All One Horse

the essence of his teaching

We all know Nascimento Watsenaam, the man who doesn’t dare laugh in public. For reasons of correct behaviour, no doubt, or decorum, or selfesteem, or having to satisfy the tax inspector. He holds it back, he keeps it bottled up until the darkest movement of the night. Then he betakes himself to a secluded spot where he can place both hands on the knees, pull his back in a knot, and vomit up the hot laugh like a jet of undigested mirth. Tears are squeezed through tightly closed eyelids, his facial muscles hurt, his earthly body heaves and shakes. He travels all over the world — from Spain to Rome to Lusaka to Canberra to Bombay. Everywhere the man has to go looking for dark alleys or uncultivated fields or the secret places in the lee of buildings — away from the geometry of the moon — where the penumbra is turgid. We hear him. People are broken from their sleep with shudders and with shivers. Hands fumble for eyeglasses, false teeth, pistols and alarm clocks. ‘What? What was that? Ooohhh…’

On his way from Nomansland to Wet Country, Nascimento Watsenaam stops over in Australia. He goes for a run along very high cliffs, down a brown cracked-mirror path, where only very rich people who can afford to lose a child come jogging in the dew. He is looking for the solitude of unconstrained laughter. He so much wants to see his gurgles writhing on the spear of the sun. The cliff-face is red. He sees carved there in even a deeper red: Now whitefellow has made of the Dreamtime a nightmare. Night can not be trusted. It is too distant.

In Bombay it is difficult to find an unfrequented votive sanctuary. There is much poverty there — people resting their aching bones for the night in lane and entrepôt, other people under the veil of darkness scrounging in refuse bags for sustenance. Animals too, having to outwit the humans. Animals imitating the sounds of human intercourse. ‘Don’t go shitting there,’ we tell the man, ‘you will find the turd filched from your underpants. And be on the lookout for where you laugh!’ In Bombay there are also grey-vested crows with impertinent stares and evil claws and beaks which they use for tearing apart the human corpses put out for the gods on the Towers of Silence. Gods seldom laugh. That is what distinguishes the man from the gods.

The man has no choice. Man cannot smile without having laughter in reserve. The one abbreviates the other. The one is the flag of the other’s manoeuvres and surrenders. Only politicians can ply a smile with their lips without having anything up the sleeve to back it up with. If man can no longer smile, reflecting the lack and the decadence, bile accumulates in the lower hollows, draining him to bitter despondency, slackening all self-respect. His coffee will have the taste of a fat female thigh. No, man is hooked on the absolute of cackling. How else is he to dog and to dig his death?

We all know how the man, Nascimento Watsenaam, goes erring through the streets until in desperation, sick to his stomach with the need to let his laugh out soon before it becomes a cyst or a cestode or a festering cesspool for small cetaceans, he clambers over a wall into the park on Mulabar Hall where the Towers of Silence try to entice heaven with their fruit of a counter-order. The art is to move away from the sad stench of decomposition and the rigorously patterned flitter of skeletons in moonlight, and yet to find an eddy of obscurity.

He finds it. Or thinks so. There must have been other animals also feeding on the night. Hardly does the laugh protrude when he hears a furtive coming or going. And deeply imbued by etiquette the man gets the fright of his life. Had he but coughed, grabbed the wet laugh and ran! A flash. Too late!

We all see him perish in a figure of speech: glum and deflated, the face gaunt, sunken eyes, not even the most minute uplift of mouth-corners to suggest a whiff of redemption. The man disappears from our knowledge, cursed maybe for ever to move from joke to joke in search of lost levity or levitation. But jokes are placebos for those bitten by the dog of death. We all see him no more.

We all know the thin old cat with the bloated stomach who sometimes burps, licks its whiskers, and cannot repress a sly grin. In exactly this same way does Gautama transmit the essence of his teaching.