I sat up and stretched. For a moment she reappeared in the lotus position, absorbed in a concentration we all could practice. Her figure in leotards was a thing of perfection.
The phone rang behind me.
I lay back on the rug and breathed in. A conversation would drive this pleasure away. It rang again. An image of Corinne had appeared. “Yes?” I picked it up. “Venus and Apollo. Lessons in breathing and massage.”
“This isn’t Merrill Lynch?” a rasping voice asked.
“No. Venus and Apollo,” I said.
“This a massage parlor?”
“A very clean place,” I sighed. “Just braything and massage.”
“Sorry,” he said and hung up.
I turned off the set and lay down. Then the phone rang again.
Was it Corinne? It rang again. She hadn’t said she would call. “Hello,” I picked it up. “This is your friendly breather.”
“Well, hello,” she said. “What’ve you got to tell me?”
“That I knew it was you.”
“Did you do your Lilias?” There were wide open spaces in her voice.
“All the way through. I can hold the Cat Stretch for a count of five.”
”And now you’re breathing?”
“That’s all I do. Just breathe and stretch.”
“You sounded so tired last night.”
The night before I had reverted to form. During the afternoon there had been a siege of doubts about Atabet and I had decided to quit all this self-centered practice. “No, it’s fine,” I said. “It all went away in my sleep. How’s our leader?”
“His usual self. He’s been out at the beach.”
Now there was someone beside her. “Hello, Darwin!” said Kazi. “Your pains go away?” His high-pitched voice seemed to be asking the question and giving an order at once. “You see the pictures?”
He had given me a series of diagrams to “catch my demons in.” An obsessive thought would get stuck in the mazeway of lines. “Yes,” I said. “I think it works.”
“Oh, fine!” he shouted. “You are good student!”
Was he making fun of me? Sometimes it was hard to tell. “But there is a problem,” I said. “That one with the flames gives me a headache.”
“Good!” he exclaimed. “You can stop it whenever you want.”
“You mean the headache?”
“Stop looking at it.” I could see him giving me that somewhat disconnected smile. “Look at the other ones.”
“So it doesn’t matter how I use them?”
“Oh, it matters. But that’s all right.”
There was silence as I searched for his meaning. Sometimes I wondered how well he understood English. “But I don’t want to get it wrong,” I said. “I’ve been concentrating on them for hours.”
“Good! Yes?”
“Well, thanks. Is there anything else I should know?”
He handed the phone to Corinne. “I hope you’ve got that straight,” she said. “We’ll see you tonight after dinner.”
I went to the window and looked up to Atabet’s roof. From here I could see the pole from which he sometimes flew the old Basque flag. Like a temple or hermitage that watched over the city, his apartment seemed to offer protection. If only places like it would protect and bless every city . . . .
But now it was time for the ritual. I got out a yantra, propped it up on the desk, and let my thoughts flow toward it. An image of my office appeared—and old bills, the bust of Plotinus, manuscripts waiting for decisions, a letter to Cleveland, a resolution to phone Mr. Marks—then an image of Atabet out at the beach. As I gazed through the lines I could hear him. The way he paused between words suggested the spaces we fell through.
“But we can fan this earth into flame,” he had said as we looked down at the city. And as the honky-tonk music came up from the joints on Broadway he had hummed a line from Bach. I could hear the melody now—and see his face—and there were chords in the sounds from the street. Even the traffic was singing, tires whistling in the soft rush of air.
September 23
Day by day a way is forming. This practice of non-choosing awareness; Kazi’s yantras and mandalas; Lilias on KQED. This morning doing her exercises I had an image of her students all across the U.S.A. lying on rugs like mine—a floor of bodies 3,000 miles across, mostly overweight, rippling like a sea of Jello. A vision of the primordial jelly from which all life arises.
All the world is our ashram!
Corinne equates the following practices: Samkhya’s discrimination of purusha-prakriti; Buddhist vipassana; the citta-vritti-nirodha from Patanjali’s sutras. All of these are ways in which the witness self, the purusha, deepens and comes into its own.
And I see each day how prakriti works in this organism named Darwin Fall: in the morning the fear, after lunch the sadness, after dinner the plans for escape. In this apartment, with so few distractions, the pattern emerges until any dummy can see it. Atabet says my reliability and obsessionality can turn into “steadiness of will”! Much neurosis is distortion of some hidden strength. His catatonia turned to trance and pantomime. We all have symptoms to lead us.
Until we met, neurosis was my practice.
Then this joy. I wept for an hour at my incredible luck.
September 24
Must I simply “observe” this growing love for her?
This afternoon we talked about her marriage and divorce, her child, her lifelong friendship with A. She said they are not lovers, and “yet they are.” I did not have the nerve to ask her if they ever slept together.
Cannot forget that vision of her many faces. Why do I struggle against that kind of seeing? The world is a shimmering chasm I’m afraid to fall into.
We talked about “detachment and opening.” As one opens to these powers of the soul, one must grow in the self that sustains them. Being as the veils drop. More purusha. There must be “a proportionate development of action and space.” More space for more action. More stillness for more of the dance.
“The right ratio of [upward to downward/inward to outward] reowning.”
September 25
We talked again about her life. She has a degree in social work and practices therapy part-time with a clinical psychologist in Corte Madera. Says that all her work is informed by Atabet’s vision and experience.
Between Corinne and Kazi he has two traditions to help him—Buddhist and modern, the Vajrayana, Perls and Reich!
Catharsis, she says, can deepen our capacity for vision. It gives us a larger space in which to breathe and feel, and helps reveal our secret leadings. Self-acceptance allows more consciousness. She, Kazi and Jacob are “midwives to each other.”
We talked about her divorce. She had a brief love affair with a woman she met at Berkeley when she was getting her M.A., the only woman she has ever loved like that. Never would have been a good therapist, she says, if she hadn’t surrendered to it.
September 27
Today she put me through a version of Perls’ Gestalt practice she learned from Richard Price at Esalen. I acted out the parts of my dream: the shaman watching from the valley’s edge, the gnarled little figure painting snakes by the light of a guttering torch. Had I lived through all those centuries? To the people of the valley the shaman was ageless, old enough to remember a “Time of the Caves” before this new kind of worship appeared. I seemed to remember some of the words—a language between gibberish and Sanskrit.
When we finished the dream, she let me associate to other meanings. She says a dream like this can be seen in four or five ways.
Asked her if she believed in reincarnation. Says she is open to it. Both she and Atabet think there may be more to learn about “the person’s continuity.” Even the ancient wisdoms might be incomplete. It is something, she says, that Atabet and I will have an interesting time discussing.
Told her about my memories with peyote, scenes like the one in the dream. She asked me how much of it might be “coded here in the body,” and how much
came from some other localizable source. I and Atabet will want to talk about “localizability.” Akasha sravana, hearing patterns in the unbodied ether. All these things seem real now, as they were when I started the book.
“A Time of the Caves.” What does it symbolize? Each time the dream has appeared it has delivered another detail. In some way it seems a reflection of my meeting with Atabet, but there are other levels to it, including those words from Sanskrit.
As I reflect on this “dream,” other memories appear: of that time with peyote when I saw the Indus River and a house on a hill with rows of jars and boxes, one jar imprinted with an image of a god in the lotus position. And words in a script I couldn’t quite read. That language too was strangely familiar. Floating around in my memory banks are pieces of ancient India, moods and words and images that reappear like shards of a buried experience. The most interesting thing is my resistance to it. Is there a more coherent memory from which these images spring? She says there might be, but that it will require a larger capacity for seeing and feeling. So we need to redesign our bodies! My chest is too constricted and prevents expansive feeling. Pull your shoulders back! All the cathartic exercises will help release and order my psychic hemorrhaging. I asked her how far it might go, how complete one’s reconstruction could be. She says that is the 64-dollar question. Atabet thinks it involves the finest structures of the cells. We might have to alter the DNA through some kind of “cellular and molecular psychosurgery”! The next evolutionary jump might involve the creation of a body strong and incorrupt enough to hold the “supramental light.” The entire operation is like a docking operation with our angel! Through all these practices we are feeling our way into the future, coming ashore like amphibians into a larger space.
Like amphibians—it is a good metaphor. I can breathe and walk more freely now, and see that it is within everyone’s power to move into this life-giving air. Spirit is a new environment, with more room to move in.
September 28
Now she says I have to start jogging! First Lilias, then this. Is it the All-American Yoga?
And again the Bolinas Lagoon. What is there about it that holds this clue to the mysteries? Today I finally said I would go there and swim it.
15
DRIVING OUT TO STINSON Beach I had felt my apprehension building about this seemingly asinine venture. Was Atabet serious when he said it was an important part of our seminar on history?
We were jogging down the beach toward the inlet we would swim across, Corinne running ahead at the edge of the water, one strap of her bathing suit falling off of a shoulder. “The tide’s coming in.” Atabet pointed toward the current flowing in through the narrows that joined the lagoon and the ocean. “The water’s about seven feet deep now.”
He went down an incline and started swimming toward the other shore. We waded in after him until we were waist deep in seaweed. Then I froze. The slick tendrils around my legs began a wave of panic. This was the reason I had resisted the swim in the first place. All my life I had hated these tide-pools, and had always refused to walk through them.
“You didn’t tell me it was full of stuff like this!” I shouted, “I’ll stay here while you swim it. Goddamnit! Something bit me!”
I turned and climbed back to the beach. He was treading water about thirty feet out, while she stood up to her waist where I left her. Neither of them said a word. “Go ahead,” I yelled, sitting down on the gravelly incline. “I’ll enjoy the sun while you swim. Please! Just go ahead.”
“You promised you would do it,” he answered. “I’m disappointed.” He gave me an angry look and swam on toward the opposite shore.
“He thinks it’s important,” she said. “He’s mad at you.”
“But why?” I protested. “What’s this all about?”
She shrugged, lifting her hands toward the sky with a look of ironic surrender. I forced a laugh. I shared this detached amusement with her about some of the programs he prescribed, but I knew that if I didn’t do it something would be violated. It would be a breach of trust between us, and a failure of nerve that would be harder to overcome in the future. This set of fears would get worse as long as I refused to meet them. He had said it bluntly on our drive from San Francisco: my fear of the ocean was close to my discomfort with his paintings and the images they evoked of sealife inside our bodies. And close to my fear of the unconscious world in general. The hemorrhaging images I was born with came from a place that was dark and tangled like this ocean bottom. I looked down at it now with a sense I was sinking. In a moment the panic would hit me. “All right!” I stood up with a shout. “I’m going to do it!” She took my hand as I came toward her and together we waded through the current. Then we started swimming.
“Keep moving,” she smiled, rolling over to swim on her back. “The tide’ll take us down the beach toward the lagoon, but that’s all right. Just don’t fight it.”
It was a powerful current and I could see we would reach the shore fifty or a hundred yards closer to the lagoon than the place where Atabet had landed. He was already on the beach, watching while we came across. “I’m out of breath,” I gasped, rolling over to float on my back. “How deep is it out here?”
“It’s only four or five feet now. You can probably stand up.
I felt for the bottom. Even though it was covered with slime it was good to know I could touch it. It would be impossible to make the shore in this current.
We were thirty feet from the beach and I started to wade. She swam on her back beside me. Hundreds of slimy things were brushing past my legs now. God knew what might crawl into my trunks. “Aren’t there eels out here?” I gasped.
“Once in a while. But they’re little ones.”
“Eels, jellyfish, crabs—oh God!” I thought of a time I had panicked in water like this. That was the last time I had felt these sensations. “What is this stuff?” I slapped the water. “Why do they make it like this?”
“Relax,” she grinned. “Sometimes they feel good.”
As she said it, something let go and for a moment I felt suspended between panic and a trembling pleasure. If I could stay steady, if I could hold back the fear, maybe the pleasure would take me . . . .
Atabet had come out to help me. “Grab my hand,” he grinned, pulling me up on the sand. “Where did you find that?” A ribbon of seaweed was draped over one of my shoulders. “Take it.” I was gasping for breath. “Take it and frame it!”
“Jesus!” I fell on the ground. “Do we have to cross that thing again?”
“Just going back,” he said. “But the tide’ll be in and we can swim all the way.” I sat down to regain my breath. To the south, there was a long crescent of steeply rising hills and the beach curved with it for miles. A fogbank was moving southeast, at an angle to the shore, forming a valley that was bounded by mountains on one side and mist on the other. He swept an arm toward the moving horizon. “It was worth it,” he said. “Just look at the view.”
The inlet ran along the San Andreas fault, I thought. Continental plates were grinding together below us, down to depths of forty miles. “Do you feel those tremors?” I said. “People say you can feel them all the time out here.”
“But we haven’t got to the best part yet.” He pulled me up. “I promise the rest of it’s easy.”
We crossed the beach to the ocean. Then he started to run through the surf. There were boulders ahead, and another series of tidepools. In water up to his waist, he waded through an opening of rock and signaled for both of us to follow.
I looked through the opening he had gone through. There in front of us, like something I had seen in a dream, stood a vault of boulders and glistening sealife, a cavern carved into the last remains of the sandstone cliff. A golden ochre stalactite hung from the grotto roof and the wet slick walls were covered with reddish algae.
Corinne had come in beside me. With her hair hanging over her shoulder, she looked like a sea-creature I’d seen in a dream. He pulled her to hi
m. Standing side by side they might have been satyr and nymph, two figures from a time before history . . . “See this?” He touched the rock. “Does it remind you of something familiar?”
The red surface was covered with ribbons of purple weed, green collars of moss and the black backs of mussels. But gleaming through everything else was the boulder itself, a slippery brilliant surface that looked like living flesh.
“Your painting,” I said. “It looks like the flesh in your painting.”
“It’s where I got the idea. It’s my master.” He ran his hand down the wall, and wiggled a fern-like creature that was dangling near his shoulder. “Isn’t it familiar?” he murmured. “Like something you’ve known?”
I looked up through the opening to the sky. Yes, there was something familiar. This cavern of the sea was like something inside us.
She leaned on his chest with the fern. “It tastes good,” she said. “Here, see?”
He bent down and kissed it. They seemed unfamiliar and remote, two figures in a dim foreign land.
“It tastes like you,” he whispered.
I leaned back on a rock for support. Each surface felt warm and alive, and the grotto was shaped like a heart. As he bent toward her face I remembered a time I had almost died passing through a place like this. These red slippery walls still might crush me. I crossed to the wall and pressed my hand against it. Memories of my mother were rising. And her smell. And my father’s voice calling . . . .
“Corinne,” he said softly. “Would you see if the tide’s coming in.” She went out through the opening we had come through. Against the towering rocks Atabet seemed a tiny figure.
“Jake,” I whispered. “I’d like to go.”
“In a minute,” he whispered. “We’ll go in a minute.”
“We’ve got to go now!” Corinne yelled. “The tide’s come up all at once!” A wave hit the cliffs, and foaming surf came sliding in around us. He led me out to the ledge, but our escape route was covered with churning white water. “We’ll have to swim!” he shouted. “Just let the breakers take you. Darwin, you go first. We’ll watch until you get there.”
Jacob Atabet: A Speculative Fiction Page 10