She watched the waterfall turning back into a stream and rushing to meet the waves of the sea. The ceaseless chatter of the stream was silenced by the booming chant of the sea. A wave disclosed a seam of cloudy emerald before it came in a white rush among the rocks. God, she was at it too. Maybe everything was making love.
Looking at this scene, it was hard to believe an earlier passage in Jean-Paul’s letter.
I announce the death of Nature. The ancient dialogue between Nature and Culture, and its reconciliations in the pastoral, the Arcadian and the romantic, are over. Culture stands alone on stage and, like a bereaved husband who has ‘let himself go’, no longer seeing any reason for restraint without his old partner and his old opponent, gorged on sleeping pills and junk food, bloated and self-regarding, shouts out his repetitious soliloquy to an audience of widows like himself.
A seal popped up inquisitively. Those eyes that looked as if they had been swimming through their own tears.
‘Is it over?’ said Crystal out loud.
The seal made no reply.
12
Some people said, ‘Be here now,’ but what Brooke said was, ‘You’re always missing something.’
Here she was in an absolutely fascinating Rumi class, but she could be doing something else absolutely fascinating instead. She knew that Crystal Bukowski was at Esalen doing an exciting-sounding meditation workshop. Brooke was no stranger to meditation, she had built the most beautiful, completely authentic zendo in the garden of her summer place in Rhode Island. She even sent the architect to Kyoto to study the whole thing and get every detail right.
What finally convinced her that she was in the right place, that most elusive category of all, that spot you could never find at a party, was the secret thought that she was in a room with two men who, God forbid they should think she thought so, were on her staff.
Adam was a star, an absolute star, on her staff. And Kenneth was a complete failure, on her staff. The sinister thing (where was Dr Bukowski when you really needed him?) was that she had grown much fonder of Kenneth since his compromising admission of failure. Pathetic, downtrodden, powerless, he was only a step away from being completely perfect.
The wonderful thing about Adam was that he made Rumi so relevant. She had thought to begin with that he might be a little too homocentric, if that was a word, but she had soon substituted the permissive thrill of imagining she liked his introductory refrain, ‘Through the grace of the Divine Mother and the love of my husband…’
Her initial recoil from the suggestion that she see sperm as holy water was swept away by the thought that the comparison would have annoyed her own far from Divine mother. It also would have failed to make her mother think of sperm as any more sacred — for that, Adam would have had to compare it to a mint julep.
Both Adam and Rumi were fond of culinary comparisons. Rumi had said, ‘My poetry is like Egyptian bread.’ Brooke, who had been to Egypt, couldn’t help regretting this news. Apparently what Rumi had meant was that you had to eat it straight away, whereas Brooke felt that you shouldn’t touch it at all. Luckily the Johnsons, who were the most thoughtful hosts you could possibly imagine, had croissants flown in from Paris every day. They appeared miraculously at breakfast as their boat throbbed down the Nile, past the fundamentalist children gesticulating on the ragged banks. Poor Rumi probably never tasted a croissant. Anyhow, the point about the Egyptian bread was the same as what Blake meant when he said you had to kiss joy ‘as it flies’ in order to live in ‘Eternity’s sunrise’. She was learning so much.
Then Adam had said you had to seal the vessel of love with fidelity, that it was like making a good soup. Although there were no dogmas, you had to be faithful to one person for the rest of your life, and stay on your knees adoring God through that person. Once you were doing that, there was no room for any more dogmas.
Kenneth took notes discreetly in the back of Adam’s class. ‘Stop complaining and start contemplating; stop rebelling and start co-creating,’ he wrote.
Life was complicated; sometimes hypocrites and even idiots said things that were true. He was a hypocrite himself, so he ought to know. His conscience, like a sunburnt scorpion, was stinging itself to death. Adam’s case brought out all his new agonies of self-reproach. If only Brooke had been nasty to him, he could have hidden his failure in retaliation and escape.
Instead, here he was, Kenneth Shine — even his name was false — the former ‘ambience director’ of the Blind Parrots, a group whose ambience was more celebrated than anything else about them, sitting beside his patroness to whom he had sold himself as a New Age Prometheus, proposing to steal the forbidden fire of every spiritual fad anybody had ever thought of and stoke it into a single inferno of wisdom, but failing in fact to produce a single word. And here was Adam Frazer, whom he had always billed as a total fraud, turning out to be an unreliable soprano, occasionally hitting an unmistakably high note amid the shuddering props, gushing orchestration and weird melodrama of his performance.
What made the horn of Kenneth’s paranoia overflow completely were the attacks on fake gurus and New Age thinking which sometimes erupted from Adam’s tutorials on the incomprehensible splendour of Divine love.
‘It’s time for all of us to grow up,’ Adam was saying, pausing like a nanny who wishes to show that her own tantrums are more terrifying than anything her little charges could manage. Kenneth prickled with unease.
‘You don’t need complicated mantras, all that’s bullshit too. The Divine is always listening to the soft whisper of your heart…’
Or, in my case, thought Kenneth, the loud scream.
‘I used to go and visit an old Sufi,’ said Adam, ‘who lived in a small room with lots of books, and always had a bowl of fresh roses in the corner, and one day he said to me, “You know of course that Rumi and Shams were lovers?” And I said, “Of course they were lovers, they met at the highest point of the soul where hearts fuse, and their souls became one…” And he said, “Yes, but you know that they were lovers.” And I said, “Yes, at that level there’s no body any more…” And he said, “My dear Adam, go over to that bowl and take the rose out of the bowl” — I was completely confused by this point — and so I took the rose, this great big open red rose, and he said, “Smell the rose and tell me if it’s physical or spiritual.” I just took the rose and something very strong happened which I can’t put into words, and the full impact of that rose exploded all over my body and my soul and I realized the shattering stupidity of separating soul and body.
‘This is the secret that is being given to the whole human race now, which we’re at last adult enough to receive. Not the pasteurized, patriarchal version which splits off the spirit and the body, but the full secret of the full human Divine experience.
‘If you want to see the light that is streaming from everything,’ Adam incanted, ‘if you want to see the light streaming from your lover’s body, then you must be in a naked state of adoration and gratitude. If you want a rose to speak its secret name when you gaze at it; and if you want to be fed in dreams and visions; and if you want to feel with every second you spend on this earth that you are a Divine being; if you want that experience and it’s the only experience you want, because all the rest is pointless bullshit and vanity and stupidity and ego; if you want that experience, the Beloved asks only one thing — it doesn’t ask that you be brilliant, it doesn’t ask that you write three hundred and fifty books…’