Hanging with the Elephant

by Harding, Michael

  The first time I went to a meditation session in the Buddhist Centre in Cavan, we got instruction on how to practise single-pointed concentration. They said to sit with a straight back, in a lotus or half-lotus or Zen position, and pick a spot at the end of the nose and, rather than close your eyes, focus on this spot and breathe in and out. Let the breath come and go as it pleases. Don’t form it. Don’t control it. Don’t guide it. Allow the breath to come and go. As the thoughts come and go. And watch the breath. Watch the thoughts in the mind, rising and falling. But keep focused on the breath. In and out. With your eyes open and focused on some little spot at the end of your nose.

  Of course, they meant a spot on the carpet in line with the end of the nose. I didn’t get that. I thought they meant a spot that was actually on the end of my nose. So I was trying this for weeks, and going cross-eyed until I began to develop headaches every time I tried to do it. I think that’s when I gave up on the formalities of Asian practice. At forty, my body was too unruly to be moulded into anything close to the thin whippet-like bodies of men and women in the group around me; men as supple as young ash plants and women as delicate as dithering ballerinas. I was out of my depth.

  But over the years, I have definitely found a lot of spiritual consolation from sitting at the stove and doing nothing and it’s great after all these years to discover that I was actually meditating without realising it.

  On this occasion, of course, it was going to be different. I was going to do it right. And so I began. Hoping that the walk had emptied my mind. Hoping to focus on my breath.

  I took out a little meditation cushion. I lit a candle at the far end of the room. I found a small Buddha statue in a drawer and set him up on the table. I sat on the cushion and waited. Sadly, no great realisation or sense of enlightenment surfaced. In fact, I couldn’t keep my mind still for two consecutive seconds. The elephant was all over the place. For example, I started looking at the flame, but began thinking of a dinner party. I chastised myself. I must discipline this elephant, I told myself. But for some reason, I connected the image of an elephant with a badger. I know they’re not the same size but they do wobble in a similar fashion when they’re trotting.

  And that led me to think about the real badger. He’s invisible to me because he only moves around at night. But when we came here twenty years ago, I found his track through the garden, like a human pathway. He came over the ditch and into our sloping field and down at a diagonal towards the road on the southside of the property. Back then, the place was a soft hill, curved and smooth, and beneath the grass there was a million tons of shale.

  In time, Sean Quinn arrived, and he walked the land and pointed to where the sandstone ledge ended and where the shale had collected millions of years earlier, creating the hill that our house now sat on. Sean desperately wanted that shale and before long he had secured a deal with farmers around us to dig out a quarry just on the edge of our property. The diggers came and dug for months, and then years, until the hill vanished, except the ledge our house was on, and, at the end of our garden, a cliff emerged, dropping sixty feet down into a pond below. It was a dramatic change to the landscape. We had bought a house on a hill and it became a house on the edge of a cliff. Instead of having a few ditches as a view, we had the entire length of Leitrim in our windows, and mountains stretching from the top of Lough Allen to the southern point near Drumshanbo.

  But the badger wasn’t pleased. The warrens beneath the ground that had probably been there for decades or even centuries must have endured a terrible onslaught from the JCBs over the course of ten years. Then the recession came, and Sean Quinn was destroyed and the quarry closed and the gates rusted and heather grew around the pond below us as we looked down over the cliff.

  When I’d come back from the walk, I’d gone down to the end of the garden to examine the ash tree. It used to flower every summer and then produce a glorious flush of red berries. But gradually it had become choked with ivy, and when new fences were being put down by the quarry people, the tree was in the way so they cut it to a stump. However, in the intervening years, the roots had sent out new shoots and now a new daughter tree stood beautifully bare, beside the old stump and against the backdrop of the lake. I didn’t hug it, but I certainly curled the flat of my two hands around the bark of the young sapling and offered her a few words of encouragement. And that’s when I saw the badger track. The pathway had reappeared, exactly as it had been twenty years ago, a zigzag line through the long grass, the heather, the rushes and even through the fence. Mr Badger or his grandchildren now moved across the earth on the same lines as they had done for generations, long before the upheavals that had befallen them during the time of the boom and the diggers in Mr Quinn’s quarry.

  It took a lot of effort to get the badgers out of my mind and to start focusing on my breath again, but the next thing that distracted me was the banjo, because I couldn’t ignore it in the corner of my eye. It had been lying neglected in its case beside the computer desk for months. I don’t play the banjo. But the musician in Mullingar who gave me the walking stick also gave me the banjo for my sixtieth birthday.

  Perhaps I ought to have taken it up and played something. I could pluck out ‘Amazing Grace’ and the ‘Leitrim Jig’. I could play three chords – G, D and C – which I’d downloaded onto my iPhone the day after my birthday, so I wanted to quench the candle and pick up the instrument. I guessed that most people would find strumming a musical instrument far more soothing for the mind than trying to focus on a spot at the end of their nose. My nose as it happened.

  But I decided to persevere. I banished the banjo and began to focus once again on my breath. Breathing in and breathing out. I took a quick glance at the little plastic clock on the bookcase. I had begun at 11 a.m. and figured it might now be near midday, and I wanted to get a Scollan’s lunch before 1 p.m. because all the school students come then and create a bottleneck queue for lasagne. But the clock said it was only 11.10.

  The reason why my guru once told me that the mind is like an elephant was to explain how very hard it is to discipline the mind. Even with strong ropes, it’s not very easy to keep an elephant still. It will go where it wants unless it is trained. But beginning again to think of the mind as an elephant was making me tense. I can’t win here, I told myself. If my mind was a horse, I wouldn’t be able to control it. An elephant is way beyond me. It’s ridiculous. Why bother at all?

  I was now fighting myself. It’s a terrible twist that I get into sometimes when I’m trying to meditate. I’m sitting there as still as a statue of the Buddha but inside it’s mad. It’s a war zone of rage. I’m flitting through all the people I loathe. All the reasons I should loathe myself. It’s like a therapy group in my head but everyone has gone berserk and is talking at the same time. I end up more stressed out than when I first began. And though I was still sitting on the cushion, my hands joined in my lap and my eyes to the ground, I was contorted in fury, and full of frustrated desires to scream or kick the cat or just shoot someone.

  And maybe that’s why my mind eventually drifted to Afghanistan again. Or maybe it was because of the documentary that had surfaced in my BBC podcasts the previous day as I was driving home.

  A soldier had been talking about his tour of Helmand province.

  ‘We were driving over a ridge,’ he’d said, ‘and we came under fire. There were Taliban trenches all around us, which the Taliban had left half an hour earlier, and now we were in them and they were firing at us.’

  He’d said he liked techno music and that when he was preparing for a tour of duty he made playlists for his iPod. He used dance music for physical exercising and country and western music to put him to sleep at night when he was lying in some half-dug grave under the Afghan sky, but when he was in battle, he found techno music was by far the best soundtrack for killing. And he described what it was like on one occasion to be in battle, shooting away at other people.

  ‘They started shelling us with rocket
s,’ he’d said. ‘We were fighting them non-stop for forty-eight hours. And in those situations, if you get something wrong, you’re going to die. And as you’re picking your target, and as you squeeze the trigger and watch the target fall, you must be focused. And when you see the target fall down, you flick a map to give grid references to the guy on top even though the bullets are still flying over your head. But there is no fear because you are busy and focused. The fear only rises when someone shouts “Stores!” and you know that the aircraft who got your co-ordinates has just dropped its load and it’s on its way down and you feel sickly for a moment because if you got it wrong, it will land on you. And then it detonates. Your heart leaps. And you’re back up firing again. And of course you’re fully focused.’

  ‘Now that,’ I’d said to myself, ‘is what I call a man.’ And I’d been impressed by how much music meant to him. I could just imagine them all with their iPods and mp3 players banging away intensely and finding more focused concentration in those moments than I would ever find in twenty years of looking at a spot at the end of my nose.

  Earphones gave him the illusion of privacy when he needed to relieve himself sexually in the middle of battle, he’d explained – but I didn’t quite understand what he meant.

  ‘And just as in sex, when the killing stopped, the elation was intense,’ he’d said. ‘A euphoric release. But empty.’

  That’s what he’d said. The man was having some kind of mental orgasm as he killed other people. And he was euphoric about it. And then empty. You just can’t beat the BBC.

  ‘I had a metallic taste in the mouth like after adrenaline,’

  he’d said, ‘but empty.’ And he’d grown accustomed to it. And he’d needed more each time. More risk. It’s what turns men into boys. I could just imagine a squad of them with headphones and sexy battle fatigues, like warrior princes going off to slaughter, and them creating playlists for the action on their little iPods.

  ‘And when you’re fighting,’ he’d said, ‘when you’re scrapping all the time during an engagement, when it has become just an old-fashioned shooting match, it’s just like trying to get through a crowd to get water at the bar during a dance. So there’s a bias towards dance music. I mean it makes sense.’

  Right. Of course. Techno music, for the war on terror. You learn something new every day.

  ‘Bullets flying and the sound of RPGs is music in itself,’ he’d declared. ‘Sometimes I would put on my cans and listen to Josh Wink as all hell was breaking loose. Oh, yes, definitely,’ he’d concluded, ‘it focuses the mind.’

  Well, why the fuck was I wasting my time staring at the floor when I couldn’t focus at all? I was up on my feet in an instant and quenched the candle in complete frustration and went outside and paced up and down the garden, using the musician’s walking stick to whack last year’s nettles and me in a rage that I couldn’t quite understand.

  If she hadn’t been in Poland at that moment, what would I have done? If she were near me, if she were in the kitchen, what would I do? I would have gone into the house for a cup of tea, a slice of currant bread or a bowl of chilli soup; whatever was going. It would have calmed me down. Or if she had been in her studio at the end of the garden, I could have gone down and sat by her stove as she sculpted some new figure in clay. If she were not in Poland, she might have sustained me. Any kind of small talk would have taken me away from the badger and the soldier and the war in Afghanistan, because as sure as there is shite in a goose, meditation wasn’t helping me.

  MY MOTHER WAS afflicted with loneliness. I suppose it eats away at everyone eventually. Of course, it’s glaringly obvious in the old bachelors from up the hills buying their bread and rashers in village supermarkets, and you can’t miss it in widowers who take up carpentry just to belong to a club, or widows who go to yoga classes. And there’s often someone in the local book club or drama group who has had a sudden bereavement and is trying to get out of the house. And they walk with such a heavy weight that their loneliness is easy to feel. But there are lonely people in marriages, too. Unnoticed. Those whose smiles are a prison because they just can’t admit even to themselves that their partner is a waste of space, in case it brings the world tumbling down on their children’s heads or in case their mothers would say, ‘I told you so.’

  Sometimes when I see a couple sitting together in the corner of a bar, I can’t avoid noticing how she glows in his presence, smiling like the sun, holding her face close to his, but when she slips away to the bathroom, the smile evaporates and her expression is drained and uneasy – and then does the make-up seem just a touch overdone. And all her gloss and powder seem like a prison door behind which she too might be wondering why she always feels alone. Maybe everyone is lonely and maybe it’s incurable. And no matter how many relations hold hands around a deathbed, there is no escaping the solitude of that final letting go. And maybe that’s the secret of this universe. Certainly when I look at the happy young woman my mother was in pictures from the past, she didn’t know what the universe had in store for her.

  Her face blazed with happiness as she walked the streets of Cork, arm in arm with her friends. And even when we were growing up, she loved having people come to stay, and preparing dinners, and wheeling trollies of freshly made buns into the drawing room when the room was full, and making chicken soup dinners when her children came home from university for a weekend, and bringing buns to the old women in the annex of the county home on Sunday afternoons, and playing golf, and going to visit her sisters in Westmeath and Dublin, and staying up all night in our house at parties when there were other people there who would listen to her stories – and all that time she loved other people. She needed other people. But like all young people, she never thought she’d get old. Like many old people, she didn’t know why her heart had grown melancholic. I suppose the heart is the core of the problem. She reached out all her life to be held by others, because we all need to be held by something or someone. And as she got older, that holding was less firm, and the friends dwindled until they were few and far between, and she realised that loneliness is what kills us all in the end.

  She was in her seventies when the beloved and I first moved to Leitrim. That was in 1993. She drove herself to our front door on the first Christmas we were in the house, and again at the end of January, for our daughter’s first birthday party. But two years later, she was going downhill. She was seventy-nine and we thought she wouldn’t last much longer. She stopped driving. She was short of breath. And she had dwindled into a small bird of a woman in a tweed suit. She sat in the kitchen of our little cottage in the hills above Lough Allen on Christmas morning. Myself and my beloved went for a walk around noon, as the turkey roasted slowly in the oven. Outside it was snowing and the world was silent and white.

  ‘I’d prefer to watch mass on the television,’ Mother had said.

  So off we went, me and the beloved, arm in arm, while the old woman held herself in rigid attention for the pope, and the child slept in the cot in the front room.

  I thought it might have cheered my mother to be alone with her grandchild, but it didn’t. She was still watching the pope when we returned.

  ‘How was the child?’ I’d asked.

  ‘No trouble,’ she’d replied, as if the baby might have been a sheep.

  But now I know that while we were out walking, she was writing in her diary – a tiny book, hardly bigger than a cigarette box, with just one line for each day of the year.

  Christmas Morning. Last night they had visitors in the front room. A young couple. Teachers. I sat in the kitchen all night at the television. Very lonely. No wireless.

  Later that night, alone in her bedroom, she wrote about Christmas Day.

  My pudding and cake went down well, I think.

  On Stephen’s Day, she wrote again.

  Not feeling well. I want to go home.

  She stayed another six days but insisted on going home before New Year’s Day. We watched her pack her bag like
a sorrowful child heading off to a grim boarding school on the last day of December, and we put the small presents we had given her on Christmas morning into the boot of the car. On each of the six days, unbeknownst to us, she had written another terse report in her diary.

  Not well today.

  We had dinner in Ballinamore on the way to Cavan and when we got to her house, I discovered a leak from a pipe in the bathroom. The ceiling was ruined. I phoned a man, who promised to come out the following day and fix it. I kissed her on her dry, powdery cheek at the front door and drove away.

  ‘Ring me when you get home,’ she said.

  I tried her number later in the evening, but she didn’t answer. I left a message wishing her a happy new year and guessed she had gone to bed early.