On the Edge A Novel (20 page)

She watched the waterfall turning back into a stream and rushing to meet the waves of the sea. The ceaseless chatter of the stream was silenced by the booming chant of the sea. A wave disclosed a seam of cloudy emerald before it came in a white rush among the rocks. God, she was at it too. Maybe everything
was
making love.

Looking at this scene, it was hard to believe an earlier passage in Jean-Paul’s letter.

I announce the death of Nature. The ancient dialogue between Nature and Culture, and its reconciliations in the pastoral, the Arcadian and the romantic, are over. Culture stands alone on stage and, like a bereaved husband who has ‘let himself go’, no longer seeing any reason for restraint without his old partner and his old opponent, gorged on sleeping pills and junk food, bloated and self-regarding, shouts out his repetitious soliloquy to an audience of widows like himself.

A seal popped up inquisitively. Those eyes that looked as if they had been swimming through their own tears.

‘Is it over?’ said Crystal out loud.

The seal made no reply.

12

Some people said, ‘Be here now,’ but what Brooke said was, ‘You’re always missing something.’

Here she was in an absolutely fascinating Rumi class, but she could be doing something else absolutely fascinating instead. She knew that Crystal Bukowski was at Esalen doing an exciting-sounding meditation workshop. Brooke was no stranger to meditation, she had built
the
most beautiful, completely authentic zendo in the garden of her summer place in Rhode Island. She even sent the architect to Kyoto to study the whole thing and get every detail right.

What finally convinced her that she was in the right place, that most elusive category of all, that spot you could never find at a party, was the secret thought that she was in a room with two men who, God forbid they should think she thought so, were on her staff.

Adam was a star, an absolute star, on her staff. And Kenneth was a complete failure, on her staff. The sinister thing (where was Dr Bukowski when you really needed him?) was that she had grown much fonder of Kenneth since his compromising admission of failure. Pathetic, downtrodden, powerless, he was only a step away from being completely perfect.

The wonderful thing about Adam was that he made Rumi so
relevant.
She had thought to begin with that he might be a little too homocentric, if that was a word, but she had soon substituted the permissive thrill of imagining she liked his introductory refrain, ‘Through the grace of the Divine Mother and the love of my husband…’

Her initial recoil from the suggestion that she see sperm as holy water was swept away by the thought that the comparison would have annoyed her own far from Divine mother. It also would have failed to make her mother think of sperm as any more sacred – for that, Adam would have had to compare it to a mint julep.

Both Adam and Rumi were fond of culinary comparisons. Rumi had said, ‘My poetry is like Egyptian bread.’ Brooke, who had been to Egypt, couldn’t help regretting this news. Apparently what Rumi had meant was that you had to eat it straight away, whereas Brooke felt that you shouldn’t touch it at all. Luckily the Johnsons, who were the most thoughtful hosts you could possibly imagine, had croissants flown in from Paris every day. They appeared miraculously at breakfast as their boat throbbed down the Nile, past the fundamentalist children gesticulating on the ragged banks. Poor Rumi probably never tasted a croissant. Anyhow, the point about the Egyptian bread was the same as what Blake meant when he said you had to kiss joy ‘as it flies’ in order to live in ‘Eternity’s sunrise’. She was learning so much.

Then Adam had said you had to seal the vessel of love with fidelity, that it was like making a good soup. Although there were no dogmas, you had to be faithful to one person for the rest of your life, and stay on your knees adoring God through that person. Once you were doing that, there was no
room
for any more dogmas.

Kenneth took notes discreetly in the back of Adam’s class. ‘Stop complaining and start contemplating; stop rebelling and start co-creating,’ he wrote.

Life was complicated; sometimes hypocrites and even idiots said things that were true. He was a hypocrite himself, so he ought to know. His conscience, like a sunburnt scorpion, was stinging itself to death. Adam’s case brought out all his new agonies of self-reproach. If only Brooke had been nasty to him, he could have hidden his failure in retaliation and escape.

Instead, here he was, Kenneth Shine – even his name was false – the former ‘ambience director’ of the Blind Parrots, a group whose ambience was more celebrated than anything else about them, sitting beside his patroness to whom he had sold himself as a New Age Prometheus, proposing to steal the forbidden fire of every spiritual fad anybody had ever thought of and stoke it into a single inferno of wisdom, but failing in fact to produce a single word. And here was Adam Frazer, whom he had always billed as a total fraud, turning out to be an unreliable soprano, occasionally hitting an unmistakably high note amid the shuddering props, gushing orchestration and weird melodrama of his performance.

What made the horn of Kenneth’s paranoia overflow completely were the attacks on fake gurus and New Age thinking which sometimes erupted from Adam’s tutorials on the incomprehensible splendour of Divine love.

‘It’s time for all of us to
grow up
,’ Adam was saying, pausing like a nanny who wishes to show that her own tantrums are more terrifying than anything her little charges could manage. Kenneth prickled with unease.

‘You don’t need complicated mantras, all
that’s
bullshit too. The Divine is always listening to the soft whisper of your heart…’

Or, in my case, thought Kenneth, the loud scream.

‘I used to go and visit an old Sufi,’ said Adam, ‘who lived in a small room with lots of books, and always had a bowl of fresh roses in the corner, and one day he said to me, “You know of course that Rumi and Shams were lovers?” And I said, “Of course they were lovers, they met at the highest point of the soul where hearts fuse, and their souls became one…” And he said, “Yes, but you know that they were lovers.” And I said, “Yes, at that level there’s no body any more…” And he said, “My dear Adam, go over to that bowl and take the rose out of the bowl” – I was completely confused by this point – and so I took the rose, this great big open red rose, and he said, “Smell the rose and tell me if it’s physical or spiritual.” I just took the rose and something very strong happened which I can’t put into words, and the full impact of that rose exploded all over my body and my soul and I realized the shattering stupidity of separating soul and body.

‘This is the secret that is being given to the whole human race now, which we’re at last adult enough to receive. Not the pasteurized, patriarchal version which splits off the spirit and the body, but the full secret of the full human Divine experience.

‘If you want to see the light that is streaming from everything,’ Adam incanted, ‘if you want to see the light streaming from your lover’s body, then you must be in a naked state of adoration and gratitude. If you want a rose to speak its secret name when you gaze at it; and if you want to be fed in dreams and visions; and if you want to feel with every second you spend on this earth that you are a Divine being; if you want that experience and it’s the only experience you want, because all the rest is pointless bullshit and vanity and stupidity and ego; if you want that experience, the Beloved asks only one thing – it doesn’t ask that you be brilliant, it doesn’t ask that you write three hundred and fifty books…’

Just as well, thought Kenneth.

‘… it doesn’t ask that you live on a glass of orange juice,’ said Adam, ‘and stand on one leg and mortify and torture yourself in the Himalayas. All those things are too easy. Anybody can adopt a few forms, anybody can have a discipline that makes them feel good about themselves.
All that is bullshit!
’ he screamed. ‘The Beloved, who created all of this, is asking only one thing of us: that we become one love.

‘Don’t think it’s easy, because it’s not easy. It’s simple but it’s not easy. It demands one very important thing of us, it demands humility, always being on your knees…’

Funny how ‘our’ turned into ‘your’ with the mention of knees, thought Kenneth. Standing on one leg is bullshit but being on your knees is crucial. Posture remains an important issue.

Kenneth was pleased with the sharpness of his observation, and with the joke of hearing Adam promote humility, and yet at the same time he was uneasily impressed by Adam’s passion. How could he split himself off so consummately from what he was saying? In the end there was no substitute for self-deception, Kenneth reflected enviously; it left insincerity standing, or kneeling, on the starting line.

‘The Sufis say that there’s a gate for each one of us,’ Adam continued, ‘through which each one of us can enter into the garden of Eden, but the shape of that gate is the shape you make when you’re on your knees. You can’t get through it standing up and you can’t get through it jogging; no guru can take you through it, you have to go through it yourself,
on your knees.

‘All these philosophies which have been patriarchal and destructive have said that the point is to get out of here. What an absurd idea to be told that you’re just a pathetic little worm trapped in a million lives of bad karma, brought to this appalling Earth which is nothing but illusion, darkness, suffering and disaster, and the only thing you can do is scourge yourself and batter yourself and purify – never forget that word purify!

‘This is not an illusion,’ wailed Adam, pointing to the pretty view out of the window. ‘This is a masterpiece of the Divine. The Beloved is looking at the Beloved through your eyes. Ramakrishna says that knowledge will get you into the courtyard, but only adoration will get you into the bedroom. Poetry is the sign saying “This way to the bedroom”.’

The bedroom, thought Brooke, that was another place where she might be having a wonderful time.

‘Adoration is the opposite of capitalism,’ said Adam. ‘In capitalism, the more money you spend, the more money you lose. In adoration, the more love you give, the more you feel. The soul’s extravagance is endlessly returned…’

Now that was the kind of investment adviser she really needed! God was great, there was nothing he didn’t do better than everyone else. And yet it was Kenneth, sweating with guilt and probably plagiarizing Adam’s pronouncements, who was in danger of securing her adoration.

‘The Divine wants you to have the whole thing,’ said Adam. ‘Not just a banana…’

A banana? thought Brooke. That certainly wouldn’t be a good return on your adoration investment.

A banana? thought Kenneth. Why not at least say ‘the Presidency’? What catastrophic prompting of the unconscious had led Adam to say ‘banana’? The guy was losing it, thought Kenneth gleefully.

Kenneth and Brooke looked at each other and frowned.

‘The elite, the hierarchies, have not worked,’ said Adam. ‘We’re twenty years away from extinguishing life on this planet. There are people who know all the facts about the forests, there are corporations that know exactly what they’re doing, and still sit swilling Château Lafite, on their electrical chairs, in their Armani suits, discussing how to kill the peasants so they can get their land…’

They didn’t sound
that
elite, thought Brooke, in their Armani suits. And Adam sounded as if he’d be happy to see them in another sort of electrical chair, being turned into little wisps of smoke.

Kenneth yawned. The trouble with the end of the world was that it was taking so long, it was difficult to hold anyone’s attention. He definitely wasn’t going to mention it in his book.

‘Clearly what is needed at this time is a massive infusion of love into the heart of the world, a vast awakening in everybody of a deep, deep ecstatic connection with the body, and with Nature and with each other, because if we don’t have that connection with bodies and nature and each other, we won’t do everything we can to save the planet. We’ll be sitting on our futons when the last tree is burnt down, saying all this is an illusion, and actually choking to death. It’ll be that stupid.’

‘Adam,’ said a woman with a French accent.

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t feel comfortable with you saying … well, you can say what you want…’

‘Yes.’

‘But I don’t quite agree with “Everything else is bullshit”. Because you’ve been through it and so now you can see that it’s bullshit, but for those who want to go through it, that’s OK.’

‘Oh, I agree, I’m just trying to point out that it may be a waste of time,’ laughed Adam. ‘I’m just trying to transmit something.’ He paused.

Thinks that ‘transmit’ makes him sound too much like a guru, thought Kenneth. He’s cornering himself.

‘I think you have to be very aware,’ Adam resumed, ‘of how the ego can entrap you in another game. I think you have to be very aware of how the ego can appropriate the image of the seeker as one of its theatrical roles. I think you have to be extremely aware that you can fabricate experiences for yourself, experiences that you think of as Divine visions. I think you have to be very aware that there’s something hilarious in the whole enterprise of seeking something which you already are.’

Kenneth watched Adam leap from his guru corner on the spring of rhetoric, saw him stiffen with confidence as he regained his audience of seekers by recalling them to these sensible precautions.

‘Unless your seeking has that continual subversive humour, unless it has that continual self-awareness, unless it has that humility about its potential vanity, arrogance and
silliness
,’ roared Adam, ‘then you’re going to be trapped by seeking and you’re going to be trapped by every other activity.’

‘And being a lover too,’ said the Frenchwoman.

What an annoying woman, thought Brooke. Why doesn’t she just let Adam fly? He’s such a star, and he’s on my staff.