John Updike - S

Not, of course, that we expect the Reagan government to make up our losses. But we don't expect to be dunned for money we don't owe, either. During my attempt to fill out your forms, a number of questions arose; let me mention only the most nagging:

In Form 990, Part VII, yes-or-no Question 79 asks, "Was there a liquidation, dissolution, termination, or substantial contraction during the year (see instructions)?" As I say, there seems to have been a contraction, but how substantial relative to previous years I have no way of knowing with the incomplete information at hand. My sense is of a material contraction of some duration, amid a deceptive explosive spiritual growth. The instructions I am parenthetically instructed to "see" do not seem to be attached or included, or else I have not grasped what instructions (in your sense) are.

Re Schedule A of Form 990, Part II, "Compensation of Five Highest Persons for Professional Services (See specific instructions)": Does spiritual guidance delivered in platform lectures and darshans (informal teaching sessions, with questions and answers) and in the even less tangible form of physical proximity and meaningful silence and abstention from public appearance constitute a "professional service," and does compensation include limousines and bejewelled timepieces as well as cash? Again, what instructions?

Page 2029-8 of Form 1024 lists four columns of numbered types of Exempt Organizations and invites us to "select up to three codes which best describe or most accurately identify your purposes, activities, etc." Number 030-"School, college, trade school, etc."-of course is one. And even though we are not 001 ("church, synagogue, etc."), number 008-"Religious publishing activities"-is rather tempting, since our books are indeed-in the broad sense specified above-religious. But number 260 ("Fraternal beneficiary society, order, or association") also appeals to a number of us here, since fraternity (which I assume includes sorority) is our goal, not only for ourselves but for all mankind. Along the same lines, under "Advocacy," numbers 520 ("Pacifism and peace") and 529 ("Ecology or conservation") seem very much to the point, while others in the same "Advocacy" category, such as 522 ("Anti-communism") and 539 ("Prohibition of erotica"), do not. But no doubt just two or three code numbers are all you need, and I am being, as a novice tax accountant, much too conscientious.

Yours sincerely,

Ma Prem Kundalini

Temporary Accountant,

Ashram Arhat

Dearest Pearl -

I'm sorry to have been so slow to answer your letter. The truth is, darling, it hurt your mother's feelings a teeny bit. Of course I'm delighted that you and Jan had such a lovely summer in Europe-it was brutally hot here, and people, even the ones that didn't get heat stroke, began to act very testy-not Vikshipta, the vile-tempered German I mentioned before-he actually left in July and I've heard is trying to get a counselling job in Seattle or Portland or some other cool misty place, but my guess is he'll be back; there's even less of what he wants out there than in here-but the women I work with. The sannyasins call us the "godmothers," not entirely kindly I think. Perhaps women together all day and night are too much of a good thing-tHat female attentiveness begins to work on the nerves, one begins almost to long for a man, who doesn't notice anything-your own father certainly didn't have that among his faults, that tireless nervous susceptibility-I mean bursting into tears or storms of rage over each imagined slight or deviation from utter devotion. In the nature of my expanded duties here I've been spending more time with the Arhat himself, and one woman, called Durga, who still claims to be his chief executive assistant-though she does nothing these days bjit agitate and storm and sulk and consort with the security forces, young men full of guns-is jealous of me, and another, Alinga, my dear housemate, is jealous of bint, our adored Master. I used to think women were so prone to jealousy, because the patriarchal society denied them any power except that which they could extract from interpersonal relationships, but now I wonder if it isn't more biological than that-the women here have power enough: the Arhat in his total goodness and rather playful fatalism grants them all of it, really-and relates, at a wild guess, to the vigilance female mammals have to have in regard to their young when they're helpless, which continues even when no children are on the scene, except the infant we forever carry inside us, waiting to suck and be fondled. There are, as I know I already wrote somebody, a few children here, brought by single mothers or mated couples and even one or two born in the clinic since I've come, but by and large children are one area where the Arhat isn’t totally accepting and benign. He calls them "human tadpoles" and speaks of the overpopulation in India and parts of Africa and the starvation as a horror worse than Hitler's extermination camps because nobody's able to invade and stop it, and indeed the Western nations' efforts, shipping in food and inventing new kinds of wheat and rice, just postpone the problem and make it eventually worse-I think his own experiences when very young whatever they were were so horrendous that just the sight of a child is painful to him. The ashram keeps a little school up through sixth grade but older than that the children are bussed to the Dorado Regional High School forty miles away and come back as you can imagine with a great many conflicted and angry feelings from their contact with the children of the "Outer States." They are encouraged to drop out as soon as they legally can, at sixteen, which is in a way sad, since their parents here tend to be if anything owreducated.

All this as a prelude to speaking honestly with my own child, my lovely little priceless Pearl. I am glad as well as surprised that you found Jan's parents so delightful-their house in Amsterdam dating back to 1580 and on a lovely quiet canal, their country estate with its working windmill and squawking peacocks, their apartment in Paris, their twenty-meter yacht kept at a Turkish harbor, their fluent English, French, German, and Italian. I still don't understand why Jan's father is entitled to call himself a count if they come from this long line of innkeepers and beermakers, but I'm glad you found the brewery itself so thrilling-though of course everything is clean, dearest, otherwise their precious beer would taste of lint and cobwebs and cockroach feces. The whole dreary process has to do with bacteria-a rather hideous microscopic kind of farming. Frankly I have always found the idea of fermentation rather disgusting, and even in college when it was the thing to drink and I had no figure worries I hated that sour bitter burpy taste of beer. It has been really not the least of my blessings these last months to get away from your father's martinis and all those suburban cocktail parties and to be in an environment where the human vessel and its conduits are as much respected as those giant glass vats and shiny copper tubing you were so impressed by are. Think of where the beer goes then-into the ulcerated guts of drunken loud barflies and then vomited out into bathroom bowls and onto the sidewalks.

Most of your life stretches gloriously before you and of course part of it must be exposing your sweet and unspoiled self to all sorts of people, including these van Hertzogs, vulgar and yeasty as they sound. And it is no doubt beneficial to add new words like "flocculence" and "wort" to your vocabulary. But I am, frankly, offended at your report of their excessive curiosity as to my present situation and, more hurtful still, your own embarrassment in regard to it. Whatever can be embarrassing? Your mother is seeking truth, beauty, and freedom, and finding it-what is there to be ashamed of? Be ashamed, rather, of her previous twenty-two years of respectable bondage and socially sanctioned frivolity. Who are they, these brewers, living as they do off of human drunkenness and forced bacterial labor, to turn up their noses at a "cult" which is striving to offer the world a new model of human arrangements? With their alcohol they are 'anesthetizing sick Mankind; we are attempting a cure. These vain and vapid van Hertzogs' opinion concerns me less than that of a pair of their pet microbes-what saddens me beyond description is that my own daughter, the female child of my female womb, loved as much as any mother ever loved a daughter, appears to share the doubts of these square-headed Dutch folk. You ask me if I intend to stay at the ashram "till Kingdom Come," if I haven't already "got out of it" all I am going to "get." You speak of my renewal here as an "ego trip" when in fact the flight from ego is what I have undertaken, and you write the jeering words "group grope" when in truth the grope is all behind^me, in that pathetic suburban squirming in the closets and backstairs of respectability. The relationships I enjoy in the ashram, those that wound as well as heal, all transpire in the bright sunlight of amaya, of non-deceit. I regret even so much as hinting at my friendships here, since you seem to discuss them promptly with Jan and thence they are relayed, in the language of prurient gossip, to your-I shudder to write it-possible in-laws.