On the Edge A Novel (12 page)

Beside the lavatory itself was something simply entitled ‘Poem’.

I walk with Great Spirit through the dew

He makes me feel so shiny and new

I am happy as a child

In his embrace so firm yet mild.

Everyone agreed that, as usual, Stan and Karen’s barbecue was a unique success. Karen asked Walking Eagle if he would help them close with a blessing. Walking Eagle, who felt constrained by Robert’s presence, made the closing ceremony almost indecently abrupt.

‘Mother Earth, Father Sky,’ he called out, raising his palms to the stubborn blue patch above the patio. ‘We ask your blessing as Stan and Karen go on their Tantric workshop. May spring return to the mountain.’

‘I appreciate that,’ said Stan, raising his glass and giving Karen a squeeze.

A murmur of approval rose from the guests and dissipated in the dazzling light of the afternoon.

7

During Saturday lunch Brooke had again urged Crystal to get in touch with Adam Frazer when she arrived at Esalen. Kenneth allowed his forbidding composure to be punctuated by sarcasm when Adam came up in conversation.

‘Like all very brilliant people he can be difficult sometimes,’ Brooke admitted to Crystal.

‘Like all very difficult people he’s difficult the whole time,’ Kenneth corrected her.

‘I’ve noticed dumb people being difficult too,’ Crystal pointed out, in the hope that they could all find some common ground.

Now that she was driving down Route One, only a couple of hours from Esalen, Crystal started to wonder what she should do about Brooke’s suggestion.

There was no doubt that Adam was clever and charismatic, with rows of mystical medals shining on his chest, but he had publicly turned his back on Mother Meera, one of the gurus he had earlier publicized with unbridled eagerness. Once trapped in the supreme truth of his latest enthusiasm, he was forced to tear up yesterday’s manifesto with a screech of renunciation, or face the unpleasant prospect of keeping his mouth shut. Apart from uncomfortably recalling her mother’s pendulum of devotion and disappointment, Crystal was uneasy because of her own more hesitant but respectful relationship with the avatar of Thalheim.

The most consistent thread in all Adam’s work was the conviction that whatever happened to him was of global significance. Had he operated in the 1930s, he might well have written a book called ‘Why I’m a Communist’, followed, hotfoot, by a book called ‘Why I’m not a Communist’. Now, in the portentous shadow of the millennium, he pursued the same tango on the mystical plane. He experienced the Divine as a series of compliments paid to his sensitivity, and if he ever lapsed into humility it was the most extraordinary humility the world had ever seen and was immediately turned into a book or a film. Crystal had seen a film about his conversion to Mother Meera in which he often seemed to be on the verge of tears at the thought of what he’d been through in order to become so special. Even his laughter was lachrymose, like the giggling of a child who has been tickled for too long.

Whoever he was announcing or denouncing, taking up or dropping, Oedipus and Narcissus were two figures who commanded his unquestioning loyalty. Exiled from his magical Indian childhood by the treachery of his adored mother, he was installed in frigid England where he developed that prancing, bucking intellect with which he hoped one day to kick down the stable door.

At heart he remained unconsoled, even by his own brilliance, and when he met an Indian woman calling herself Mother Meera he was powerless to resist the rumour of her omnipotence and resumed his magical communion with the subcontinent. She was bound, by the same somnambulant logic, to betray him, as his own mother had done. This she did, or so Crystal had heard, by failing to share Adam’s excitement about his forthcoming marriage to Yves.

Again he retreated from devotion to scholarship, but Rumi, despite his intoxicating emphasis on the wine and fire of Divine love, could not last for ever. A friend of his had told Crystal that Adam’s attention was being drawn towards the Virgin Mary, the mother of all mothers, who had the advantage of already being elaborately mythologized and, thanks to being dead, was less likely than her predecessors to let him down or tell him how to run his life.

Or was she?

The race was on. Would Adam at last find in the Mother of God a parent adequate to his special needs, or would he end up staring into the glamorous pool of his own personality with an ever more candid admiration?

Crystal liked people to be fascinating, but she didn’t want them to be charismatic – charismatic meant that they expected other people to find them fascinating. Adam, having led the charge towards Mother Meera, was no less charismatic in retreat. Some of his plodding followers might be forgiven their sprained ankles and their spinning heads.

As usual his personal experience contained a message it would be mad for the world to ignore. He’d squabbled with Mother Meera, and so the age of the guru was over. With Yves’s approval and support, he was prepared to strike a posture of total independence from any mediated experience of the Divine. Gurus were fallible human beings like the rest of us, and it was dangerous to attribute magical powers to them. Of course it was, thought Crystal, but they still might know something worth finding out.

Adam had become the anti-guru guru, teaching his listeners to turn their backs on all their teachers (except himself) and strut about in garrulous self-sufficiency. This desire to abandon the people who’d helped him, driven by the deep conviction that in the Dodge City of maternal betrayal you have to shoot first, was not to everyone’s taste. It was all very well to kick away the ladder once he was on the roof, but what about those who had not yet run through most of the star rinpoches and avatars currently crowding the planet?

No doubt the transition from external authority to inner conviction was an important passage in spiritual life, but of all revolutions it must be the most bloodless; nothing could falsify it more conspicuously than the need to stab. Any real awakening embraced a past which appeared to have led with newly unveiled precision to a higher perspective. Whereas ordinary well-being always dragged along its gloomy companions, ‘How long can this possibly last?’ and ‘If only I’d known this earlier’, awakening divulged the secret of ripeness, redeeming time as well as understanding, promising that every drop of suffering had been purposeful and that things would never be the same again.

If only it happened more often.

The past contained implacable enemies of liberation, from the most general unnegotiable conditions, like the structure of the human brain, or the karmic chain of cause and effect which seemed to enslave every incident to a deep and eventually unknowable set of causes, down through the genetic codes inherited by each individual, and finally in the distracting drama of personal history. It was only by appreciating the asphyxiatingly conditioned nature of each thought and action that Crystal had developed that passion for freedom which might enable her to punch her way through the icecap of conditioning. She was well aware that this passion and the moments of spaciousness which it sometimes gave her might also be determined. Until these tricky questions were settled more precisely by science and philosophy, every choice might be contained in the invisible prison of another category of determinism.

However irrational it might seem, she felt instead that there was collaborative impulse at work, as if her passionate refusal to inhabit this frozen domain was being answered by a pitying Nature, which stooped down and lifted her from the ice with the same impersonal tenderness with which she sometimes lifted a struggling insect from a swimming pool. And then an idea like ripeness would descend on her with utter conviction and, like the insect opening its wings again in the sun, everything was perfect just as it was.

Crystal’s relationship with gurus and spiritual authority was far from simple, and she recognized in her reading of Adam’s predicament the shadow of some of her own doubts and difficulties. Adam was a kind of authority himself, not only in his own eyes, but also in the part of her that was still impressed by his cleverness and notoriety. Why else would she be wondering whether to approach a man whose behaviour she found silly and corrupt? Was she expecting to acquire mystical prowess by association? And if she was, how different was that from his ruptured faith that, bathed in Mother Meera’s omnipotence, he could realize an omnipotence of his own?

Crystal, too, had longed for paraplegics to rise from their beds as she passed, longed for emotional knots to unravel in the clear light of her presence, and longed to crown these powers with the touching modesty of disclaiming them. Perhaps the only difference between her and Adam was that when she had these longings she realized that, under present conditions, she was wasting her time.

In order to see Mother Meera, Crystal had been forced to overcome reservations about going to Germany at all. Most of her father’s family had died in the Holocaust, and her sense of her father’s absence from her childhood was exacerbated by the ancestral void that lay behind him. Germany was the Fatherland of her fatherlessness, a personal wound that took the preposterous form of a nation state, it had bequeathed her not only a family which she didn’t know but one she could not know. Her loathing of its Nazi past cut across all her ideals of forgiveness and compassion. She went there to challenge her hatred and indignation, and found her desire to give them up challenged instead.

Thalheim lay in what might have been called the heart of Germany until, arriving there, it seemed wiser just to call it the middle. The ugliness of the surrounding villages would have been dazzling enough without the hostility of the population to reinforce it, but the stony-faced family who ran Crystal’s boarding house in Dornburg chose to underline the atmosphere of dutiful depression with a particular grimness of their own. Frau Varden treated her clients as an insufferable imposition, as if they had been billeted on her by an invading army, while her two lumpish sons had perfectly decanted their sibling rivalry into a competition for the role of village idiot, knowing that the loser would always be welcome in some humble capacity at the local abattoir.

Walking around Dornburg, Crystal’s thoughts grew wilder and wilder. She longed to haemorrhage against the walls to add a little colour to the scene. All the buildings were white, the gardens trim, the designs utilitarian. Post-war Germany seemed to be punishing itself for the extravagances of its past. If its internally shuttered houses and tight-lipped inhabitants were also trying to renounce world domination, the discipline carried with it a hygienic ferocity reminiscent of the drives it was designed to extinguish. No wonder the Germans had spent their history invading other countries. Who could blame them for wanting a holiday from their own
Kultur
? When she reached the edge of the village on her first walk, shivering in the December snow, she found a cute sign, decorated with a cow and a few buttercups, saying, A
UF
W
IEDERSEHEN
D
ORNBURG
! It reminded her that on the flip side of every bully was a sentimentalist, like those smiling pigs painted on a butcher’s window, wearing a lop-sided trilby and a willing expression.

The devotees in her boarding house added to her isolation by drowning all the fine distinctions which had crowded her mind since she had first heard rumours of Mother Meera’s divinity. For them the focus of controversy was not her status, but their own status, as measured by where they sat during
darshan
, the silent encounter with Mother Meera which was the climax of their pilgrimage.

Crystal discovered this preoccupation at her first breakfast, and learned the nicknames of some of the Meera entourage, jokingly called the ‘
darshan
Police’.

‘I didn’t want to be in Kansas in the fucking kitchen,’ complained one American woman.

‘I was in the bookshop,’ her friend groaned, ‘and every time anyone wanted to get past me, they tapped me on the shoulder. Moustache Boy gave me a really nasty shove. You know, that was abusive. The only way I can figure it is that I had to learn something about my body.’

Boris, a ponderous Russian living in North Carolina, controlled the little group through the power of his mind.

‘Please!’ he said, as if he were asking someone to remove their car from his driveway and couldn’t be expected to keep his temper for much longer. ‘Read Jung!’

Everyone, it turned out, had read some Jung already and so Boris badgered them from another angle.

‘Jung only wrote one book for the public, that is
Man and His Symbols
, the other books are too esoteric for the public.’

‘Oh, I kinda liked
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
,’ said Robin, the woman who had been abused by Moustache Boy.

Boris gave her a furiously soulful and patronizing glance with which he conveyed that she had not understood its inner meaning. When he heard that Crystal was living in California, he became bitter.

‘Ha! California,’ he said, ‘the capital of spiritual materialism.’

It was too cold for Crystal to refuse a lift that evening, but she paid the price of overhearing Boris’s dream interpretation.

That afternoon Robin had dreamt that she was driving a six-wheeled truck. Before she could say anything more, Boris explained that ‘Six is the number of the higher intelligence.’

‘Why?’ asked Robin.

‘Because it is the sixth chakra, the brow chakra, which is the chakra of the higher intelligence.’

‘Well, there are so many systems…’ Robin began, but she was soon silenced by the Rasputin-like power of Boris’s self-belief.

‘It is very clear: you are being driven by a higher intelligence,’ said Boris, turning into the municipal car park.

Crystal, who was going to
darshan
for the first time, was able to break away and go to the head of the crowd, a privilege reserved for newcomers.