by Sonny Saul
CHAPTER ELEVEN:
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“Only in fiction can we share
another person’s specific experiences.”
John Berger —(Success and failure of Picasso)
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Beneath The Tree with Desire
Not thinking, absorbed and tranquil, like one who watches children at play, Gotama Siddhartha continued to sit throughout the day. His eyes fell upon distant yellow rice fields marked with the contrasts of dark, thick, late day shadows thrown off tall and full foliaged mango, pipal, and sal trees. Closer were shady natural garden pools upon which gently waving colored lotus flowers gleamed, floating.
It’s hard for me to picture Gotama as the Vedic Sun hero some legends depict him, but it is not so difficult to imagine that just when he had chosen, with an intuitive respect, his vantage to the East, there rose up in him an almost ecstatic and continually refreshing mode of perception the horizons of which were perpetually receding.
In trying to find ways to describe what was happening to Gotama, non-human analogies suggest themselves. From the collection: 1) when he had come to sit down under the tree, Gotama had felt as if, for lack of something to burn, a fire had died out inside of him, 2) that a change of state, as when water becomes steam, had occurred, and 3) that perhaps he was like a plant whose many shoots bloom; some at once, some in sequence.
With the sun’s decline, evening breezes were felt and the moon shone. The fleeting world of the constellations began to faintly appear and gradually brighten. Filled with a constantly renewed wonder, he continued to sit and stayed awake, aware and watching through the night. He was listening when the sounds of flapping, yawning wings, and the cries of birds broke the night’s quiet.
The large painted and black-necked storks had not yet departed from their overnight resting spots upon the tree tops, blue kingfishers held their places on low branches, a few egrets had arrived upon the surface of a nearby pond along with a solitary heron… when Desire chose to make her entrance just before the dawn.
Bowing low and slowly, concealing neither passion nor beauty, she stood opposite him for the timeless moment, which ought to have been commemorated in the folklore, legend and art of twenty-five hundred years.
Desire chose to make her entrance just before dawn…
Wanting to be seen, she gently tossed her head, stretched. Elongating her torso with a simple, connected motion, she seated herself on the earth opposite Gotama, whose slight and gentle shift of posture was the only outward signal of his grateful acceptance of her presence.
This time her words came freely. “What justifies us is our reality. How does it come about that so admirable a reality,” she inclined her upper body indicating that it was to him that she referred, “deserves no respect when expressing desire?”
Awaiting no response, she went on. “You are not like the others. You’re like me! We’ve made similar sacrifices, forsaken advantage, habit, knowledge, opinion, indolence, but for different reasons. Mine were for the sake of good taste and beauty.”
Not expecting any reply, Desire silently began to attune herself to Gotama; to his posture and to the rhythms of his breath and heart. When she had achieved a level of sympathy, she returned to the thoughts with which she had begun. “You are beautiful too, although you haven’t always preferred it. Why do we have this faculty for taking pleasure? To what end is there beauty in all of nature? What makes beauty appear? And… what is your name?”
Her abrupt last question surprised him. Without hesitation, with a full smile, he told her his name, “Siddhartha.”
“Every wish fulfilled!” Desire softly exclaimed the name’s meaning, returning his smile. “Your name promises.” The sound of her voice conveyed warmth. “My name promises too. It is Desire. When we met at first, you recognized me, and I knew you. Then, we belonged to our fantasies. But now, having exposed them, having begun to name them, proclaiming them through words and actions (she moved closer to him) we’re tied up with each other and forced to go on.”
My name promises too. It is Desire.
Moving still closer, Desire had whispered those very last words.
Siddhartha, quietly, in a deferential, friendly, and most respectful, tone answered her. “I was never ignorant of the power of human joy, nor am I careless about beauty. But I had come under the impression that the existence outside of myself of these powerful impressions was an illusion and could not be the means I was seeking. Impressions such as I was endeavoring to analyze and define could not fail to vanish at the contact of a material enjoyment that was unable to bring them into existence. The only way was to try to know them more completely at the spot where they were to be found, namely within myself, and to clarify them to their lowest depths.”
“When I severed all ties with a natural life it was because I sought deliverance. I searched as one searches for gold; washing away all that is not gold.”
Desire was astonished by this profound response, expressed so casually and intimately especially as she had expected no answer at all and was prepared to go on in monologue. Not realizing what she was doing, she reached out and took his hands, and squeezed them, saying, “Isn’t the function of life—not to interpret, not to transcend, but to experience ? … Yes, you know it is. Now you do know it. Now you are like me. Isn’t it by being natural that one best recovers from one’s unnaturalness—from one’s spirituality?”
“Pure inwardness is empty, abstract. We can’t believe in the incomprehensible! Reality dissolves into dreaming… into the merely subjective. Banishing the mysterious, the way is clear to the instincts.”
Gotama, in proximity with Desire, was feeling an ever deeper center within himself. His breathing, and now he realized his heartbeat, had synchronized itself with hers. He felt her voice as if it were his own. Her smile warmed him. She brought him to laugh with her.