A couple of weeks ago: close encounters with facets of healing.
On October 6, I attended a lecture by virologist Theodora Hatziioannou regarding HIV. The science is fascinating but what I took away is her account of visiting study subjects—in her case, primates. In monkeys’ quarters is lodged an alpha male to which visiting humans must show deference. The incongruity of the supposedly superior species making obeisance to the subjects of experiments was humbling.
In her presentation Dr. Hatziioannou included a slide of an ACT UP die-in of yore. Each time I see these images I am horrified at the momentum squandered: after all the pressure exerted we still lack healthcare.
That night, after the lecture, YouTube pushed my way a feature film, which it doesn’t often: Resurrection featuring Ellen Burstyn and Sam Shepard. I hadn’t seen it and yet I felt I knew it. I’m reminded of Kay Cordell Whitaker’s 1991 The Reluctant Shaman: A Woman’s First Encounter with the Unseen Spirits of the Earth, in which she recounts being chosen to be mentored by spiritual teachers.
In Resurrection, which I watched that night, Edna Mae McCauley (Burstyn) receives little guidance, save a light towards which she realizes she dare not advance—in a near-death experience—lured by familiar faces along the way. That encounter wells within and manifests in her desire not to take ailment for an answer, while asking few questions. And while it may have been de rigueur for the libertine ’80s, McCauley is portrayed as acting upon her carnal cravings.
In about 1975 after I met my wife Andrea Carney, her son Alex, about 8 years old, was sick. It hurt to eat. Andrea was a medical skeptic, having been involved in the American Nutrition Society since she’d been pregnant. And so at the urging of her friend Donna she took Alex to the Healing Light Center, then in Glendale. Alex saw Rosalyn “Roz” Winsky (now Bruyere), whom we’d call a psychic healer, but in this case a psychic diagnostician. She said Alex had chicken pox—in his esophagus. She suggested he eat brown rice until Tuesday (this was the previous Thursday or Friday). By Tuesday he was fine. Unlike a case study documented in 2013, Alex experienced no “classic skin rash.” That is, until about eleven years later when at a family gathering he comforted a sick baby. Who had chicken pox. Again, it was very painful, but now on the outside. By then, Roz had been the technical advisor for Resurrection.
Andrea recalls, “I sat with Roz myself one time. She advised me about my own health and told me, ‘You were a witch in a previous life, and you did not use your ability for good.’”
One of the first people I met who had the mysterious malady now known as AIDS was an artist, Al Zimmerman, whose style was just this side of naïve. Entering his tiny closet of an apartment, I and my dear friend Ricardo Reyes, an artist also, were greeted with a crèche: the Baby Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and the rest. And the rest. And the rest. And the rest: any toy soldier with a foot-base, any four-legged farm animal, any figure from a model-train Plasticville panorama, all paying homage. When Andrea and I visited the Healing Light Center years later, Al’s work was on the wall of its main space. As I recall, he painted portraits, cherubic in nature. Ricardo reminded me today that Al’s parents had been bludgeoned to death in 1965 on their Petaluma dairy ranch while he was to be discharged from the Air Force. He died at 46 in 1990 “following a long illness.” His L.A. memorial was at the Healing Light Center; memorial donations in Petaluma were to be made to the American Cancer Society.
The day after watching Resurrection I attended a current affairs discussion group that devoted much time to mending a wound from the previous session. When we went ’round the room to give our one word of check-in, mine was Healed.
