by John Updike
I still love Alinga, by the way. I mean we don't live together like we did but that lazy kind of deep affection is still there. We're spending a lot of time in the Uma Room together lately, still trying to straighten out the mess Nitya left and to keep ahead of our mail. It seems everybody is suing us, we're like a whale that's started to bleed and every shark in the ocean has gone into a feeding frenzy—I love that new term, don't you? Feeding frenzy. They use it a lot on television now, not just the nature programs but the evening news. Not only are all these governments—local, state, and national—on our case but about three sets of parents are suddenly taking us to court for brainwashing their children—though I don't see how they can collect damages, since these children are legally adult and if they weren't here doing work as worship they'd be hanging around their parents' homes soaking up money and wrecking cars and running up psychiatrists' bills. Speaking of Nitya—Nitya Kalpana, you remember, our former accountant—she says her head is out of the bad place it was in and she can do with less meditation now—in fact, she wonders if she wasn't being overdosed in the clinic by Ma Prapti, who, even though she spilled the beans for days to the FBI and everybody, is still under a lot of indictments. The way Durga tried to explain it to me, when we had our nice talk, it was more a philosophical inquiry Ma^ Prapti was undertaking. She was asking. What is the mind? It can be altered by yoga, O.K., to achieve samadhi, but also by drugs, by alcohol, by fatigue, by hormones, even by things as innocent as the moon and sugar. So why not develop a purusha pill and get to nirvana that way? A lot of people do, of course—like Marilyn Monroe and all these teen-age suicides the TV commentators keep putting on long faces about. This question of course is very troubling to the old-fashioned rigid Christian philosophical framework but it doesn't bother Oriental thinking at all, where it's all maya anyway. Anyway, I really do resent Nitya's coming out of meditation with all this officiousness. I've pretty well got the accounts so I can deal with them and I don't want her confusing things again. I feel invaded. No matter where you are, or how much enlightenment is around, human relations are tricky.
Midge, that is too bad, what you admitted, or really more implied, about you and Ed. You two always seemed so solid. I used to envy you, in fact—you seemed so satisfied, so unquestioning. I mean, you weren't expecting the world, and you saw Ed's limitations, and I know his drinking aggravated you more than you let on, and that loudmouth know-it-all manner that bothered me less than it did Charles because if you listened Ed really did know a lot of things, especially about electronic security systems and how car engines work and how the insurance companies and pension funds control the stock market, but nevertheless you never betrayed him by wincing or making sardonic eye-contact like, say, Donna and for that matter Gloria used to do, and whatever your differences your house was a fun one to be in. Those lovely lawn parties you two always gave. People are selfish, of course, and when a couple we know breaks up it's one less port in a storm, one or two less parties a year, one more house in town that begins to look weedy and sad. When I left Charles that was one of my thoughts—how sad it would be for the rest of you, not to have us to swell the scene, as it were. Heaven only knows what Charles is doing with his spare time now—not that he ever had much. Those little nurses and receptionists he used to screw so happily when he had me as part of his baggage I dare say look (and talk) quite differently now that he's, so to speak, free. Real freedom is within, Midge. You and I know that. This morning in darshan the Arhat shared with us Buddha's last words. You know what they were? See if I can recite them, without the accent. "Be a lamp unto yourselves. Be a refuge unto yourselves. Seek no refuge outside of yourselves." Seek no refuge outside of yourself, Midge—that's what I'm trying to keep in mind in these hectic last couple of weeks and you keep it in mind no matter what the future brings for you and dear old Ed.
I mean, it's been hectic here and it's been not. There's a lot of positive energy around since the scene thinned out. All along there've been a number of not-so-desirable types showing up here in dime-store sunset colors saying they were sannyasins, thinking from what they've seen on the news that this is a real gravy train, but now that all the papers are blabbing how we owe everybody fifteen million, or maybe it's fifty, they've pretty well split, and some of Agni's lavender cowboys too, now that the real fuzz in One form or another is always in and out serving summonses and repossessing computers and earth-moving equipment and running fingerprint checks on people and chemical checks on the cafeteria lemonade and ripping out illegal wiring and I don't know what all else to protect us against ourselves. Some of these outer-state types are kind of cute in their way and, you know, curious about us, and more open-minded than you might think. I don't really think you can say the world has subdivisions any more—what with television and modems we're all operating on the same sattva, and my conclusion so far, after being six months out of our own little North Shore ghetto, is that the world is really slowly getting to be a better place, provided we can keep the population explosion from turning all the land into deserts and asphalt and if the destruction of the ozone by aerosol cans with the greenhouse effect doesn't melt the ice caps and flood every coastal city out of existence, not to mention the Bomb, which seems to be the least of the problems because at least people agitate about it and picket Army bases.
God, listen to the big philosopher. But one of the things the Arhat has done for me is encourage me to let it out, let out the feelings and thoughts both and get rid of the conditioning that had us trained to keep quiet while all these fathers and husbands and sons and lovers and lawyers and doctors and Indian chiefs talked. All this trying to. be not too smart, not too loud, not too sexy, not too wonderful or else we'd overwhelm men that we were subconsciously taught to do like children in Hong Kong apartments trained to live in two cubic feet of space—I say, "Fuck it." "Fuck it" is what I say now, Midge.
But what I started to say, about all the repo men and sheriffs aides that are crawling around here, is that among the equipment they repossessed was that at the dental clinic, which was run by an absolutely cool old saint called Ganesha, 'older even than me and here because his practice in Boise began to remind him of death, so when I went with this lower-right molar that's 'been slowly going funny ever since I absent-mindedly chomped down on a betel nut, he said it looked to him like a root-canal candidate, it had been "insulted" so often with old silver fillings, but he didn't have the X-ray machine any more so I better get it looked at in town. By "town" around here they mean this dusty strip called Forrest that I think I described ages ago when I first came, full of retired people and old ranch rats and a few stray Navajos and these born-again creeps that attack the Arhat whenever he shows up for a Diet Coke—I was surprised they even had a dentist there. So I have to go in there tomorrow, if I can find a pickup truck or limo with some gas still in it. We have this five-thousand-gallon tank buried underground but Mobil refuses to fill it until we pay our bill. At the same time they keep sponsoring these holier-than-thou ecological documentaries on saving the whooping crane and the Salt Lake pupfish on television. How's that for corporate doublethink? Save the pupfish and let people 'on the path to holiness go hang.
Well, what else? What have I left out? The beauty of it here, maybe, now that what they call fall has come. Not fall like we have it, of course—nothing like all that glory of the leaves, the maples and sumac and ash, and the smell of burning applewood out of people's chimneys, and the ocean turning that almost vicious dark-gray greeny-blue color under the heavy autumn clouds. ' Here it's more of a delicate change, like a piece of transparent, slightly brown film placed over everything. The nights are getting cold again, but the days are still hot. A few of the trees do have leaves that turn yellow and drop—there's the willow wattle, and Australian acacia, and a kind called shoe-string acacia—but by and Jarge they never had much in the way of leaves to begin with, since the trick of the desert is not to gather photons, of which there are billions and billions too many, but to hold in mo
isture. The smoke tree and the paloverde hardly have leaves at all, just these threadbare skinny things that show up in the spring before the flowering and then drop right off. So you get this feeling of vegetation that already lives in purusha, with just the tiniest delicate grip on the surface of prakriti, without any of the turmoil and violence of our Eastern weeds and bushes and vines battling it out with all of their egos on every square foot that isn't absolutely rock. Here it's mostly rock, red rock and sand, so you're very grateful and aware of the slightest living thing—a lot of the desert flowers are almost microscopic, the size of pin-heads practically. I love it, Midge. I love the freedom of the almost nothingness—the hills with nothing on them but wisps of golden grass, and the skies with only some jet trails and the highest little tentative horsetails that never seem to come to anything as far as the weather goes. We had an hour of rain the other night and everybody came out of the Kali Club and danced naked in it, though it was freezing, really. Where it's so dry, water evaporates on you so rapidly it hurts, you can't help but chatter and shiver and jump around.
My dreams, Midge. My dreams get more and more intense lately. It's frightening. And a lot of them are about, of all people, Charles. I've totally stopped thinking about him consciously—we've 'stopped communicating; let Ducky and this vulture Oilman communicate—but in these dreams we're making love the way we did the first years we were married. They say people in dreams are displacements and it must be that it's really the Arhat I'm dreaming about but it seems so vividly Charles—the flat hard body he had and still has, considering his age, and the way he did everything in silence and seemed a little offended if I made any noise myself, and certain little things I won't go into but that definitely identify him as Charles, a smell even, I know you're not supposed to smell in dreams, but he smells like the desert, or at least I wake up with the spicy musty fragrance all around me, and the moon on the tangled sheets, here in Vikshipta's A-frame. And be was another, come to think of it. Another severe man. Without wanting to be, I seem to be attracted to that type. In the dreams Charles and I are usually in a bare room, a room without furniture. Almost like an operating room, except there's not an operating table or the bright lights. There must be a bed, we have to be lying on something. He's pushed himself up on his arms and I see his bare shoulders and his chest, smooth and hard and almost hairless the way he was, just a few hairs that turned gray eventually over the sternum bone and around the nipples, the plane of his chest slanting down to where our bodies join, and I'm aware of his excited breath, the warmth of it, and this dry desert sweetness like the fragrance of mesquite pods, and I'm very young and tight and worried about getting pregnant, and at the same time I'm myself as I am now, and even know that sleeping with Charles is wrong, a betrayal of the ashram, but this sense of fatherly forgiveness and understanding enclosing me is coming from him, pouring from him like chakra energy from the Sahasrara lotus, so I know it can't be Charles really, since understanding he never especially was and forgiving he certainly is not now. It's strange. But I wake up overwhelmed. He seems just enormous, and flooding me with these spiritual waves. It must be a transposition of my experiences here. We're all just masks anyway, don't you think? I mean masks of the archetypes. My best to Irving and Ed if he and you work things out and Gloria and Donna and Liz and Ann and the others but absolutely—I trust you, Midge—don't let them listen to
[end of tape]
Nov. 12
Dear Dr. Podhoretz:
Just a note to bring you up to date on my dental adventures. I think I mentioned some months ago the sensitivity, an elusive "punky" feeling, in the lower-right quadrant. The molar—it was hard to know which it was, under the crowns—has been getting slowly worse, but not so bad that I couldn't ignore it, blaming it vaguely on the general nervous and spiritual stress I've been under recently, or even on the altitude here, which I imagined might function somewhat as an airplane ride does when it gives you an earache or a sensation of pressure in the sinuses. But lately the feeling has become unignorable, and I've come forty miles to a dentist here in Forrest, the town nearest the kibbutz-like community where I now reside.
But this dentist, a much more gracious and efficient practitioner than I had expected, with a definite English accent, of all things—the British seem strangely attracted to this part of the world, the opposite of their own dreary climate, I suppose—said that I didn't need a root canal but that the crown had been badly designed and was occluding in a way with the upper teeth that was applying torque arid giving me soreness along the gums—voiid, the "punky" feeling! Well, of course I defended your crown, said you were considered among the very best in Swampscott, etc. But with this tranquil little supercilious smile he had me bite on a piece of red wax-paper and grind my teeth and then did some very delicate drilling (I didn't even have Novocaine) and I must say the trouble seems miraculously to have vanished! And he only-charged me $45 for the appointment, as opposed to the $125 that you have been asking. But of course a lot of the things you buy here are cheaper than in the East, except for what has to be flown over the Rockies, like lobsters and cranberries.
Just thought you'd like to keep abreast of my mouth and make a mark on my chart. You have several sets of X-rays; perhaps you can tell from them whatever it was you did wrong.
Happy Veterans Day,
Sarah Worth
November 12
Gentlemen:
Enclosed find endorsed checks totalling $157,634.26 to be deposited to my charge account with your book and gift shop. I look forward to visiting Samana Cay some day and using my accumulated credit to make some purchases and enjoy some leisure there.
Yours sincerely,
Sarah P. Worth
le 12 novembre
Monsieur,
Voici les formules et les renseignements nécessaires à ouvrir mon compte, et aussi un cheque, tiré de mon compte à la Bank of Boston, pour $200,000. Faites-ia mon premier dépot, s'il vous plait, et
Agréez, je vous prie,
l'expression de mes sentiments dévoués,
#4723-9001-7469-8666
November 14
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Enright—
We have been slow to respond to your several communications not because we have been taking them lightly but perhaps taking them all too seriously. Over the years a considerable number of properly concerned and loving parents have written us, threatened us, and even appeared at our gates with complaints such as yours; we are often besieged by lawyers and psychiatric "experts" and prejudiced journalists over these issues of "brainwashing" and "child abduction." Never mind that the "child" was as old as thirty-four in one case, and in almost all cases well above the legal age of consent. Never mind that "brainwashing" is a nebulous term that could with justice be applied to our elementary-school introduction to the history and the capitalist, "freedom-loving" values of the United States; or to the religious rubrics pressed upon the child not only by church, synagogue, and mosque but by home influence and certain sentimental strains of popular entertainment; or to the massive inculcation of consumeristic hedonism sought by the relentless barrage of television commercials and printed advertising. Not to mention the habituation to violence and vice that follows from even modest exposure to the televised dramas 'sandwiched between the insidious commercials; and the absolutely pervasive and irresistible rape of adolescent minds by the nihilism and eroticism of popular music; and the more specialized forms of brainwashing undergone in military and corporate indoctrination programs.
Our brains are there to be washed, Mr. and Mrs. Enright, by everything from elevator music to bumper stickers, and amid this polluted tide of bobbing, jostling, oozing propaganda a few souls elect to discipline their egos and follow the Master. Our way is not easy. Many fall away when they realize that the death of ego is the price of happiness. Many desert when they discover that cherished possessions must be sacrificed to non-attachment. Many have lately defected, rather than face the true richness of paradox which the Master
has prepared for them. Openness and spontaneity are our watchwords, not control. Your son Kevin, or Yajna as we call him here, came to us freely and is free to leave. Though appreciative of all you have done for him, from nursery school to business school, he does not want to return to your big sandstone house in Saint Louis with the mansard roof and porte-cochere, on its archaic private street, though he thinks back upon it fondly, as we all should upon scenes we have outgrown. He is not brainwashed. He is adult, and at peace, and on the road to nirvana.
Look into your own hearts. Our Master advises you to consider this text from the blessed Dhammapada: "'These are my sons. This is my wealth.' In this way the fool troubles himself. He is not even the owner of himself: how much less of his sons and of his wealth." In demanding we return "your" son to you, you become "fools." A semantic misunderstanding lies at the heart of your confusion: when we speak of "our" or "my" son or daughter or wife or master, we are not expressing ownership but by a grammatical shortcut a certain intuitively felt connection: these persons or manifestations of enduring modalities have wandered into "my" sphere of apprehension, the possessive pronoun being used merely to locate the subjectivity. But people do not own people. Your son is not "yours" even though you carried him in your womb and paid for his extensive education, frat fees, auto insurance, etc. Though for a time he was "yours" to imprison within your Richardsonian mansion and perhaps to bully and beat and certainly to manipulate with the psychological blackmail at which the nuclear family is so adept, he is not "yours" now, to reflect creditably upon you in the eyes of your equally narrow-minded and proprietorial acquaintances, or to reverse the declining trend in the railroad enterprises that made your family fortune^ or to extend your genes and generations further into the void of maya; he is, instead, "his"—or, to put it more exactly, his ego or aham is at the service of his highest self, the atman, as it merges with purusha, the changeless and featureless spirit which at the beginning of phenomena allowed itself to be clouded with the emergence of matter and its complicated turbulences.