by John Updike
What made me absolutely the most indignant and heartsick, though, was that snide piece about the Arhat's limousines and wristwatches with diamond-studded bands and his shoes ordered by the dozen from a London bootmaker and the rest of it. The fact is the Arhat is absolutely penniless-everything goes into the Treasury of Enlightenment and is incorporated or set up as a trust and he has no idea of what comes in and goes out. He is so truly beyond material things that he just innocently assumes whatever he needs or desires will materialize. He really does live like the lilies and the birds of the air. Furthermore, his diamonds are meant to symbolize for his followers the jewel trees of the Buddha Realm, the incredible Land of Bliss that we meditate upon to break down the logical mind so nirvana can enter in. As it happens, I see the Arhat fairly often now in connection with my work-not just taking dictation as I was but giving advice sometimes (something Charles incidentally never asked for, my advice) and other times just sitting and sharing his silence-and there has never been a sweeter, gentler, wiser, saner man. One half of me wants to get the entire world to love him as I do, and the other half selfishly wants to keep him all to myself. Not that that's possible: he is surrounded by love, he gives off so much love-energy himself. "Luff-enerchee" is the way he says it. He even says that I-7, Mother, whom you raised to be such a proper little Bostonian female prick-have this luff-enerchee. One of the things he likes about me (you will die) is my skin, which you always said was so disgustingly dark and oily, so I looked dirty even after I'd had a bath-you wanted me to have your own rice-paper complexion, with a few tasteful freckles across the shoulders and on the back of the hands just to let us know you were real, and you did use to look stunning, like some powdery woman from Marie Antoinette days, going out to a formal do in a low-cut dress, leaving me all lumpy and plump and adolescent and miserable and dirty-looking behind in the house. I do hope, on this subject, you've given up your absurd attempt to get a tan and are using a Number 15 sunblock even if you're just going outdoors to get into the car and go shopping. With PABA-not only does it prevent further damage but it helps mend the DNA damage that has occurred, along with the zinc and A and JE you should be taking as I think I wrote you before.
Charles, as you may know-I have no idea how much you two are communicating behind my back, I can't bear to think of it, it's too klishta, too duhshama as we say-has gone to England to press his side of the story on Pearl, who seems infatuated with a very unsuitable-sounding boy from the Lowlands. I've always hated the Dutch ever since that sadistic Mrs. Van Liew you used to stick us with while you and Daddy went off on one of your cruises or precious New York or Tanglewood weekends. She had these really delusional things about germs and God and kept making us wash our hands before even having a graham cracker and would go into these religious raptures at bedtime that got me so upset I would wet the bed. Jeremy I don't think ever did recover, that's why he went to South America-so he could have a graham cracker without washing his hands. Only down there they call them tortillas.
Ymglad you rolled over the CDs as I suggested. The stock market really isn't for people advanced in age with short-range goals; don't forget that, buy or sell, the broker takes a commission, and that's all he cares about. If you're frantic to get rid of some of all that old IBM and AT &T Daddy bought for a dollar a share, the head accountant here, a very clever woman called Nitya Kal-pana, with as it happens some nervous problems at the moment, has developed a really advantageous method of giving whereby you sign over shares and take a tax deduction for the full market value somehow twice, without paying for any of the capital gains-strange as it sounds I think you'd show a better profit giving it'to us than by selling it. And besides which, you'd make your little daughter very proud.
Isn't that & crime that that admiral is so shameless and obtuse? Isn't there a rules committee or some such body you could complain to? It seems a pity to call the Boca police but he does sound unbalanced and not merely senile and though I know most crimes of passion are committed by Hispanics there's always the exception that makes the papers. Keeping your hurricane shutters down on the side where he comes knocking is all very well but as you say it cuts out the cross-draft and the view of the courtyard. Could you move to a second-floor condo? If he's as infirm as you describe him I don't see how he could climb the stairs. Really, aren't most men just terrible? Charles has got this new tough lawyer called Gilman who keeps writing me these rather comically officious letters about a Hertz car I mislaid and some other financial details that you can bet if a man had done them wouldn't strike him as nearly so highhanded. But the head cold I came with is quite gone at last and I feel quite aklisbta (undisturbed, empty of impurities, only like every Sanskrit word there's more to it than that, there's a whole lotus of meanings). Without even trying I've lost five pounds (I think it's the not drinking that does it, and the no meat with its fat) and got my hair cut rather short-a friend of mine says I feel now like a nylon teddy bear. Don't forget to take calcium, and A not only for your skin but thyroid and eyes too-the best pills are the ones made from fish-liver oil-and to keep especially the Perkins silver out of the Florida air, in the bottom of the breakfront.
Many hugs,
Sare
P.S.: I was just joking about you and Mrs. Van Liew being responsible for Jerry's going off to South America. Don't brood about anything I write. I'm absolutely hyper with happiness these days, in spite of Charles and his clammy shadow, and have to let off steam.
June 18
Dearest, dearest A.-
It's so horrifying out here I have to drop you a note, on this motel stationery that amuses me so much I keep stealing it. What Babbling Brook? And who is this child dabbling in it? And these dark ominous trees? The real world hit me like a big hot fist. Traffic jams! Men in suits! Filthy sidewalks! Ugly unloving looks on all sides! The girl at the Hertz counter in Phoenix looked utterly bored to have the car back-thank you once more for finding it for me, and the keys-it was on my old-fashioned Puritan conscience*and now I'm finally cleansed of my last, last iota of guilt toward Charles-and they will be billing the poor man thousands of dollars. She told me I should have gotten the long-term rate, I said I thought I would have it only a day or two. Now I'm terrified of taking the bus back to Forrest. I can't deal with outside people any more. The terminal is sheer hell-plastic bucket seats bolted to the floor, a whole row with individual television sets screwed into the arms so we can all keep up being cretinized while waiting, hideous non-music blaring, greasy people eating greasy tacos and cheese-and-onion subs-the pathetic stench of unenlightenment, of avidya. Obese morons in cowboy boots and profoundly drunken Indians stare at me as I sit scribbling this, trying not to tremble-I don't look to the right or left, everybody looks so rough and savage and purposeless, while this huge rude incomprehensible male voice keeps announcing bus departures-it's as if I'm inside something horrible, churning and stinking and grinding, it's as if I'm being digested, or will be if I don't hold fast to the peace of the ashram. And of you. I can't stop wanting to be with you. The quiet of it. The non-speaking. The lightness of the speaking when there is some. I keep touching my hair, that I cut to please you, and the bristle and tingle of it startles me, as if I'm not touching my own body, and I think of your hair, its severely straight parting and the shimmer of it brushed flat against your perfect skull, and the startling darkness of it at the nape of your neck-like some animal glimpsed asleep in the dark of his burrow-when your head nestles at the bottom of my abdomen, my tummy you call it, your nape hair at its roots the same raven-blond shade as that where there is, so beautifully and refreshingly, no linga. Was he thinking of that when he named you? He knows so much, even into the future. I wish I could have sometime that tape of his you mentioned, on Woman as the Portal to Moksha. Now I think my bus is being growled over the loudspeakers, people are milling at the gate already, crowding around as if to gobble up the carbon monoxide. What a trashy death pit the world truly is!
I won't send this in case D. does read our mai
l, but I so much wanted to reach out and touch you now. I'll slip it to you when you and Yajna pick me up in Forrest. I can't wait but must. I am, indeed, your devoted nayika,
K.
June 18, 1986
Gentlemen:
Enclosed find an endorsed check for eighteen thousand dollars ($18,000) for deposit to my account, #0002743-911. Your earlier receipts and statements are hereby acknowledged. My address continues as you have it.
Yours sincerely,
Sarah P. Worth
June 18
Dear Dr. Podhoretz-
Thank you for your cordial response. No, a July appointment will not do either, as I am staying in Arizona for a while longer. I am not living at this motel, by the way, but at an agricultural community about forty miles away. The drugstore there does have unwaxed dental tape and I have been fairly diligent, though sometimes at night I am so tired I can't make myself believe flossing matters as much as you say. Do Africans and Afghans always floss? They seem to have lovely teeth and gums, in photographs.
I bit down hard on a betel nut the other day and ever since then there has been not an ache exactly but a sort of apprehensive tenderness-not exactly tenderness, more of a vague funky feeling-in the lower right quadrant, where you said there tended to be tissue inflammation in any case. I.do hope I don't have to go through another root canal! If worse comes to worst, I'll have the endodontist out here send you an X-ray for your records. The dental facilities are surprisingly adequate in this agri-commune, though I believe they use an outside lab for their gold and porcelain crown work.
Warm regards,
Sarah Worth
June 18
Dear Dr. Epstein-
I enclose a check for $180 to cover our last two appointments as billed by you. I trust that this clears up our accounts. I feel 7 should render an accounting of what I've been up to-as if the pseudo-daughterly guilty feelings that you led me to override in regard to Charles remain undischarged in regard to you. Looking back at my years of therapy, I confess that it all now seems much more patriarchal and Judeo-Chris-tian than it did at the time. Far from being my ally-against Charles as I fantasized, you were his ally against my liberation. Not that I blame you: I, too, was resisting my liberation, since I had no confidence of my finding a place in any world but the atrophied Puritan theocracy in which I had been raised, by parents whose sense of their own worth was inordinately tied to ancestral achievement, to being "our sort" of New Englanders. My father took, I think, real and dimly perverse pleasure in doing the absolutely predictable thing, in doing his piddling trust-officer thing in Boston and going to his clubs and dressing like a Harvard undergraduate to the day of his death, in striped tie and gray flannels and oxblood cordovans with little waxed laces.
Even at the time when I was most enchanted with our process it did cross my mind that Freud's notion of what went oh inside Viennese women was somewhat absurd. I was once a little girl, for example, and until I was four, when my brother was born, I had no idea that little boys had penises, let alone that I should envy them for it. His looked like quite a comical little button, as I remember. My father always dressed in his room and once forbade me to go with him and Mother to a nudist beach on Martha's Vineyard, as I more than once told you. You never commented on whether or not this had been repressive of them.
I wonder now if the precious classic therapeutic silence isn't just another version of the Victorian father's silence, his awe-inspiring absence except at dinnertime, with the same disciplinary implications, at 'least as regards women. My knowledge of Hindu and Buddhist psychological thought is very imperfect but the notion of the subconscious as a pool of eddies (vasanas) that originate in memory and feed the conscious eddies (cbittavrittis) and which certain exercises can eventually erase in a blissful motionless (nirvana = without wind) state of samadbi has-this way of putting things-a certain intimate, non-terroristic simplicity that appeals to me. Western psychology interfaces-to use a fashionable term-with society and morality, and Eastern with the body, with physiology-which rather better fits with the way, most days, I feel. I mean, should the game be to referee the war between superego, ego, and id, or to relax the whole system, by letting the ego and its harassing entangle^ ments just fade away?
At any rate, you did your best by your lights and that is all any of us can do. I don't want to harass you with a long letter-though your bill gave me a shock, arriving out of a world of petty finance I had rather forgotten and showing by its resubmission that Charles has abandoned his responsibilities toward his wife's medical care. In fact, I can't write a long letter, since this motel where I am waiting for some friends to pick me up isn't very generous with its stationery to those who are not staying here as guests. I obtained my presqnt supply by sauntering around outside and then nipping into a room that the Mexican maid had left open and stealing from the desk. Our old Sarah wouldn't have done that, would she? But once you perceive that all material and intellectual phenomena are just threads in a great weave of illusion (maya, samsara) it becomes oddly easy to act on your impulses. Property is not only theft, it's nonsense.
My best to Mrs. Epstein. All those years of Mondays * I used to wonder and wonder what she was like and what it was like being married to such a marvellous-understanding man. I suppose I was madly jealous of her-I know that's the kind of thing you people like to hear, it's all grist to your "transference" mill. But now she can be Bianca Jagger for all I care, and good luck to you both.
With warm regards,
Sarah Worth
June 18
Dear Martin-
Your mother in a nice letter to me thought it would help if I sent you a card. I'm sorry you're in jail but I have recently learned that all the material world is a jail. Develop inner peace.
Your well-wisher,
Sarah P. Worth
June 18
Dear Eldridge-
This is a mesa, which is Spanish for "table." There are a lot of them here, and you've probably seen some in television commercials-the one with the Nissan truck.
Your friend,
Sarah P. Worth
[tape]
"Sarvasam eva mayanam, strimayaiva vishishyate." This is from an ancient Mahayana text and says, "Of all the forms of illusion, woman is the most important." For Buddha and his followers, woman is the portal of release. She is that within the world which takes us out of the world. She is that being through whom is made manifest the karuna, the compassion, of nirvana, of non-being. She is the living wonder of the world. The mounds of her body are like temple-mounds; they symbolize nirvana. The lotus of her body is the lotus of Sahasrara, of final illumination. "Buddhatvam yo-shidyonisamsritam." That is a very important saying. Repeat, please. "Buddhatvam yoshidyonisamsritam." [Responsive mumble.] It means, "Buddhahood is in the female organ." The yoni. The cunt. Buddhahood is in the cunt. OM mani padme HUM. The jewel is in the lotus. The jewel is the mind. The lotus is nirvana. The mind dissolves in nirvana. But also the jewel is the linga, the cock. The lotus is the cunt. The cock in the cunt. This is bliss, rasa. This is samarasa, the bliss of unity. This is Mahasukha, the Great Bliss. This is Mahabindu, the great point, the Transcendental Void. This is maithuna-fucking. This is Shiva and Shakti united, purusha and prakriti united to make bliss; this is sahaja. Sahaja is the state of non-conditioned existence, of the pure spontaneity. We must learn to acquire the pure spontaneity. When Kundalini unites with Atman, this is also sahaja. That is why we learn our mantras, learn our mudras. That is why we learn pranayama. That is why we strive to cleanse ourselves inside and out. To be nonconditioned, to have the pure spontaneity. Ommmm!
Buddha was not a nice boy. He was not a nice quiet boy with fat cheeks always sitting with his hands folded in his lap. He conquered Mara by the technique of maithuna, of fucking. Mara means "death." First Mara came to Buddha in the form of Kama, desire. When Buddha was not deterred from enlightenment by seductive desire, Mara got rough. Mara assailed Buddha with visions of many horrors, demons, anim
als, monsters with very bad-smelling breaths and armpits, shrieking ghosts. Among these horrors danced a little naked black woman bearing in her hand a skull and wearing a necklace of many little tiny skulls. This was Kali. She is death. Also she is desire and delight. She is the goddess of time. Death and desire are the children of time.
But our Lord Buddha had done his maithuna, his fucking. He had fucked his wife, Yashodhara, and made Rahula, his poor abandoned son. A prince in those days had many other ladies also. His father, Shuddhodana Gotama, had built for his son, called then Siddhartha Gotama, a pavilion of much luxury and equipped it with many ladies skilled in the ways of music and dance and love. So Mara could not shake Buddha. He who has known love has passed through the center of the world and cannot be shaken. Krishna among the Gopis knew endless love. Radha, his favorite mistress, became a goddess, bruised as she was by love, scratched and bloody with love, her clothes torn by love, her hair tangled, her body wet with the sweat of love, which is sweet. Again and again Radha faints. Again and again the touch of Krishna restores her to vigor and to love. Then he multiplies himself nine hundred thousand times and copulates with nine hundred thousand Gopi women. The gods and the goddesses and the sages in the heavens watch with dumbfoundment. The goddesses faint many times while watching but in the desire to learn maithuna ask to be born all over India in the form of little princesses in the palaces of kings. They are born then. This is the fact. This is what happened in the glades of Vrindavan, as reported faithfully in the Brahmavaivarta Purana. OM mani padme HUM.