A Short History of Richard Kline (24 page)

‘You patronise me. You patronise me and I am not deceived. You are a clever man.' At this point Rajesh turned to me – ‘He is a clever man' – and then back to Martin – ‘you should know better.' In this way their banter persisted for a few minutes, with Rajesh's wife, Lila, shushing at her husband discreetly in the background until, with a display of resignation, he turned his attention to other patrons.

That night I reminded Martin of a remark he had made the previous week about divine discontent. The phrase troubled me. What was the import of this ‘divine'? Discontent was an experience I knew all too well, the prickly self, the restless spin and burn of it. But I choked on the ‘divine' bit, and I took up Huxley again. I could relate to Huxley's computer-like model of the brain but flinched from the idea of a Mind at Large. Was this another way of talking about God?

‘The God question can't be answered,' replied Martin, cheerfully, helping himself to another portion of naan. ‘Don't worry about it. It gets in the way.'

‘In the way of what?'

‘Your practice. You can chew on it for years and end up where you started. Without your practice the brain will play the same games over and over. You could read ten volumes of theology and be none the wiser. You could
write
ten volumes of theology and still doubt. If you must think of God, think of being itself, not
a
being. Forget the divine, if the word bothers you. However we label it, there is the ground of all being.'

‘That's too vague. It's like, “God is what I say it is.”'

‘There is no God, not in the biblical sense. There is a cosmic consciousness, a form of intelligence that pervades everything. You can choose to tap in to it, or you can ignore it and try and go it alone. Not that you can ever truly go it alone, because you swim in the ocean of that consciousness like a fish in the sea, and the particles that make up that sea are the same as the ones that make up you. But you can swim blind or swim with your eyes open, so to speak.'

‘But the fish survives, whether its eyes are open or not.'

‘It's a metaphor, Rick. Think of that ocean as something dynamic, not static. Some modern theologians talk of the theology of the event. They distinguish between a
name
, such as “God”, which is a static entity,
out there
–' he gestured into the distance – ‘and a dynamic process, a movement of energy that is constantly evolving. The name is a convenience that we use to refer to the event but it cannot capture the event, which constantly seeks new forms and new ways to express itself. Think of it as a physics we don't yet understand, a vast, all-encompassing intelligence. We are within it and hence it's most likely beyond our understanding. But we can tune in to it. When we meditate we don't go into stillness, not in a static sense – that's a common misunderstanding – we go into a zone where we can connect directly with that current.'

‘We go with the flow?' My sarcasm was intended.

‘More to the point, we learn to trust the flow, we surrender to it. Surrender is the hard part. And in any case,' he added, ‘consequences follow from actions without any supernatural intervention. It's about how energy works. The law of karma functions like the law of gravity. You don't need a god. If there
are
gods, then they are minor deities who look on while we sort ourselves out.'

That night I went home feeling elated. Two men in their forties sitting in a cheap restaurant over a ferocious curry and debating the form of God seemed, at that moment, to be the height of pleasure. Every part of me, every atom, had been wholly engaged. I had held nothing in reserve. The ordinariness of my surroundings meant nothing.

Just the weekend before, Zoe and I had sat through an interminable dinner party in a penthouse apartment, during which our hosts had outlined in detail their plans for the renovation of a farmhouse they had bought in the Dordogne. The prospect of this farmhouse – this elaborate pastoral fantasy with its own plumbing, rewiring, re-roofing and collection of rustic furniture – seemed to illuminate their lives with so intense a glow of possibility that I was reminded of Leni and her villa. What
was
this obsession with dwelling places? It was as if time could be defeated by creating the perfect space, by the conversion of the evanescent into the stationary. Time could be objectified into something solid and reassuring. And yet I had never much cared where I lived. I could easily imagine going on the road, as Martin had. Perhaps one day I would.

On the drive home I remarked on this to Zoe. The house in the Dordogne was escapism, I said, an avoidance of death.

‘You
would
see it that way,' she said, tersely. ‘Other people might see it more straightforwardly as a fairly normal pursuit of pleasure. They can afford it, so why not?'

‘Pleasure? They moaned constantly about the obstacles.' But I knew the obstacles were the point. It was the quest that mattered, the need for a goal.

Zoe had stared ahead. ‘You're so judgemental. And anyway, everything after a certain age is an avoidance of death.'

The unspoken lay between us: What you do, your newfound conversion, is just escapism in another more self-righteous form. At times like this I heard my mother's voice:
Why can't you just accept things as they are?

For some weeks my meetings with Martin continued on as before, in what I think of now as a holding pattern. Occasionally I got a niggling sense that Martin was withholding something from me, something he judged I was not yet ready to hear. Maybe he felt that I could cope only with one big idea at a time, in this case the self as a laboratory, an experiment. It was a point he returned to over and over, his touchstone.

‘You are a thinker, Rick,' he would say, ‘but thinking can only take you so far. Nothing I say, nothing you read, will make much sense without your
experience
, and especially your experience of her, your teacher. She is the substratum of your knowing, and everything else is tested against that. It takes root – or not – in that experience. You can think of this as “spiritual” if you like, as metaphysics, but you are never not an empiricist in the broadest sense.'

On the last Saturday in August, he appeared to be unwell. He looked pale, and throughout our walk he coughed in intermittent spasms and spat phlegm into the bushes. It pained me to see him so distressed. Maybe I was insensitive but for the first time it occurred to me that Martin led a lonely life. If he fell ill, who would look after him?

‘Are you okay?' I asked.

‘Bronchitis. A weakness of mine. I tend to get it around this time of year.'

This was followed by another coughing fit that had him hunched over with an arm clutched to his chest. His body shook.

‘You need to see a doctor, get some antibiotics. I can drive you there.'

‘It's alright, I'm on a course already.' For a moment he was breathless. Then he straightened up, and with some deliberation turned to face me. ‘I've had some news,' he said. ‘I'll be going away soon.'

‘Away?'

‘New Zealand. My guru has a centre in Auckland and he's asked me to run it for the next six months. Maybe longer.'

‘When do you leave?'

‘Two weeks.'

Ah, so it had to come to an end. ‘I'm sorry to hear that. I'll miss our walks.'

‘So will I.'

I asked him if he needed any help. His furniture put into storage? A lift to the airport?

‘No,' he said. ‘No, it will all be taken care of.'

And now I was at a loss. With Martin I had felt more at home in my skin, had breathed more easily, walked more lightly on the ground. We had shared in a rare intimacy, rare because it cut to the core of things. In the circles I moved in there was no-one I could talk to about what mattered to me most.

I began to reflect on what had brought me to this point. I recalled certain events, and relived them, searching for clues as to what I should do next. I sat in my study and read through the notebooks I had inscribed after my meetings with Martin, read them over and over, obsessively. I would read them if I couldn't sleep at night, or first thing in the morning in the quiet minutes before I settled to meditate. I scrawled certain phrases on bits of paper and stuffed them in my pockets, or in my wallet.

After a while I decided to enter the contents of the notebooks on my laptop and created a set of files, one for each meeting with Martin. In this way I sought to construct a conversation with myself, since I could no longer speak with Martin in the flesh. But this was frustrating, and only resulted in me asking more questions that Martin wasn't there to answer.

One night, late, when Zoe and Luke were in bed, I deleted the files from my laptop. Then I carried the notebooks downstairs and squatted beside the wood heater. I tore off their plastic covers and fed the notebooks into the flames, one at a time, and waited. They took a long time to burn. In the morning there was nothing left. The grey metal corkscrews of their ring-binding lay scattered in the ashes.

on the escarpment

In early September he got a phone call from Rebecca. Sri Mata was flying to Australia and would be staying on for six months, an unprecedented length of time. She would live on a property in Kangaroo Valley, owned by one of her devotees, but every Sunday morning she would be emerging from her seclusion to hold regular programs in the city.

He could scarcely believe it. So, he told himself, I have not been abandoned.

Though she lived within him as a daily presence, in her physical form she had been so remote for so long, so inaccessible as a phenomenon within Nature (Martin's words), that it seemed barely conceivable that she would appear on Sunday mornings in a house at Strathfield to conduct meditation. According to Rebecca, one of her devotees would drive her up every Sunday morning early and drive her back after lunch. There would be an hour of meditation but there would be no talks, no question and answer sessions, no words.

Whereas once he might have felt agitated, impatient, apprehensive or excited about this dramatic change in her availability, instead he felt only relief. Would he behave foolishly, as he had at the retreat? No, this time it would be different. Martin had prepared him for this. The next step, he had said. Be ready to take the next step. Would it be confronting? He had no idea. By now, all he knew was to expect the unexpected.

The house in Strathfield was a large stone Federation villa with an old English privet hedge in front. A sign on the front door directed visitors to a path that ran around the side of the house and a walled garden at the rear. It was clear that the original land had been subdivided decades before so that a series of red-brick townhouses could be built next door. All that remained of the once impressive grounds was a wide courtyard surrounded on three sides by a high brick wall that enclosed what must have been a terrace of huge flagstones, now cracked and worn. An old frangipani tree grew in one corner, and a dilapidated garden shed stood in the other. A few big terracotta pots were dotted about, newly planted with the brassy yellow of marigolds. A birdbath cut from tin and painted in rust-red and bright blue stood incongruously under the frangipani tree.

The courtyard had been swept clean, and near the back door a table set up with a white cloth, a vase of flowers and some incense. In front of this table was her peetham, a large padded stool as big as a coffee table, which he recognised from her public programs in the past. There were rows of plastic chairs arrayed in the middle of the courtyard, and a gathering of around eighty people had assembled, among whom was Rebecca. She saw Rick enter, and waved.

It was odd, waiting for her to appear, as if they were waiting for an emissary from Venus. An attendant rang a small bell and announced she would soon be with them, and he found he was holding his breath. And yet when she emerged from the back door of the villa, a diminutive figure in a plain white cotton sari with her blue-black hair drawn back in a bun on the nape of her neck, her presence seemed utterly natural, as if she, and they, had always been there, and indeed some of them laughed, involuntarily, as if they were all participating in some delightful joke.

She paused beside the peetham to smile at them. With her right hand held to her heart in her customary greeting, she looked around the courtyard, meeting the gaze of many of them, though not all. Then, matter-of-factly, she settled herself cross-legged on the peetham and rested her palms on her knees. An attendant leaned over to whisper in her ear and she raised a hand to point in the direction of the house.

How natural, how graceful her every gesture. Every small thing, he thought:
every small thing.
It was her gift to make of every small thing a benediction. And with that thought his body went loose and he felt as if he might cry out: At last I have found perfection! He had gone through life thinking he would never know it, and here it was, so plain, so unadorned.

Turning back now to face the assembly, she joined her palms together in the prayer position and raised her hands above her head in a salute. To them. He could not begin to describe his feelings at the moment of that salute. So natural, so joyous, so down-to-earth. Had he ever felt more at home in his life, here in this old courtyard he had never before set eyes on? What fortune had brought him here? How strange and yet how not strange. How homely and unremarkable. It was as if everything else in his life at that moment was strange and alienated, warped and unnatural, jarring, pushed out of shape and, above all, banal. This alone was the bliss of nature, inherent in all matter, revealed now and made manifest in her form.

She lowered her arms and composed them in her lap. For a long minute she looked around the courtyard, gazing at each one of them with her tender, radiant smile. Then, tucking the hem of her sari in under her feet, she closed her eyes to indicate the beginning of meditation. In her deep, resonant voice she murmured the syllable
OM
three times so that it wafted on the air of their enclosure like a benign tremor.

For an hour they meditated, an hour that might have passed in a matter of minutes. After what seemed an absurdly short time a bell rang and he opened his eyes. Sri Mata continued to sit there in silence, looking around from face to face, smiling. Then, abruptly, she rose and in an instant had disappeared into the gloomy interior of the villa, the white folds of her sari illuminating the dark hallway.

Rebecca announced that refreshments would be served, and the word ‘refreshment' struck him as comically inapt. They had already been refreshed beyond measure.

He had no desire to linger, to risk dissipating the moment in small-talk, but nor did he feel in any state to drive a car, and feared he would run a red light. Instead, he went for a walk, strolling for several blocks in that unremarkable suburb, stared at by children, barked at by dogs, restored to himself in some incalculable way.

When he got home Zoe took one look at him and raised an eyebrow. ‘Well, you look relaxed.'

He put his arms around her but said nothing, too full to speak.

Evidently, then, in Martin's terms, he was still a child, still clinging to the hem of the teacher, too dependent on the physical form. Surely if his practice had matured, and by now it ought to have (hadn't he been diligent, apart from that one lapse?), then he would not need this, this primitive subjection to another human being. What did it signify? That old ally, his intellect, was on its guard; as usual, it held many questions in reserve. It must protect him from any softening in the head. Was he at the mercy of some cycle of regression?

Over the weeks that followed he began to experience a subtle change in his outlook. For one thing, he found he was becoming less judgemental. There was the occasion on which he had to listen, yet again, to friends talk obsessively about the renovation of their cottage in the Dordogne, and for once he listened without irritability. The property was not a cottage but a ‘sheepfold' and accessible only by a rocky track of two kilometres. It was, they intoned, the perfect retreat (as if, he remarked later to Zoe, the Australian continent was too noisy for them). He, who was impractical and had never so much as driven a nail, even managed to ask them a few questions. Was there drinkable water? Were the tanks they planned to install local or imported? How were their French lessons going?

‘You were very congenial tonight,' said Zoe as they drove home. ‘Since when did you develop an interest in water tanks?'

He shrugged. ‘If it makes them happy …' To the rest of their friends and acquaintances it would make far more sense than his own eccentric path. Who was he to pronounce on anything? The more time he spent with Sri Mata, the more aware he became of how little he knew, really
knew
, as opposed to all the knowledge he had acquired so easily since boyhood. At its core this peculiar new state of unknowing was generous; he might even describe it as, well, loving.

On the fifth Sunday he decided to sit to the side of her peetham, because he liked occasionally to open his eyes and glimpse her in profile: the coiled bun of her blue-black hair; the curve of her nose; the composure of her rounded shoulders; the white cotton of her shawl ruffled by a mild breeze. This, he told himself, was the image he would call to mind at the moment of his death.

For now, he marvelled at the perfect poise with which she sat, straight-backed and with no visible movement, for an hour. Except that now and then she would observe, or in some way sense, that one of the meditators had nodded off; then she would pick up a small pebble from a handful she kept in a brass bowl beside her and throw it, with unerring aim, at the forehead of the lucky miscreant. These stones became treasured items among the devotees, though it had not as yet happened to him. Nor did he yearn for any token. To be there in her presence was enough.

He found that each Sunday morning he drove to these meditation events with questions in his head, and on each occasion these questions evaporated in her presence – either that or an answer came to him during the meditation, though always in a form that he could not put into words, and that could only be described as the deepening of a spiritual intuition that grew in and was nurtured by her presence. If afterwards he could recall these questions, they ceased to seem important, to have lost their charge, as if the meditation process was a liquid solution in which such cerebral irritants were dissolved. It reminded him of Martin's idea of the laboratory of the self; in his Sunday-morning state he was a beaker of fluid that filtered out the dross, and Sri Mata was the flame. Which is not to say that there weren't times when he wasn't restless, when thoughts from work didn't intrude, or anxieties, about Luke especially, but he focused on his breath and returned to his mantra. In her presence it seemed all too easy. He was a child at the breast. And in time he became complacent; everything, he told himself, is fine as it is.

But then, one morning, she ambushed him. He felt himself being drawn up into a vortex as if at any minute he might leave his body and not return. Death was only an instant away; he could drop the sheath of the body without fear or regret, for it was not death as he had until then imagined it; rather, it was like boarding a train, and she was there, in the carriage, inviting him to sit beside her.

I could let go
, he thought,
let go now of everything
. Ah, but no, no, it was not possible, and he felt a hot wave of panic shimmy up his spine.
No, I'm not ready for this
, he heard himself say, silently.
Not now. Not yet. I am not a monk. I have my wife and son to look after. Would you have me abandon them?
He opened his eyes and stared at her, motionless on the peetham. Her eyes were closed, her stillness uncanny.

One Sunday, after she had risen and turned towards the door of the villa, she hesitated, turned back to the peetham and stooped to the brass bowl to pick out a pebble. Then she looked at him and held out her hand.

Taken aback, he glanced around. What was the meaning of this gesture? The meditation was at an end and he had not fallen asleep. Moreover, he had never seen her do this, offer a pebble to a devotee
after
meditation. Nor was he sure at first that the pebble was intended for him, but her gaze was so direct, and prolonged, that there could be no doubt, and as he reached out to take it, brushing her cool fingers lightly, she said, in her deep-throated and heavily accented English, ‘For your friend.' And before he could in any way respond, she had turned away and was walking in her quick, matter-of-fact stride towards the house.

He stood there, in shock. He hadn't the faintest idea what she was talking about. What was for his friend? Well, the pebble, of course, but what did that small stone signify? And what friend? He headed for his walk around the streets of Strathfield, his usual stroll after meditation, fingering the stone in his pocket, rubbing it between thumb and forefinger, turning it over and over until at last it came to him.
Martin
. Martin Coleby. She meant Martin. How did he know this? He just knew.

But Martin was in New Zealand – at least, he had said he would be remaining there for several months, and perhaps indefinitely. Was he meant to post the stone to him in the mail? Perhaps that was it, not that he had a forwarding address, but it should not be difficult to discover the location of Martin's centre in Auckland. And when the stone arrived Martin would know what it meant.

He returned to his car and was not far into the journey home when it occurred to him that Martin might be in Sydney. Perhaps he had returned and she was directing Rick to renew contact, to resume their dialogues and the teaching Martin had been so generously willing to offer him. By the time he reached Parramatta Road he had resolved to ring Martin the next day, and then corrected that thought. Martin would have given up the rental of his little terrace house and the old number would be disconnected. He drove on, past the turn-off in Camperdown, but the pebble in his pocket was like a hot coal that burned into his thoughts. Finally a voice arose in his head – or, to be more precise, reverberated in his chest, like a struck gong. It said, ‘Go now. Go to Martin's place.'