by Martha Ronk
A lie seemed, she thought, although she couldn’t explain why, less intrusive than the truth, less insistent because less obviously connected to the world. It was lighter than air and therefore, like words which in no way corresponded to the things themselves, perfect. From time to time she thought she was being cruel—not dishonest, since that seemed a concept so difficult to define that she simply brushed it to the side—but perhaps, she thought, perhaps cruel. He might think, as she was certain she wasn’t, that she was purposefully lying to him for some reason, but it was simply her way of showing him the nature of the world, of providing him a way of seeing more clearly or around corners.
You must understand, she said, returning to her usual point, that things won’t always be the same; you won’t always, as I am sure you must know, be glad to see me or miss me when I am not sitting here next to the Chinese lamp. Things are always changing, and just because something seems fixed, it might, one day, be quite otherwise. I mean, for example, you know, and she sounded, even she knew, preachy, things aren’t always what they seem—even photographs are doctored, you know, they simply scan them in and erase whatever they don’t want for the story or whatever. They take things out and put things in. He sat quietly listening to her and she found herself telling him that when she was a child her parents had needed to tame her speed, her hyperactivity they called it, and had thrown her against the wall. She looked over at him to see if he believed her. Yes, she said, they took me by the shoulders and threw me against the wall. I rocked myself to sleep in a corner, humming and banging my head on the wall.
When she had been in her twenties she spent time looking at photographs of autistic children who didn’t make eye contact, who refused to speak, who banged their heads against the wall. She remembered clearly how it had felt but she didn’t know if remembering made it true. It hurt some, but in truth that was nothing compared to the relief of hearing a steady and rhythmic sound that blotted out everything else. What was everything else, she wondered now, and what was wrong with those children that they had to muffle up the world with so odd a manner of rocking, swaying, banging. Now that she had told him she also told him that the person she was describing, the child she had in tow, seemed more like a character in a book than herself. It was so very long ago, she said, it can’t really be true, but simply a story I have made up.
The man sat quietly and listened to her. He felt, so it seemed to her, no great need to comment on these stories of her childhood, or for that matter, to analyze their meaning, their relation to him or even to her. He heard every word she said, but he didn’t need, as she certainly did, to make them make sense or to fit them into his sense of her, whatever that might be. He always said he was glad to see her when she returned for the weekend with bags of groceries, but she wondered what it might mean since she had told him so many stories that there was no way for him to know who she really was. What did he see when he looked at her and how, she wondered, could she manipulate his seeing without his knowing she had done so, and how would she want, in any case, to look.
She told him she had been a photographer, in a former life, but what she didn’t tell him was that it was her brother who had been the photographer and that the photographs she passed off as her own were ones she had taken from him. She entertained him, or at least believed she did, with stories about Nadar’s portrait photographs, their deliberate solidity, the way the folds of a person’s skin were like the marbled folds of the curtain in the background. We can’t help it, she said, we just can’t help believing that what’s in a photograph is real, no matter what.
She gave him a photograph of herself to put on his bedside table, a photograph that made her look completely natural—unposed, uncropped, undramatic. She did not look especially good or even as good as she might have looked if she had chosen more carefully. Yet in truth, she had had many photographs of herself taken and had torn up most and chosen not the one that showed her at her best, but the one that seemed most randomly selected, as if it were just left over or just the one she happened to find lying about to give him. She was looking out into space and her face was slightly, although only slightly, blurred as if she were in the early stages of flight. Such a gift, if one could call it a gift, was, she knew, another falsity, although she was as yet unable to name for what. She so wanted to give him something, some iconic disruption that would, so she convinced herself, ultimately please him or reorient him in ways he would surely embrace, if not quite yet. It was the artifice of the unaffected, the pose of the unposed. She had had a purposefully bad haircut, so short she looked like a boy, not unlike her brother at a young age. She said she was afraid he would forget her if he didn’t have the photograph to remember her by. You might forget me, she said, sitting under the Chinese lamp, knowing all the while that she wasn’t telling the truth.
In truth, it was she who would forget him, would forget after a short time what his eyes were like, and would be, therefore, in spite of the ploy of the groceries and the carefully prepared and polite questions, unable to return, and who would tell those who asked that he was, like the others, one of the betrayers who wasn’t, she had come to discern and despite appearances to the contrary, at all what he seemed. And she would continue to say to those who still would listen that it was a classic case of betrayal (You can never tell about appearances, she’d say) and would, somewhat to her credit, know that it was no such thing.
Soft Conversation
Whatever faith exists it will not be altered by human affairs. Those who believe deeply in the Buddha consider it possible that when he arrives the wind and waves will be calmed.
—Inscription in Cave 323, Tang dynasty
Their conversations were always so soft they didn’t get anywhere, but then neither did either get really upset or disoriented as happens sometimes when there is direct disagreement or tension between the two parties who are trying to agree about what to do about a specific problem, a hard one, or what should they do in general, even harder. It was as if they had entered into a room lined with soft materials and moved about effortlessly and easily, bumping into one another softly.
The shape of their conversations goes something like: what do you think, and yes I agree with you, and I’d be happy to try if you’d like to, and you certainly are right. The entire conversation has a sort of ritualized shape to it, organized around repeated phrases, and a rather respectful even reverential manner. If anyone thinks this is an exaggeration, just try eavesdropping once in a while. It is rather as if what one hears, rather than the individual voices, is a sort of echoing drone, a circling around a central tone of accord.
What is being set in motion by their engaged endeavor at agreement is not however only agreement but rather the process of perpetual becoming, each of them dedicated to the idea, although neither has a need to speak of it, of never reaching a conclusion and thereby slowing time to the eternal present by means of never arriving but always rearranging the terms of the agreement. If one comes into conflict, on the other hand, as they both recognize, one of the parties will win and one will lose and time will be reinstated. It will be 3 A.M. and one of them will exult, I win.
But if they keep on having the same or nearly the same conversation about, as it happens this time, a trip they might take in the future, they will possess that trip endlessly since they will never arrive at the moment of decision, will never buy the tickets, will never experience liftoff or jet lag and will never regret that the trip has come to an end.
Thus far they have successfully prolonged time through Thailand, Japan, and China, all places they thought they had wanted to visit and certainly they had read the guidebooks about, wanting especially to encounter what they believed would be a different sense of time, a sense of time slowed and prolonged towards which they aspired. They would, they thought, be encouraged to recognize the transitoriness of all human endeavor and the need to avoid attachments to the paltry things of this world.
She had been especially drawn to the Chi
nese caves at Dunhuang since time there was layered over itself again and again, walls originally painted in the 4TH century, then repainted in the 6TH and afterwards partially destroyed and repainted until the encrusted present was an emblem of multiple times overlapped into the present moment that they would see once they got there. It was the color she especially wanted, the hallucinated and druggy turquoise of the ceilings and, she thought, it must have helped those long-ago believers touch the eternity they chanted about while circling round and round the center pole. The Buddhist angels floated up there, holding bowls of timelessness in their outstretched hands. This was the trip they had most agreed upon; it seemed to them at the exact moment during which they were discussing it to be the most perfect trip in the world. Their voices grew soft and quiet as they came into perfect accord. The moment seemed to extend. The room fairly hummed with unity and pleasure. It will be perfect, they said.
But of course once they had agreed on the perfection of this specific plan and walked in circles about the living room, saying yes it seems exactly right, and I agree about the length of the stay, and what a good idea you’ve proposed, they were unable to move out of the perfection they already had in hand. It seemed a travesty to disrupt it. They could see the whole so completely that the thought of leaving this perfection for the imperfection of dusty travel stopped them dead in their tracks. And so they gathered themselves into the agreed-upon rituals of chanted accord. They pulled the caves of their own making in close and agreed that it would be best, yes, she echoed, for the time being, not to rush into anything, but to go over the same ground again and again, trying to get a sense of having already been where they had thought to go so that they could finally agree on how much they had thoroughly enjoyed the moment of standing still in the middle of Magao Cave 323 where they could almost hear the distant chanting of believers.
Listening In
She listened to him talking quietly on the phone, although she knew it was something she wasn’t supposed to do. She knew that in his former life others had pulled at him and asked him what he was doing, whom he was talking to, when he was leaving, and when he was coming back. Now the unspoken rule between them in this new life they had set up was to walk into the other room and not to.
She could, however, hear him say something in the even way he did no matter what and agitation kicked in. It seemed a reaction one might have to poison oak, although that couldn’t be right since this was a non-irritant that made her irritable. How could quietude in a quiet room set her off?
Trying not to respond to someone who most especially wants you not to respond was hard. It seemed a kind of setup if you were the sort of person, surprisingly, she found, she was. It was difficult not to say, who was that dear. It was difficult to try not to have a reaction when you were having a reaction and she found that trying not to try was worse.
She found herself lurking in ways she had never lurked before. She hadn’t thought of herself as someone who would lurk in the hall, just so she could listen in. She found her own body dragging slowly through the hall and found it hard to recognize herself, she who always had taken her days as they came. She wondered who that person was she had become, the one who listened in.
She had read about men who had secret lives and she was sure he was not one of them. But it was hard to tell despite his obvious integrity. Then too, you could never tell, and she was the one at home alone all day while he went off to teach his classes and although he said they were perfectly matched, it was true she didn’t understand the books he wrote. Somehow, despite the lectures she gave herself about it, these phone conversations made her feel left out and, although she had never used the word alienated before, it was what she felt.
His conversations were lengthy, quiet, serious. They took place during or after dinner while she was clearing up. She thought she could hear certain repeated words and she tried to piece them together as if she were knitting together an ancient manuscript. There were words she recognized like emptiness or dependent and there were words that came in a sort of tonal slur so that she couldn’t quite get hold. After holding back for sometime she’d sometimes allow herself to ask, in a voice a bit too bright, who had called, but he would smile and say no one or it’s nothing important, not meaning, she thought, in any way to dismiss her question which however he didn’t answer as he moved out of the room into his study.
Over a period of time she collected the overheard words in a list and when she typed them into Google she got back any number of sites she thought might be useful in sorting out what was going on in the back of his mind. Pages printed out in front of her and she underlined the important ones in yellow marker:
#1 Ultimate truth ‘cannot be spoken’ (pu k’ e shuo ag).
Taking up the idea of the unspoken, she tried to pare down what she said and more often than that to smile blankly during all conversations. It seemed a gesture that was as close to the truth as she could get, especially since her own smile was a bit crooked, one side of a lip sidling up farther than the other. She tried not to push as she had occasionally done previously, but to let things go their own way into silence.
At first she found this unpleasant, like watching a string of words freeze in the air. He continued to make the phone calls as he had always done, although he noticed that their interactions had shifted somewhat. Nevertheless, he had his work to do and he continued to move ahead, phoning, e-mailing, writing, and working. She wasn’t sure where this would get them, but she’d see.
She read: The Bodhisattva’s mode of being is described in terms of ‘no grasping,’ ‘no attachment.’ She was unsure what to do since she’d always liked holding onto him, not in public, of course—she hated couples who grabbed each other in public—but in the kitchen on the way through the house, she liked the sense of being attached to him, settled into his skin and clothes, washing them, folding them, a bit of cloth passing under her hands. She decided to leave the laundry until next week.
#2 Conventional truth is samsara in that it alienates one from the source and truth of all existence.
The word she grasped most clearly and the one that seemed most useful was conventional. She knew, of course, that he was the intellectual and she the conventional one. But before she hadn’t minded and he seemed to appreciate her willingness to keep life going for them both. She’d do the shopping and he’d go to work. She’d buy the groceries and cook; he’d read academic magazines before dinner and retreat to his study afterwards while she took up her colored pencils to draw.
She’d put on her favorite movie and then arrange the pencils in rows and draw precisely accurate pictures of everything in the house as Julie Andrews sang. She had already done the furniture, the items in the refrigerator, the contents of her purse, even the money, the coins and bills, the ticket stubs and credit cards. At first the pictures were not so small, but they began to get so much smaller that she could fit hundreds on a single sheet. As she fitted them one after another in rows across the blank paper, it seemed to make them all equal somehow, as if the large and the small could all be colored red.
She noticed that the unconventional women in the neighborhood tended to go to classes, gardening classes or yoga classes or mommy and me classes. You could recognize them by their footwear. Since she had no children and no garden, this left the yoga class, and so she enrolled in the local Y. Her favorite pose was the corpse pose at the end, but the rest was fine as well and she kept it up. One morning when he had needed to let her know he would be late returning from work, he phoned, but she didn’t answer. When he asked her where she had been, she said nowhere dear. She thought it would be best if she sprung all her unconventionality on him at once, perhaps for their anniversary coming up soon. She thought that might be the right time.
She hadn’t been sure she’d like the classes, they seemed so peculiar and the words so foreign, but she did. It seemed like loading the dishwasher. You had to be adept, you had to be precise, you had to pay attention to each plate and
slot. She slotted herself into the sideways facing warrior pose between two panes of glass. She floated in the space like an insect on a flower and, although she’d never felt so alone before, she also felt fine.
One day when her husband couldn’t reach her, he came home for lunch and slipped on the wet path up to the front door and twisted his ankle, not too badly, but it did hurt and he had to wear a soft cast. He found himself reaching out for solace in ways he hadn’t before.
When the phone rang after dinner, she answered it and then held it at arm’s length and waited for him to make his way with his one crutch over to the small space off the kitchen. She found that his sprain made him talk louder into the mouthpiece so that it was easier to listen for the special words, but she had to do the dishes quickly in order to get to the meditation class recommended by her yoga instructor, so she forgot to listen. Goodbye dear, she called and left as he was finishing up the conversation on the phone.
#3 Destruction, cessation, non-existence, elimination, exhaustion—all give negative description to the experience of ultimate truth.
