S. (6 page)

I don’t know what it was set me off, really. Nobody likes somebody trying to rape them, especially after insulting their pussy, but in a strange way it had to do with forces beyond that, with this boy’s—Yajna, his name is, we’ve made up a little since, he even tried apologizing, he said his head was in a bad space that day, and I had to tell him it was all all right, I felt very motherly toward him, and his mother, wherever she is, no doubt loves him and is worried to death about his being here with what she imagines are terrible creepy people—as I was saying, with this boy’s being a
man
and
not
being a man quite either, my brain waves or whatever they are oscillated between these two poles—his being and his not being, his maleness and his immaturity, his bully-power (I was terrified, remember) and yet his pimply shaved-headed
cal
lowness—and I just got more and more indignant. If I had had the strength, I would have torn him to bits and ground the pieces into the mat, the way you do a wasp that’s been annoying you all afternoon, you know how in the fall they come out of the windows on the sills somehow on sunny afternoons and bumble around on the bedspread and the kitchen table so stupidly and into your half-empty coffee cup—I just
hate
it!

Of course, we can’t all go around all the time getting hit on the jaw and trying to tear somebody’s ears off, but I must say it did wake me up. That’s a phrase the group leaders and
encounter therapists around here use all the time—“waking up.” “Getting rid of the garbage” is another thing they say. That oscillation I felt inside my head got me to thinking about men in general, my feelings about them. It must all go back to Daddy, who just basically on weekends and bank holidays if he didn’t go off to play golf at Brookline hid in the library reading Thorton Wilder or those dreary Metaphysicals. Maybe I’m angry, deep down, because, though I loved him and knew he loved me, he wouldn’t
come out
. But then this rapist-boy
did
in a manner of speaking come out, and I don’t seem to like that either. And then, even more confusingly, Fritz looked me over afterwards to see if I had been damaged and should go to the ashram infirmary, and on the way walking back to my trailer to get my jeans and sun hat and work shoes—this was all around nine in the morning, just beginning to get hot—we went to his A-frame and I slept with him.

It was nice, Midge. Nice. Though with Germans there’s a distance, they have difficulty showing their feelings. His eyes are so pale they seem transparent, you can look right through them into nothing. He told me what his name means: it’s a modality of consciousness halfway between total confusion and total concentration. I
love
that part of it here, learning all these new things, and not just with your brain but your body, with your spirit and whole self—with your atman. You should have seen me, though, that afternoon: big blue swollen jaw and one eye half shut and a lot of stiffness around the neck and shoulders from when all the rage came out. I looked so dreadful they left me off from the artichokes two hours early—I think they
do
treat me with kid gloves a little, compared to some of the younger, more trampy women—and next day I was told I had been transferred from fieldwork to construction
assistant at the Hall of a Millionfold Joys—people call it Joy-Six-Oh, the Arhat likes jokes and encourages everybody to make them. The work is right at the Chakra, which makes it handier for me and Fritz to steal the odd half-hour. He’s so ef
fi
cient. I hadn’t slept with a man except Charles for so many years—that thing with Ducky Bradford you were all so curious about never got past a few stilted luncheons downstairs at the Ritz, there was something missing, I’m not sure he isn’t a bit gay, it would help explain why Gloria always seems so skittish when the girl-talk gets gutsy—for so many years, I felt a bit shaky at first, but so far, if I do say so myself, it seems to go just fine. I was afraid of seeming too old, but he’s very complimentary about my figure and the ojas shakti expressed by my glossy hair—it’s the supplements, Midge, vitamins A and E-complex and the zinc and that evening-primrose oil!—and says he’s bored silly with these twenty-year-old guru groupies, as he calls them. He says they have perfect bodies but no real spirit, and maithuna is above all a spiritual act. He himself is older than he looks, thirty-seven. He was with the Arhat in India, at the first ashram, in Ellora. He says he was really one of the founders—it was his idea to combine encounter therapy with tantric yoga. He shares this A-frame with only one other man, Savitri, who’s out on the road a lot of the time, giving interviews and selling the Arhat’s books and tapes and meditation aids, and there’s a whirlpool bath, one of those you can sit in up to your neck, instead of just a trailer shower the size of a mailing tube where you keep bumping your elbows on the soap rack and treading in everybody else’s germy wet towels that they just leave where they dropped them. Disgusting!

I know you won’t, but you
must
n’t tell Charles about Fritz—my hunch is he’s going to start suing me. Charles, I mean. About Vikshipta: a lot of the people here, actually, are
well into their thirties and forties, with Ph.D.s and jobs they left in city planning or architectural offices or legal firms—they’re not crazies, the place really runs, we really
are
accomplishing things. Joy-Six-Oh will be up by the end of the summer, with air-conditioning throughout and all the electricity solar-generated from panels on the roof. Is that what they call a zero-sum situation? Today, for the first time, they let me drive a backhoe. It’s such a darling machine. It lifts this big obliging hydraulic arm with its elbow up in the air and instead of a hand it has a scoop or bucket they call it, with these four pointy fingers shiny from gouging at the ground—they’re replaceable, I never realized that—and you sit there in this shaking cab scared to pick the wrong lever because this huge mechanical animal under you, that feels so gentle and plodding and patient, has so much blind power it could crush somebody just as easily as it picks up a boulder. I adored it, being allowed to run it. Its controls are all sticks, so it’s almost more natural than a car. Everybody, including the foreman, who used to be a Mormon, said I was very good—I really have the touch. It’s like I become the backhoe’s spirit, its jiva.

Forgive me, Midge, the way my mind is flipping around, but everything here is so energizing I said to Fritz I don’t see how the Arhat does it, all of us feeding off him this intensely spiritual way. He said—Vikshipta, I must learn to use his real name—that’s why he must conserve himself and needs all these women to hide behind, living so withdrawn you hardly ever see him except at darshan and when he drives by in his limo. We drink his silence the way he drinks Brahman’s, Vikshipta said.

How can I describe to you how I feel here? Tender and open as if I’ve shed an old skin, Midge. Everything makes such an im
pres
sion—the rocks I’m sitting among, and the sunset in its love colors like some great slanted fragmentary
walkway we’re seeing from underneath, and a breeze that stirs up the resiny smell in the cypress and reminds me of a smell from my childhood, some deep secret kitcheny scent out of a grandmother’s drawer, and this little lizard who’s been keeping me company. He’s like a perfect little living jewel. He’s been absolutely frozen as my voice rattles on and on. I’m getting hoarse. And just
then
, when I cleared my throat, up he stood and raced away on his two hind legs like a tiny man with a long green tail! He had a collar around his neck and for all I know a bow tie! He was—how can I say?—
one
with me, as the buzzards overhead riding the air currents home are one with me, and my birth and death, and you are one with me, dear Midge, and my lover is one with me when we can find a half-hour. Vikshipta’s hair is nearly as long as mine and utterly bleached on top from being out in the sun. When he isn’t leading therapy sessions he helps on the crew that’s building a ring road to keep cars out of the Chakra, looking ahead to the time when this will be a real city of many thousands, a thriving alternative to the atrocious way people live now.

Can you hear the supper blast? It’s an old foghorn that used to be on a boat in San Francisco. They use it to call us to dinner, or in case there’s nuclear war. You can hear it for miles, way out in the artichokes, and it reminds me of the only thing of my old life I miss, besides you and the girls and Irving—the sea, the triangular piece of it I could see from our front windows. It was never the same. Every day, every hour, it was a slightly different color, responding to the wind, and the sky, and my mood. Do you think I was going stir-crazy?

It’s still me, Midge, a few days older and wiser. Happy Mother’s Day. I
must
finish this tape and get it off to you. There’s just
so much
hap
pening. I know your image of us, and mine too used to be, is of people in lavender robes sitting around in a trance, but what we are trying to do here isn’t escape the world but revolutionize it—offer up a model of creative activity without ego and competitive antagonisms, so that from our central crystal here in the desert human society will spontaneously restructure itself, like certain chemicals when you put in just a pinch of the right precipitant. Vikshipta explains it better than I can; he used to be a chemist. He gets quite lovely when he talks about the new world we’ll concoct here. He worked in West Germany for some huge I. G. Farben spin-off until it seemed to him everything they were making—fertilizers, industrial additives, pesticides, even medicines and drugs—was poison, that the whole human species was a kind of poison, worse even than rats and cockroaches and viruses, and he left his wife and little child and went into the world to search for purity. This was in the Seventies sometime, when you and I were being suburban. He went to Nepal and the Himalayas but it was too cold there, no matter how pure, and he kept getting parasites, and then, drifting south to visit the great carved caves at Ellora, he came across this little ashram run by the Arhat in this pale-green farmhouse on the edge of town. It was like, he says, a carnival—absolute freedom and a lot of abuse of the freedom, of course, but in the still center of it all this utterly calm and rather humorous man who just radiated vidya, and prakhya. Not that he ever said so much, he still doesn’t and, when he does, afterwards it’s almost impossible to remember what was said, you just have this wonderful feeling of being washed clean inside, of everything klishta, everything impure and painful, having been gently purged. What Vikshipta liked about the Arhat was that unlike a lot of gurus he didn’t demand quiescence, he
invited dynamism, and instead of just being a slave word by word to what Patanjali wrote about yoga over two thousand years ago he had heard of Freud and modern psychotherapeutic techniques and in this cosmically good-humored way of his was willing to give anything a shot. There weren’t these usual repulsive little anatomical stunts like sucking things back up through your anus and cleaning out your sinuses with a silk string, but a lot of group encounter, and hydrotherapy, and some primal scream, and strange things like food fights and blue movies—anything to wake people up, was the Arhat’s approach. He embodies or localizes, that is, purusha to such an extent that it leaches away all the prakriti in the people around him. What
I
find sweet, in all this, and not so chauvinistic as it sounds, is that purusha, motionless inactive spirit, is male, and prakriti—active nature, you could say—is female, so that in the ideal maithuna, that’s what they call fucking in Sanskrit, the woman does all the work! The men always sit and she is always on top, the way Shiva and Shakti do it! I was shy at first but now I like it, its being up to me, so to speak, even when there’s all these men in one of these groups. They sit in a circle called the shri chakra and what you do is called chakra puja, or purnabhisheka, the complete consecration. You have to see them all as motionless purusha and your yoni as a purifying fire. Midge, it does work! It gets very impersonal, and that’s not such a great loss, it turns out. You become all yoni and your spirit gets delightfully unattached.

Enough of my lecturing. For God’s sake don’t tell any of this to Charles or even to Irving. What other news do I have? I still haven’t figured out where my rental car went to, and I know Hertz must be bugging Charles, but what can I do? That cold I had when I came is still hanging on. I must say
there’s a lot of minor illness around here, colds and fevers and aches and pains. I think people get groggy, the twelve hours of work as worship is too much physically, though wonderful spiritually. Even the girls who come to make the beds and tidy the trailers in the morning with the most radiant look on their faces have these awful coughs and sniffles. I’ve changed jobs again, just when I was getting so good at the backhoe some of the guys would let me scratch their backs with it as a joke. I guess it’s a promotion, though I miss the healthy mindless outdoors—you get hardened to it, and there’s always a satisfaction when your body responds to a challenge. It settles the mind into silence, physical labor. But Durga came to me and asked if I could type. She didn’t like me from the start and I believe she hates me now because of Vikshipta, though I don’t know what their relationship was before me. She
is
beautiful in a way, with those pale-red eyebrows and that black pearl above her nostril, and wears those flowing robes to make the best of her figure, but she doesn’t give off really man-pleasing vibes—she seems too angry at something, and it could be is too close to being a man herself. Wimpy types like Vajna are terrified of her and whine all the time about how she’s abusing the Master’s trust, the way she runs the place along these kind of paranoid lines. But for some reason I’m not scared of her. I said I wrote a mean letter but never had typed professionally. She said they needed another typist in the Uma Room pool to answer the Arhat’s mail. It pours in from everywhere—Europe, Australia, Africa, even the South Sea Islands. Our run-ins with the local ranchers and the state land-use freaks have gotten us some national publicity, you may even have seen some of it on the seven-o’clock news, after Natalie Jacobson. People send checks, just for what seeing the Arhat on “Sixty Minutes” has done for them. They fall in love just like
I did. He really
is
a master of the interview—so funny and relaxed and sweet and respectful and solemn and sly, like the baby of the family that’s always been made much of. Actually, his early life was very hard and cruel. A person’s moksha is supposed to erase his past, but the story you hear is that his father wanted to mutilate him as an infant to make him a more effective beggar but—this was all in Bombay, where as everybody knows the poverty is terrible—but his mother hid him under a heap of rags or cow dung and smuggled him to her sister in the countryside near Ellora, and that’s where he grew up. He’s enchanting to me on TV because the camera gets so close to him; otherwise he’s whizzing past in a limousine, and even onstage he seems very far away, and dwarfed by this huge silvery-polyester armchair he likes to sit in, and on weekends, when the day trippers and who knows what crazies are there—if they shot John Lennon they’ll shoot anybody that appeals to them—he’s behind a curved plexiglas shield that makes him even harder to focus on. But on TV you can see exactly the way his slightly chubby cheeks kind of tense up when he’s speaking on an allegorical level, and the beautiful way his mouth moves in his beard, especially that amazing “s” he makes, his front teeth not quite together like he’s holding something between the back ones, and his really incredible eyes—they seem absolutely to have no reflected highlights, just this smooth dark bulgy inky brown that goes in and in. I love his lids, too—they’re so
sculp
tural somehow, and how the lower ones get this funny bunchy extra wrinkle when he’s said something sly, that you can take two ways. And his hair, the kinky energetic grayish bits you can see at the edge of the turban. It’s hard to know how old he is. He might be our age. Or ten years older or younger. There’s a new videotape, made since the one on ego-negation and prapatti we used to watch
together—on sachchidananda and moksha, it’s really wonderful, for $39.90, and if you order it direct from us never mind about the five-percent Arizona-state sales tax, nobody pays it around here because we’re a religious organization.
Do
let me know if you don’t adore it as much as I do.