‘Where are we?’ asked Crystal with a breathtaking mastery of language. ‘It all looks the same.’
‘Whuh,’ he managed, dragging the water bottle out of his backpack. Being on fire was thirsty work.
Why had she said that? Why had she introduced the further disturbance of pointing out that they were lost? Everything did look like everything else. They were in a fractal landscape: the smallest cracked pebble contained canyons that lay on the ground of canyons that branched off wider and wider canyons in a land of wide canyons. And those cracks led to gulleys that ran into streams that flowed into tributaries that disgorged into the churning ochre drain of the Colorado. Seen from above, he knew that this vascular system, contained within the echoing canyons, created another layer of resemblances to various anatomical, botanical, crystalline and zoological formations.
There were star-shaped flowers and, no doubt, flower-shaped stars, but these multiplying resemblances which might at other times have spoken to him of an intricate design, or at least of an intelligible vocabulary, now crushed him by annihilating the space between what had become purely mental objects.
A more primitive and chaotic collapse of space took place when he tried to make out where they were sitting. The pink and yellow rock shimmered and shifted like an exasperating piece of optical art, but instead of being able to step out of the pretentious gallery in which it hung and into the visual liberation of the street, he was installed in the centre of this little conceptual joke, caught like a loose hair from the paintbrush in the pigment that surrounded him on every side.
Surrounded and invaded: his own flesh was also a pink and yellow landscape which he could not help imagining flayed in a butcher’s window, a few sprigs of sagebrush arranged at the base.
These thoughts, which would have taken so long to formulate, took no longer to think than a wasp’s sting to sting.
As if this weren’t enough, he seemed to be in a landscape crowded with debris from an era of reptilian giants. Its petrified iguanas, tortoises, lizards and dragons were swapping positions at high speed, receding and rushing forwards like the garish chariots of a funfair ride.
‘I see what you mean,’ he said.
Each gasped word, particularly ‘I’, ‘see’, ‘you’ and ‘mean’, seemed to lead down hazardous mineshafts of communication designed by narrow conventions, held up by rotting props and filled with dead canaries. ‘What’ preserved a comparative innocence.
He knew that the only way to gauge real time was to move through real space, that the only way he could stop the poisonous vine of malaise from strangling him completely was to pit his most fundamental resources against it. This was not an experience to relax into but an enemy to defeat at any cost.
A low bank of earth rose nearby. If he could get to the top of it he might see something that would lead them back to base camp, to water, to food, to someone whose mind was not ravaged by psychedelic drugs, although he secretly believed that the disappointment of these consolations would tip him into permanant madness.
Crystal hoped the trip wouldn’t get any stronger. The beauty of the psychedelic realm was eluding her right now. She felt she was being taken further away from her centre, not deeper into it. The truth was she had wanted something for Jean-Paul.
When she had introduced him to Lama Surya Das at the New York Open Center he had said how many interesting questions he had about the nature of meditation. Surya Das silently made the gesture of unscrewing Jean-Paul’s head and throwing it away.
‘Ah, so you understand that I think too much,’ Jean-Paul said with satisfaction.
‘A lama understands everything,’ Surya Das replied with a self-mockery as gentle as everything else about him, except his passionate desire for full realization.
She’d thought that Jean-Paul might get ‘out of his head’ in a constructive way but now she wasn’t sure, watching him sway on all fours like an infant on its first crawl.
Jean-Paul clutched at the ground as if it was the last bush on the lip of a precipice, his fingernails filling with dirt. When he reached the top of the little mound he turned around and sat down heavily on the ground. The busy landscape, dancing with strobe lights, was as indecipherable as before, apart from the distant green haze of the first leaves breaking out on some cottonwood trees. He could remember seeing cottonwoods in the creek that ran parallel to the trail. He raised his arm and pointed in their direction.
‘There,’ he said.
Ostensive definition, was that all he could manage? He, whose student essay on Hegel had been the talk of the philosophy faculty of the Sorbonne for one heady week, was now reduced to pointing. He whose commentaries on Lacan were considered seminal by the analytic community in Paris was unable to form a sentence. Drugs had reduced him to an imbecile.
Crystal turned slowly and smiled at him. Maybe being a real man and finding the way home would help. There she was again, more focused on the other person than on herself. With this hint of self-reproach she felt the eruption of old feelings about her father. He had loved her even when he wasn’t there, he had never stopped loving her. Therapy had taught her to name and map her abandonment, but Poonjaji had shown her that he had loved her even when he wasn’t there, that he had never stopped loving her. For years she had been angry and filled with mistrust, but after seeing Poonjaji last year in Lucknow, she had gone down to Goa and spent a week lying on the beach alone feeling wave after wave of liberation. Every suffering turned into a teaching, and when she pulled at the oldest and heaviest chains of her soul, they tore like paper decorations in a child’s hands.
Turn the mind back to the source, that’s what Poonjaji always said. Yes, it was there, that humming, that deeper reality. It was there all the time, all she had to do was turn her mind back to the source. She felt the turning like a muscular contraction at the centre of her brain, and her attention vaulted over the thoughts that sensation provoked, over the thinking that enabled those individual thoughts to exist, and plunged itself into a limitless field of light. And then she knew, without needing to argue or to formulate it, that thinking was a degradation, a falling away, a clamorous and vain insistence on distinctions which had their conceptual charm, but no ultimate reality. The ruling force was not argument, or logic, or personality, or the individual manifestations of life, but life itself, the organising principle that germinated seeds, exploded novas, and deserted the body at death without leaving it any lighter. This mysterious, weightless and invisible force pointed to a genealogy more fundamental than the history of the things that had happened to her. She experienced it as not only transcendently grand but touchingly personal. Her whole body was taut but completely relaxed, as if she were locked into and held gently at the first stages of an unstoppable orgasm.
‘There,’ Jean-Paul reiterated hoarsely.
He was pointing to something.
‘Is that the way home?’ she asked.
He nodded. Crystal, while overflowing with loving kindness towards Jean-Paul, couldn’t help taking a mischievous pleasure in his speechlessness. When she had tried to tell him what happened when her sense of self was wedded to a sense of life that didn’t require her to think in the normal sense, he had scolded her, ‘But this pure Being is a linguistic scandal! There can be no thought without language and no language without culture. Even being asleep is a cultural act! We bring to it our expectations of the language of dreams, we bring to it quotations from a thousand books. When we say we are in a state of Being we place ourselves at the centre of a complex cultural argument, not beyond that argument.’