Jacob Atabet (12 page)

The events of June were profounder than I thought. We are putting something together that is larger than I have been willing to admit.

B
Y THE MIDDLE OF
S
EPTEMBER
I had established a practice that was part psychotherapy, part physical training, part meditation. But on some days I came close to quitting. It was for that reason that Atabet and Corinne gave me a copy of Dante’s
Purgatorio
on my 33rd birthday, inscribed with their signatures under a photograph of us all in front of Sts. Peter and Paul’s. The book, they said, would be a travel guide for the next stage of my journey.

September 17

Listened to plainsong from the Abbey of Encalcat, a record Corinne gave me. How much pain have these Gregorian chants relieved through the centuries?

An image of souls in Dante’s Purgatory has haunted me all through the day. Like me, they heard this music and felt the distant light. There is new life within these afflicted emotions, a paradise waiting. An epic like Dante’s could be written on the purgatory of the coming age.

September 18

Fear and relief I am built from their rhythm. In spite of all their reassurances, I find new worries: about the Press (which Casey is running surprisingly well), about my heart (which Simon Horowitz says is all right), about Armen’s belief that Atabet is “paranoid.”

Today a strange sight on the Bay. A tanker at the edge of a fogbank, then a tunnel in the mist running all the way to Sausalito. A tunnel I could see through. It felt like some kind of message.

Atabet still resting.

Simon Horowitz a good man. I trust him. He has known Atabet and Corinne for several years, knows about A’s life in detail. But would not let me draw him out. I want to know more about what he thinks of Atabet’s physical and mental state.

Still practicing this choiceless awareness. Atabet says I don’t have to choose between contradictory courses of action now. Just observe them without shifting from place to place.

This apartment is my monk’s cell, my base camp in Purgatory.

Evening. Corinne agrees that my meeting with Armen helped me find a new set of limits. Maybe that was the reason I felt compelled to see him.

A new set of limits. And a practice. Read the
Purgatorio
for the second time.

September 20

Corinne gave me a massage, and the pain in my chest broke into ripples of laughter. For ten minutes I was laughing out of control as I saw that part of my body is always dying. What is there to fear? Life and death are simultaneous. 2,500,000 red cells are being born and consumed every second! We are
living flames
, burning at the edge of this incredible joy.

Then I was dizzy and she made me lay back on the bed.

To see her was to look through peyote eyes. She was a huge Indian squaw, then a Japanese geisha, then a boyhood chum, Billy Daniels! the toughest kid on the block with his freckled cheeks and chin tilted back when he grinned. And a Rubens nude. A swift, wicked, exalting bisexual encounter.

Evening. All day I have been in this state of mild shock and bliss, with insight after insight pouring through me. Joys are laid up for us. This is my truest life.

September 21

A dream of ancient caves last night. And a valley. And a sun like a heart at the edge of the hills, throbbing gently, dancing down ladders in front of my half-closed eyes. Then its rays were speeding west toward the caves with their figures of the sun and the moon. A hundred suns and a hundred moons, animals wavering in torchlight, sliding through shadows as they reached out to take me.

Was it a dream or a memory? An image of this valley had beckoned for thousands of years, it seemed, through all the turns of weather and forgetting. To the north, the glacier had risen and the wind had smelled of ice, but now the hills were bare and brown and the curving river turned to mud. Its smooth surface, like the fields around it, was perfectly still. And where the shaman’s cry had echoed through the valley there was this sonorous chanting, almost as ancient, counting out the names of God . . . .

She tried to help me remember. Subtle spasms while she held me. There is something in it that is too much to bear.

Where did she learn these ways of helping? Each day she grows more beautiful.

Atabet says to begin sitting each morning, noon and late afternoon, forty minutes each time. And hatha yoga exercises with Lilias on KQED! I can’t believe it. He says that “all America is our ashram” and that my apartment is a
kyiphug
, my “happy cave.”

T
HE WAYS OF ENLIGHTENMENT
, I thought, had to have more dignity than this. It had never been my idea to take my guidance from a lady on television who looked and sounded like someone who taught at a fat farm for women. “Now stretch,” the soothing voice said. “Stretch as far as you can.”

I lifted my head toward the ceiling and tried to arch my back. “That’s
good
,” said the voice. “You see how easy it is?”

But as she said it something cracked. I came down on my chest and rolled over. “All right,” she said, arching upward until her pigtails fell on her rump. “If it hurts, don’t force it.” She gave us an ingenuous smile, her head turned to see the camera. “But if you practice you can do it like
this.
” She held the arched position, then swung around to the lotus position.

Watching her supple body I felt the spasm relax. It was as if she were sitting just a few feet away. “Now class, you’ve been so good,” she winked. “Today you get a treat. All right?”

I nodded back at the screen.

“Now lay on the floor like this.” She stretched out on the platform and turned her head to guide us. “Today we’re going to breathe. Not the usual way though. We’re going to
really
breathe. Way down
low.
Now feel it going up and down.” I lay back on the rug and exhaled. “Are you really breathing?” she whispered. “If you aren’t, let the breath come
down.
Don’t hold it up in your chest. Now there.
That’s good!
”

I felt the slow delicious pleasure. Each day that week we had learned to take each breath through our stomach and thighs. “Now down through your
toes,,
” she said. “From the top of your head to your toes. Can you feel the prana?” At the beginning of the program she had told us something about it. “Can you feel it spreading?” And indeed I could, through my legs and the soles of my feet.

”Do you feel it?” she breathed.

A piano was playing, and I looked up to see her. “Lilias,” her name, was slowly moving through the screen. “Do you feel the pleasure?” she murmured as the letters moved past. It was nearing the end of the half-hour session and I hated to see her go. “Do you feel it spreading around you? The breath and the pleasure and the feeling of health?” She fell into silhouette and the credits came past. While I simmered in this first form of bliss, the list of directors and sponsors passed through me. I and the set were one. Then the letters KQED came blazing onto the screen, and a resonant voice told us how to order the
Lilias Yoga Book.
Then there was a pitch for the non-profit station.

I sat up and stretched. For a moment she reappeared in the lotus position, absorbed in a concentration we all could practice. Her figure in leotards was a thing of perfection.

The phone rang behind me.

I lay back on the rug and breathed in. A conversation would drive this pleasure away. It rang again. An image of Corinne had appeared. “Yes?” I picked it up. “Venus and Apollo. Lessons in breathing and massage.”

“This isn’t Merrill Lynch?” a rasping voice asked.

“No. Venus and Apollo,” I said.

“This a massage parlor?”

“A very clean place,” I sighed. “Just braything and massage.”

“Sorry,” he said and hung up.

I turned off the set and lay down. Then the phone rang again.

Was it Corinne? It rang again. She hadn’t said she would call. “Hello,” I picked it up. “This is your friendly breather.”

“Well, hello,” she said. “What’ve you got to tell me?”

“That I knew it was you.”

“Did you do your Lilias?” There were wide open spaces in her voice.

“All the way through. I can hold the Cat Stretch for a count of five.”

”And now you’re breathing?”

“That’s all I do. Just breathe and stretch.”

“You sounded so tired last night.”

The night before I had reverted to form. During the afternoon there had been a siege of doubts about Atabet and I had decided to quit all this self-centered practice. “No, it’s fine,” I said. “It all went away in my sleep. How’s our leader?”

“His usual self. He’s been out at the beach.”

Now there was someone beside her. “Hello, Darwin!” said Kazi. “Your pains go away?” His high-pitched voice seemed to be asking the question and giving an order at once. “You see the pictures?”

He had given me a series of diagrams to “catch my demons in.” An obsessive thought would get stuck in the mazeway of lines. “Yes,” I said. “I think it works.”

“Oh, fine!” he shouted. “You are good student!”

Was he making fun of me? Sometimes it was hard to tell. “But there
is
a problem,” I said. “That one with the flames gives me a headache.”

“Good!” he exclaimed. “You can stop it whenever you want.”

“You mean the headache?”

“Stop looking at it.” I could see him giving me that somewhat disconnected smile. “Look at the other ones.”

“So it doesn’t matter how I use them?”

“Oh, it matters. But that’s all right.”

There was silence as I searched for his meaning. Sometimes I wondered how well he understood English. “But I don’t want to get it wrong,” I said. “I’ve been concentrating on them for hours.”

“Good! Yes?”

“Well, thanks. Is there anything else I should know?”

He handed the phone to Corinne. “I hope you’ve got that straight,” she said. “We’ll see you tonight after dinner.”

I went to the window and looked up to Atabet’s roof. From here I could see the pole from which he sometimes flew the old Basque flag. Like a temple or hermitage that watched over the city, his apartment seemed to offer protection. If only places like it would protect and bless every city . . . .

But now it was time for the ritual. I got out a
yantra
, propped it up on the desk, and let my thoughts flow toward it. An image of my office appeared—and old bills, the bust of Plotinus, manuscripts waiting for decisions, a letter to Cleveland, a resolution to phone Mr. Marks—then an image of Atabet out at the beach. As I gazed through the lines I could hear him. The way he paused between words suggested the spaces we fell through.

“But we can fan this earth into flame,” he had said as we looked down at the city. And as the honky-tonk music came up from the joints on Broadway he had hummed a line from Bach. I could hear the melody now—and see his face—and there were chords in the sounds from the street. Even the traffic was singing, tires whistling in the soft rush of air.

September 23

Day by day a way is forming. This practice of non-choosing awareness; Kazi’s yantras and mandalas; Lilias on KQED. This morning doing her exercises I had an image of her students all across the U.S.A. lying on rugs like mine—a floor of bodies 3,000 miles across, mostly overweight, rippling like a sea of Jello. A vision of the primordial jelly from which all life arises.

All the world is our ashram!

Corinne equates the following practices: Samkhya’s discrimination of
purusha-prakriti
; Buddhist
vipassana
; the
citta-vritti-nirodha
from Patanjali’s sutras. All of these are ways in which the witness self, the
purusha
, deepens and comes into its own.

And I see each day how
prakriti
works in this organism named Darwin Fall: in the morning the fear, after lunch the sadness, after dinner the plans for escape. In this apartment, with so few distractions, the pattern emerges until any dummy can see it. Atabet says my reliability and obsessionality can turn into “steadiness of will”! Much neurosis is distortion of some hidden strength. His catatonia turned to trance and pantomime. We all have symptoms to lead us.

Until we met, neurosis was my practice.

Then this joy. I wept for an hour at my incredible luck.

September 24

Must I simply “observe” this growing love for her?

This afternoon we talked about her marriage and divorce, her child, her lifelong friendship with A. She said they are not lovers, and “yet they are.”
I
did not have the nerve to ask her if they ever slept together.

Cannot forget that vision of her many faces. Why do I struggle against that kind of seeing? The world is a shimmering chasm I’m afraid to fall into.

We talked about “detachment and opening.” As one opens to these powers of the soul, one must grow in the self that sustains them.
Being
as the veils drop. More
purusha
. There must be “a proportionate development of action and space.” More space for more action. More stillness for more of the dance.

“The right ratio of [upward to downward/inward to outward] reowning.”

September 25

We talked again about her life. She has a degree in social work and practices therapy part-time with a clinical psychologist in Corte Madera. Says that all her work is informed by Atabet’s vision and experience.

Between Corinne and Kazi he has two traditions to help him—Buddhist and modern, the Vajrayana, Perls and Reich!

Catharsis, she says, can deepen our capacity for vision. It gives us a larger space in which to breathe and feel, and helps reveal our secret leadings. Self-acceptance allows more consciousness. She, Kazi and Jacob are “midwives to each other.”

We talked about her divorce. She had a brief love affair with a woman she met at Berkeley when she was getting her M.A., the only woman she has ever loved like that. Never would have been a good therapist, she says, if she hadn’t surrendered to it.