by Rob Doyle
The Valium helped, before it ran out – I owe you. It would be fun if you were here. Although, if you were, who could I write to? It would be nice to drink red wine until everything was a blur, then wander the streets at dawn. I read your story, by the way, and thought I recognised the man, which made me feel I should keep my distance.
Most days I hang around by the canal, the cafes. I’m spending more money than is coming in, as usual. Often I feel I’m not writing or reading enough, that work proceeds too slowly. But then something clears and I realise it’s going at exactly the pace it needs to. Says the Tao Te Ching: nature never hurries, yet everything gets done.
Hotel
During my final year at college, I took an evening course in meditation at the Buddhist Centre in Dublin. The classes were held in a room below street level, so that you could look up and see the polished shoes and high heels of office workers hurrying past on their way home. Before taking the course, I’d had a vague understanding of what meditation was, coupled with a sense that I was the kind of person who needed it most. My knowledge of Buddhism was likewise vague. I thought of it as something exotic and reputable, a cultural practice of people in distant lands who weren’t as screwed up as I was.
On the first evening we were instructed in the two core practices of Buddhist meditation: the one that continually reverts attention to the breath, and the one that cultivates feelings of compassion for self and others. The effect meditation had on me was dramatic and immediate. My psyche was like a virus-clogged laptop that had been defragged and rebooted. Meditating for around half an hour every day, I was amazed at how clear and focused I felt, how in control of my habitually racing thoughts.
I decided that, in order to explore this new-found source of clarity, I would quit all the stimulants I’d been greedily consuming since my teenage years. This had never really struck me as a serious possibility before: drugs and alcohol, coffee and cigarettes were, I imagined, entwined with my very identity. I knew that these substances were not without blame for my ruinous inner state – the depression and exhaustion and anxiety and paranoia – but because they also seemed to offer relief from that inner state, I had rejected out of hand any suggestion that I give them up, even when it was put to me by my psychoanalyst. Now it seemed feasible to forego the endless pursuit of a high, because I had discovered something to replace it with.
I began hanging out more at the Buddhist Centre, where I took further courses (yoga turned out not to be my thing – it required effort, whereas meditation involved literally sitting there doing nothing) and bought books on Buddhism. I found the literature luminous and nourishing, a balm after the Gothic explorations of deviance I’d read as a student of psychoanalysis (I was studying for a master’s in the subject, impelled by the revelations of my own therapy) and the nihilistic art that was my usual fix. The later Buddhist schools in particular – Mahayana and Vajrayana – were seductively psychedelic and enigmatically metaphysical. (From the Heart Sutra: ‘The world is the same as the Void. The Void is the same as the world.’) It impressed me that Buddhism offered a blueprint for living that was not moralistic but rational – Buddhists rarely spoke of good or evil, only of skilful or unskilful actions. It did not require the abdication of reason but rather reason’s full application, though with the ultimate aim of transcending rationality. Buddhism as a whole was sunny and fresh; delving into it was like discovering Bach, or Brian Eno’s ambient albums, after years of listening to abrasive punk.
For a period – the phase of my life I want to imagine here – I was fanatically interested in Buddhism and hoped it might offer a way out of the predicament I was trapped in, if I could only exert enough vigour in aligning myself with its teachings. I wondered why everyone was not as passionately engaged with Buddhism – the body of wisdom I learned to call the dharma – as I was.
Time rushes past. We become swept up in life’s tumult. Years go by, full of drama and event. We roam the world. And then, during moments of calm, we see that time hasn’t really gone anywhere, just as we ourselves are right where we were ten years earlier, though our skin is tougher and lines are etched in our faces. It dawns on us that time does not progress along a line, as we supposed, but expands outwards, and deepens.
The Buddhists tell us, famously, that there is no self (the doctrine of anattā) and no abiding substance to the phenomena that make up the world in its flux. That can sound appealing. At least, it sounded appealing to the younger me, for whom the self was, as Nietzsche put it in his loopy idea of eternal recurrence, the heaviest burden. I still find it comforting to believe that there is no self – but only on those days when the self throbs like a toothache. Other times – when I get a rave review in a major newspaper, say – I’m quite into my self. I check my self out, admiring its reflection in the world’s mirrors. Then a hatchet job appears and I’m all for anattā again. The same oscillation runs through my feelings around impermanence, another big theme for Buddhists (anicca, they call it). All is transient; therefore do not cling, take life easy, roll with it. None of what arises and falls in phenomenal existence – the rave reviews or the hatchet jobs – is worth being swayed by, because none of it was ever really there. Again, it’s a nice theory – in theory. I alternate between taking comfort in the doctrine of anicca – nothing that hurts me can last – and being discouraged by it: if nothing lasts, what does anything matter? Why write books, if they and the beings who read them are destined to vanish utterly? It was precisely such runaway trains of thought that had led me into the depression from which I looked to Buddhism for solace. And here I am, years older and none the wiser. When it comes to the doctrines of anattā and anicca, I still want to have my cake (even though it isn’t there) and eat it (even though there’s no I to do the eating).
When I finished my studies in 2005, I had no sense of what I wanted to do with my life, other than that I ought eventually to become famous – my suffering seemed to merit it – and that I wanted to travel. I had a fair bit of money saved up, having worked part-time and lived at home throughout college. My friend Matt and I booked one-way flights to Bangkok, with the aim of spending a year travelling in South-East Asia. We would have done this anyway, but my recent interests provided an additional motive for exploring a region where Buddhism flourished.
I have been high with Matt in numerous time zones, and drunk with him on more occasions than either of us would wish to remember. When we flew to Thailand, though, it was the newly sober me who accompanied him. After touching down in the Bangkok night, we made for the Khao San Road, where we checked in to a cheap room with a huge, ominously wobbling ceiling fan. We lay on parallel beds as thumping music from the adjacent nightclub rattled the walls and epileptic neon flashed on the window.
After a few days of acclimatising in Bangkok, we set out along the backpacker route. While Matt endured hangovers and chased girls, I visited temples and looked at Buddhist art in museums, aware that if I had been born here, all of this would seem as dull to me as Catholicism did back in Ireland. Each morning, in the hostel rooms we shared to cut costs, I perched on the purple hard-foam blocks I’d bought in Dublin and meditated. While it sometimes felt like a chore, more often I relished sitting in the morning quiet, tuning in to the body, observing the drift of my thoughts. The technique of meditation is simplicity itself. The idea is that by gently insisting on a direct perception of the meditative object – traditionally, the sensation of the breath, considered as it flows through the lungs and abdomen, then through the nostrils, and finally in its entirety – the mental constructions that come between us and reality get cleaned away. It was no surprise that meditation worked so powerfully in my case: I really did need it more than others. If you put five plates into the dishwasher, four of them slightly dirty and one of them filthy, it’s the latter that will benefit most. When we arrived in Asia I had been meditating for several months, and the simple truth is that everything in my life had improved: I read better, slept better, wrote better, thought bette
r. I was more present to the people I encountered, less grindingly cerebral and abstracted. I no longer suffered from the social awkwardness that made me avoid eye contact and extricate myself from conversations at the earliest possible opportunity. Before I began meditating, I’d felt I was skimming the surface of life; now I was learning to sink to the depths.
Keen to see what would emerge from a period of intensive meditation, I persuaded Matt to join me on a retreat. Scattered around Thailand are monasteries that welcome Westerners who are willing to meditate for long hours and obey the monastic rules. The first retreat we signed up for was at Wat Pah Nanachat, a forest monastery in northern Thailand. We spent a month there, during which time we pledged to maintain the Buddhist noble silence.
Meditation should make you saner, but at Wat Pah Nanachat I meditated myself crazy. My grievances with the conditions at the monastery were many, and here is just one: the jackhammers that clanged and roared all day right outside the meditation hall. Monks in saffron robes wandered hither and yon, but the place felt more like a building site – it was a building site – than a realm of tranquil contemplation. My mind began to gnaw on itself with weird fixations and vicious self-critique. Eventually I broke. One evening, a couple of weeks in, I knocked on Matt’s cabin door. He let me in casually, as if this were normal and not a violation of our vow of silence. He sat on the wooden floor with his legs crossed, emanating ease, and asked me how it was going. When I tried to reply, tears came to my eyes. Matt looked away, embarrassed. We were not the kind of friends who cried in front of one another. After an awkward moment I pulled it together enough to unburden myself: I explained that I had grown terrified of my own mind. Inside me was a malevolent entity whose intention was to torture and annihilate me, and now this presence had the upper hand – I was at the edge of catastrophe.
Matt asked me, reasonably enough, what I was on about.
I tried to explain. Several hours of each day were devoted to walking meditation – you pace from one end of the hall to the other, bringing awareness to the soles of the feet. When you reach the wall, you turn around, then set out for the opposite wall. Simple enough, or so it would seem. But whenever I approached the wall, a feeling of disquiet would arise, as if the wall were a looming menace. Initially this feeling was mild, but soon it became unignorable. That was the problem: I tried to ignore the dread, with the result that it was all I could think about. I knew I ought to observe these obsessions as transient phenomena that arise and fall like any other, void of substance. But this knowledge was useless because now I worried about my worrying, and for all I knew this vortex of anxiety and meta-anxiety would expand to destroy everything good in my life. Any man who has been through the fiasco of sexual dysfunction will recognise the mechanism: first you get spooked by some mishap that would be fleeting and insignificant if you did not fixate on it; but you do fixate on it, and soon it is the worry itself – rather than the worry’s object – that blocks what ought to happen from happening. Worry manifests its object – we ourselves erect the gallows we swing from. Once again I had fucked things up spectacularly, allowed my lunatic obsessions to wreck what might have helped me.
Matt took all this in with calm interest. He himself, it transpired, was having a pleasant time – he would be happy to stay on for an extra couple of weeks, although he was looking forward to getting drunk in Chiang Mai. The evidence of Matt’s sanity reassured me – maybe I could be sane again too – and I managed to stay on for the remainder of the retreat.
We travelled to Laos, then to Vietnam, before swerving into Cambodia and back into Thailand. Our respective experiences in Asia ran in a neat parallel: Matt’s was nocturnal and hedonistic, whereas mine remained sober and largely solitary. Without drinking, I found it hard to be around people; I just wanted to get back to my books. Although I had forsworn partying, I got a vicarious kick out of Matt’s debauches. Often he would be getting back from his nights out as I arose to meditate. He would recount his drunken, lovelorn misadventures while I set up my meditation space, lighting incense sticks.
We attended another retreat, in the south of Thailand. I was still rattled by the previous ordeal, but this retreat came with strong recommendations and lasted only ten days. Sure enough, it was all that the northern boot camp was not, conducive to insight rather than implosion. Afterwards, Matt returned to Ireland, having exhausted his savings. The night before he flew out, I suspended my year-long abstinence and we whizzed through Bangkok’s bars, downing Long Island iced teas. Then he was gone and I was alone in Asia, with no real reason to be there other than an aversion to what other Westerners I met called real life, which seemed to mean doing what you did not want to be doing.
One evening, feeling that if I returned to my hotel room I might hang myself, I wandered through Patpong, Bangkok’s red-light district. I had avoided such situations as antithetical to my meditative focus, but tonight, depressed and lucid, I saw that I was free to do as I liked, in this unreal life on the far side of the planet from anyone who knew me. I watched a strip show in a dark venue where I was the only customer. A dozen girls crowded on a platform with a lit-up floor, all in white lingerie. They were like children, giggling and chattering, making no effort towards eroticism. I drank a beer, and left when I felt tempted by the smiling girl who sat beside me and placed a hand on my thigh, saying there was a room upstairs where we could go. Out on the shimmering pedestrian strip, I looked up to see a white girl in a red dress, as alone as I was, walking towards me. Our eyes met in a glance of abashed, charged acknowledgement that neither of us should have been there. A few days later we travelled together to Ko Pha-Ngan, an island in the Gulf of Thailand. At the gaudy tourist enclave of Haad Rin, we rented a motorbike and scouted the island till we found a secluded beach on the north-western coast. Wooden fishing boats drifted in and out from a jetty. A bamboo cafe served pad thai, coconut shakes, mango with sticky rice. We rented a beach hut, paying for three weeks up front. During the days, we lazed in hammocks and read, and rode to the island’s hilly interior, and had sex in our cabin with sand on the floor. Afterwards, as our breathing slowed, I could hear the swelling hiss of the surf, the cries of birds, the rhythmic dunk of a fisherman’s oar. Once, as I was phasing in and out of sleep, she read me lines from Camus:
We swim ashore to an empty beach, all day plunging into the water and drying off on the sand. When evening comes, under a sky that turns green and fades into the distance, the sea, already calm, grows more peaceful still … Knowing that certain nights whose sweetness lingers will keep returning to the earth and sea after we are gone, yes, this helps us die.
At night we got drunk on buckets of whiskey mixed with ice and Red Bull, and danced at psy-trance parties in the jungle, where om symbols and luminous Hindu deities hung above the dance area. In the mornings I would step down from our cabin and plunge into the gulf to wash away my hangover.
The first cracks appeared in my meditation practice. I’d been scrupulous about not missing a single day, suspecting that, if I did, it would be that bit easier to miss another, until soon I would not be meditating at all. Now, enervated from drinking, dancing, sex and the island sun, I tried to at least go through the motions – the non-motions – however sluggish and dull I felt. Some days, though, I was just too worn out. Looking back, it seems appropriate that my commitment began to waver during that hazy, dreamlike island spell. Perhaps the loveliness of it all – lingering in paradise with an attractive woman, given over to pleasure – showed me that I would never become any kind of Buddhist. The dharma was a refuge where I could alight for a while, recover vital energies lost to terrible times, and then move on. The Buddhists insist that sensual delight is fleeting, can only lead to attachment and misery and therefore must be renounced, but in my cells I knew that the earth housed no higher good. Denying myself would be like declining to swim in the blue waters of the gulf to avoid getting wet. Of course, when you flipped the perspective it was no less clear that they were right and I was wrong
. All of this would be my ruin. I was hooking myself on a drug that would one day run out, and when it did my anguish would be final and absolute. You fucked until you could fuck no more, at which point you were really fucked. There was nothing out there, nothing beyond – this was it.
Isolde flew home to Marseilles. I stayed on the island for a while, riding the motorbike and getting drunk alone. I left and spent a month trailing listlessly across Malaysia, then flew across the South China Sea to Borneo, too lonely to want to meet anyone. I was meditating every day again, heeding the Buddhist counsel and sitting with it – the sadness, the torpor. In the drag of depleted serotonin I boarded a boat that kept going upriver, through the rainforest, from one village to the next, till there was no further village to reach. The tribespeople lived in longhouses, and entertained themselves with illegal cockfighting and drunkenness. Former headhunters, they had modernised and were now more interested in tattoos. I got a tattoo, covering a prior tattoo I’d grown tired of. I took a picture and emailed it to Isolde. If you get bored of this one, she wrote back, you’d better just get the arm amputated.
Various people had told me I really must go to India, so I returned to Bangkok by train and flew to Calcutta. For the next half-year I traced a jagged arc across the country’s north. Other Western travellers – the kind who had careers and lives back home – would have needed no more than a month to tick off all the places I saw, but my approach to travel by now amounted to staying as still as possible, against exotic backdrops that gave this stasis a veneer of achievement. Whenever I moved on, I did so from a kind of politeness, a sense that it would be embarrassing if I just kept hanging around indefinitely. By drifting from city to city, I could maintain the appearance of motion when in truth I was going nowhere. On Christmas Eve, I got drunk on a Calcutta rooftop with a Norwegian girl whose head was shaved. The hangover breached my defences, and my body spent the next two weeks turning itself inside out. I was often too feeble to stagger to the corner kiosk for the daily bowl of boiled rice I was urged to get down me.
