A Short History of Richard Kline

by Amanda Lohrey

  Well, she said, she knew of a Vedantin monk who lived in the inner west, not far from me, a man called Martin Coleby, who taught yoga and ran classes from his home.

  ‘I did a workshop with him once,’ she said. ‘He’s pretty cool. Not pious, or anything like that.’

  Didn’t monks live in monasteries?

  ‘Not Martin. He went to India when he was young, spent time in an ashram. Now he’s a renunciate.’

  A renunciate?

  ‘Celibate, vegetarian, all that.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In St Peters. In a crummy little terrace. He doesn’t have much money, only what his students can afford to pay.’

  I thought about it for a while and the idea was plausible. It would be private, no-one would know. I rang this Martin Coleby.

  Martin suggested I come on a Thursday evening after one of his regular yoga classes and we could take it from there. Perhaps he had something to offer me, perhaps not.

  As instructed, I arrived promptly around seven, just as his students were rolling up their foam mats and saying their goodbyes at the door. I waited to one side until they were gone, all the while observing Martin, a muscular man of medium height, lean and with a kind of tensile strength, as if he might once have been an athlete. He wore loose white drawstring pants and a grey t-shirt, and had a tattoo around his right bicep, an inscription in the alphabet of some exotic language. His head was shaved and bullet-shaped, with a long, narrow face, high cheekbones and hollowed-out cheeks. His eyes were a pale icy-blue but the most striking thing about him was the ugly red welt that ran along one side of his skull, as if it had been seared with a hot poker.

  I must have stared a moment too long, for Martin smiled ruefully and said, ‘I had a tumour removed late last year. I think I might be onto my ninth life.’

  I hesitated, wondering if I ought to ask politely after his prognosis. But I just stood there, feeling like the interloper I was, until Martin waved me across the threshold and into a dark living room, shabby and sparsely furnished. It smelled of incense.

  ‘Some tea?’

  I nodded, though I never drank the stuff. He indicated I should follow him down the narrow hallway into a big glassed-in area at the rear of the house.

  At one end of this space there was a small alcove of a kitchen, where he stood by the sink and waited for the kettle to fill, waited with a quiet focus that I sensed he brought to every task, no matter how menial.

  When the water had boiled he poured it into two mugs and added a fine green powder. Then he handed me a mug and said, ‘Okay, Rick, tell me why you’re here.’

  It had been a long day at work and I hadn’t yet been home; I hadn’t thought of what I might say, had rehearsed no line of inquiry, had fronted up in a state bordering on irritability. But I opened my mouth and some words fell out. ‘I seem to have acquired a weird attachment to a woman I hardly know.’

  ‘Attachment?’

  ‘Well, you could call it that. She creeps into my thoughts, all hours of the day and night. It’s like …’ I sighed, conscious of deep fatigue. ‘It’s like she inhabits me.’ I might have been describing one of those office infatuations to which men of my age were supposedly prone.

  ‘And who is she?’

  I said her name.

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘You know her?’

  ‘I know of her.’ Martin gestured at a small fold-up table by the window and I pulled out a chair and set down my thick ceramic mug of tea. Martin sat opposite. ‘Tell me what you know about her,’ he said.

  ‘I know some of her personal history, but not much. I know she lives just outside Chennai, and that she seems to have followers around the world, whom she visits every year. I’ve googled her and she doesn’t have a profile. She’s not a big name.’

  ‘No, she’s a bit of a recluse. She pretty much works under the radar.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘India has many sages, but few of them travel. It’s only in the last few years that she’s decided to emerge from relative seclusion.’

  ‘Yes, but who is she?’

  ‘She’s a holy woman. A saint, if you can live with that idea.’

  A saint. Saints in my boyhood religion were dead. I stared down into my tea, which I still hadn’t touched. It looked green and unappetising. ‘I’ve never had any interest in this kind of thing, but now, for some reason, I’m drawn to it.’

  ‘Then you’re lucky. It’s your time.’

  ‘My time?’

  ‘You must be ready for what she has to teach you or you wouldn’t be having this experience.’

  Riddles. It was all riddles. ‘Yes, but what is this experience?’

  Martin looked at me from over the rim of his mug. ‘You tell me.’

  So I began, more or less at the beginning, to give an account of my experiences with Sri Mata. I tried to be matter-of-fact, almost to the point of sounding offhand, but the more I talked the more I doubted the wisdom of my being there; it all sounded limp and nonsensical. Finally I lapsed into silence, and ventured a sip of the tea, which by this time was lukewarm and made me feel nauseous.

  Martin had listened with eyes closed and now he opened them. ‘That’s it?’ he said.

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Okay.’ He laid his palms flat on the table and looked down, like a cabinet-maker assessing the grain of a piece of wood. ‘Sounds like you learned to meditate because you were desperate. And when you’re desperate you become open to change, which in your case was finding a teacher.’

  ‘I wasn’t looking.’

  ‘You don’t need to. When you’re ready, they find you. That’s how it works.’

  ‘It?’

  ‘The practice.’

  ‘The practice? You mean meditation?’

  ‘That and more.’

  ‘There is no more.’

  Martin shrugged, as if to say: that’s what you think. ‘You can’t do it all on your own. Well, some people can but it’s rare. Mostly we need a teacher, a recognisable form, someone we can relate to. When you go and see a being like Sri Mata, you’re viewing the ultimate truth by proxy. You see that she’s different. She seems to be in possession of something you’d like to share in. You’re drawn to that.’

  ‘To what, exactly?’

  ‘Well, to begin with, her energy. She’s at peace and yet alive, magnetic even. She’s realised the truth and makes it visible to you through her bodily presence.’

  ‘What truth?’ My tone was cynical, churlish.

  ‘The unity of the field, of all things. You had a glimpse of that, your experience in the bottleshop. But that’s how she sees the world all the time. And that’s how the world really is, only for most of us there’s a film over it.’ He raised his hand and lowered it like a curtain. ‘And she’s like a light socket or a cable that plugs you into it, it being what lies beyond the appearance of material objects, a unified field of consciousness that pervades everything.’

  I found I was holding my breath, perhaps because there was no logic here that I could recognise. ‘If it pervades everything then I’m already a part of it, so why do I need the connection to her?’

  ‘Because, like most of us, you’re blind. You think you’re a goldfish in a bowl, when really you swim in the ocean. But before you can strike out freely you need to develop your stroke, as it were. She is your life jacket.’

  ‘I’m inflated?’

  Martin smiled. ‘With grace.’

  ‘Why me?’ I said, and it wasn’t really a question, more that I was thinking out loud. ‘I’m hardly a prime candidate for this stuff.’

  ‘Think of it this way: why not you?’

  ‘You said I was “ripe”. How was I ripe?’

  ‘You meditated, didn’t you?’

  ‘That was stress management.’

  Martin nodded. ‘For some people, yes.’

  ‘And why not for me?’

  ‘Well, obviously not for you. Because you’re here, asking these questions. An
d because you left your family in the middle of a nice picnic and hitched a ride in a taxi.’

  A nice picnic? Something about that word ‘nice’ made me want to laugh out loud. Who was this man? Had he ever led a normal life? ‘I don’t know why I left the park that day. It was out of character.’

  ‘You felt out of control?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Then maybe this “character” you were out of is worth looking at more closely. Who is this Rick Kline?’

  I was weary. I had come here for answers and all I was getting were questions. But what had I expected? Some kind of comfort, maybe? Instead, I was swimming in sand. I turned to look out the window, where it was still light. In the drab concrete courtyard there were pots of herbs and a bush of bright red chillies. On both sides of the courtyard rows of tall tomato plants were tied to stakes. They grew in a narrow strip of earth between the concrete and a high paling fence, and though the fences were dilapidated the patch of garden was neat and carefully weeded. The tomato plants were laden with green fruit, glossy, abundant and looking as if they were about to burst their skins.

  I turned back to Martin. ‘I’ve never thought of myself as anyone’s disciple,’ I said. ‘I don’t have the temperament for it.’

  ‘No, I can see that. But then, maybe you’re not the person you thought you were.’

  This, in truth, was a large part of what was bothering me. For years I had constructed a version of Richard Kline that now seemed beside the point. I was a snake that, instead of sloughing off an old skin, had retained it, and now I was forced to impersonate an old self while I grew a new skin underneath, and the two skins were suffocating me. I struck out on a tangent. ‘I don’t like the group thing. I don’t like the way people behave around her, they’re like children. It’s cultish.’

  ‘And yet you like to sit with her.’

  ‘That’s one way of putting it.’

  ‘Is that devotion?’

  ‘It doesn’t feel like it.’

  ‘Then how does it feel?’

  Good question. How does it feel? Impossible to describe that feeling. A cluster of words and phrases swarmed in my head until, finally, one word fell out, one lame word. ‘Emotional.’

  Martin nodded.

  ‘But not in the usual way,’ I added, hastily.

  ‘In an unusual way?’

  ‘Unusual for me. I tend to choke up.’

  Martin seemed to know what this meant. ‘And these are sad tears?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Happy tears?’

  ‘No, not exactly.’

  ‘Then they’re guru tears.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning tears of recognition.’

  Recognition? This was a striking thought. ‘Meaning I recognise her?’

  ‘And she recognises you. It’s called darshan, a special form of seeing. It’s a two-way thing. Relational. Not a passive viewing but insight, a direct vision of the truth. And a particular kind of truth, one we always knew but had forgotten. You see the truth in her and she sees the truth in you.’

  ‘Maybe.’ I hesitated. ‘I don’t know.’

  Ah, but I did know. Or I thought I knew, at least for a while, but then that early euphoria had left me. More than that, my old self had returned, a feral dog dumped in the bush that had somehow managed to find its way home to lie under my bed and growl through the night. Now I experienced prolonged bouts of insomnia, was consumed by a restlessness that left me enervated. The initial glow of my romance with her had passed and I felt dumped, dumped by the guru wave. Back where I started. Yes, I was meditating again, but to what end? I thought of her often but I was not, after all, a changed man. The spark of that rare love was gone, extinguished. My meditation was empty, robotic.

  ‘It feels like I’ve been experiencing an infatuation, and now it might be over.’

  ‘I doubt that, Rick. What’s over is the honeymoon. You’ve been too comfortable. Doubt comes, disappointment, and with it anger. This path is not a comfortable one. It’s not meant to be some kind of poultice, it’s meant to be a sword that cuts through your defences. So if you are pissed off, no longer in your comfort zone, ask yourself: are you willing to take the next step?’

  What next step? Hadn’t the sword already sliced into me, long before I encountered her? Hadn’t my imagination always been an open wound?

  ‘No-one promised you it would be easy.’

  ‘No-one promised me anything.’

  ‘Didn’t they? Think about that.’

  By now it was dark outside, the last faint flush of summer daylight gone. Martin put his hand up to his mouth to suppress a yawn, and I saw that he was tired. My eye went to the ugly welt on his scalp; in fading light it looked like a black shadow.

  I stood and said it was late and I had better be going.

  Martin rose and walked me to the door, where he laid his hand on my shoulder. ‘Just go with what you have, Rick,’ he said. ‘Be patient and think of the self as a laboratory. Whatever experience you are having, explore it, test it out.’

  ‘Well, thanks for seeing me.’

  We shook hands but the mood was flat.

  I walked out into the dark street, a leafy avenue lined with plane trees. I was a man who had strayed into a cul-de-sac. It was unseasonably mild, a humid Sydney night when the warm stillness feels like an embrace, a random blessing.

  Soon I would be home, back to base, and then what?

  Slowly I walked towards the car, and when I reached it I looked back to where Martin was still standing in the open doorway, leaning against the frame, the palm of his right hand resting on the dome of his head, a buddha in the porch light.

  Suddenly he straightened up and stepped out onto the footpath. He waved, and called to me across the street, and pointed in the direction of Sydney Park, just a few kilometres down the road. ‘I go for a stroll every Saturday afternoon in the park, usually around four. If you feel like a walk, come by.’

  Sydney Park. I had never liked it, never cared for its attempts at renewal, which had about them a whiff of morbidity. At that time the trees were young and immature; from a distance they looked flimsy. The remnants of the old brick factory remained, its sombre industrial chimneys, its rows of abandoned brick ovens like small prison cells, the stolid Victorian masonry of the arches where homeless men slept at night, rags and cardboard flaps left in abject piles during the day.

  I met Martin outside the western entrance to the park at the bottom of King Street. It was a fine, cool afternoon with a glint in the air, and we began our walk beside a stand of eucalypts where bark and leaf debris crunched beneath our feet.

  I felt a kind of sap rising in me, an expansion of energy in my chest, and thought maybe it was too long since I had gone for a walk, and should do it more often, and take Luke along with me. By then we had come on some young men who were kicking a ball. One of them held the ball in his right hand, having just retrieved it from the bottom of a low rise, and he turned and kicked it directly at Martin. I found this provocative, but when it came spinning towards us, just above head height, Martin raised his right arm and caught it effortlessly, one-handed, before dropping it onto his foot in a practised stab kick. The youth who had kicked it fumbled the ball and the others jeered.

  ‘Not bad.’ I said. ‘Signs of a misspent youth.’

  Martin grinned. ‘I’m out of practice, but they,’ indicating the boys, ‘like to keep me on my toes.’

  In the days leading up to this meeting I had thought a lot about Martin. Until my encounter with Sri Mata, my own life had been conventional, but where had Martin Coleby come from?

  Zoe was curious. How did you get to become a middle-aged suburban monk? she asked. Disappointments in love? Trauma at an early age? Psychically poleaxed and left with no other option but to retreat from the world? Or maybe an obsessive will to self-mastery? Women always wanted to know these things, always wanted someone’s history, but I was not about to ask; it felt too personal.

>   Instead, I asked about the guru–disciple relationship. Had Martin ever been to see Sri Mata?

  ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I have my own teacher. I used to live in his ashram outside Chennai. For twelve years.’

  He said this slowly, almost haltingly, as if it had been a long time ago.

  ‘Why didn’t you stay there?’

  ‘He told me to leave, go home, teach others. He said I’d become too comfortable in the ashram, too pleased with myself.’

  ‘Were you?’

  ‘Probably. I didn’t want to come back here, that’s for sure. I was unhappy with the idea, very unhappy, but here I am.’

  I felt an urge to ask him more about this ‘unhappiness’, but sensed it was off-limits. But it did embolden me to pose a question that had troubled me since Joe Mazengarb had raised it. Was the guru a substitute parent?

  By then I was familiar with Freud’s argument, not only from my reading but also from my irascible debates with Joe; any kind of god or guru was an idealised parent, a desire to regress to the infant state and to seek safety and psychic security in submission to the wise man (or, in my case, woman). It had been Joe’s abrasive dialectics that had led me to read Freud in the first place and to discover the troubling notion of transference, that in my attachment to a guru figure I was unconsciously transferring unresolved feelings and desires from my parents to another adult. In other words, I was just a big baby and needed to get over it.

  To my surprise, Martin was not dismissive of the idea.

  ‘I think there’s an element of truth in that,’ he said. ‘None of us has perfect parents. Some of us do need to be re-parented, for a while at least, and the teacher does that. At the same time,’ he added, ‘this feeling of something missing, which you experienced as a child, is not just because you’ve been expelled from the womb, or because your parents weren’t perfect. It’s hardwired into us, a divine discontent. The fact that we experience this nameless discontent is a sign that we are attuned to an unconscious knowledge of something else, something larger than ourselves. God, the Mind at Large, cosmic consciousness, call it what you like. It’s a part of us and we are a part of it. In the Bhagavad Gita Krishna calls it the Knower of the Field. And this is what meditation leads to, getting in touch with the Knower, who, by the way, is always there within us. Has always been there, both without and within.’