to wonder. Smaller “weird” stuff had been happening for some time (that I’d finally noticed, at least), so that big one just sort of fit right in, incredible as it seems to me, even now. I mean, I was one of your all-time cosmic-class thing lovers! And I’m suddenly going to leave behind not only my favorite things, but my favorite, perfect house, my finally perfect studio, and last but not least, my last and most perfect, most favorite child!? To go I knew not where and do I knew not what, for what reason, I hadn’t the slightest clue!!! Hey, if that’s not weird, what is?
Here, I have to back up a bit. One of the other weirdnesses was a trip I made, clear out of the blue, to Greece. A few months earlier, I’d “come across” in suitably mysterious fashion, an ad for a house rental on the island of Mykonos, which I’d been to twice before- briefly- on cruises. Without batting an eye, I booked the place for six weeks in the summer. My daughter was going to visit with old ballet school friends back in her old NYC stomping grounds, so everything fit like a jigsaw puzzle. It put itself together without me touching a single piece, I swear! I’d finally connected with an agent who loved my work, due to a Marx Brothers kind of mix-up with a Canadian rip-off outfit and he was working hard on selling my novels and screenplay.
About that time, I got sick, which I rarely did. Some sort of flu thing that hung on a couple of weeks. Bed-&-TV-bound, I watched the entire OJ Simpson debacle, the OK City horror and reruns of Waco and Ruby Ridge non-stop, along with old movies in the off-hours. What you might call a 24/7, full-immersion course. Human Nature 101. Never a big fan of my own race, this put me right over the edge. But I still hoped to sell my imaginative novelist’s/screenwriter’s versions of it. Then I went to Mykonos.
Again weirdly, I took my “Bible” along... a huge, unabridged dictionary that, along with a slew of lighter tomes, put me way over TWA’s weight allowance. I think I’d already started a new thing on how words we use were changed through the centuries, so that some are actually the reverse of what they started out meaning. “The Gender Conspiracy” would have been a real shaker-upper. Anyway, on the plane, I suddenly started pouring out lots of other totally new things. Essays, no less. I must have written 50 pages or more, annoying the hell out of fellow passengers with the light on, while they were trying to watch the movie. Turned out that was just for openers.
Weird happenings hit a peak in the ancient farmhouse I’d rented. Poised almost at the top of the highest hill on Mykonos, the sea way below took over the view and you could almost feel millennia peel away, if you stood still enough. I’d hung a little brass bell from the hanging light fixture, to tinkle in the breeze and a funny capiz shell mobile-like mess from another one, that would rustle in the slightest riffle. They started rustling and tinkling right away. Then, they stopped. Then... they’d tinkle and rustle away when the air was dead still! Feeling silly, but playing along, I’d say to them, “OK, if you’re telling me something, ring once for Yes, twice for No.” And they did! Stuff like that.
From the git-go, the stuff I’d started writing on the plane, wouldn’t stop. As soon as I got settled in, lo and behold, the owners’ rental agent on the island turns out to be a typist and she does up the work fast as I could pen it. I send some off to my agent and he calls- half-way ‘round the world from Edmonton, in Canada!- talks for over an hour and tells me to keep it coming. “It” was like nothing I’d written before. It was all about how stupid and selfish and self-destructive we humans are, and how we could learn to not be. It was mostly asking questions the readers would find answers to themselves, than telling folks what to do. What I called “philosophy for everyday use”. My 27-year-old, male agent/editor even swallowed the necessarily feminine-bent tone of much of the work, without flinching. Said he couldn’t argue with the truth I presented so convincingly backed-up with historical evidence.
So... after I got back, came the “final straw” event that headed me out into the wild whatever yonder. My daughter was turning 18 and had been making noises like she needed to have her own life away from mother’s keen eye. A ballet dancer since before she could walk, she’d worked hard all her young life for a single goal, had reached it before most people even know what one is, and as ballet dancers do, had grown up at a very early age. I’d gotten her a car of her own, had her professionally driver-school taught for safety’s sake and she was an official salaried member of the ballet company she’d finished her training with. It was the right time for me to go.
My own life was being made miserable, as usual, by her dad, my second ex. Her living with me didn’t set well. He wouldn’t rest till he had the full set of my seven kids in his collection (the last 2 were his, he’d adopted the others). The other six were all gathered around him with their various mates, kids, etc. in his father-founded bleep-pile, Las Vegas. She was the only holdout and he would have treated her better if she wasn’t with me. As it was, she suffered along with me, whenever he felt like suing me for something, to use up what little I had left of what little I got in the divorce that he hadn’t ever stopped trying to get back.
So, I signed over our sweet little house and all the lifetimes of my favorite beloved things in it, to my favorite, beloved daughter on her 18th birthday, after cashing in what old-age security funds I had left and buying a 29-foot RV to disappear in. Packing it with not much more than my computer equipment and the four or five hundred books most pertinent to a study of the human race, off I went, into the sunset. Well, since I headed east, I guess it was “into the sunrise”. Leaving all that connected me to my old life behind, I went anonymously into the pure, unpeopled desert. I had no idea, however, what I was supposed to do when I got there, besides read up on “us” and try to figure out what made humans behave so inhumanely.
When I’d pick up an Indian hitchhiker, stop at their roadside stands for a look, and once after a breakdown, when a Navajo took me and my rig home with him to fix it for me, if asked my name, I’d just say it hadn’t found me yet. That’s how it felt. I was nobody in particular any more. Who/whatever I was meant to be, I’d know when the time came, I figured. Now, I was never what you’d call a “spiritual” person. I did not believe in any version of “God” and knew all religions were con games for those who enjoyed being suckers. Where I got these strange ideas from, I’d no idea. But, they felt right. The “Indians” I met knew right away. I was on a “vision quest” they said.
It wasn’t anything strange to them. I had the soul of a Hopi/Navajo/Apache, or whatever the speaker’s tribe was, they’d say. That felt right, too. Some of these new friends, not letting it stop them, called me “No-Name-Yet”! So that’s who I was for five or six months. I think it was when I “weirdly” ended up in Greece for another six weeks, that the name finally found me. Leaving the rig in Galveston when my favorite ship, the Stella Solaris, showed up on its way back to a summer season in the islands, I spent over a month on board as we crossed the Atlantic. She hit all the main tourist ports on the way to Piraeus and I stayed on for the first few days of its island hops, got off when it hit Mykonos. It was yet another of those things I was “meant” to do, or all the pieces wouldn’t have fallen into place by themselves again.
I wasn’t able to totally divorce myself from my old self, since I was driving a vehicle, my home-on-wheels. I’d stashed my driver’s license away in case some yo-ho rear-ended me and the cops would want to make sure I wasn’t an RV-booster. And, for some strange reason, along with it, was my old passport. Ah-hah! “Coincidence” you say? Who knows. But when I turned onto that dockside road on Galveston Island and saw a big banner across the street that said, “Welcome Stella Solaris” and it turned out it was due the next day, and there was only one cabin left available... I had my passport! I also had what remained of my $133,000 old-age money after paying cash for the RV and tooling around border-to-border, coast-to-coast for about a year.
There also just “happened” to be a storage facility half a block from the pier that would take my portable casa for a couple of months pre-paid. Not to mention, the Pier I shop next door to the inn that was next to the pier, where I could get whatever I needed for a cruise-cum-lengthy-island-stay. And whatever else might be in store for me next. It just came to me! I was “maia” on the ship!!! I remember the purser, an old friend from previous trips, changing his passenger list from my “legal” name, as I explained, to my “professional” one. They knew I was a writer, so it wasn’t any big deal. All writers are “different”... right?
So... maia must’ve “found me” sometime before then. Does it matter to anyone but me, just when? I’m kind of compulsive about needing to know. Never really comfortable till I can figure everything out. I do remember that the first long stay on Mykonos, when there was all that bell-ringing going on, I started thinking about a name to use for the new work. Gaia came up from somewhere. The mother earth thing seemed sort of close, but not close enough. I think I thought of Maia then, but only as a pen name for the new stuff I was writing. One of the prettiest names I’d ever come across, it was the name of an incredibly beautiful little girl who was in a ballet class with my second oldest daughter decades earlier. Gaia made me think of it again.
Sometime in my wanderings later, I must have started using it for me, as well as for the work. Funny, isn’t it, that I can’t remember exactly when or why? Maybe it’s the way of vision quest names. That’s how Crazy Horse got his. He saw a horse acting weird when he was out there questing, and there you are... instant name change. All I know is, from the first time someone asked my name and I said “maia” it felt like I’d always been her. Never felt as strange as I’d thought it would. Not awkward at all. From the very first I had no trouble reacting automatically when called that, though I’d been answering to something way different for the previous 57 years!
It seemed pretentious to have a capital letter for what felt like such a humble non-person, so I do without one. Same thing for a “last name” that really only labels one as the property of this man or that one. If just “maia” isn’t enough for anybody, I knew it would be their problem, not mine. It does cause a little hassle now ‘n then, like when I needed an account up on the Hopi mesas to get propane and the computer did not know how to deal with a one-name name. The neat Hopi who ran the local office was outfoxed when he typed in “none” in the space for “customer’s last name” and it came out “Maia None”! Then there was the TV satellite company in the South Bronx, that made me “Maia Writer” by combining who with what. Officialdom refuses to accept a generic human. Too hard to control, I guess. Good!
Okay. That covers the new “who”. Before we get into the rest of the “what” I should pave the way with a little more about the old one. The “now me” must’ve started back there in the “then me”. From here, I can see signs were trying to make themselves noticed, but I was too stuck in the scheiss of everyday life, love and all that rot, to see them for what they really were. Signs & portents. In olden days folks knew enough to pay attention to ‘em. Nowadays, we’re too smart and sophisticated. Too civilized for our own good is what it comes down to. Whether at some level I did pay attention, or if I just followed them without knowing it, I can’t tell from here. Looking back though, I can be sure that I either followed or was led every step of the way.
Even before the last years of unbelievable, not-possible weirdnesses, my pre-maia life was way too over-full of close to everything in human experience you could think of, to be just a haphazard series of “coincidences”. It was as if, needing me to learn enough to end up writing what I do as “maia” something plunged me into as much of what human life has to offer as possible, so I’d soak up the knowledge first-hand. See what you think.
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