A month before the thing with my hands I had an unusual experience sitting one morning:
2020-5-21
Awakening to not being awake … sitting, I feel myself pushing against something plastic. Like scrubbing copper that has oxidized or blackened—a vessel, say … what you see when you first start to scrub is not the original state of the copper, but the difference is stark enough to recall to mind what it looked like in its original state, the way it gleamed … is this an image that came to me sitting, or did I see it in a dream, or drifting off to sleep last night?
It’s not clear from this entry, but the experience I’m describing was one in which I felt as if my face were being erased. This is a rough approximation. It would be more exact, though perhaps less useful to the reader, to say that a cooking vessel, a saucepan say, had assumed the place of my face, and what I felt was that vessel being scrubbed, a layer of carbonization being removed.
The experience recurs twice in my journal from that year:
2020-7-21
Tuesday. Gut better, everything better. Up early, strong sit—I can feel my concentration improving. The sense of my face being erased has returned—partly guided, a bit spontaneous. Not with the feeling of brightness I experienced in May—this time it’s more like it’s being washed out with ink. I felt alert this morning, sitting, but the ego dissolution lacked the euphoric edge of May—it was closer to simply happening, neutral affect. Perhaps that’s … progress, if such a word applies.
2020-9-10
… Scrubbing a pan, seeing the brightness underneath—scrubbing away my face …
It is unclear whether this last reference refers to a recurrence of the face erasure experience or to a memory of it. At that point, the second week of September, I was confined to a twelve-square-meter studio, having just arrived in London from New York. You’d think that kind of thing would be good for one’s “practice”, but it was around then that the spirit that had animated my sitting through the late spring and summer began to ebb.
Something else worth mentioning by way of context: reading back through my journal from this time, I am struck by how much pain I was in. Of course a lot of people were in a lot of pain at that time—the first wave of the pandemic—and my own circumstances were comparatively comfortable. But my journal for then is filled with mentions of positional vertigo, waking nausea, depletion, despondency, intestinal pseudoobstruction, “feeling underwater”, feeling blocked writing, hyperacusis (when everything sounds loud), ravenous appetite—and a drivenness, an insistence on doing more: working out more, rising earlier, sitting longer, spending more time working on Japanese, spending more time drawing and doing other things “for pleasure”, applying for more grants—coupled with a disappointment at sleeping in, skipping a sprint, etc. This last part, the drivenness, was marked, though hardly unique to that time.