Mount H., Part 1I was sitting in my favorite Chinese restaurant in Belleville, Paris one Friday night as is my custom, tucking in heartily to a platter of langoustines aux noix de coco, which is a sublime dish, when my gastronomic reveries were disturbed by two vulgar young Americans at the table opposite from me, loudly and pretentiously discussing plans for some Internet venture or other. They spoke of hungry ghosts and situationists, of the electronic music from Cologne and the dancing of the Baoule tribe, of the Nyingma and the Gelugpa, of tantra, mantra and sutra. Quite obviously they knew nothing of what they spoke. The fiercest glances I cast in their direction did nothing to silence them, and so I quickly finished my bottle of Bandol, folded up my newspaper and retired to a quiet nearby bar, to continue my meditations. As I poured a little water into my Pastis 51 and shut out the sound of the soccer match on the TV, I began to reflect on their conversation. They were fools: sans doute. But good looking. Bon. What they planned -- nothing less than to reveal the movement of the sacred at the heart of all of contemporary life--was ill-conceived and, besides, impossible. This was true--but had I not once tried something similar? A thousand times I tried to dismiss their shrill, earnest voices from my consciousness. A thousand and one times they came back. I worked my way down the Rue du Faubourg du Temple, stopping at every Algerian or Turkish Tabac that I encountered for refreshment. By the time I reached the Place de la République, the funfair shone before my intoxicated eyes like the simultaneous appearance of each of the seven Bardo states. As I clung drunkenly to the rear of a merry-go round hobby horse, spinning slowly round and round, I resolved that I could not assume the posture of a sneaking coward and slink away. Had I not once made similar commitments? Had I not? You, my friends, were those two Americans in that restaurant. The name of your website was catchy, I admit it, and so you were not hard to locate. Although I am far away from you, I too have lived in America - as you shall see. I know you will not refuse to publish my story--besides, I am a busy man, and I shall not choke your letterbox with spurious chattering. It is not that I seek fame--what would that be but a source of distraction from my work? What then? All I can say is that the story concerns an unfinished business, and ... ah, but what of that? Brevity, Analog, brevity ... and so without further ado, I begin.
by
On the night before the chosen date of our adventure, I had the impulse to masturbate, while going over an old manuscript that I had found in a file on my hard drive. Since at that time I lived on my own, deep in the woods, I opened up the short story folder on the same drive, and prepared to immerse myself in the familiar, flow of pornographic fantasy, when the strong scent of an electrical fire began to pervade the room. I brushed the smell aside and tried to concentrate on the stream of four letter words, acts and desires passing across my computer monitor, while outside, the pack of Huskies I had been placed in charge of, howled at the moon. Finally the cacophony got so bad that I was forced to abandon my reading and go investigate. The house was calm, there was no smoke and nothing was plugged in that I could see -- and the smell seemed to come from several places at once, both inside the house and out. Finally, I went out to the back yard where I found Alfred, the alpha dog of the pack, waving a dead skunk around in his jaws. A barbaric jubilation had spread among the pack. They shuffled nervously, alternating between brazen showing off and proprietorial hoarding. Although repulsed, I knew that intervention was pointless, so, my head still heavy with lust, I left them to the corpse. It was, I felt, a disconcerting omen. There were three of us. I myself had recently finished obtaining a doctorate in philosophy, as a result of which, I had, for the past year, been unable to read any document longer than a paragraph. I had plunged into yoga practice, while working for a dotcom company in lower Manhattan. The hours there dragged and, when the Crash came, I was laid off and quickly bought myself a ticket to New Delhi , where I spent my time hanging out with dancers, Tibetan monks and raga singers, as I repeatedly asked myself "what is it that you really want?" Then there was Finn, an old Irish anarchist, who had fallen into the company of Sufis during a period on the lam in the East, a secret guesser and story teller of some repute, who lived in the nearby town of N, from which he monitored the world and it¹s slow descent into torpid chaos, impatiently waiting for the tide to turn. And there was Sharpey, a communist yogi and poet from New York, who had recently emerged from an extended period of self-imposed silence, with a stunning series of one syllable poems. That summer we all found ourselves in exile from the city, uninterested in work, with no expectations, and no plans. It was the year 2001 and the millenium spread out before us like a torpid mirage, triggering that slow but insidious vertigo that always accompanies the discovery of the truly deep, the truly infinite, hiding, as it usually does, behind a veil of conventional perception that says "it cannot be that vast--therefore it is not. Look, is that not my house down there? After all, we are but a few steps away from home ..." I had reached the point where I simply could not see a way forward. In fact I had probably reached that point a long time before, but a decade spent working in medicine, treating people with AIDS had obscured the reality from me, in a cloud of crisis and fear. In my youth I had been an artist of a quite conventional sort, but somehow my faith in art had been eroded, as I'd come to realize contemporary art is for the most part little more than a crafty career move for those with a quick tongue and no scruples. I'd been a leftist for the while in the eighties, I had been chased on horseback by mounted cops outside newspaper plants in East London, and by swastika tattooed skinheads through the subways of London, Paris and Berlin. But the realization that communism really was a crock of shit, and that pretty much the same gang of hustlers controlled the communist states as all the other ones, gradually loosened the grip of Marx on me, until I was left with nothing but a few vague generalities about love and democracy, a growing interest in what, for want of a better word, I will call spirituality. And a deep passion for music! That summer, after my return from India, where I had spent considerable time in the blissful company of saints, dead and alive, I was making a point of visiting sites associated with anyone who I considered a modern, western saint. In London, I had tracked down William Blake¹s grave, in the middle of a sidewalk next to an old graveyard in Shoreditch, and meditated there, as I had at the beloved Sufi and Buddhist shrines of Northern India. Workers on their lunchbreaks sat on the grass nearby, eating and chatting. I was craving a trip up, down or sideways into that luminescent realm of the all in all. So I shut my eyes, and began to go down into darkness where Blake lay. At first there was nothing, just dark silence. Then a voice, cranky, as though aroused from sleep, said "who the fuck are you??" A moment's silence followed. My host was making an assessment of what was happening at ground level. Then that same crabby voice again: "go on: fuck off!" So I fucked off back to America. To be continued.
|