Edward Aubyn - On the Edge

He was worried by the respect for harmony inherent in this last part of the theory, but Stash and Crystal, who wanted to get going, told him it was perfect.

Everything was fine for the first three days. They bounced around LA telling everyone that this was It, Adios, The End. Their friends were too cool to dissuade them; they were too proud to dissuade themselves. During the next three days the insomnia started to take its toll. Krater worked on refinements of the Theory. Should they stretch out their terminally weakened bodies in a roach-infested room, or did this show an unreconstructed desire to be part of the future? He argued each side of the case with increasing violence.

Stash’s teeth started to fall out of his bleeding gums like ripe fruit. This blow to his vanity seemed to undermine his desire to die. Only Krater’s incandescent personality held the operation together. Stash was burning through a layer of cultural conditioning, he claimed. Romanticism had taught them that death was beautiful. Naturally they would have to break through the barrier of this myth as they descended into Nada. There would be a layer of horror also, he warned them. That too was superficial. Nada was flavourless, odourless, without affect: when they hit Nada there would be no pain and no peace, just an indifference he called White Time which would cancel the presence of either possibility. As usual, Krater was thrown into crisis by his own claims. Was he giving a transcendent value to White Time?

Crystal tormented him with questions about the relation of White Time to the Buddhist Void and other rumours that had floated through the questing skies of her childhood. ‘Avoid the void,’ she wrote hundreds of times on the walls of her bedroom. This simple phrase shattered her addled mind again and again, sometimes itself disintegrating into ‘A void, the void.’

‘The definite article is definitely out,’ screamed Krater on the seventh day. ‘We can’t turn it into a place.’

Later that day he crashed his car but failed to kill himself. Stash, unplugged from Krater’s rhetoric, fell into bed and slept for three days.

Crystal, demented and sleepless, went out in search of the vitamins and honey she desperately needed, her exhausted mind reduced to a metronome, a void, the void, a void, the void. Clasping a pot of honey and scooping the golden liquid into her mouth, she staggered down Santa Monica Boulevard weeping with gratitude.

Krater had a near-death experience and said there was nothing to worry about. Stash went to the dentist, who said there was plenty to worry about. Krater resumed formal education and went on to teach in the comparative religion department of UCLA. Stash started a computer company which gave ten per cent of its profits to the environment, without even building an advertising campaign around its generosity.

After her Nada days, Crystal sat firmly on the fence, worrying that she was neurotic when she worried and worrying that she was becoming stupid if she ever briefly and haphazardly stopped.

One day when she was twenty-nine, she almost crossed the street to avoid walking past the Be Here Now Metaphysical Bookshop. Glancing distastefully into the window, expecting the usual hotch-potch of Crystal Rainbow Quantum Self-Help Healing Miracle books, their authors’ photographs bearing witness to the twin miracles of hairspray and marginal publishing, she saw instead a photograph of Shunryu Suzuki’s austere and imperturbable face. There seemed to be a certain tenderness in the one raised eyebrow. ‘I’m still here. Where have you been?’ it said to her guilty soul. She remembered the mosquitoes, and she remembered that she had a story of her own to pursue, distinct from the maternal see-saw of credulity and disappointment to which she had been strapped until her Nada days.

The often-repeated claim that meditation was more like coming home than going anywhere was in her case literally true.

* * *

But what was going on now, in the famous present moment which, like a naughty child, couldn’t be left unattended for one second?

‘You know the way your parents used to say, “Don’t just sit there, do something,”’ Surya had said that morning. ‘Well, what I like to say is, “Don’t just do something, sit there.”’

She folded her legs and sat on the lawn. Why was she so uptight? Why was she fleeing from the other people on the deck? Why were they bothering her?

Why was she bothering to ask? She knew she mocked these fumbling seekers, whose left brains didn’t know what their right brains were doing, because she was shocked by her own clumsiness. During meditation that morning she had been daydreaming about sex. She hadn’t even watched the thought of sex arising and announcing its ephemerality, like the landscape from a train window. She’d been right in there, craving, projecting, tuning her fantasy so as to make it more gratifying, worrying about how many affairs to have at once. It was so uncool.

Yesterday in the tubs, she had felt the adhesive longing of Peter’s glances, and she knew she hadn’t managed to let go of them. The reason was obvious: the desire was also in her. She had been touched by his desire to understand what had happened on the massage table. He hadn’t said anything to her at the time that it happened, but she had felt that sudden moment of involuntary concentration, she had seen him stagger back to the tub and she knew that he’d been mingling with the stars. It had happened to him spontaneously, just as it had not happened to Jean-Paul, either spontaneously or under the wild duress of psychedelics.

She was shocked by her lascivious daydreams because she had come to rely on meditation at least delivering that first level of detachment, from which to observe, unmoved, the movement of her desires and dilemmas. Neither fear nor hope, neither optimism nor pessimism, could distract her from looking into the real nature of things, which meant, at this level, looking into the unreal nature of things.

A cold demolition of the self lay at the core of her practice, but instead of making her feel cold it released her into a more passionate life, not focused on the volatile and exhausting play of her impressions, but on the clarity that enabled her to cut through them.

From this foundation rose a hierarchy of states which she had classified in a private lexicon.

There was that silvery dilation of consciousness in which awareness was itself the object of awareness, as if two mirrors were resting face to face with nothing to reflect except the power of reflection.

Sometimes, as if it were tired of hurrying everywhere, time stopped and instead of one thing after another there was one thing, a moment rising out of the plain, like a mesa from the desert floor. The witness and what she witnessed arose at once, without a word of explanation, and stood in the silence of that single image. The whole mental landscape stretched skywards, as if it had agreed to El Greco’s gaze.

If these long moments were reimmersed into the stream of time, it took on an erotic pulse, as if Tantalus’s torment had been reversed and she could eternally take the first bite of a white peach, over and over, perfect each time and each time freshly perfect.

The key was to throw herself beyond the parapets of language, where a linguistic junkie like Jean-Paul could only imagine vertigo or nonsense. He had never tired of quoting to her the ominous and taciturn last sentence of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus , ‘Of which we cannot speak we must pass over in silence’, but he took ‘pass over’ to mean dismiss, as you might pass over a candidate, whereas she took it to mean contemplate, as a hawk might pass over a landscape, missing nothing.

Beyond the parapets of language, meaning could take flight into a realm of purer metaphor. But if images were further up the metaphoric stream than words, what was the object that revealed itself through these metaphors? What was the source?