AMARIS

QUESTION 1: How would it alter my consciousness if I wrote my life from the perspective of a magical realist character?

SOMETHING STRANGE HAS BEGUN

The Red city across the seas was a place that altered it’s inhabitants. Scorching through their psyches, it had moulded their minds in so many ways. Formally, it was known as Amalari; a hot place filled with fire and life where young people went to build themselves up in the world and break apart the ideas of their parents… a red city suspended far into the future compared with the hooded mountain land Amaris had come from.

Some places were more into the future than others were- or at least that was the case according to their historicist world view that outlined history as a gradual progression towards civilisation. Each section of the globes position in time was therefore determined by their appeared ‘level of civilisation’. So this firey red city- with it’s cobbled brick streets and green grey canals, once seen as so historic- had bended into becoming the future. Filling up with force, it’s people had been filled too with a passion to move forward; to supersede their histories and invent new ways of being. It was exactly what their species had done for generations; torn apart one Order of Established Normality in order to a create a new one- recycling the stories of who they were.

In a place like that, so big and brimming with life, she could be anything and everything. She could step outside the narrow confines of what her mountain town and all the ideas of who she thought she was in order to open her wings like a butterfly emerging from it’s cocoon. Colours and confidence and parties and people and languages and love and questions and queerness… it was a world utterly unlike anything she had known.

But quickly she learnt how to speak this new language of Life.

Amaris had packed her bags and sailed across the seas when she was still only seventeen- disappearing forward into the future. She had gone there to study at the Academy of Acquired Knowledge; a prestigious institution with an academic ambiance that seemed to romanticise even the most mundane moments. The days she spent her lunch hour eating by the canal while the sun sliced it’s way across her face, the smell of dust and books that seemed to sit on all the students who left the library, the soft humming of the city outside the stone walls of the Academy’s square. It was here in this huge house of knowledge that she had been introduced to the forms of philosophy that would come to fill up her days.

Coming to learn the architecture of a good arguement Amaris drank in all these new ideas like a man lost in the desert. Poetry and Politics, Science and Spirituality… she sunk into the sea of knowledge her species had acquired over so many centuries. It was here at The Academy that she was introduced to the ideas of a philosopher called Bordeau who argued that there were different Orders of Established Normality’s in different ‘fields’ or social contexts. Different ways of behaviour accepted in each different social world- imaginary codes of conduct. This seemed somehow to make sense to Amaris; the ways of this red city were so different from her highland mountain home she felt she had to almost begin again from zero in order to live. Everything was different. How they dressed, how they talked, the kind of things they cared about…

It took her time to learn their ways but she was persistent; peeling back the layers of the people of the Red city until she understood how to be one of them, until she learnt how to speak this new language of life.

To prove that she could speak it well she moved into the old graffitied dentist school in the cities west wing; a place where the students at all the various academies of knowledge came together to find and loose themselves. A place where life was lived with the raw ruthless intensity of not believing in tomorrow. It was filled with the kinds of kids who liked to shatter apart their parents expectations; shaving their heads, dying their hair blue, piecing their faces and doing anything they could to disrupt. They spent their weekends sweating on the dance floors of abandoned buildings, obsessed with their own beauty and impermanence - then sleeping through the week just to do it all again the next weekend, not thinking about anything except the need to not think. The truth was that in all the ambitions of the firey city they had become lost in all their available options, overwhelmed by all the possible people they could become…

How they could identify themselves within all the possibilities they were offered?We can only become what we can conceptualise as possible. And in Amalari there were so many possibilities of personhood presented; more cultures, more sexual orientations, more studies, more films, more fashion, more drugs, more politics, more people… there were so many possibilities presented that these young people felt frozen by the responsibility of bearing their own identities.

And so naturally they wanted to rebel, they wanted to become artists and take drugs and go to all the parties, shave their heads and get eyebrow piercings in sweaty basements at one o clock in the morning. They wanted to listen to techno music and come home at 11am and dance through the destruction of their youth. They wanted to rebel against the Order of Established Normality through their alternative fashions and taste in music…and at first Amaris had respected that.

When she had stepped into their world for the first time as a pale faced timid nineteen year old, she had been overwhelmed by the exotic beauty of this kind of life; by the colour and chaos of it all...

At the first party she went to in the abandoned dentist school the dance floor had been dark blue and the hot electric energy of the room had overwhelmed her. She had barely been able to breath. Everywhere around her were beautiful painted bodies, draped in outfits so gorgeously unusual they looked like they were struggling out of a fashion magazine. It was a world that was fast, that was always moving and never slowed down for even an instant. Take beautiful pictures to provide proof of this beautiful life you lead, make yourself known, have a name that people will remember and don’t forget to count your success by the number of friends you have.

She admired these people and their hedonistic appeal so much that she decided to become one of them; to move into the graffiti’d dentist school with them and go to all the parties and have the kind of life that they would think was beautiful. What other option was there but to become part of the world you found yourself in? She didn’t know what kind of life she wanted to lead yet, at nineteen when the possibilities seemed too endless to imagine… and so she became just like the beautiful perfumed people she had encountered; working to crush the Established Order of Normality with each new party she went to, each new piecing she placed on her body.

What they didn’t realise though was that through all their romanticised cultural rebellion they were simply replacing one Order of Normalicy with another. Breaking the conventions of their parents only to create new conventions that their own children would have to break in return. But they didn’t care about that really, they cared about their parties and their drugs and their beauty - and most of all they cared about making the most of this moment becuase they were afraid of whatever tomorrow might bring.

AGOY- a dance with breath

And yet, while all this had been going on Amaris had been living a second life alongside the first. Two train tracks which never met; two lives which somehow seemed to never intersect. Because next to this fast paced red world of drugs and image and excess she had begun to spend every free moment she had at the cities centre for spiritual exploration. It was known by the people who went there simply as the Agoy studio; a huge marble stone building at the edge of town, where silent red robed people would go to chant mantras, move their bodies to the flow of their breaths and sit for hours with minds focused on nothing at all. A place of total stillness in the midst of a world of endless noise; the studio was a centre for peaceful control of ones own internal world, hidden just underneath the Red disaster of such a city.

Amaris had made a second home inside this strange space.

Meditation had always been her means of survival, ever since she was thirteen years old and it had saved her life. As a child all the doctors had been sure she was going to die because she refused to eat and got so dangerously underweight her bones began to show and she would faint on stage at her school during each musical rehearsal.

“Please please put on weight.” All the adults would beg her desperately. They would try bribing her, shouting at her, threatening her with hospitalisations but nothing would make her eat.

She had grown addicted not eating becuase she found that it made her mind calm, it took away her need to think about the everyday worries of the world and being somebody when all she could ever think about was the hunger that lived inside her stomach.The only problem was that she couldn’t stop and realised that soon she really would die if she kept going. The flesh had slipped off of her bones so quickly that she seemed like a skeleton and her mother cried herself to sleep every night becuase her only daughter was surely going to die.She didn’t want to die of course. But she preferred death perhaps to the kind of life that seemed like the only availability at the time; spending all your mental energy caring about what people thought of you, how pretty you were or which boy liked you. It seemed impossible not to care about those things when the rest of the world around you did.

And so thirteen year old Amaris had accepted that she might die and made her peace with that. She talked to her teddy bears about it and fell asleep to the sound of her rumbling stomach.

And then something remarkable happened.

One day she went shopping with her mother and turning over the titles in the non fiction section of a book store her fingers fell onto the pages of a beautiful light blue book. ‘Mediation made simple’ it’s cover informed, ‘the way towards controlling your mind and controlling your life’. She leafed through it’s pages hungrily.

“Mom can I get this book?”

As you have probably already guessed it was mediation that allowed Amaris to live. As an anorexic thirteen year old she devoured this book hungrily, realising so wondrously that there were other ways of controlling her mind. She decided then that she was going to live. And gradually as the pounds piled back on she learnt how to be with her breath and her body.

Ever since she had continued mediating. This new found ability to believe in the world again changed her in many beautiful and unexplainable ways, sinking into such delicious realities that she never wanted to leave; becoming exactly the kind of person she wanted to be. Meditation had formed her into who she was, and so when she had moved to Amalari she knew she wanted to explore the potential of spiritual practice further.

Yet on the first day she went to the Agoy studio she had been terrified. Anxiety was a living animal inside her eighteen year old chest.She walked slowly along the red brick path to the studio, clothed in her own silence. All the other people that were ahead or behind her on the path were much older than her, and they wore long red, white or orange robes while she was dressed in simple black pants and a t-shirt. She thought about turning back. But no, she had promised herself, promised her life that when she moved to a place where there was a spiritual centre that she would go. Agoy - the art of body and breath- was an ancient practice known all over their world and she had wanted to learn it for as long as she could remember. So she walked on, placing one soft sandled foot in front of the other, If it was horrible she wouldn’t make herself go again but she had to see for herself first.

The many worlds interpretation of quantum physics argues that many different realities can exist within each other; that different dimensions of existence can simultaneously sit side by side. Amaris could feel and taste the reality of this statement as she walked along the dusty road to the Agoy studio; so close yet suddenly so far away to the wild red world outside. When she finally reached the large marble building she took her shoes off and followed the other people inside. Cool, Calm and Quiet. It was one huge temple room covered with pictures of saints and sages. High ceilinged with an echoey acoustics so that the calls from the Agoy master at the front of the room reverberated back across the entire space.

“Inhale, Exhale coming up for Ado Mukha Svananasa.’the red faced man called from the front. ‘Now Exhale lowering down for Chaturanga Dandasana”.

Most of the people in the huge chamber were following his instructions, moving their and breaths bodies rhythmically to the sound of his voice. The reset were meditating in the back corner, eyes closed attention somewhere deep inside the depths of themselves, only half there. Amaris took a mat and a block from the stack in the back corner of the room and positioned herself close to the back. What followed was one of the most physically intense hours of her life, leaving her body aching in places she didn’t know it could ache. The poses ironed out every part of you; mind, body, soul… She lay in the rest pose at the end, thanking life for her having made it through without embarrassing herself.

“Three words that the student of Agoy lives by’, the tall bald Agoy master with the far away face called as he paced around the room. ‘Three words; truth, simplicity, love. Live by these words and you will find your happiness, your freedom of mind.”

She hadn’t known it then but this man would grow to become one of the most important figures in her life. His name was Gomulka and he alongside his husband Pavarishi Maharishi had founded the agoy studio which was the first spiritual centre of Amalari. Together they had travelled across the Eastern Hemispheres and learnt the old science of Agoy, living in ashrams and temples, drinking in all the Eastern wisdom. After eight years of life in an ashram on top of a clouded mountain, they had brought back the practice of Agoy to Amalari, the city of their birth. But in a place like Amalari Agoy was a strange thing; a practice that opposed the fast paced individual ways of their culture, a practice that made little sense to the minds of most people. A floating practice, that could act somehow as a portal into another place. Amaris had felt so much joy after that first class that she decided to go again and again and again. She got a job at the studio and went at least three or four times a week, slowly watching how her body and mind begun to change. She grew used to the intricate flows; stronger, more flexible and was continuously surprised by her own capacities.

But she didn’t talk about it to her friends from the abandoned dentist school. Rather she kept the two worlds separate- intersecting spheres that didn’t touch. They existed side by side, opposing one another. She knew at some point she would have to make a choice, have to cut away one of these contradictory lives. The right choice of course would be to leave behind the wild lifestyle of parties and people and pleasure…She wanted to live by ‘truth, simplicity and love,’ but she was having trouble with simplicity. The appeal of those parties and people and fashion was so great, and she she didn’t know if she was ready to give up the chaos of her youth at only 20 years old all in order to go and chant mantra with people who were all at least fifteen years older than her. But the joy that she felt after the practices was so great, so intense, it was a form of joy that was higher than the joy she felt at those hot Red parties. A form of joy that was light to carry, a form of joy she did not have to feel guilty about… and she did feel guilty often when she went to the agoy studio hung over from the night before listening to Gomulka discussing discipline and dedication.

The truth was she wanted both of these two worlds to go on existing side by side, she didn’t want to have to choose… but it seemed somehow that they were incompatible and that soon she would need to make a decision about the kind of life she wanted to lead.