Rick Moody - The Diviners

She was once employed in the helping professions. She told him so. She was once employed in the profession of exotic dancing, and so it does not seem as though she will turn away from the desperate collision of soft tissue, this mashing of faces. She has an Indian guru. She has learned to play the harmonium. She is allowing herself to be kissed by Thaddeus Griffin, movie star and practitioner of yoga, and she is kissing back a little bit, and this is the pose called the Adulterous Union, wherein two practitioners, who are elsewhere participants in love’s vast covenant, conjoin their mouths on the Oriental carpet in the ashram.

“I really can’t help myself, you know, I can’t help what I’m going to say, so I’m just going to say it. Because why hold back, you know? You’re just incredibly beautiful, do you know? Do you know how beautiful you are?” The yogin says these things as though to say them were a chant. It’s no falsehood to speak in this way. Falsehoods are not noble truths. She is beautiful, even if it is also true that the yogin thinks virtually everybody is beautiful. Fully two-thirds of the yoginis he passes on the street are ravishing. They don’t know this about themselves because a ravishment doesn’t know what it is. For example, the way a certain woman wears glasses, tiny spectacles, pinched onto her nose like a fence that protects the male of the species from the memorable hue of her eyes. She probably works for Internal Revenue. There’s a way she shifts her weight from side to side as she walks, she has the most beautiful ass he’s ever seen, and this ass was created as an evolutionary novelty so that men would see the ass of this Internal Revenue employee and these men would beg to be with her, and she would preserve her rajas, or genital ejaculate, and suck up bindu, thereby ensuring fruitful multiplication, in turn creating the chromosomal reproduction of the perfect ass, and thus the continuity of a brave line of Internal Revenue employees.

However, upon seeing this woman on the way to the Ashram of the False Guru, the yogin’s reverie about her ass is interrupted because passing close by her, in the opposite direction, is another yogini in a conservative suit who is wearing a high-visibility hard hat. She is so beautiful with the hard hat on that it is almost impossible not to propose to her on the spot, and the fact that she has a mole on the side of her nose is completely irrelevant to the enlightened yogin, she has to wear that hard hat, she must keep wearing that hard hat, and as a matter of course he’d still be thinking about her, except that now he passes a woman with that little calf muscle, the calf muscle from too much high-heel wearing, or perhaps it is just the advanced practice of uttankoormasana, resulting in a sculpting of calves; she smiles as she walks, the yogini, and the smile of a yogini is philosophically overwhelming, emanating from the third eye center; it is as if the yogini knows that the universe is situated in her body; it is as if the yogini drinks the water from the cranial bowl of the yogin; if they all smiled while walking, yogins would be as idiots stunned by the multitude of smiling yoginis, and still he is thinking about these calves, that smile, wondering if he should run after the yogini in order to get to know her in her quintessence, in her rajas, whoever she is, this as he enters into the ashram, signs in for class, only to find, again, by the sale leotards and the CDs of thunder drums, as the fountain spills into its retaining pool, the aforementioned Nora Richards.

“So how much for a private lesson, anyway?”

Which brings us to this moment. Nora is attempting to observe the rigors of private tutelage, pushing against his pelvis as she tries to get him to do the second warrior pose with binding, reminding him to lock in the belly, performing in this way the mula bandha. Close the anus and strongly draw upward the excreting energy. She reaches under, and she must know how enlightening it is to have her reaching under him in this way. He is truly experiencing the enlightenment and the freedom from rebirth. And it is then, in a state of enlightenment where there is no room for individual consciousness, that Thaddeus suggests that she masking-tape his wrists together in order to ensure that the binding in the pose is performed according to tradition.

“What?” Nora asks.

He is balanced in sushumna, between inhalation and exhalation, between the masculine and the feminine. He is thinking that this is a bad idea, this private class, in that it does not observe abstinence from the eight kinds of erotic action, namely, to think it, to praise it, to joke about it, to look with desire, to converse in private, to decide to do it, to attempt to do it, to perform it. And yet it seems like a very, very good idea at the same time, because self-discipline splits the personality in two, as the masters say, and without self-discipline one drinks in the fluids of the moon.

“With that.” He selects from among the personal effects of the False Guru. Standard-issue American masking tape, the sign of a well-equipped desk.

“Isn’t it going to hurt?”

“It’s going to make it so that I do the pose right, you know, and that’s what I’m after. I’m all about trying to do the pose right. That’s why we’re here.” He’s in the pose and he really does feel like a warrior, because he is a warrior of the Adulterous Union, he is a warrior of expedient decision making and inadvisable seductions, and he’s in the pose, the warrior pose, and this is the presentation of the lingam, the gesture of the lingam, in which concentration on longing is in the shape of an arrow shining like a thousand suns, and this is good, because sometimes he has to resort to the philters of Western medicine to achieve the proper presentation of the lingam, and he reaches one arm under himself and one around his side and says, “Bind me.”

“What about getting it off later? That’s going to burn.”

His impatience is plain to see. For this is the lingam gesture. Nora peels up the end of the tape, wraps it around his wrists twice, and then, under pressure, a third time. This is the pose of the Humiliated Pupil, and once in it, he scuttles, as if crustacean, closer to her, where he can plant his five o’clock shadow on her hams, and she giggles, and he kisses her thigh. Her thigh has the excellence of distant galaxies.

“Take off the gear.” He means that the time is so short. And she does the perfect yogic removal of layers, one leg at a time, like a pink flamingo of yogic abandon. And because she has the experience in the helping professions, she has eliminated coarse overgrowth from her body, except for a landing strip, in the Brazilian style, and she giggles as he cranes with his neck, winching forward to make a landing in the folds of her, though she cannot help but say, “Flat back, shoulders down, please. Shoulders down,” and then there’s a little rush of the breath of the ocean, a silencing, as he has now placed his tongue where he would prefer to have his tongue, his subtle tongue of the candle flame. Exertion is involved because his hands are in the binding position and so his hands cannot be used. And it is said that meditation upon the mandala on the wall in the office of the False Guru shall alleviate conditions of suffering, the mandala on the tapestry, that representation of Shiva the destroyer, but this causes distraction from the presentation of the lingam, which causes the lingam to fail. There is no other explanation but the explanation of unnecessary concentration upon the mandala. How could this always happen? Losing himself in the shambhavi mudra when he should be engaged with the tantra and the yogini. How could it happen?

He collapses onto the floor. “Bow pose. Can we do bow pose?”

The yogini expresses hesitation at causing pain to the yogin in the pursuit of the bow pose, which is better performed by seasoned practitioners. And yet the entire alimentary canal will be toned in this practice, which is the practice of dhanurasana, likewise adrenal glands and thyroid gland.