India, the land of the gurus where celebrity culture, such as it is, still refers to the template of reverence that easy pagan idolatry affords. Gurus adorn tea towels and mugs like Kardashians. When Yogananda describes the first sighting of his guru, to a westerner the sincerity of his adulation is almost obscene. We only love so wholeheartedly and uncynically in adolescence, or when we revisit that hormonal tundra in juvenile adulthood. I was in my own storm of idiocy, my own adolescence beaten thinly almost into middle age, on a trip with a woman who I blindly adored, who I had ill-advisedly appointed as a custodian of my heart – one last throw of the dice. We who look for god in romance are doomed. Your idol will fall and you will be too bereft to pick up the pieces.
After a disastrous holiday where the delusion we had impulsively projected shattered and left just the bare bones and broken hearts of us, I ran into Jimmy in an Indian airport. I knew Jimmy Mulville already, he works in TV and he doesn’t drink, like me. I’d once overheard him say, ‘I wanted to live an autobiography, not a life,’ and instinctively plagiarized it in my own autobiography. He was with his wife and three of his four children navigating an airport. I was at the carousel with my paramour conducting an introduction with the stink of argument still on us. Later on in the flight, Jimmy ambled over and gave me a book he was reading, Robert Johnson’s Inner Gold – a Jungian account of mentorship, how we ‘give another our gold to carry or hold’. Gold in this metaphor being, I suppose, a symbol of our highest self, our truest intention, the aspect of us that is so beautiful it is too much for us to hold alone.
I took the occasion of our meeting – a time when my old idea of salvation through romantic love was demonstrably failing – the location, an airport, and the book, on mentorship, to be a sufficiently serendipitous spur to ask Jimmy to mentor me. What I knew of him then was: he is a successful producer and manager of people, he has been married for over twenty years, he’s been alcohol and drug free for over twenty years, he’s from a working-class background, he supports Everton FC, he’s an only child, he has a dark side, he is funny, he’s educated, both classically – he went to Cambridge on a scholarship – and in the ‘school of hard knocks’ sense. Asking someone to mentor you, as I have said, is a simultaneous acknowledgement of vulnerability and admiration, and even in the most secular and occidental context bears a trace of Yogananda’s euphoric sincerity. No one wants to be rejected by someone they admire and who knows they’re vulnerable. But after my holiday my old method of redemption through love was still giving me a good battering. If you’d asked me at the time what the problem was, I would have instantly blamed the woman I was going out with. Now I know the problem was my unreasonable, unconscious requirements.
I asked Jimmy for help, he agreed to help me. I told him about the melee that was my relationship and he was always able to ‘hold it’. Meaning that my problems never fazed him – the last thing you need when opening up your heart is for the person you’ve appointed to blanch or gag. He pointedly never offers unsolicited advice, instead meeting my enquiries with his own experience. There is a great power in this. Some of the things he has said landed as perfectly in my mind as the first maxim of his I plagiarized: ‘Being Human, is a “me too” business, we’re all in the mud together’ or ‘Next time you see the signpost that points in the direction of a destructive relationship, don’t go in that direction.’
Jimmy guided me. Not only through the conclusion of that clearly doomed relationship but also helped me to let go of the many co-dependent professional relationships and friendships in which I was mired. Co-dependency can mean ‘relationships where the boundaries are not clear and the roles are blurred’. In my case I had outsourced many aspects of my life that I needed to take personal responsibility for. This is likely particularly common in showbusiness, where there is an industry built on the indolent whimsy of the ‘artist’. Through Jimmy I saw there was no future in that identity, that I had made myself dependent on too many people because I was afraid to grow up. That I selected relationships with women that were doomed because I was trying to satisfy a religious impulse in a practical dynamic. A marriage must be clear and robust, the married couple must have a mutual vision of the relationship and a consensus on their roles within it. It is a highly practical arrangement that includes domestic management, sex, child-rearing, recreation, counselling, tension, friction, love and hate. I used to enter into relationships with abandon, like it was a balmy lagoon. I was always astonished by the tsunamis and whirlpools that consumed me. I now know that instead of appointing a female to make me feel complete, I must access the ‘female’ aspect of myself and honour that – this means an open relationship with my creativity, my emotions and my wildness. Certainly not an open relationship of any other description. We’ve had that argument let me tell you.
To give you one clear and Damascene example, recently I awoke in County Wicklow knowing, deeply knowing, that I must go for the daybreak swim that I’d agreed to go on, that I could not lie in bed next to my wife all cosy, I had to whip off the duvet and get in the car and drive to Greystones, where the other dawn swimmers would be. Stephen Flynn, one of identical twins of the Happy Pear ethical eatery, had invited me and when I said ‘yes’ I was pretty sure I was lying. But when I awoke I knew I must go, that in the cold and perfect morning, in the novelty of the trip with these Irish strangers, I would find something in myself that I would otherwise be trying to drag out of my wife. I foresaw the dawn and the crashing tide, the tentative strangers that dive from the rocks into cold morning. I stopped my idle mind and rose against its decree and let my mad freewheeling beast of a dog into the passenger seat like Chewbacca. It was still dark. In the car I felt my soul rewarded, I felt alive. I felt I’d broken free of the trammels of my own making. It was of course beautiful there. Stephen Flynn and his brother are men on the path and we must walk with those who walk the path with us, or we feel so terribly alone.
Those twins – even when you’re just with one of them – are a handful, male but gentle and kind, even the bravado is endearing. Down to the Greystone rocks we go, past the abandoned edifice of the eerie Victorian hotel that looms over the ladies’ bathing beach, as was. On we go to a jutting peninsula that reaches into the orange glinting morning. There they are, this morning crew, with hot drinks and warm smiles, a tribe intuitively formed around the totem of the dawn swim, its obvious root in hunting and worship and the deep gods of nature. I refuse of course to dive from the mad, serrated, Tetris block that Stephen suggests but jump in from a lower ledge – ‘Don’t kill yourself trying to impress strangers, Russell, it’s not 1999,’ says some wise and tutored inner me. Bear swims too and it’s quite a morning and I feel certain in the breaking day that God is everywhere.
Jimmy, like Chip, is an atheist. But he lives like a holy man, by which I mean, as if the real world is the unseen world, the eternal world, not the temporal one. He goes on annual trips with the teacher who taught him Classics as a kid because he missed a school trip to the ancient world. His now elderly former teacher leads him through Athens or Pompeii giving the man the lessons he would have given the boy. I asked him why he makes this pilgrimage and he said it connected him to the person he was.
I sometimes find that when we reach across the dualistic divides there was no boundary there at all. I’ve already seen that the male and female effortlessly coalesce and are found, the one within the other. In my conversations with great atheists I’ve found spiritual reverence that borders on shamanism. As Yanis Varoufakis, the principled Syriza beefcake who led Greece’s democratic revolution, said: ‘Some people believe that matter preceded spirit, others that spirit preceded matter – I happen to believe the former. In any event, spirit is here now and we have to deal with it.’ He made this lucid announcement while I interviewed him for my podcast, Under the Skin. Whether you are an atheist, believing that we are naught but gas and maths with no intelligence or consciousness beyond what’s required to access bananas, or you believe that the phenomenon of consciousness itself is evidence of a connection to something beyond the material, we have to now agree that morality, kindness and love are present in our deepest codes.
Mentorship needn’t be total duplication. I’m not trying to become my mentors, I’m using them as a focal point to help me summon and nurture latent qualities which, without stewardship, I may not be able to realize. At the point I met Jimmy I was trapped in a pattern, behavioural and mental, that I bet a neurologist would be able to point to on a thermal screen. Well-worn circuits. Because I identified with aspects of his past and wanted to emulate him I was willing to ask him for help and then accept that his insight would be of more value than my own instincts and experience.
We met at a point that was transitional, in my own life but also so typical that it is well covered in myth and mocked in popular culture as a ‘mid-life crisis’. I was confronted with a choice between my old way of doing things, which on the surface looked like promiscuity, hedonism and obsession but was in fact a romantic, rootless belief that an idealized woman could save me or that many women could distract me. I’m not saying I was conditioned or even programmed into believing those ideas but both of them happen to be popular cultural notions – woman as redeemer and the male as hunter, or to use the parlance of the day, player. I could’ve continued to search for an earthbound goddess or ambled into middle life still acting like a seventeen-year-old but something deep within me called out for change.
Alone, I am not at all convinced that I would have been able to break this cycle, the pain would’ve led to seeking the balm of the very behaviour that caused it – addiction in an instant. Because I have a program of recovery I recognize that I must when in crisis:
1. Acknowledge it.
2. Believe it could improve.
3. Ask for help.
You’ll notice I continually paraphrase this simple formula as it is a tool that can be relied upon to instigate change in any circumstance. In my book Recovery, where I break down the 12 Steps in detail, I spoke at length about mentors, their pivotal role in instantiating new psychic energies – this is as clear an example as I can offer.
In my moment of crisis after my relationship with this extraordinary but unsuitable woman ended, a woman who in fact had the essential qualities of every girl I’ve ever loved from the playgrounds of Grays, Essex, to the red carpets of Los Angeles, a kind of unobtainable helix of mystery and destruction (not objectively, I mean in conjunction with the ridiculous mix of hormones and behaviours wrapped in the bag of skin I live in – one man’s Delilah is another man’s soulmate), I felt that not only had that relationship failed but that my whole life had failed. In a way I was right; I had recognized the relationship as an emblem of my poor navigational skills that had led to the rocks I was dashed upon. Even if the truth hadn’t risen to my conscious mind as wisdom, it was present in my belly as misery.
Jimmy, when I rang him, forlorn in the aftermath of this wreckage, was unflustered. I said I could walk away from everything in my life, that none of it seemed valuable or real. That I didn’t want to live in the house I lived in, do the work I did, hang with the people I was working with or even wear my clothes anymore. I may not have said I felt like I was dying, or that I wanted to die, something I continually announced in my actual adolescence; I was constantly poised, bread knife at the wrist in some dreadful tableau of self-sacrifice, bawling at my baffled mother that I wanted to die. Of course, then there was no one who could ‘hold’ that truth: that was, in fact, the problem.
Jimmy was unfazed when confronted with the middle-aged version of the suicidal teenager. Firstly he is not emotionally involved. The care, or even love, he feels for me is not going to capsize his objectivity, he is a father figure, not a father. A father can be, as we all fucking know (!), a more fraught and conflicted role. Being an appropriate mentor, somewhat delivered by serendipity – all my mentors have floated into my life, like celestial beings – Jimmy knew what to say. He had been in this position himself. It is normal, necessary, beneficial to, at the midpoint in the journey, question the direction of travel. The relationship was but one aspect of my life that needed to change, it was the most vivid and obvious but it was merely the emissary for all necessary change. I had been living in an illusion and the illusion was fading. I was awakening from the dream of my previous self and if the somnambulance was roughly disrupted I would not withstand the shock.
I will always remember the tone with which Jimmy spoke if not all of the content. He normalized my feelings, he contextualized them, he told me they would pass and that this was part of my metamorphosis. Crucially there was an authenticity to his words that meant I trusted him more than my own feelings. He always demonstrates these qualities. When I make the pilgrimage to his Camden office and patiently wait while he wraps up a meeting or a call, I sit on the leather sofa, self-conscious and reverential, focused on the picture of Duvall and Brando in The Godfather that is above the sofa opposite, above where he will sit. He is good humoured and bursting with tales of work and family, expletives and comic voices, sometimes deep sentiment. His classical education means that his counsel is spiked with references to Ovid or Virgil and I sometimes want to take notes but that may prevent me from continually taking note.
Whilst it is tempting to idealize him I am aware, due mostly to the authenticity of our communication but also because I’m not twelve, that he is flawed and complicated and imperfect. This is important: the nature of our relationship is bounded. I am not dealing with the total of this man. Is one ever dealing with a total person? I am dealing with him in his role as a mentor. He is an ideal to which I aspire and an objective voice when I need guidance. There is no value in iconoclastically demolishing my personal Olympus, in destructively slobbering over Martin Luther King’s infidelities. I focus on the components of my mentor that I am hoping to summons from myself, the dormant power that alone I may not activate. If I say, ‘Well, Jimmy isn’t perfect,’ I will ultimately use the ordinary details of human fallibility to impair my own progress.
Sometimes when I am making an incredible fuss over some minor piece of bullshit, when I am contemplating leaping out of my car like a slender James Gandolfini to confront someone at a traffic light, I think: ‘Wow, there are men who call me up for advice and here I am, unable to contend with normal emotions – what a fraud I am.’ But this is not the case, my all too evident flaws do not prevent me being a successful mentor as long as these relationships are correctly bounded. All of the people I mentor understand the nature of this dynamic, its benefits and its limitations. They know that the method I use is verified and ancient. They know that I want nothing from them, that my only intention is to help them; I don’t want money, prestige or power from them. These are men like me, men that have turned to drugs and sex to cope with the absence of a spiritual dimension to their life. Who in the absence of loving guides have improvised philosophies from their primal urges and crazy circumstances. When they need me I am not the fool at the traffic lights, I am the man they need me to be.
Once I called Jim when he was about to take his seat at the theatre or something that meant there was little in the way of small talk, and though I was quietly frantic he dispatched insights like sharp, quick darts, for all I know while buying a box of Maltesers. Perhaps young men like me go awry because nobody can hold them. I don’t mean embrace, I mean in a parental sense, like parentheses, to ‘bracket’ them, to stand as a dam either side of the wayward lash and unmovingly emit care. The only authority I ever knew was negative. Either inefficient or corrupt. This is the consequence of living with false ideals in a materialistic society. The authority that I give to Jimmy is sacred, I know he is flawed but I am not consulting with the flawed part of him I am consulting with the part of him that is willing in spite of his own numerous obligations, work, and family to provide loving counsel for free. I believe this relationship becomes a conduit for truth, divine truth. That needn’t mean it’s all chocolates and roses. There’s a fair amount of ‘suck it up’ and ‘face your fear’, but it is truth. Perhaps we can take truth to mean the timeless, the universal. Things that will not erode and fade, qualities I need to live the life I have moved into.
How does someone who has never been a father become one? How do any of us progress beyond our temporary limits? The potential person we can become hums in an invisible grid within and without us. A genius may actuate by intuition but all of us need heroes, role models and mentors, that we may see what is possible, living mandalas to lock onto as we inhale and expand into new states.