God, the French were crazy. All she’d been able to say was, ‘It doesn’t feel like a cultural argument. It feels great.’
‘But culture is great, culture is fantastic,’ he’d said. ‘Also, it’s all we have.’
Jean-Paul half rolled and half crawled back down to Crystal’s side, and with the awful defiance of a dying king heaving himself from his bed to sign the orders for a last batch of executions, staggered to his feet. The price he paid for this effort was to burst again into clear yellow flame. His skin prickled with pinpricks of sweat and he stumbled forward, supported by unreliable knees, his arms outstretched to catch a fall. He imagined his blackened flesh peeling like curled butter and falling softly to the ground. He felt everything false and shallow and cunning falling away with that burning flesh, and wondered nervously what was left.
Crystal resigned herself to following Jean-Paul’s wavering return. He obviously needed to be going home in some sense, even if home was a tent where he’d only spent one night. Guilty about the pleasure she’d taken in his speechlessness, Crystal started chanting to the female Buddha, OM TARE TUTARE TURIE SOHA, and immediately felt a downpour of reassurance, falling like a pelting rain of honey into the starving mouths of humanity. OM TARE, she imagined it falling onto Jean-Paul, TUTARE, she imagined it falling onto her, TURIE SOHA, their blood turned to liquid gold.
Jean-Paul’s flesh burnt away again and again. What was left? What was essential? He longed for a diamond body, an incorruptible and incombustible diamond body, but he could see only a charred corpse, a black-and-white war photograph as banal as it was hideous. In the burning ghats of Benares, beside the Ganges, the only other time he’d travelled exotically, he’d seen the bandaged corpses sit up as they burnt, sit up and burst from their bandages, resurrected by the medium that consumed them, but that was just a moment when fact and symbol made an amusing marriage. It meant nothing, nothing.
Sinking deeper into scepticism he started to contemplate with fresh anxiety the substructure of language, hidden like the submerged section of an oil rig under the opaque and frothing sea that separated the conscious from the unconscious mind. The garrulous and busy platform was language itself, the site of visible industry, but underpinning it was Chomsky’s deep grammar, the web of relations that made the acquisition of language possible. In the beginning was not the word but the grammar, a skeleton waiting for semantic flesh and giving it order. If the eye socket was not waiting for the eye, the eye might turn up on a kneecap or in an armpit. He’d too often glibly equated thought and language by expanding the term ‘language’ to include all patterns of imagery, but there could certainly be no thought without grammar. It was the hard wiring of the subject — object relation, and the thinker was always a subject even if, or perhaps especially when, he was the object of his own thoughts.
The reason Jean-Paul found these otherwise familiar reflections disturbing was not only that he experienced his own analogies with complete conviction, feeling his eyeball sliding down to his kneecap, or squinting out of the steamy and hirsute darkness of his armpit, but also because he felt his own deep structure being exposed to the danger of alteration. If his grammatical core was being corroded, if some fundamental girder was being removed or replaced, then a sense of self that went far beyond education, nationality, personal history or sexuality could be disrupted and he would lose not just himself but his opportunity to regain himself by reading the world in a way that made sense.
He had taken a drug, his body would metabolize it and everything would be all right. He had taken a drug, his body would metabolize it and everything would be all right.
Crystal felt engulfed in the golden cascade of her first mantra and, just as an espresso can be welcome after a rich meal, for those who still eat rich meals and haven’t given up caffeine, she chose to switch to the Dzogchen mantra, the ultimately laconic ‘Ah’. She immediately felt the change of energy. Clarifying, all-accepting, Ah, immersed fully in the moment, Ah, all the rocks vibrating with the same frequency, Ah, expression of wondrous surprise and deep simplicity, Ah, all sounds, all mantras, all colours converging in that one syllable, Ah, her chakras flowering in time-lapse bursts, like the purple convolvulus untwisting in the morning sun, Ahhhhhhhh.
Jean-Paul’s paranoia was relentless, but he staggered on. If he was left only with madness, it would be his own madness. The thing he could call his own in an inferno of alienation was the alienation itself! Hadn’t Nietzsche said that the measure of a person was his ability to embrace contradictions and hold tensions in place? He forced himself to look up from the dusty tips of his hiking boots and try to admire the landscape.
Crystal was exquisitely aware of every footstep she took as she wove her way mindfully among the patches of kryptobiotic soil and bare rock and fruitless sand. She felt the Earth calling to her and to millions of others, to rise to this level of kryptobiotic mindfulness. With one careless footstep she could disrupt the habitat of the tiny creatures that made up this living soil. She was deep into the interconnectedness of everything, tendrils of desire springing from her feet and webbing with the roots of all the plants of the Earth.
The silence now was as deep as a cathedral bell. The colours, the blue sky washing over the yellow stone and running into the pale-green sagebrush, spoke of a subtle harmony. She felt herself joining the landscape, not in some vaporous interfusion but with a groan of surrender.
They had just hit a patch of brilliant grass, each porcelain blade streaming with light.
‘Look,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘A Colorado bluebird.’
And yet we are in Utah, thought Jean-Paul, and still it persists in its scandalous blueness. This bird is a disrupter of nomenclature, a categorical dismemberment, a crosser of borders, an inhabitant of the margins.
Crystal sat down on the grass and watched the bluebird. Perched in a thornbush, it looked to her as vivid and brilliant as a painted tile from Isfahan, a songbird in the jewelled tree of a Persian paradise. She willed it to come closer and the bluebird dipped towards them and came to rest on a nearby bush. She imagined its darting perspective and felt she had entered the mystery of its consciousness, seeing the world reflected in the dark beads of its eyes. The bird flew closer still and turned at the last moment, revealing the darker blue plumage of its back, its radiant feathers dyed with a concentrated solution of the sky against which it moved.
The flight of this complex bird moving from bush to bush, thought Jean-Paul, traces the line of a telephone wire dipping and rising outside the window of a train. But what message does it bring along the wire? For two days he had been trying to impose comparisons and extract metaphors from this landscape. When the rocks, with their usual disturbing plasticity, had conjured up a city of minarets, pyramids and camels, he had pondered both the coincidence of this constellation of imagery — had one image triggered another? — and the inescapable fact that the Anasazi, the now extinct ‘original inhabitants’ of these canyons, could not have seen any camels or minarets or pyramids, unless of course they were Egyptians, as Robert no doubt believed. How had these unmistakable signs appeared to the Anasazi? Did they see things which resembled those objects in their own culture, or did they read the elements of the picture with a radically different gaze?
Just as the vapour trails of jets criss-crossed overhead in the lost wilderness of the sky, the traffic of analogy moved from one object to another, plundering every language, every culture, every landscape, and creating an ever more opaque web of connections, a mirror increasingly scratched. But out of this apparent reduction of resources, hybrids would arise, increasingly complex combinations of increasingly exhausted elements. Would these images constitute novelty or merely decadence?