Stuck in Tucson

[Ilya Shambat]

There were any number of women who were attracted to me for my writing. One was a very beautiful – and highly accomplished – woman named Lisbeth, who descended from Mary Queen of Scotts. She was a rocker when she was younger – a good one – and then she and her husband went into management. For a long time they lived traditional Christian lifestyle. Then she started seeking, and one of the things that she found was me.

There was another woman named Kat, who was about my age. She lived in Tucson and was an art student. She had been paralyzed from waist down in a car accident. She saw herself as an “ugly, malignant thing.” I did not share that view.

There were some magnificent things going on. When I was talking to Lisbeth over the phone, I could see white spots hovering in the sky with absolute peace and beauty. My younger brother tried to get me to go inside, so I told Lisbeth about that and said that I was working for a slightly higher authority. She was torn between her ethics and her desire. I ended up seeing her in person, and it was a beautiful experience. We went to the park and walked through streams and climbed trees. She ended up choosing her husband and her family, and she and I remain good friends.

Then I boarded the bus for Tucson. Kat did not have a place for me to stay, so I wound up on the street. I was on the street in Tucson for two months. It was not a bad experience. The climate there is quite forgiving, and I did not have to fear for my life.

I met a number of interesting people. One was a lady named Hayley, who came from Kansas and had a lot of spiritual knowledge. She had had people trying to rape her and kill her; she also had respect of a number of people, including her boyfriend, who was significantly older than us and was running a major shop in Tucson.

She went on a date with a man named Noah, and the next day her apartment flooded. She had a friend named Cammie, a young Native American woman who was very creative and very spirituality knowledgeable. She shared a house with a woman named April, who had had her leg taken off by a train after her boyfriend left her. I called her Dido, and she said that if he were to meet her she would probably do just what Dido did when Aeneas visited her: Say nothing.

I was getting visualizations of a Gordian knot wound around souls. I was talking about there being a way to untie the Gordian knot by “man's wits guided by man's desire.” The wits by itself will fail to correctly locate the center. The desire by itself will not know how to correctly untie the knot. Combine the two, and it is possible to untie the Gordian Knot, and there is no need for the sword.

I wound up living on a diet of grapefruits and prickly pear cactuses. I was going from one place to another while having all sorts of amazing experiences. At one point I was swinging off of rungs, and two hummingbirds hovered before me.

Some of Hayley's friends were nice, and some others were quite nasty. There was a young man named Eric who radiated compassion and wisdom. He was with a young woman who, when I told her something, said, “We all run around and suppose, Illy sits in the middle and knows.” She had a friend named Peter who had been severely disappointed in relationships. He was saying that the nerve center responsible for such things should be cut.

I had a vision of a shark. Next day April told me that during the same time she and her friends had been discussing sharks.

When Hayley believed that she had been possessed by witches, she called Scott Stanley, the head of the Tucson Castaneda chapter. Scott was very well-off, and one day he invited me for breakfast. He looked at my astrology chart and said that I was completely unrealistic, that I had an awkward personality, and that I had a strange relationship with my mother. That however was not the important part. He was talking about how on some days he would see many white cars, and that there was a meaning to that. He also did a story about 300 people a year dying in the no-man's land that was the highway between America and Mexico. He could not get that story into the papers, so I advised him to try getting it in Le Monde.

Hayley's boyfriend was telling me that the situation was simple. He said that a guru had told him that you look for answers, and you get them. I do not know if that is correct; clearly that person was a guru and was in the business of giving answers. There will always be people with such aspirations. They include the aforementioned guru; they also include any number of others.

But the most interesting set of people I met in Tucson were a part of an artist collective called the Solar Culture. Its head is a gentleman named Steven Eye. He created a center next to the railroad station that constantly hosts art exhibitions and music performances. He and his volunteers were very welcoming to me and to many others. He was at that time with a young woman named Joy, and they in addition to running the center kept going to the deserts for spirit questing. He is no longer with Joy; he is married to a woman his age from Poland. If it is true, as some claim, that relationships are about equality, then he has made the right choice.

Kat and I had a lot of fun. We would have sex outside of a convent and say such things as “we are creating reality.” She kept talking to me about how diminutive I was. One day we were in an alley, and I called her “alley Kat.”

She had an analytical frame of mind. The more she analyzed, the more she found wrong in my structure. She was talking about how she had had a boyfriend who was an asshole and knew that he was an asshole, whereas according to her I was an asshole but had ideals. She gave me a copy of “The Crow” comic book. She had complete hatred for established religion; but she believed that she was very honorable and that others should be as well. I once told her a white lie to protect her feelings, and since then she labeled me a liar.

What is the correct course of action in such situations? According to one view, a lie is a lie and is always bad. According to any number of other views, sometimes it is necessary to lie. The latter case comes especially from Eastern and New Age religions. According to these beliefs, you get what you send out, so you cannot say anything negative. The correct response to that is that there are times when you do have to say things that are negative. If a nuclear reactor blows up, you need to tell people what had happened, or else they have not the knowledge that they need to protect their lives and their health.

Is lying bad at all times? How many people tell others that they are fine when they aren't? Are all lies similar, or are there degrees and gradations?

Is it the same to tell a person that you are fine when you aren't as it is to fail to tell the people that a nuclear reactor has blown up?

I had had a similar conversation with Layo. We were talking about how the kings and the nobles in the past thought that they were better than others because they were not lying. I said that they did not need to lie because they were in their position. Layo said, “It's true, why would a king need to lie?” I have come to a conclusion that in lying, as with everything, there are degrees; and some lies are more excusable than are others.

I picked a pomegranate off a tree and was going around town asking people to pick their seed. Based on that seed, I could interpret their situation in life. What I found with the pomegranate was that there were patterns that then got deconstructed. A person would see a pattern in a fruit, and the next person would see something completely different. At one point I approached a beautiful young lady. She picked the best seed in the fruit. Then her boyfriend showed up, and we had an exchange. Later on in the day I got attacked by some teenagers, who broke a Yegermeister bottle on my head.

Meanwhile Lisbeth was posting some beautiful writing. She tried to convince me to go off the street and get a place where I could write what I wanted.

I went to jail for being at a hotel which hosted a New Age convention. I ran into a Papago Indian named Macedonio, who told me about his spirit quest that resulted in him seeing a white buffalo. One of the guards thought that I was eating soap, which was completely not the case. He kept going on and on about it, threatening to have me tied up. Kat posted a bond; I got out; and the charges were dropped.

I went to jail at another time. I was in a medical library, and a woman falsely thought that I was masturbating. When I was in jail, I was telling people what I saw in them. The person who interested me the most was a young detective who got framed by some creeps for their crime of defrauding old people. He was put in jail a day before his scheduled wedding. The woman's ex, who had been violent, was messing with her at the time. The lawyer refused to take on the case because it was a Class IV felony.

There was a Mexican kid who got violent with his white girlfriend. He continued to love her very much. He was talking to me about maybe him needing to be in jail in order to get back with her.

There was a man named Vincent who had been a decathlon champion. He was not in a good shape. His work life was sketchy, and his home life was not a good one. His wife was highly manipulative, and she got him in jail for an argument. There was another man there who said that he was there for “beating [his] wife's fist with [his] face.”

I did not develop contempt for the people in jail. I developed compassion for them. All of the above people were good enough individuals, and in no way are they worse than an average person.

I took a bus toward San Francisco. Kat accompanied me at the bus terminal. She told me that I did not like her, so I kissed her all over her face and said, “Would I not do this to someone I did not like?” She said, “all right little whore you,” and I was on my way to San Francisco.

https://sites.google.com/site/ilyashambatbiography
Ilya Shambat.