The Book of Formation, page 12
MI: What do you think changed?
I: Well, I was thinking about this while making the chart and I think it was as if that previous year was this ideal time where I had enough intelligence to be funny but not enough to be self-aware and judge myself.
MI: Is that what intelligence is to you?
I: I think so, yeah.
MI: Hmmm…[traces his finger across the chart]…and then you…the next bump I see here was around the age of fourteen…
I: And that was a big one. Big. It really shifted for me, in an instant, when I was sitting under this tree at a park a few blocks away from my school, and there were these three girls with me. I can’t even remember their names now. Heather, I think, was one of them, and they were from my school, talking about some teacher, who they all felt was lowering their GPA—whatever—and I remember listening to their voices and something about the intersection of their words, the way they were all speaking at the same instant, it acted like a trigger and I started to feel a change in me. We were learning about the asthenosphere at the time—and I remember imagining that process happening inside of me, the drifting tectonic plates.
MI: Was it pleasurable?
I: Sort of. After it happened, I was just brain dead. I could’ve been drooling. So it was pretty different from the other experience I mentioned before. This was very brief and personal. I was completely disinterested in other people while it was happening. It was purely internal. But yes, I was definitely excited, especially later that night when I could feel it, even when I was going to sleep. I remember thinking that my life would be marked by that moment. I was aware that everything would be categorized as that which came before and after that moment. And it was. It is. I mean, I had spent years going with my family to weekly Mass, which was all about the soul and being filled with the love of God, but I never experienced any of that in church, that faith feeling, and so when these things happened, it didn’t even occur to me that it might be a religious experience. Maybe if I were alive a hundred or a thousand years ago I would have immediately seen it in that religious context. I would have joined the clergy. But for me, I didn’t know how to frame it. It seemed so separate from the rest of life. I even thought it was maybe a glimpse of a possible mental illness and I was a little ashamed to mention it to anyone, especially my parents, and too embarrassed to mention it to my friends, thinking it would be viewed as self-indulgent, which I think is something I still feel, right now, talking to you.
MI: Discussing yourself.
I: It’s hard for me. But I also think this is what led me here. To interviewing. Being inquisitive for a living. And I think this is one of the things I first related to Mayah and the show. It gave some shape to these kinds of experiences. It’s all about questions and answers.
MI: On the chart, it looks like the most recent of your changes was when you met your current partner…
I: Yeah, it was—but hey, I feel like this is becoming a long detour. We don’t have to walk through this whole chart. I know that takes multiple sessions to do a proper reading and—mostly, I wanted to get your feedback on it to see if it looked like I was on the right track.
MI: Yes. I think you are. But as I was saying, charts aren’t my specialty. Other practitioners would be able to go much deeper.
I: You’ve been spot on so far. I can’t believe I talked so much. Verbal purging.
MI: That means it’s a sensitive chart on your part. And beautifully rendered. Lovely draftsmanship, too.
I: Thanks. I put some time into it.
MI: My only recommendation would be to fill in some of the interstitial areas. You’ve focused on these significant experiences here [gestures to four points on the chart] but consider some of the troughs, the moments of inactivity, the gaps in memory. Those seemingly empty periods are just as important, if not more so.
I: That’s good, yeah. Thanks. I appreciate that. I know our time is limited here.
MI: Don’t mind that.
I: But, uh, moving on, another thing I wanted to bring up here, before we’re out of time, is what’s being called “Broken Leg Personality.” I hear that phrase everywhere now since the episode last season when you coined it. I’m curious if you think people are using it correctly.
MI: What do you mean?
I: Well, it’s a meme now and it’s just—it’s like what happened to the word zen, which traditionally had this ancient philosophical ineffability, but then people started using it to mean just relaxed and serene. Maybe you can just talk a little bit about how you originally meant BLP? Or maybe just talk about that episode?
MI: Sure. Well, Mrs. Crenshaw was the guest on that episode. She had written to us a few months before and had sent along a series of photos of a fractured leg she’d incurred from a car accident. One of them showed the leg a few hours after being broken, when it was puffy and dark pink. Another showed it a few hours after that, black and blue. Another showed the leg in a cast. Then there were some photos of the leg after it had healed. Her letter was mostly concerned with the leg because she was sure it had affected the way p was flowing through her body. She said she hadn’t been the same since she broke it. She thought about it when she woke up, when she fell asleep. She dreamed about it. When it hurt she worried about what the pain meant, and when it didn’t hurt she was anxious about when pain would return. It started to dictate all her actions. She wouldn’t stand unless she had to, in case she might worsen the leg. And later, when it seemed to be healed, she was afraid she might hurt it again.
I: The cycle of paranoia.
MI: Then she started aiming that fear at her husband. She started telling herself that he wasn’t sympathetic enough and she resented him for it, for not being as concerned about the leg as she was. She started questioning his involvement in the accident. He’d been driving when their car was sideswiped by a truck, which forced them up onto the curb and into a bus stop. Luckily, he came out of the crash with just a few minor scrapes. She suffered the more severe injury. And she started thinking that he had done this on purpose, that he didn’t like the leg and had somehow steered the car into the bus stop at a particular angle to intentionally break it. Or sever it. At the time she wrote the letter, she was considering elective amputation just to please her husband.
I: But I remember, when you brought him on the show, he had no idea about any of this. She was too embarrassed to discuss it with him.
MI: Yes.
I: But she’s OK discussing it with thirty million viewers?
MI: Sometimes it’s the only way. [laughs]
I: And your opinion is that this woman needed a personality that could handle the injury better than the one she had.
MI: When your body gets hurt, you point to that injury, and the more you point, the more p gets stored there, in that spot. Injuries don’t ever go away, even if they superficially heal. It rains and gets cold and you feel them come back. They’re there, under the skin, even when the feeling is too subtle to notice. Maybe you’re busy doing other things so you don’t mind the sensation, but later, when you’re at home alone, when your mind starts pointing again, then the pain becomes as big as your experience. If you move in a certain way, you start to feel it. Then you feel it even when you don’t move. You plan your day around it. This is a broken leg personality.
I: When pain controls you.
MI: And it does. Too much pain makes it hard to have a personality at all.
I: Tell me about it.
MI: To have a full personality, you have to make friends with pain. More importantly, you have to expect it. You have to know it’s coming for you—here, gone, and then…hello, it’s here again. That’s normal.
I: Periods of sickness are healthy, in the scheme of things.
MI: Illness is a part of life. Accommodate it.
I: So with Mrs. Crenshaw, you gave her a kind of pain treatment.
MI: Yes. This is a part of rehab. As soon as we work out all the glows and the moves, we work on pain management. Everyone has their own definition of pain. It’s part of what defines their personality. With Mrs. Crenshaw, we focused on the chronic pain in her leg. It was important for her to know that it would always be there. It’s real. It would change its shape as time went on, but it would never completely go away. The moments where she didn’t feel pain would be special, little fortunes. And to make her feel this way, we gave her pressure lessons and temperature trials.
I: Which have been a bit controversial.
MI: It’s nonviolent pain. No one’s attacking her. It’s inflicted lovingly and with care and in a tranquil setting. No scars. No marks.
I: And the point is to raise her pain threshold, right?
MI: The point is for her to have a good relationship with pain.
I: But isn’t pain important? Isn’t it basically like an alarm system for the body?
MI: We’re not numbing her. We’re changing her opinion of it.
I: And how did you know when it worked?
MI: We would ask her how she was doing, and she would say that she was feeling good, even when we knew we had just given her a significant dose of pain, a sensation that she had previously registered as uncomfortable.
I: People say these experiments with pain are irresponsible, especially when you have so many children who idolize you.
MI: I don’t think it’s very safe for me to accept that responsibility, do you?
I: What about the boy, the teenager in Ohio, who was hospitalized after trying one of these cold-heat trials? From what I understand, he had a grand mal seizure.
MI: He pushed it too far. And so he learned a little bit about the power of pain. But he had no lasting problems from it. Just pure pain. The trials are designed this way, so the pain doesn’t hurt the body. It only affects the p. If they follow the practice correctly, if the trial is administered by someone who has absolutely no violence toward you, then I think it would be good for anyone.
I: Even children.
MI: I mean, of course, we suggest different temperatures and pressures at different ages. But I do think children should get involved with their p. Hearing you speak about your own personality development earlier, I wish you had had someone to speak with about what was going on. You’d have a better relationship with your p, which is what we all want, even children.
I: And in terms of self-exploration at that age, it’s got to be better than experimenting with synthetic drugs and vandalism.
MI: And what better time to get in touch with pain than the time in life when pain is the most acute—teenagehood. The very age when people start manufacturing their own pain.
I: But the thing is, with these trials, you can’t ever know what anyone’s intentions are, right? You don’t know whether they’re doing it for valid reasons. You can put the ideas out there, you can explain it all perfectly, but you can’t control how they’re used.
MI: Again, it seems you’re asking me about taking responsibility.
I: I guess I am.
MI: That’s something I can’t do. I’m not a guardian. All I can offer are choices.
5 The title of Mayah Isle’s 2003 book from Hyperion.
VII.
April 2006
LOS ANGELES, CA
Before I met the Isles, the path of self-transformation always seemed like a lot of unnecessary huffing and puffing to me. As I saw it, life was a puzzle and I just had to keep going until all the pieces had been rightly put.
For example, in my twenties my plan with food was to dial in my “perfect health” diet. I’d establish some kind of rule set—eliminate nightshades, eat thirty grams of protein thirty minutes after waking, eat fruit on an empty stomach—and then, once all that was locked in, I wouldn’t have to consider nutrition for the rest of my life. The anxiety of what to eat for dinner would forever dissipate. Bliss.
And I could do this for everything—wife, work, hair, hygiene, fashion—until I arrived at the flawless life: no more changes. That way, I could focus on the important issues of our time.
But, alas, those were the thoughts of a fool—a “tug,” as Masha liked to say. I’d die living like that. Because that’s what dead people are: unchanging. The body isn’t a permanent thing. It’s an eddy in a stream, a temporary accretion of minerals, liquid, and debris.
So I should have expected that the first of my convictions to crumble would be diet. I had, for twenty years, been a vegetarian, identifying with this position on the most fundamental levels—health, morals, ethics. Then, while reading a book on plant intelligence, my confidence withered in a few days. The things plants could do! They’re smarter than us. How had I not seen the arrogance of monoculture? We wipe away a vast spectrum of species and replace them with an army of engineered plant clones? This was totalitarianism. How could I ever think plants were more easily sacrificed than animals? And with that, the first pillar of my ideology collapsed.
I had come to PM with a solid history of self-control, but the movement disabused me of that ridiculous impulse. I was no longer a brain riding the horse of my body, drunk on authority. I was the horse. I used to feel pride when people referred to me as a person of principles, as if I were sticking to my ideas in the face of an irrational world, but after PM, I wanted nothing to do with the term. I just wanted to be p.
All this personality crumbling began around the end of Mayah’s final season on the show, which I had begun watching, as they say, religiously. At the time, no one knew she was on her way out, of course, but we knew something was coming. She loved to drop hints.
On one of the final episodes, she curved her face into a puckish grin, clasped her hands together, and hinted at a “top secret project” she’d been developing behind the scenes.
“I’m so excited to tell you guys what I’ve been working on,” she said.
[massive applause]
“But…I can’t! Not yet. No matter how much I want to,” she said.
[loud booing]
With setups like these, Mayah could milk every drop of anticipation from her audience.
“Believe me, it’ll be better if we all wait for it,” she said. “For the thrill of it. We don’t get many true surprises in life, but I want to give you one of them.”
Over the nine months of the show’s twentieth season, the blogs and online forums swelled with speculations. Most of these revolved around upcoming celebrity guests, including one persistent rumor about a Supreme Court justice making a turn. Finally, in the premiere of season 21, the show delivered its surprise under the banner of its new, stately name—M!
The episode began atypically, with Marshal delivering the opening monologue. He gave updates from the show’s twelve-week summer break, demonstrated some seasonal moves (“the autumnal reach”), and described all the new dietary supplements (desiccated beetle carapace, white pine cream) available through the show’s website. When the show returned after the first commercial break, the country was introduced to Mull.
—
I admit, my knee-jerk reaction was not one of open-minded wonder. I wish it had been, but my intellectual prejudices were too deep seated to allow for that. Certainly, a large number of fans now consider the episode a revelation, one of those moments that forever changed their relationship with the world. And I fully believe that Mull deserved this kind of reaction, but all I felt was a knot of fear in my esophagus, which has always been my personal trigger spot.
The media’s response was a more dramatic version of my own: conservatives were personally offended by Mayah’s choice to dethrone herself from a position of power, and liberals mourned the loss of an icon. One prominent mover called Mull “an affront to the difficulties of mental illness,” which got a lot of head-nodding responses from all sides. Several major news outlets claimed, without any evidence, that she was an attempt to cover up a turn gone wrong. These accusations were dismissed, however, when the design plans for Mull were made public and proved how comprehensively premeditated the turn had been.
The response, as divisive as it was, revealed just how emotionally attached the world had become to Mayah. She was at the foundation of contemporary culture and it seemed that she couldn’t be removed without devastation. Unfortunately, this made Mull the offender, the one responsible for the loss. She was the big, bad monster of PM before anyone had the chance to know her. The world, it seemed, was not ready.
The polemic surrounding Mull didn’t seem to hurt the show’s popularity, though, and while she certainly alienated some, she drew in others. Those who had loathed Mayah’s new-age pomp seemed to have an immediate connection with Mull’s earnestness. A few of Mayah’s old friends called her a “cherub” and viewed the transformation as a kind of altruistic sacrifice. For them, her new, plump figure and the smiling, dreamy look in her eyes suggested an undisturbed inner life of good intentions. Her personality was ideally tuned to her body.
Shortly after the season premiere, I remember trawling through the online blog, Mayahalive.com, and discovering a whole network of male fans (mostly blogging under mythological avatars) who had arrived to the show only once Marshal had assumed the role of primary host. On another blog, I found a small niche group—Mullies—who regularly discussed their sexual fantasies surrounding Mull.
But the controversy was too much for the network. After Marshal’s sexual harassment lawsuits, Mull’s questionable personality couldn’t be overlooked, and an informal public investigation began. In what was often called the “Isle Trial,” the show was probed from every angle and forced to expose its internal workings. NBC ran a clinical documentary, dissecting the precise techniques used for turning, as if they were nothing but a series of mechanistic actions. The FDA began releasing reports on the Isle line of herbs and supplements. The FCC held an internal investigation about Mull’s turning process, which was partly leaked by a few gossip magazines. A new reality show, The Return, featured talks with previous guests and crew members describing their experiences—some of them were beneficial, certainly, but the show chose to emphasize more controversial moments for dramatic effect.
