S. (16 page)

You do that, Art.

Shanti, Master.

You two be good now.

[
Unintelligible voices, fading. Silence. Heartbeat
.]

It is not so, when ugly Durga calls you little. You are tall
.

Five eight. Five eight and a half, actually.

You are not young, but your skin is smooth. Your hair is dark and abundant. Your posture is excellent. That is why I called you Kundalini. For her to make the ascent up Sushumna, the spine must be held very straight
.

My mother was a stickler for posture. Posture and what fork to pick up and how to leave your knife so the waiter will know to clear.

This mother. Where is she now?

Florida.

She must be very rich
.

Not really, Master. In truth I believe she is squandering in foolish investments the small amount that my late father did leave her.

She would perhaps think our ashram a foolish investment
.

It would be, for her. Not for me. I love it here.

You have a good friend in Alinga, perhaps. She is also tall, but not so stately and upright as Kundalini
.

She is very beautiful.

In an imperilled way. The way of a flower. She has imbibed too much indifference, not the holy vairagya of the yogas but that of this country, of its flatness and muchness that drives its people to sarcasm and mass murder. I am thinking of your West. Your East is more like my India. It teems—is that the expression? One big appetite, with the energy of appetite. You have this appetite, this energy. Alinga does not. Already, she slouches. She slumps. Her hair goes unwashed. She begins to wilt. She is like a cut flower
.

She’s been very kind.

She has shown you new asanas, I think. But once you had a husband?

I believe I still do. He was—is—a doctor. Rather handsome. Very efficient and work-oriented. An internist with an office at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Yet after some years with this technological marvel, you became bored. You took up yoga. You had flings
.

Not very many. I’ve always been a good girl.

And you are a good girl here. Your letters are excellent. You can balance the books. You do not yet seem to have the madness
.

The madness?

As you notice, with Ma Prem Durga. After much valuable service to Buddha and to Vishnu, she becomes irritable. She becomes
erratic and overflowing with grievance. She loses spiritual touch. It is this stress of maintaining a religious ideal, of bucking the trend. In the larger world, responsibility is remote. In our smaller world, responsibility is intimate. There is no Big Guy to which the buck passes. We are the Big Guy. It is heavy
.

For even you, Master?

Very heavy, I think, in my vasanas. All these operations—the agricultural workings, these therapies, the publishing houses that make my image over and over, the bookstores selling these images and my darshans with many typographical errors, the boutiques selling all clothes in the sunset colors that are also the colors of love, the natural-food stores and the massage parlors in these many places here and abroad that Durga must visit with such great expense—all these things run from my spiritual energy. You smile, why is that?

They
stem
from your spiritual energy, they run
on
it—either would be correct.

So. These things run on me, as you say. English is strange in its little words. In German there is the same thing, the strange floating little words only the natives can dispose properly. I have often considered that language is stranger than it seems. It conveys meaning, we perceive that, yes, but also it makes a tribal code, a way to keep out others. It is of that intricacy which in paper currency is meant to defeat counterfeiters. The religion of the Hindus and even more of the Jains has this repellent intricacy, which to be ideal must be endless, which piles upon the mind until the mind goes blank and may receive enlightenment. I forgive you for smiling at your Master
.

Also, I love the way you say “love.” Lufff.

Kundalini is a cruel tease of her poor overworked Master. Even she runs on me. The beelike sannyasins in their long lines come in from their ten or twelve sunny hours of work as worship and imagine they are now saints entitled to dance all night at the Kali Club and sneak their drugs and have their highs, but why are they
permitted to do this, how have all these structures to ease their chittavrittis arisen? They are running on me, my spiritual energy, my lack of ego. It is false to say all things have a material explanation. All things material have a spiritual explanation. What do you think, Kundalini, is the essence of the world, of prakriti?

Its essence is illusion.

No. That would be too jolly. The essence of the world is pain. Is duhkha. Duhkha, and fear
.

Oh dear.

Truly. “Oh dear” is the truth. You do not feel duhkha and bhaya because I am with you. But the pain and fear that is suppressed in you pushes over onto me, I have sucked it out of you, it comes into me as if into a vacuum. Dreadful terror. Only men and gods can hold such terror. With animals, death is over in an instant. With men, too, in actual misfortune, it is over in an instant—the animal numbness mercifully comes. But a man in repose, he can hang forever over this abyss of bhaya, this steep invisible terror that being alive brings. It is the clamoring of the million demons of death unleashed by Mara on the night of our Lord Buddha’s enlightenment
.

You mean—there is no release? There is no salvation?

There is for the disciple. Not for the Master. There is for the bees, but not for the queen bee. For by consenting to be a guru, I am permitting prakriti to contaminate my purusha, to make it heavy. I am trading on my atman. For this sin I have this horrible heaviness. Perhaps my energy is no longer fuelling our enterprise. Perhaps my oil filter is dirty. Can you smell it, my fear, my dirtiness? Come closer
.

[
Rustle
.]

And you, do you not ever feel this dirty?

Oh yes. My mother—

Your sari fits you very pleasantly. You look Indian. You need only the pearl above the nostril, and the tikka, the third eye, between
your brows. You have the eyes of an Indian woman. The beautiful dark eyes of
ressentiment.
In India women are worshipped and degraded. It is a good combination
.

I would not think a jivan-mukta could feel fear. In achieving samadhi he has put away kama and krodha, lobha and bhaya.

He is mukta, yes, saved, but also he is jivan, living. That is his tension. That is his duplicity
.

Could you not withdraw deeper into purusha, to lighten and cleanse yourself?

Ah, Kundalini, I cannot. I am always, as they say, in play. I must inspirit the ashram. I thought to hide behind a screen of women, but as you see they quarrel, they make very bad vibes
.

Women feel fear, too.

No. When they do, it is the man within them who is fearful. There is no fear in the woman herself. She is a goddess. To touch her is to feel fear vanish. Your hips are solid. Your husband, did he admire your hips? Did he seize them in the night, for comfort?

He—

Your feet look comely in sandals. Such long straight toes. So many American women, I thought when upon arriving in this continent, have ugly toes, from being squeezed inside the pointed shoes
.

My mother believed in sensible shoes for children. We went barefoot all summer, especially in Maine, and when we used to rent a cottage on Martha’s Vineyard.

A woman is flame. A woman is smoke. A woman is Radha, sweaty with love. Sweaty with rasa. Your breasts—

[
Rustling. Louder heartbeat
.] No. Not my breasts. Not today.

[
Laughs
.]
Neti neti? Is there something wrong with your breasts?

No, people—I mean Charles—

Ah, this Charles. He is in my path. I think you have not yet burned him away
.

I’m sorry. I’m not inwardly prepared for—for this step up. I must go and think. I must meditate.

Meditate well, Kundalini. You can help me
.

How? Never mind. I suppose I see how.

Perhaps you do not see all. My desire, my kama, is to turn your body into spirit. I have this power. The adept man has this power. I promise what is called Paramahasukha—instant purusha
.

It sounds like just the thing. Master, I must go.

Go, then. May you rise to Sahasrara. May your Shakti merge with Shiva. OM mani padme HUM
.

Oh Midge, I can hardly think, I can hardly talk, I never dreamed—I was so terrified he’d touch it, between my boobs. Now what do I do? I shouldn’t even send the tape to you, but I can’t have it around here—suppose Durga got ahold of it, or Vikshipta, they both hate me so much anyway. But it seems a blasphemy to erase it—I mean, when all is said and done, he
is
a kind of god, at least the closest we’re apt to come to it. He didn’t really strong-arm me, he seemed sort of fumbling, even, and rather pleased when I turned him down. It was sad. And the worst thing was—oh God, I could cry, I feel like crying suddenly, just to be away from them all, the relief—the worst thing was, I’m not attracted to him, I don’t think, not in that way. I mean, I
love
him, the way you and Irving do—I adore him more than ever, now that I’ve seen him up close instead of on some fuzzy videotape or out-of-date poster and actually seen him
breathe
and felt his personal energy-field. I’ve never felt anything like it, all other men by comparison are brutes or wimps. Though he’s not especially handsome, not as handsome as the posters. He’s really quite short—he keeps talking about my tallness when as you know I’m not
especially tall for an American woman—Gloria’s taller, and so for that matter are you—and he has a potbelly, and his front teeth have this cute space between—maybe it’s something they do to Indian children when they’re little, you know there’s this story about his having been maimed to make him a beggar child—and I have the feeling beneath that twisted-wool turban he wears he’s probably pretty bald, men with hair of that wiry type—you can see it beside his ears, where the turban doesn’t cover, and his beard of course—tend to have that happen. But, my God, the gentleness of the
force
that comes off of him, it’s like an oil bath, it’s like the shot of whiskey we used to take working its way into our blood, all churned up, those first few minutes. And once he slipped out of—what can I call it?—his Masterhood, his cosmic distance, and perched forward on that big silver-threaded armchair he uses as a sort of throne to grab my ass, I had this incredible wave of pity, of wanting to open myself the way I used to to little Pearl, to become this brainless fountain of life. I mean, the vibe I got was not so much that he needed to fuck me as
feed
on me, the way he says we all feed on him. With Vikshipta there really
was
this sensation of his wanting to sock it to the whole world and I was there under him as a kind of delegate, and the joy of it all for me was my ability to “take it,” to absorb the fury and make it into something positive—but with the Arhat there was just an utterly unaggressive
neediness
, when I thought the whole idea of being a jivan-mukta was that you needed nothing.

And though this will shock you—you mustn’t let Irving or any of the others except maybe Donna, if it will distract her from her mourning, listen to this—I don’t want him to come between me and Alinga. Between her and me there has been giving and taking both, and what he said about her being
a wilted flower wasn’t exactly the way I would have put it, though there is a way in which I, though I’m older, am younger in spirit—all that bourgeois repression and watered-down Puritanism has kept me fresh, you could say, in a way a lot of the very charming and gifted and committed people here aren’t, quite—they give the impression even when they’re just in their thirties of having run everything through already once and knowing that nothing is going to work, really, that all these therapies, the Rolfing and massage and dynamic meditation and rasamandalis and primal scream—though here they don’t scream, they just say “Hoo!” over and over until they feel empty—are just a way of turning a sick person over in bed, of changing position, of having a “trip” though you’re going to have to have another in a few hours, just like a meal or a nap or a crap (my language! I know) and the beauty of what the Arhat says he wants is to take us beyond all that, out of the cycles, and with Alinga, I guess is the point of what I’m trying to say—my heart is still racing, my thoughts are tumbling all over themselves, and they’re doing something noisy with the vinyl panels out at Joy-Six-Oh so I can hardly hear myself think—I had
peace
, I felt complete, comple
ted
, just watching her move around the A-frame lazily with the sunlight slanting in on her long hair and making the top of her brushed head shine and then, the way the A-frame is built, with not too many windows, just the few thin skylights high up, the next moment vanishing, Alinga this still is, all but swallowed in the shadows like some lanky drifting plant that grows in utter quiet under the water. A peace like no man can give. Men stir you up. They give you a poke. They always come on too strong or not strong enough, and emphasize the wrong things. They’re always trying to find
out
, they don’t just take things in. Maybe that’s why I loved our group
so much, nobody had to say anything except silly things and giggle when Irving tried to bend us all into pretzels.

Tell Irving you can’t share this tape with him but it’s nothing against him personally and I hope the insurance has covered all the losses in the shop. The good thing is he wasn’t there, they might have killed him—just boys usually, stoned and scared out of their minds. It’s the frightened people that do the damage in the world. In your next tape do let me know if you see Charles around town ever. I don’t have the slightest emotional curiosity about him but I’m beginning to get these legal letters from his hired thug Gilman that make me, honestly, worry for his sanity. How can you share a man’s bed for twenty-two years, picking his socks up every morning and trying to make them match when they come out of the dryer, and then find him so full of sheer malice and hatred? It’s like these things in those newspapers you can buy in the supermarkets,
I Married a Monster
or
Hubby Reveals He Came From UFO
. And you
must
let me know how the August boat races went. I’ll never forget the year Pearl came in second in the junior division, the Rhodes 19s, with all these brave puffed-out sails thick as snowflakes flecking the horizon out by the far nun, and the biggest darkest most terrifying thunderheads I’ve ever seen building up in the northeast, beyond the lighthouse on Ferry’s Point, and my heart