Sometimes when life shifts and changes, I think of how that parachute rises and falls. We don’t always perceive cause-and-effect, but it’s not as nebulous as mere correlation either: a shift occurs, which we both effect and experience. We are at once both actor and acted upon; we participate in a larger dance, with incomplete information, simply knowing sometimes that things are more right than before.
I am from New York, but hadn’t lived Stateside in two decades, having been mostly in eastern Europe since university days. I suddenly found myself back in New York, not by choice, this past summer. There is a long and difficult sequence behind this. Suffice it to say here, the dominant feeling being back “home” was one of exile. A part of me inside felt as an east European refugee on these shores. Yet it was in a way no one could see outwardly – since I am from here, born and raised and with family right here in New York.
Being back after two decades, thrust into an odd configuration, including with family suddenly, without choice, and by the way separated from my life belongings and plans, I felt severed from narrative – my European narrative, my life narrative – with nothing to replace it. So I felt doubly displaced – an outsider to all I knew. In some ways I was also intimately familiar with where I’d landed – familiar, yet with no clear string back to the life Stateside I once knew. I felt trapped outside my own culture. Displaced.
Heavy metals, chlorides and traces of nearly two dozen neurotoxins have seeped into (or in cases been inserted into) our urban water supply. Some of these have been there since long ago, it’s true – but I had been away a long time. For my body this quasi-toxic onslaught was dumped in at once without regard. How could it not have had an effect?
After a few months back in the US I felt compressed, twisted, locked down – under immense pressure, with sudden mood swings, scarcely able to focus. Something drastic had to be done, and one day I decided to stop eating.
I embarked on this fast spontaneously, in desperation, this past autumn. At first I considered it as a hunger strike – but this conception had several flaws. Firstly, what I could be striking against was too complex – the goal difficult to articulate, and would be even more difficult to realize in this way. Moreover, I’ve arrived to the point where I do not believe in such protest, “politicizing” the personal and threatening possible self-harm. I’m not speaking for others here, only the point to which I have arrived.
In general, where there is an obstacle to address, one can approach it from the physical or from the spiritual viewpoint. In this case, I quickly realized that what I urgently needed to address was inside – and that although I couldn’t articulate it to others’ satisfaction, I would know when I had reached a breakthrough with it. So the concept of a hunger strike gave way to that of a spiritual (and cleansing) fast: an attempt to reëstablish sacral space, in the close, pressured, unchosen, uncertain and (from one perspective) debased situation in which I found myself.
Even so, I’d done a 46-day starvation fast once before, with herbal tea and apples quite like this, 15 years earlier in Budapest. I drew heavily on that experience now, and added a lot of research along the way. So this has been one of the two great fasts of my life. I didn’t put a limit on it in advance this time; it proceeded in several stages.
Oddly, it was almost instantaneously helpful. I wonder about that. I quickly dropped into a space where I could better cogitate and advance, to see better what was crushing around me, and how to strengthen and navigate it – all impossible just before beginning this fast.
I don't mean to paint the situation with such a bleak brush, by the way. Things were variegated, rich and nuanced, yet the days always built quickly to something crushing and defenceless. Much of the time since returning I felt either reduced to a 12-year-old or smashed into being a borderline autistic 75-year-old, shuffling around with zero artistic connection or coherence.
The second and third days of the fast were hard – very spiky – as chemical withdrawal went on apace, including with caffeine from the fine espresso I'd begun drinking again daily a month or so earlier.
After those spiky first days came a burst of good feeling. The body raids a store of easily accessible protein around days 3-4 or 5, so this energetic burst can be typical in such fasting.
Then I slogged through a heavy, rocky day as my body adjusted to its next stage of deriving nutrients, presumably extended ketosis — switching from seeking proteins via blood glucose to ketones, from sugars to fat as a main source of sustenance.
Paradoxically, a fast can help address external stresses not by strengthening the body but by weakening all its hard bits – breaking down resistance, dropping into a lower shell where one becomes truly non-confrontational. Bit by bit, hard nodules broke down over a couple-few weeks, the body more able to connect to source, realigning – more protected. If one can use the space thus gained to nudge external factors way forward – a narrative which happened to be available to me just then, via a new project – then one can even rediscover a path to one's own authentic bliss. This is what seemed to be happening – slowly, episodically, with great caution and attention over the ensuing days.
Again, this is not a recommendation. Anyway, since I’m lazy, I found I like fasting the way I like long-distance train travel — you just sit there, and you move hundreds of miles.
One morning for breakfast I didn't eat a mesclun (mixed greens) and rocket-leaf salad, with fresh wet mozzarella balls, fresh whole basil leaves, sliced hard-boiled egg, sun-dried tomatoes, black olives, avocado, and mint, tossed with raisins and toasted pumpkin seeds and sea salt, with a creamy parmesan and cracked pepper dressing. I considered not eating tiny mandarin slices with this as well but finally left them out. And I could hardly taste not eating the avocado, which is typical. I don't think there's any way to eat avocado where the taste comes through really, except in guacamole. But I liked the idea of it a lot.
By week number five, symptoms of weakness emerged. Such fasting is a practice, a hard path to harmonizing inner-outer disparity, and it certainly demands one stay on top of it – like riding a strange horse.
At one point I switched to organic apples, and was astonished. In the state I was in, one could simply taste it instantly: I’d been eating globes of chemicals before, and now I was eating apples again. Apples, it turns out, are one of the most pesticide-absorbing foods there are.
I started researching more what goes into our foods. I found a list of alternate names for MSG and ways it sneaks into our foods unlabeled. That one's a shocker. MSG is not just something people are allergic to, it's a neurotoxin, and significant numbers of people are affected by it adversely, so it's astonishing how systematically and frequently it's inserted into our basic food supply while seeking to cover this up. There's no benevolent way for me to understand this. So the fasting time was a real wake-up call on the importance of learning more about such things, and making decisions accordingly.
I started scouring for food photos, ripped from the New York Times and my mother's vegetarian magazines (she's not a vegetarian, she just likes the magazines); I culled the internet for recipes. I fantasized at pictures of food like others might eye centerfolds: French-Moroccan tagines and Indian paneers, Asian kababs and wintery soups with white beans and baby new potatoes with nutmeg and Swiss chard, coarsely torn. If you serve soups in shallow bowls then the bulky ingredients don't fall to the bottom.
My God, have you ever imagined how many varieties of kebab there are? Armenian pepper-spiced ground meat khorovats roasted with parsley. Uyghur deep-fried mutton with cumin and sesame oil. Southeast Asian Rajpooti soolah with barbecued partridge and boar in Kachari wild melon sauce. Persian kebabs steeped in yoghurt and spices with a dash of powdered sumac and raw egg yolk on the rice – and at least a hundred other main varieties.
One night for dinner I didn't lovingly savour fillets of cubed lamb rubbed with parsley and garlic, marinated in a garam masala / green chilli paste, then cooked with peeled tomato, diced onion, chopped cilantro (coriander leaves) and pine nuts in a rosemary-infused saffron oil, served with yellow basmati rice, fresh hummus, butter-grilled flat bread, and a light green salad tossed with feta in an olive vinaigrette. . . . .
Where was I? Oh yes. During this time I came to understand how spending extended time in the small apartment situation I was in was such a peculiarly concentrated and extreme pressure it had been impelling me to buckle with sudden anger – sometimes randomly, as a result of rubbing against a vastly different spirit (one which has caused me crippling damage in the past) – i.e. anger as a healthy mechanism for protecting boundaries, but in an unhealthily vulnerable situation where the boundaries are not available; thus I was raw and exposed all the time. At other times I am certain this anger was brought on by someone I was with, from nothing, all of a sudden – either unwittingly, from her intentional exposure to an outside influence – testing me for some reason – or else to inculcate a sudden and extreme emotional reaction in me so as to negate and dispel something she found distasteful to deal with, usually in terms of responsibility for deep wrongs.
I mentioned above an inner-outer disparity – this, it turns out, was a main factor motivating this fast. The uncharacteristically severe feelings which had started surfacing in me without warning from rank nowhere were a strong symptom of this disparity. Previously in life I'd have taken such reactions in me as a sign that I should run away from something as fast and far as possible. This fasting began to reveal a different way to deal with it – to get down under it and dwell inside it and grow, in stages.
I insisted on sacred space as a fundamental right, and slowly a good long extended feel for what can really be going on emerged. Now I was able to identify and strengthen vulnerabilities, to disentangle, and stay disentangled; instead of running away, I ploughed right through this existential slop and found basic autonomy, insistently so, through this process – something new.
The parachute was right here in this room.
Anyway I was quite weakened by this stage of the fasting – and the precise weaknesses showed me where I am weak: they were exacerbated by the fast, so I could actually identify and strengthen them. It’s a bit like rehearsing old age.
It’s astonishing to realize too how much of life is a theatre of the real. I had just gone over a month without food, just apples and herbal tea, yet I felt better than I had in years. This is not conventional wisdom, surely. There’s a lot more to this reality than we know.
Once a greater autonomy was vouchsafed, vulnerabilities identified, techniques sussed out and defences strengthened, I reverted to what I experience as a realer, wholer self. External teachings help clear a forward path with this by the way; one needs a positive program to pursue in such a time – not just a negation of eating, but a program compelling one forward.
Our self-symbol, the core identity of our "mind", exists in our muscle memory, in the whole rigmarole of body (and outside our body) – not just in our brain, which manages, co-ordinates and interprets this. So the ability to re-access muscles, quite literally to stand up again in ways I recognize, back in the reinforcing context of this culture I once so deeply belonged to, back in New York, returned me to a vital sense – perhaps a sense of belonging to the present again – as a physical state. It's exactly the kind of trajectory I was hoping to find with this fasting reset, and lucky to find it.
It was a calculated race, with a specific set of goals, in a terrain I knew well, yet with totally unique circumstances, and great vigilance. Again: I do not recommend a starvation fast to others. The ratio of muscle loss to fat loss in such a game may be something as bad as 17 to 83. Muscle tissue grows back, so it is not permanent damage – except when taken too far, when it can become real damage from knock-on effects. Each of us has unique circumstances and resources. Know yourself, be vigilant, and act on that knowledge.
In the last phase I feel as though I was exploring death through exploring particular weak points, to focus on and strengthen them, and understand and navigate this process better in future. It produced a renewed presentness. This presentness is something I retain.
Since the fast I’ve gone nearly 100% organic. I’ve cut out all meat including fish, all sweeteners including honey, all grains including rice and corn, and most of the starchier vegetables. No caffeine, no gluten, no soy, no cornstarch – in fact no artificial ingredients whatsoever. Restaurant eating is largely a memory for me now. I’ve not been rabidly fanatical about it – I make a couple of exceptions with ingredients, and there have been a few situations over these few months where it behoved me to drink a tea with tap water that I’m offered, or whatever. Yet in general: it’s a staggering new lease on life.
It’s funny, now that I’m eating again, that I’m not even eating most of the foods I was fantasizing about during the fast. It’s like I burned through that layer and arrived at something else. I remain alert to cravings, and respect what the body is telling me.
Throughout the fast I continued looking into related factors – so I’ve changed more than just my diet. There's no more aluminium in my deo, fluoride in my toothpaste, or endocrine disruptors in my soap and shampoo. I’m using ascorbic acid powder to de-chlorinate the bath, and another powder to help detoxify further. If there’s something I won’t allow in my food or drink, why would I soak in it or rub it into my gums and scalp every day?
Here below is a photo of a recent meal. It's something like chunks of organic avocado, with triple-washed organic baby spinach leaves sautéed in extra pure olive oil, with pan-charred garlic pieces, an organic freshly-crushed peppercorn medley (white, black and green), California rock sea salt, plus a smidgen of Madras curry powder and freshly chopped organic sage leaves. The curry powder is with coriander, turmeric, fenugreek, cumin, chili, curry leaves, salt, cinnamon, clove, ginger, black pepper, garlic and asafoetida. I've added fresh shredded ginger (a must), a small handful of shredded organic red cabbage, pieces of organic California lemon (fruit and peel), a half-teaspoon of minced shallot, organic California capers, organic red kidney beans, sliced red pepper (60% hot, with overtones of sweetness) and a small sheaf of freshly chopped organic cilantro (leaves and stems) – be sure to add the cilantro just before finishing, as it will cede much of its tang if kept over heat too long – with a dollop of locally-sourced organic crème fraîche, over a portion of fork-fluffed organic royal rainbow quinoa cooked in artesian imported Fiji spring water – all, thanks to the economy of scale which the organic food industry has achieved by now in the US, for cheaper than what a Chinese take-out meal or a burger down the street would cost. I love this.
I feel like I'm able to choose to be here now, to make choices again for the first time since arriving back Stateside. It moved the situation along; it recalibrated, it sheared habits and smoothed chokepoints. Walking around the City is completely different now, untethered from the tens of thousands of restaurants and food stands glutting every block. Maybe I feel a better understanding now about what people are here, on this earth, in relation – some false scrim has maybe slipped away a little. Anyway I'm eating remarkably tasty food.