Nancy Wait

Talks about her book, and about being an artist and a writer

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Awakenings for me have tended to be just that—waking up one morning and feeling radically different.  Waking up to a completely different reality than the one I’d gone to sleep in.  Naturally these experiences did not come totally out of the blue.  They were preceded by days and weeks of tumultuous happenings.  The awakening was like a crescendo.  Boom! The cymbals clashed and I woke up to a new reality.  Outwardly, everything appeared the same as it had been when I went to sleep the night before.  But I had changed.  My world had altered.  And afterwards, in a matter of months, my whole life would radically change too.

The first time it happened I had dreamed of my death, so when I woke up I was amazed and happy to be alive.  But a transformation had occurred.  My old life was gone.  It was over.  The second time it happened, eleven years later, I woke up one morning and thought I was dying.  But I was really awakening to another new life.  As if I had shed another skin.  It was all about shedding, about getting to my core.  Shedding ideas of who or what I thought I was.  And in the process, dying to my old self.

I’ve called both of these “spiritual awakenings” because they took me to places not of this world.  It was a world of visions and voices and strange goings on, especially the second time.  But what they both showed me was an inner world of my own imagination that was as true and vital and real as this one is.  And, while they seemed to happen overnight, they were the result of years and years of preparation.  Yet this preparation was nothing special.  It was no more than just leading my life, following my dreams, following my passion, my bliss, and often stumbling horribly.  But in the end, who cares about the stumbles if eventually you arrive at your destination.

I’ve tried before to write about what I call my “second awakening,” and it never came out right.  I’ve sounded psychotic or manic because I had so obviously taken leave of my senses.  Which is why the experience makes little sense without putting it in the proper context.  And the context has been difficult to arrive at.  The context has taken years and years to establish.  But without it, neither of these awakenings would have given me the deeper knowledge and insight that I’ve longed for.

I have come to believe that both these awakenings, or dying experiences, really,  were about reliving a previous death.  A very traumatic previous death.  A death of someone else, not me, unless I am her reincarnated.  And I don’t remember anything about her life; only her death.  And remembering her death seems to be what my life’s been about.  So whether I am her or she is me is rather beside the point, because we are connected in profound and startling and unarguable ways.

You see, there was this young girl of eleven who was killed in World War II.  Her plane was shot down by the Nazis over the Bay of Biscay.  The aircraft burst into flames before falling into the sea, disappearing forever.  Thirty-three years later I dreamed that I was shot and fell to the bottom of the sea.  But then a door opened underwater.

When I was a child of eight, I used to have a recurring nightmare of being enclosed in a steel box with water pouring in, and no way out.  The water got higher and higher, until it reached my nose.  And just when I thought I was going to drown, I would wake up.  Waking up always got me out of that death trap.

The little girl who died on that plane was eleven.  When I was ten my eyes suddenly went bad and I had to wear glasses.  I could no longer see into the distance without wearing glasses.  I think I was afraid to see ahead.  Maybe I was afraid of turning eleven.  Then I did turn eleven and nothing happened.  I wasn’t afraid of flying, and I didn’t learn about the little girl until I was fifty.  But I had gone to live in the country of her birth, because that was the place where I felt most at home.  And later on I painted her picture, still without knowing who she was.  There are things that we don’t know, yet we somehow know them anyway.  Things that come to us in dreams, because we want to remember.  Or we long to live in another place, because we feel more at home there.  We have these longings, these dreams and inner urges to make something familiar manifest in the real world.

I must have wanted to remember very badly, because after the first awakening when I was shown the door under water,  I became a painter and painted from my imagination.  I wasn’t really imagining things though, I was just using my intuition, painting my dreams, my visions.  It wasn’t an imaginary world, it was what I felt inside.  The only way I could reach those feelings was through pictures, not words.  One day she came out, this little girl in a red dress sitting at the bottom of the sea.  Her eyes were open; she didn’t look drowned.  I didn’t know that it was now forty-four years after that plane was shot down in World War II.  But after I painted her, I kept noticing when my digital clock said 4:44.  I noticed that a lot, but I didn’t know what it meant.

I didn’t know why I was painting all those drowned people, either.  Or those figures on fire, falling into the sea.  But it must have been time for me to know, because of what happened that July, 1987, forty-four years after a plane was shot down over the Bay of Biscay.  It was the Fourth of July, Independence Day, and I woke up feeling like I was on fire.

I’d had a premonition the day before.  I saw my neighbor come in with a new barbeque for the holiday.  “Getting ready for the Fourth?” I said.  Then, for some unaccountable reason a wave of fear shot through me.  I suddenly felt that I was going to be barbequed.  Fried.  Burned alive.  My worst nightmare.

I was living alone in a beautiful studio in the East Village.  The walls were covered with my oil paintings.  I took them all down and stacked them against the wall.  I couldn’t bear to look at them anymore.  It was crazy, I know, but it was like I was suddenly seeing them for the first time, seeing what I saw, as if I was seeing myself in the mirror for the first time, as if my awareness had been magnified a hundredfold.  We know that our eyes actually serve to block most of what is out there—and there’s a reason for it.  It can hurt to see too much.  It can be confusing.  I hid the paintings as if that would help me to be blind again, but it was too late.  I’d seen something, and it scared me.  So now I saw the bare while drywall with nails sticking out, and I knew I was being nailed. I thought of pulling the nails out too, but then I would see the holes in the wall, and somehow that seemed worse.

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By the spring of 1987 I had been painting non-stop for nine years, both commercial work and work from my imagination, which was all figurative, and mostly of the female form.  Early on it had begun to feel like I was painting a journey.  I called it Journey To The Deep, because I was drawn to painting figures falling into the water or rising up from the water or crawling out of the water onto dry land.  I thought of the water as a metaphor for the depths of my psyche.  The paintings seemed to paint themselves.  I didn’t question whether they were good or bad, or care really, what anyone else thought of them.  And then, as suddenly as the series had started, it came to an end.

I didn’t know it was the end at the time.  That the last of the drowned figures would be the one I had painted of a little girl sitting at the bottom of the sea in a red dress, with eyes open as if she wasn’t dead at all.  It was a particularly satisfying painting for me.  I related it to the time in my youth when I had escaped a very unfortunate situation by pretending I wasn’t there.  Pretending that I was drowned at the bottom of a swimming pool.  In a way this painting was like making my hidden self visible again.  Perhaps in doing so, I was releasing a great deal of pent up energy, because not long after I finished the painting, the vibrations began.

When the vibrations came the first time, a few years earlier, I only felt them in my legs.  A friend had taken me to the beach one night.  It was winter, and freezing cold.  We stared out over the waves, the black water, the white caps rolling in, the star-filled sky above.  All we did was stare at the sea and talk about how cold it was, and the next day I had the funny feeling in my legs.  A feeling of movement, as if the sea had somehow entered my bloodstream.  I asked my friend if he knew what it was, and all he could come up with was that I was probably drinking too much caffeine.  But I knew that wasn’t it.  I thought it had something to do with going to the ocean that night, and with a man named Sendar.  His name was Sendar.  It sounded like Send Her.  Because later on I would fantasize that I had been sent here.  How could I not when that channeler told me I was here on sabbatical?  I’d asked the channeler why I wasn’t more like other people?  Why couldn’t I get excited about things they got excited about?  “Because you’re only here on sabbatical,” he said.

I didn’t know what to do with that information, so I put it aside.  I kept it in the place I kept other interesting information that I didn’t know what to do with, like my mother telling me I was conceived in revenge for World War II.  Sabbaticals and revenge scenarios are all very well, but you still have to live your day-to-day life.

The vibrations in my legs went away after a while, and I forgot about them.  Yet now they were back, taking over my whole body.  The swirls always started in my solar plexus, and only when I was lying down.  The sensation was pleasant, relaxing even, as I gave into it.  I had to give into it.  There was no use fighting something I had no control over.  Swirling, spiraling up to my heart area, then my forehead.  Probably in my legs, too. They made me feel very awake, very alive.  I hardly needed to sleep or eat, and spent a great deal of time looking words up in the dictionary and writing down their meanings in a notebook where I would then make what seemed profound connections at the time.  Everything seemed important, and all with layers and layers of hidden meanings.  It can be like that sometimes.  You’re breaking out from one reality to another, and you don’t know where you are.  I look at those notebooks today and they make little sense.  I was like someone who is stoned and thinks they’re having brilliant revelations.

Oh yes, I thought I was being very brilliant at the time, discovering hidden codes that would at last make sense of my life.  But, I was having a breakthrough.  Or rather, I wanted to have a breakthrough.  Break through to the other side of the mirror.  The other side of something. There had to be more than this! I thought of smashing one of my mirrors, but that might bring bad luck, so I took a hammer and smashed the glass of a picture frame.  It was a bit of performance art.  Of course nothing happened other than having a mess of broken glass I now had to clean up.  But maybe intention is all that matters, because the next morning I woke up feeling unbearably hot.  New York is always hot in July, but this heat seemed to be coming from inside, like my body was on fire, smoldering from within.  I immediately turned on the fan and sat a few feet away, but nothing changed.  I wondered if the fan might be fanning the flames?  The heat was so strong that I stared at my bare white arm, half expecting the skin to turn black like charred wood.  The thought sent me scurrying into the bathroom to douse myself with cold water.

First I only sat on the edge of the tub with my feet in cold water, wondering if steam was going to rise up like when you run water over a hot frying pan in the sink. There was no steam, but there was no cooling off either, even though my feet turned red with cold.  I remember padding back into the studio with my wet feet and just standing there on the wood floor, trying to relax with my arms at my sides, consciously willing the heat to pass through me and into the floor boards, as if I was trying to ground an electrical cord.  But then I thought it would be better to stand on cold porcelain, so I headed back to the bathroom and got in the shower.  The water was a great distraction.  As long as I was under cool running water I didn’t feel how hot I was.

And so the hours passed, or what felt like hours, first pretending it was just a normal shower and washing myself, then washing my hair, then rinsing.  At some point I started singing.  I even danced.  It was all bravado.  I’m not sure when the tipping point came, when I started playing with the faucets, pretending they were the controls of a space ship.  Oh yes, I was preparing to come in for a landing.  That’s why I felt the burning, I was speeding through the atmosphere.  Finally I managed to managed to make  a safe landing.  The shower felt over, but I was unsure about getting out yet, so I began to run a bath.  The water filling up the tub was red. Maybe it was minerals.  New York water can be brown sometimes, though I’d never seen it red.  Somehow it made me think of the waters of birth.  Like I was being reborn, and coming back into my physical body from somewhere else.

Then, when at last I was ready to face being dry and was toweling myself off, I said silently, “How did I do?”

“Better than expected,” said a voice.  The voice was inside my head, but it didn’t feel as if it was coming from me.  It felt like an outside someone.  There was a sound of gentle laughter in the background, like children laughing.  Or were they angels?  I was in an altered state, as if I’d been hypnotized.  It was a place of complete acceptance, with no worries or concerns.  I had done better than expected.  That was good news.  Or was it?  Had so little been expected of me?  I pondered this as I dried myself off with a towel.  Then, as I was reaching for a blanket from the cupboard to wrap myself in, the voice said, “You will have a son.”

I went into the studio and sat on the floor in my blanket.  My body still felt warm inside, but it was a nice warm and my skin felt deliciously cool and clean.  The room was cold.  I had put the air-conditioner on high before getting in the shower.  For some reason I felt as if I had died.  I was obviously still alive, but I wasn’t like I had been before.  I felt as if I was in other hands now.  I didn’t think I was in charge of myself anymore.

When I was dressed, sitting perched on a stool in the living room area, the voice spoke again.  It said, “You don’t have to paint anymore.”

“I don’t?”  Again I heard the tinkling laughter in the background.

“No, you’ve painted enough.  Now you have to write how you got here.”

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Five years later I did have a son.  And five years after that I went back to college to learn to be a writer.  I’ve been working on the story of how I got here ever since.  It begins after the war when my mother happens to meet a Jewish man on a cross-country bus and decides to conceive a child with him “in revenge for World War II,” as she put it.  Then I write about my childhood, and as I remember all the small details as well as the big events, another story starts to emerge.  I don’t see it yet.  There are all these clues sticking out like red herrings but I’m unable to piece them together or make sense of them.  Like the time a friend took me to the British Spiritualist Society and the medium said Leslie Howard was looking after me.  It was one of those pieces of information I didn’t know what to do with, so I put it away.

And it might have stayed in the recesses of memory had there not been 9/11.  Those happen to be my numbers.  Nine is my Destiny number, eleven my Path of Destiny. But of course I wasn’t thinking of that than.  Like everyone else I was in shock.  Afterwards came the anger.  And it was this anger that allowed the resonance with my mother’s anger over World War II, opening up the valve of memory where I had stored her tale of revenge.  Bringing to the surface that other piece of incomprehensible information that Leslie Howard was looking after me.  I knew that the actor had died in World War II, but I didn’t know exactly how.  So I looked it up, and that in turn led me to find his biography (which was out-of-print, but I got a used copy which turned out to be a library book from Phoenix, Arizona).  From this book I would learn that he was killed in a plane shot down by the Nazis over the Bay of Biscay.  And that there was a little girl of eleven on board, and her name was Petra, which means rose-red.  Rose-red was the color of the dress of my little drowned girl in the painting.  The name of the plane was Ibis, which meant immortality to the ancient Egyptians.

Painting the girl under water and then feeling the vibrations and the burning, was part of my awakening to who I was, or what I was for.  In order to know this, I had to stop painting.  A picture may be worth a thousand words, but In the beginning was the word. Awakening is only the beginning.  It’s ongoing, day by day, moment by moment.  But unless we wake up, we will never have the day, or the moment.

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