Sun House, page 45
Risa took a resigned sip of wine. “Feel free.”
“I know Sanskrit was a big deal to you until you discovered that—hello!—Hindu culture is impossibly sexist. And I know you think your Skrit scraps are some sort of rebellion against that sexism. But the Brahmins you’re counterattacking don’t live anywhere near here, Risa, so the person you end up attacking is me. And I’ve had enough! Please, Risa. No more Sanskrit nonsense during our social life, especially!”
“But I wasn’t attacking you at all,” she said. “I was praising an unusual attribute. When rudra boils up in you, honest to God, Julian, you’re stunning. So I conjured a word that praises the beauty of heatedness: rudra. Then Kyle was so cute, thinking it was a blazing-hot Korean dish, that I ran with it. Then you got mad, which got funny so fast I ran with that too. And look what happened! Audrey and Kyle really like each other! Can we be happy about that and try to enjoy each other now too?”
“If you promise to delete Skrit scraps from our life, yes,” Julian said.
Risa held her wineglass up before the candle, shut one eye, and stared at the backlit red liquid as she swirled it round and round. “You’ve never let me explain my attraction to Skrit scraps. It would mean a lot to me if I could. May I?”
Julian heaved a pained sigh, but faintly nodded.
“In my experience, the human yearning for truth really does spiral inward. Without truth’s inward momentum people get stuck on the surface of things and fall prey to appearances, cheap card tricks, political and religious power plays, banal hocus-pocus. Skrit scraps combat that danger by tapping into truth’s inward momentum. The Vedic mind is concentric, Julian. It has three layers. Manas is the outermost layer. The great trickster of the soul. ‘The faith and doubt organ,’ the Upaniṣads call it. Manas is the machine that churns out opposites: certainty and uncertainty, attraction and repulsion, yes and no, forward and backward. This has its value, of course. But it lacks depth. Lacks heart. The nature of manas is to forever declare I will, I won’t, I’m happy, I’m sad, I like this, I hate that, till a person is so bound up in a self-spun cocoon of mental impressions they go blind to everything but their cocoon. Incarnation after incarnation, the faith/doubt organ binds us this way. But in the Vedas—”
“Wait!” Julian cut in. “Hold on, Risa! Incarnation after incarnation? That’s the kind of pretentious crap that has to go bye-bye! What have you experienced, besides a little teatime chitchat with your friends, that gives you any right to speak of past incarnations?”
Swirling her wine before the candle flame again, Risa waited till she was calm enough not to hurl Julian’s scathing tone back in his face. “What I experience,” she said quietly, “is a feeling of arrogance if I pretend that spiritual giants like the Buddha and Jesus and Krishna don’t know more about such matters than I do. Would you contradict Beethoven if he shared secrets about composing symphonies, or diss Martina Navratilova’s secrets about crushing top-spin serves, because what they said was beyond your experience? It’s common sense to believe it when Buddha, Krishna, and Jesus in the Apocrypha all tell us reincarnation is the way of it. That’s not teatime chitchat. My concepts of mind and soul are based on truths that realized beings bequeath humanity to free us from illusion. And Skrit scraps connect to this kind of wisdom. May I describe how?”
Julian’s face had long since darkened, but he nodded.
As she was framing her thoughts Risa noticed her wine trembling. Julian’s left knee, under the table, was bouncing up and down at a high rate of speed. Lifting her glass to stop the wine’s shaking, she said, “According to Vedic wisdom sources, inside manas, the outer mind, is an incomparably greater mind. American Buddhists call it ‘Bodhi Mind.’ Tibetans call it ripka. The Sanskrit word is buddhi. I prefer the term ‘heart/mind.’ This mind, according to the greats, is infinite, clear, all-loving.”
As his knee bounced like crazy, Julian said, “How can the finite you speak of the infinite without speaking drivel?”
Swirling her wine again to ease the sting of his words, Risa said, “To paraphrase the greats is not drivel. It’s a form of trust known as faith. The truth about Bodhi Mind, ripka, heart/mind, say the greats, is that if we stop smothering it, it is our very own true mind! In sad contrast, the faith/doubt organ wraps us tighter and tighter into the cocoon of opposites that make heart/mind impossible to experience. Why squander my life listening to my doubting organ chant, I like this, I hate that, I’ve decided, I can’t decide, I’m going, I’m staying, I’m happy, I’m miserable? That very chant is why we need a sadhana, a spiritual practice, that coaxes us into silence and depth. I’ve had meditations blissfully erase me lots of times, and humble Skrit words and John of the Cross phrases surprise-attack me with joy beyond words. I’m sharing the truth of my experience because I care about us, Julian. If you don’t experience such things, fine. But why get worked up over my experience? Can’t you view my Skrit scraps as an annoying but harmless quirk along the lines of, say, the way your knee keeps bouncing the entire table?”
Julian blushed, stopped bouncing, and snapped, “Your Skrit scraps are a hell of a lot weirder than my nervous tic!”
Risa broke out in an amused smile. “If this is some kind of contest and weird equals victory, compare my Skrit scraps to the way you jam your little finger in your ear and, when you think no one’s looking, inhale its fragrance like a fine wine. My manas finds that pretty weird. But a more heartful place in me glimpses the curious little boy in you. Out of affection for that boy I recently did a little ear excavation myself, and there upon the tip of my pinky sat a fleck of lost pumpkin pie filling from inside my own head! And when I sniffed it? Yowza! An acrid smell like nothing else on Earth!”
Her giggle set Julian’s knee to bouncing. He then noticed it and—out of pride, shame, confidence, lack of confidence, faith, want of faith, and a skein of other manas dichotomies—forced himself to hold rigidly, miserably still though he was seething.
“Aw, come on,” Risa coaxed. “I’m not being derisive. We’re funny little creatures, us humans. To wrap this up so we can relax, can you please believe that I love Skrit scraps because they awaken feelings of love? Love’s a big deal in spiritual life, right? Sure, the couple thousand Skrit words I remember are pathetic in a scholarly sense, but they’re rife with a centripetal energy that spirals into depth. I don’t just think this, Julian. Skrit phrases have led to experiences that are beacons in my life and I don’t want to lose that. I can be more discreet. But I’m hoping you can learn to ignore my scraps the way I’m ignoring your knee.”
Julian blushed deeply, again stopped bouncing his knee, and snapped, “Finished!?”
Risa nodded but wished her wineglass was fuller.
“Then I’d like to say a few words as well.”
“Of course.”
“Back in my anthro days, I actually studied brain science. Unlike you, Risa! And ‘brain’ is the word I want. Not ‘mind.’ Not ‘mind inside the mind.’ Not ‘heart/mind.’ I mean the mind located in the organ in our heads. Every PhD in the field can tell you that the brain’s dynamics give us the perception, the memory, and the consciousness that have led to the greatest achievements of mankind. Yet all I’m hearing from you is an eccentric laywoman trotting out prescientific bits of mythology or scripture, calling her bits holy, then using her vague concept of holiness to lord it over brain science—even as your brain houses the awareness you’re using to critique the brain! Wake up, Risa! Our brains create art, symphonies, cures for disease, skyscrapers, jet planes, civilizations, and are by far the most vital part of us!”
“When it comes to architecture, science, engineering, the tools that build civilizations, manas dynamics are vital, I agree. But I hope you’re enough of a historian to agree that, without guidance from heart/mind, manas dynamics also lead to selfishness, blind greed, blind prejudice, corrupt politics and business, diabolical weapons, police states, wrecked ecosystems, wars, and other forces that bring down civilizations. And I’m not even damning that. But when it comes to what you call ‘the greatest achievements of mankind,’ we’re not on the same page. For me, the greatest achievement conceivable is to merge with ultimate reality. And heart/mind has experiences that show me Buddha Mind, Christ Mind, Ram Mind exists. My manas thinks heart/mind isn’t worthy of comment because it’s not an object it can quantify via laboratory experiments or peer-reviewed studies, but I’m not interested in manas’s opinion of what reason can’t know. In short, we disagree, Julian. I love the greats who say the Unseen Unborn Guileless Perfection is the essence of our being. Manas hears that as nonsense, but seeking spiritual truth with manas alone is like trying to play a guitar with my elbows, or hug you with my ears, or—”
“Get you pregnant with my tongue,” Julian cut in with a heat that caused Risa’s mind to fly off the rails and crash in a dark ravine. His tongue…My cleft…His tongue…
Julian stood in the candlelight, glowing with rudra. “I just spoke out of something besides the faith/doubt organ. How did I do?”
Risa couldn’t reply. Despite everything she’d just said, she felt susceptible to the way they too often detoured around their vital impasses: Julian shone in defiance of the spiritual greats, proud of what his tongue was capable of, urging her body to spiral outward and away from heart/mind to join him body to body. Desperate not to succumb, Risa summoned a Skrit scrap she’d taken to heart years ago: She who knows the bliss of Ātman, bliss that turns away words, bliss the mind never touches, is afraid of nothing. Unassailed by the thought Why do I do what is evil? she knows good and evil as Ātman, cherishes both as Ātman.
Seeing her lips moving, knowing she’d summoned a scrap, Julian showed no impatience. He just blazed, willing to take or leave whatever she chose. And it struck her: while he was effortlessly embodying physical beauty, she was laboriously debating her spirituality when she needed to be embodying it with all her heart. O Rudra who bestowest happiness and dwellest in Julian’s body! Why does his arrogant patience awaken my weakness?
Their differences were profound, the impasse long. When Risa stood, she meant to simply take her empty wineglass into the kitchen, but as she rounded the table found herself taking a half step toward Julian. Inches at most. She glanced up to see if he’d noticed.
His gaze, still upon her, was dark; exultant; shining.
She set her wineglass on the table. The invisible rope she’d tried to climb to safety snapped. Her dumbsaint memory bank went haywire, seizing on lines from a Beguine book: You, Marguerite of Hainault, called Porete, are vehemently suspected of the stain of heretical depravity. Because of this we have caused you to be summoned, that you might appear before us in judgment.
It was Risa who then broke free of the inward spiral and strode round the table; Risa the Sons Only Verse rebel who smothered Julian’s lips with her own; Risa the heart/mind defender who let herself be drawn like a moth/hedonist/hypocrite, praying all three were Ātman, to the candle of his face, feel of their glowing skin, flame of his unspeaking tongue.
X. Jervis on World Peace
(Portland, mid-1990s, December)
By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers.
—Teilhard de Chardin
ON A RAINY December morning, Jervis and TJ are walking a quiet street at the foot of Forest Park when, apropos of nothing of which TJ is aware, Jervis slams to a halt behind a parked car, eyes its bumper stickers, and in his papery voice rasps, “‘Pray for Peace. Visualize World Peace.’ What do you think, Teej?”
TJ would prefer not to reply, but figures Jervis might know what he’s thinking already. So he speaks, but keeps it short. “Judging by the evidence, I’d say that world peace is not even close to the hand this world has been dealt.”
“That’s it, Teej!” Jervis paper-whispers. “These stickers are ordering us not to inhabit the world we’ve been given. The way I see it, Earth might be a precious fleck of blazing-hot chili pepper in an infinite vat of mayonnaise. The way I see it, we should wrap our arms around our tiny planet’s endless chaos and injustices and suffering while we’ve got the chance. There are so many shapes and sizes of self-serving pigs, mass delusions, violence, and peacelessness on Earth that the situation should be studied, not wished away. The fuck. A VISUALIZE WORLD PEACE sticker shows all the imagination of a DO NOT DISTURB sign. If I drove a car my sticker would say MAKE YOUR PEACE WITH THE RED HOT SMOKIN’ PEACE WE’VE GOT!”
TJ can’t hide his amusement. “You’re pretty worked up about this.”
Jervis eyes the offending bumper darkly. “Screw ordering random motorists to remake the universe to suit their prejudices. If the last few centuries had known world peace, a plague of happy fucking would have raised Earth’s population by fifty billion and we’d be dead of the effects of that.”
“Well then,” TJ says with a tight little smile, “peace to earthquakes, tsunamis, wildfires, and the Black Death.”
Jervis shoots air in and out his nose. “That’s the idea. But let ’er rip, Teej.”
Standing in the rain in his high-fashion clothes, TJ tries his genteel best. “Peace to warmongers, racist slobs, STDs, unlevel playing fields, undescended testicles, the Bermuda Triangle, and Tornado Alley. All is an Ocean.”
“Which accepts all the flowers and coconuts and filth and gore that flows or falls or gets spumed into her forever! That’s it, Teej! That’s it.”
Jervis closes his good eye, peers at God knows what with the glass one, and undergoes some kind of liftoff: “Peace to that royal fuckup ‘thy neighbor,’ and to Jesus’s hilarious command to love him. Peace to my Kearney Street neighbor Dick Strom, and his lucrative investments in weapons for the world’s dictators, and corporate theft of the world’s poor people’s water. Peace to Dick’s addict son, Dick Junior, who ripped out and pawned his eighty-year-old grandma’s car stereo last month trying to live by his dad’s example. Peace to Dick Senior for saying, ‘I don’t know what’s gotten into that boy!’ Peace to Jesse Helms for saying, ‘I’m not intolerant. I just know what it says in the Scriptures.’”
TJ is surprised by a feeling of expansion as Jervis’s paper-whisper begins to sound downright reverent, though his words, at first, sound anything but.
“Peace to my unwanted virginity, Teej. Peace to the decades it’s been since a woman touched me with even faint sexual intent. Peace to the insane idea that virgins are pure. I’m a virgin. Peace to my useless nighttime virgin erections. Peace to my virgin dream, four nights ago, of standing next to a woman so sensuous that nothing but the circling slide of her wet red tongue over her own wet red lips brought first her, then me, to orgasm. Peace to the fact that every bit of my wrecked body loved that lonely little orgasm. It was a surge of Ocean. A perfect little surge. Peace to the sword Love brought to Earth as Jesus and the Kurukshetra battlefield slaughter Love brought as Krishna and the burned-at-the-stake agony Love gave Herself as Marguerite, Dirk Willems, and Joan of Arc. Peace to the meth thugs who beat my brains and stomped my throat when I imperfectly served the same Love. Peace to the hundred hurts and incapacities that brought Ocean’s crushing capacity down upon me. Peace to the storm tides that slam me around like a sloop in a gale with no sails or rudder. Peace to the Transorpene that quells the storms with side effects so strong that giving voice to side effects may be my only purpose in life. Peace to that purposelessness. Peace to the fact that I was just a container of love till Love smashed the container and the Uncontainable came gushing out. Peace to the way Ocean sooner or later pours every fool who thinks they fathom the holy a triple shot of Old Unfathomable, tosses it down their throat, throws in a match, and incinerates everything they ever claimed to fathom. Peace to every force, accident, crash, blow, curse, and blessing that murders our complacency. Peace to my wrecked voice for the things a wrecked voice can say that an unwrecked voice can’t. Peace to my glass eye and empty eye socket for seeing things that a seeing eye can’t. Blackness, for instance. Light’s parasite. Blackness that took the five hours I spent in a dumpster, eleven hours I spent in surgery, and forty-nine days my mindless body was loved and cared for and prayed over, and crushed them into a single black ball of nothing. Peace to the fact that for forty-nine days I was black nothing, so who or what am I now? The fuck, Teej. Peace to the fact that not one man or woman I’ve met, me included, knows what they’re saying when they call their self my self, their life my life, or the soul my soul. It’s all Ocean, all unfathomable, and peace to everything that evaporates the pious puddles we try to make of her shorelessness, fathomlessness, and roar. Peace to the Peace inside every act of compassion and outrage and love and hate that happens. Peace to you and me again and again clawing our way inside no peace that isn’t already perfect and here, piercing it all, making and unmaking and remaking it all. No other.
“This peace,” Jervis whispers more softly as his brother’s eyes fill.
“Right here,” he breathes, peering down into whatever it is he sees.
“No other,” Jervis whispers in a cold steady rain on a cold Portland sidewalk while Teej stands beside him, weeping and shaking at the savage purity of his broken brother’s kind of peace.
XI. The Carport Folk Festival
(Pipestone, 1995)
In the dream I drew piano keys
on the kitchen table. I played them
without a sound.
The neighbors came in to listen.
—Tomas Tranströmer
ROPE TRICK: FOR the first time in three years, Dee Anna Steitz woke Walt at first light. Her voice didn’t make a sound. It just took effortless advantage of the early morning silence to speak to a long-married, forever-receptive chunk of her husband’s head.
