S. (29 page)

Your unextinguished old flame,
Sarah née Price

December 19

Revered Master—

To quote the blessed Dhammapada: “I have conquered all; I know all, and my life is pure; I have left all, and I am free from craving. I myself found the way. Whom shall I call Teacher? Whom shall I teach?”

Forgive me for leaving unceremoniously. Our farewell was implicit in our every encounter, and within the cycles of karma meetings and partings are hardly to be distinguished. If Nitya Kalpana is now recovered enough to resume supervision of the Treasury of Enlightenment, kindly explain to her that any apparent discrepancies she notices in the books must be blamed upon the irregular methods of accounting which I, having never attended business school, had to improvise; and if
that
does not explain everything, blame the diabolic machinations of the perfidious Durga. In return for this courtesy, rest assured that our personal relations and whatever revelations they brought are sealed in my vasanas, to remain there as speechless vidya forever. If not, not—if you take my meaning. Neti neti, that is to say, or iti iti. I think our mutual reticence forms a beautiful harmony—a balance of sublime negativities—and pray that you will agree. At our last, and frankest, discussion there was a tape recorder between my breasts, my breasts which you were always kind enough to admire. In my allocation of recently received artha, more than half has been left in your discretionary fund. 300 K ain’t hay. May the ashram prosper, along the lines of Hinayana as you mentioned.

Where am I? I feel you asking “Where are you?” much as I was asked, on arriving at the ashram three seasons ago, “Who are you?” We know now who I am: I am Kundalini, the energy-serpent that rises. Master, I have come to that place
which always interested me—where purusha, in its eternity, immutability, and utter freedom,
very slightly
wrinkles (as I picture it) and makes the infinitesimal concession whereby it permits itself to be wed to prakriti in all its tragic tumult of phenomenality and flux. Or perhaps (the distinction, like so many in your teachings, remained a bit obscure to me) I have merely come to that site within prakriti whereby the three gunas are ever so delicately jostled out of their perfect equilibrium and precipitate mahat, which then evolves into ahamkara, the first rude perception, the first dim ego, which then bifurcates into the subjective and the objective, in the latter of which, as I recall, the five tanmatras, subtle and potential, give rise to the relatively coarse paramanu and sthulabhutani—atoms and molecules! The subjective equivalent would be (as I conceived it) the chittavrittis, the eddies of consciousness it is the purpose of yoga to suppress.

I fear I was a bad sannyasin, for all the flattery and tutorial zeal you and Alinga and Vikshipta lavished upon me, because I was never able quite to let go of my chittavrittis—I was afraid of the void beneath them. For what is life, this illusion which we live and wish to sustain, but this very same skin of fluctuating awareness, of unsteady and no doubt unworthy nibbles and glimmer and halted thoughts and half-sensations? Isn’t this, this thin impalpable skin of color and flicker, this and only this the ecstasy of existence that we wish to prolong forever, to prolong beyond that palya after which even the shining protons of the diamond-strewn Buddha Field fall into decay? The terrible unending stillness of samadhi was for me indistinguishable from death, and I dreaded falling into it inadvertently while in some asana—I was terrified that moksha would swoop down and render me blank. In these last several weeks I have often reflected upon you and conclude that you
are not, as I may in a moment of female pique have implied, a fraud: no, truly you are a jivan-mukta, a living blank who simultaneously sustains the chittavrittis while locating his being beneath them, in that utter indifference which is purusha and the atman. Just so, the body of a man on death row mysteriously continues its operations—its fluid exchanges and molecular haggling—even to the grotesque extent that on the evening of his execution this body falls asleep and in the morning it consumes breakfast, a meal its enzymes and digestive juices are still busily attacking when the electric current fatally surges through and melts all connections. You
have
relocated your life, Master, and that is what I am still seeking to do.

When I came to the desert I thought my environment greatly simplified, but it was a seething crowded place compared with where I am now. In most directions there is merely the line where samsara makes its vast sad horizon with nirvana. Sattva, rajas, and tamas are all in such nearly perfect balance here that the merest smudge in the sky serves for a cloud, a single small yellow-breasted bird for a flock, and a trip to the local bookstore for an adventure, a pilgrimage. Your books and your posters are on display, and my love for you is slowly being restored to the love it was before reality intervened. For, yes, we do wish to live entirely in our chittavrittis yet cheat them by hoping they are not all there is, and any demonstration we can make of our ideality—loving a man on a poster, for instance—flatters this hope. The pleasure of love, you taught me, lies in love’s stalling, in vajrolimudra. How you did wickedly delight in my dying again and again while impaled on your inflexible ungiving all-giving vajra, your darling thunder-jewel! For a woman, the equivalent of such nivritti—since our female instrument of love is the entire body, even to the eyelashes and the toenails—is removal,
denial, betrayal even: love’s expression must become absence and silence.

My absence you already have, the silence will follow this letter. I fear you will not greatly care. Mahima will make my void her plenum. There are many Shaktis. And the human hunger for a god will always reward those with the temerity—the inner density and vacuity—to call themselves gods. Something like that happens whenever a woman falls for a man. But the
suffering
a woman endures for the same mute Shiva, the same stony linga, over and over! My entire subtle body aches; I awake to this ache and fall asleep impaled upon it. Also, I have caught a cold, as I tend to when I travel. These ignoble constant sniffles and sore throats of ours, and twinges in the teeth—are they, do you suppose, scratches that as it were geologically remember prakriti’s being extracted from purusha?

In all those blissful months, even while wimpy Yajna whacked my jaw and Vikshipta turned sadistic and the shots were ringing out during Durga’s last stand, your spirit sheltered me and I felt no fear. Now I feel fear. Master, having already bestowed upon me the mudra of dama (your boon more generous than perhaps you knew), do not withhold your abhayamudra.
Fear not!
—what all the gods say, like so many suns burning through the mists of circumstance.

[unsigned]

December 13, 15, 18—while
a full moon comes and goes

Dear Charles—

The disgusting news that you are to marry Midge Hibbens knocked me for a loop, I confess. She babbled away blithely
about it in the last of these tapes we’ve been exchanging—as of course you know. You know everything, it turns out, though I must say the image of you and Midge holding hands and God knows what all—heavy petting, let’s call it—while listening to your poor betrayed wife’s gushing taped confessions is one of the least appetizing images of courtship I have ever entertained. With her really remarkable insensitivity, Midge assumed I’d be
pleased
by her news! She said she’d been detecting all sorts of guilt in my references to you and this should ease it! She
had
mumbled a bit in her tape before the last one about her and Ed “having troubles” (of course leaving out that the main trouble was her wish to switch over to you), and in response to that I girlishly mentioned this dream in which you and I were making love, and it must have been in response to that that she popped her gladsome tidings. I do think she took a fright of jealousy from just my dreaming about you! Talk about possessive!! And not even in legal possession yet.

I wonder how much you really understand about Midge. She is crass, Charles. She is lively but not sensitive. In our sessions with Irving she has never shown the slightest grasp or interest in the philosophy and cosmology underlying hatha-yoga. As far as she’s concerned it’s just a slimming exercise—which she does need, granted—but as far as spiritual energy goes she might as well be doing aerobics to the Bee Gees. I’m sure she’s wonderful in bed—any woman is, when there’s a conquest to be made—but aren’t you going to get
tired
of that brassy laugh, those unreal paprika-colored curls, the way she says “doggie” instead of “dog” and “din-din” instead of “dinner”? It wasn’t just Ed who was the loudmouth in that couple—remember how we used to come away from their house with decibel headaches? Midge has the kind of mind
that honestly thinks the sayings on barbecue aprons and big fat coffee mugs are cute. And whose house are you proposing to live in?—not ours, that would be a
sacrilege
, and their split-level is much too tacky for a man in your position—that shag-carpet rumpus room Ed put in the basement with all that pine panelling and shelves for his bowling trophies was fine for the yoga group but can you imagine yourself sitting down there of an evening in the Barcalounger reading through their stacks of old
Smithsonians
? And what are your snobby MGH neurosurgeon friends going to say when Midge in one of those lurid loose splashy dresses she wears to confuse the weight issue breaks into her shrill giggle and asks the host if there’s a little-girls’ room where she can wash her hands? Darling, you’re going to have a decibel headache day and night. I just can’t bear to think of her in our
house
or even in our
garden
—she’ll just put plaster toads and bunnies everywhere and
choke
the bed with marigolds and salvia—she has absolutely no eye—in fact I’ve often wondered if she isn’t hiding color blindness, the way she dresses and the way her slipcovers go with her wallpapers—hideous! She
does
wear contact lenses, you know—one time doing Shirsasana one of them came out and we never did find it in the rug so it must have slipped back into her brain and may still be there.

I love Midge, of course. She has very little negativity, and for another woman that’s a great plus, since we tend as a sex toward depression. Many’s the time I went over there vaguely desperate and came away laughing, full of cottage cheese and fruit salad and white-wine silliness. It was like going to some unisex health club where you leave your intelligence in the locker room. But for a
man
, who wants a partner who can give him back some resonance at every level, it will be like living with Pearl at age twelve and a half, only not so pretty
and with no prospect of growth. There is something sweet but
arrested
about Midge—she has always been so vain of her dainty hands and feet, in rather insistent contrast to mine especially—she was always having us compare shoes, and professing astonishment that mine were so much like rowboats, and always touching or patting me with her little stubby paws as if to call attention to them, with all their preposterous eye-catching clunky rings and really very
tawdry
fingernail polish, those plummy reds and baby pinks and even, I remember one Saint Patrick’s Day, an unbelievable parsley green. And her feet, squeezed like rising dough into these poor creaking pumps—I mean, as women supposedly head into the twenty-first century, are bound feet what we need?

But I forget that you must be a man in love, enchanted, bewitched, and that even my most innocuous observation will strike you as sheer spite. Not at all—you two deserve each other. But before I leave the subject: Have you ever listened to her eat?
Listened
, I mean—she makes little happy humming noises with every bite, and pats her lips together in a kind of tiny applause all the way up from her stomach. Perhaps she makes the same noises in bed—that’s for you to know—lucky you. For her, of course, you are a great step up—Ed called himself a security-systems analyst but he was really just a glorified electrician installing these futile burglar alarms, whereas you are in one of the hallowed professions—the
only
hallowed one, actually, since teaching and preaching and lawyering are all known now to be con games. I must say I can’t
bear
it, imagining her humming and smacking her lips over you in the dark—your betrayals had become old hat to me and had male thoughtlessness and brutishness to exonerate them up to a point, but Midge inside that doggie piggie brain of hers
must
have known it was somehow not
nice
to steal a
woman’s husband while that same woman was trustfully giving and giving of herself on these tapes, those utterly confiding and trusting Maxells. Burn them, in all decency.
Not
in our fireplace—they’ll stink and melt and stick fast to the andirons and the bricks. How about in Ed’s old barbecue pit? One thing I
have
decided: you are
not
going to live with that hateful ridiculous woman in my lovely house with the view of the sea and the rocks and those English-style border beds I brought back from the absolute weed-patches that old Mrs. Pyncheon had allowed to grow up everywhere. You will
sell
the house and give me my
half
of the proceeds if in fact I don’t have Ducky ask for
all
of it, 100%—women
usually
get the house, they were supposedly the
homemakers
—even your hatchet man Gilman will tell you that.

And what of little Pearl? Suppose the news gives her a miscarriage?

Later. Another day. Calmer now. Peace, Charles. I realize this morning that Midge is only rising to a higher level of socio-economic energy and should not be blamed. And I suppose honestly there was nothing in my tapes to indicate that you weren’t fair game, though a person with even a
little
sensitivity—but I can’t rouse myself to even enough indignation to complete the sentence. What matters really and always has is
us
—you and I. I’ve taken time to think and meditate and just relax into the space I’m in, and I’ve decided I don’t believe in divorce and will write and tell Ducky to make no terms at all. You and your roly-poly little suburban pudding can do whatever you want—retire to her rumpus room and leave adulterous stains all over the shag carpet. Your infatuation will wear itself out with or without my blessing. I’m doing you a great
favor, blocking a marriage that no sane man, and certainly not my straitlaced thrifty Charles (you know how Midge
spends—
Ed was always bragging/complaining), would really want. No, what you really want is to skim from Midge that demonic erotic courtship energy women can produce for short spurts and then abandon her emotionally just as you did me.