Because none of us want to think the universe is a blank dream….
— Jack Kerouac
When I was in my early twenties, I lived out of a hotel near the old NATO base in Bagnoli, Naples. I was there because I had nearly severed my femoral artery during a deployment to the Middle East, and after inpatient treatment, there was no room in the barracks for me during outpatient treatment. I'd been warned that living off base would be dangerous because of how Neapolitans treated those stationed there.
That was not the case with me.
After surviving my near-death experience, where it was a miracle that I was still alive, I had no choice but to approach everyone I came in contact with with such openness and honesty that it felt like I'd become a magnet, attracting equally positive people. All because I'd come to see myself as a ghost.
Before my near-death experience, I worried about saying the right things.
If people liked me.
I worried about directly expressing my wants and desires, especially if that conflicted with the wants and desires of the women in my large Puerto Rican family, a taboo in my family.
But now that I was a ghost and I understood that this one life was mine to live, the way I approached my time in Naples is best summed up in the following:
Homo sum, humani a me nihil alienum puto.
I am a man, nothing human is foreign to me.
—Terence, Heauton Timorumenos 77 (c. 165 BCE)
Because nothing was foreign to me anymore, I began attracting women—some from bases in the area, others from clubs and speakeasies hidden away from outsiders—who, before my near-death experience, I would’ve hidden what would’ve been considered my badness from.
“There is no sin in pleasure, especially if we get only one life,” I would say.
And out came their badness to do things with me that would have been considered taboo to their families, especially the men in Naples, who treated women as either someone to place on a pedestal or someone to degrade.
There’s a reason for what may sound like boasting: it’s a pattern I’ve repeated ever since.
Currently, I’m in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to deal with not only Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder stemming from the day I almost died decades ago, but also with how the battle I am fighting now, with cancer, has pushed that to a chronic state (CPTSD), where there are days I feel no hope.
And that is where I discovered an unexpected stuck point.
At the root of most stuck points is shame and self-blame for trauma endured. But my stuck point is not rooted in that at all.
Mine is rooted in an addiction I've developed to liminal spaces of the sublime that I first encountered in my near-death experience: standing at that door at the edge of nothingness and gaining the sense that this nothing is not the nothing most people would think of. It’s the nothingness described in the Upanishads as a peace that passes understanding, and that Sufis describe as fana—the word for the total annihilation of self.
Die before you die.
— Rumi
For years, I’ve chased this annihilation through orgasm.
But I can only experience that if I feel a connection to the woman I am with.
Connections were all that I built during my time in Naples. And in those connections, I experienced la petite mort in the arms of women who sought their own little death.
There are days when I ask myself, “Why bother with CBT at all?”
I’m battling cancer.
My oncologist told me that life as I knew it was over.
I needed to get used to a new normal.
To let it go.
Then I remember a scene from the movie Jacob’s Ladder and the scene where Louis (played by Danny Aiello) shares a quote, attributed to Meister Eckhart, with Jacob (played by Tim Robbins):
Eckhart saw Hell too. He said, ‘The only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won’t let go of your life, your memories, your attachments. They burn ’em all away. But they’re not punishing you, they’re freeing your soul. If you’re frightened of dying and you’re holding on, you’ll see devils tearing your life away. But if you’ve made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth.’
The new novel that I’ve begun is to help me let go of these intense memories of pleasure that have become like those devils tearing away at the life I could be living today, because now, more than ever, I need to be present—in the moment, in the now.
I’ll be posting draft chapters here in the coming weeks. In the meantime, I’ve shared a DJ set I recorded about ten years after Naples, whose sound matches the mood of those long walks at night with the “friends” I had made, who became the inspiration for both Charlotte and Toria.
From Page to Sound: The Mood and the Feel
This is the Naples of my memory. The DJ set carries the mood and feel behind the new novel. Listen and you’ll hear it.
TRACK LIST
00:00 Holden & Thompson — Come to Me (Amateur Guitar Mix)
07:11 Agoria ft. Scalde — Dust (Rocco Vision Mix)
14:24 Yaxkin Retrodisko — Don't Cha Want It (Deepsee Mix)
21:33 Blue Six — Sweeter Love
28:00 Jori Hulkkonen — Let Me Luv U
35:50 Ormatie — Twisted Turns
40:06 Astrid Suryanto — Distant Bar (16 Bit Lolitas Mix)
46:39 Manoo — Winter
52:40 Manoo — Redzone
58:06 ADJD — Save Me
1:02:51 Roman Salzger — Solaris (Sebastian Drums & Rolf Dyman Work Machine Remix)
1:09:05 John Creamer & Stephane K — I Wish You Were Here ft. Nkemdi (Mike Viera & Pete Tha Zouk & Jaimy Remix)
My latest novel The Desert Road of Night, which explores many of the themes in my short stories, poems, and personal essays like this one, is available now on Amazon.
