Isaac Constantine : Saving the World Through Touch
Courtesy of Author
Saving the World Through Touch by Isaac Constantine, a transformative memoir both political and spiritual as well as deeply personal, spans nearly two decades in the author’s life. The confessional narrative chronicles his battles with divorce, family dysfunction, career woes, estrangement, addiction, mental illness, and other hurdles on a quest—driven by youthful idealism, full of adventure but fraught with disappointment—for self-actualization. Volume I, the first book in a projected trilogy, opens with an intensely visceral and harrowing forty-page narration of the author’s psychotic break in the fall of 2016, which led to his arrest and hospitalization. Subsequent chapters dramatize the backstory to this tragic event. It begins with the end of his marriage, with the grief and shame that drive him from New York City, his hometown, thousands of miles away to Northern California to begin his life anew. The work endeavors to find order in the chaos of his journey and meaning in the madness of this period in his past. Volume II will recount Constantine’s subsequent eight-month residence in two mental hospitals, his trials with the criminal justice system and mental health establishment, and his long, painful recovery from the trauma and destruction of the events set forth in Volume I. In Volume III he finds salvation as he gratifies a dream to compete in combat sports, meets the love of his life, and becomes a father.
In Volume I the author’s journey leads him to an Israeli shamanic therapist who treats patients with mushrooms; psychedelic nature retreats for men; a school for psychic meditation; a gym that trains professional fighters; the battlegrounds of Occupy SF and Oakland; massage school at Esalen; a second-wave hippie tea house and the federal drug trial for its charismatic owner; Burning Man; a polyamorous tribe of Burners living off-the-grid at an experimental art collective deep in the desert; and SF County Jail. Seeking community—a family to replace his own, from whom he grows estranged—the author is drawn to several countercultures that welcome him at first but alienate or spurn him in time. His mounting isolation, frustration and anger destabilize him, driving him to increasingly dangerous environments and self-destructive acts. After an epic downward spiral he breaks over one Thanksgiving weekend. During a manic episode, he’s arrested for destruction of property and threatening his spiteful neighbor, then jailed in the grip of acute psychosis.
Constantine conceived of the project years before many of these events occurred, back in 2013, soon after signing his first book deal for his debut novel. He’d intended to write about his experiences in California ever since he moved to the state in 2008; after five years he’d seen and done enough to begin. Once the title came to him, he began a literary experiment, drafting the memoir on social media—in status updates and the captions above and comments below other posts—recounting past episodes and narrating new adventures in real time. He experimented for years and wrote exhaustively about his journey before committing the work to manuscript form. A significant portion of the material written on social media will be integrated in the final draft. The author introduces relevant Facebook and Instagram posts toward the middle of Volume I. He works them in gradually, interweaving digital missives and images with traditional narrative. The work grows progressively experimental through the second and third volumes, the latter of which will incorporate audio and video for a digital edition.
Below is a selected excerpt from Saving the World Through Touch.
““Spend a few minutes alone with the mushrooms before you eat them,” Yonatan said from where we sat face-to-face on the studio carpet. The mushrooms lay on the floor between us in a copper offering bowl on a ceremonial bamboo tea tray with a glass of water and two vanilla beans floating in a dipping bowl of honey. The honey and beans would dilute the acrid taste and help keep the “medicine” down.
“Speak to them,” he went on. “Tell them what you want to learn.” I nodded ironically though with restraint, without a smirk or titter. I wanted to be respectful, to observe the ritual with solemnity, and in my heart of hearts I too wanted to believe that the mushrooms would hear and answer my prayers, but a civilized skepticism—a feature of my upbringing—was deeply ingrained in my self-identity. This conflict grounded me at times, protecting me in some measure at least from charlatans and other frauds; then there were days when the warring natures residing in me rioted, as if to escape the prison in which they were locked together. The friction was present in the urge to write to my parents before taking mind-altering drugs. My anxious attachment to them (Yonatan called it “enmeshment”) conflicted with my zeal for adventure and autonomy. I wanted to please my parents, to be steady and dependable, and as long as I’d had a job and someone to keep an eye on me they were satisfied and left me alone. My wish for their approval had confined me to a safe and respectable life that came apart when my latent disdain for conformity erupted. As my marriage ended, I regressed to my troubled teenage self—lovesick, overwrought and routinely intoxicated. It reminded me of when I failed out of college after my first semester, got suspended for a year and moved back home. I hadn’t relapsed in my late twenties to abusing hard drugs again, but I turned desperate and embattled like I’d been ten years before. I’d matured so much in those years, or so I believed, and had been so pleased with my progress, but once I lost my footing again I discovered that some part of me preferred to suffer. Secretly I felt more authentic, more alive in agony. Suffering was romantic; it glowed like a halo on tortured souls. After all I was a writer, and all great writers suffered for their art. I guessed I’d have to suffer more before my suffering paid dividends but I was impatient to reap the rewards of my struggle as some great authors did—to earn recognition, to be loved and suffer less—so I was at war with myself.
There was something broken in me that I couldn’t define and which no one else could diagnose or fix. The wound had fractured my identity, dividing me against myself and nature. It was this vague affliction that I wanted to probe on this journey. When Yonatan left the studio to give us privacy, I lifted a thin stem from the bowl, focused on the shriveled, round, brown cap, and petitioned the dried, dead fungus out loud for insight and healing.
After I’d finished speaking to it I bit off its head and folded the stem between my open jaws into my mouth. I pressed the mass with the tip of my tongue to my teeth and chewed the brittle corpse to a rancid pulp with my incisors; the mushrooms were delicate, Yonatan had said, so I wouldn’t need to use my molars. His method shielded the taste buds and kept the dregs from sticking in my teeth. Because it was my first mushroom journey with him, he’d given me just four grams, but that was as much as I’d ever eaten. Some mushrooms were stronger than others, I knew, but based on the quality of his Molly I figured that these would hit hard. I swallowed the first with water and chased it with a nibble of honey-dipped vanilla bean, then repeated the steps until the copper bowl was clean.
By the time Yonatan returned fifteen to twenty minutes later I’d moved from my seat on the floor to the mattress, where I lay face up with my eyes open and waited to feel something. He lingered by the entrance and dialed some knobs on the CD player until the sounds of birds, insects, monkeys, predatory cats and other beasts reverberated through the speakers that surrounded me. The old cabin floor trembled through the mattress as he stepped across the room holding a gray sleep mask with black lining; I sat up to take it, slipped the mask over my eyes and lowered my head to the pillow again. Lying in darkness, steeped in the cries of the wilderness, he covered me to the sternum under the blankets I’d slept in.
“Have a meaningful and provocative journey,” he said with vicarious cheer, emphasizing the latter, then stepped across the room again to sit. “I’ll be here.” I could tell where he sat—on the carpet against the wall—by the direction of his voice.
The baritone hum of a Quena crept in at a murmur and grew louder; it fluttered, receded to a low, steady thrum and dithered again. A second flute joined at a higher octave and harmonized with the first, mirroring the clean, stark melody. The notes fused with the calls of the wildlife. The flutes stirred the loop of animal noises like ingredients until the mixture boiled over in a fever of sound. Electricity traced the contours of my brain as signals careened between my neurons over the synaptic web. The current overflowed like the music, running down my torso, arms and legs. Sound vibrations aroused every nerve ending from head to toe. Pressure waves washed over my field of awareness, which shuddered like cochlear fluids, converting vibrations to nerve impulses which my parietal lobe disarranged so I heard the music in my skin and felt it in my bones. I had the sensation of moving rapidly, falling almost while my body lay still. I wanted to brace myself but had nothing to hold. And the journey began.
”
Constantine studied English at Williams College in Massachusetts, and creative writing in the fiction concentration at Columbia University, where he earned his MFA. Jeremiah’s Ghost, an autobiographical novel he started at Columbia and wrote in his twenties, was published in 2014. After beginning his memoir, the author broke ground on The Rituals of Grief, his second novel, in 2016. The novel is set at a morally suspect wellness retreat on California’s Central Coast and features a female protagonist coping with grief and confusion in the wake of her brother’s suicide. The work is a departure from Constantine’s autobiographical writing. After his hospitalizations, and two years of crippling depression that kept him from writing, once he began to write again, he set aside the unfinished novel to focus on the memoir. Today, he is well on his way to completing the manuscript for Volume I. Each of the three volumes will exceed 100,000 words.
For more information about Jeremiah’s Ghost please visit here and Amazon and other major booksellers and local bookstores.
