Chapter 1: Maybe Cynthia                 
Chapter 2: Past Lifes                                   
Chapter 3: Stoner                                          
Chapter:4: the Sacred                                  
Chapter 5: Spring 2015                                
Chapter 6: the substance of life and painting the city
Chapter 7: Three Portraits of Lucky
Chapter 8: Creep 
Chapter 9:The Psychic Lover
Chapter10: the Devil's Story
Chapter 11: a Snit with Ezra

There are some secrets I want to tell you about, around, a Joan and a Cynthia. Maybe Cynthia.
      Joan was a woman of my age. She was another of my father's ex-lovers that he, Ted, pushed in my direction to try and tease me away from my second wife, Teri.* Joan and I, though, simply developed a close professional interaction. Joan was a psychotherapist. She started coming to see me as a patient and brought her whole family, and she referred many of her friends and clients to me. She herself came regularly as a patient primarily to do deep psychological work. For a while I was her primary therapist.
     The story I want to tell concerns a patient of hers whom she referred to me, an artist called Cynthia who was deeply disturbed and very ill. We managed to produce an effing "miracle" the day before her scheduled surgery.

Cynthia had a "contracture" in her gut (in the later third of her ileum), five centimetres long on the barium swallow. She had not eaten, or passed stool, for eight days, and was scheduled for surgery. I was asked to visited her in hospital on the eve of her operation.
     We talked, some about white flowers, her mother and white funereal flowers. We also did some CranioSacral hands on "unwinding" over and under that contractured spot in her gut along with "visualizing". Cyn saw a prawn-like pink embryo, in her gut.
     Did it have a name? I asked.
     "Maybe Cynthia." (The patient's name was not Cynthia.)
     Did Maybe Cynthia have a message?
     "Yes. The message is 'No'."
     "No?"
     "No, I don't have to... I don't have to die." And with this ideation, realization, there was a "release" and my hands seemed to move three inches laterally (back towards me) and, after a pause, a second "release". My hands followed the tissue and now they seemed to travel three inches superior (cephalad). And Cynthia and I "knew" that the problem had resolved, that the constriction had released.
     She was radiant.
     In the morning Cynthia passed stool and she was hungry, so instead of surgery, she had breakfast. The hospital served her bacon and eggs!

{Ah! footnote: concerning the moving of my hands the "three inches" that appeared to accompany the "unwinding", the release of the constriction? It had to be in some sense (in large part) symbolic - a ritual that I had unconsciously devised - or at the very least it was a gross amplification. And the vectors, the direction was "wrong". (The release, very likely, was radial, of sphincter-like muscles, not lateral.) but, but who knows.}

Naturally I became very excited about the work I was doing with Cynthia. I became fascinated. She was intelligent, vivacious... And I found myself telling her that I found her attractive.
      "That's not a problem if it's only a little bit, is it?" Cynthia speculated. I was silent. And of course it was a problem. And the shit hit the fan when Cynthia discussed this transgression of professional boundaries with Joan, her therapist. Joan was outraged. I had betrayed her, Joan, and she told the world. (more or less). I was devastated.
     Oh, and I said she sounded like her mother (ten minutes into her strident denunciation, I needed her to take a breath, and that blew her away, for years…)

It was immediately after this phone conversation that I wrote Maybe Cynthia… (the poem) in the very first of my sketch books, woven there in with pictures…
     A few weeks later, Ted, my father, returned to Toronto from wintering in LA. I picked him up from the airport. Had I seen Joan? Ted asked. "Not lately," I answered. "I'll tell you about it tomorrow."
      The next day, round at his flat I told Ted the story in detail. I was rather defensive about the incident and when Ted questioned me about several aspects, my defensive response felt perhaps even a little belligerent, oh in a general way. I felt embarrassed, then, not just about the incident itself, but more so about the awkwardness, unpleasantness, I had brought, fleetingly, into the conversation. When I finished relating the story - and having discussed it in some depth; "My therapist says (this and that)" - we reached a still point. The other side of that still point I went over to Ted and sat beside him. I lay down and rested my head in my father's lap. Bosom of Abraham.
     After some moments Ted said, "I have something to tell you." Another pause, and he said, "I find you attractive."
     I rolled out of his lap, off the couch, to the floor (oh in laughter, in laughter)

(there are a couple of anecdotes, that were written here in the first draft, that I have now moved into the footnotes: click)

I should mention that I have been in therapy half my life, and that after Maybe Cynthia I did some training, in counseling: "I need better boundaries," I thought. And I got bounced out two courses (on Bioenergetic) by Big Mommas (by that I mean assertive, bossy, trumpish people {not necessarily large physically}).
     So, I was studying psychotherapy with a group that had been the "Toronto School of Bioenergetics", but then fell out with Lowen and devolved through several other names. Much of the falling out was over "drives" and "developmental stages"(1c). The new school didn't believe in them as such. I wrote a poem for Carl Moore (the other instructor: co-coordinator with the Big Momma) a rant about drives and stages, that needs a little bit of further explanation : "hy.drol.ical" pertaining to a model of drives as cisterns filling and discharging (from early ethology), and "e.thol'ged" is neologism pertaining to ethology (the zoological study of animals behaviour), and, "the return of the repressed" is a key Freudian phrase/concept.
    Here we go then… in a cockney accent    for the first stanza

The Baby with the Bath Water

what I think is that
when you was born
you was pushed
down
and out of a narrow passage

your skull bones was squished
and shifted like
tectonic plates
pin head you burst
neath your mother's tail

at first
you were a scream
a face
a mouth
and hunger
and mother was all

or that bottle

then you had another end
and consequence
cramps in the gut
and bupps
and little squeezy tease'ems
tumbles
life was not all ups

and then there was mother
and the wide world
there was war
beyond the window
and rumours of war
there was love
and anger and aloneness
in this twentieth century
history
tottering on the brink

I had an oral phase
from the first
and a phase I got into "agency"
with my face
from the first
to my mother

I discovered my hands
and played with them
a lot
ever since

I had a stage
a step
of denial
and a lot of this was around gut
and bum
and learning to say no

and I had attachments
to mum

and there were hungers and fears
urges and
drives
some of them built!
and your hy.drol.ical model
e.thol'ged them just fine

and there was terror
terror drives

there are all sorts of drives
dig?
both in and out of relationship

out?
skewed about
down into the unconscious belly

and then
there was
the return

   * * *

I brought the Baby with the Bath Water to the year's end party, Big Momma had decided that I wasn't to be invited back (to a second year) (2) and read it, and handed it to Carl.
     Carl said, "I don't know what to do with this."
     "Keep it, or throw it away," I'd like to think I said.

Later, the class was saying good-bye, and hugging one another: and Louise said, "You should give Carl a hug. You'll regret it, if you don't."
     I went to hug Carl Moore. "Not the pelvis!" he shrieked. Swear to God.

     and that will do for an intro to:...  Maybe Cynthia the poem….

Maybe Cynthia: the poem…. was written in my very first sketch book (3) and perhaps this psychic shock ignited,  propelled,  my painting.