Sun House, page 44
When they disappeared, Lorilee turned, with an ache in her heart, south to Two Medicine Peak, felt an avocet-like love for its familiar shape, and a fledgling-like fear that the avocets and Dōgen were urging her too to leave. So many years this Peak had defined her place on Earth. So steadfastly it had watched over her and Japhy. “What does Dōgen mean by ‘mountains hidden in hiddenness’?” she asked the peak. “Could there be a way to hide you in my own hiddenness? If I hide you in me, can I bring you when we go?” The silence answered in the way the night air stirred it; way stars and crickets pierced it; way dark water kept creating a far-off child’s laugh.
She had just turned back to her now-distant campfire when an invisible wave washed over, spinning her round to face Two Medicine. The Peak had become a great seated presence. The meadow had become the presence’s open palm, Lore herself a small gift placed in the palm. Some kind of alchemy sank her to her knees. Thirteen tons of rage once swallowed for the Buddha’s and Japhy’s sakes became a philosopher’s stone. The Peak’s north face became a door. The fossil Bivalve, in Elmerina’s palm, became the key to the door. Lore’s heartache turned the key. Two Medicine opened.
An essence gushed forth. The poison Lore had swallowed was transmuted into a gold converted by Lorilee’s nature into folk music: her chosen medium. But, Earth being Earth, there were still challenges to be met.
First challenge: these surges were not humming a few little hill tunes for her to set down on paper. This was an avalanche of songs vying to burst to life through the conduit of one small woman, one dulcimer, one trash-can amp. A friend of J. S. Bach’s, after hearing yet another fresh masterpiece Papa Bach had composed with breakneck speed, asked how he managed to think up so many compositions. Bach laughed and said he had no need to think at all. His problem each morning was how not to trample all the music that had appeared on his bedroom floor in the night. Two Medicine’s upturned palm of meadow had become Bach’s floor! As Lore rushed back to camp she felt every small and great object from trailhead to summit to talus to source spring to meadow to avocets to stars scrambling to serve as muses. There was a brief, euphoric moment when easily ten songs were vying to burst into existence at once. She laughed, reached camp, told herself, “Mono-task!” built the fire up big, grabbed her composition notebook with musical staffs, her colored pens, sat on her log, took up her instrument, set the amp between her legs, and sent her voice and strings down inside it. Breath-warmed words, resonating steel, and love swizzled together in the amp’s śūnyatā and flew up into her face as a music unlike any she’d ever made.
Second challenge: the first song she heard was a ballad. But as she began trying to capture it she realized that beginnings and endings are entirely arbitrary where such Buddha ancestors as mountains are concerned, so she settled for beginningless and endless. That’s why, on the recording she eventually made of what the Peak was bestowing, Lore is already singing deft lyrics and the dulcimer is already rich as it first becomes audible. And it’s why, twenty-three minutes later, with no lessening of intricacy, the voice and instruments refuse to stop expressing themselves as they fade back into silence.
Third challenge: the ballad was coming so fast that setting it down in notation was impossible. But as she began scribbling the first few notes and chord progressions, her right hand suddenly knew music-capturing tricks that Lore herself didn’t know. Her hand invented a dots-and-dashes shorthand that let her capture melodies as fast as she could sing them. When lyrics too came on in a flood, the hand jotted just a first few letters of each word and Lore found she could still conjure the entire line. In no time she’d set down ten verses of an outpouring that up till this night would have thrilled her after a full day of struggle. But now, seated in a palm and calm that prevented astonishment from disabling her, she penned another ten verses, and then—ever less surprised—ten more. To capture so much so fast was a world wonder, but she ordered herself to wonder later: more needed to be captured now! She grabbed a different colored pen and, right on top of a page already glutted with melody and lyrics, scrawled, “Cello comes in here: *,” then shot an arrow round to the page-back and set down the first cello part she’d ever imagined. “Mandolin joins cello here: **,” she muttered, penning in more untested notes. “Tin whistle avocet flyover comes in here: ***,” she wrote, and a full year later the braided cello, mandolin, and whistle parts proceeded to flood listeners’ hearts in the very places she’d foreheard them.
Once upon a time in a place called Colorado, a scruffy mountain peak and lone singer-songwriter found a breed of music hidden in hiddenness. Deep into the night, and again the following night, Lorilee sang, strummed, and scratched out songs till she was too wrung out to produce another note. When hidden music kept avalanching down the mountain even so, she just lay back, stared up at the stars and Peak, and sighed helpless thanks. Mountains—her string-worn fingers, muscle memory, and ringing ears informed her body—belong to the people who love them with a reciprocal love greater than even her greatest efforts could capture or contain.
But she did manage to carry four mortal folk songs and one arguably immortal ballad down off the old peak. The mortals she named “Mountain So High,” “Bivalve,” “Elmerina’s Pearl Earring,” and “My Old Mountain.” The deathless ballad—and the record she released a year and a half later—she named “Thirteen Tons of Poison Sutra.”
IX. Heart/Mind vs. Manas
(Providence, 1995)
Manas (Sanskrit): the mind; the inner organ which consists of “desire, deliberation, doubt, faith, want of faith, patience, impatience, shame, intelligence, and fear (Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad I, v. 3); the inner organ which shapes into ideas the impressions carried by the sense-organs…[and] is the cause of doubt and volition, the other three organs being the buddhi (infinite intelligence), chitta (mind-stuff), and ahamkara (I-consciousness).
—Risa’s beat-to-crap $1.25 Harper Torchbooks
The Upanishads; notes
ON VACATION ON Cuttyhunk Island, staying in a cottage Julian had painted in exchange for three weeks of free rent, he and Risa were sitting in the breakfast nook, enjoying their coffee as morning sunlight streamed in, when there was a faint knock on the window just above them. They both looked up in time to see a small bird falling groundward. “Very punk, with the tiny red topknot,” Julian remarked to Risa. “Looked like a badminton birdie! Any idea what kind of suicidal…”
Realizing he was talking to no one, Julian was stunned to silence. Risa had vanished!
He felt a rush of fresh salt air and realized the back door was open. Unsure what was happening, he picked up his coffee cup and stepped to the window. The bird lay in the flower bed below, immobile, its tiny blood-orange head bowed, eyes closed, beak opening and closing. Death throes, Julian thought. Then bright color caught his eye.
At the edge of the lawn thirty feet away an orange cat crouched, tail twitching, then streaked toward the bird. Helpless to stop it, Julian yelled, “Shit!” at the window glass, then gasped and lurched backward as some arm-waving lunatic—No, Risa!—shot into the frame, screeching, “HYEEEE! GIT! GIT! GIT!” scaring Julian so bad he dumped coffee down his Chi Pants as the cat veered off and vanished.
An instant later, kneeling beneath the window four feet from Julian, separated by glass, cupping the bird in her hands, Risa’s face took on the medieval madonna look that, paradoxically, always sent a surge through his penis. Placing her lips to her joined palms, she began whispering sweet nothings to the bird inside.
Her speed in reaction to that tiny thud, Julian thought, was impossible! She dives into what is the instant it happens. And now she’s holding the bird to her left boo, er…heart, prob’ly thinking that location has magic powers. Getting pretty Out There, girlfriend. Then again, I like being held to that boob myself. But this…jibber-jabber of mine. Shit! This is my Barney reflex, isn’t it!
Thinking he’d never seen Risa so clearly, he went in the kitchen, dabbed at his pants with a sponge, poured more coffee, and joined her as she stepped out of the shrubs onto the lawn.
“Look!” she whispered, opening her hands a little. “A ruby-crowned kinglet!”
Just as Julian peeked, the bird’s eyes became clear, its body quickened, Risa opened her hands, and the tiny creature nearly slapped Julian’s face with its wings in liftoff.
“Oh, perfect!” Risa cried as it let out faint calls and winged away. The bloom of happiness on her face was almost blinding. Julian couldn’t help smiling back—until she gushed, “Weren’t those the sweetest little flight-calls ever?”
His smile withered. Sweetest little flight-calls. Yeah, right. But he managed to pursue what impressed him. “You saved that bird’s life, Risa. You knew that cat was coming for it. How?”
“When I picked our dinner bouquet last night, I found a pile of feathers under the same window and saw the cat next door. I learned as a kid that when birds thump glass and cats hear it, they check the scene. If the tom was nearby I knew I’d have to move fast.”
“Fast, I guess! You were greased lightning! But then you calmed completely, holding the bird to your heart, speaking to it. Was that purposeful, do you think? Were you telling it things?”
“Nothing calculated,” she said with a shrug. “I was just cooing. If you’d just smacked an invisible wall and a giant ten thousand times bigger than you picked you up, don’t you think terror might kill you though the invisible wall hadn’t? But if the giant held you to her heartbeat, and you felt her pulse and breathing slow, wouldn’t you sense she wasn’t out to devour you? I’ve saved a lot of window-stunned birds, Julian. If you become nothing but warm hands and empathy, lots revive. And to the ones who don’t, you whisper, ‘You were beautiful. You’re still beautiful. Whichever way you go, little one, live forever!’”
Julian split in two. Half of him wanted to sweep Risa up in his arms, carry her into the cottage, throw her on the bed, get naked, hold her to his heart, make love, and listen to her sweetest little flight-calls. His other half was thinking: Fuck me with a fairy feather! Sure, a bird’s alive because she computes details with impossible speed. But her awareness of these subtleties feels threatening somehow. Why can’t she just sip her coffee and grin when I say a bird looks like a badminton birdie? Why can’t we enjoy our lox and bagels while a cat enjoys a bird like regular people?
IT WAS HARD for Julian’s and Risa’s friends to believe a couple so charismatic could be threatened by a quirk as innocuous as Risa’s fondness for pidgin Skrit. Yet—ever more obviously—they were. A scene from the escalating struggle:
They had gone out to Yun Deuk’s, the fabled Providence Korean restaurant, where they met up with a friend of Risa’s, Audrey White, an associate humanities professor at University of Rhode Island, and with a friend of Julian’s, Kyle Morley, a grad student in anthropology at Brown. As they drove to Yun Deuk’s Julian confided to Risa that Kyle was a great guy and that, if the chemistry between him and Audrey felt right, Risa shouldn’t hesitate to play matchmaker. She said she looked forward to seeing whether that possibility opened up.
Risa knew Yun Deuk’s so well that she’d decided on her order before they arrived. So while Julian, Audrey, and Kyle pondered their menus she leaned back, took a slow look around, noticed the glowing red taillights of cars streaming past in the rain outside, the crimson-jacketed maître d’ removing the raincoat of a woman whose blouse was red, and the red backs of the YD menus. She then quietly said, “Rudra.”
Just that fast, her two syllables of Skrit caused Julian to shoot her a warning scowl.
It backfired. The anthropology-minded Kyle took the stern look to mean that Julian and Risa had strongly differing tastes about food. Curious now, he began paging back and forth through the bilingual menu, saying, “Rudra…Rudra…I don’t see it, Risa. Is it a special? Will the waiter tell us about it?”
“Rudra,” Risa said with a bright smile, “is the Destroyer. Not quite Shiva, but close enough. I remember a line, maybe from the Puranas: ‘When Rudra, the tawny god, lamented, out of his mouth poured blazing fire.’”
“Whoa!” said Kyle. “A dish so hot it makes you breathe fire!”
There was no such dish and Julian was slicing his index finger across his throat at Risa. But a chance to wax Sanskritic to an enthused listener was so rare she said more. “The word stems from the root rud, which means ‘to cry.’ In English we’d never connect a word meaning ‘to cry’ to the color red, thence to fire, thence to a theonym for the destructive power of a god. English words tend to be centrifugal. They lose all meaning when their definitions fly too far out of their original orbit. But a lot of Skrit words, rudra being a great example, are centripetal. They spiral inward, exploding to more and more intense levels of meaning.”
Seeing Julian glaring and sawing at his throat, Kyle laughed. “I can’t believe they’d serve such a thing! Was it some kind of Korean initiation rite? Does surviving a bowl of rudra mean you’re a warrior or a shaman or something? Tell me more!”
“Following the word as it plunges inward,” Risa said while Julian groaned and dropped his head into his hands, “rudra ceases to mean ‘red’ and starts meaning ‘to howl,’ then ‘to roar,’ then ‘to rage.’ Further in yet, rudra becomes a blazing force of destruction. Necessary destruction. Annihilation of the false. But look, Kyle!” She nodded at Julian’s face. “There’s a perfect example of rudra billowing inward, gaining greater and greater intensity!”
When Kyle and Audrey turned to Julian and he reddened even more, Risa adopted the manner of an enthused museum docent analyzing a great painting for a tour group: “See how his anger is charging inward now, creating a racing metabolism and actual heat, setting not just his face but his entire body aglow? That’s the centripetal power of rudra. And if we stay detached, not letting his anger cow us, we see that, my God, this man is magnificent when rudra is charging through him!”
Taking Julian’s crimson fury to be a hilariously cooperative illustration of Risa’s lecture, Kyle and Audrey cracked up.
“Lots of Sanskrit words coax us inward toward an intensified order of things,” Risa continued. “Ooh! I remember a riff. Sort of!” Turning to Julian, she joined her palms, bowed to him, then recited: “O Rudra who bestowest happiness and dwellest in Julian’s body! Serpents are Thy bracelets, elephant skin is Thy, uh…shirt and pants. And Thy pealing laughter shatters worlds! O Conqueror of death! Please look upon us with Thy most blazing form!”
Steam now seemed to fly from Julian’s nostrils and Audrey realized he was truly angry. But Kyle broke out in applause. “An Academy Award and a very cold beer for this blazing man!” he laughed. “But, Risa. Gracious God! How hot is this stuff? You’ve got me so curious I think I’m actually going to try it!”
“Yun Deuk’s doesn’t serve a dish called rudra,” she finally admitted. “But if you think you’re ready for warriorhood, the kimchi with four stars will fly you straight into an encounter with the Destroyer!”
“Done!” Kyle cried while Audrey laughed and Julian glared at Risa with disgust.
She set out to make peace. “That was my one and only Skrit fit for the night, Julian. It’s out of my system. Nothing but English for the duration, I promise.”
“Oh no!” he cried. “We’re fascinated, honey. Proonda Boonda Goonda. Garuda Neruda Barracuda. A forty-eight-cards-shy-of-a-full-deck of ancient Sanskrit is just what America needs!”
“Yeah!” Kyle chimed in. “Why stick to English in a Korean restaurant?”
Audrey had been eyeing Kyle with steadily growing pleasure. “Culinary bravery, endless curiosity, and a nature so kind you haven’t even noticed that Julian is actually pissed off,” she said. “Are you always this quick to make the best of things, Kyle?”
Kyle blushed at the mention of Julian’s anger, having taken it for an act. But he was quick to spread graciousness in all directions. “In most situations,” he said, “I prefer finding reasons to feel grateful to reasons to feel miffed. But when a situation is truly dangerous, my tendency is a serious fault. Julian tried to warn me, Audrey. When the kimchi arrives, you’ll see the kind of disaster to which my optimism can lead!”
When Audrey gazed at Kyle with delight and he smiled back, Risa seized the moment: “You should know, Kyle, that Audrey is much like a cool old Skrit word herself. The closer you get to her, the more you see that she too spirals inward to more and more intense levels!”
When Audrey and Kyle blushed, but kept beaming at each other, Risa turned to Julian with a smile that said: It’s working!
Julian glared back with unmitigated anger, though the love he’d encouraged her to facilitate was blossoming before his eyes.
IT WAS KYLE who began shining with rudra once his kimchi arrived. Laughing as he washed it down with a beer and three waters, fanning his mouth, pouring sweat, he kept at it till his face nearly ignited. But to the eventual applause of waiters, other diners, and the chef himself, he downed every torrid bite.
“Our warrior-shaman!” Audrey cried when he finished. Spiraling inward to a more intense level, she then stood, crossed round to his chair, and kissed him on each blazing cheek, lingering a little to marvel at his skin’s extreme heat.
KYLE AND AUDREY left Yun Deuk’s arm in arm, headed for a folk club to catch Clannad, an Irish band they’d discovered they both loved. Julian and Risa drove home in silence because Julian was still steaming, which sent Risa into strategic withdrawal.
When they reached their spacious loft, he lit candles in the dining area, dimmed the other lights, and poured them each a glass of red wine, which seemed to suggest a move toward romance. He then offered Risa a chair at their dinner table and circled round to take a seat on the table’s opposite side. “Before we relax,” he said, “may I get something off my chest?”
