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 like 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.
‘It’s what Ralph Abrahams calls the “sunset effect”,’ said Kenneth. ‘While there’s a beautiful sunset, even if the optical effects are produced by pollution, people won’t understand the magnitude of the crisis.’
‘You see, you know so many interesting things,’ said Brooke, ‘even if you haven’t gone to the trouble of writing them down.’
There was an appreciative silence.
‘Kenneth, do you think the seals know?’ asked Brooke, as their car flashed past the glittering sands of Andrew Molera beach.
‘Know what?’ asked Kenneth.
‘That it’s the end of the world.’
‘Oh, they know,’ said Kenneth. ‘They know.’
* * *
Karen lay on the bed in her pink tracksuit listening to her Waves at Sunset tape which always filled her with a unique sense of peace and wonder. Stan, with that literal-mindedness which sometimes challenged his wife’s patience, walked along the cliff’s edge looking at the sunset and listening to the waves.