In therapy, and in meditation, he’s done both, for his research, they advocate a similar schizophrenia. So that you separate a ‘witness consciousness’ from the feeling, experiencing yourself experiencing, as it were. Hours of sitting still, looking inside and finally you sense that you are the one looking on, not the one whose heart aches, not the one who is broken and sees no future. It’s become second nature to him now. He sees his mental world float by through the clear sky of his awareness. The mist of his mind cleared years back.
And yet just because he watches his feelings and his thoughts, how he deals with the world hasn’t changed that much. In some ways, the consciousness – ‘Ah yes, this is what I think about that. See how there is some aversion above the apathy’ – has made him less free to act. He is bound by his insight to try to act on it, rather than from it. Shouldn’t he be a better man rather than just a wiser one? Shouldn’t his knowledge confer some power over his feelings?
Jogging now. He thinks of a Tibetan monk he met at a retreat centre in France when he was writing a series of pieces on mind and spirit for a semi-intellectual, left wing journal. The man, as people always say about the Dalai Lama, did exude a peaceful aura. Jesse asked the traditional questions: isn’t it easy to be calm and detached, happy and optimistic, when you’re in the ivory tower of the monastery? The monk smiled – patience seemed to seep from him, which had the effect of making Jesse feel limited.
The monk wrapped his crimson and yellow robes more tightly around him. Jesse knew, from earlier conversations, that in line with one tradition, this man had sewn his clothing together himself from donated scraps, cut from the robes of his brothers in his home monastery in India before he had travelled to France.
‘The material, it should be pamsula,’ he’d said. ‘That means they should have been burned by fire, chomped by oxen, cut my mice, worn by the dead… Fortunately, that’s rather difficult to organize.’ He had broken off, laughing, his eyes sinking into creases, then flashing open as he resumed. ‘But to take these pieces, to stitch together, to make a whole from these left-over parts… It felt right to me. I don’t explain well. But you see, it reminds us that wholeness is an aim as well as an illusion. And even here,’ he waved his arm to encompass the steep hillsides of holm oaks, gorse and rosemary, ‘even here is not paradise.’
Jesse listened, writing in his Moleskine notebook, as the monk explained that his life was not without tribulations. He explained that he had to face up to all the demons of his own mind. That he had felt overpowering guilt and pain about his inability to help free his homeland. That he had, at times, felt strongly tempted to break his vows in various ways – he wouldn’t be more specific. And that the community occasionally hit conflicts which it could be troubling to resolve. ‘Even here,’ he said again, ‘it is not paradise.’
On that trip, Jesse had met a woman. He’d ended a long-term relationship a matter of weeks before and was raw and sore, his senses too acute, his skin too thin. That was why he’d jumped at the chance to go on the retreat. He had been due to cover a conference in Oslo with some top neuroscientists and a Nobel Prize winner in attendance, but the monks on the mountain had seemed more appealing.
He stops running, wipes his forehead and puts his hands on his hips, breathing deeply. He can’t go back into the hotel yet, he stretches, lets his mind drift back to the monastery above Montpellier. And the woman.
She had brown hair that curled loosely, pre-Raphaelite. And a wide smile. That’s what he remembers best, the smile that blazed through his depression. Blue eyes, slightly alien eyes, the shape of them and the long black lashes. She walked like a dancer, with that looseness in her lower back, a certain grace. ‘Yoga,’ she’d told him.
She was there on a meditation break – with yoga sessions. They’d talked over breakfast, after her two hours in the studio. ‘I’m not a morning person, but there is something magical about meditating and moving as the sun comes up.’
‘What happens for the rest of the day?’
‘A break from the spiritual stuff for a few hours now, cryptic crosswords for me – all the mind calming makes me feel I’m atrophying,’ she laughed. ‘Maybe I’m not a natural fir for this kind of thing?’
‘And then?’
‘And then we sit in meditation after lunch through to early evening. The first two days were tough. Yesterday a bit better.’
Jesse asked if she knew the monk he was there to interview, ‘Oh yes, he’s great! The compassion and whatnot he’s got in droves, but he has a good sense of humour, too. And he’s broad-minded.’ Jesse watched her face as she spoke, the life in it, the vitality. Her voice rose, the speech quickening as she continued. ‘I was talking to him about Auden the other day… the poet… sorry, patronising… do you know his poem ‘For the Time Being’? No? Well, in it Auden seems to acknowledge the inevitability of the worldly, the carnal, the life of the flesh – and says that for those of us for whom life is sex and blood and passion, not just spirit – there is still room for us in heaven…’ She looked down, seemingly embarrassed, a light blush flaring, though it could have been the warming sun.
She raised her eyes to his again, caught them, utterly, he couldn’t look away. ‘Sorry, I get rather over-excited about ideas. And anyway, he, he got it and understood. Even agreed, though the life of the soul is his path… but it’s good not to be excluded…’ She faded away again.
‘Yet you’re here on a meditation retreat? The life of the soul rather than the body?’
She laughed, her eyes creasing, head thrown back, ‘It’s a balancing act! If I put in enough work here, I can go back to passion with a certain aura of purity!’
‘So what is a life of passion?’
That was when it happened, it was as though he were on the pack ice, walking confidently, and suddenly, at his feet, a crevasse opened. He saw, for a second, a split second, in her expression, the unique identity of her. Indefinable. He couldn’t say afterwards, she was like this or that, or she was this kind of person. It was visceral. The sense of flailing on the brink of extinction, arms windmilling about above a vertical drop, the turquoise and azure and indigo of the glacial entrails. He felt the vertiginous allure of the depths and the raw fear. Agony and ecstasy. The pull and the push of it. Would he choose the painful heave of parturition into a new self or hold his nerve and thank whatever could be thanked that he was still standing?
‘Passion,’ she said. ‘If you are open to passion, you are open to pain. It’s the inevitable. Beauty and terror are intimately connected. That’s what all religions know. It’s what they try to explain. The thing is, even if you avoid the passion, you cannot avoid the pain. You might limit it, but you can’t avoid it.’ She spread out an arm, ‘That’s my problem with all this – they try to limit pain by avoiding passion but it serves just to guarantee lives of quiet desperation. Though they’re probably in denial.’ She took a sip of her coffee, black and strong, from the cafetiere they were sharing. ‘Me, I know there’ll be both. And thank God for that. I’m alive.’ Her eyes flashed, defiant, perverse, ‘But sometimes I need a break. That’s all.’
She pressed her lips together, ‘Have I said too much?’
Did she say that? He could have imagined it.
Jesse was looking at her. Watching as she cut up an apple, ate the pieces, teeth slicing through the red skin and white flesh.
‘I’ve just split up with someone.’ That vertiginous pull. He stopped abruptly, pulling back from the ledge again.
She said nothing, her gaze open, receptive. A smile like a kiss on her lips.
‘It was messy and…’
‘That’s why you’re here? Not just work?’
‘Yes.’
They were silent a moment. Then she reached across the rough oak of the table, as the sound of the cicadas intruded on his consciousness for the first time. The touch of her fingers. And he watched the jays crowd on the mulberry tree, the thin branches dipping and diving as they landed, cawing and clumsily striking each other, the iridescence of their glossy wing tips flashing in the light of another glorious day.
He couldn’t meet her eyes. He wanted to get up and go. He wanted to stay there forever.
How could something be so right and so wrong at the same time?
She smiled, a slight smile, and stood, her body sleek in close-fitting yoga clothes.
‘I hope you find what you need.’
He watched her walk away, movements of a big cat, then called out, ‘Hey…’ She turned, pivoting on one leg, the smile in place when she faced him, her hair free. ‘What’s your name?’
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