Eleusis.

"Synchronicities take you to the edge, but no further; 

the message is received but the source hidden. 

Beyond the uncanny crackle of the signal you have to make a leap" Erik Davis.

3 am. 

I feel as if I'm covered in static electricity, St Elmo's fire. 

I am unsure of myself. 

The feeling is of darkness. 

And of being swept away. 

Of walking a labyrinth, a spinning void.

To a place beyond the stars.

What happened?

Hours earlier, as the lights came up and everyone started to leave, we stood for about ten minutes trying to exchange phone numbers - my phone refusing to do RCS - I was trying to write his number into Google Keep. 

Neither of us were thinking straight. 

We had just seen Tool.

Hours later - 3 am, 31st of May 2024 - my feelings were making even less sense. Sure, a lot had already happened already that day but.. But at 3 am I couldn’t even tell if I was feeling my own feelings. I am used to picking up other people's emotions as sensations - but usually there is more context when it happens, and so I don't lose myself in the experience. But here now - in bed wrapped in the early morning darkness - I felt bereft. My skin was full of pins and needles as if I was inside a thunderstorm.

Days later I think I know why I felt this way, we had an experience in common - more than Tool! And what I thought he had been through was too much for me to acknowledge at the time. I think I had heard him say? Heard enough to be sure that we had both survived something terrific and tyrannical - to do with psychosis, drugs, suicide. In row T I was trying to assess where he was on the curve. On his journey around and around the rings around the moon. And I didn't want to acknowledge the resonance, the weight of my memories,  there was no time and we were in public so - so I didn't let myself really feel the whole of it as we sat in row T.

Row T seat 113.

We are both therapists because of what we have experienced. And I felt extremely protective of him. That is where the connection began. This is why at 3 am...I still wouldn't let myself recognise what I believe -  that only someone who has been there too, can ever lift the stone, and take the dagger from my heart. Between wakefulness and sleeping, I felt the full force. If I was right and we had survived the same place? Could be that we had been in opposing roles? I know that nothing creates healing through 'relational depth' more than being with someone else who knows. But it isn't everyone's style to set the controls for the heart of the sun, to seek out and take the full impact of memory. But I value a direct encounter with the truth. For me it is the only way to regain wholeness and power, to become a stalker entering the zone of traumatic memory.

Most people want to run, and forget.

But that's not me.

As Descending played, my eyes filled with tears. 

Pride in both of us. Becoming a therapist certainly isn't running away...

And by his side, slowly, gradually I relaxed into feeling safe - for the first time in seven years - and I hadn’t expected to feel safe at all. I hadn’t wanted to leave the house! I’d left home with a sense of dread, a sense of being about to take a trip I might not come back from. As I left the car, as I waited to take my seat, I'd felt naked, exposed and lost. For sure I was alone and I didn't know where I was or where I was going or why I was there even. But it was OK, I felt OK, because I'm so used to feeling this way. 

But in row T Seat 113 I felt strong and safe. I made a conscious effort to make him feel safe too, to breathe in any tension, to breathe out pure golden light. 

After the gig we hugged - and he was gone. I was alone in the bright light of the foyer. I felt winded, I felt that drop in safety as if I'd lost my shield and I was back on the battlefield. I felt as if someone had just hit me. I pushed through the doors and out into the night. Now I had to fight the urge to run back against the crowd, to try to find him as he headed for the train. But there were so many people, I was one in a sea of thousands following a long, long winding and narrow path in the opposite direction to the train station. Bright lights in my eyes, we were all just shadows surrounded by silence in a sea of noise. The path led around a lake of grey sky and through black tunnels lit with splashes of light. A surge of people we flood through the neon subways, the walls painted with a spiralling confusion of fluorescent graffiti. Then more dark paths bordered by tall trees. Street lamps like captured suns. The trees become cypresses, I was no longer of this world or in it, I thought “I am a child of Earth and Starry skies”…

ʺI am the child of Earth and starry Heaven; and I am parched with thirst and I perish; but give me quickly refreshing water to drink from the lake of Memory.ʺ

During the gig he'd said "Maynard...he is a shaman!" and I’d said, “Tool - this is the Eleusinian mysteries!” this had made me laugh, only in a Tool gig! And I thought then of how it must have been for the attendees at Eleusis 1800 years ago; their long walk from Athens, towards and then in to the confusion of the glaring, brilliant lights, and the mystery of the initiation in the Telesterion. Then the darkness and the separation as the kykeon wore off and the cold of the night, and the sense of separation bringing heaviness and exhaustion - each person like me, walking forward - a river of people making their way in darkness and sudden flashes of vivid colour, heading forwards towards the promise - as Dionysus dances onwards over the water into a far away beyond the grey, into endless meadows, to the rapture of gentle summertime, the bliss of a softness, enlivened with the perfume of flowers. 

Eleusis was the promise of life after death, of a blissful, ever opening new day. But the mysteries ended in 396 A.D with the destruction of the sanctuary. 

I want to turn around. I have to run back. I must to do this!

I want to shout his name into the dark, I need to find him!

I don’t do this - he will be on the train and I have to get home.

I gulp down common sense with each breath, and let despair have its way. I merge with the dark and keep walking, I let myself be carried forward. And at the final subway the pathways open, trees are static fractals against a colourless sky, a blotting paper shore line bleeding ink into a sea of ichor. Suddenly the sky opens wide and I see the high tension cables that will lead me to my car. But it isn’t over yet - the spinning sense of a starless void continues. There are no satellites above me, and I have no idea where I am in relation to home! So I just drive and trust that at some point the navigation systems will catch up, missing turnings, roads become narrow. I feel as if I'm driving in circles!

Eventually I get home. Tumbling into bed - merciful sleep takes me.

I awake at 3 am…