Edward Aubyn - On the Edge

Brooke dashed after him. She had arranged a special lunch for herself and Adam, Kenneth and Yves.

‘Let’s not dawdle,’ said Adam, ‘or they’ll all come and ask me to read their poems. How was I?’

‘Brilliant,’ panted Brooke, trying to keep up.

The windows surrounded Peter with faint reflections of meditating figures, upright on their cushions. Slumped on his own zafu, he discreetly lifted his ankle from a pressed artery. His lower leg had been tingling its way to death on the carpet and he couldn’t bear it any longer. He was resigned to the ache in his knees which had taken up residence immediately, but he was surprised by the skewer of pain running from his neck to his right shoulder. He discreetly — discreetly again, although in this room full of statues every blink felt like an Olympic event — arched his back in the hope of bringing some relief. What was he supposed to do, meditatively speaking? Pretend it wasn’t happening? How was all this sitting around related to the strange experience he’d had in the hot tubs?

In one respect he didn’t really care. He was in love with Crystal and he was in love with the possibility of a renewed ecstasy. Physical ruin was a small price to pay for these promises of self-transcendence which seemed to merge in the mysterious light of next weekend’s Tantric workshop. Although it was for ‘committed couples’, he still had twenty-four hours to persuade Crystal to come along with him. If she agreed, he would be completely broke and miss his last chance to go back to the bank on Monday morning. Peter felt the thrill of finally detonating the edifice of his old self.

Everybody knew that being ‘in love’ was a state of temporary insanity, that’s why it was so important to make it last as long as possible. It was the bubbling up of the absurd conviction that he had just met a human being unlike any other: not wounded or demanding or confused; not deceitful or egotistical or cruel; not lost or weak or stupid; someone generous, splendid, inexhaustibly intriguing, and reciprocally deluded.

Love was such a small word, how could its single syllable attend to so many catastrophes at once? Like a doctor in an emergency ward, it was always on call, covering for a fondness compounded of pity and duty, rushing to the scene of a violent sexual obsession, falling to its knees in a mountain monastery, throwing stale bread to clockwork pigeons, meeting somebody else’s wife in a hotel room, changing a nappy at four in the morning. What time could it possibly spare to certify his romances?

Perhaps this time it was true love: not the insomniac registrar but the brain surgeon with steady hands. And yet, how had Crystal so convincingly replaced Sabine, and how had Sabine so convincingly replaced Fiona, all in a few months? Fiona, it was true, cried out for replacement. Her opinions were doomed expeditions, her voice a futile gesture, her kisses kamikaze pilots. Now, she seemed not to have been born into the complexity of the world at all, but to have slipped thinly and diffidently to the ground, like a page from a fax machine, the announcement of some fading appetites and sociological facts that stuttered, almost noiselessly, from the roller of her genetic fabric.

He hated Fiona for the use she had made of Gavin’s death in the Cult Busters meeting she had been to with his mother. Hatred was famously close to love, people wrote books about that sort of thing, but it also had a justified reputation for not being close to it at all. As this thought passed through him, Peter could feel his hatred break up into guilt, and see pity rushing in to soothe the guilt. These Buddhists were certainly on to something. The exhausting business of turning his colliding and scattered emotions into a story about who he was was matched by the exhausting business of editing it into a story he liked. The first thing he asked about a situation was whether he liked it or not, and the next question was how it would ‘turn out’, which meant whether he would like it or not later on.

During the last forty-eight hours he had been forced to see the extent of this tyranny. Even ‘meditating’ he kept asking, ‘Do I like this?’ ‘Is this for me?’ ‘Will I get enlightened?’ ‘Will I like that?’ ‘Are the others bored too?’ And that was when he was concentrating. The rest of the time he just drifted through the ghostly landscapes of the future and the past, arranging and rearranging them until he liked them more, or decided that he didn’t like them at all. It was pathetic. There he was again, having an aversion to his own mental life. It went on and on.

Once or twice he had stopped asking, ‘Do I like this?’ and had felt the encroachment of a subtle and alien calm. Needless to say, in the face of this opportunity for a new experience, he had painstakingly reconstructed the story which had just dematerialized. ‘Am I the sort of person who kisses a woman he hardly knows as he leans on a wooden fence above the foaming Pacific?’ Yes! ‘Am I the sort of person who then invites her to a Tantric workshop which will cost him his job?’ As soon as possible!

He was in a radical frame of mind, partly thanks to Lama Surya Das, who was leading the meditation. Peter had expected a wizened ethnic type in a saffron toga, smiling tirelessly and bowing to the insects. The Lama in fact turned out to be a burly American who walked to his zafu as if it were the striking plate on a baseball field. Peter dimly sensed that somewhere in the depths of his meditating mind the Lama was perpetually hitting a home run, but instead of dashing around the field he stood there, watching the ball arc into the open space which was the true object of his attention.

‘Now that the mind is extremely spacious,’ said Surya Das, as if to confirm Peter’s speculation, ‘turn it back abruptly on itself with the laser-like question, “Who or what is experiencing right now?” Sense that directly, no need to analyse it too much, just pop the question and let go. Who or what is experiencing, controlling, thinking? See through the seer and remain free. Plumb that gap, that bottomless abyss, that luminous openness, pure presence. It’s too close, so we overlook it. It seems too good to be true, so it’s hard to believe. It’s too simple, we can’t get our minds round it. It’s too transparent, we can’t even see it. It’s not outside us, so we can’t reach it. That’s the innate great perfection. Don’t overlook it.’

He fell silent again.

Yeah, thought Peter, just pop the question and let go. He pictured himself falling through space, like a Magritte businessman. He let go of his umbrella, and fell faster. He heard the wind rushing in his ears. That rushing sound, that was pure presence.

Who or what was experiencing right now? Perhaps he was a ‘what’ after all. Perhaps under the sociological ‘what’ was a psychological ‘who’, and under that another impersonal ‘what’. Poor old ‘who’ was sandwiched between a ‘what’ hardly worth knowing, and another ‘what’, hardly knowable. ‘Buddha nature’ made it sound like a big who, that was the lure, but actually it was a big what. It never belonged to you, you belonged to it.

There he was pondering again. Pondering wasn’t meditating, or was it?

Just pop the question and let go. Rushing sound in the ears, pure presence, free fall. Wasn’t this fabrication, wasn’t this fantasy? God, meditation was a nightmare, one got in such a muddle. Still, he’d better look as if he knew what he was doing, or Crystal might never kiss him again.

Begin again. Shed his armour, and shed the bandages under the armour, throw away his masks and the sincere countenance under his masks. Say goodbye to his body, his cherished body. Watch it fall away, like the discarded section of a rocket. And his mind, his cherished mind, watch it fall away. Who watches it fall away? Sense that directly.