Like the Guy in the Taoist Parable Clinging to the Riverbank
The following excerpt is from my new book, Days of Shock, Days of Wonder: The 9/11 Age, the Ways of the Mystics, and One Man’s Escape from Babylon in the Belly of a Whale, a contemporary memoir about my confrontation with the spiritual and cognitive dissonance of our times.
The conclusion of this excerpt is the first piece of the book that I wrote, long before I knew that I was writing a book. It marks a turning point in my story that made personal change possible. It was this moment of Taoist surrender to life’s current that pulled me out of the political realm of 9/11 truth activism and returned me to the Sufi path of the heart.
The book’s fourth and fifth chapters describe my exploration of Sufi mysticism with the “wild Sufis” of northern India. Here, at the end of the eighth chapter, the pendulum of my narrative swings away from the shock of politics and back to the wonder of the spirit. But like the men and women of spirit before us, from Jesus and Muhammad to Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King, I knew then that I would still have to return to the political one day without losing my balance again. And I’m happy – and grateful – to say that I did. But first I needed a good shove in the right direction.
Excerpt
IN FEBRUARY 2009 my days of living out of my backpack in a rented room came to an end. Kristy had gotten engaged. She was moving out to live with her boyfriend. I couldn’t pay the rent on my own or furnish the place, so I had to move out too. I found myself apartment hunting in the middle of winter, when the wind chill is forty degrees below zero and walking outdoors is painful. All I needed was a room with a kitchen at one end. Something for five or six hundred dollars a month. The best I could find was a a basement suite with windows that started near the ceiling. The fence next door was so close that it blocked out most of the sunlight.
Worse, I ended up doing what I’d said I wouldn’t. I bought a bathmat, a garbage can, a cutlery holder. A chair, a lamp, a coat rack. A sofa bed, a coffee table, two area rugs. A book shelf big enough to divide the room. Two mirrors framed in wood three feet across and six feet high to make the place feel bigger. In no time I’d racked up a debt of nearly three thousand dollars on my credit card. Like a good consumer, I was dancing with the bankers.
My new neighbour turned out to be a noisy savage into all-night binge drinking and shoot-em-up movies. The noise came through the connected fan vents above the stoves in our kitchens. And he beat his girlfriend. Their early morning fights ended with her screaming, “Don’t touch me, don’t touch me, don’t touch me!” Followed by the thud of his fists and then by her flight in a taxi with her pit bull in tow. Another man would’ve punished the guy for hitting her. He would’ve waited for the girlfriend to leave and then pummelled the bastard. But I wasn’t that man. I talked to him instead. But talk was all I had. And nothing changed.
MEANWHILE, MONTREAL 9/11 Truth was starting to fray. There was a running dispute over the content of our website. Some members wanted postings restricted to the truth about the attack and to the “deep political” agenda of the real attackers. Others said that we should cover all corruption and deception. As a compromise we agreed to add a disclaimer to the site. It explained that not all members condoned all postings. We agreed to disagree “in the spirit of rooting out the empirical truth.” This seemed to solve the problem.
But the conflict reached a crisis over Michael’s postings. In the fall he’d caused a row when he’d used the site to publish interviews with a woman who claimed to have dirt on Canadian politicians. Something about a prostitution ring. At issue was the woman’s credibility. Now he’d angered the group’s francophones. Something about Quebec’s separatist politicians being in bed with US globalists. At issue was Michael’s judgment. At our next meeting we confronted him. But there was nothing we could do. A friend of his had launched the website before Montreal 9/11 Truth was formed. We had no control. We talked about starting a second website under a different name. I was too angry to even consider it. Instead the night ended with me shouting at Michael down a university corridor as we headed to the metro station.
We soldiered on. On April 18 we held a lecture by Richard Gage. The founder of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. A reporter was in the audience from the National Post, Canada’s right-wing daily. Jonathan Kay. He was working on a book about the truth movement. He’d written that truth activists were no better than Holocaust deniers. When he spoke during the question period after the lecture, I heckled him. I was fed up with the propaganda war. On April 3 evidence that demolition explosives were used in the attack had been published for the first time in a peer-reviewed journal. A group of scientists had found “red/gray chips” of thermite in dust samples taken from four locations at ground zero. The findings had been verified by laboratories in the United States and Europe. It was the smoking gun!
But people weren’t convinced. It was making me crazy. I couldn’t read a newspaper, or watch a movie, or edit books for work without seeing the big lie. It was told over and over again in countless ways. False history was being written and played out under our noses. And if you told people, you got slandered. So I shouted at Kay from the back of the room.
I shouldn’t have. Two days after the Gage lecture I quit the truth movement. “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” That was one of our mottos. It bannered a lot of truth websites. I needed to figure out how to do that. The love had gone out of my actions. I’d lost the Sufi path.
ONE NIGHT AS I drifted toward sleep in the basement of sorrows, my neighbour’s girlfriend came home late and started banging on their door. He hollered from his place in front of the TV set. Then he went and let her in. The door slammed behind her. There was a thud. She cried, “You punched me in the face!” I shoved my earplugs deeper into my skull and closed my eyes to it all. The pipes that swished with the piss and shit of the tenants upstairs. The girl cradling her swollen jaw behind the wall. My useless rage.
I decided to move out. I’d lasted four months. I’d have to break the lease but it didn’t matter. The apartment wasn’t legal. There was a bylaw against basement suites so mine was rented out on the sly. The owner had to let me go. But it was June, when most leases ended in Montreal. On July 1 everyone would be moving to new digs. For two weeks I trudged across the city looking for rental signs in building windows. I visited half a dozen overpriced dives. Most were carved out of bigger apartments that had once been livable. In some, the kitchen was built into a closet, with the refrigerator standing out in the room.
I eventually found a place on the third floor of an old building that stretched along the street for two blocks. You could smell mould in the walls but I was desperate. At least it was above ground. There were treetops outside the windows. I filled out an application and paid the deposit. The landlord would have to check my references. Two days later he called to say that I should come and get my money back. It was noisy there, the walls were thin, I wouldn’t like it. My basement landlord had told him why I was moving out. I tried to explain that the problem wasn’t the noise but the violence. He didn’t care. It was mid-June and I was back on the street looking for an apartment.
The weather turned hot. I walked and walked. It gave me a throbbing hemorrhoid. I felt like the guy in the Taoist parable clinging to the riverbank. His fingers are swollen and bleeding. His body is being dashed to shreds by the rocks. But he won’t let go. After six blocks of agony I stopped at a pizza place to use the washroom and adjust things down below. I got a slice and shook on some hot peppers. I took a bite and burned my tongue. I sucked in some cooling air and inhaled a pepper flake. It seared my throat, I began to cough, and the spasms dislodged my hemorrhoid. That was when I gave up. I let the pepper do its worst. I let the hemorrhoid distend. I was done. The current could carry me where it wanted.
Notes:
1 By 2014 over two thousand architects and engineers had signed Richard Gage’s petition to Congress for a new investigation of the attack. One that would be independent and scientific. See http://www.ae911truth.org and N.H. Harrit et al., “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe,” Open Chemical Physics Journal 2, no. 1 (3 April 2009): 7–31. On the removal of steel from ground zero to conceal the use of explosives, see “The Expeditious Destruction of the Evidence at Ground Zero,” n.d., http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/groun....
2 This saying is likely a paraphrase of Gandhi: “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.” See B. Morton, “Falser Words Were Never Spoke,” New York Times, 29 August 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/opi....
