Well, he certainly wasn’t going to tell them about the second half of his dream, the wet half. He hadn’t had sex for so long that he wasn’t surprised, but the trigger for his unsolicited discharge was a girl he’d only met at Monday lunch. God, was it only yesterday? He had thought about her so much that he felt he had known Angela for weeks. He even felt a song coming on. The only lyrics Haley could inspire were vicious and sterile. What rhymed with aromatherapist anyway? Twist, fist, pissed, cut your wrist …
Angela was a workscholar, that’s what they called the people who paid to work here. Yes, paid to work here. He must get some workscholars in his band. He was going to meet Angela now in the baths. What a great place. You got to see someone naked straight away. What a crazy place where they got to see you naked straight away.
The door of the room opened and Jason stooped studiously over the page.
‘Are you coming to dinner?’ asked Haley.
‘No, I’ve got to write my dream down for Jungos.’
‘Isn’t that rather goody-goody of you?’
‘Look, if I don’t write it down you criticize me, and if I do you criticize me.’
‘See you later,’ mumbled Haley, leaving the room.
Gotcha, thought Jason.
A blue jay (Angela had told him that’s what they were called) landed on a tree she hadn’t yet named for him outside his room. It was beautiful here. He wasn’t really the urban thug he pretended to be. Can the birds tell it’s apocalypse time? That might make a good first line. As they beat their way through the rich brown air of Hollywood, they might start to wonder, but on this untamed coast, while the sun played its classic solo in the storm-washed sky …
Isn’t that what we’re all looking for? thought Jason, practising for Angela. Our own untamed nature. He felt another song coming on. What would we do if there was no untamed nature to guide us?
She’d love that, she’d definitely love that.
* * *
Angela had prayed to the Goddess to bring a beautiful man into her life, she had handed it over and trusted, and now she’d met Jason, a rock star from England. Life was beautiful. And the timing was perfect too. Without having a boyfriend, she had told all her friends that she was going to the Tantric workshop that weekend. You had to be a couple to attend. She’d just handed it over and trusted. Jason had a girlfriend, but she had a beautiful feeling about that too. The Goddess had sent her a dream last night showing her that they weren’t really suited, and that Jason was meant for her.
* * *
Crystal didn’t quite know what to make of the long, disturbing letter Jean-Paul had sent her from Paris. At its core there seemed to be genuine confrontation with the horror he had felt in Canyonlands but been unable to embrace. A lot of his time on the Lakoda reservation had been spent acting out the fantasies he had stored up from his passion for Western films, ululating and waving his power shield at the once indifferent but now paternal sky. In addition to this lonely pursuit, and with a bravery she couldn’t help admiring, he had done several tepee ceremonies, swallowing nauseating doses of peyote and discovering in the fire at the centre of the tent the chaotic video of his own fears, as well as the healing messages that Great Spirit transmitted through the earnest and practical prayers of his new brothers.
He described, in a surprisingly lyrical passage, how he had seen again the knotted balls of newborn vipers that rolled and writhed along the gravel paths of his aunt’s house in the Loire. As a child he used to watch them obsessively during the Easter holidays. His uncle put out poison and soon most of the vipers died, limp and scattered, like a burst bag of liquorice, around the fatal bowls. The flickering leaves of the poplar trees, the silvery ringing of his bicycle bell, all became vivid to Crystal as she sat beside the Esalen waterfall at sunset.
The others forgot about the vipers but Jean-Paul could not forget. The mockery and the disapproval of his aunt silenced the ‘viper-mad’ boy, but also shaped the solitary confinement into which all his terrors were later thrust, and out of which his cleverness, for what it was worth, was born. And now, out of the burning coals of the tepee fire a new ball of vipers writhed and rolled, and Jean-Paul, with the unbearable poignancy of a scalded child, writhed and rolled around the tent as well.
Snake medicine was powerful medicine, his new brothers told him. Whatever belief he was able to muster in the emblematic language of Great Spirit, he could not lose the sense that these were his vipers. This clinging to the uncollective unconscious drove him back to Paris, where they spoke his own dialect, but he returned irrevocably changed. Where was the subversive analysis of American culture he would have done better to write in the greenhouse of the Bibliothèque Nationale? His best friend said that it had been a grave mistake for him to leave France. ‘Nothing is more fatal to one’s judgement than evidence,’ he told Jean-Paul. Instead of being ludic he had become ludicrous, he told everyone else, who hastened to report back to Jean-Paul. His publishers told him that the French public’s love — hate relationship with American culture was crying out for his penetrating deconstruction. An old girlfriend found a pair of beaded moccasins in his cupboard when she quickly scanned his room for signs of a woman. His neighbours became grumpy about the monotonous drumming that issued from his apartment every evening.
Here, Jean-Paul started to describe how he had struggled to come to his senses, and the tone of the letter changed. The vulnerability which Crystal had rather admired gave way to a more familiar voice, but one which was giving birth to a somewhat obscure insight.
I remember attending a lecture by Jacques Derrida in which he described the ideal text as being ‘like a vagina, infolding and outfolding at the same time’.
I admired his audacity and his eroticism, but I imagined they were at the service of plurality and indeterminacy, the gods of my intellectual pantheon. I never suspected that this infolding — outfolding was the only structural expression that could be given to the rhythms which I would see and feel as I hurtled through the infinite depths of my peyote purgatory. It charms me that this copulative and generative image should be at the heart of true structure. We must have known something when we were born. The truth was, as it were, staring us in the face but, never formulated, it was easily forgotten as we learned to live in a world ruled by that sick tyrant and his part-time nurse, absurdity and stoicism.
How proud I was of my self-doubt, that bed of nails on which the existential yogi ostentatiously takes his rest. But if we do not doubt our doubt, if we are not sceptical about our own scepticism, it becomes the opposite of itself and is merely complacency wearing the mask of science. I doubted everything and then stood strangely pleased on the ground of my own doubt. What happened in Canyonlands is that the ground gave way, and I found, under the crust of my inadequate scepticism, a visionary realm where I stood in terror before the birth pangs of thought itself, the infolding and outfolding pulse of la pensée.
When we look at the detailed physiology of the brain processes which ‘cause’ consciousness (even though qualia may be ‘emergent properties’ which are categorically different, etc. — sometimes the instrument panel of language tells us we are on the ground when the windows are stained with a stratospheric blue), we see that the boutons at the tips of the axions that fire into the cleft of the dendrites are making love before they make thought … Je fais l’amour donc je suis!
Crystal had no precise idea of what Jean-Paul was saying. She must look into the riddle of consciousness one day. What the hell were axions? She realized that the synapses must look as if they were fucking — at least something in her was getting laid. Jean-Paul’s own style of lovemaking had a surprising amount of what he would have called ‘eroticism’. He appreciated a holiday from the cerebral even more than a belligerent sensualist. In the end, though, she wanted sex as well as everything else to be a form of meditation.