The Book of Formation, page 8
V.
March 2002
BURBANK, CA
Publicly, Marshal Isle was born on the premiere episode of season 16. Mayah sent me a ticket for the show and I attended the live taping in Burbank, a short drive from the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles where I was then living.
I arrived excited to see the new stage, which had been dramatically remodeled, from the traditional couch-and-desk set of most talk shows into an open-faced, two-story house design. I sketched out a quick diagram of the scene in my notebook. I described each room’s distinct character, expressed with wallpapers, flooring, decorations, and fetish objects. A recent article in Turnstyle had explained how each room would be used for different kinds of guests. The violet and yellow room, for example, featured a dreamy soundtrack, a bergamot scent, and some moody lighting gels—a kind of bedroom setting for guests who were having trouble with what Mayah called “staying in the waking state.”
The audience that day expressed the show’s usual demographic: primarily women, with a light sprinkling of men (most of whom were probably accompanying women) and a variety of international supporters. On my right, an older Filipino-American mother and her middle-aged daughter spoke in their native tongue; on my left, an Irish lady, who had flown in from Dublin for the show, read a thin biography of Amelia Earhart.
As show time approached, the stage manager instructed us to applaud when the signs flashed. The house band fired up the show’s triumphant theme song and the crowd stomped their feet. An older couple stood up and danced in the aisles.
When the music faded, Mayah trotted onstage and in her big round bell of a voice, bellowed the standard opening call:
“Whaaaaaaat?”
And then, as usual, she waited with open arms for the audience to reply:
“Nooooooow!”
She then gave a long, poetic monologue on “the ocean of p,” which included some of her favorite topics—mitochondria, weight loss, spring hats—before building to her big announcement.
“Now that I have a new home,” she said, pointing to the new stage, “I guess I need a family to put in it, don’t I?”
The crowd hooted, the lights dimmed, and she made a theatrical disappearance behind the big red curtains. Smoke bloomed from beneath the floorboards and the house band thrummed a drone as images of young, ruddy boys flashed on a screen above the stage. When Mayah returned, she led a blindfolded man to the center of the stage, her face beaming, her eyes moistened with tears—close-ups caught all the details. Then an explosive crack from a snare drum, a spotlight, and Mayah removed the scarf to reveal her new cohost.
The young man wore a white kilt that hung to his knees. Atop his head, a firm-looking dome of a haircut. A sleeveless terrycloth vest clung to his chest. His limbs were carved caramel.
The crowd erupted at the sight of him and he absorbed their reaction, smiling with an ease that I spent a long time admiring before I fully realized the remarkable, ineffable transformation that had taken place. No bundle of descriptors can truly convey the uncanny experience of staring with pure wonder at someone with whom you are already intimately familiar. You struggle to see him, not because of blurred vision, but because any possibility of recognition had been anticipated and deflected with expertise.
Mayah announced the man as her son, Marshal, and led him through the audience, up and down the aisles, close enough to allow every individual to lay their hands upon him. She called this “being somatically introduced” and he nodded and giggled through the whole process, taking it all in like a prize winner basking in acceptance.
On the screen above us, a short film displayed Marshal creeping into a low-ceilinged basement—PM fans later called this the “doghouse.” The video depicted Mayah spoon-feeding Marshal with what she told the camera was “the Belladonna fast.” She demonstrated how to mash thornapple into a honey-infused oil that could be used, in trace amounts, in basic cooking. She explained that during the two-week fast, Marshal sat almost completely still and was only allowed to move in prescribed ways at specific times, a procedure that would help him detoxify from his old personality.
As uncomfortable as the video looked, Marshal seemed to skip through every scene like an appreciative puppy. At the end, after a long time-lapse shot, he emerged from the basement, naked and wide-eyed, squinting at the sky. The camera held a long shot of his face, which had become remarkably chiseled since I last saw him, and the music thrashed to a climax. All of it felt a bit heavy-handed for my taste, but the women flanking me seemed genuinely overwhelmed with emotion.
The rest of the episode took the form of a one-on-one conversation. Marshal described how he could “feel the world on his skin…like a baby!” and thanked Mayah repeatedly. I noticed that he spoke at a slightly lower pitch than Masha, and that he produced words with a satisfying new click and pop, as if every syllable were cut from wood and stone.
At one point, he sprinted through the house set, jumped onto a bed, stamped his feet, and did a kind of twist-flip in time with the band’s soaring R&B melody. A woman called out for his hand in marriage. Later, a Norwegian teenage girl crawled onstage, threw her arms around him, and fell into some kind of ecstatic fit.
The episode was the most-watched television event of the month. The critical response, however, was polarized. Some of the more aggressive reviews denounced Marshal’s “character game” as a publicity hoax. Others worried that it was not a hoax, that Mayah’s ascetic practices had led her to what The New York Times called “torture TV” and “self-help without limits.” The New York Post put the image of a fist-pumping Marshal on its cover, and in a bold, screaming font above it, the phrase “I’m ready!”, an exclamation he’d made many times over the course of the episode. The Chicago Tribune called him “Mayah’s new manservant.”
Many saw the addition of a cohost as a lure to draw a younger audience to the movement. This was partly due to Marshal’s activities outside the show, his lectures at colleges, where he would screen clips of the show that were unfit for network television (nudity, language, general intensity) and give advice for at-home personality work. The events were overwhelmingly popular.
On a trip to New York shortly before the following interview, I attended one of Marshal’s two sold-out lectures at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium in Manhattan. Onstage, he carried himself with the sort of gliding confidence I would have once described as natural. He danced on the balls of his feet, as if his enthusiasm for the material was inflating him with kinetic energy. He pulled audience members onstage and bantered with a wry humor that wouldn’t have suited Mayah, but somehow perfectly complemented her ideas. He sang, made goofy faces. He oozed charisma and the crowd loved him for it. I loved him for it. How could I not? Here was a person made to be the object of adoration. You could feel it.
For my purposes, I would go as far as saying it’s the responsibility of any subject to help their interviewer adore him, to make me respond to his every phrase with a desire to know more. If the interviewee does their job, my questions should spill out of me in a stream of endless curiosity: And then what? And then what? They give me curiosity, and in return, I give them attention, and therefore, love.
To clarify, I’m using love as Isle used it. I loved his personality. I wanted to walk through the world as if I were living inside him, and he inside of me. I didn’t want to seduce him or marry him, I just wanted to believe in him.
In fact, this “love” may have been the first time I ever believed in anything. For most of my adult life, I didn’t find the nonmaterial world worthy of attention—spirits, faeries, gods, emotions of uncertain origin. I told myself that I was happy with the world as it simply appeared to be. And I must say, that perspective held strong for a long time, right up until my body collapsed on itself.
I imagine that all biographers must experience a least a whiff of this infatuation. Did Eckhart feel it for Goethe? Boswell for Johnson? Plato for Socrates? I think so. What other kind of energy could fuel such a long-term, seemingly selfless project as chronicling another person’s life? What is that, if not love?
I’ve often had to defend my enthusiasm for PM. For years I was an apologist, always on the defensive with friends and editors, breathlessly trying to justify the movement and my interest in it. Almost everyone I knew scoffed at the extremist methods and the horrors of the celebrity culture that surrounded it—two critiques which were pretty hard to refute. I’m usually pretty good in a hot debate, but those days I felt like a bigot with a stammer. I was perpetually searching for the perfect explanation for what my friends dismissed as an immature fixation. But eventually, I just stopped caring. To hell with them. I was high on intuition.
As I saw it, Marshal addressed the criticisms of PM through his very being. How could PM be nothing more than escapism, as many people said, when this man had not only rejected a former self, but truly inhabited a new, shining personality? This man gave me a model. All I saw in Marshal, as he projected his voice from the stage, was a human exactly as he should be, and I wanted to celebrate him for it.
After the lecture, I waited and watched him take on a queue of fans that wrapped around the block. He generously spoke with each person, touching their shoulders, snickering at their jokes, and radiating his endless supply of sunny extroversion. I stuck around over an hour for a chance to congratulate him—to meet him, really—but ultimately, I didn’t want to meet him that way. It wouldn’t be right. I wasn’t just another fan.
—
A few weeks later, Shara Ulman, Mayah’s new publicist, called and asked if I would like to interview Marshal for an upcoming issue of Turnstyle. “He’s looking forward to meeting you,” she said, before launching into a list of topics I should avoid during the interview—classic PR micromanaging.
This was a peculiar time for me, career-wise. I seemed to have acquired some momentum from years of bylines in reputable publications, and yet I didn’t know where I was headed. I spent a lot of my time surrounded by famous, seemingly compelling individuals, but I had lost my fascination for the work itself. Over the last decade I’d been keeping my head down, literally navel-gazing, tracking my health in ten-minute intervals, consumed with myself to the exclusion of all else. Years later, when I finally looked up, I found myself inhabiting the career of a talking head.
A few times a month I’d get requests, usually by news outlets, to comment on some cultural happening, and I’d spend a few hours scrambling to construct a perspective that seemed sturdy enough to present as my own. How did I feel about the legacy of some recently deceased so-and-so actress? What does her death say about the lineage of all women in film? Of women in society? How was cinema changed by her presence? Did I enjoy her final performance in the acclaimed dramedy about important such-and-such social issue of the moment? And on and on.
My talk with Isle, I hoped, could be a departure from the news cycle I’d been caught in. Over the course of our last four meetings, I’d increasingly felt like I was in the presence of a friend, and I hoped that this dynamic hadn’t been entirely lost in the turn.
The interview took place at Ulman’s Santa Monica office during the show’s off-season. Marshal was scheduled for a string of interviews that afternoon, and mine would be sandwiched between People and Time.
On my arrival, Ulman showed me to an empty conference room where I set up my new digital recorder, which I tested three times to ensure it was working correctly, since, unlike my old one, it was always completely silent.
When she returned with Marshal, I broke into a quick sweat. He removed his sunglasses and strode toward me with a wide, earnest grin, remarking how nice it was to “finally meet me,” as if dozens of people had mentioned my name to him. I laughed in agreement and I remember feeling uncertain about how to physically position myself in relation to him. I thought of Amazonian cultures, deep in the forest, who purposely forgot those who died. They burned the belongings of the dead and never again invoked their names so that the souls of the deceased could travel to the beyond without burdens from the physical world.
Up close, I could see the deep color of his hale complexion and the power of his chin, which seemed more prominent now, as if it were leading the rest of him. As we began talking, his eyes rested on my face and remained there for the next hour, giving me a feeling that was initially unnerving—nauseating, even—but then, over the course of our interview became so comforting that I missed the quality in everyone else I encountered over the next few days.
The transcript that follows was published in a highly abridged version in Turnstyle. It came out during the ratings blitz known as “sweeps week.”
—
INTERVIEWER: I hear you’re coming from another interview.
MARSHAL ISLE: Yep, just down the hall. Ended a few minutes ago. And you? Where are you coming from?
I: Oh, just the east side.
MI: You live over there?
I: Yes, for a few years now, with a roommate I met online.
MI: Living with a stranger.
I: Once a stranger. Now a person who knows the most intimate details of my life.
MI: Oh yes. So true. I love that.
I: And so this interview you’re coming from—what’d you talk about there? I don’t want to ask you all the same questions you’ve been answering all day.
MI: I’m sure you won’t, but, if you’d like to know, the last couple of questions were about the kind of product I used in my hair and what type of women I find attractive. [laughs]
I: How’d you answer?
MI: Truthfully, I have no idea what product goes in my hair. It’s all chosen by Gina1 and I’m thankful I don’t have to consider it.
I: And the women?
MI: I find all of them attractive.
I: All women?
MI: No, all types of women. That was the question.
I: Sounds like a cop-out.
MI: No, no. That’s an authentic answer.
I: So you’re saying you have absolutely no preference toward any type of women? What about the ones with drool leaking from their mouths and hateful ideas running through their heads?
MI: Yes, those! [laughs] I like them too.
I: Do you find all these interviews exhausting?
MI: [shakes head] Not at all. I enjoy it. I’m energized, actually.
I: Because when we spoke last time you were having difficulty.
MI: I’m sure that’s true but—
I: But you don’t remember any of that.
MI: No, I don’t.
I: None of it.
MI: No.
I: And of course you also don’t remember anything about me…
MI: I was told that we’ve spoken before, but no, I don’t have memories of it.
I: [laughs] Really? I know we shouldn’t linger on this, but—
MI: I totally understand if my presence is making you uncomfortable.
I: No, well, I guess I just didn’t realize that this would be so…I mean, it’s very hard to appreciate this situation if you haven’t gone through it before.
MI: Yes, many people feel that way.
I: When you watch it on screen, on the show, it’s one thing. Or even when I was in the audience and you were onstage—even then, it still seemed like performance, and I imagined that underneath, you were still the same as before.
MI: Right.
I: But I guess that’s just what you think when there’s a stage—it’s all for show.
MI: I can certainly see how it might seem that way. Do you feel that I’m only acting this way?
I: No, no. You wouldn’t do that, I know. It’s just, even though I knew what was going to happen, and I spoke to Mayah about it, I guess it didn’t sink in.
MI: Right.
I: And you really don’t remember any of our prior meetings at all?
I: No, I try not to.
I: You try? See, now—what’s that? Because if you’re trying, that sounds like you haven’t forgotten. That sounds like acting. That’s what you told me, before.
MI: I’m always trying, even if I would rather not be. I can’t help it. Neither can you. It’s funny, there’s this impression people have about taking a turn: that it’s instantaneous, that forgetting your memories is as easy as pouring water from a cup. You just say goodbye to them forever. But it’s not as clear as that. It’s not done with brute force. The effort is more feminine. Sinuous. It’s not work, but an ongoing negotiation with memory. Different every day. Always dynamic. This is the same kind of relationship you have with your personality. If you can speak with it, then maybe you can recognize the distance between it and you. Then you can love it.
I: So it’s not like amnesia. One second and your whole history is erased.
MI: No, no. You ease into it. You need a soft mind to truly forget. No memory is really gone until you want it gone. Not once. Not twice. Every day. You’re always paddling out of the current.
I: I’m not sure I know what that would be like, to want some memory out of my head with such vehemence.
MI: Ah, but you do. You forget all day long. You may not do it on purpose but you are always selecting memories to trim and others to carry with you, everywhere you go. It’s no different. I’m just paying attention to it.
I: Mayah thinks we’re too obsessed with our memories, right? If you love something, set it free.
MI: Memory is not who we are.
I: So then, in your case, are your memories lost forever? Or are they just more distant from your daily thoughts?
MI: For me, I’d have to spend a lot of time and effort to return to them. I’ve made sure of that. The process is not dissimilar from recalling a dream. If you try to keep it, maybe it remains for a few hours. Maybe you maintain a connection with it for weeks. Maybe you write down one special dream and read it over from time to time, and perhaps you occasionally recall a fleeting moment of it. But for the most part, you forget your dream easily. Just like that. It isn’t useful to your life, so why keep it? But if you want to try and recall a random dream from two years ago—really, truly remember it, the details and everything—that’s almost impossible. And that’s how life memories are too. Just let them float away.
