A Body of Water

by Beverley Farmer

  All the same, the Rinpoche said, perhaps it’s sad for him to have been recognised so young and set apart and trained so rigorously. He himself was a child tulku.

  At the monastery school – he laughed – a child is chosen ‘Bodhisattva of the week’…(We all laughed too. Of course, this is charming. But wrong motivation – like children persuaded by Roman Catholic nuns to go without sweets and to feel virtuous for having mortified the flesh.)

  The parents of the dead girl have two living daughters, one just walking. They all went to the stupa today. The girls twined their arms around it in the sunlight, their hair a white dazzle.

  The Rinpoche came down to the farmhouse in jeans and tee-shirt in the early evening for his ride. The fat mare that grazes in the hollow was brought up and saddled and he trotted and cantered around and around the paddock. So did P tentatively, his plum-red robes trailing; so did G, recklessly, and was thrown in the long grass as if dumped by a wave – not hurt, he said.

  Hardly anyone is left here now. The last of us leave tomorrow. A woman is playing guitar by the fire downstairs and singing.

  MONDAY: We three interstate remnants who are left went to P’s guru puja early this morning. After breakfast I offered to help him move his things back from the gompa room to the A-frame hut in the bush. The narrow window beside his bed – beside his pillow – looks out on the lake of white trees. He showed me his mala of 108 beads, every one a tiny skull carved out of yak bone. We promised to keep in touch.

  The plane, delayed for hours by a thunderstorm, plunged and wallowed like a boat across Bass Strait while the passengers screamed, and laughed, gulping beer from cans. There are worse deaths, I thought; most deaths are worse. But it wouldn’t have looked good for Amitayus. I made a chaotic re-entry into my old life, there under the battered slate roof in Faraday Street, with a bit of help from my friend. I couldn’t wait to get back to the coast.

  Once here, walking gratefully down the metal staircase again and hearing the sea breathe and smelling its salt skin: I realised then how much I missed having it beside me – its taken-for-granted everpresence – while I was in the valley. The lake only looks like the sea; its smell is that of inland water, and its voice.

  The grapevine at Faraday Street is huddled yellowing in its corner, but here, in a great shaggy tangle of jasmine all along the fence and over on to the trees next door, the grapevine is green, brown, yellow, crimson – the leaves spread larger than webbed hands.

  Now that I’m back I think I might put aside work on ‘Red Fishes’ for a story set at the retreat. The lake, the gompa, above all the lotus window – the physical setting in its silent stillness to be emblematic, a mandala. The main character will be a monk, a European but not P – a very different man, detached, solemn and remote. He will encounter and be disturbed by an irreverent young couple. The encounter = the story.

  With a letter and a book of my stories that he’d asked for, I sent to P in his hut a copy of Rilke’s ‘Buddha in der Glorie’ and the haiku I wrote in the gompa.

  A temple of wood

  by a lake of dead white trees.

  Wheeling flies sing Om.

  Is there a jewel

  in the lotus? A crystal

  clear drop of water.

  Mist, trees round the lake,

  corpses of drowned trees mirrored

  are gone, wind-gathered.

  I dyed my eggs for Easter. I still do this each year. Some cracked in the boiling water and will be veined inside, a branching of crimson over the white skin. They dried a rich dark tamarillo red, glossy once I polished them with oil.

  J’s father died before dawn on Anzac day. She was in the armchair beside him at the hospital, as she had promised him she would be.

  She came down here on Friday, at sunset. We walked down the metal steps and along to the lighthouse, slowly, because she had trouble breathing. We stopped to rest. On the cliff above Yellowtail Rock we sat circled by mosquitoes. Her hand shook, holding her cigarette. She stayed nine days and nights at the hospital, not sleeping properly for all that time. She has nightmares when she does get to sleep.

  The morning of the funeral (Wednesday) began overcast and ended in thick rain. J in her black clothes went up and read from Isaiah, though not the earthy King James Version in my grandfather’s Crimea Lodge copy. (The Bible my mother made me accept as my fourteenth birthday present I got rid of long ago, lost it, threw it away.)

  And in this mountain shall the Lord of hosts make unto all people a feast of fat things, a feast of wines on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wines on the lees well refined.

  And he will destroy in this mountain the face of the covering cast over all people, and the vail that is spread over all nations.

  He will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from off all faces…

  Outside the church afterwards family and friends stood bunched up, at a loss, released into sudden awkward talk. By the time the cars reached the cemetery it was drumming rain, and mist hung in the shaggy gum trees. We waited for nearly an hour until a priest arrived – there had been some slip-up – and bustled through the service. The grave was oozing and puddling mud. A desolation.

  Looking up Isaiah in my mother’s father’s Bible, I dislodged a negative that she must have put there for safekeeping, between the black endpapers: of me in my pram in the garden at the old house.

  At last – ‘Epitaphios’ is accepted.

  The story about the monk is starting to take shape: ‘A Drop of Water’ is its name – from my haiku about the jewel in the lotus in the gompa window. A viable story, yes, I feel it in my bones: it will end my two-year drought.

  The knowledge that Eastern doctrines propose to us is not transmissible in formulas or reasonings. Truth is an experience and each one must attempt it on his own. Doctrine shows us the way, but no one can travel it for us. That is why meditation techniques are so important. Learning is not the accumulation of knowledge, but the attuning of body and spirit. Meditation does not teach us anything, except to forget everything we have been taught and to renounce all knowledge. After these trials, we know less but we are lighter; we can begin our journey and face the vertiginous and empty look of truth. Many centuries before Hegel affirmed the final equivalence between absolute nothing and complete being, the Upanishads had defined states of emptiness as instants of communion with being: ‘The highest state is reached when the five instruments of knowing remain quiet and joined together in the mind and the mind does not move.’ [Katha Upanishad]…The ultimate identity between man and the world, consciousness and being, being and existence, is man’s most ancient belief and the root of science and religion, magic and poetry. All our endeavours are aimed at finding the old path, the forgotten way of communication between both worlds. Our search tends to rediscover or to verify the universal correspondence of opposites, reflection of their original identity. Inspired by this principle, the Tantric systems conceive the body as a metaphor or image of the cosmos. Sense centers are knots of energy, confluences of stellar, sanguineous, nervous currents. Each one of the postures of embracing bodies is the sign of a zodiac ruled by the triple rhythm of sap, blood, and light…

  Octavio Paz: The Bow and the Lyre (My italics)

  The human body is the best picture of the human soul. Ludwig Wittgenstein

  I listened again to the tape of my parents’ voices, that D brought me when she visited last year, having kept it since we sent it to her in Athens in the late sixties. (D and I had grown up in the same street, in and out of each other’s houses: little girls in the sun in prams, on swings, on top of a pumpkin crop. Our mothers had been best friends until hers died young, of leukemia, just before this trip to Europe. She and I were writing to each other then, her letters to describe her travels, mine to enclose progressive attempts at a translation of the Axion Esti the untranslatable great poem…) We had each recorded a stilted little message, Mum and Dad, Chris and I, and filled up the tape with Theod
orakis songs gone tinny and quavery now, but they were contraband treasure in those days of the Junta and D was overjoyed. But the voices! Mum and Dad introduced themselves as Auntie Til and Uncle Colin, then carefully read what they had written down. I remember the day clearly, the four of us sitting in the lamplight, Dad delicately handling spools of tape. (No one else was allowed.) But to my amazement and pain, nothing about their voices was familiar to me.

  Since then, playing it over and over, I have thought, yes, I recognise them. Yes, of course. A trick of the mind? – like ‘remembering’ incidents of one’s early childhood that have become often-repeated family myths? I played the tape to Taki, and to H. Yet Mum died only nine years ago; Dad, fourteen. Fading, unwinding; being unmade.

  The poetic experience is a revelation of our original condition. And that revelation is always resolved into a creation: the creation of our selves. The revelation does not uncover something external, but rather the act of uncovering involves the creation of that which is going to be uncovered: our own being. And in this sense it can indeed be said…that the poet creates being. Because being is not something given, but something that is made…

  Poetry requires no special talent but rather a kind of spiritual daring, an unbinding that is also an unwinding.

  Poetry opens up to us the possibility of being that is intrinsic in every birth; it re-creates man and makes him assume his true condition, which is not the dilemma: life or death, but a totality: life and death in a single instant of incandescence.

  After creation, the poet is alone; now it is others, the readers, who are going to create themselves in re-creating the poem. The experience is repeated, but in reverse: the image opens up to the reader and shows him its translucent abyss…

  Octavio Paz: The Bow and the Lyre (my italics)

  Yes. Splash…

  Old pond,

  leap-splash –

  a frog.

  Basho (1644–94)

  ON BASHO’S ‘FROG’

  Under the cloudy cliff, near the temple door,

  Between dusky spring plants on the pond,

  A frog jumps in the water, plop!

  Startled, the poet drops his brush.

  Sengai (1750–1837)

  (Frog-splash. The German word gets it all-in-one: Frosch.)

  Now the sticky new little leaves on the broken hibiscus are all sooty with aphids.

  Mist – a stiffening of density in the air, like an egg beginning to poach – a frill, a lace lifting, a pallor – the earth the yolk inside it, veiled, unveiled as the waters of space move in the sun’s heat, light.

  H’s walnuts: shrivelled black purses like prunes, passionfruit – when they split they show the clean brown brain-shells inside.

  May Sarton in her Journal of a Solitude: ‘It occurs to me that boredom and panic are the two devils the solitary must combat.’

  Today I made three jars of red quince jam.

  A Drop of Water

  TENZIN WHO USED TO BE HANS lives in a shack on the steep bank of a lake. His eyes open at dawn beside a long pane of glass facing the lake in which currents of mist slowly slide and lift over green-leaved grey trees along steep banks, the white skeletons of trees drowned when the river was dammed to form the lake, and the reflected images of all the trees. He is confronted every day with the suffering world at its most beautiful, the spectacle of it spread like a tanka painting at his feet to illustrate Delusion, Impermanence, the Wheel of Life.

  Once, after meditating with half-open eyes which had seen nothing but his vision of the Buddha seated in front of him radiating a light which entered him in the form of white nectar, he saw the last sunlit web of mist curl away and a great white tree in the lake slant and subside like a ship into its white wake and vanish under the grey glass. Equanimity: the lake closing its silent lips, every leaf motionless.

  He meditates mostly on death. He has a mala for counting mantras: at first sight, a necklace of beans or of carious teeth, white turning yellow and brown-edged, but the beads are of yak bone carved into the shapes of tiny skulls. He sees himself found lying dead here one day with the mala around the bones of his neck, one great skull and one hundred and eight bead ones and he smiles: for all the world like a gift-packed Easter egg.

  After nightfall noisy possums and bush rats come round his shack. He spreads jam on bread and leaves it on the verandah, watching eager hands stretch out and snatch. Now and then he comes across a small animal lying dead in the leaves on a track, still plump and richly furred, resonant with blowflies, its mouth and eye-sockets and nostrils a red fretwork where ants are propping and tugging. Bush rats nest inside the walls. His room itself is ratproof. He will not risk the destruction of the Buddha. The rats fight and squeal at night. He wonders if a snake ever finds them and traps them in there. There are snakes around, tiger snakes mostly. He sees them less often than he hears them – a slither in the bracken, a wind fluctuating in the grass on a still day – and is always careful not to risk taking one by surprise. None, as far as he knows, has ever come into the shack, but it has dark corners during the day, and at night his candles and kerosene lamp, while they cast a golden warmth of light around, would not show up a snake.

  The shack is in a hidden valley, part of an old overgrown farm being run at a loss – though there is hope for it – as a Dharma centre. Life all over the valley is ascetic, the buildings mostly ramshackle, the food eggs and goats’ milk, rice and lentils and whatever else they can grow. There are power stations in the mountains, but the cost of a line to the valley puts it out of reach. Having no resident lama at the centre, they are glad of a monk, even a novice like Tenzin. The offer came at a time when he was looking for a solitary place to live. In payment for the shack all he needs to do is chop wood a few hours a week, and look after the gompa.

  The gompa stands apart at the end of the paddock. The heart of the farm, formally consecrated by an abbot, it has six walls, one for each syllable of the mantra of Tibet, Om Mani Padme Hum, Hail the Jewel in the Lotus; one for each of the realms into which beings are reborn on the Wheel. Blond shingles cap it. Being under that roof is like being inside a pine cone. Twelve rafters, spokes of a wheel, radiate from one great black trunk in the centre; six have a silky gold curtain on a track. The floor is polished pine and when the altar candles are lit their long flickering shapes burn along it. One wall has a vast brick fireplace, beehive shaped like ovens in old Europe. In another wall is the gompa’s only source of daylight, a small, square stained-glass window with a white lotus set in a sea-blue diamond, the rest of the panes clear (as is Ether, Mind) except for a small lozenge of light at each point of the diamond: green for Water, yellow for Earth, red for Fire, blue for Air, for Sky. Hung on a red thread, a faceted pale blue bead glows and magnifies in the white corolla of the lotus. The window catches the rising sun. The jewel in the lotus flashes, and the colours and black lines of the panes spread along the floor like a lance pointing at the fire. Incense and candlesmoke waver past the altars in the waxy sunlight.

  At that end of the paddock soft-leaved ginkgo trees have been planted inside wooden cages on which grey-green whiskers of lichen are growing long. A small white monument nearby, a stupa, enshrines the remains of a girl drowned years ago. At the hour when he wakes to go to the gompa, this dim shape among the cages is a child’s white beanie and dress. It has a window in the front in which a brass Buddha sits in meditation, and under it are engraved on a tablet the name and dates and the Perfection of Wisdom mantra. Om Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Soha. The window is lightly misted, as if the Buddha is breathing inside.

  When Tenzin arrived at the beginning of the summer he mistrusted his intense consciousness of the place, accusing himself of letting his senses attach him to its beauty and harmony, when his whole endeavour was to go beyond the senses. Now he in his material body has become one with the place, eating the food grown there and returning his wastes to it, and it seems to him that his mind has made of it a living mandala to be used, li
ke the mandalas and coloured Buddhas and Bodhisattvas in the tankas, as images reflected on the surface of the bubble of his emptiness.

  The summer is over in the valley before he notices: the brambles in the bracken are hung with blackberries, the tall ragwort stems all over the farm have small flowers. With the first frosts the overloaded quince trees in the old orchard droop and let their woody fruits fall in the wet grass. Like almonds when they first formed, over the summer they have ripened and bulged out smooth and golden all over but for the traces of pale green vernix clinging to their hollows. Blackbirds stand pecking into them, their beaks the same butter yellow.

  In autumn, he has been warned, his peace will be invaded. Before or soon after Easter the farm always holds a ten-day retreat. This year a young Tibetan lama is coming from California, one that Tenzin met in India – years ago when he was still Hans – soon after the monasteries in Tibet were destroyed and the boy fled across the Himalayas. They say his English is good now. Because families with babies are coming, Tenzin gives up his shack – wrenched, to his shame, by the loss of it – and takes his books and a few necessities to the small back room of the gompa.

  The day before the retreat begins the young lama arrives and the farm people welcome him with tea in the guest quarters and take him to see the gompa. Tenzin pulls the heavy log door open. ‘Tenzin?’ the lama says while they are slipping their boots off. ‘I know you. Have we met before?’

  ‘Yes, in Dharamsala.’ Tenzin feels his face turn hot with pleasure. ‘Back in the sixties. You wouldn’t remember.’

  ‘Oh! Long time. Your name I don’t remember.’

  ‘Hans.’

  ‘Hans, yes! Did you perhaps have very long hair?’

  ‘That’s right.’ He runs a rueful hand over the grey-brown stubble on his skull.