Primed for Mysticism and Scared to Death
Detail from Giacomo Balla's "Street Light," 1909. From the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. It’s the first week of August and I’ve lost track of what my life is good for. Seeking oblivion, I’ve joined some friends in a rented cabin in Maine. These last few mornings, I’ve woken up around 8:30, lying in bed a little while longer and then walking barefoot with my yoga mat down a soft path of pine needles and moss to the dock. It’s a short practice, only half an hour, and by the time I’m done, everyone else has drifted down with towels and coffee mugs. The sun shines fully on the dock in the morning, and we warm ourselves a few minutes before diving in one by one. We had expected to swim despite a chill, expected to struggle, but there is none.
A long time ago, I heard someone refer to non-artists as “civilians.” And as I pass the days here, swimming and eating lobster and feeling richer than my day job should allow, fresh off the failure to publish my first novel, which took me six years to write and for which I never considered another alternative, I think to myself, Perhaps I am a civilian. And, Would that be so terrible?
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The book I wrote was called Mikey Shine, about a small-time drug dealer who trades an aimless life in South Florida for the insular world of Chabad-Lubavitch, a messianic Hasidic sect of Judaism known for bringing secular Jews back into the fold. At a Brooklyn yeshiva for recent returnees to the faith, Mikey and the other students, all lost boys, struggle to reconcile the fraught secular lives they’ve left behind with their new spiritual identities.
Responses from agents trickled in over the course of several months. The book was too niche, too introspective, too religious. The Torah exegesis bored them. What did it have to do with now, with us? Why would a kid like that become religious? They didn’t buy it; they couldn’t relate.
I found ways to defend my honor in conversation with civilians. People only want to see Hasids selling drugs or having gay sex, I told them. They don’t care to watch them study Torah. They want to root for someone breaking out of fundamentalism, not being drawn in.
I empathized. After all, my protagonist doesn’t stay in yeshiva: his love of textual study only awakens him to the possibility of creating something of his own, and the story is revealed as an artist’s journey. But Mikey’s initial susceptibility to the poetry of Biblical text seemed to my readers a kind of original sin, and one that I was guilty of by extension.
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I dropped acid for the first time at fifteen, and beauty burst through the thicket of my teenage dramas and insecurities like a glowing, white reindeer—earthly and ethereal, at once. Though I didn’t yet
