HEALERS, PT. 1
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| M. Sieveking's hands. 1915. |
When she tells the story to others, she tells it as a joke.
She gives it an even progression, a three act structure, and a tidy little punchline. Starting with an overly optimistic set-up—the cheery crowd, the beautiful weather, the vivid sensations—she calls to mind the purity of hope and community, the promise of being made whole, of being restored, of being touched by healing hands. She exaggerates here, knowingly. Her audience, her friends, know she was never really bought in. No, not Corinna.
Then she describes the actual meeting: the tightly packed line full of families and pets and dialects; the old Indian woman on the stage that wasn’t really a stage, each of them taking their turn to be embraced; then, when it is her turn, Corinna approaching the saintly woman and graciously accepting the hug, looking deep into her caring eyes, and leaving feeling less alone, even loved.
And here, Corinna lets her voice fall flat and her expression hang with comedic disdain. “But the next morning,” she says, “I wake up with a body ache and a cough. I call Jessi and ask how she feels. It takes her a while, but finally she says, ‘I think I have a little bit of a cold.’ And I’m like…” she pauses here to switch to a mock-angry whisper. “I think that bitch got us sick!” This is an integral part of the punchline, her calling this saintly Indian healer a bitch. “That big bosom of hers,” she says, “Is just one big fucking germ-factory.”
That’s where Corrina’s story, the one she shares, ends. A classic tale of reversal. And with her punchline, there is laughter, bright smiles, sometimes happy condolences, usually followed by someone else’s breezy telling of a multicultural mishap, or just a refiling of wine glasses.
What Corrina doesn’t fully explain was the purpose of her trip to Jhia, the traveling Hindu “hugging saint”. She doesn’t explain that the trip was for work, a kind of research for her latest project.
While Corrina had been freelance writing full-time since the pandemic, her latest foray into long-form work was digital self-help books. Corrina was a realist and a cynic, someone who had always chided the self-help industry, even back in its quaint 1990’s infancy. But now, with the internet and self-obsession and psuedo-science booming, it was clear to Corrina from her home-office vantage point, that there was good money in giving bland advice. The market was seemingly bottomless.
Like anything she wrote—movie treatments, ad copy, wedding toasts, ghost-written memoirs—there was a formula undergirding the narrative. Self-help books were no different. Each had, at most, four distinct parts.
She called the first part IDENTIFICATION: describe the universal problem behavior, the thing we are learning to abandon, and explain it in as many ways as is tolerable. What does this problem look like, feel like? Describe the experience from the point or view of some made-up “clients”, people who “came to me one day” with a problem they needed fixing.
The second part was DEFINITIONS: don’t offer solutions, but do give new names to the problem thinking, or habit, or process. Without going into details, create a vocabulary for your specific brand of advice, describe it as “a system,” or “a method,” or “a plan.” This makes your analysis seem unique and not the hurried recycling of dozen or so other articles, themselves recycled too, about the same thing.
The third part finally got into the system/method/plan which Carrina called RETHINKING: identify the old narrative and replace it a the new one. Corrina usually grabbed the most common advice and repackaged it, using the basic language of CBT therapy, and she just explained the rethinking over and over through fabricated examples and generic analogies.
The fourth part was technically the actual explanation of “the plan” but it was essentially useless. Corinna didn’t even have a name for it. According to all of her metrics and all the industry knowledge she could get, no one ever finished these types of books. The most ambitious would get through part three only, so the fourth section became, for Corrina, a kind of vague metaphysical inquiry, a type of psycho-babble vamping. It was writing that used lines of logic that Corinna’s mother would have called “gobbledegook” and Corinna often called “horseshit.”
It was all content that Corinna herself would have recoiled from if she ever encountered it herself on the wild of the internet, and yet, there was something enjoyable about this formula. Every so often, Corrina even stumbled upon a tidbit that was actually decent advice. Sometimes, especially in the “part four” chapters, her prose could reach the feathery flight of a haiku. Other times it felt more like wellness industry madlibs.
It was an exercise, an assignment, and Corrina had always been someone who liked an assignment.
She had her own library of downloadable titles for many universal “problem areas”, as she called them. They were all published under a pen name with the series title “How to beat!” As in: “Only 24 in a Day: How to Beat Procrastination!” or “What’s Your ETA?: How to Beat Being Late all the Time!” or “This is NOT the End!: How to Beat Negative Thinking”.
She had been toying with writing about secular spirituality—that seemed like the next big trend—and that is what led her to Jhia, the hindu spiritual leader, the hugging saint in the middle of her worldwide tour.
The plan was this: show up early to get a spot in line to get hugged by Jhia, take lots of notes, talk to some people, and tap into the wobbly psychology of someone who wants to spend a weekend day getting hugged by a stranger to better their soul. Hopefully, there would be enough there to use as the opening imagery and framing device for her next book.
Bianca was invited along for several reasons: firstly, because she could serve as an emotional template for Cassie’s authorial perspective; secondly, because she would entertain Cassie through something she feared could be dreadfully boring; and thirdly, because Bianca had a better car to drive out to the suburban nature preserve where Jhia was holding court.
“I’m not sure I get it,” Bianca had said on the phone when Cassie explained the plan to her. “I mean, she just travels around and asks people to show up and hug her?”
“Yeah,” Cassie had conceded. “I mean, I think that’s pretty much the whole deal.”
There was a long pause.
“That’s kinda kinky,” Bianca had said. The nature preserve was called Hope Spring Woods. The name came from the freshwater spring on the property and its supposed first American tenant, a fur trapper named Egbert Hope. However, the plaque to Hope was quietly removed in the 1990s when it was discovered that Hope most likely murdered a family of three by arson to gain rights to the land. This was a fact that Cassie loved to share with people whenever she could. And it was one of the first things she reminded Bianca of when they passed the expressway exit sign for the preserve.
“Yeesh,” was all Bianca said in response. “Bad vibes.” She was resting in the passenger seat, her head back and eyes closed, having asked Cassie to drive while she “woke herself up.”
“I think the vibes are all better by now,” Cassie shrugged.
“No, man. Murder vibes are forever.” Bianca said this with such authority, Cassie couldn't help but laugh.
Bianca was what Cassie would describe as a believer. To her, any theory about the inner workings of the world was plausible, especially ones that were emotionally appealing.
Once, they were seated next to an experimental playwright at a fundraiser dinner for his theater. When Bianca had asked him what his work was about, he answered the question by asking, “do you believe in witchcraft?”
Cassie heard Bianca say, “sure!” as she got up to escape to the bathroom.
In most other people, the easy intellectual drift towards the supernatural—be it astrology, crystals, chakras, ghosts—was maddening to Cassie. But, there was something about the breeziness of Bianca’s belief that was tolerable. And if Cassie ever pushed back on anything Bianca professed to believe, Bianca never fought it that hard. She would shrug and say something general like, “Well, it’s not like they just made up Tarot yesterday,” and then she would change the subject. So when Cassie laughed at Bianca’s determination about “murder vibes,” Bianca responded by sitting up with a sincere furrow in her brow. “I mean, if any vibes are stubborn it’s gonna be murder vibes, right?” she said. “I guess so,” Cassie conceded. Once off the expressway, Cassie drove down a slender, winding county highway. The forest on either side was dense, making the June morning that seemed dry and hot on the expressway suddenly misty and cool. After creeping down the drive into the preserve, the canopy broke to show that the half-circle parking lot that surrounded the visitor center was filled with cars and buses.
“Jesus Christ,” Cassie muttered to herself.
Bianca looked at the expanse of vehicles and shook her head, saying cryptically, “hugs, man.”
The license plates were from every corner of every neighboring state. Cassie felt a twinge of excitement. “Man, people really love this shit,” she said. Cassie let Bianca walk ahead of her as they approached the visitor center, a common tactic she was only half aware of using when they were in a new environment. Bianca—tall and strawberry blonde, with a wide-open and toothy face—always made a better first impression than Cassie, who was just like Bianca but shorter, with black hair, worse posture, and a demeanor that she always hoped was cool and collected but she feared was cagey and aloof.
Bianca taking the lead always worked; as they approached the front doors, three young men with tight smiles and baby faces, each wearing a bright yellow t-shirt that said, “I can help!”, gave Bianca a bold welcome and handed both of them tokens: paper cards with a letter and number combination. They took turns explaining the process for what they were calling “the darshan presentation.” “This is your darshan group number,” said the blond one. “We will start calling group numbers in about thirty minutes to fill the meeting space,” said the next one.
“Once you are in the space, Jhia will give her address,” said the last one, who was actually Indian. “That will be followed by a meditation that you can join as you are able and then the darshan, where you will meet Jhia for her blessing.”
The Indian man bowed his head subtly to Bianca and the two white kids just grinned.
Inside the visitor’s center, families, couples, and the elderly milled about. At one end of the lobby was a long desk with pamphlets for a few dozen state parks and preserves. At the other end was an exhibit on the native plant and animal species. In one corner of the exhibit, kids were pushing big yellow buttons on the wall to play recordings of the different frog croaks one might hear in the preserve. A small group of young women using wheelchairs talked in the middle of the lobby. Several Indian families bedecked in colorful saris and kurtas waited, perusing the maps of the nearby river system and reading the panels about the majestic state tree.
“What’s a darshan?” Bianca whispered to Cassie.
“It’s like the hugging part, I think.”
Cassie wanted to strike up a conversation with someone. She wasn’t after any specific insights, she just knew from experience that listening to what they had to say was the best way to get a sense of where the real story was.
“Give me a minute,” she said to Bianca. “I’m gonna talk some people up.”
Bianca nodded and winked like they had a secret. “I’m gonna get a flattened penny,” she said brightly, already two steps to the vending machines past the information desk.
Cassie moved through the nature exhibit, pretending to read the informational panels scattered among the painted forest scenes. After one rotation, she returned back to the first person she spotted, a young woman who was wearing a cream colored sari and watching her very young daughter explore a racoon sculpture that was crouched next to a sign that read, “PET ME!”
She had learned long ago that it took very little to start a conversation. The dumbest remark would do the trick perfectly. “Wow,” Cassie said, “that thing’s as big as she is.”
“I know!” said the mother with a laugh. “I don’t think I’ve seen a raccoon up close before.”
The woman had the slightest curl of an accent and beautiful olive skin.
“She’s a cute kid,” Cassie said. “I’m surprised by this turn out. Do you know if this is typical?”
“Yes, Jhia always draws a pretty big crowd. Many of us are traveling from the same places.”
“Oh, really?”
“Mostly from the city. I came from the city with a group,” she said, looking behind her. “We’re all neighbors in West Ridge.”
“Oh yeah? I drove in from the city too. I’m not too far from West Ridge!” Cassie lied. “So, you’ve seen Jhia before?”
“Yes, she’s come every two years for quite a few years now. This year many of our children are old enough that now they’ll remember meeting her.”
“Neat,” said Cassie. “This is my first time.”
“Congratulations.”
“What keeps you coming back?”
The woman looked at her blankly, as if the question was a strange one. “Are you familiar with the Hindu concept of darshan?”
Cassie winced and whispered in feigned embarrassment, “not really.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” the woman said, gently touching Cassie’s shoulder. “All are welcome.” She smiled a warm smile, then stepped forward to guide her child through the display.
Cassie watched her take her daughter’s small hand and help her up onto a small step where she could better look at three photographs of something called the Prairie Vole. When Cassie turned around she saw Bianca was standing behind her, a grape lollipop in her mouth. “Look,” she said, holding up a misshapen penny that had a creature crudely embossed in its center. “It’s a Northern Cardinal.” She smiled wide, showing purple-stained teeth, but then her face dropped when she saw Cassie’s.
“You okay?” she asked.
Cassie couldn’t tell what kind of face she was making; still, she tried to stop making it.
“Of course I’m okay,” she said.
Bain News Service, Publisher. "M. Sieveking's hands." [Between and Ca. 1920] Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/2014700932/>.