I mean, it's been hectic here and it's been not. There's a lot of positive energy around since the scene thinned out. All along there've been a number of not-so-desirable types showing up here in dime-store sunset colors saying they were sannyasins, thinking from what they've seen on the news that this is a real gravy train, but now that all the papers are blabbing how we owe everybody fifteen million, or maybe it's fifty, they've pretty well split, and some of Agni's lavender cowboys too, now that the real fuzz in One form or another is always in and out serving summonses and repossessing computers and earth-moving equipment and running fingerprint checks on people and chemical checks on the cafeteria lemonade and ripping out illegal wiring and I don't know what all else to protect us against ourselves. Some of these outer-state types are kind of cute in their way and, you know, curious about us, and more open-minded than you might think. I don't really think you can say the world has subdivisions any more-what with television and modems we're all operating on the same sattva, and my conclusion so far, after being six months out of our own little North Shore ghetto, is that the world is really slowly getting to be a better place, provided we can keep the population explosion from turning all the land into deserts and asphalt and if the destruction of the ozone by aerosol cans with the greenhouse effect doesn't melt the ice caps and flood every coastal city out of existence, not to mention the Bomb, which seems to be the least of the problems because at least people agitate about it and picket Army bases.
God, listen to the big philosopher. But one of the things the Arhat has done for me is encourage me to let it out, let out the feelings and thoughts both and get rid of the conditioning that had us trained to keep quiet while all these fathers and husbands and sons and lovers and lawyers and doctors and Indian chiefs talked. All this trying to. be not too smart, not too loud, not too sexy, not too wonderful or else we'd overwhelm men that we were subconsciously taught to do like children in Hong Kong apartments trained to live in two cubic feet of space-I say, "Fuck it." "Fuck it" is what I say now, Midge.
But what I started to say, about all the repo men and sheriffs aides that are crawling around here, is that among the equipment they repossessed was that at the dental clinic, which was run by an absolutely cool old saint called Ganesha, 'older even than me and here because his practice in Boise began to remind him of death, so when I went with this lower-right molar that's 'been slowly going funny ever since I absent-mindedly chomped down on a betel nut, he said it looked to him like a root-canal candidate, it had been "insulted" so often with old silver fillings, but he didn't have the X-ray machine any more so I better get it looked at in town. By "town" around here they mean this dusty strip called Forrest that I think I described ages ago when I first came, full of retired people and old ranch rats and a few stray Navajos and these born-again creeps that attack the Arhat whenever he shows up for a Diet Coke-I was surprised they even had a dentist there. So I have to go in there tomorrow, if I can find a pickup truck or limo with some gas still in it. We have this five-thousand-gallon tank buried underground but Mobil refuses to fill it until we pay our bill. At the same time they keep sponsoring these holier-than-thou ecological documentaries on saving the whooping crane and the Salt Lake pupfish on television. How's that for corporate doublethink? Save the pupfish and let people 'on the path to holiness go hang.
Well, what else? What have I left out? The beauty of it here, maybe, now that what they call fall has come. Not fall like we have it, of course-nothing like all that glory of the leaves, the maples and sumac and ash, and the smell of burning applewood out of people's chimneys, and the ocean turning that almost vicious dark-gray greeny-blue color under the heavy autumn clouds. ' Here it's more of a delicate change, like a piece of transparent, slightly brown film placed over everything. The nights are getting cold again, but the days are still hot. A few of the trees do have leaves that turn yellow and drop-there's the willow wattle, and Australian acacia, and a kind called shoe-string acacia-but by and Jarge they never had much in the way of leaves to begin with, since the trick of the desert is not to gather photons, of which there are billions and billions too many, but to hold in moisture. The smoke tree and the paloverde hardly have leaves at all, just these threadbare skinny things that show up in the spring before the flowering and then drop right off. So you get this feeling of vegetation that already lives in purusha, with just the tiniest delicate grip on the surface of prakriti, without any of the turmoil and violence of our Eastern weeds and bushes and vines battling it out with all of their egos on every square foot that isn't absolutely rock. Here it's mostly rock, red rock and sand, so you're very grateful and aware of the slightest living thing-a lot of the desert flowers are almost microscopic, the size of pin-heads practically. I love it, Midge. I love the freedom of the almost nothingness-the hills with nothing on them but wisps of golden grass, and the skies with only some jet trails and the highest little tentative horsetails that never seem to come to anything as far as the weather goes. We had an hour of rain the other night and everybody came out of the Kali Club and danced naked in it, though it was freezing, really. Where it's so dry, water evaporates on you so rapidly it hurts, you can't help but chatter and shiver and jump around.
My dreams, Midge. My dreams get more and more intense lately. It's frightening. And a lot of them are about, of all people, Charles. I've totally stopped thinking about him consciously-we've 'stopped communicating; let Ducky and this vulture Oilman communicate-but in these dreams we're making love the way we did the first years we were married. They say people in dreams are displacements and it must be that it's really the Arhat I'm dreaming about but it seems so vividly Charles-the flat hard body he had and still has, considering his age, and the way he did everything in silence and seemed a little offended if I made any noise myself, and certain little things I won't go into but that definitely identify him as Charles, a smell even, I know you're not supposed to smell in dreams, but he smells like the desert, or at least I wake up with the spicy musty fragrance all around me, and the moon on the tangled sheets, here in Vikshipta's A-frame. And be was another, come to think of it. Another severe man. Without wanting to be, I seem to be attracted to that type. In the dreams Charles and I are usually in a bare room, a room without furniture. Almost like an operating room, except there's not an operating table or the bright lights. There must be a bed, we have to be lying on something. He's pushed himself up on his arms and I see his bare shoulders and his chest, smooth and hard and almost hairless the way he was, just a few hairs that turned gray eventually over the sternum bone and around the nipples, the plane of his chest slanting down to where our bodies join, and I'm aware of his excited breath, the warmth of it, and this dry desert sweetness like the fragrance of mesquite pods, and I'm very young and tight and worried about getting pregnant, and at the same time I'm myself as I am now, and even know that sleeping with Charles is wrong, a betrayal of the ashram, but this sense of fatherly forgiveness and understanding enclosing me is coming from him, pouring from him like chakra energy from the Sahasrara lotus, so I know it can't be Charles really, since understanding he never especially was and forgiving he certainly is not now. It's strange. But I wake up overwhelmed. He seems just enormous, and flooding me with these spiritual waves. It must be a transposition of my experiences here. We're all just masks anyway, don't you think? I mean masks of the archetypes. My best to Irving and Ed if he and you work things out and Gloria and Donna and Liz and Ann and the others but absolutely-I trust you, Midge-don't let them listen to