Photographs courtesy of Lisa Carver.
Day One
All around me are short, shiny young Romans groping each other. The old ones engage in the more solitary pleasures of hawking loogies and eating out of greasy paper bags. I’m on my way to a dark retreat on a farm so high up in the mountains it requires five modes of transportation to get there—plane, train, metro, bus, taxi—each more confusing than the last. You buy your bus ticket at a particular newsstand nowhere near the bus. The only reason I knew this was because Antonello, the dark-retreat guide, had emailed me travel instructions … paragraphs of them … which I had memorized for dear life. Clutching my ticket, I tried to go through gate ten up the stairs to platform ten, as instructed, but the gate was locked. I tried gate eleven, but there was a sign saying not to cross the platform, which would have been the only way to get to ten. Vomit or diarrhea had been flung over the wall of the stairwell at regular intervals the whole way up. How did anyone have so much stuff in their guts? And why would they keep going up the stairs? I would have laid down and called 911. These Italians are of hearty stock. The smell was amazing. The arrow indicating the way to the metro switched directions so many times it curled and pointed at the sky. I guess you just guess here. Don’t even think about asking for help from the people in little cages like tollbooths scattered about. Signs in front of the booths warn in English: “We’re Not Here to Give Information.”
At last I alighted in Sora, the town closest to the farm, population five thousand, and called the taxi driver, Giulia, but she only giggled and said her boyfriend took her car and she had no idea when he would be back. I walked the streets of Sora and noticed that all the clocks were off, but each told a different wrong time. Actually, now that I think of it: Other towns don’t even have clocks anymore, do they? Everyone’s looking at their phones.
Which is one reason why people go on dark retreats. It’s the only place you can escape your phone, with its light and sounds. When my husband Bruno’s ex-wife Emilie asked why I would torture myself like that, I gave my usual answer: I don’t do anything for why; I do everything for why not. But this is more than a whim. I used to be fine with how I am: never staying in one place or with one person. But lately something feels off, feels in need of fixing, and I don’t know where the problem is. Could be I will find it in the dark. That’s historically what dark retreats are for: to heal body and mind when more conventional methods fail. Often a mirror would be secured over the bed as a passageway for ancestors or spirits to give you whatever advice they’ve been saving up. I’ve had too much hubris to listen to anyone’s wisdom, especially my ancestors’, considering half the ones I know about were rapists or murderers. But if we learn the most from mistakes, it follows that the worse someone lived, the better their advice must be. Hold on, dead Carvers, I’m coming!
I was waiting as instructed at a fountain in the middle of town with a directional arrow pointing inexplicably straight down to the center of the earth when a woman in a bikini hanging out of a banged-up car with no taxi sign hooted at me.
“You must be Giulia,” I said.
“I must,” she answered—not sarcastically, but as a simple imperative—and we were on our bumpy way.
The farm is made up of lush hills that stretch empty all the way to the empty sky. So peaceful. Lethargy rolled through me in waves as Antonello showed me around, two chickens in tow. Antonello could have been thirty or sixty. He was open yet unreadable, joking yet serious, bony and taut yet gentle. He looked like he was born on this farm (he was) and would die here, just like his father and his father before him. I said I was hungry, and he yanked some grapes off a vine on the wall and handed them to me. I’m glad I told him I was a vegetarian! He looked capable of grabbing one of the chickens, wringing its neck, plucking its feathers, throwing it on a fire, and handing that to me as easily as the grapes.
At the end of the line lay my dark room. It’s basically a cave, its stone walls carved into the mountainside and fitted with a bed, a dresser, a card table, a chair, and a doorless bathroom over to the side. No nightstand for the book I need to read in order to sleep or the notebook I need to keep in order to live. For the first time since my father taught me to read and write at two years old, I would be without both. I did bring a tape recorder with black electrical tape over the red “on” light just in case I have some thoughts, but it’s not the same. Writing has been my one constant. I was about to be truly alone. For a night and a day and a night and a day and a night and a day.
Antonello asked what meditation method I’d be using to manage anxiety or fear. I said none. He looked dubious. I said, “We’re just animals. Animals crawl down into pitch-black holes all the time. I think it’s normal.” He said, “So your method is no method.” I got irritated at that, because I will not be using the no-method method! That’s a method! If you plan for something, that’s what you’ll get. I don’t want to manage my fear—I want to meet it. But first, dinner.
We took Antonello’s seventies van down to the regular part of the farm where British, Portuguese, Romanian, Dutch, French, and Italian guests gathered around two long tables pushed together. No one but me came for the dark room. The others are here for relaxation, nature, silent horseback riding … The next time I sit at this table, everyone here now will be gone, and a new pack will have arrived. I don’t join in the conversation.
“Are you ready?” Antonello asks when I put my fork down.
Oh, yes.
Day Two
(transcription numbered with each time I turned the recorder on)
1.
I just had my once-daily human visit, as such. Antonello knocked on the door and wordlessly placed some food in the vestibule between the outer and the inner door. He had said my meal would arrive at one o’clock each day, so I figure I’ve been in here fifteen hours with nothing to say worth turning this recorder on for. If I hadn’t just had that fractional interaction with the world to remind me there is a world out there, who knows if anything at all would have occurred to me as worth preserving for later. In here it feels like there is no later.
When I went to sleep last night, it felt normal. You sleep in darkness and silence. But when I opened my eyes in the morning and there was no light and no coffee and no bustle of stepchildren getting ready for school, I was instantly thrust into an altered state. I started hallucinating my surroundings. Furniture, walls. Not seeing it—I was imagining it. And imagining was exactly the same as seeing. It’s making me wonder how much I imagine what I think I’m seeing out there in real life too.
Eating in here is nothing like the eating I’m used to. Sometimes I get the fork to my mouth and there’s nothing on it—it must’ve fallen off. And what even is it? Something that could have been eggs with nuts inside. A spongy breadlike thing—mayhap a giant mushroom? And some really sour lettuce, possibly seaweed. I don’t know this food and I don’t know the man who brought it—not really. You just have to trust. It must’ve been like this in the womb: you didn’t decide anything; stuff just came; you just ate it. I love when things get down to their simplest form. After a few bites, I was full. Everything is slowed down here, functions are going extinct. I pictured my digestion trying to outrun the slowness and then just shrugging and curling up for a nap. This constant game of intake and energy conversion and discharge and beginning again before you’ve even finished one job … why didn’t it ever occur to me I don’t have to keep going and going? I could just … not eat.
I hallucinated stepping out onto the balcony, which doesn’t exist. I looked down the valley, which doesn’t exist. I didn’t exactly feel my body moving, going outside. I was just doing it. It was totally natural. It’s so still here, I guess my brain knew I needed to see and move or I’d go crazy, so it let me see and move in this other way that has always existed, I just never had cause to tap into it before.
I also hallucinated two rectangles of light cast on the wall from two windows instead of shadows. Wait a minute. That’s what windows do. Ha ha ha! But in my brain windows cast shadows, and this was opposite. I thought that for at least thirty seconds. And then just as it had drifted in, it drifted away: the hallucination, then the awareness that it was a hallucination, then the story I built about what it means to hallucinate.
Nothing spectacular has shown itself—nothing like the dragon that visited the Buddhist monk on his dark retreat that he talked about on a YouTube video. It’s all mundane. I shouldn’t say mundane because it’s very beautiful. What I mean is it has become ordinary almost instantly—the ways of the dark.
I tried hallucinating on purpose just to see what I could see. I saw a snowy mountain dotted delicately with evergreens and a cabin. Then I remembered where I’d seen this mountain before: in a large Japanese painting behind the sofa at Mrs. McCooey’s, a woman paralyzed by polio who my mother would take me to visit. I’d stare at that painting and fantasize about being there instead of where I was, with the boring adult conversation, which was always the same. Now I am one of those boring adults talking instead of escaping into a painting.
When I was a kid, I thought art and songs and movies were real. Then I grew up and grew money and influence, and art became symbolic. Everything became symbolic. And complex, and distant. Now, in this room where I can’t see and can’t impress anyone, nothing is symbolic, everything is easy, and I can walk into paintings again.
2.
I feel like it’s bedtime, though it could be anytime. I don’t know how to behave here. There’s no habit, no feedback, no punishment or reward to show me what is expected of me. The same way I can’t inspect the food, can only eat it, I can’t inspect the life I’m leading right now, can only live it. Well, I’m not leading it. I’m lying in it. In the light, you get to choose from a menu at a restaurant, and you choose from the menu of life—what kind of friend will you be that day, what hobbies will you learn that year. There’s only the one thing here. And it’s eternal.
I know this: I’ve spent way too many of my first twenty-four hours being bitter about Bruno, filling this room with lists of all the ways he is chaotic and selfish. He’s not even doing anything to me right now! I give so much energy to fighting with him when we are in the same room, how disappointing that I’m continuing the fight when we aren’t. Obsession is an invasive species of the mind. You can reimagine events so constantly it chokes out all the other little events that are trying to happen. I’m ashamed. I’m having to face that it is me choosing to live my life in struggle. I gotta stop telling myself it will be better “when …” There is no “when.” There only is.
Auuugh, gawd, listen to me holding forth and forth to my audience of none! I can’t stand myself.
3.
It’s hard to tell sleeping from waking in here. But I do recognize what a nightmare is, and I just had one, so I must have been asleep. In it Bruno kept turning the light on and telling me about something happening—animals replicating. I said, “Leave me be. They’re going to replicate whether I’m there to see it or not, and right now I’m on my dark retreat.” But he wouldn’t stop, so finally I went to see these animals replicating. I could hear something moving behind an old built-in bookcase, and I yanked desperately at it to free the creature, and pulled out chunks of what I realized was the original Bruno. The pieces were falling apart in my hands like rotted food, while the replicant Bruno yelled and gesticulated at me. It was so horrible it woke me up. It was horrible because it’s true.
We categorize nightmares as unreal because we, as a species, don’t “believe” in sleep. I mean as a landscape, its own real place. Perhaps I should reverse it, stop paying attention to what people say when I’m awake and instead believe what they say in my sleep.
4.
Harry Styles lyrics running through my mind: Stop your crying, have the time of your life, gotta get away from here, you’re not really good, everything will be all right.
5.
Came here to report that I was walking in the snow in a black snowsuit. I saw an oval space in the snow and curled up in it. I pulled snow over me like a blanket and it kept me warm. I thought, Why didn’t I ever realize we don’t have to be cold?
I don’t know why I keep seeing snow when I know it’s not winter out there. I guess because snow is white, and I’m hungry for the opposite of blackness.
6.
I feel my separateness. I feel like a tiny piece of gravel cutting into the heel of the darkness. The darkness is whole and I am just an aberration. I don’t matter. I have never had that thought before! How terrible it feels! How I wish I could talk to someone or look at homes on Zillow or walk the dog—anything to tell me that it’s the darkness that’s insignificant and fleeting, not me. Oh God, it’s awful in here! I can’t even fantasize about the other activities on the farm that I might do when I get out of here, like paragliding, weather permitting, because it won’t be me out there paragliding. It will be Lisa Light. Lisa In Motion. I don’t know that person. Me Now is stuck in here forever. Without all of Lisa Light’s scurrying about, I have come to the terrible realization that—get ready for it: There is no God. Sigh.
I thought God was everything and so that meant me, too. But now I see there is no “one life” that I’m a part of. I am a minor character in someone else’s plot. Someone else being this darkness, this stillness.
Day Three
1.
When you chew, you hear yourself. I don’t want to hear myself chewing! And there’s nothing I can do about it! Chomp, chomp-chomp-chomp-chomp-chomp. I ate yesterday’s unknown fruit for breakfast, and oh my goodness! The squishing and the chomping. I could hear the juice squirting! I don’t want to know all the machinations of the human sausage factory. I can’t handle it. This awareness of process. I want to live in a dream, flitting about. Just do your jobs, body, and don’t tell me about it.
2.
I hallucinated a church bell. I think it really did ring a few times—the only sound loud enough to penetrate these castle walls—but then I heard it two hundred and fifty more times. I counted. I started experimenting with trying to stop and start it, and I could. So it probably wasn’t real, but you never know with Italians and how much they love Jesus—two hundred and fifty could be exactly the right amount of times to ring His bell.
3.
Okay, 113 church bell tollings from the opposite direction. Then twenty more from the first direction. It’s getting irritating because I don’t know which world I’m in. I’m also starting to hear something like the ticking of a clock or horse hooves on cobblestones in the distance. You know how when the radio’s set at the lowest volume in your car, you can’t quite hear music but you know it’s there? You can sort of feel it? It drives me crazy. This sound is like that, only I can’t adjust the volume. It could be what John Cage describes as the treble hum of our nervous system above the base thump of pumping blood.
Maybe there’s a whole lot of sounds all the time that we never hear. Maybe I’m hearing a tree growing right outside my window.
4.
You hear about vicious killers in solitary confinement feeling tender toward a rat in their cell, or an insect. There’s a fly or a bee or a mosquito in here with me … Pretty sure it’s a fly, a big horsefly, and I feel tender toward it. It really breaks up the monotony. It’s doing things, moving around, living. I feel united with it against the darkness. We’re two of a kind!
5.
It feels much later than one o’clock. I’m so distressed. Antonello hasn’t come with my food. I don’t care about the food, but I care about the coming to my door.
My insect is gone too. Maybe it died.
6.
I think it’s night, but I can’t sleep because I’m seeing so much light. Bright light above, below, within. Drive-in movie screens with bright white movies playing. Walls of graffiti, all the words white white white. And silver. If I close my eyes, it doesn’t stop it because the light is coming from inside me. You guys, there is all this light inside my brain. I’ve stayed in here too long.
Day Four
1.
It’s the fourth day. I think. It feels like the fourth year. My muscles have atrophied. I get dizzy when I stand. It’s weird to walk. The floorboards sort of … float up to meet my feet. I imagine they must actually move an infinitesimal amount each time we walk on them. Everything must, even stone. Every single thing is coated in membrane—that is the nature of things. I simply haven’t been sensitive enough to pick up on the motion of objects till now. But yes, everything is in motion. Each time my foot lands, I can feel the give, and the springing back, of the floorboards. It’s disconcerting. I’ve always thought of myself as walking on a surface, not with it. In fact, the floorboards are walking on me too.
2.
I don’t like to think of other people having been in this room or coming here in the future. We are not welcome, with our disruptive thoughts cutting the one cool Everything into pieces. At first I thought the darkness didn’t care about me, but I was forgetting we care a lot about a splinter stuck in our finger. The darkness might try to tweeze me out! Or drive me mad with terror or boredom so that I self-eject. I have always been good at camouflaging myself, so thus far I have eluded detection. But if someone else came into the room—even if I think about somebody else here—the darkness might sense their presence, even my made-up person’s presence, because they wouldn’t be coated in darkness camo like me. And then, after the darkness was done with my made-up person, it might scan for more intruders and find me! Oh ho, now I’m all spooked out.
3.
I took a shower. It was nice. I took off my clothes and stood under the showerhead (I felt for it to figure out where to stand) and turned on the faucet, and what happens next is totally predictable when you perform those three operations … yet it surprised me as if it just happened on its own, as if I didn’t do anything at all to create that wetness.
Another surprise came when I got out of the shower. Earlier, I’d felt around for the cool basin and left my towel in the sink. I thought I would be able to find it there easily. Turns out that wasn’t the sink. Can you guess what it was?
I was careful putting my clothes on, because it’s dangerous to drop things in the dark. They move. I lost a sock in the night. I took both of them off and dropped them by the bed when I went to not-sleep. This morning only one remained. I was on my hands and knees everywhere feeling for its brother. Somehow it got to the middle of the room!
Trying to find the right place to comb the part in my hair so that it doesn’t dry with my cowlick gone haywire without looking in a mirror was precarious.
Anything done tentatively is exquisite. When forced to move slowly, to grope for one’s bearings, we become fragile, delicate. We come across small beauties that normally we rush past and trample. Feeling uncertain opens the possibility of surprise. Surprise is not enjoyment. It’s awe. Humility. Surprise is being outsmarted by the universe, and we glory in our smallness because it allows us to be teased in a loving way by the ubiquitous.
This feeling was perfectly captured by a travel guide who took a duchess to see the Grand Canyon: “Upon standing on its rim and encountering its vastness for the first time, the duchess flung her arms open and screamed.”
4.
Every time I feel my way along the soft stone wall, a nanoscopic layer falls off. How many feels, over thousands of years, before this stone wears clean away, and I can plunge my hand through the wall into the outside?
5.
The electricity bill for this cottage must be so low. Ah ha ha!
6.
Note to self: Look up the meaning of desultory. I do believe this pillow is “desultory.” It’s a wet noodle pillow.
***
***
And that was my last transmission from the dark. I tried to gauge when it was 10 P.M., so I would exit at the same hour I entered, but I miscalculated, because when I wobbled out of my room I was hit in the face with some hazy afternoon sunrays. All the better to witness the world with.
7.
Oh my God. All that is out here! Fruit trees, a mother cat with kittens, horses whinnying, stone houses with no doors in the doorframes, no windows in the window openings, no floor but dirt. These are probably those crumbling Italian countryside houses you hear about that you can buy for a dollar. Of course now I really want to buy one and stay here forever. Hey, I bet that’s the father cat there. There’s so much dimension out here. I don’t know why I ever went indoors! This world is glorious! I gotta take it while I can have it! Because—you guys—I’ve gotten a glimpse of what’s to come. Death is heavy, man. Literally. It hurt my chest lying on me. And the loss of God got me right in the mouth. I can feel with my tongue a bunch of canker sores inside my lips and one of my cheeks.
And that’s where the recording stops, with a small scream from the first human being I came across, an old-fashioned, lots-of-layers dress despite the warmth of the day, woman. I’d forgotten to look at myself before emerging. I must have been a sight. All pale, with my legs moving funny. Puffing my lower face out so the cankers didn’t scrape against my teeth while I muttered into the recorder. I wore sunglasses even though by now it was twilight, and a later (shocking) glance in the mirror revealed that my cowlick pointed straight to the moon.
Day Five
I met the guests at dinner, and they were indeed all new people—from Scotland, Spain, Australia, Ireland, Poland, and England. They were curious about what happened in the dark. After hearing what I went through, a couple of them wanted to try it out; the rest said over their dead body. When I got to the part about losing God in there, a vibrant gay handsome Australian actor/content creator named Robbie cried, “I found Him!”
He whipped out his phone and read what he had just written about the year since his mother died and he found out his Argentinian fiancé was using him for a visa, so he ran away to Thailand and did ayahuasca and breath work and something with three initials that unblocked trauma quite traumatically, it seems, as evidenced in the video he showed me of himself in little black underwear shaking like someone being exorcised.
He asked what I do and then he googled my name and was yelling SUCKDOG?!?! The name of my band from a million years ago. Seven faces stopped eating and they, too, demanded an explanation. I said, “It was the eighties.” That seemed to satisfy everyone.
Robbie was vegan and alcohol-free while he lived in Thailand, until he came to Italy and someone offered him a glass from a fifty-thousand-dollar bottle of wine. I asked if it tasted like $50K. He said no, it tasted like $5K: He only had one glass.
It is so good to hear other people’s jokes and not just your own.
Antonello explained how they make cheese on the farm the old-fashioned way. They slaughter a lamb and use its intestines (I think) to make the milk bubble (I think) as it’s churned instead of the chemicals that Americans and now the rest of the world use instead. They make everything on this farm themselves with absolutely nothing from stores. Nothing modern whatsoever. Robbie said he learned from Antonello that agriculture is exactly the same as spirituality.
Robbie and I spilled it all—utterly indiscreet. What a relief it was to make sense to someone! Conversation with him is not the high wire act it is for me in France. Even after three years of living there, Parisians find me inexplicable, and it kind of hurts my feelings. Everything there is undertone and nuance that I just don’t get. I don’t want to get it! It feels like a game with rules written in invisible ink, where someone has to win and someone has to lose. I don’t want to do either! I want to know and be known and laugh a lot at stupid stuff—but not at how stupid other people are. Robbie’s the same. We love juvenile movies like Airplane! Robbie just says anything, like I used to do. No context, no modesty, fast and loose with facts. He thinks I’m normal. I am normal!
In my exuberance at being able to speak without effort, at not having to pay attention to another culture’s manners, at not trying to predict and disarm my husband’s next mood, I maybe went overboard: I accidentally ate an entire tureen of lentils that I thought were for me, but it turns out were for the whole table.
Day Six
I am so emotional since regaining the world of light and sound that comes from sources other than me. When Robbie didn’t appear at breakfast or the afternoon activity, I was like an actress in a Mexican soap opera twice betrayed. When he showed up at dinner, I was so joyful I forgot I’d ever been anything else until … this redhead came late and enthralled the table with tales of her past life when she was a Chinese woman who loved her husband and he didn’t love her and she got hooked on opium because of it and died giving birth to their sixth child … Robbie joined in with one sentence only: “A shaman told me my spirit animal is a turtle.” “Turtles are so wise,” the redhead noted, and began giving a tutorial on the subject. “Turtles are so cute,” I interrupted, “with their little E.T. heads.” “Little E.T. heads!?” cried Robbie, and we both burst out laughing while the redhead remained stone-faced. Touchdown! There’s not room enough in Robbie for two new best friends.
The redhead shot back that my marriage was unsustainable. I said, “Well it is or it isn’t, I don’t really care which.” But inside I was thinking, I don’t think you’re one to decide about some else’s marriage, after having six kids in a row on opium until you died.
Day Seven
To get to breakfast, activities, or dinner, I’d walk to the common area from my little stone house (dark no more—all you have to do is turn on the lights … and it shrinks! I can’t believe how huge my room got in the dark!) down a hilly, winding, lonesome road flanked by vineyards twenty minutes each way. Dogs would bark my coming as if passing a torch, alerting the next dog two minutes away of the demon who dared step foot on their land. When they’d discover—a hurtful surprise each time—that they couldn’t break through their fences and maul me, they did the next best thing and peed at me. A chorus of urine streams. I never shared the road with another human or vehicle … just me and the grapes and olives and figs and birds … until this morning, my last (maybe my last ever, I thought), when an escaped German shepherd trotted straight at me and I thought, Feel no fear, feel no fear, feel no fear. It worked: He let me pass. I feel more in sync with everything in this world since I found out what it’s like to be just with myself. To meet even an attack dog is welcome in its not-me-ness.
Enormous pink ribbons tied to the gates of two houses across from each other at the entrance to the farm proclaimed that each had been blessed with the birth of a daughter. Since no one ever leaves here, I imagined these two little girls growing up together and then growing old together. I’d seen their grandmas a few times, with their plain clothes, plain faces, plain attitudes, bending over to yank weeds or do some other earth business; slow, placid, belonging. That will be these babies someday.
For my last breakfast, I asked for cold water, and the staff acted like I was a zoo animal who broke out, hitchhiked to a diner, and demanded crickets. “Antonello won’t let us have cold water in the morning as it’s not good for the health,” a French guest explained. “ ‘You don’t wash dirty greasy dishes in cold water,’ ” she quoted.
“I don’t wake up as a dirty greasy dish,” I protested.
An edict of Antonello’s can be griped at, but it cannot be overturned. I drank my water tepid.
Robbie was steadily sucking down coffee. “I didn’t sleep at all last night,” he said. “I was lying on the hammock under three blankets staring at the full moon and it came to me: You met Lisa for a reason.” He decided that reason was to make me the scriptwriter for his TV dramedy about his mother coming back from the dead to give him gay dating advice. I fly to Thailand in January to begin shooting!
Lisa Carver published the nineties zine Rollerderby. She lives in Pittsburgh and wants a divorce. Her latest book is Lover of Leaving, and her Patreon is called Philosophy Hour.