On the Edge

by Edward St. Aubyn

  A second attempted rebellion, with daily acid trips and hits of Hawaiian grass from water-cooled bongs, foundered even faster as the analogies between the unreal and the Absolutely Real multiplied mockingly before her eyes. The brilliantined palm trees and the humming air, the way in which space collapsed into two dimensions and became perfectly pictorial, only to give birth by Caesarean section to a mental reality of potentially unlimited dimensions: all these flashy effects seemed to mimic the ecstatic promises of Realization. She felt the guilt and exhilaration of artifice, as if she were eating tropical fruit in a snow-bound city.

  She only really broke away from her mother when the trips started to go wrong and the surface excavations of her analysis opened into the deeply grooved fissures of an earthquake zone.

  This time it was Crystal who left a note for her mother in the empty apartment. She was only seventeen at the time but seventeen years later the embarrassment of that note still sometimes ambushed her.

  Dear Lynda,

  I’ve gone to live with Krater and Stash. We’ve decided to grab and grasp at the debris of the American Dream you’ve always so despised, before the Nuclear Winter gives birth to the ultimate Cockroach Civilization.

  Stash says that Roaches are going to be the only survivors and that they’re going to evolve into a superintelligent Roach race with weird myths about the Beautiful Bipeds who once ruled the planet, knew the secrets of flight, fission and long-distance communication but abused their power and destroyed themselves.

  Skeptical young Roaches are going to say that those are just myths, but we know that it’s true, because we’re living in the backward-stretching shadow of the Age of the Roach.

  Krater says that in view of the gravity (and the entropy) of the situation, we should get as many kicks as possible before we get the ultimate cosmic kick of Extinction. The only thing we have to do, of a religious nature, is to bow down every time we see a roach and say, ‘I salute the future.’ After that you can step on them while you’ve still got the chance to show that two feet are better than two dozen.

  ‘When I got this note I felt middle-aged for the first time,’ Lynda told Carla, an acquaintance of hers who was a therapist.

  ‘The note is about standing on her own two feet,’ said Carla. ‘She feels you’ve been involved with too many religions. Two feet are better than two dozen because when you’re looking for independence, your own despair is better than someone else’s hopes.’

  ‘Oh, my God,’ wailed Lynda, ‘my daughter sees me as a roach.’

  ‘Ya, but she’s a “sceptical young roach”, so she’s still your daughter.’

  ‘Anyhows, it’s not her own despair,’ said Lynda, ‘it’s Stash and Krater’s.’

  ‘Those are her two feet for the moment. They may not really be hers but at least she chose them.’

  ‘Here I am trying to be a good midwife to the New Paradigm and all the thanks I get is that my own daughter wants to squash me like a bug.’

  ‘It’s tough being a parent,’ said Carla, ‘but you gotta let go of her, she’s in her own process now.’

  ‘You’ve helped me a lot,’ said Lynda, but somehow she lost touch with Carla after that.

  Crystal entered a period of overwrought nihilism, cruising around LA on amphetamines. Fidelity was for the faint-hearted and everyone fucked everyone else.

  ‘It’s no coincidence,’ Krater used to say, ‘that “committed” is the word they use when they lock you in a mental institution.’

  Before abandoning formal education for TV, Krater had discovered that Goya was supposed to have said ‘Nada’ on his deathbed. Instead of ‘Yo’ or any other traditional gang salute, Krater, Stash and Crystal said ‘Nada’ to each other at breakfast (a meal they usually ate in the evening) and ‘Nada’ to each other when it was time to crash at lunch the next day.

  Televisions blared in every room, artfully tuned by Stash to ‘self-surf’, switching channels haphazardly so you couldn’t lose a sense of the triviality of the medium. If visitors were uncool enough to want to watch a programme, the gang would shout ‘Nada’. Sometimes, if Krater was up, he would launch into the fuller rap.

  ‘TV is the sewer pipe of this society. We stand underneath it, we shower in it, because that’s where the biggest roaches are.’

  They would clasp their hands together and bow reverently, ‘We salute the future.’

  One day, the gang was so bored by their own boredom, so underwhelmed by their own negativity, that they decided to stay awake until they died, in an amphetamine equivalent of La Grande Bouffe. Krater couldn’t do anything without a sound theoretical context. Although he regretted this lingering positivity, at least his need for meaning was dedicated to Nada, and so he said that there would be an exemplary sarcasm in dying of starvation in an obese society. They would represent an imploding population amidst the population explosion, homing in on Nada by diminution, consciously conspiring with the real nature of the world rather than struggling against it pathetically.

  He was worried by the respect for harmony inherent in this last part of the theory, but Stash and Crystal, who wanted to get going, told him it was perfect.

  Everything was fine for the first three days. They bounced around LA telling everyone that this was It, Adios, The End. Their friends were too cool to dissuade them; they were too proud to dissuade themselves. During the next three days the insomnia started to take its toll. Krater worked on refinements of the Theory. Should they stretch out their terminally weakened bodies in a roach-infested room, or did this show an unreconstructed desire to be part of the future? He argued each side of the case with increasing violence.

  Stash’s teeth started to fall out of his bleeding gums like ripe fruit. This blow to his vanity seemed to undermine his desire to die. Only Krater’s incandescent personality held the operation together. Stash was burning through a layer of cultural conditioning, he claimed. Romanticism had taught them that death was beautiful. Naturally they would have to break through the barrier of this myth as they descended into Nada. There would be a layer of horror also, he warned them. That too was superficial. Nada was flavourless, odourless, without affect: when they hit Nada there would be no pain and no peace, just an indifference he called White Time which would cancel the presence of either possibility. As usual, Krater was thrown into crisis by his own claims. Was he giving a transcendent value to White Time?

  Crystal tormented him with questions about the relation of White Time to the Buddhist Void and other rumours that had floated through the questing skies of her childhood. ‘Avoid the void,’ she wrote hundreds of times on the walls of her bedroom. This simple phrase shattered her addled mind again and again, sometimes itself disintegrating into ‘A void, the void.’

  ‘The definite article is definitely out,’ screamed Krater on the seventh day. ‘We can’t turn it into a place.’

  Later that day he crashed his car but failed to kill himself. Stash, unplugged from Krater’s rhetoric, fell into bed and slept for three days.

  Crystal, demented and sleepless, went out in search of the vitamins and honey she desperately needed, her exhausted mind reduced to a metronome, a void, the void, a void, the void. Clasping a pot of honey and scooping the golden liquid into her mouth, she staggered down Santa Monica Boulevard weeping with gratitude.

  Krater had a near-death experience and said there was nothing to worry about. Stash went to the dentist, who said there was plenty to worry about. Krater resumed formal education and went on to teach in the comparative religion department of UCLA. Stash started a computer company which gave ten per cent of its profits to the environment, without even building an advertising campaign around its generosity.

  After her Nada days, Crystal sat firmly on the fence, worrying that she was neurotic when she worried and worrying that she was becoming stupid if she ever briefly and haphazardly stopped.

  One day when she was twenty-nine, she almost crossed the street to avoid walking past the Be Here Now Metaphysical
Bookshop. Glancing distastefully into the window, expecting the usual hotch-potch of Crystal Rainbow Quantum Self-Help Healing Miracle books, their authors’ photographs bearing witness to the twin miracles of hairspray and marginal publishing, she saw instead a photograph of Shunryu Suzuki’s austere and imperturbable face. There seemed to be a certain tenderness in the one raised eyebrow. ‘I’m still here. Where have you been?’ it said to her guilty soul. She remembered the mosquitoes, and she remembered that she had a story of her own to pursue, distinct from the maternal see-saw of credulity and disappointment to which she had been strapped until her Nada days.

  The often-repeated claim that meditation was more like coming home than going anywhere was in her case literally true.

  * * *

  But what was going on now, in the famous present moment which, like a naughty child, couldn’t be left unattended for one second?

  ‘You know the way your parents used to say, “Don’t just sit there, do something,”’ Surya had said that morning. ‘Well, what I like to say is, “Don’t just do something, sit there.”’

  She folded her legs and sat on the lawn. Why was she so uptight? Why was she fleeing from the other people on the deck? Why were they bothering her?

  Why was she bothering to ask? She knew she mocked these fumbling seekers, whose left brains didn’t know what their right brains were doing, because she was shocked by her own clumsiness. During meditation that morning she had been daydreaming about sex. She hadn’t even watched the thought of sex arising and announcing its ephemerality, like the landscape from a train window. She’d been right in there, craving, projecting, tuning her fantasy so as to make it more gratifying, worrying about how many affairs to have at once. It was so uncool.

  Yesterday in the tubs, she had felt the adhesive longing of Peter’s glances, and she knew she hadn’t managed to let go of them. The reason was obvious: the desire was also in her. She had been touched by his desire to understand what had happened on the massage table. He hadn’t said anything to her at the time that it happened, but she had felt that sudden moment of involuntary concentration, she had seen him stagger back to the tub and she knew that he’d been mingling with the stars. It had happened to him spontaneously, just as it had not happened to Jean-Paul, either spontaneously or under the wild duress of psychedelics.

  She was shocked by her lascivious daydreams because she had come to rely on meditation at least delivering that first level of detachment, from which to observe, unmoved, the movement of her desires and dilemmas. Neither fear nor hope, neither optimism nor pessimism, could distract her from looking into the real nature of things, which meant, at this level, looking into the unreal nature of things.

  A cold demolition of the self lay at the core of her practice, but instead of making her feel cold it released her into a more passionate life, not focused on the volatile and exhausting play of her impressions, but on the clarity that enabled her to cut through them.

  From this foundation rose a hierarchy of states which she had classified in a private lexicon.

  There was that silvery dilation of consciousness in which awareness was itself the object of awareness, as if two mirrors were resting face to face with nothing to reflect except the power of reflection.

  Sometimes, as if it were tired of hurrying everywhere, time stopped and instead of one thing after another there was one thing, a moment rising out of the plain, like a mesa from the desert floor. The witness and what she witnessed arose at once, without a word of explanation, and stood in the silence of that single image. The whole mental landscape stretched skywards, as if it had agreed to El Greco’s gaze.

  If these long moments were reimmersed into the stream of time, it took on an erotic pulse, as if Tantalus’s torment had been reversed and she could eternally take the first bite of a white peach, over and over, perfect each time and each time freshly perfect.

  The key was to throw herself beyond the parapets of language, where a linguistic junkie like Jean-Paul could only imagine vertigo or nonsense. He had never tired of quoting to her the ominous and taciturn last sentence of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, ‘Of which we cannot speak we must pass over in silence’, but he took ‘pass over’ to mean dismiss, as you might pass over a candidate, whereas she took it to mean contemplate, as a hawk might pass over a landscape, missing nothing.

  Beyond the parapets of language, meaning could take flight into a realm of purer metaphor. But if images were further up the metaphoric stream than words, what was the object that revealed itself through these metaphors? What was the source?

  There was a silence that lay under the noise of life, and then there was what George Eliot had called ‘that roar that lies on the other side of silence’, the roar of the growing grass and the squirrel’s heartbeat. For Crystal the descent didn’t stop there. Under the roar she had found another layer of silence, and, concentrating carefully, under that silence she had heard a hum.

  How many strata could an archaeologist of silence discover, and what secret communications were packed in their hushed embrace? Was that hum the sound of some fundamental life? Or was it the sound made by the chanting of discarnate Tibetan monks who occupied a fairly shallow band of secret articulation among innumerable sub-basements, each sealed off by layers of apparently final silence, and including, in their descent towards the final object of contemplation, the chattering of extraterrestrial elves, as yet inaudible to her unrefined ear?

  She could only guess.

  What she knew was that beyond any fabrication there were those moments in which all sense of self was replaced by the sense of limitlessness. Who was having the sense of limitlessness if the sense of self had disappeared? That would be the logical question, but it could only be asked from the point of view which the experience had abolished. If these terms could be preserved at all, they had to be reorganized: if there was limitlessness, how could you exclude yourself from it?

  She could of course take a dose of psilocybin or LSD or DMT and bring on the melting boundaries, but then the limitlessness was paradoxically limited to the substance that induced it. Psychedelics could point the way to being free but in the end she wanted to be free of them as well. The experience of limitlessness in any case created its own natural resistance in the form of crippling impracticality and the terror of madness which shadowed the disappearance of the self. She didn’t want to add to it the toils of dosage and availability.

  Besides, the flamboyance of the psychedelic realm, its seductive way of suggesting that everything invisible could be visualised, kept her in thrall to imagery, when what really fascinated her was the persistence of consciousness beyond both words and images. Sometimes she struggled to provide a structure for this persistence, imagining the total absorption of the personal mind into an impersonal mind whose metaphorical play, if it had any, her mind was not designed to register, but whose presence she could detect by this vivid and palpable breakdown, by the sense that there was something she couldn’t grasp because it had grasped her.

  The joke was that she was sitting on the lawn at Esalen, picking the sultanas out of her grated carrots and musing about these high meditative states, when today she had failed to achieve even the most rudimentary concentration.

  Apart from the stew of sexual fantasy in which she’d spent the morning simmering, she had continued to speculate about whether she should fraternize with Adam Frazer.

  What did she care if she saw him here or not? The twists and turns of his career were really none of her business, she decided in a burst of simplification. Either Adam would arise or he wouldn’t. Such a useful word, ‘arise’ …

  ‘Hello.’

  Crystal looked up.

  ‘Adam!’ she exclaimed. ‘I was just thinking about you.’

  ‘That’s what happens when you think about people hard enough,’ said Adam. ‘They manifest.’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t even thinking that hard,’ said Crystal. ‘I must have special powers.’

  ‘I don’t l
ike someone not thinking hard about me,’ said Adam. ‘By the way, have you heard about Brooke and Kenneth?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, apparently, they’ve had a Wagnerian squabble. It turns out that Kenneth hasn’t written a word of the book which Brooke has been subsidizing for the last two years. He’s a complete mountebank, a snake-oil salesman.’

  ‘Is Brooke furious?’ asked Crystal.

  ‘Furious,’ said Adam, ‘but mature. They’re coming here for a weekend ritual workshop, for a weekend ritual reconciliation. Actually, they’re coming tomorrow to spend a few days on the coast, baring their souls. You know that they had an affair, don’t you? Or tried to have an affair. Poor old Kenneth couldn’t manage it, even when he closed his eyes and thought of the Morgan Guaranty Bank.’

  ‘I guess some people just don’t find banks sexy,’ said Crystal. ‘How do you know that’s what he thought about? Were you there?’

  ‘I can read his mind, and it has Morgan Guaranty written on every page,’ said Adam firmly. ‘Brooke’s threatening to sit in on some of my talks and to bring Kenneth with her. Typical of the extremely rich to want something for nothing, don’t you think?’

  ‘Humm.’

  ‘Remind me, you’re here for…’

  ‘Dzogchen.’

  ‘Oh, my God, isn’t that supposed to be silent? I’ve dragged you from the crystalline air of Himalayan contemplation into the dusty and toilsome plains of gossip.’

  ‘I was in them already,’ said Crystal, ‘but on my own.’

  ‘That is contemplation,’ said Adam; ‘gossiping alone.’

  He pressed his fingers exaggeratedly to his lips and tiptoed away.

  Crystal looked out to sea and emptied her mind.

  11

  ‘What a divine evening,’ said Brooke. ‘It’s probably global warming, which isn’t so divine, but let’s try to enjoy it anyway.’

  Kenneth smiled in agreement. His wise superior smile had given way to a grin of genuine relief. He was enormously grateful for Brooke’s magnanimity. She could have taken a harsh line about the entirely unwritten book which she had subsidized for the last two years but, after admitting to her sense of betrayal, she had headed for higher ground and looked for a way to handle the situation constructively.