On the Edge A Novel (4 page)

There were star-shaped flowers and, no doubt, flower-shaped stars, but these multiplying resemblances which might at other times have spoken to him of an intricate design, or at least of an intelligible vocabulary, now crushed him by annihilating the space between what had become purely mental objects.

A more primitive and chaotic collapse of space took place when he tried to make out where they were sitting. The pink and yellow rock shimmered and shifted like an exasperating piece of optical art, but instead of being able to step out of the pretentious gallery in which it hung and into the visual liberation of the street, he was installed in the centre of this little conceptual joke, caught like a loose hair from the paintbrush in the pigment that surrounded him on every side.

Surrounded and invaded: his own flesh was also a pink and yellow landscape which he could not help imagining flayed in a butcher’s window, a few sprigs of sagebrush arranged at the base.

These thoughts, which would have taken so long to formulate, took no longer to think than a wasp’s sting to sting.

As if this weren’t enough, he seemed to be in a landscape crowded with debris from an era of reptilian giants. Its petrified iguanas, tortoises, lizards and dragons were swapping positions at high speed, receding and rushing forwards like the garish chariots of a funfair ride.

‘I see what you mean,’ he said.

Each gasped word, particularly ‘I’, ‘see’, ‘you’ and ‘mean’, seemed to lead down hazardous mineshafts of communication designed by narrow conventions, held up by rotting props and filled with dead canaries. ‘What’ preserved a comparative innocence.

He knew that the only way to gauge real time was to move through real space, that the only way he could stop the poisonous vine of malaise from strangling him completely was to pit his most fundamental resources against it. This was not an experience to relax into but an enemy to defeat at any cost.

A low bank of earth rose nearby. If he could get to the top of it he might see something that would lead them back to base camp, to water, to food, to someone whose mind was not ravaged by psychedelic drugs, although he secretly believed that the disappointment of these consolations would tip him into permanant madness.

Crystal hoped the trip wouldn’t get any stronger. The beauty of the psychedelic realm was eluding her right now. She felt she was being taken further away from her centre, not deeper into it. The truth was she had wanted something for Jean-Paul.

When she had introduced him to Lama Surya Das at the New York Open Center he had said how many interesting questions he had about the nature of meditation. Surya Das silently made the gesture of unscrewing Jean-Paul’s head and throwing it away.

‘Ah, so you understand that I think too much,’ Jean-Paul said with satisfaction.

‘A lama understands everything,’ Surya Das replied with a self-mockery as gentle as everything else about him, except his passionate desire for full realization.

She’d thought that Jean-Paul might get ‘out of his head’ in a constructive way but now she wasn’t sure, watching him sway on all fours like an infant on its first crawl.

Jean-Paul clutched at the ground as if it was the last bush on the lip of a precipice, his fingernails filling with dirt. When he reached the top of the little mound he turned around and sat down heavily on the ground. The busy landscape, dancing with strobe lights, was as indecipherable as before, apart from the distant green haze of the first leaves breaking out on some cottonwood trees. He could remember seeing cottonwoods in the creek that ran parallel to the trail. He raised his arm and pointed in their direction.

‘There,’ he said.

Ostensive definition, was that all he could manage? He, whose student essay on Hegel had been the talk of the philosophy faculty of the Sorbonne for one heady week, was now reduced to pointing. He whose commentaries on Lacan were considered seminal by the analytic community in Paris was unable to form a sentence. Drugs had reduced him to an imbecile.

Crystal turned slowly and smiled at him. Maybe being a real man and finding the way home would help. There she was again, more focused on the other person than on herself. With this hint of self-reproach she felt the eruption of old feelings about her father. He had loved her even when he wasn’t there, he had never stopped loving her. Therapy had taught her to name and map her abandonment, but Poonjaji had shown her that he had loved her even when he wasn’t there, that he had never stopped loving her. For years she had been angry and filled with mistrust, but after seeing Poonjaji last year in Lucknow, she had gone down to Goa and spent a week lying on the beach alone feeling wave after wave of liberation. Every suffering turned into a teaching, and when she pulled at the oldest and heaviest chains of her soul, they tore like paper decorations in a child’s hands.

Turn the mind back to the source, that’s what Poonjaji always said. Yes, it was there, that humming, that deeper reality. It was there all the time, all she had to do was turn her mind back to the source. She felt the turning like a muscular contraction at the centre of her brain, and her attention vaulted over the thoughts that sensation provoked, over the thinking that enabled those individual thoughts to exist, and plunged itself into a limitless field of light. And then she knew, without needing to argue or to formulate it, that thinking was a degradation, a falling away, a clamorous and vain insistence on distinctions which had their conceptual charm, but no ultimate reality. The ruling force was not argument, or logic, or personality, or the individual manifestations of life, but life itself, the organising principle that germinated seeds, exploded novas, and deserted the body at death without leaving it any lighter. This mysterious, weightless and invisible force pointed to a genealogy more fundamental than the history of the things that had happened to her. She experienced it as not only transcendently grand but touchingly personal. Her whole body was taut but completely relaxed, as if she were locked into and held gently at the first stages of an unstoppable orgasm.

‘There,’ Jean-Paul reiterated hoarsely.

He was pointing to something.

‘Is that the way home?’ she asked.

He nodded. Crystal, while overflowing with loving kindness towards Jean-Paul, couldn’t help taking a mischievous pleasure in his speechlessness. When she had tried to tell him what happened when her sense of self was wedded to a sense of life that didn’t require her to think in the normal sense, he had scolded her, ‘But this pure Being is a linguistic scandal! There can be no thought without language and no language without culture. Even being asleep is a cultural act! We bring to it our expectations of the language of dreams, we bring to it quotations from a thousand books. When we say we are in a state of Being we place ourselves at the centre of a complex cultural argument, not beyond that argument.’

God, the French were crazy. All she’d been able to say was, ‘It doesn’t feel like a cultural argument. It feels great.’

‘But culture is great, culture is fantastic,’ he’d said. ‘Also, it’s all we have.’

Jean-Paul half rolled and half crawled back down to Crystal’s side, and with the awful defiance of a dying king heaving himself from his bed to sign the orders for a last batch of executions, staggered to his feet. The price he paid for this effort was to burst again into clear yellow flame. His skin prickled with pinpricks of sweat and he stumbled forward, supported by unreliable knees, his arms outstretched to catch a fall. He imagined his blackened flesh peeling like curled butter and falling softly to the ground. He felt everything false and shallow and cunning falling away with that burning flesh, and wondered nervously what was left.

Crystal resigned herself to following Jean-Paul’s wavering return. He obviously needed to be going home in some sense, even if home was a tent where he’d only spent one night. Guilty about the pleasure she’d taken in his speechlessness, Crystal started chanting to the female Buddha, OM TARE TUTARE TURIE SOHA, and immediately felt a downpour of reassurance, falling like a pelting rain of honey into the starving mouths of humanity. OM TARE, she imagined it falling onto Jean-Paul, TUTARE, she imagined it falling onto her, TURIE SOHA, their blood turned to liquid gold.

Jean-Paul’s flesh burnt away again and again. What was left? What was essential? He longed for a diamond body, an incorruptible and incombustible diamond body, but he could see only a charred corpse, a black-and-white war photograph as banal as it was hideous. In the burning ghats of Benares, beside the Ganges, the only other time he’d travelled exotically, he’d seen the bandaged corpses sit up as they burnt, sit up and burst from their bandages, resurrected by the medium that consumed them, but that was just a moment when fact and symbol made an amusing marriage. It meant nothing, nothing.

Sinking deeper into scepticism he started to contemplate with fresh anxiety the substructure of language, hidden like the submerged section of an oil rig under the opaque and frothing sea that separated the conscious from the unconscious mind. The garrulous and busy platform was language itself, the site of visible industry, but underpinning it was Chomsky’s deep grammar, the web of relations that made the acquisition of language possible. In the beginning was not the word but the grammar, a skeleton waiting for semantic flesh and giving it order. If the eye socket was not waiting for the eye, the eye might turn up on a kneecap or in an armpit. He’d too often glibly equated thought and language by expanding the term ‘language’ to include all patterns of imagery, but there could certainly be no thought without grammar. It was the hard wiring of the subject–object relation, and the thinker was always a subject even if, or perhaps especially when, he was the object of his own thoughts.

The reason Jean-Paul found these otherwise familiar reflections disturbing was not only that he experienced his own analogies with complete conviction, feeling his eyeball sliding down to his kneecap, or squinting out of the steamy and hirsute darkness of his armpit, but also because he felt his own deep structure being exposed to the danger of alteration. If his grammatical core was being corroded, if some fundamental girder was being removed or replaced, then a sense of self that went far beyond education, nationality, personal history or sexuality could be disrupted and he would lose not just himself but his opportunity to regain himself by reading the world in a way that made sense.

He had taken a drug, his body would metabolize it and everything would be all right. He had taken a drug, his body would metabolize it and everything would be all right.

Crystal felt engulfed in the golden cascade of her first mantra and, just as an espresso can be welcome after a rich meal, for those who still eat rich meals and haven’t given up caffeine, she chose to switch to the Dzogchen mantra, the ultimately laconic ‘Ah’. She immediately felt the change of energy. Clarifying, all-accepting, Ah, immersed fully in the moment, Ah, all the rocks vibrating with the same frequency, Ah, expression of wondrous surprise and deep simplicity, Ah, all sounds, all mantras, all colours converging in that one syllable, Ah, her chakras flowering in time-lapse bursts, like the purple convolvulus untwisting in the morning sun, Ahhhhhhhh.

Jean-Paul’s paranoia was relentless, but he staggered on. If he was left only with madness, it would be his own madness. The thing he could call his own in an inferno of alienation was the alienation itself! Hadn’t Nietzsche said that the measure of a person was his ability to embrace contradictions and hold tensions in place? He forced himself to look up from the dusty tips of his hiking boots and try to admire the landscape.

Crystal was exquisitely aware of every footstep she took as she wove her way mindfully among the patches of kryptobiotic soil and bare rock and fruitless sand. She felt the Earth calling to her and to millions of others, to rise to this level of kryptobiotic mindfulness. With one careless footstep she could disrupt the habitat of the tiny creatures that made up this living soil. She was deep into the interconnectedness of everything, tendrils of desire springing from her feet and webbing with the roots of all the plants of the Earth.

The silence now was as deep as a cathedral bell. The colours, the blue sky washing over the yellow stone and running into the pale-green sagebrush, spoke of a subtle harmony. She felt herself joining the landscape, not in some vaporous interfusion but with a groan of surrender.

They had just hit a patch of brilliant grass, each porcelain blade streaming with light.

‘Look,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘A Colorado bluebird.’

And yet we are in Utah, thought Jean-Paul, and still it persists in its scandalous blueness. This bird is a disrupter of nomenclature, a categorical dismemberment, a crosser of borders, an inhabitant of the margins.

Crystal sat down on the grass and watched the bluebird. Perched in a thornbush, it looked to her as vivid and brilliant as a painted tile from Isfahan, a songbird in the jewelled tree of a Persian paradise. She willed it to come closer and the bluebird dipped towards them and came to rest on a nearby bush. She imagined its darting perspective and felt she had entered the mystery of its consciousness, seeing the world reflected in the dark beads of its eyes. The bird flew closer still and turned at the last moment, revealing the darker blue plumage of its back, its radiant feathers dyed with a concentrated solution of the sky against which it moved.

The flight of this complex bird moving from bush to bush, thought Jean-Paul, traces the line of a telephone wire dipping and rising outside the window of a train. But what message does it bring along the wire? For two days he had been trying to impose comparisons and extract metaphors from this landscape. When the rocks, with their usual disturbing plasticity, had conjured up a city of minarets, pyramids and camels, he had pondered both the coincidence of this constellation of imagery – had one image triggered another? – and the inescapable fact that the Anasazi, the now extinct ‘original inhabitants’ of these canyons, could not have seen any camels or minarets or pyramids, unless of course they were Egyptians, as Robert no doubt believed. How had these unmistakable signs appeared to the Anasazi? Did they see things which resembled those objects in their own culture, or did they read the elements of the picture with a radically different gaze?