On the Edge

by Edward St. Aubyn

  ‘And of course it was Ramakrishna, and he was actually lying in the grass, and he was talking in rabbit language to the baby rabbits, and what he was saying was, “You’re very silly baby rabbits,”’ Adam lisped, ‘“because over there are baby snakes and you think they’re rabbits, but they’re not rabbits they’re snakes. Don’t go and play with the snakes because they’re going to kill you. Do you understand?” And the rabbits said, “Yes.”

  ‘And then he lay down with the baby snakes and said, “I love you and you’re right to be snakes, Mother made you snakes, but you’re not to kill those baby rabbits. You’re cleverer than they are and you know they think you’re rabbits and it’s very naughty and you must stop it.”’

  This guy’s got more voices than a jukebox, thought Kenneth.

  ‘There he was,’ Adam resumed in a voice which had discarded its copy of Peter Rabbit: ‘he wasn’t in the lotus position, he wasn’t emanating peace, he wasn’t collecting cheques for being enlightened. He was in the space of total love, and he was protecting the baby rabbits from the snakes, so he was honouring both of them.’

  What were the snakes supposed to do, thought Kenneth, in a fit of compassion, become vegetarians? Or were the mice they ate not made by Mother?

  ‘When you hear stories like that you realize you’re having such a limited experience. Here we are trapped in our identities, in our clothes, in our vanities, in our plans, in our projects, in our disciplines, in our dogmas. But the Divine itself is extremely humble, that’s the point we always miss – the Divine is so humble that it appears in a ladybird. We’re so busy thinking about the sixteen types of emptiness that we don’t notice that this thing we’re brushing off our sleeve is God.’

  In that case the sleeve it’s being brushed off is God’s, thought Brooke with relief, a bigger God’s.

  ‘Here is a poem that really speaks to this condition. Rumi is really giving us the neat vodka in this poem.

  ‘“In that moment you are drunk on yourself, you are prey to a mosquito…”

  ‘Everything is too much,’ Adam explained. ‘Oh, I’m feeling too neurotic to go into town today; oh, I’m feeling too desperate to go and feed the poor. “In that moment you leap free of yourself, you go elephant hunting…”

  ‘I love that line. Anything is possible.

  ‘I remember seeing a programme about Mother Teresa in Lebanon. LE-BA-NON. Everybody killing everybody else, because they’re all in such a drunken rage. Mother Teresa arrived and said, “Well, actually, across the valley there is an orphanage of spastic children, and tomorrow I’m going to get all those children out.”

  ‘And all the military authorities said, “You’re nuts! Do you realize that if you even walk out of that door you will probably be shot? Leave those children be, and if they’re all going to die, that’s fine. You’re going to walk through ten miles of enemy territory, and how do you even know that they’re alive?”

  ‘And she answered, “I’m going to ask God for those children, and I’m going to get what I want.” And the next day there was a ceasefire and she and a few old Lebanese ladies walked those ten miles and they took those spastic children out, and every one of them was saved, because she was mad enough to say, “I don’t buy your logic.”’ Adam shook with contempt.

  ‘“I don’t buy it,”’ he went on, calmed by his discharge. ‘There is another rule, there is another law, and there is another power than your pathetic little games. And that power is the Divine power, and love can call upon it, and she could, because she was humble enough and awake enough.

  ‘If you are on the side of love you can change the world – one person.’

  The room became silent.

  Brooke was crying. She didn’t quite know why, but all her other thoughts had disappeared and she was suddenly overwhelmed by pity and relief. Someone had gone in and saved the children. It was so moving.

  Kenneth looked at the effect Adam had created. Life was complicated. Sometimes Adam could shift the whole room by invoking the perspective of an absolute truth, but he was such an unreliable witness to that truth. His slash-and-burn, rave-and-squabble progress filled the air with the smoky perfume of burning bridges. But then, Kenneth pushed his logic forward, he, Kenneth, was such an unreliable witness of Adam’s unreliability. And who was the reliable witness of his judgement of Adam? What was the value of these judgements we all spent our time formulating so carefully? It was like one raindrop trying to estimate the position of another raindrop as they fell together through space.

  ‘Last year I came to a moment when everything was falling completely apart,’ Adam resumed. ‘We were being persecuted and divided and had no sex for nine months. It was a horrible, horrific story. I had told the truth about my guru and I had the demonic force of all the disciples against me. I thought we’d be murdered, and then a voice said, “Even if you die, the fact that you are trying to bear witness to the truth of life will mean that in invisible occult ways anybody who stands for truth will be fed by you, even if you’re killed, even if people believe the worst of you, it doesn’t matter, stand for life anyway. Get annihilated…”’

  Get annihilated? Is this still ‘the voice’? Kenneth wondered.

  ‘“… that standing, even if you’re defeated, puts you in the eternal order, not in the order of the world.”’

  Oh, so standing is good, thought Kenneth, who was getting hungry. It’s just standing on one leg which is bullshit. Standing and kneeling are good. He’ll be walking next; a proud moment. And what about that ‘eternal order’, sounds like an ‘elsewhere’, an ‘otherwhere’? Is this a man looking at life ‘without consolation’? Kenneth’s blood sugar plummeted.

  ‘Christ was, after all, in wordly terms, defeated…’

  ‘Christ, now he thinks he’s Christ,’ muttered Kenneth.

  Brooke smiled at him enquiringly. Kenneth smiled back obediently.

  ‘… defeated in this dimension, but the act of standing for what he believed really transformed our vision of life.

  ‘There’s an astonishing new discovery,’ Adam continued excitedly, ‘that, in Aramaic, Christ is punning with the last words he spoke on the Cross. They could mean, as they’re traditionally translated, “My Lord, my Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?” But the very word which means “forsaken” in Aramaic could mean, wait for it, “My Lord, my Lord, why hast thou glorified me?” The pun gives us the clue to the whole inner nature of the Crucifixion. The ultimate dignity comes from the total embrace of that abandonment, that’s the paradox.

  ‘Real mystic alchemy is not a game, because you’re dealing with the fundamental powers of the universe. It’s very, very difficult, because what’s trying to be born between two people on that path isn’t Shams and Rumi, but Shrumi or Rams. That’s why Rumi often signs the poetry Shams, because he genuinely didn’t know, he’d crossed over, they’d done it, Rumi was transformed by Shams and Shams was transformed by Rumi, and Shrams wrote the poetry.’

  ‘Adam?’ asked a middle-aged woman in a grey tracksuit and thick white socks. ‘Is Yves your Shams?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Adam calmly.

  Shall we call him Adamy or Yvam? Kenneth pondered. Or perhaps Jesus Shramdric? Or Mother Jesus Yvansham? Or The Gloriously Forsaken Mother Jesus Ramashramydam? Weak with hunger, Kenneth started to laugh silently but uncontrollably.

  ‘This is a new model,’ Adam resumed. ‘The tragedy of the guru disciple thing is that the guru isn’t implicated, whereas in this relationship both go to another stage of love and discover the non-duality which occurs when both beings are fused. And that’s what Shrumi is communicating.’

  Kenneth had a coughing fit and had to leave the room.

  ‘The only comparable relationship is a young child,’ Adam confessed. ‘I mean, when you’re a mother and that child is in pain, all the therapists in the world can tell you to be detached but you can’t sleep: the suffering comes from this immense identification with the other person. You’re not in any kind of theatre in tha
t love, you’re not on any kind of stage, you’re not posing, you’re deprived of all the normal games by which people control each other and control themselves.

  ‘Really, what goes on is that Shams says, “You fool, don’t you understand what’s at stake? Stop it.” And Rumi has a nervous breakdown which is exactly what he needs, because he has to have that breakdown to get to the next stage. And Shams then leaves because Rumi has to be broken by that leaving. This would look to a normal San Francisco therapist like madness. They have all sorts of fancy names like co-dependency and sado-masochism. They wouldn’t be anywhere near what was going on in the relationship, because what’s actually going on is atomic fusion, nuclear fusion.’

  ‘Do we have to have a nervous breakdown too?’ asked the woman in the grey tracksuit.

  ‘No, no, no. Bless you. You may be lucky enough to have a harmonious relationship, and that may be a karmic gift.’

  ‘Add children to this dynamic, Adam, and it’s totally different. You can’t afford to do this stuff if you have children. These two guys didn’t have to deal with children.’

  ‘Of course they didn’t, but they had to deal with homophobia. Try homophobia, darling.’

  ‘Why do you think the disciples were so vicious?’ asked the Frenchwoman.

  ‘I think they were freaked out that Rumi, who they were projecting on as a Master, suddenly appears as a person shattered by love, crying and unable to organize his experience. And then he was with Shams, this utter nutcase who is obviously going through something immense. They don’t want a Divine experience, they want security, and so they do absolutely everything to stop it, out of a mixture of fear, panic, anxiety, rage at other people’s happiness, incredible self-accusation at not feeling as much as other people, and hatred of beauty – don’t underestimate that: I think we all have it. And so on, and so on, we’re all in this game of comparison.’

  Kenneth tiptoed back into the room, looking studiously solemn.

  ‘But let’s not dwell on all of that,’ sighed Adam. ‘After all, is there anything more sublime in the world than sitting with a group of friends thinking about these things, in a place as incredibly sacred and radiant as this place has been for centuries and centuries. Being here with you I feel gratitude for the Earth, immense gratitude for the Sun. I feel affection for everyone that I’m looking at, because I know that everyone is sincere and searching and Rumi is the great wine-pourer, and something wonderful is going to happen whether we like it or not. We’re in the hands of powers greater than ourselves.’

  There was a murmur of appreciation from the room.

  ‘Let’s end with a poem. I might try to sing it for you…’

  ‘Uhmm,’ said several people encouragingly.

  ‘“Those tender words we spoke to one another,

  They will be stored in the secret heart of Love,

  And one day,

  And one day,”’

  Adam repeated the line, belting it out at top volume.

  ‘“They will fall like rain,

  And the whole earth will be made green

  With our love.”’

  Cheers and applause rose from the audience.

  ‘Isn’t that beautiful?’ purred Adam. ‘The springtime is coming, the real springtime, and this is the agony of childbirth.

  ‘I love you all,’ said Adam, hurrying towards the door like a man expecting to be mobbed. ‘And I’ll see you at four o’clock.’

  Brooke dashed after him. She had arranged a special lunch for herself and Adam, Kenneth and Yves.

  ‘Let’s not dawdle,’ said Adam, ‘or they’ll all come and ask me to read their poems. How was I?’

  ‘Brilliant,’ panted Brooke, trying to keep up.

  13

  The windows surrounded Peter with faint reflections of meditating figures, upright on their cushions. Slumped on his own zafu, he discreetly lifted his ankle from a pressed artery. His lower leg had been tingling its way to death on the carpet and he couldn’t bear it any longer. He was resigned to the ache in his knees which had taken up residence immediately, but he was surprised by the skewer of pain running from his neck to his right shoulder. He discreetly – discreetly again, although in this room full of statues every blink felt like an Olympic event – arched his back in the hope of bringing some relief. What was he supposed to do, meditatively speaking? Pretend it wasn’t happening? How was all this sitting around related to the strange experience he’d had in the hot tubs?

  In one respect he didn’t really care. He was in love with Crystal and he was in love with the possibility of a renewed ecstasy. Physical ruin was a small price to pay for these promises of self-transcendence which seemed to merge in the mysterious light of next weekend’s Tantric workshop. Although it was for ‘committed couples’, he still had twenty-four hours to persuade Crystal to come along with him. If she agreed, he would be completely broke and miss his last chance to go back to the bank on Monday morning. Peter felt the thrill of finally detonating the edifice of his old self.

  Everybody knew that being ‘in love’ was a state of temporary insanity, that’s why it was so important to make it last as long as possible. It was the bubbling up of the absurd conviction that he had just met a human being unlike any other: not wounded or demanding or confused; not deceitful or egotistical or cruel; not lost or weak or stupid; someone generous, splendid, inexhaustibly intriguing, and reciprocally deluded.

  Love was such a small word, how could its single syllable attend to so many catastrophes at once? Like a doctor in an emergency ward, it was always on call, covering for a fondness compounded of pity and duty, rushing to the scene of a violent sexual obsession, falling to its knees in a mountain monastery, throwing stale bread to clockwork pigeons, meeting somebody else’s wife in a hotel room, changing a nappy at four in the morning. What time could it possibly spare to certify his romances?

  Perhaps this time it was true love: not the insomniac registrar but the brain surgeon with steady hands. And yet, how had Crystal so convincingly replaced Sabine, and how had Sabine so convincingly replaced Fiona, all in a few months? Fiona, it was true, cried out for replacement. Her opinions were doomed expeditions, her voice a futile gesture, her kisses kamikaze pilots. Now, she seemed not to have been born into the complexity of the world at all, but to have slipped thinly and diffidently to the ground, like a page from a fax machine, the announcement of some fading appetites and sociological facts that stuttered, almost noiselessly, from the roller of her genetic fabric.

  He hated Fiona for the use she had made of Gavin’s death in the Cult Busters meeting she had been to with his mother. Hatred was famously close to love, people wrote books about that sort of thing, but it also had a justified reputation for not being close to it at all. As this thought passed through him, Peter could feel his hatred break up into guilt, and see pity rushing in to soothe the guilt. These Buddhists were certainly on to something. The exhausting business of turning his colliding and scattered emotions into a story about who he was was matched by the exhausting business of editing it into a story he liked. The first thing he asked about a situation was whether he liked it or not, and the next question was how it would ‘turn out’, which meant whether he would like it or not later on.

  During the last forty-eight hours he had been forced to see the extent of this tyranny. Even ‘meditating’ he kept asking, ‘Do I like this?’ ‘Is this for me?’ ‘Will I get enlightened?’ ‘Will I like that?’ ‘Are the others bored too?’ And that was when he was concentrating. The rest of the time he just drifted through the ghostly landscapes of the future and the past, arranging and rearranging them until he liked them more, or decided that he didn’t like them at all. It was pathetic. There he was again, having an aversion to his own mental life. It went on and on.

  Once or twice he had stopped asking, ‘Do I like this?’ and had felt the encroachment of a subtle and alien calm. Needless to say, in the face of this opportunity for a new experience, he had painstakingly reconstructed
the story which had just dematerialized. ‘Am I the sort of person who kisses a woman he hardly knows as he leans on a wooden fence above the foaming Pacific?’ Yes! ‘Am I the sort of person who then invites her to a Tantric workshop which will cost him his job?’ As soon as possible!

  He was in a radical frame of mind, partly thanks to Lama Surya Das, who was leading the meditation. Peter had expected a wizened ethnic type in a saffron toga, smiling tirelessly and bowing to the insects. The Lama in fact turned out to be a burly American who walked to his zafu as if it were the striking plate on a baseball field. Peter dimly sensed that somewhere in the depths of his meditating mind the Lama was perpetually hitting a home run, but instead of dashing around the field he stood there, watching the ball arc into the open space which was the true object of his attention.

  ‘Now that the mind is extremely spacious,’ said Surya Das, as if to confirm Peter’s speculation, ‘turn it back abruptly on itself with the laser-like question, “Who or what is experiencing right now?” Sense that directly, no need to analyse it too much, just pop the question and let go. Who or what is experiencing, controlling, thinking? See through the seer and remain free. Plumb that gap, that bottomless abyss, that luminous openness, pure presence. It’s too close, so we overlook it. It seems too good to be true, so it’s hard to believe. It’s too simple, we can’t get our minds round it. It’s too transparent, we can’t even see it. It’s not outside us, so we can’t reach it. That’s the innate great perfection. Don’t overlook it.’

  He fell silent again.

  Yeah, thought Peter, just pop the question and let go. He pictured himself falling through space, like a Magritte businessman. He let go of his umbrella, and fell faster. He heard the wind rushing in his ears. That rushing sound, that was pure presence.