On the Edge

by Edward St. Aubyn

  Crystal’s relationship with gurus and spiritual authority was far from simple, and she recognized in her reading of Adam’s predicament the shadow of some of her own doubts and difficulties. Adam was a kind of authority himself, not only in his own eyes, but also in the part of her that was still impressed by his cleverness and notoriety. Why else would she be wondering whether to approach a man whose behaviour she found silly and corrupt? Was she expecting to acquire mystical prowess by association? And if she was, how different was that from his ruptured faith that, bathed in Mother Meera’s omnipotence, he could realize an omnipotence of his own?

  Crystal, too, had longed for paraplegics to rise from their beds as she passed, longed for emotional knots to unravel in the clear light of her presence, and longed to crown these powers with the touching modesty of disclaiming them. Perhaps the only difference between her and Adam was that when she had these longings she realized that, under present conditions, she was wasting her time.

  In order to see Mother Meera, Crystal had been forced to overcome reservations about going to Germany at all. Most of her father’s family had died in the Holocaust, and her sense of her father’s absence from her childhood was exacerbated by the ancestral void that lay behind him. Germany was the Fatherland of her fatherlessness, a personal wound that took the preposterous form of a nation state, it had bequeathed her not only a family which she didn’t know but one she could not know. Her loathing of its Nazi past cut across all her ideals of forgiveness and compassion. She went there to challenge her hatred and indignation, and found her desire to give them up challenged instead.

  Thalheim lay in what might have been called the heart of Germany until, arriving there, it seemed wiser just to call it the middle. The ugliness of the surrounding villages would have been dazzling enough without the hostility of the population to reinforce it, but the stony-faced family who ran Crystal’s boarding house in Dornburg chose to underline the atmosphere of dutiful depression with a particular grimness of their own. Frau Varden treated her clients as an insufferable imposition, as if they had been billeted on her by an invading army, while her two lumpish sons had perfectly decanted their sibling rivalry into a competition for the role of village idiot, knowing that the loser would always be welcome in some humble capacity at the local abattoir.

  Walking around Dornburg, Crystal’s thoughts grew wilder and wilder. She longed to haemorrhage against the walls to add a little colour to the scene. All the buildings were white, the gardens trim, the designs utilitarian. Post-war Germany seemed to be punishing itself for the extravagances of its past. If its internally shuttered houses and tight-lipped inhabitants were also trying to renounce world domination, the discipline carried with it a hygienic ferocity reminiscent of the drives it was designed to extinguish. No wonder the Germans had spent their history invading other countries. Who could blame them for wanting a holiday from their own Kultur? When she reached the edge of the village on her first walk, shivering in the December snow, she found a cute sign, decorated with a cow and a few buttercups, saying, AUF WIEDERSEHEN DORNBURG! It reminded her that on the flip side of every bully was a sentimentalist, like those smiling pigs painted on a butcher’s window, wearing a lop-sided trilby and a willing expression.

  The devotees in her boarding house added to her isolation by drowning all the fine distinctions which had crowded her mind since she had first heard rumours of Mother Meera’s divinity. For them the focus of controversy was not her status, but their own status, as measured by where they sat during darshan, the silent encounter with Mother Meera which was the climax of their pilgrimage.

  Crystal discovered this preoccupation at her first breakfast, and learned the nicknames of some of the Meera entourage, jokingly called the ‘darshan Police’.

  ‘I didn’t want to be in Kansas in the fucking kitchen,’ complained one American woman.

  ‘I was in the bookshop,’ her friend groaned, ‘and every time anyone wanted to get past me, they tapped me on the shoulder. Moustache Boy gave me a really nasty shove. You know, that was abusive. The only way I can figure it is that I had to learn something about my body.’

  Boris, a ponderous Russian living in North Carolina, controlled the little group through the power of his mind.

  ‘Please!’ he said, as if he were asking someone to remove their car from his driveway and couldn’t be expected to keep his temper for much longer. ‘Read Jung!’

  Everyone, it turned out, had read some Jung already and so Boris badgered them from another angle.

  ‘Jung only wrote one book for the public, that is Man and His Symbols, the other books are too esoteric for the public.’

  ‘Oh, I kinda liked Memories, Dreams, Reflections,’ said Robin, the woman who had been abused by Moustache Boy.

  Boris gave her a furiously soulful and patronizing glance with which he conveyed that she had not understood its inner meaning. When he heard that Crystal was living in California, he became bitter.

  ‘Ha! California,’ he said, ‘the capital of spiritual materialism.’

  It was too cold for Crystal to refuse a lift that evening, but she paid the price of overhearing Boris’s dream interpretation.

  That afternoon Robin had dreamt that she was driving a six-wheeled truck. Before she could say anything more, Boris explained that ‘Six is the number of the higher intelligence.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Robin.

  ‘Because it is the sixth chakra, the brow chakra, which is the chakra of the higher intelligence.’

  ‘Well, there are so many systems…’ Robin began, but she was soon silenced by the Rasputin-like power of Boris’s self-belief.

  ‘It is very clear: you are being driven by a higher intelligence,’ said Boris, turning into the municipal car park.

  Crystal, who was going to darshan for the first time, was able to break away and go to the head of the crowd, a privilege reserved for newcomers.

  A lecture on darshan manners, delivered on the edge of the dark and foggy car park by a skeletal and lamp-eyed man with a monkish haircut who looked as if he’d been interrupted illuminating a twelfth-century manuscript, advised Crystal not to look at the other devotees but to turn her attention inwards and meditate during the three hours she would sit in Mother Meera’s presence.

  While she stood there waiting to leave, Crystal overheard a snatch of conversation between two American men.

  ‘What did you say this guy’s name was?’

  ‘Poonjaji. He can really shift your perspective,’ said a man in a blue bonnet.

  Crystal felt a burst of affection for Poonjaji. She remembered her private interviews with him and the way he always went straight to the point.

  ‘Are you and I the same?’ he would ask in the warbling Indian accent she loved to imitate. ‘Is there any difference between you and my guru?’

  Nothing about the content of these questions could in itself explain why she had felt all the walls come down at once, and the undulation of a universal rhythm flow through her unresisted, not with the loud bliss of psychedelics but with perfect naturalness. The trouble with Poonjaji’s teaching was that there was no supporting practice, and it only took a long plane flight, a bout of flu and an unreliable man to turn this openness into a sense of agoraphobic naivety, quickly followed by closure. Having thought she was beyond meditation, she resumed with grim discipline. She couldn’t fly to Lucknow every morning for half an hour but she could sit on a cushion.

  What would be the Mother Meera effect? What would it show her, if anything?

  When the group of newcomers finally set off, the man who had spoken about Poonjaji was at the front of the pack.

  Someone came abreast of him. ‘First night, huh?’ he asked sarcastically.

  ‘Oh, yeah, well, like I figured I deserved a place in the big room,’ said the man in the blue bonnet.

  He’s lying, thought Crystal. He’s on his way to see someone who he thinks is either God or a fully realized human being and he’s lying in order to ge
t a better seat. What’s the deal here? Hasn’t it occurred to him he might be blowing it?

  And here she was on her way to see the same person and getting annoyed by the behaviour of a stranger.

  The group advanced swiftly and quietly through the streets, approaching a house with a large room on the ground floor and a dimly lit window upstairs. Ah, thought Crystal, uplifting her thoughts, that’s her home, that’s where we gather downstairs, and from her bedroom Mother Meera engages in her lonely work, sending the Paramatman light into the world.

  It was not the house. They moved on to a stubbornly ordinary village house and stood in line, having their names checked by a man with a clipboard and a mustard-coloured tie.

  Inside, Crystal sat down in a room crowded with rows of white plastic chairs; its wallpaper was silky and white, the floor tiles white marble, and against the wall stood a large armchair draped in pale floral silk. On the ceiling the light bulbs were contained by opaque glass lotuses, not with a thousand petals but with six, each petal patterned with sinuous tendrils of clear glass.

  Crystal sat down and closed her eyes.

  She was astonished by the speed and directness with which she was javelined into concentration. It was a ferocious state of mind, piercing her with a sense of urgency. Why was she holding back from the final generosity, the final embrace of life? How could she bear to run along the gleaming tracks of a determined and yet fugitive experience?

  All the touching deathbed scenes she had ever imagined flashed over her at once. Smiling serenely at her inconsolable friends, she would be wise and kind, a reconciliation in one hand and a legacy in the other, courageous in the face of pain, witty at the end.

  Why wait? Why wait until she had a hospice for an address? Why wait until she was twiddling the dial on a morphine drip?

  Why not do it now? If not now, when?

  She opened her eyes and looked around her, ostensibly to check whether she was participating in a mass psychosis, but also wanting to steady herself with the reassuring metallic flavour of irritation with which Germany and Boris had provided her so conscientiously over the last twenty-four hours. Who were these devotees she had fallen among? What context did they provide for her prickling sense of urgency?

  Not surprisingly, visiting someone called ‘The Mother’, there were various connoisseurs of the maternal: earth mothers, lost boys with pursed lips, thin unsuckled daughters. She looked around, relieved by the triumphant return of her critical mind.

  The honey-blond crew who discussed the enneagram over coffee in their lovely homes. Gold jewellery. Very long fingernails. They hold the saucer under their chins as they sip from the cup. They brush the crumbs from the corner of their mouths with pinched napkins. No minds to speak of, but a kind of gooey generalized lurv. Easter bunnies melting next to a fake log fire.

  And the hippies who’d done India and done acid and done communal living. Hair still long, but grey now. Experts on altered states who thought that Mother Meera might give them a hit that would take them back beyond the detoxifying diets, beyond the ashrams, back to the early trips.

  And old people who would hardly be able to get on their knees to rest their heads in Mother Meera’s consoling hands. They wanted to be less scared of death, of all the things they’d done and hadn’t done. Who could blame them? Who could blame any of them?

  ‘The Mother’ came into the room and they all rose, eagerly, coolly, arthritically. She’s a small Indian woman with a moustache and a fancy sari, thought Crystal, but she felt a visceral recognition during the avatar’s swishing passage through the room, and sensed a masterpiece of concentration housed in that fragile body.

  Crystal closed her eyes again and shifted instantly into an intense reverie. She saw an image of pale-yellow roses beaded with rain, and felt that this vivid picture was somehow accompanied by an elaborate anecdotal atmosphere.

  She was seeing these roses in the early morning, after talking all night in a curtained room with someone who was not yet her lover but would be soon. And then she’d gone outside. Wet grass, almost as laborious as sand to walk through, and the melancholy excitement of a new day without sleep, the smell of rained-on earth and, round the corner of the house, the roses, against a stone wall, their heads stooped with water, but also stooped from having to mean so much, like a newborn child who inherits a famous name, not just wet flowers but old roses.

  Behind her closed eyes she closed her eyes again, and the smell hit her in the middle of the brow like a picture nail. The inner sensation of beauty disarmed her predatory mind which, a few moments earlier, had been watching for something to condemn, like a cat beside a mousehole. Now, she had merged with an imaginary rose and was nodding carelessly on the edge of a symbolic realm, pregnant with the atmosphere of amorous adventure.

  Far out.

  If only I could sustain this awareness for ever, thought Crystal, immediately losing it, recognizing the inevitability of the loss, and finding a new centre. The operation was over in a second. Some things were lost, some remained. The thing was to see what was there, instead of moping about what was lost and hoping it might return. The enigma of how things became available to consciousness was some consolation for their apparent loss, as well as a promise of further loss. She had spent so much of her life chasing after half-concealed thoughts, like a diver hurrying towards a glint in the seaweed, only to find when she got there at last the lid of a tin rocking limply in the current.

  The roses were gone but she had cut through their loss with a bracing sense of present reality.

  This Mother Meera was quite something; or the collective expectation that she was quite something was quite something. What did it matter? In her presence Crystal was able to hover on the thermals of impermanence without needing to beat a wing. And if those warm currents, caused by appreciating the insubstantiality of her own thoughts, were removed, and she hovered in pure emptiness, beyond even acknowledging the emptiness, would she have to flap a wing?

  She experimented, relaxing completely into the knowledge of her own death, taking groundlessness as her ground, and free fall as her playing field. Instead of spiralling downwards, she found a still more essential poise. Her eyelids parted slowly, her lips parted slowly, and her slowly exhaling breath seemed to last from the beginning of time to the present moment, so solid was her sense of connection between those two non-events, passing like a rod through the centre of her body.

  Quite something, the little Indian woman was quite something.

  Curious to watch the process of darshan more closely, Crystal beamed in on the devotee who was kneeling in front of Mother Meera, his head in her hands. After a few moments he gazed up into Mother Meera’s eyes. Crystal was trying to discern the exact quality of the transmission when she was distracted by the sound of muffled crying.

  Only a few seats away from the avatar’s armchair sat the source of the noise. Her face was crumpled, halfway between the tear pump of a devouring Picasso hysteric and the glycerine leakage of the sickliest devotional postcard. Tears streamed down her cheeks with such hydraulic prowess, it was hard to believe that she was not connected to the mains water supply. As one fluid ounce followed another into a chain of soggy handkerchiefs, Crystal started to imagine the slates of a mountain lodge glittering in the spring thaw; Venetian floods submerging the chequered piazzas, and eventually, in pure awe, Noah’s ark bobbing under a dehydrated sky.

  The reason she couldn’t find her way to compassion was the repulsiveness of the display. It seemed to be divorced from direct suffering and to spring on the one hand from a simple rage that Mother Meera was getting so much attention, and on the other from a veil of piety suggesting that only she, Wasserworks, understood the exact nature of the sacrifice the Divine Mother had made by descending into the charnel house of human incarnation.

  Crystal tried to persuade herself that this was the core of suffering, the suffering of self-centredness, and that it too required compassion, but she only grew more exasperated.
Wasserworks’s strategy of draining attention towards herself was bad enough, but the dissonance of her calamitous expression as she looked at darshan was like going to a concert with someone who stoutly whistles another tune during the performance. Crystal tried all the usual self-accusations to discover why she was so annoyed by this woman, but finally had to give up and be annoyed by somebody else.

  Immediately behind Wasserworks, and in comic contrast, was Mrs Ecstasy, who had her hands folded over her heart and her head cocked to one side and a grin from ear to ear. She looked like a clown on a circus poster.

  Crystal tried to stop but she simply had to accept that she was doomed to shuttle between passages of exquisite insight and blasts of annoyance and disrespect.

  Ah, there was the liar, without his blue bonnet, looking shifty as hell. The Macbeth of darshan, whose victorious proximity to Mother Meera was utterly compromised by his means of winning it, was sweating on his throne. Whatever self-righteous pleasure Crystal might have taken in his punishment collapsed at the thought that she must soon present herself to Mother Meera. Who was she to condemn Blue Bonnet, or anyone else? What was so pure, after all, about her own state of mind?

  She realized she was asking these questions in order to be able to look without malice into the eyes of what might be God, whoever she was, or an agent of the Paramatman light, whatever that was. The calculated nature of this correction made her feel even more phoney. She realized that any pretence would give way like so much sodden paper, and that this too was an effect of the context she was in. She exhaled and let it happen, finally coming to rest in the knowledge that she had come to Thalheim, however misguidedly, because somehow she wanted to be a force for good in the world. That was true. She could rest there.