Aldous Huxley - Island

"Karuna."

"Attention. Attention."

"Karuna."

Will raised his hand once more and touched her lips.

"Do you hear what they're saying?"

It was a long time before she answered. Then, raising her hand, she took hold of his extended finger and pressed it hard against her lower lip. "Thank you," she said, and opened her eyes again.

"Why thank me? You taught me what to do."

"And now it's you who have to teach your teacher."

Like a pair of rival gurus each touting his own brand of spirituality, "Karuna, attention," shouted the mynah birds; then, as they drowned out one another's wisdom in overlapping competition, "Runattenshkarattunshon." Proclaiming that he was the never-impotent owner of all females, the invincible challenger of every spurious pretender to maleness, a cockerel in the next garden shrilly announced his divinity.

A smile broke through the mask of suffering; from her private world of swords and memory, Susila had returned to the present. "Cock-a-doodle-doo," she said. "How I love him! Just like Tom Krishna when he goes around asking people to feel his muscles. And those preposterous mynah birds, so faithfully repeating the good advice they can't understand. They're just as adorable as my little bantam."

"And what about the other kind of biped?" he asked. "The less adorable variety."

For all answer she leaned forward, caught him by the forelock and, pulling his head down, kissed him on the tip of his nose. "And now it's time you moved your legs," she said. Climbing to her feet, she held out her hand to him. He took it and she pulled him up from his chair.

"Negative crowing and parroted antiwisdom," she said. "That's what some of the other kind of bipeds go in for."

"What's to guarantee that I shan't return to my vomit?" he asked.

"You probably will," she cheerfully assured him. "But you'll also probably come back again to this."

There was a spurt of movement at their feet.

Will laughed. "There goes my poor litde scrabbling incarnation of evil."

She took his arm, and together they walked over to the open window. Announcing the near approach of dawn, a little wind fitfully rattled the palm fronds. Below them, rooted invisibly in the moist, acrid-smelling earth, was a hibiscus bush-a wild profusion of bright glossy leaves and vermilion trumpets, evoked from the double darkness of night and overarching trees by a shaft of lamplight from within the room.

"It isn't possible," he said incredulously. He was back again with God-the-Fourteenth-of-July.

"It isn't possible," she agreed. "But like everything else in the universe, it happens to be a fact. And now that you've finally recognized my existence, I'll give you leave to look to your heart's content."

He stood there motionless, gazing, gazing through a timeless succession of mounting intensities and ever-profounder significances. Tears filled his eyes and overflowed at last onto his cheeks. He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped them away.

"I can't help it," he apologized.

He couldn't help it because there was no other way in which he could express his thankfulness. Thankfulness for the privilege of being alive and a witness to this miracle, of being, indeed, more than a witness-a partner in it, an aspect of it. Thankfulness for these gifts of luminous bliss and knowledgeless understanding. Thankfulness for being at once this union with the divine unity and yet this finite creature among other finite creatures.

"Why should one cry when one's grateful?" he said as he put his handkerchief away. "Goodness knows. But one does." A memory bubble popped up from the sludge of past reading. " 'Gratitude is heaven itself,' " he quoted. "Pure gibberish! But now I see that Blake was just recording a simple fact. It is heaven

itself."

"And all the more heavenly," she said, "for being heaven on earth and not heaven in heaven."

Startlingly, through the crowing and the croaking, through the insect noises and the duet of the rival gurus, came the sound of distant musketry.

"What on earth is that?" she wondered.

"Just the boys playing with fireworks," he answered gaily.

Susila shook her head. "We don't encourage those kinds of fireworks. We don't even possess them."

From the highway beyond the walls of the compound a roar of heavy vehicles climbing in low gear swelled up louder and louder. Over the noise, a voice at once stentorian and squeaky bellowed incomprehensibly through a loudspeaker.

In their setting of velvet shadow the leaves were like thin shavings of jade and emerald, and from the heart of their gem-bright chaos fantastically sculptured rubies flared out into five-pointed stars. Gratitude, gratitude. His eyes filled again with

tears.

Snatches of the shrill bellowing resolved themselves into recognizable words. Against his will, he found himself listening.

"People of Pala," he heard; then the voice blasted into amplified inarticulateness. Squeak, roar, squeak, and then, "Your Raja speaking . . . remain calm . . . welcome your friends from across the Strait ..."

Recognition dawned. "It's Murugan."

"And he's with Dipa's soldiers."

"Progress," the uncertain excited voice was saying. "Modern life ..." And then, moving on from Sears, Roebuck to the Rani and Koot Hoomi, "Truth," it squeaked, "values . . . genuine spirituality ... oil."

"Look," said Susila, "look! They're turning into the com pound."

Visible in a gap between two clumps of bamboos, the beams of a procession of headlamps shone for a moment on the left cheek of the great stone Buddha by the lotus pool and passed by, hinted again at the blessed possibility of liberation and again passed by.

"The throne of my father," bawled the gigantically amplified squeak, "joined to the throne of my mother's ancestors . . . Two sister nations marching forward, hand in hand, into the future . . . To be known henceforth as the United Kingdom of Rendang and Pala . . . The United Kingdom's first prime minister, that great political and spiritual leader, Colonel Dipa ..."

The procession of headlamps disappeared behind a long range of buildings and the shrill bellowing died down into incoherence. Then the lights re-emerged and once again the voice became articulate.

"Reactionaries," it was furiously yelling. "Traitors to the principles of the permanent revolution ..."

In a tone of horror, "They're stopping at Dr. Robert's bungalow," Susila whispered.

The voice had said its last word, the headlamps and the roaring motors had been turned off. In the dark expectant silence the frogs and the insects kept up their mindless soliloquies, the mynah birds reiterated their good advice. "Attention, Karuna." Will looked down at his burning bush and saw the Suchness of the world and his own being blazing away with the clear light that was also (how obviously now!) compassion-the clear light that, like everyone else, he had always chosen to be blind to, the compassion to which he had always preferred his tortures, endured or inflicted, in a bargain basement, his squalid solitudes, with the living Babs or the dying Molly in the foreground, with Joe Aldehyde in the middle distance and, in the remoter background, the great world of impersonal forces and proliferating numbers, of collective paranoias, and organized diabolism. And always, everywhere, there would be the yelling or quietly authoritative hypnotists; and in the train of the ruling suggestion givers, always and everywhere, the tribes of buffoons and hucksters, the professional liars, the purveyors of entertaining irrelevances. Conditioned from the cradle, unceasingly distracted, mesmerized systematically, their uniformed victims would go on obediently marching and countermarching, go on, always and everywhere, killing and dying with the perfect docility of trained poodles. And yet in spite of the entirely justified refusal to take yes for an answer, the fact remained and would remain always, remain everywhere-the fact that there was this capacity even in a paranoiac for intelligence, even in a devil worshiper for love; the fact that the ground of all being could be totally manifest in a flowering shrub, a human face; the fact that there was a light and that this light was also compassion.