 We queers are all acquainted with the bardos now-- last year we started boning up on those elaborate theories of old Tibet about what happens when you die. We grab the ancient tracts off the Health and Self-Help shelves, we weight their curling corners with beeping pill boxes and bottles of antioxidants. We try to memorize quickly the countries of transition, before we have to cross the border ourselves. Communiques of the rinpoches fall out of our knapsacks, we chew them fifty times before swallowing with rice and vegetables in the macro joints. Over twig tea and wheatgrass demitasses we rate the local zendos-- the head monk at this one recommends placing the tongue just behind the teeth, applying a little suction (swallowing can be distracting to beginners); and darling did you notice the abbot at that one has lips like a flung plum? Everything we do we always do well, so if we’re going to die, well then, how does it work? Where are the instructions? We sit up late at night unable to put down the guidelines of this or that ascended master, how to remind ourselves (can’t write notes on your sleeves for after, can you? no sleeves no wrists no arms). How to remember to let the life force exit through the crown of the head rather than the asshole, remember not to go towards those bloody red lights--or is it the blue ones (must check index, rebirth, inauspicious). We don’t want to come back as actuaries or ayatollahs or hungry Wall Street ghosts. The demographics of the bardos are shifting-- it’s largely homos and Bosnian teenagers this year clogging the revolving door between the cosmos: and the yearly lovely obons of the monasteries, those autumn flotillas of memorial lanterns set loose on lakes and rivers, usually so serene-- ruined now by hordes of tragic queens pushing to the edge of the water, arms loaded with fragile paper boats labeled Peter, Vincent, Kenneth, Michael, Gustavo-- setting the lake on fire, the underbrush, the barn, the Catskills, the Eastern Seaboard. It’s not so many who are dying, really, the papers say, when you think of the number car crashes kill, or booze, or drugs, or cancer. But I kissed all the ones on my list, my finger spent whole mornings tracing the freckles on each of their forearms, so this is different. We’re going to Tibet to die because they’ve been doing it over and over again. And of course you are dying, too, but so slowly you don’t notice as we must. So just this once we will show you how it is done: beautifully, gratis, we’ll let you watch how we hand each other so gently over the barriers. |
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