Maya

by C. W. Huntington

  And now, in India, everywhere I looked I gathered more evidence that there truly was something wrong with the world, something fundamentally amiss. Life was a continually deferred promise of happiness, a lie that no one dared expose simply because the alternative seemed worse.

  It was early December, as I recall, and I was browsing the stacks at the American Library when I stumbled upon Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death; it had only recently been published. Leafing through the pages, my eye fell on the following passage:

  What are we to make of a creation in which the routine activity is for organisms to be tearing others apart with teeth of all types—biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one’s own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue. Everyone reaching out to incorporate others who are edible to him. The mosquitoes bloating themselves on blood, the maggots, the killer bees attacking with a fury and a demonism, sharks continuing to tear and swallow while their own innards are being torn out—not to mention the daily dismemberment and slaughter in “natural” accidents of all types: an earthquake buries alive 70 thousand bodies in Peru, automobiles make a pyramid heap of over 50 thousand a year in the U.S. alone, a tidal wave washes over a quarter of a million in the Indian Ocean. Creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place on a planet that has been soaked for hundreds of millions of years in the blood of all its creatures. The soberest conclusion that we could make about what has actually been taking place on the planet for about three billions years is that it is being turned into a vast pit of fertilizer.

  As a child growing up in the American Midwest, the woods and streams and fields had always been, for me, a place of comfort. At an age when my friends were staying after school to play team sports, I treasured the solitude and silence of the small, forested area near my suburban home. I couldn’t comprehend why anyone would want to stay at school longer than necessary when he was free to roam outdoors, away from teachers and coaches and all the exhausting social games. The smell of damp earth in the early spring, the crackling of leaves under my feet in late October: this was my refuge.

  As an undergraduate I hiked and backpacked in the Smokey Mountains, the Adirondacks, and the Rockies. Later on, after Judith and I were married, we went together on camping expeditions. All my life I had turned to nature in order to escape the drudgery and nonsense of human society. It had never occurred to me that nature could be viewed as a “nightmare spectacular.” Becker’s words opened up a new and unsettling perspective.

  I passed the remainder of that afternoon and the next few days moving from one troubling book to another, from one bibliography to the next, following a trail of words that led like breadcrumbs ever deeper into the dark recesses of the natural world. I read of murder and cannibalism among lions, hyenas, and a seemingly endless number of other vertebrate species, many of which routinely organize in warring packs, maiming and killing their enemy’s young and battling each other to the death. But what I found most distressing were the unspeakable horrors of the insect world. There was Fabre’s Sphinx Wasp, capable of performing “the most delicate and exacting nerve operation on its grasshopper prey,” immobilizing the insect’s legs so that it can be sealed up alive in a darkened chamber with an egg deposited on its stomach. The egg releases a tiny larva, which begins, shortly after birth, to feed on the paralyzed grasshopper, chewing methodically into the living body of its host, avoiding essential organs, preserving the life of its benefactor for as long as possible. Ammophila wasps substitute a caterpillar for the grasshopper, leaving several eggs instead of one, so that the soft, living body of their victim writhes and squirms as it is eaten alive.

  This was a natural world far removed from the bucolic scenery of my childhood experience. But as an adult, how could I have remained so terribly naïve? It now seemed to me that I had been living, all these years, in a Disney film, some fantastically romanticized world that had nothing at all to do with the merciless truths of nature. It was all there in the title of Becker’s book: Denial of Death. Why had no one ever pointed this out to me until now? Why had no one forced me to look?

  There is a Sanskrit phrase describing the teaching of the Buddha as yatha bhutam darshanam, “seeing things as they are.” In Chicago I had studied Buddhism in the context of my graduate work in Indian religion and philosophy; but early on I had decided to specialize in the Hindu philosophy of Vedanta. Chicago was now far away; decisions I had made there no longer seemed quite so important. After reading Becker I decided to take another look at what we had learned in those classes and seminars on Buddhism. I began by reviewing the basic doctrines in the Pali canon. Pali is the classical language of Theravada Buddhism, the form of Buddhism practiced in Thailand, where Mickey had lived as a monk. This was where I turned for a fresh look at the most fundamental of all Buddhist teachings, the so-called four noble truths.

  According to the first of the four truths, every dimension of our present experience is infected with a kind of existential dis-ease called, in Pali, dukkha. Dukkha is the gut-level understanding that things are not in our control, and the anxiety that accompanies this understanding. Dukkha is most apparent at times of sickness and physical pain, or when confronting the infirmities of old age. But it is also present in the inevitable force of change and loss, in the shadow of death that falls over all our earthly joys. In order to enjoy our lives we repress any disturbing thoughts—including the thought that this present sense of well-being cannot last. However, some 2,400 years before Freud, the Buddha taught that while disturbing thoughts may be successfully repressed, the effects of repression boil up unpredictably, giving shape to all manner of perverse desires and fears. Even the best of times—what we call “happiness”—when viewed through the lens of this first Buddhist truth, are seen to be permeated by a chronic, inescapable unrest.

  The second noble truth teaches that dukkha originates in tanha: an insatiable thirst. The commentaries make it clear that the word “thirst” has two primary connotations, craving and clinging: “Craving is the aspiring to an object that one has not yet reached, like a thief stretching out his hand in the dark; clinging is the grasping of an object that one has already obtained, like the thief clasping tightly the object of his desire.” Reflecting on these words, I looked back over all the years I had spent reaching out for one thing after another—clothes, cars, status, sex, knowledge—only to see the anticipated pleasure slip through my fingers.

  To have and to hold, till death do us part.

  And what does the thief want now? What is the rarefied object of his present desire?

  The third noble truth—that the flames of this chronic malaise might once and forever be extinguished, not at death but here in this life—was a proposition truly beyond reckoning. Rifling through the Pali canon I discovered that the Buddha was reluctant to speak on the topic of nirvana, and when he did it was always through the media of poetry, parable, and metaphor:

  Certain recluses and brahmans have abused me with groundless, empty lies. They claim that I have led people astray with these words: “When one reaches nirvana, called the beautiful, and abides therein, at that time he regards the whole world as ugly.” But I never taught such a thing. This is what I say: “When one reaches nirvana, called the beautiful, then he knows for the first time what beauty is.”

  Robert Frost wrote somewhere that there are no two things as important to us in life and in art as being threatened and being saved. And it was right around this time in December, absorbed in Becker’s grim visions of nature and the teachings of the Buddha, that something did change. I would not call it nirvana, nor was I saved. But something changed.

  Since coming to India I had been increasingly troubled by a peculiar feeling—for lack of a better word—that I could not escape from myself. This feeling was epitomized in the dream where I stood, paralyzed, wanting desperately to get rid of the dead child in my arms. I re
called the dream one morning while laboring to unravel a particularly convoluted Sanskrit compound. I had by then entirely forgotten it and had in fact wanted to forget. But now, from wherever lost dreams are hidden, the memory of that dream returned along with the recognition that this urge to escape from myself was nothing new. Since long before Judith and I were married, I had fantasized about being someone other than who I was, someone wiser and more compassionate.

  But who is this person who so craves to be someone else?

  Dominated by this longing to be someone more spiritual, I had never thought to ask myself this simple question. Not, Who do I wish to be? But rather, Who am I? I had never really looked at myself without blinders or filters, prejudices or fantasies. To see myself as I was, however, I needed to accept myself as I was, for the two were, in practice, no different.

  I looked down at the dead child in my arms, no longer anxious to push him away, and as I watched he gradually came to life. He was, in a sense, resurrected from the shadows of night into the light of day, moving with me from one kind of dream to another, until all that remained of the unsettling image from Agra was his fair complexion. It was still me, but in this new vision I appeared to myself in the guise of Pierrot, the sorrowful, whiteface clown, pining away for his lost love, peddling his black Atlas bicycle along a tightrope stretched high in the air, his bland features branded with a greasepaint frown: pitiful and absurd, and in constant danger of falling from his lofty perch.

  It was not a particularly agreeable self-image, but it was entertaining in its fashion, and not altogether without romantic appeal. The character of Pierrot is, after all, an icon with a long pedigree: painted by Watteau, Fragonard, Chagall, Modigliani, Picasso, given breath and movement in Deburau’s mime, literary subject of Janin and Gautier, bourgeois citizen of post-revolutionary France, devotee of Schopenhauer, disillusioned hero of the Symbolists. Watching the clown perform—going about my daily business with classes, dealing with people at the Fulbright office—I began to come to terms with my role. Little by little the desire to be someone else no longer monopolized my attention, for my attention was now drawn of its own accord to the sheer spectacle of this tragic, alienated naïf who took himself and his troubles so very seriously, doing his clever tricks so far up there above the ground.

  Sitting alone in my room, a barrage of new questions pressed in. Where had this clown come from? Did he have any other life, before his life on the wire? Who was he when the costume was removed? Who was he at night, all by himself in the dressing room, seated without his makeup in front of the brightly lit mirror?

  Who was he, really?

  I resolved to see clearly who was incapable of love, who was lonely and filled with contempt, who was so dreadfully fragile, so eager for attention.

  All my life I had been told a story about myself—I had told myself a story—which, until now, I had never thought to question. In this story I was unique, with a special destiny all my own. I was defined by my capacity to evaluate opportunities, to make judgments on the basis of those evaluations, and taking into account such judgments, to make decisions and take appropriate action. It was moreover essential that I perform all these tasks correctly, for as the protagonist in my own story, I was defined not only by my choices but also by the necessity to endure their consequences—consequences that would cascade down upon me with the passing of time. The personality had to be groomed with the utmost care. Being somebody is, undeniably, a very serious business.

  And now I began to suspect that this story was, if not exactly wrong, somehow incomplete and therefore deeply misleading. What is consistently left out in the telling is the part about how this unique individual with the power to shape his fate inevitably serves as the pivot point around which the entire mechanism of suffering turns. Every action, every word, every thought that revolves outward from this center sows the seeds of pain in myriad forms. To be somebody—trapped in character—is to live an unending drama that is at once joyful and heartbreaking, beguiling and perilous, but above all, false. For the ego is, ultimately, nothing but a sad clown, a performer condemned to discover his own selfish desires and fears everywhere reflected in an endless hall of mirrors we call “the world.”

  6

  I MADE PLANS to travel to Banaras over Christmas. Not that Christmas meant anything one way or the other in India. In Hindi it’s called Bardha Din, or “Big Day”—as when a waiter said to me one afternoon, while depositing a stainless steel saucer on my table:

  “Aap kaa Bardha Din aanay wala hai na, sahab?”

  He stood there smiling cheerily, a damp rag slung over one arm. Waiting, I suppose, for some response. I stared at the contents of the saucer, a mound of sliced red onions encircled by a small wreath of green chilies.

  “Isn’t your Big Day coming soon?”

  Right.

  Christmas just seemed like a good time to get out of town, and the holy city of Banaras seemed like a good place to go. I had a contact there, a fellow named Ed Rivers. We met at that party where Judith freaked out under the watchful eye of my doctoral advisor. At the time Ed had been in Chicago visiting a mutual friend and this friend had brought him along to our apartment. He and I barely exchanged a word the entire evening, but Ed made a strong impression on me. He was fresh off the plane from India, and I could smell it on his clothes.

  As far as I was concerned, he might as well have been a visitor from Neptune sitting there in our Hyde Park apartment. He probably felt like one. This was a period when every male in the country under age thirty had shoulder-length hair either tied back in a ponytail or else left wild, flying in the wind. There was no other option. We dressed identically in ripped bell-bottom jeans, blue work shirts, and heavy construction boots. But here sat this placid man with short, neatly combed hair glistening with intensely aromatic oil. His manicured mustache extended out in two points that appeared to be waxed. And he was wearing tight polyester pants and blue rubber flip-flops. I don’t think he spoke more than three sentences all evening. He just settled into Judith’s big wingback chair and sat there, silently smoking dope and twirling the ends of his mustache, nodding and smiling like he was viewing a mildly entertaining documentary film on social customs among the people of the Amazon rainforest. Early in the evening we talked briefly about India, but as the night unraveled, I pretty much had my hands full.

  Still, the image of Ed Rivers, so far removed from the mad disarray of my life . . . it stayed with me. All I really knew about him was that he was a musician who had been living in Banaras for almost ten years, but when the Fulbright came through, I got his address from our common friend. In early December, when I began making travel plans to Banaras, I decided to write to Ed and ask if I might come for a visit. A week later I received a pale blue Inland Letter containing an invitation to stay at his place in the Shivala neighborhood.

  It was appropriate that this first pilgrimage to the holy city came when I had just begun to contemplate the significance of being threatened and being saved, of death and resurrection, for Banaras is traditionally known both as the Great Cremation Ground and the Forest of Bliss.

  The first epithet goes back to a collection of tales preserved in the Puranas, where the story is told of a minor deity who conspired to enhance his prestige by hosting a grand Vedic sacrifice in the holy city. He invited more or less everyone in the universe of any mythological stature except Lord Shiva, the Great Destroyer. Shiva had been intentionally left off the guest list because of his notoriously erratic behavior. This was to be a genteel affair, not the sort of gathering where one wants a known miscreant tricked out in leopard skin and dreadlocks, stoned off his ass, just waiting for the chance to hit on every goddess in the place and finish off the evening with his infamous dance of cosmic annihilation. Such is Shiva’s reputation. Unfortunately, when word got around that he hadn’t been invited, it caused a stir. A Vedic sage named Dadhichi stood up and publicly denounced the whole business, declaring that without Lord Shiva, the sacrificial
arena was nothing more than a polluted cremation ground.

  In the Kashi Khanda, a medieval chronicle, we are told that Banaras is the “graveyard of the cosmos” because even the most exalted deities come there to die at the end of the Kali Yuga, when Shiva crushes the world under his dancing feet.

  People say that in Banaras death is welcomed as a long-awaited guest. Death in Banaras is the end of rebirth, and so it is also the end of re-death. In Banaras, the texts say, the mighty tree of samsara, which grows from the seed of desire, is cut down with the axe of death and grows no more. Shops in the old city behind Chowk do a brisk trade providing bamboo biers for carrying the dead. Corpses routinely float through the crowded bazaars of the city, born aloft on the shoulders of village men who carry their deceased relatives from far away to be cremated here on the banks of the Ganges. It’s not uncommon to see such a litter with its macabre cargo strapped disconcertingly upright into a rickshaw, wheeling its way to the cremation ghats, or to catch a glimpse of somebody’s grandmother strapped flat across the roof of the family Ambassador like a freshly cut Christmas tree.

  In Banaras, only the flames of the funeral pyres never die. The cremation fires are the many mouths of Agni, oldest of the gods. Agni devours our offerings and cleanses this moribund flesh, unleashing the soul from its bondage to the wheel of samsara.

  Banaras is not only the Great Cremation Ground but also the Forest of Bliss. And Lord Shiva is not only the Great Destroyer, the supreme yogi unmatched in his ascetic fervor; he is also the greatest of lovers, unmatched in the enormity of his sexual passion. In what may be Shiva’s earliest surviving representation, a terracotta relief excavated along the banks of the Indus River, we see a male figure seated in the classic lotus posture, legs crossed, deep in meditation, a massive erection rising to his navel. My lingam is everywhere, Shiva proclaims in the Kashi Rahasya, like sprouts rising up in ecstasy.