S

Dearest Charles-

The distance between us grows, even as my pen hesitates. The engines drone in the spaces between words, eating up the miles, the acres of the flat farms in big brown and green squares below the wing as it inches along. I close my eyes and see our white house, its two screened porches and long glassy conservatory, its peek at the sea and the rocks of the cove-those gray rocks you and Pearl and I have picnicked on so many times and that when the sun beats on their veins feel warm even in February-and its undulating lap of lawn and the bulb bed so happy and thrusty with leaves, now that spring has come. Do leave a note for the lawn boys when they come tomorrow to set their big wide reel mower a notch higher, since last Tuesday they scalped that area over by the roses, where the ground bulges up. How often I've spoken to them about it, and with what results! Of course it's not always the same boys, year after year.

I bought two extra boxes each of your apple granola and unprocessed bran-so you have breakfasts at least for a month. You may wish to speak to Mrs. Kimball about coming now more than once a week. As you know Thursday is her day and I always try to tidy up for her, especially the kitchen and our bedroom. She arrives around noon. If you can't bring yourself to make the bed at least pull the covers up and smooth the puff. The most gracious thing, the day she comes, is to air the bed for the morning with the puff and covers down and windows open to get our body smells out but possibly such refinements were wasted on her anyway. Also: she knows where the front-door key is hidden down up in under the garbage-can bin lid, the door on the right, and puts it back there when she goes home, but don’t leave the burglar alarm on when you go off in the morning-I did once, as you may remember, absent-mindedly when Irving switched yoga lessons at Midge's to Thursday morning because the boy who helps him in the framing shop had to go to his grandmother's funeral or something and the police came as they're supposed to (though not very promptly, she later confided) and poor Mrs. K. with that crooked heavy-lidded eye of hers that makes her look dishonest in any case had a terrible time explaining, since though I trust her with the key I could never bring myself to trust her with the code to the burglar-alarm system-it seemed too intimate. She does, incredible though it may seem to us, have a sex life and who knows with what kind of men who might casually get it out of her? Whereas it would take a real conscious betrayal for her to cold-bloodedly take a key to the hardware store and have duplicates made on that nasty-sounding little machine. You might ask her if she can give you Mondays as well. The thing about dust and dirt that men don't realize is it doesn't just sit there, it sinks in.

I withdrew half of our joint accounts, all the ones I could find records of-the 5½% checking, the savings account at 6½ %, and the capital account in Boston at 7¾% (I think). Indeed, I took a teeny bit more than half since the CDs are tied up for six months at a time and you have all the Keogh and medical-partnership retirement-plan money stashed away that you've always been rather cagey and secretive about, not to mention those tax-shelter real-estate partnerships Ducky Bradford got you into years ago and that you said would be too much trouble and might alert the IRS to put into our joint name-one of the things I suppose I've always resented without admitting it to myself is how you tended to call money "yours" that we really earned together since not only was I keeping up our lovely home to. enhance your image with your patients and fellow-doctors and raising our daughter virtually unassisted since you were always at the office for reasons that didn't dawn on poor innocent me for years, not to mention how while you so heroically (everybody kept telling me) slogged through medical school and internship I was the one who gave up two years of college and any chance of going on to graduate school-I was majoring, you have no doubt forgotten, in French philosophy, Descartes to Sartre-it's amazing to me what I once knew and have forgotten, all that being and nothingness and cogito ergo sum, all I remember now is essence precedes existence, or is it the other way around?-anyway I loved it then, and fantasized myself as Simonede Beauvoir or Simone Weil and instead substitute-taught French and sewing at that terrifying parochial school in Somerville, those clammy-faced nuns and priests who I swear did act a bit lecherous even though nobody in those days believed they could, and stood on my feet all day in the boutique in Porter Square where it turned out their real business was selling pot in little Marimekko sachets. And you have also no doubt forgotten that your tuition fees were partly paid out of that trust fund Daddy had set up for me.

As to the stocks-I had intended to sell only half but then couldn't decide which ones and since everybody agrees the market can't keep rising like it has been I told the broker at Shearson Lehman to go and unload them all. He sent me these forms requiring both our signatures and I rummaged through your desk for one of those big black felt-tips you always use-that same imperious C-scrawl you use on prescriptions and checks and even on the love-note to that brainless LPN you were fucking that time I discovered the Christmas present you were going to give her in your golf-club closet (a Wedgwood shepherdess!-no doubt some private erotic joke in that, to your little Bo-Peep)-I know it so well, that signature, it's been branded into me, I wouldn't be surprised to see it burned into my flank if I looked down, char for Charles, it felt wonderful writing it-being you for a second, with all your dark unheeding illegible male authority. I had meant to divide the amount but Shearson Lehman sent it all in one big check though I had asked the young man I talked to not to-Midge was saying they get them all out of Tufts and Northeastern, these baby brokers now, the smart boys from Harvard and Brandeis go to Hong Kong or straight to Wall Street where the huge money is-but it came in one check anyway and I figured that if the market goes down as it's certain to-even Irving was saying the other day it will, according to the astrological signs-then I'm saving us both money and maybe should award myself a commission. So I have. Anyway, darling, you have all the house and furniture plus the Cape house and the acres in New Hampshire we bought as an investment in case the Loon Mountain condos ever spread that way. Besides taking my jewelry-you can't object to that, some of it was Great-grandmother Perkins's and you gave me the other things, the moonstone brooch for our fifth anniversary and the pear-cut diamond pendant for our tenth and for our fifteenth those rather ugly though I know expensive rectangular emerald earrings I always thought with my dark hair and rich complexion made me look too much like a squaw, a Navajo in turquoise chunks-I rented a big safe-deposit box and put in it the silver teapot with the side-hinged lid and the oblong salver with the big monogrammed P and embossed rim in rope motif that came from the Prices, and the chest of Adam flatware and those lovely fluted double-serpentine candleholders from the Peabodys, and Daddy's coin collection and those old editions of Milton and the Metaphysicals he scandalized his family by spending so much money on the year he went to London to learn the luxury-leather business and didn't, plus some other few odd old family things, I forget what. It's a huge box, much bigger than a breadbox, and the girl at the bank and I both struggled sliding it back into its empty space, like a pair of weakling undertakers grunting and straining in the crypt. I have both keys, don't bother looking.

(Wet spot here because stewardess came with second drink. Little and giggly, just your type, a Filipino I think. The prefab daiquiri mix is not so absolutely sugary as most. Daiquiris it just occurs to me have always been my drink for "letting go"-remember that time we flew down to Saint Martin for your vacation?)

My old Charles-how much I loved you and love you still! Your cheek so excitingly rough in bed at night, that of a beast in whom time had been ticking all day, and then so excitingly smooth in the morning when I kissed you goodbye so you could go heal the world. The wonderful worthy way you smelled-after-shave lotion and the starch m your shirt collar and your hands all soapy and antiseptic and pink. And your sweat, your distinctly own, after we played tennis or made love. Sometimes (may I confess?), even when we were along in years and a distance had grown between us, even then I would miss you so much, the afternoons in the house alone stretching so silently long for me, and the sea that bright metallic four-o'clock blue but the rocks already in shadow, that to cure my hollowness, my dread, I would go to your pajamas on their hook in the closet and smell them-bury my face in their soft flannel in search of your faint, far stale sweat. It was most intense around where your neck rubbed: I found that touching. Somehow we American girls are raised for the smell of a man in the house. Even the scent of your urine and of that unmentionable other lingering in the bathroom into the middle of the morning was comforting-doorways into another being, another body like your own, helplessly a body.

And unlike, say, Midge and Ann Turner and even Liz Bellingham, I was never really satirical about our material advantages, the socio-economic side of it all. Our comfort did not embarrass me. I knew how hard we had worked together to make you a grand grave man, with just enough silvery hair flaring out above the ears, and how important to you the alchemy was that turned your horrible patients' complaints and diseases into our prosperity. Unlike some (Liz, who should talk, whose father never lifted a finger except to sign a bar bill) I saw nothing funny or vulgar in our matching Mercedeses, or the heated lap pool we installed in the old conservatory for your back and my figure. This was economic health, it seemed to me, as attractive as any other kind. The Truro house perhaps was an enhancement that didn't quite work-I could never get used to that mildewy mousy little damp stink that hangs under the pines-so unlike the North Shore with its stern chaste oaks and hemlocks and granite-or keep the squirrels out of the crawl spaces in the winter, or get the aura of the previous people's fried clams and onion rings out of the kitchen. And then of course Pearl and her friends rather ruined my happy early associations (when you could still go skinny-dipping in the ponds in the dunes and the roads really were just ruts in.the sand) after they got old enough for rock and beer and cigarettes and the dreadful rest of it those last summers. For me it became like running a bus route, slithering up and down the driveway heading back into Wellfleet for one more ton of hot dogs and some pimply guest's highly specific favorite munchie called Fritos or Doritos or Cheez Doodles.

Why do Americans always think they should feel guilty about their things? I loved our things. Things are what we strive for, what all the waves in the air tell us to strive for-things are the stuff of our dreams and then like Eve and Adam digesting the apple we must feel so guilty. I didn't, I don't think. Through my thirties I was shamelessly happy about being'me, being part of us. I loved our renovations, the amalgamated maids' rooms and the garage excavated under the porch and the marble-topped island in the kitchen and the lap pool echoing and splashing under all that whitewashed-dap-pled conservatory glass. I grimly enjoyed doing battle with the aphids on the roses and the chinch bugs under the sod and the garden boys with their headphones and lazy stoned smiles, their pulling up groundcover and leaving weeds and poisoning the lawn with fertilizers every summer in big brown stripes. I loved even those famously dreaded suburban cocktail parties, going in the car with you and in the door on your arm and then us separating and coming together at the end and out the door again like that Charles Addams cartoon of the two ski tracks around the tree. I loved you, my eternal' date, the silent absent center of my storm of homemaking, the self-important sagely nodding doctor off in his high-rise palace of pain. I didn't mind fatally the comical snobbish brusque callousness that comes when you've processed enough misery, or the rabid reactionary politics that came with not wanting any national health plan to cut into your fat fees, or even the nurse-fucking when it became apparent-I could smell them on your hands no matter how many times you scrubbed, and there was a new rough way you handled me-because though in some sense you were just another Boston-bred preppy brat not much older than I in another you were my creator, you had put me here, in this rocky grassy sparkling seaside landscape, amid the afternoon silence and the furniture (except of course the things Daddy wanted me to have and Mother had to ditch, grudgingly, when she sold the Dedham house and bought her hideous Florida condo).

Charles darling, it was not your fault.

(Long interruption. They brought me food on a tray-funny chickeny sort of rolled-up thing. Fork and knife and napkin all rolled up too. Hard to unroll and not bother with my elbows the sleeping man next to me. He already hates my writing, my scratching and scratching and pausing now and then to blot my tears. He's terrified I'm going to start confiding the reason for my hysteria and so feigns sleep. Typical male avoidance maneuver. Then I got sleepy, having consumed the little demi-bouteille du vin rosf californien. Plane bounced up and down over some white-nosed mountain range as soon as the girl filled my coffee cup. No girl, actually-a woman about my age, both of us too old to be bouncing around in the sky with these mountains poking upwards at us. Then I dozed. I don't know where your Filipino went to-she seemed busy in the first-class section and then got absorbed into the cockpit. They say with these automatic pilots all sorts of things go on-nobody, really, is flying the plane. Just like the universe.)

Perhaps it was your fault. Leaving me alone so much amid our piled-up treasures, you gave me time to sense that my life was illusion, maya. Midge's yoga group, that I joined just for the exercises and something to do, gave me a vocabulary. My spirit, a little motionless fleck of eternal unchanging fttrusba, was invited to grow impatient with prakriti-all that brightness, all that flow. I would look at the rim of the saucer of my fourth decaf for the day and feel myself sinking-drawn around and around and down like a bug caught on the surface of bathwater when the plug is pulled. Pearl 's going away to England was part of it. Your emotional desertion and the fading of our sex life was part of it. But there was-something beyond and behind these phenomenal manifestations that was rendering even my unhappiness insubstantial. I seemed, like some dainty Japanese on the other side of the world with her rice-powdered face and pigeon-toed stockinged feet, to be living in a paper house, among miniature trees and gardens raked to represent nothingness. And into this papery world broke love.

That much you should know. I have left you out of love for another. Your own "genteel atrocities of coldness and blindness toward me were not by themselves enough. I was too stoical, too Puritan, too much a creature of my society for solitary rebellion; I needed another. Who he is, and where we are together, I will trust you not to seek out. Your dignified useful life, of which I was an ever smaller and less significant adornment, surely will forbid any ugly vulgar furor of detectives and lawyers and warrants. Let me become truly nothing to you, at last. I will change my name. I will change my being. The woman you "knew" and "possessed" is no more. I am destroying her. I am sinking into the great and beautiful blankness which it is our European/Christian/Western avoidance maneuver to clutter and mask with material things and personal "achievements." Ego is the enemy. Love is the goal. I shed you as I would shed a skin, with some awkwardness perhaps and at first a sensitivity to the touch of the new, but without pain and certainly without regret. How can I-we-regret a phase of life that is already dead? Are not all oiir attachments, in truth, to things that are already dead?

If you decide to sell the house or any part of our joint holdings, I of course expect-my legal half. If in time you wish to remarry (and I expect you will, not out of any great talent for uxoriousness but because the ferocious sea of seeking women will at some point overpower your basic indifference; the only bulwark against women is a woman, and a wife is convenient, especially for spoiled and preoccupied men of middling years) I will ask an appropriate settlement in exchange for your freedom. The affront, to your pride and convenience, of my desertion should weigh little, in any wise court, against the nearly twenty-two years of mental and emotional cruelty you with your antiseptic chill have inflicted on me. More than twenty-two-since I date my bondage not from that rather grotesquely gauzy and bubbly and overphotographed August wedding at King's Chapel the year our fathers were all for Goldwater but from the moment when you, with the connivance of my parents, "rescued" me from what was so generally deemed to be an "unsuitable" attachment to dear little Myron Stern.

But enough, my once and only husband. No grudges. Between us the scale is fairly balanced. Darkness, though the plane has moved west with the sun and given us a sunset in slow motion, has at last come, and little unknown cities twinkle below. We are descending. The human pilot has resumed the controls and the pretty little Filipino has reappeared, checking our seat belts with mock concern for our well-being. The fat man has stopped pretending to be asleep and is leaning his bulk into me, straining to see out my window. He fears for his life. In his gross voice he has the temerity to tell me I should put up my tray. I hope he reads this sentence. That is not my hand trembling, but the sudden uncongenial mixture of air and metal-the shaking of the plane. No-I am suddenly terrified to be without you (interruption: we have landed and are taxiing)-to be without you now that dinner hour has properly come, and our windows will be black against the yews outside, with the lights of a lone boat moving across the cove, and the automatic garage door will be grinding upward to receive your Mercedes, and rumbling down again, and the stairs up from the basement will resound with your aggressive footsteps, and there you will be, so solid and competent and trusting and expecting your quick martini before dinner. But then I realize that this happened-darkness came to you, you found the house empty, you read my horrible hasty note-hours ago, in quite another time zone.

Love,

S.

Dearest Pearl -

Perhaps by now you will have heard from your father. He was always less afraid of the transatlantic telephone-those strings of dialled numbers, those crackling foreign accents-than I was. My wiggles, you used to call my writing. When you were two, and we were still living in the little Brighton house, you would crawl up on my lap expecting to see a drawing on my desk as when we crayonned together, and were so disappointed to see just my wiggles, little crooked lines all in one dull color.

Well, darling, I am doing my wiggles now in a motel in Los Angeles, and have left your father. It was nothing he did, or that I did, suddenly-it was more a matter of what he and I had been doing for years and years, or not doing, rather-not even paying attention. You remember how conscientiously I used to tell him, at dinnertime, of my day?-the little tail-wagging housewife-puppy, whimpering and drooling, offering up her pathetic worried bones and chewing sticks, her shopping trips to Boston and her excursions to the plant nursery in Wenham, her tennis games and her yoga lessons and her boozy little lunches at the club with the same women she played tennis with yesterday, as if to say to this big silent he-doctor, this gray eminence, "Look, dear, how hard I've been working to enhance your lovely estate!" or "See, I'm not wasting your money, I couldn't find a thing I wanted to buy at Bon-wit's!" or "Every hour accounted for-not a minute of idleness or daydreaming or sleeping with all these dark handsome strangers that came today to pump out the fat trap!" Well, I recently tried an experiment. I didn't tell your father a thing about my day. And be never asked. Not once, day after day of biting my tongue-he utterly didn't notice. That settled it. So absent from his perceptions, I might as well be absent in fact.

Of course, there is a little more to it than that. We of the frailer sex have to have some wild hope, something to go to-otherwise a million years of slavery has conditioned us to huddle by the hearth, stony as it is, and pound some more millet, and get pounded in turn by way of thanks, and commune with the moon. I speak as one of my generation, that came of age just as the Fifties ended-I was nineteen when Lee Harvey Oswald shot them dead-and then by twenty I was married to your father and working too hard to support him really to notice that a revolution was going on, and all the old barriers were down. With your generation, dear Pearl, the barriers are not just down but forgotten, trampled into history. The harvest is in. How thrilling it has been for me-I almost wrote "us," still thinking in the plighted plural-to see you grow, tall and fearless and carrying your femaleness like a battle flag! Even when you were tiny I saw you as a soldier, your hair pale and straight and shiny as a helmet-magical blond child of a dark mother and prematurely gray father. I had been a tall girl too but had always to fight the impulse to hunch. Your father, to give the devil his due, loved you extravagantly. He didn't want a son-when you were born he confessed to me he couldn't have tolerated sharing me with another male. That was still in his chivalrous days. To your generation his remark will sound chauvinistic but at the time it expressed our happiness, our three-cornered joy. My own bliss, holding you even that first hour with your pulsing hot bald skull and freshly unfolded hands that even then had a bit of a grip, was that of seeing myself extended, my womanhood given a second try. My genitals had always been presented to me subtly as a kind of wound and you I vowed would never feel wounded. Daughter, your father liked to say. Just the word. It is a much more satisfying word, with those mysterious silent letters in the middle, than simple little son. So now you can see how I have this fear of being locked out by you two. I am in disgrace, I have flubbed my r &le. You have been so admirably the daughter-lisping your first words ("Dada," "Mama," and then "coogie" from the Cookie Monster on "Sesame Street"), mastering toilet-training and small-muscle motor control just when Dr. Spock thought you should, pitching for that mixed-sex softball team that went all the way to the semifinals in Danvers when you were thirteen, growing flaxen-haired and just the right amount of buxom and getting into Yale so smartly when Harvard couldn't accept any more legacies and now for your junior year abroad pondering the Metaphysicals (your grandfather would be so proud!-he doted on them, and Milton and Spenser and Marvell) in some fogey old don's musty digs with its electric fire (this is more my imagining of it than anything you've written in your I must say very few letters) and lighting up High Street and Carfax with your wide-eyed long-haired easy-striding American beauty and on weekends having champagne and strawberries with the sons of the nobility just as in "Brideshead Revisited," which you will remember we enjoyed so much, you and I together, you staying up to watch it even though it was school the next day, not so very long ago. (Am I wrong to date your passion for things English from those shows?) You have played and are playing so splendidly the role of Daughter and your father impeccably assumed the part of Dada but I seem to have forgotten my lines and wandered offstage. Will you forgive me? (Your father's forgiveness, oddly, doesn't interest me at all.)

Twenty is an age when your parents still think of you as a child and if you were to die or get married one would sadly say "only twenty" but as I recall that age there is little "only" about it and I must appeal to you as another woman to understand me, to simply know. And having so appealed I realize, or seem to realize, in this rather terrifying motel room where the air-conditioner rattles as if mounted off-center and people seem to keep bumping against the door as they go by in the hall to the ice machine, that of course there is no question of condemnation, that you and I will continue to love each other as we did that first minute, when you gripped my finger with this little violet baby hand the texture of a wilted flower, because we are aspects of the same large person, that even in that first minute all your eggs (this is an incredible physiological fact I recently read in The New England Journal of Medicine which your father gets) were tiny and perfect in you and you were my egg, tiny and perfect. I am crying as I write this and perhaps make insufficient sense in the fashion of maudlin people but do beg you to believe that I am your mother still.

Study well, my sweetheart. When I try to picture you to myself I see a shining blond head bent over a book. Your love of books, from Babar to Tolkien and romances with those embossed titles in lurid colors to Austen and Dickens on up to these unpleasant modern writers who try to make us all feel shabby was so intense your father and I used to whisper what had we done wrong, what parental failing of ours was to blame. When you were in your early teens, after your softball craze but before "Brideshead" caught your fancy, I would sit and watch television-these very stupid well-intentioned shows with minority families cavorting around or police stations or high schools and the canned laughter heaving away-hoping you would be tempted to join me in that cozy corner room upstairs, with the heavy drapes and your father's old medical books and my father's priceless editions, because I imagined this was what normal American children should be watching. But no, my dear elf-child, you stayed in your room wrapped in lovely contortions around a book, while I of course got hooked and had to watch these idiotic stories to the end. Of course I used to worry at your snubbing television and me together but now I see that the children we have are just miracles like any other, like geysers or glass skyscrapers or mountains of maple trees in fall in Vermont, and that we have nothing to do with creating them-our job is to stand and wonder. Our job is to marvel and love.

Study well, and never be tempted by drugs. People (which I see only in the dentist's office, but must say I do devour eagerly there) and the National Enquirer (which Irving my yoga instructor is devoted to for its spiritual dimensions, its ESP and UFO news) are so full of these young English nobility and their dangerous drug habits that they pick up in imitation of the rock stars, out of class guilt and a subconscious Marxist wish to destroy themselves I suppose. But there's no reason for an American girl to get involved in any of that. Your mother's not a churchgoer as you know but I do believe firmly that our body as God made it, with no additives, not only lasts longest but is most fun. And along the same lines don't get too infatuated with male homosexuals. I know they must seem, especially with those English accents and marvellous high rosy complexions, very amusing and charming and unthreatening but remember, dearest, they don't really like women. They think women are strange, too strange to deal with, and competitors furthermore. Normal men think women are strange too but they don't try to steal other men from us and at least up to your mother's generation had developed a certain delusional system around our strangeness that could be quite touching-they treated us like handicapped persons, opening doors and explaining our needs to waiters as though we couldn't talk. Well that may be gone but I'm sure that enough of something similar remains for you to concentrate on nice normal boys if you can find any in that dear decadent old country.

I must be tired all my commas are dropping away. About an hour ago there was a strange kind of rodeo in the parking lot-low-slung cars covered with glittery paint prowling in noisy circles, and then there was a quarrel just outside my door in an appalling language I realized was Japanese! In'fact in the coffee shop I was surprised at how many Japanese there were, as if I had gone farther west than I wanted. Tomorrow I must head east again, driving into the desert in my rented car-not a dreadfully perilous adventure perhaps but enough to make a middle-aged lady's heart rise in her " throat. I must end, darling. I must let you and me go to bed. I began by feeling quite prickly and apologetic and defensive toward you but now feel quite close. I feel you are with me. Part of you, of course, with part of me. Write me at this address: c/o Ashram Arhat, Forrest, AZ 85077. Doesn't it sound like the end of the world? Do try to be a more conscientious correspondent than you have been-I am so alone now. And don't give the address to your father.

Much much love,

Mother

Dear Dr. Podhoretz-

I am sorry, but I am going to miss my cleaning appointment next Tuesday the 29th and don't know when I can make another. As you can see from the postmark I am a long way from Swampscott. But I promise to keep flossing and using the rubber tip on my gums. I certainly don't want to undo your good work and go through all that oral surgery again! Once was enough!!

Cordially,

Sarah Worth (Mrs. Charles)

Dear Shirlee-

I'm afraid I'm going to miss my hair appointment next week after all, after all the trouble we went to to find an ideal time when I wouldn't get caught in either rush hour. My husband and I are taking a quite unexpected vacation in tlie romantic Far West. We're about in fact to get into the car and drive hundreds of miles, right past Palm Springs where Bob Hope and President Ford have their fabulous homes! I'll phone you when I get back-by that time my hair may be down to my waist! Your rinse should be kept up and I'll pick up some Clairol at a drugstore-Darkest Brown I think is better for me than the Natural Black, which tends as we know to kill the gleam. I do hope things begin to work out better with Martin and his new probation officer, and that Eldridge's dyslexia therapy continues to work wonders. He is such a cute boy-the day he came into the beauty parlor and asked each woman in a chair if her boyfriend lived with her or just came around! As we agreed last time, it would probably be less unsettling for him if his father didn't come around at all-but then life is so complex, isn't it?.It's so hard to know how totally we're supposed to live for others, and what we may do for ourselves.

Say hello for me to Marcus and Foster and Annette. Not to mention the meter maid on Newbury Street who always seemed to be there the very moment my meter ran out!

Your customer and friend,

Sally Worth

Dear Mother-

I'm exhausted from driving in the desert for hours but wanted to drop you a note to counterbalance whatever alarming stories Charles is pouring into your ears. It is true I've left him but for ten years more or less it's felt every morning and midnight as if he's left me. Ever since my second miscarriage and our realizing that Pearl was the only child we would ever have there's been this coldness and tension between us that you surely have noticed on your visits, though perhaps you haven't-Charles always seemed, frankly, more your kind of man than mine. You and he did use to get together with your martinis and purr, over exactly what piece of catnip I could never decide, and then decided it was me-me as some kind of possibly lovable but certainly messy and very likely untrainable discipline problem. You two shared a curious dry ability to without-exactly saying anything make me feel dirty-my hair untidy, my feet too big, my skin too swarthy, I didn't know, people don't ever know what's wrong with them, they'll believe any bad thing. Whereas Daddy, as you remember, never did warm to him, though he tried, with that wonderful gentlemanly nature of his, but after Charles kept questioning his calls those Sundays when they played singles on the grass courts at Longwood he really stopped trying. Also, Charles was so humorless and whatever Daddy's other faults he was just the opposite, always so sly and wry, such a tease though I'm not sure you always knew when he was teasing, as I did.

At any rate I'm not writing to justify myself-my God, I'm forty-two!-but to let you know on the wing as it were that I'm physically well and you're not to worry. There's no other man, not really, not the way you think, but I did feel my entire flight out here the day before yesterday taking place in an upholding atmosphere of love-love streaming against my face and chest like the sunset light in that clipper ship we had framed above the big carved mantel in Dedham. I used to look at the picture as a little girl until I felt myself to be a mermaid in the waves, looking up at this artifact of men from another world-the masts, the riggings, the portholes, the wooden woman on the prow. All the details of that picture-the froth, the clouds, their little dabbed-on crests of sunset red-seemed magical to me, a piece of a Heaven I would some day enter. Think of me as still that little girl. Think of this episode now as my continuing my education. In fact it is like that, back to school, but school where my real innermost self, my atman, will be taught to free itself from maya and karma, from all the trappings of prakriti. Trapped among trappings-isn't that what we all are? Women, especially. I loved the way you lightened yourself so drastically after Daddy died and you went to Florida, but when I was there in December you seemed to have accumulated so many glass-and-wrought-iron tables and splashy pink mildew-proof sofas and driftwood sculpture and shadowboxed paintings on black felt I felt claustrophobic again, just like back in Dedham with all of Daddy's collections and your nice things from the Prices and the dark walnut furniture, the lancet-window breakfront and Gothic sideboard, from Great-granddaddy Perkins's Medford place. Speaking of which, I had such a strange hallucination today* while driving through the desert. There is this shimmer, you do see mirages, they become very common-lakes with not just water but what look like beachfront cottages and I could have sworn sailboats and (this is the point) at one point a big rambling Victorian brown-shingled structure being reflected in the water just like that lodge in Maine we went to once or twice when I was very little to visit Great-granddaddy Perkins in the summer-this impossibly ancient man with a beard smelling of mentholated cough drops who took me by the hand to the edge of the porch to show me where the red-squirrel family lived in the hickory tree. He said the red were smaller but fiercer than the gray and drove them out. He seemed to think their being red. squirrels would greatly interest me but I didn't know they were rarer than the gray and expected all squirrels to wear little trousers like in Beatrix Potter. How stupid children are.

What I want to say is, Don’t let Charles con you. To him I was another piece of furniture and unless I got coffee spilled on me or squeaked like a rusty door he never gave me a glance. You and he have always tended to gang up on me and as Pearl would say I'm through with guilt trips. Through, Mother.

Next morning. The words were beginning to blur before my eyes and I could hardly hold my head up. Also there seemed to be a wolf snuffling and scratching just outside my window, trying to get some lid off something, though maybe it was a raccoon or if they don't have those out here a gopher. And what I think must be coyotes off in the distance, yipping and yowling, saying something to each other all night and being somehow ventriloquists so their voices came from all sides of me and seemed right in the room. There was a full moon last night. I shouldn't have broken off in the middle of my letter for my dreams all night were of you, you when much younger, moving around the Dedham place with a kind of angelic swiftness and telling me to sit up straight and never rest my left hand on the table while eating. I was setting the dinner table and couldn't for the life of me remember what side of the plate the fork went on-I have this problem with left-right sometimes when driving and people are giving me rapid directions, and though I know you always deny it I still have this feeling I was meant to be left-handed and you and Mrs. Resnick in Miss Grandison's Day School's first gradeforced me to be right-handed; they say you're cross-wired for life if that happens. Anyway, tired as I was, I hardly slept. Dawn out here comes with a kind of snap, like those metal shutters being rolled up in Italy, and by nine-thirty it's already hot. But dry-I had that usual New England April cold when I left and after less than forty-eight hours, my head feels clear. I do hope your back is better now that Boca Raton is beginning to swelter again. What you've always called rheumatism the doctors and the television commercials seem to think is osteoporosis, bone loss due to improper diet. You never drank milk and all that frantic dieting to keep getting yourself into your same dresses all those years must have taken its nutritional toll. It's not too late-you can buy these calcium supplements at any drug- or health-food store, and if you don't rush the dose at first, there's no constipation. Also, you must wear number IS-Total Protection-sun screen when you go to the beach; the buildup of actinic damage over the years is cumulative and at your age the circulation doesn't carry away the damaged DNA like it used to. In fact, at your age you shouldn't be going to the beach at all-when Charles and I were down at Christmas I was shocked to see how brown you were. You looked dyed, frankly, and with your tinted hair the effect was honestly bizarre. It's not as if you have naturally tanning skin, the way Daddy did and I do. Use lotions with "PABA and take vitamin A, 500 mg. twice a day. Super stuff, A. Good for skin, eyes, insomnia, and cancer.

The best of the Price silver along with that serpentine candelabra Granddaddy saved from the Peabody creditors I put for safekeeping in a rented lockbox at the same bank where I opened my own independent account. I'm still angry about the way my trust fund got absorbed into Charles's medical education and I can't tell you the satisfaction it gave me not to check the little box marked Joint. The Price and Peabody silver you still have (and that precious teeny-tiny salt-and-pepper set way back from the Prynnes) I hope you are taking out and polishing once every three months and keeping in " felt bags, not plastic, between polishings-that Florida salt air is death on silver, whereas somehow in Massachusetts the salt doesn't matter so much, maybe the lower humidity doesn't hold it in such suspension. Grandmother's lacework tray for calling cards for instance I noticed looked definitely pitted, and I know that didn't happen in Dedham where all those pieces were kept in the Perkins breakfront. I don't know why you have the tray out since you have so few callers and nobody uses cards any more anyway. While we're on these materialistic subjects, I think your plan to cash in your CDs as they come due and go back into the stock market now that interest rates are down is disastrous. For one thing everybody is doing it and the market is inflated. For another with inflation flattening out thanks to Reagan's hardheartedness cash is as good as gold-better than gold, in fact, which slumps right along with the soft dollar our export industries are clamoring for. My advice would be to rake off the interest every six months when you roll them over if you must have the spending money but keep the capital in these no-risk certificates and let Daddy's portfolio-all that heavenly old IBM and AT &T he picked up for almost nothing-enjoy the bull market if there is going to continue to be one. The gain there over the years is so great that a little bearishness only dents your paper profits but if you were to enter now at the peak with real cash it would break your heart. Someone of your age or even mine trying to select stocks tends to be disastrous because we have no real grasp of this new world of services and computer communication and go for solid old things like steel and rivets and coal oil and GM that are losers. Real things nowadays are losers. Things like fast food and videotapes that people use only for a minute and then forget are where the money is, somehow. But not all the companies doing that are doing well either.

I guess this is what they call parting advice. Today makes me nervous. I'm making my leap into a new life. For breakfast, this Mexican girl brought a tray to the room in worn blue jeans and a man's cowboy shirt and they just assumed I wanted greasy hash-browns with my inedibly peppery scrambled eggs. The coffee was actually gritty, I think they just boil the grounds in a pot and pour it. I'm sorry you've been besieged by this retired general from across the courtyard but glad you decisively repelled him, even at the price of being rude. He sounds odious. As well as pathetic. Write me your health news as the A does its wonderful work. For now I think the address on this stationery (isn't the logo a riot?) will be best, in case I have to beat a hasty retreat. Say a prayer for me if you still do such things.

Love and hugs,

Sare

Gentlemen:

Enclosed please find endorsed checks totalling, by my own calculations, $174,963.02, for deposit in my account, #0002743-911. Kindly send my receipt and subsequent account statements to me c/o Babbling Brook Motor Lodge, Forrest, AZ 85077, marked PLEASE HOLD.

Thank you sincerely,

Sarah P. Worth

Dear Dr. Epstein-

I will not be in next Monday or any Mondays as far as I can foresee. I have taken a step-not the step, since over the years we have discussed so many steps I might take, but a step-out of my psychological impasse, away from the resentful dependency you and I have often agreed was so unhealthy. I feel fragile and naked but free. Thank you for giving me, in all our many talks-my talks, I should say, coupled with your wise listening-the ego-definition and strength to attempt this. Perhaps now the task next before me is ego-transcendence.

If Charles calls with some ridiculous proprietorial tantrum, you will know how to handle him.

With gratitude and esteem,

Sarah (Worth)

[tape]

Dear Midge. Hi. It's me. Sarah. I think it's May fifth, but there aren't many calendars around here. Oh, Midge, what a time I've been having! Just let me check and see if this damn thing is working, the little spools going around. They seem to be. Well, I got here. Tell Irving. We see the Arhat in person go by in a limousine every.day, sometimes twice a day. It's bliss, tell him. Actually that's only half the truth of it, but there's no point in telling him the worst, he's such a gentle hopeful soul, Irving, and I'm sure he'll never make it here to see for himself. The fact is that along with its being really quite as heavenly and spiritual and freeing as we used to imagine there's also a strong element, everything being so loosely structured, of dog-eat-dog.

Where shall I begin? I left Charles, of course. He went off to work Monday morning as usual and instead of puttering about as usual I packed my more practical summer things and some raspberry-colored jeans I had found in some Army-Navy store up along where Boyl-ston Street gets grungy, across from the Pru-purple is not an easy shade to find, I tell you-and my running shoes and an old denim jacket of Pearl's and two sweatshirts that really were more pink than mauve but I didn't know how strict the ashram's color code was going to be-I'm being boring about the clothes, I know-and off I set, in my one prim and proper suit, the black-and-white check with the boxy jacket and pleated skirt, and with enormous butterflies in my stomach. I mean, this is my life, and I'm throwing it away!

I landed in Los Angeles, to make it harder for Charles to trace me through the airlines, and, coming in to land, I couldn't help thinking of how planes keep colliding in the air there and how absurd if my big pilgrimage were to end that way, instant nirvana. But actually the landing was perfect, once we came down through the chop. Then I stayed in this motel near the airport in a dreary area called Hawthorne-I'd always had these glamorous illusions about Los Angeles and Hollywood but what I saw looked like just one big Neponset Circle-and after a bad night, where these Japanese kept knocking on the door, I rented a car and drove what seemed forever on Route, I think, Ten and didn't see anything of Palm Springs with all those celebrities and golf courses and arrived really bleary from the shimmer on the highway and the mirages. But once I got to this little sad town in Arizona called Forrest, just the air, Midge, was so good to breathe, so spicy and quiet and energizing-tell Irving all his lessons in pranayama came back to me and my sinuses felt absolutely cleansed, though the cold I had when I left has actually come back worse than ever, you can probably tell from my voice. Well, they work you like dogs here, at least at first, and there aren't near enough blankets for these cold clear nights, and it's a real dogfight at dinnertime for food, some people are just too tired to stand in the endless lines, and at noon they bring you these soggy vegetarian box lunches out in the fields or wherever they have you working, and sleeping six to a trailer everybody's germs travel all around-but I'm getting way ahead of myself, and don't mean to complain. Down deep in my atman, beneath all these sniffles and this hysterical physical fatigue, I am absolutely at peace. Tell Irving I'm tasting at last that samarasa he used to talk about, that I could never quite get to just by holding my breath or stopping all thought as he used to try to make us, which just sent us into giggles, didn't it?-how can you stop thought, since even in dreams it goes on, I mean. The electricity in your brain just crackles and crackles until you're dead.

Midge, I know I'm rambling hideously. I'm actually shaking, I'm so cold and probably feverish and achy all over. Those summer clothes I brought aren't really the right thing, and my raspberry-colored jeans get incredibly filthy and heavy and soggy. The worship crew-that's what they call a work crew-I'm attached to is pouring cement for the foundation of this building called the Hall of a Millionfold Joys, though they told the county commissioners it's just going to be an agricultural greenhouse and tractor garage, and all day long I shovel this gray goop so it goes into the corners of the forms without pockets of air under it and then smooth it with these big flat wooden things like huge rakes without any teeth. It's more fun than hoeing artichokes and setting out hybrid heat-resistant tomato plants, which I was doing the first two weeks in this absolutely merciless sun, but, my goodness, your shoulders do ache from pushing the goop around-I'm not sure a woman's muscles are put together exactly like a man's. And these aluminum trailers really aren't very well insulated, though from the outside they have that quilted look. The only heat they have are electric heaters, but between midnight and six electricity is cut off for every place but the guardhouses along the border and the section where the Arhat and his close advisers live and the Kali Club, a kind of disco or dance hall where the sannyasins express their joy and gratitude to Shiva for the eternal cycle of creation and destruction. Everybody in my trailer is hoping eventually to get into one of the new A-frames they're putting up, where only three or four sannyasins have to share the space and a family, if there is one, can get some privacy. You don't see many children here, the Arhat thinks birth control is the number-one global issue on a materialistic level, but there are a few, cute as can be in their little purple bib overalls and round-toed sneakers and whatnot. The color code asks we dress in the shades of the sunset, symbolizing the end of mundane concerns, and that gives us quite a latitude, when you think about it. You see people in red and orange and everything, really, but blue and green, though at sunset in this air there often is a tinge of green. Also the Arhat calls these the love colors-he has the cutest way of saying "love."

Midge, you should see me. I'm huddling in all my clothes except for my cement-covered running shoes in my grape-colored sleeping bag on the thin carpet over the cold aluminum floor a foot or two above the desert sands, which are crawling with scorpions and snakes and things like leggy pale rats-I always thought deserts were supposed to be dead but this one is just bop-ping with life, especially after the sun goes down-and talking into this gadget, a Seiko mini-cassette player I bought at this electronics boutique they have over at the ashram mall. They sell a lot of gadgety stuff here, I was surprised, even mugs and T-shirts with the Arhat's picture on them, and for what I'd call wild prices, since there's nowhere else to buy anything for forty miles around and anyway all the profits go into the Treasury, of Enlightenment and represent the love we feel for the Arhat.

He is beautiful, tell Irving, and Liz and Ann and Gloria and whoever else shows up for yoga these days. So beautiful. The posters we had don't really do justice to the glow he has in person-the aura, I suppose it is-this incredible olive smoothness of his skin, which isn't half as dark as you think of Indians' as being, and a surprisingly substantial nose the opposite of re-trouss6, and thick black eyebrows in two perfect arches, and these rich chocolaty eyes there seems ho bottom to, just pools of knowingness, and this amazingly gentle smile that isn't exactly mocking but on the verge of it, and these delicate graceful hands with all their rings flashing when he waves through the limousine window. I see him drive by every day, now that I'm no longer stuck out in the artichoke fields-I got terribly sunburned those first days, all across my shoulders and the back of my neck, since I had my hair pinned up, and you know what a good tan I usually take-and you wouldn't believe the peace he generates, even at thirty miles an hour. We all hold hands and chant for him and the feelings of positivity and centeredness are fantastic. Tears come not just to my eyes but everybody's, even people like Fritz who have been with the Arhat for years, even back in India, when the ashram began. Fritz is my group leader. My lover, too, I guess I can tell you. You, Midge, but not Irving or anybody else. Actually, Fritz'd kill me if he heard me calling him Fritz instead of his ashram name. The Arhat gives us all names, when he gets around to it, he hasn't given me mine yet and the others say it takes months often before he notices you. Fritz's is hard to remember if you aren't at home in Sanskrit yet. Something like Victor or Vic Scepter-that isn't quite it. Oh well. I'm tired. I say he'd kill me and that's not true, but actually he does have a funny little temper. He's German by birth and likes things to be just so. Acb ja.

The others who live here in the trailer are all over at the Kali Club right now. How they do it after working-worshipping-twelve or fourteen hours a day I have no idea, but they're all younger than I and tell me if you love the Arhat enough you don't need sleep. Let me go back to the beginning, I know this is confusing. I stayed in this motel in this tiny town called Forrest, with two "r"s, I don't know who he was, somejrancher or explorer or vicious Indian-killer I suppose, with all ticky-tacky newish houses and nothing in the way of trees except for a few straggly cottonwoods down by the creek they call Babbling Brook but that to me seemed dull as ditchwater and utterly silent, even though April here is supposed to be the great run-off time from the snowmelt in the mountains. The mountains are very far off and look transparent except for their snowy tips. The rocks are reddish and have a soft look as if a child just got done kneading them. That's k-n-e-a-d. To finish up about the trees-there was a lovely tamarisk in pink bloom outside the stucco post office, and in the motel courtyard a strange kind of huge tree with tiny oval leaves and long pods at least a foot long hanging down rustling and clattering in the wind. There's always a certain amount of wind out West. The town seemed to be mostly cowpoke types and retirees from the insurance business in Phoenix, and when I asked about the Arhat's ashram you should have seen how their faces hardened up. They bate him, Midge-this is old Goldwater country and they still call people hippies and say he's brought in all these hippies to have drugs and orgies and furthermore the city he's putting in illegally is playing havoc with the local water table. They told me how he'd gouge all my money out of me and work me to death and pump me full of drugs. The man at the post office said, "That devil fella they call a rat sure earns his name." I can't do the Western accent very well yet. One man, I think he was an Indian, American Indian I mean, even though he wore one of those little plastic truck-driver hats, you know, with a visor and the name of a beer on them, spat at my shoes when I tried to explain how the Arhat's message was simply love and freedom and furthermore he was making the desert bloom. On top of all this, the motel gave me a breakfast with hash-browns that made me queasy all morning.

The roads down here are endless, and mostly dirt packed into ruts and ripples. It seemed to take forever to drive that forty miles, bumpety-bump-bump, trailing this enormous cloud of dust. I don't see how people in Arizona can have any secrets, because anywhere you go you leave this giant clue of dust in the air for hours. Not that there were any houses or people that I could see-not a sign of life except a few sorry-looking cattle and a lot of black-faced sheep who leave their wool snaggled all over the barbed wire. All the time, you are gradually rising, and the sagebrush, or maybe it's mesquite, getting sparser around you, and the ground rockier, and then suddenly you're overlooking this valley with tidy long fields of different shades of green, and yellow bulldozers and school buses crawling around on a system of roads below, and this big flat-roofed mall and rows of aluminum trailers, and on a shelf above them rows of A-frames being constructed on red earth scraped into shelves, and in the center of everything a sort of blue-paved space with an actual fountain, a fountain surrounded by rainbows and spray. The people in Forrest even mentioned the fountain to me as a waste of water, but I found out later it's perfectly ecological, just the same ten thousand gallons being recycled over and over as a symbol of the circulation of karma. Midge, I was stunned. I was stunned breathless. This bad to be the place I was meant to bring my life to. My poor bedraggled silly life, to be recycled. Even though Irving had shown us a few photographs you have to see it in context, to be in the space-all that gentle gray-green desert and then this unexpected valley with slanting walls of tumbled orange rock in their weird, soft-looking shapes the wind has carved, and this mild blue washed-out Western sky over everything like a face of Brahma. Inside I just felt this glorious relief.

There was a gate across the dirt road, and a guard dressed in lavender uniform but with a real enough gun, one of those Japanese machine guns that look like toys; but he saluted me, "Namaste," just like Irving sometimes does, and was really only a boy, an ordinary curly-haired boy about Pearl's age, rather cute and deferential, really, once I got over the shock of being accosted. I explained how I wanted to join and he asked me if I had been in correspondence with the Master and I had to say no, it hadn't occurred to me he would answer a letter and I had come pretty much on impulse. I heard myself saying this and realized that up to that moment it had been like I was doing everything in a dream and with one-half of my brain expecting Charles to wake me up and take me home. But then I took courage from the way Irving had made us see that all life is like that-lived on the skin of the void and without real substance, just motions we go through by constructing these hallucinatory goals and short-term strategies.

The boy frisked me for weapons or drugs-I had to laugh, but then felt I was undercutting some little performance he must do, like when you betray children who are being very serious about reciting a poem or shaking hands the way they've been taught to-and he gave me a card to put on my windshield, and from a checkpoint down in the ashram they took me to a place where several trailers had been put together to make offices. They call this hodgepodge the Uma Room, I know now. After a rudely long wait I was finally taken into this windowless place where a striking but not very pleasant red-haired woman with a black pearl in one nostril put me through an inquisition. So I wanted to become a sannyasin, she said. How come? I explained with what dignity I could «muster how I'd fallen in love with the Arhat through listening to his tapes and meditating on his photograph in a yoga class I'd been taking. Oh really? she said. Did I have any venereal disease and how much money was I bringing to the Treasury of Enlightenment? I explained to her I had left my successful doctor husband on a more or less sudden inspiration and all I could bring away was eleven thousand dollars. I had thought of saying ten, but eleven sounded more like it really was all I had. She said-her name, I should be explaining, is Durga, and she is sort of the Arhat's right-hand person, he's of course above the day-to-day details, and she has one of these quite red-headed complexions, with a face pale as ice, that opaque ice that builds up in the refrigerator, and furious green eyes and a cleft chin, which I think are generally handsomer on men-she said that didn't seem like very much and was there any way I could get any more? Did I have credit cards? Access to jointly held securities? To make a long story short, I got very dignified and said I had brought my body and mind and atman and what more could the Arhat in his transcendent wisdom desire? She got uppity on her own side and said the Arhat desires nothing, his name and the concept of desire should not even be put in the same sentence, but that his work was great, as I no doubt must have noticed while driving in as an uninvited trespasser. I said I bad noticed and marvelled and firmly intended to put myself at the service of this work. She asked me what my skills were, and I said those of a homemaker and helpmeet who had completed only two years of college intending to major in French philosophy, and she said it would certainly take some ingenuity to put those skills at the service of the Arhat. She spoke in this stilted way, like the high priestess in the old Cecil B. DeMille extravaganzas, but with this lovely Irish lilt that kept coming through. I wondered if she were exactly sane, but now that I've learned she had been an artiste of some sort in Dublin once, I suppose that explains it.

Really, it wasn't all that intimidating, because outside the little windows of the trailer I could see these other sannyasins going by laughing and looking so happy and peaceful and hugging and kissing each other whenever they felt like it. She gave me a speech about how work here was worship, and the harder the work the more fervent the worship, and she doubted I could do hard labor. I said I had been an active gardener in my old life-my old life, Midge! as if I already had a new one-and played tennis twice a week all summer, and would she like to arm-wrestle? It just popped out, a little like the things Irving sometimes says to us at the beginning of a session, to cleanse our minds and shock us into satori. I would never have been so fresh and aggressive in my normal life. Already I was liberated. The Arhat's love was in the air here and giving me courage. You could see Durga was stunned for a second, her eyes narrowed and this chin of hers, like Gary Grant's only of course on a woman not so eflfective, this chin of hers lifted a little inch, and all she said was I should save my internalized violence and hostility for the dynamic-meditation session. So that implied I was accepted, but, Midge, if I'd known what a dynamic-meditation session was I might have gotten back into my car, but they had taken my keys and driven it away, like valet parking, and in fact I never have been able to find out what happened to it, so tell Charles, if by any chance you see him, that I can't help whatever notices from Hertz he keeps getting-they're not my fault. The rest of that day was spent filling out forms indemnifying them against all sorts of damage and taking Rorschach and personality tests to see if I was mentally healthy, enough, for my own protection as well as theirs they explained, and having a really very thorough examination for venereal diseases-very disagreeably done-though when I asked for a Contac for my cold they said it was just maya and to ignore it.

Oh God, I am tired. And now I hear people outside coming from the disco and I don't want them to hear me talking to you on this thing-people steal here, there's nothing really against it in the Arhat's philosophy, and they say Durga has spies everywhere and is really paranoid about betraying our secrets to the outside world-so I'll say good night and tuck you into my sweater. You and the other girls would hardly know me. I sleep in my clothes and pretty much stink of sweat and cement, but after a while you don't mind it, in fact you rather like it, your own smell. Here they all come, high as kites.

Next day. Just a few minutes before I go and face the hideous dinner brawl. I really shouldn't say that; they do a wonderful job here organizing things, but the Arhat's spiritual magnetism has just overwhelmed the facilities-a setup designed for four hundred is being asked to house and feed nearly a thousand, with a lot of day trippers and curiosity seekers on the weekends. It's what Charles used to say of the hospital-no matter how many beds you put in, there's always one sick person left over. I've found a place to be by myself a few minutes, though some of our group leaders tell us a wish for privacy is very pro-ego and anti-ashram. I don't know-Buddha was always doing it, and the Arhat never tells us to go everywhere in a noisy smelly bunch like some of these sannyasins seem to want to. Obviously, you need to be by yourself just for spiritual sanitation now and then. When I think of all those days rattling around in my old house, going from room to room picking up, waiting for Pearl to get back from school or Charles from work or for somebody just to call or the mailman to come up the drive with his Laura Ashley catalogue-fourteen rooms and four baths and two and a half acres of lawn all for me-it seems obscene in a way and yet a kind of paradise. Isn't it funny how paradise always lies in the past or the future, never exactly in the present? Just last night in his darshan, the Arhat said there can be no happiness in the present as long as there is ego. He pronounces it "iggo." As lonk as sere iss iggo, the happiness-I really can't do his accent, he has the strangest, longest "s"s, different from any sound we make-sub happiness fliesss avay. Like sub pet bin and sub pet catt, zey cannot exists in ze same room. Ven sub Master doess nut preside, sub vun eatss se utter. I make it sound ridiculous, but in fact I could listen for hours, it's like a fist inside me relaxing, like a lens that keeps opening and opening to let in more and more light. Even when I don't understand the words-literally, from the way they're pronounced-something very beautiful is going on inside me, by orderly stages, the way something grows, a few more cells every day.

For instance, Midge, I'm sitting out in the rocks about a half-mile from the Chakra-you know, where the Fountain of Karma plays-and there's a kind of natural bench-out here where I am, I mean-under what they call an Arizona cypress, with these drooping gray-blue limbs and little brown berries seamed like tiny soccer balls, and I wish I had words to say how charged it all feels, how pregnant just the rockiness of the rocks seems-the little silvery veins of some mineral, the little loose heaps of rosy dust, the parallel ridges showing all the millions of years of sedimentation-and then too the'breeze and the cypress with its resiny essence and the distant mountains like wrinkled tissue paper-how sacred, really, and the whole matter of whether God exists or not, which I always thought rather boring, is just plain transcended, it seems so obvious that some thing exists, something incredibly and tirelessly good, an outpouring of which the rocks and I and the perfect blue sky with its little dry horsetails are a kind of foam, the foam on the crest of all these crashing waves, these outpourings all through the aeons of time, and yet terribly still, too-I know I'm not expressing it very well. There is something in everything, its wness, that is unutterably grand and consoling. I just feel terribly. I feel-how can I put this?-like I'm carved out of one big piece of crystal and exactly fitted into a mold of the same crystal. Tell Irving I feel motionless. Ask him if this is samarasa. My happiness is deeper than I've ever felt happiness before. It's as if there is a level the sun has never reached before. He makes it possible, the Arhat, he permits it-his voice, his glow. God, I love him, even though he makes me suffer. Love-luff, he says-is agony. A-go-ny, Midge.

A cute little lizard has just showed up. He's quite bright green. As I'm talking he stares at me with one eye. He really knows how to be motionless.

I began to tell you about my dynamic-meditation session. It must have been a week ago, though it feels a lot longer. I wasn't nearly so secure here then, so plugged into the energy sources. About ten people, most of them younger than I, plus Fritz, whose name here, I must remember, is Vikshipta. A bit like "stick shift." Durga was there too, queening around with all her orange hair and a ton of bogus-gold bangles on her wrists and a big loose violet robe that didn't quite conceal how overweight her hips are. I bet she put him up to it: the boy who after we'd all settled into the lotus position in a circle shouted I reminded him of his loathsome mother, even though she didn't have a big black pussy like I did, and tried to hit me. I shouldn't say "tried," the little shit did hit me, right across the jaw so my back teeth on that side ached for days, and then tried to grab my arm to twist me down-you could see he was excited, if you know what I mean. We are all naked, I should have explained, except for the leaders, who keep their robes on. I was dumbfounded and numb, I initially went into what Dr. Epstein used to call my masochistic-recessive mode, of, you know, the good girl who retreats into the knowledge that sbe's not doing anything and somebody else is to blame. The few occasions when Daddy and Mother would get violent, over his drinking usually, I'd go into that mode, and in a way also when they bulldozed me out of Myron Stern, the boyfriend I had in college I know I've told you about, out of him and into Charles, who was just graduating from Harvard. Having all your clothes off in front of a lot of strangers makes you feel oddly detached. The meditation leaders in their robes weren't doing anything to help, just swirling around shouting "Who are you?" at people, or "Ko veda?," which means "Who knows?," and the other sannyasins were making a kind of moaning hullabaloo that wasn't any help either, and I looked up past this brat's shaved head-you don't have to shave your head here, but he was going all the way-and I saw this very Irish sort of Peg o" My Heart smirk on Durga's big white chalky face and I just got mad, "Midge: you wouldn't have known me. He, the aroused boy, had me pretty much on my back by then, and I kneed him right where he was most interested, let's say, and then got a grip on his ears, since he didn't have any hair, and pulled his head this way and that, and wound up pounding it on the floor while Durga and Fritz, I mean Vik-shipta, were trying to separate us, which they hadn't been doing while be was on top. Somehow that boy, who you could tell from the few words he pronounced and the supercilious way he tipped his head back and tucked up his upper lip had had all the advantages, was that particular kind of boy I've always taken an irrational dislike to. You see them all the time, the sons of people you know and the kind of country-club kid who used to be hot after Pearl. They act so-what's the word?-entitled, screwed up or not, flunking out of An-dover or not, and if they don't rack their Porsches up against a tree or overload their little heads with cocaine will end up being a professional something-or-other just like their smug chauvinistic absolutely insensitive old-fart daddies. The language I used against this poor boy you wouldn't believe, Midge. It just vomited out of me, with all this suppressed rage. Tell Irving that meditation with him was never like this.

I [I1] don't know what it was set me off, really. Nobody likes somebody trying to rape them, especially after insulting their pussy, but in a strange way it had to do with forces beyond that, with this boy's-Yajna, his name is, we've made up a little since, he even tried apologizing, he said his head was in a bad space that day, and I had to tell him it was all all right, I felt very motherly toward him, and his mother, wherever she is, no doubt loves him and is worried to death about his being here with what she imagines are terrible creepy people-as I was saying, with this boy's being a man and not being a man quite either, my brain waves or whatever they are oscillated between these two poles-his being and his not being, his maleness and his immaturity, his bully-power (I was terrified, remember) and yet his pimply shaved-headed callowness-and I just got more and more indignant. If I had had the strength, I would have torn him to bits and ground the pieces into the mat, the way you do a wasp that's been annoying you all afternoon, you know how in the fall they come out of the windows on the sills somehow on sunny afternoons and bumble around on the bedspread and the kitchen table so stupidly and into your half-empty coffee cup-I just bate it!

Of course, we can't all go around all the time getting hit on the jaw and trying to tear somebody's ears off, but I must say it did wake me up. That's a phrase the group leaders and encounter therapists around here use all the time-"waking up." "Getting rid of the garbage" is another thing they say. That oscillation I felt inside my head got me to thinking about men in general, my feelings about them. It must all go back to Daddy, who just basically on weekends and bank holidays if he didn't go off to play golf at Brookline hid in the library reading Thornton Wilder or those dreary Metaphysicals. Maybe I'm angry, deep down, because, though I loved him and knew he loved me, he wouldn't come out. But then this rapist-boy did in a manner of speaking come out, and I don't seem to like that either. And then, even more confusingly, Fritz looked me over afterwards to see if I had been damaged and should go to the ashram infirmary, and on the way walking back to my trailer to get my jeans and sun hat and work shoes-this was all around nine in the morning, just beginning to get hot-we went to his A-frame and I slept with him. It was nice, Midge. Nice. Though with Germans there's a distance, they have difficulty showing their feelings. His eyes are so pale they seem transparent, you can look right through them into nothing. He told me what his name means: it's a modality of consciousness halfway between total confusion and total concentration. I love that part of it here, learning all these new things, and not just with your brain but your body, with your spirit and whole self-with your atman. You should have seen me, though, that afternoon: big blue swollen jaw and one eye half shut and a lot of stiffness around the neck and shoulders from when all the rage came out. I looked so dreadful they left me off from the artichokes two hours early-I think they do treat me with kid gloves a little, compared to some of the. younger, more trampy women-and next day I was told I had been transferred from fieldwork to construction assistant at the Hall of a Millionfold Joys-people call it Joy-Six-Oh, the Arhat likes jokes and encourages everybody to make them. The work is right at the Chakra, which makes it handier for me and Fritz to steal the odd half-hour. He's so efficient. I hadn't slept with a man except Charles for so many years-that thing with Ducky Bradford you were all so curious about never got past a few stilted luncheons downstairs at the Ritz, there was something missing, I'm not sure he isn't a bit gay, it would help explain why Gloria always seems so skittish when the girl-talk gets gutsy-for so many years, I felt a bit shaky at first, but so far, if I do say so myself, it seems to go just fine. I was afraid of seeming too old, but he's very complimentary about my figure and the ojas shakti expressed by my glossy hair-it's the supplements, Midge, vitamins A and E-complex and the zinc and that evening-primrose oil!-: and says he's bored silly with these twenty-year-old guru groupies, as he calls them. He says they have perfect bodies but no real spirit, and maithuna is above all a spiritual act. He himself is older than he looks, thirty-seven. He was with the Arhat in India, at the first ashram, in Ellora. He says he was really one of the founders-it was his idea to combine encounter therapy with tantric yoga. He shares this A-frame with only one other man, Savitri, who's out on the road a lot of the time, giving interviews and selling the Arhat's books and tapes and meditation aids, and there's a whirlpool bath, one of those you can sit in up to your neck, instead of just a trailer shower the size of a mailing tube where you keep bumping your elbows on the soap rack and treading in everybody else's germy wet towels that they just leave where they dropped them. Disgusting!

I [I2] know you won't, but you mustn't tell Charles about Fritz-my hunch is he's going to start "suing me. Charles, I mean. About Vikshipta: a lot of the people here, actually, are well into their thirties and forties, with Ph.D.s and jobs they left in city planning or architectural offices or legal firms-they're not crazies, the place really runs, we really are accomplishing things. Joy-Six-Oh will be up by the end of the summer, with air-conditioning throughout and all the electricity solar-generated from panels on the roof. Is that what they call a zero-sum situation? Today, for the first time, they let me drive a backhoe. It's such a darling machine. It lifts this big obliging hydraulic arm with its elbow up in the air and instead of a hand it has a scoop or bucket they call it, with these four pointy fingers shiny from gouging at the ground-they're replaceable, I never realized that-and you sit there in this shaking cab scared to pick the wrong lever because this huge mechanical animal under you, that feels so gentle and plodding and patient, has so much blind power it could crush somebody just as easily as it picks up a boulder. I adored it, being allowed to run it. Its controls are all sticks, so it's almost more natural than a car. Everybody, including the foreman, who used to be a Mormon, said I was very good-J really have the touch. It's like I become the backhoe's spirit, its jiva.

Forgive me, Midge, the way my mind is flipping around, but everything here is so energizing I said to Fritz I don't see how the Arhat does it, all of us feeding off him this intensely spiritual way. He said-Vikshipta, I must learn to use his real name-that's why he must conserve himself and needs all these women to hide behind, living so withdrawn you hardly ever see him except at darshan and when he drives by in his limo. We drink his silence the way he drinks Brahman's, Vikshipta said.

How can I describe to you how I feel here? Tender and open as if I've shed an old skin, Midge. Everything makes such an impression-the rocks I'm sitting among, and the sunset in its love colors like some great slanted fragmentary walkway we're seeing from underneath, and a breeze that stirs up the resiny smell in the cypress and reminds me of a smell from my childhood, some deep secret kitcheny scent out of a grandmother's drawer, and this little lizard who's been keeping me company. He's like a perfect little living jewel. He's been absolutely frozen as my voice rattles on and on. I'm getting hoarse. And just then, when I cleared my throat, up he stood and raced away on his two hind legs like a tiny man with a long green tail! He had a collar around his neck and for all I know a bow tie! He was-how can I say?-one with me, as the buzzards overhead riding the air currents home are one with me, and my birth and death, and you are one with me, dear Midge, and my lover is one with me when we can find a half-hour. Vikshipta's hair is nearly as long as mine and utterly bleached on top from being out in the sun. When he isn't leading therapy sessions he helps on the crew that's building a ring road to keep cars out of the Chakra, looking ahead to the time when this will be a real city of many thousands, a thriving alternative to the atrocious way people live now.

Can you hear the supper blast? It's an old foghorn that used to be on a boat in San Francisco. They use it to call us'to dinner, or in case there's nuclear war. You can hear it for miles, way out in the artichokes, and it reminds me of the only thing of my old life I miss, besides you and the girls and Irving-the sea, the triangular piece of it I could see from our front windows. It was never the same. Every day, every hour, it was a slightly different color, responding to the wind, and the sky, and my mood. Do you think I was going stir-crazy?

It's still me, Midge, a few days older and wiser. Happy Mother's Day. I must finish this tape and get it off to you. There's just so much happening. I know your image of us, and mine too used to be, is of people in lavender robes sitting around in a trance, but what we are'trying to do here isn't escape the world but revolutionize it-offer up a model of creative activity without ego and competitive antagonisms, so that from our central crystal here in the desert human society will spontaneously restructure itself, like certain chemicals when you put in just a pinch of the right precipitant; Vikshipta explains it better than I can; he used to be a chemist. He gets quite lovely when he talks about the new world we'll concoct here. He worked in West Germany for some huge I. G. Farben spin-off until it seemed to him everything they were making-fertilizers, industrial additives, pesticides, even medicines and drugs-was poison, that the whole human species was a kind of poison, worse even than rats and cockroaches and viruses, and he left his wife and little child and went into the world to search for purity. This was in the Seventies sometime, when you and I were being suburban. He went to Nepal and the Himalayas but it was too'cold there, no matter how pure, and he kept getting parasites, and then, drifting south to visit the great carved caves at EHora, he came across this little ashram run by the Arhat in this pale-green farmhouse on the edge of town. It was like, he says, a carnival-absolute freedom and a lot of abuse of the freedom, of course, but in the still center of it all this utterly calm and rather humorous man who just radiated vidya, and prakhya. Not that he ever said so much, he still doesn't and, when he does, afterwards it's almost impossible to remember what was said, you just have this wonderful feeling of being washed 'clean inside, of everything klishta, everything impure and painful, having been gently purged. What Vikshipta liked about the Arhat was that unlike a lot of gurus he didn't demand quiescence, he invited dynamism, and instead of just being a slave word by word to what Patanjali wrote about yoga over two thousand years ago he had heard of Freud and modern psychotherapeutic techniques and in this cosmically good-humored way of his was willing to give anything a shot. There weren't these usual repulsive little anatomical stunts like sucking things back up through your anus and cleaning out your sinuses with a silk string, but a lot of group encounter, and hydrotherapy, and some primal scream, and strange things like food fights and blue movies-anything to wake people up, was the Arhat's approach. He embodies or localizes, that is, purusha to such an extent that it leaches away all the prakriti in the people around him. What / find sweet, in all this, and not so chauvinistic as it sounds, is that purusha, motionless inactive spirit, is male, and prakriti-active nature, you could › say-is female, so that in the ideal maithuna, that's what they call fucking in Sanskrit, the woman does all the work! The men always sit and she is always on top, the way Shiva and Shakti do it! I was shy at first but now I like it, its being up to me, so to speak, even when there's all these men in one of these groups. They sit in a circle called the shri Chakra and what you do is called Chakra puja, or purnabhisheka, the complete consecration. You have to see them all as motionless purusha and your yoni as a purifying fire. Midge, it does work! It gets very impersonal, and that's not such a great loss, it turns out. You become all yoni and your spirit gets delightfully unattached.

Enough of my lecturing. For God's sake don't tell any of this to Charles or even to Irving. What other news do I have? I still haven't figured out where my rental car went to, and I know Hertz must be bugging Charles, but what can I do? That cold I had when I came is still hanging on. I must say there's a lot of minor illness around here, colds and fevers and aches and pains. I think people get groggy, the twelve hours of work as worship is too much physically, though wonderful spiritually. Even the girls who come to make the beds and tidy the trailers in the morning with the most radiant look on their faces have these awful coughs and sniffles. I've changed jobs again, just when I was getting so good at the backhoe some of the guys would let me scratch their backs with it as a joke. I guess it's a promotion, though I miss the healthy mindless outdoors-you get hardened to it, and there's always a satisfaction when your body responds to a challenge. It settles the mind into silence, physical labor. But Durga came to me and asked if I could type. She didn't like me from the start and I believe she hates me now because of Vikshipta, though I don't know what their relationship was before me. She is beautiful in a way, with those pale-red eyebrows and that black pearl above her nostril, and wears those flowing robes to make the best of her figure, but she doesn't give off really man-pleasing vibes-she seems too angry at something, and it could be is too close to being a man herself. Wimpy types like Yajna are terrified of her and whine all the time about how she's abusing the Master's trust, the way she runs the place along these kind of paranoid lines. But for some reason I'm not scared of her. I said I wrote a mean letter but never had typed professionally. She said they needed another typist in the Uma Room pool to answer the Arhat's mail. It pours in from everywhere-Europe, Australia, Africa, even the South Sea Islands. Our run-ins with the local ranchers and the state land-use freaks have gotten us some national publicity, you may even have seen some of it on the seven-o'clock news, after Natalie Jacobson. People send checks, just for what seeing the Arhat on "Sixty Minutes" has done for them. They fall in love just like I did. He really is a master of the interview-so funny and relaxed and sweet and respectful and solemn and sly, like the baby of the family that's always been made much of. Actually, his early life was very hard and cruel. A person's moksha is supposed to erase his past, but the story you hear is that his father wanted to mutilate him as an infant to make him a more effective beggar but-this was all in Bombay, where as everybody knows the poverty is terrible-but his mother hid him under a heap of rags or cow dung and smuggled him to her sister in the countryside near Ellora, and that's where he grew 'up. 'He's enchanting to me on TV because the camera gets so close to him; otherwise he's whizzing past in a limousine, and even onstage he seems very far away, and dwarfed by this huge silvery-polyester armchair he likes to sit in, and on weekends, when the day trippers and who knows what crazies are there-if they shot John Lennon they'll shoot anybody that appeals to them-he's behind a curved Plexiglas shield that makes him even harder to focus on. But on TV you can see exactly the way his slightly chubby cheeks kind of tense up when he's speaking on an allegorical level, and the beautiful way his mouth moves in his beard, especially that amazing "s" he makes, his front teeth not quite together like he's holding something between the back ones, and his really incredible eyes-they seem absolutely to have no reflected highlights, just this smooth dark bulgy inky brown that goes in and in. I love his lids, too-they're so sculptural somehow, and how the lower ones get this funny bunchy extra wrinkle when he's said something sly, that you can take two ways. And his hair, the kinky energetic grayish bits you can see at the edge of the turban. It's hard to know how old he is. He might be our age. Or ten years older or younger. There's a new videotape, made since the one on ego-negation and prapatti we used to watch together-on sachchidananda and moksha, it's really wonderful, for $39.90, and if you order it direct from us never mind about the five-percent Arizona-state sales tax, nobody pays it around here because we're a religious organization. Do let me know if you don't adore it as much as I do.

Anyway, Durga comes up with this same icy face she had the day I pretended to have no credit card, and told me to join the typing pool. I said to her I had the impression she hated my guts-you learn to say such things here, everybody does it, it gets the garbage out and clears the air-and she said her feelings and mine were of no consequence, all that mattered here was our service to the Arhat, though she tad observed that women of my social class tended to play at enlightenment for a few weeks and then go on to some other style of vacation, and once we were out tended to be very cozy with both the press and the law-enforcement authorities-she has these phobias about the FBI, the IRS, the CIA, and the Immigration Service, not to mention the local sheriff. She said the Master had become aware of my presence, and the executive committee had concluded I had the requisite energy and karmic potential to serve at a higher level than skimming concrete or even operating a backhoe. My heart sank. I loved that big sweet sleepy yellow thing, a brand-new diesel John Deere. But, softhearted me, I said O.K. and have been working in the Uma Room for three days now. It's all little cubicles. They give you these form responses and after a while you can elaborate on them to suit your own style, within limits, but even so it's not really enlaging labor like the other was, the outdoor work. One advantage, it brings you quite close to the Arhat, though I haven't seen him yet-he lives in the original ranch hacienda, which has been remodelled and connected to these fitted-together trailers by a kind of breezeway. They say Durga is always slipping in to consult with him, and some of the others. The executive committee is mostly all women-the Arhat has this theory that women are stronger in selflessness than men, which may be a nice way of saying they're subservient. I couldn't wear my ratty muddy work clothes to the Uma Room, and the other typists wear saris, so I've gone and bought myself a couple at the Varuna Emporium and spend about a half-hour every morning trying to fold it so it doesn't fall off or get all sloppy whenever you lift your arm. They offer quite a line actually of clothes in these sunset shades of purple and violet and dusky lavender and even burgundy and magenta and a Very attractive rosy brown. The Emporium puts out a catalogue I'd be happy to send you, along with the order form for the moksha videotape if you and the girls want to get it.

I keep waiting for' this tape to run out, since my Puritan conscience, it must be, won't let me send it off to you until I've filled every inch. You and Irving and Ann and Liz and Gloria top and Donna, if they're around Wednesday, do the same and send it back-I'm not so far gone into prapatti and all that as not to miss a lot of the good things I've left behind. The ocean must be full of sails by now on the weekends, and the tulips up everywhere. I've missed the daffodils, the apple blossoms, and the hawthorns. Above all, Midge, I miss your friendship. The women here try to be nice and friendly but they tend, frankly, to be from different social circles from what you and I are used to. A lot of them of course are very young, for one thing-just teen-age runaways or dropouts still acting out their adolescent crises. The Arhat is what they're doing instead of bulimia or drugs or turning tricks on Sunset Boulevard. They're young but not very often glamorous-rather the opposite, dumpy in fact, though how they get fat on the diet of rice balls and artichoke paste they serve in the mess hall I have no idea. I've lost seven pounds, myself. Then the ones that are older were hippies, many of them, fifteen years ago, or beach bums, and the drugs left some short circuits in their heads-little gaps they just smile through as if what they said made perfect sense. I'm not speaking pf the psychotics and addicts, though we have a few of those too. But they don't push themselves on you, they tend to stick to themselves and are rather shy. It's the women of some quality and education who are so disappointing. They have this-I don't want to be unkind, but-this Midwestern blandness, even when they come from the West Coast. There's no history really where they're from except old Spanish missions or Russian fishing settlements or Mickey Mouse back when he was Steamboat Willie-that's as far back as the collective memory goes. They've been to college, a lot of them, and some have advanced degrees evidently, they're not exactly dimwits, but really they don't speak my language-everything has only one dimension for them, there's no double entendre and the double voir that goes with it-it's just impossible to have with them the kind of silly fun we used to have. There is one, I should say-from Iowa, of all unlikely areas-called Alinga, with some refinement and subtlety. That reminds me, a fascinating thing Alinga did tell me this morning about the

[end of tape]

Dear Ms. Grumbach:

It filled me with limitless happiness to receive your precious letter and to hear of your perfect love. Selfless and loyal love such as you profess is one of the greatest weapons Man and Woman can have in their ceaseless struggle to escape the cruel cycles of karma and enter into everlasting moksha and sachchidananda. I accept your love, my dear pilgrim, and would welcome you at Ashram Arhat if certain technical requirements can be met.

Millennia of yogic experience have determined that the individual spirit cannot return to the Atman if encumbered by worldly possessions. I ask merely that for the duration of your life here under my protection and guidance-may it be eternal!-your financial savings be placed in the care of the vigilant and efficient custodians of our Treasury of Enlightenment. Their infallible wisdom and the irresistible success of our communal enterprise will ensure that your assets shall be returned to you greatly enhanced if you ever were, most regrettably, to decide to leave our company.

Demand for places amid our limited facilities is such that we must ask a minimum deposit of ten thousand dollars (U.S.). In addition there are fees totalling eight hundred dollars monthly to cover a modest portion of the unavoidable expenses of your food, housing, health and accident insurance, lecture and darshan fees, and supervised meditation. Sannyasins are of course expected to practice worship in the form of constructive labor for twelve hours a day and either to bring with them sturdy boots, a sleeping bag, a sun hat, and appropriately colored garb or else to purchase such supplies at the Varuna Emporium located to the right of the ashram Chakra, with its famous fountain. A mala of beads of sacred sandalwood ending in a beautiful hand-carved pendant containing a color photograph of myself plus a hair from my head or beard will be provided 'free, as a benison of Buddha, and should be worn at all times, save when bathing or (at the wearer's discretion) engaged in sexual intercourse. A full range of contraceptive preparations and devices may be obtained at the Karuna Pharmacy; and various iconographic aids to life at Ashram Arhat, including incense and other purifying inhalants, can be purchased at our shops, as described in the enclosed catalogue.

These aids, and my inspired and unexpurgated books, videotapes, and audio cassettes, not to mention posters depicting my present (and final) physical incarnation, selected Hindu deities, tantric visualizations, and ritually constructed mandalas can of course be ordered and utilized by those who do not yet feel able to cut their sordid earthly ties and surrender to the new order of existence established here at Ashram Arhat, amid the immemorial peace of the healthful semi-arid Sonoran Plateau.

Dear Gladys Grumbach, I return your love a million-fold and with tranquil exultation await your reply. Come and join me! Yoxi and none other ignite my heart's flame. As the Lord Buddha asked, "Who shall find the Dhammapada, the clear Path of Perfection, even as a man who seeks flowers finds the most beautiful flower?"

Shanti,

Shri Arhat Mindadali, M.A., Ph.D.

Supreme Meditator, Ashram Arhat

/spw

Sir:

Your recent editorial in the Forrest Weekly Sentinel condemnatory of the Ashram Arhat as a "glorified summer camp" for "bored yuppies" and "pathetic societal strays" would be beneath our notice were we not sincerely anxious to cultivate good relations with our fellow-citizens of Dorado County and to have our substantial contributions to the regional economy recognized. A barren tract of exhausted range has been transformed into productive agricultural land at no cost to the water table. Our extensive irrigation and sanitation draw solely upon an aquifer confined to the valley of Gritty Creek, now happily renamed the Sach-chidananda River and not to be confused with the miserable alkaline trickle the good "citizens" of Forrest have amusingly dubbed Babbling Brook.

To correct a few other misapprehensions or deliberate misstatements: (1) Our facilities for meditation, therapy (both physio- and psycho-), non-soil-depleting agriculture, and hand manufacture have never claimed tax-exempt status; via real-estate tax and other levies the ashram has contributed $46,742.07 to Dorado County coffers in the fiscal year ended this March, in return for which we have received precisely no public services-neither police protection nor trash pickup nor highway maintenance nor water nor sewer mains nor anything but the forced enrollment of sixteen of our children in public schools where, after sickeningly long bus rides, they are bullied and tormented by their teachers and fellow-students alike and subjected to a bowdlerized, anti-evolutionist, right-wing curriculum that would insult the intelligence of a chuck-walla. (2) Our armed security forces exist solely to defend our property and personnel against the attacks of trigger-happy rednecks and beered-up adolescents who have repeatedly damaged and fired upon our water tanks, our outlying pumphouses and tool sheds, our faithful watchdogs, and our signs of welcome in many languages. (3) Our so-called "orgies" are in fact exercises in the ancient art of tantric yoga, wherein the participants worship one another as Shiva and Shakti, the fundamental forces of the cosmos; sexuality and spirituality are forms of one energy, proclaims our Arhat, whose love unites us all and in ecstatic love of whom we are all made new.

With united voice, therefore, we remind you that this is supposedly a free country. Accredited lawyers among us stand ready to defend our constitutional rights. Defamatory and false information infringes these rights. Ashram Arhat holds out the hand of peace to its neighbors in Dorado County and the "city" of Forrest. Let us live side by side and strive to make our hitherto sadly neglected region the paradise it can become. The world is weary of the old agendas; let us welcome in the new agendas. Vindictive and mendacious editorials such as yours feed the atmosphere of hate that has grown up needlessly, and in his ineffable sorrow our Master has empowered me to compose this letter of friendly correction.

Yours most sincerely,

Ma Prem Durga

Executive Director, Ashram Arhat

/spw

My dear Charles,

I was sorry to receive your letter. I am so sorry that Midge gave you my address, after I begged her not to. She is still, as I must not forget, very much of your world, very much attached. Even Irving, I fear, is just playing at dvandvanabhighata-the cessation of trouble from pairs of opposites. You and I, my dear, I see now, were such a pair of troublesome opposites.

You speak of our bank accounts and stocks. You even write the slanderous word "theft." Were not those assets joint? Did I not labor for you twenty-two years without wages, serving as concubine, party doll, housekeeper, cook, bedwarmer, masseuse, sympathetic adviser, and walking advertisement-in my clothes and accessories and demeanor and accent and even in my body type and muscle tone-of your status and prosperity? How can you be so mired in prakriti as to care what numbers are printed on the bank statements that you never used to read anyway? Those numbers flowed effortlessly and inevitably from your work-you did not work to produce those numbers. I always did the accounts and the budgeting. For you as well as for us here at the ashram, work is worship-but you worship a stupid god, a stodgy pudgy god of respectability and outward appearance, a tin snob god of the "right" cars and shoes and country clubs, of acceptable street addresses and of acquisitions that dissolve downwards into d£mod£ junk rather than, as for those who take the path of yoga and non-ego, dissolve upwards, into samadhi and the blissful void of Mahabindu. I pity you, darling. Your anger is like that of an infant who with his weak little rubbery arms beats his mother's breast and produces no effect but her loving, understanding laugh.

You dare drag in our daughter. You say Pearl is appalled. You threaten me with the loss of not only her love but all communication with her. You say she will renounce me. How absurd. One cannot renounce a parent. A parent can renounce a child, for purposes of future inheritance, but a parent is unrenounceable-a parent, however inconvenient, is a fact. Facts cannot be renounced, though they can be not known, through avidya, or, through vidya, transcended. A parent can be, if not transcended, survived-you have survived your own father but carry him with you like one of those fetuses that in some unfortunate women turn to stone-every time you cleared your throat with one of those prissy little "ahem"s it was your father clearing his, fat old poker-faced Freddy Worth-you even had his supercilious rapid eyeblink when you were trying to put something over on one of us-me or some gullible misdiagnosed patient or one of those poor doctor-crazy nurses you persuaded to spread her legs in their grotesque white stockings-a parent should be transcended, I'm trying to say, as a snake sheds its skin. Pearl and I are women and on the same continuum, and, having contributed your microscopic ridiculous sperm with its bullet head and wriggling tail, you can stand there all you wish, clucking and wringing your hands and telling her to hate me. She won't. I am her mother. I am she as she was once I. At the age at which I very immaturely married she is trying to become a free intelligent woman among her boyfriends and girlfriends and the scenery and ancient glories of England and shouldn't be bothered with our old spites and injuries and your impotent rage. Don't you see, dear muddlehead, we were a wave, a certain momentary density within the maya-veil of karma-events that produced Pearl, but now she is moving on and we must too. Let go of her and me. You have the houses and the New Hampshire land and all the silver that didn't come from either the Prices or the Peabodys-the Worth stuff is clunky but sterling and you could sell it on consignment through Shreve's if you're feeling so desperately poor. You have your profession and society's approbation. I have nothing but my love of the Arhat, and he promises me nothing. Nothing is exactly what he promises-that my ego will become nothing, will dissolve upwards.

I do hope you aren't letting the lawn boys scalp that humpy section out by the roses with that extra-wide Bunton. They should be spraying for aphids now. The peonies should be staked-the wire support hoops are in the garden shed, behind and above the rakes, on nails, in the same tangle that last year's boys left them in. I do hate missing the azaleas-that deep pink is so stunning against the ocean this time of year, all steely-blue and sparkly and bitter cold and dotted with whitecaps and the first brave sailboats.

The cold I left home with is at last getting better. Since you have the address there's no harm in telling you that the days-are so hot and bright your lips and elbows keep cracking, but the nights can be quite chilly still. I didn't bring enough warm, clothes and sleep sometimes in a parka and longjohns and have become quite deft at draping myself in a sari. At first I was assigned to a trailer-the others with me were more Pearl 's age than mine and always wanted to go dancing-but now I'm in an A-frame I share with only two sannyasins, and these suitably mature. The word "san-nyasin" originally meant someone who's become a holy beggar wandering from place to place. Our guru says that we travel most when standing still. We wear purple and pink because those are sunset colors and the world, he thinks, is in terrible decline. Also these are at the "love end" of the spectrum. I've become quite brown and my hair quite unruly. You would hardly know your smooth old coefficient in that baby-making wave we together formed twenty years ago. We seem quite sweet in our Brighton apartment as I look back on it-for all of your ugly present noises.

Fondly,

S.

P.S.: If by any dreadful misestimation of your rights and powers you carry out your threat to show up here, please understand that you will be taken into custody by our ashram security forces, a team of zealous young men I don't think you will find as cute as I do. They wear lavender uniforms and carry real guns and all graduated in the top third of their classes at the Arizona Police Academy. You will be held in a little detention room filled with pictures of the Arhat while tapes of his discourses play continuously through a loudspeaker. You will be released only when (a) a sannyasin vouches for you as a visitor (b) you find yourself on fire with love of the Arhat and humbly request to join the ashram (c) you make a generous contribution to our manifold good works and promise to go away. Since (a) will not forth-come from me, nor, most likely, {b) from you (though your expertise would be very useful here-the medical services are overstrained.and the head of the clinic, a woman called Ma Prapti, seems to be in a gloomy trance most of the time), you should 'save yourself the ignominy of (c) and stay where you are and take care of our joint property. I assume you will be renting the Cape place this summer. Be sure to send me half the proceeds.

Dear Mrs. Blithedale

It filled me with limitless sorrow to receive the letter of your lawyers inquiring after the whereabouts of the principal amount so graciously made available to the work of the ashram some few years ago. Our accounts fail to show that any fixed term was set for the return of these most precious and cherished funds, nor that any rate of interest was determined. Had interest been your aim, perhaps you should have entrusted these funds to a federally insured bank, with its glass windows and fashionably attired tellers and total lack of spiritual benefits.

But no, at such time by no means were you interested in the banks: you were interested in the peace that Brahman brings when reunited with your atman; you were interested in samadhi and casting off the sordid claims of our illusory material life. Your legal servants write that you now regret your months as a sannyasin with us and have re-embraced your forefathers' creed of Presbyterianism-a Calvinist sect which presents earthly prosperity as a sign of divine election. We rejoice if you have thus purchased inner peace. Vishnu has many avatars.

However: we have been carefully consulting your records and conclude that your ascent to samadhi was regrettably arrested at the third, or Manipura, chakra. As you will doubtless remember, this is the "gem center," whose presiding deity is Rudra, whose lotus displays ten blue petals with an inverted red triangle, and whose subtle-body site is the solar plexus. We now believe that the burning you felt there, which we joyously took as a sign of ascent toward the fourth chakra, Anahata, located at the level of the heart, may have been merely psychic resistance or simple indigestion. Your practice (abhyasana) of the asanas and mudras was ever desultory, Madame Blithedale, and your attachment to the five counterproductive vrittis of the psychomental stream (ignorance, individuality, passion, disgust, will to live) was never-we now sorrowfully feel-disengaged. The cleansing fire of asceticism (tapas) encountered in you an ego (aham) sheathed, as it were, in asbestos. Your vasanas-your subconscious sensations and urges-have stubbornly retained phalatrishna: the egoistic "thirst for fruits."

Yet we cannot find it in our hearts to condemn you, to cast you out. Such is the lavish scale of our generosity that we would welcome you back. You would rejoice to behold the many practical improvements at Ashram Arhat made possible by the ocean of generosity of which your own constituted but a single small, though infinitely treasured, drop. Our work does not cease, that ocean must flow on! Even as I dictate this affectionate missive, the steel girders of our splendid mandir, our Hall of a Millionfold Joys, are rising and being thunderously riveted together! There is not time nor strength for the backward glance! Come and rejoin us and all accountings will be made anew! Your Presbyterian legal advisers merely cast doleful shadows upon your atman, which longs to be free. As the immortal Utterly Enlightened proclaimed in the. blessed Dhammapada, "Sorrow cannot touch the man [or woman, the scribes assuredly meant to add] who is not in the bondage of anything, who owns nothing."

Your eternal servant,

Shri Arhat Mindadali, M.A., Ph.D.

Supreme Meditator, Ashram Arhat

/spw

Dear Mr. Rogers:

It filled me with sincere regret to hear of the loss of your two heads of prize cattle. However, your accusation of theft against the Ashram Arhat because the fence between us had its barbed wires snipped falls upon barren ground, for we are vegetarians at this place and have no need of rustling protein'from you. So kindly look for your cattle elsewhere, among your other ranching friends, who are rumored to relish liquor and gambling to the extent of unhinging their better judgment.

And no, we will not join you in the costs of repairing the fence and reinforcing the same. The fence is your affair, as all who are in our ashram wish to stay in and, unlike underfed steers living under sentence of death, they have no need of barbed wires.

With neighborly affection and esteem,

Shri Arhat Mindadali, M.A., Ph.D.

Supreme Meditator, Ashram Arhat

/spw

Gentlemen:

The large unpaid bill for six Lincoln limousines must be a deplorable clerical error. I have referred it to our chief accountant, Ma Prem Nitya Kalpana, who is unfortunately enjoying two weeks of uninterrupted meditation.

With my generous blessings,

Shri Arhat Mindadali, M.A., Ph.D.

Supreme Meditator, Ashram Arhat

/spw

Dear Irving-

Just a quick Monday-morning note on my trusty office Selectric with its lovely augmented memory and magical erasure features. I often think of you and assume that Midge has shared at least the gist of the tape I sent her it must have been three weeks ago. Time flies! Things hum along here, though the noon sun is getting so hot now the Master has decreed a siesta time from eleven-thirty to three. People were fainting-in the fields, especially some of the girls who have been up half the night absorbing energy at the Kali Club.

Your lessons have really stood me in good stead-a lot of the younger people have complimented me on how flexible I am. They run the Salutations to the Sun at a somewhat slower pace than yours, but then you were trying to fight flab on middle-aged matrons where here the Master is getting us in training for Sahasrara. The adept who supervises our group-Bhava, his ashram name is-cruelly emphasizes heels flat on the floor on the forward stretch and not only the throat bent way back,but the tongue out just as far and hard "as you can do. It hurts at first and feels embarrassing but is the very best thing for the thyroid and even the viscera apparently. Then, on the standard asanas, he likes you to do the Fish out of the lotus position, and the strain on the Snsides of the thighs is agony, plus the ache on the top of your head after a while. And on the Pashchimottanasana I really can't come near touching my forehead to the floor no matter how wide I spread my legs. But Bhava loves my Plough, he says, and I must say it's always been my favorite: with my knees pressed against my ears and my bottom straight up in the air I always feel so cozy, like I used to as a little girl hiding behind the sofa, so cozy and safe and absolutely me-I hold it to the point that when I close my eyes I get these things that I don't know if they're what they call visualizations but I do feel I'm in another world, or just on the verge of it. They like us to hold the asanas, except of course the Locust and the Bow, for fifteen deep breaths instead of the five you let us off with, you old softie. But some of the people, like this crybaby Yajna who's in my group,' just stop when they feel like it. There's a lot of that kind of freedom here; nobody is "uptight." Whatever we do is within the Master's love, and that gives a great feeling of ease and suppleness. You should see me go into my headstand now-I absolutely uncoil and am up in about two big breaths, and using my elbows at the two other points, too, instead of the hands, which I could never bear to lift up before. Such a scaredy-cat! You were right-once you've found the zero point the trick is to completely relax your shoulders and you can go on upside-down forever. One tip, though-here they always follow the Cobra with the Locust and not the other way around the way you taught us. The Half-Locust (the Ardha-Shalabhasana) makes a very nice transition and the stretching in the abdomen doesn't feel so violent then when you go into the Bow.

But the main thing I want to scold you about, dear Irving, is-you never told us about Kundalini! I mean, not really. Just hints, and asking at the end of a session if we felt anything at the base of our spines. As if a bunch of middle-aged women full of coffee and bran muffins would be feeling anything much except plain relief at having stopped. The reason I'm so "into" Kundalini suddenly is-do tell Midge-it's my name! My ashram name. At last I met the Arhat and he gave me my proper subtle-body name.

Actually, for a week or more now I've been taking dictation from him instead of just typing out variations on form letters. Alinga, the least creepy of Durga's assistants, came in and asked me if I could take dictation. I told her I knew nothing of shorthand but she said that didn't matter since you're basically there to inspire him. He loves women, not in the way most men do or say they do but as energy entities, as vrittis in the ocean of prakriti. I of course was very nervous going into the presence of The Master but in fact he has this marvellous gift of taking you in with these enormous sad bulging bottomless eyes, of seeming to be letting you in on some huge unspoken deeply philosophical secret.

This first time, Alinga, who is very blond and slender and serene and efficient, led me back through the cubicles of the Uma Room-it's not really a room, it's a rather higgledy-piggledy arrangement of trailers with doors and walls cut through and welded back together to make a lot of office space-out through a breezeway across a kind of courtyard I've never seen before, with these old tan rustling trees that from the size of them were planted years and years ago. They had big bumpy pods hanging down, and smelled of something like cloves. This was the old adobe ranch house, the hacienda before the Arhat came and bought all these acres. There were cats on the veranda and pegs bits of rotten rope and harness were still hanging from. Inside, the air-conditioning began again. The furniture was what. Ve New Englanders might call vulgar but may be the best you can buy around here-heavy squarish matching pieces with a silvery shiny look to the fabric, and plastic sleeves on the chair arms, and a lot of milk-glass and painted porcelain doodads displayed on open shelves, and just the hugest television set I've ever seen, the kind that projects onto a curved screen like you usually see only in bars.

The furniture didn't really give the impression that anybody lived here, if you know what I mean-it was more like the window of a furniture store. But I suppose if you're moksha you don't leave the dents on things more sthula bodies do. He wasn't in this living room but in one beyond, which he uses as an office, with a lot of off-white padded contour furniture on swivels and casters and a long desk of bleached wood, the kind that looks as though powdered sugar has been rubbed into the grain. Alinga left us and I sat down on the opposite side of the desk and tried to take dictation, my hands all jumpy and the pad trying to slide off the knee of my slippery silk sari. Some rich patron of the ashram was trying to get her money back and that was what the letter was about. It got rather technical about Kun-dalini and he had to keep spelling things. Several times he stopped and asked me if I thought a certain sentence was funny enough. I hadn't known any of it was supposed to be funny so I didn't know how to react at first. But we got through the letter and he seemed pleased. "We will buffalo that old bitch," he said, and then asked me if that was a correct American expression, "to buffalo." I said it was and he smiled his beautiful warm sly smile, so detached and sweet. He has this darling little gap between his two front teeth. His purple turban is just as it is in the posters, only woolier, somehow, with a nap that takes the light differently as the strips of it twist. His robe I think was a very pale peach, so shim-mery it looked white, and on his hands he had all these rings'that I'm sure were very expensive and authentic jewels but reminded me of those paste things people at fairs used to fish for by operating a little bucket crane, after putting in a dime.

I shouldn't be putting all this into a letter-Vikshipta and Alinga say that Durga and her henchpeople have the mail read, coming in and out-but I know how much you love the Arhat; it was your love that inspired mine. He is a beautiful presence in three dimensions, Irving. He is real. Not too tall and with a little gray in his beard but not too old either. He is paler than I expected but then of course Indians come in all shades; those invading people who brought the Vedas were just like Vikings. His cheeks and forehead are so free of wrinkles the gray in his beard and his eyebrows almost looks frosted on. His office had the air-conditioning turned way up, which went with the frosted look-I thought to myself I should wear a sweater next time. Anyway, after the letter and a few other, shorter ones-he has so many people after him, everybody wanting a piece-he asked me in that thrilling funny accent of his what my name was. I said Sarah Worth and that I hadn't been given my ashram name yet. He looked at me the longest time, with this little smile, and these bottomless eyes, and said, "You are Kundalini." I am? I said, blushing-I just went bot all over. "Veritably," he said. "You are she at last. You have come to burn away everything klishta, everything duhshama. You shall save us from our sorrowful impurity."

This seemed flirtatious and almost aggressive, so I just stood there blushing. He admired my healthy tan complexion. He said I was darker than he was. I was all flustered and said it was just genes from my father, plus vitamin E and PABA and oil baths twice a week when I was at home in Massachusetts, but of course baths were more difficult here and the desert air was very drying to the epidermis. Then he said something like "You are smooth and electrical" and settled back into his silver armchair-like a Barcalounger with high squarish arms and a padded rest for. the head as on a dental chair-and I decided the time had come for me to go. I've taken dictation a number of times since then and am hardly nervous now at all. Irving, he really is all we imagined he is, and more. I mean, as well as being divine he's nice, and shy, even.

Some years ago, while still at the Ellora ashram, he cut a tape on Kundalini, and I enclose one, free, though they go for $14.90 in our catalogue. Play it for yourself and the gang some Wednesday when you can all take an extra half-hour. Hope everything goes well with you and you're not too busy in the framing shop-you must be absolutely buried in diplomas this time of year. And graduation pictures. Soon, June weddings! Or do people just put those in albums? Or in those little store-bought frames that sit on the piano and look chintzy and somehow scary'?

Your grateful former student,

Kundalini!

[tape]

We will talk today of Kundalini. She is the female energy in things. Not just women we are speaking of; she is in all things. She sleeps coiled at the base of the spine, in the root chakra, which is called Muladhara. The lotus of this chakra has four red petals. On them are inscribed the Sanskrit letters va, sa, sa,-and sa. These letters are contained within a yellow square; this represents the earth element. An inverted triangle within the square holds Kundalini coiled three and one half times around the linga. The linga is the male organ, and also it represents the subtle space in which the universe undergoes the repeated process of formation and dissolution. Also in this chakra is Brahma, the creator-god of the gross material world. He has four arms and three eyes and four faces and holds, the sages say, a trident, a jar, a rosary, and with his remaining hand makes the mudra that dispels fear, the abhayamudra. His energy is called Dakini and is shining pink and also holds many things, such as a sword and a drinking vessel. Also in this chakra is a large elephant with a black strip around its neck. He forms the symbol of physical resistance. The principle of smell is associated with this chakra. That is all we know of Muladhara, at the base of the spine.

You ask, how does Kundalini awaken? How does she leave off her sleeping coiled around the linga? Pranayama, proper breathing, and pratyahara, the shutting down of the senses, send willpower down the two great nadis, ida the lunar channel and pingala the solar one. You ask, what is this, these nadis? They are the nerves and veins of the subtle body, which coexists with the material body. Subtle is sukshma, the other is sthula. When enough willpower goes down these nadis, Kundalini stirs. She hearkens to the vibrations of the mind meditating upon the syllable Ram, and then alternatively upon the syllable Yam. Also the great metaphysical syllable Orri is frequently pronounced, and the sphincter muscles are contracted, sucking upwards. All these things waken Kundalini. Like a woman who is restless under the bright moon, she can no longer sleep. "When she leaves Muladhara, there is the sound of a chirping cricket.

Kundalini uncoils and goes upward then to the chakra of Svadhisthana, which is located in the spine just above the genitals. Now there is the sound of the tinkling of an anklet. A sexy sound. She looks around. What is here, in Svadhisthana? Vishnu is here, dark blue, with four arms holding a conch, a mace, a wheel, and a lotus. His energy is Rakini and holds a trident, a ' lotus, a drum, and a chisel. Do not ask me what Rakini chisels [laughter, tentative}. Perhaps he is a chiseller [laughter, less tentative}. Perhaps with one of his arms Rakini is an illegal card-sharp dealer going to cheat Vishnu [less laughter, uneasy}. The lotus here is red and has six petals, bearing the letters ba, bha, ma, ya, ra, and la. The chakra's animal is the makara, a great monster like a giant crocodile. He is to water as the elephant is to earth. The principle associated with this Chakra is taste. Kundalini tastes many things now, many sweet things from her childhood and spicy things from her girlhood and sour things from time as a mature woman. The dominating element is water. She feels clean, so very clean, and hears everywhere this rushing sound. The breath of life, Prana, is here and her lungs are full; they expand like clouds. This is a happy chakra, but Kundalini leaves it and goes next to Manipura, at the level of the solar plexus.

Ooh now what is here? Now there is the deep sound of a bell. The god of this chakra is Rudra, who is red and sits upon a bull. He holds in one hand a fire and his energy is called Lakini and is dark blue. Everywhere in this chakra there is fire. There is a great inverted triangle, radiant like the sun, which represents fire. Kundalini swims in this fire. As she ascends it is very common for the person to feel very hot, to feel hot flashes. The head feels giddy. The body tingles. There may be, the sages tell us, constipation or diarrhea. The anus contracts and draws up. The chin sinks down. The eyeballs roll up. There are convulsions and visions. There is an experience of being a witness within the body. Sometimes the body feels as if it is being lifted into the air, and at others as if it is being pressed into the earth. It may feel very large or very small. It may tremble and ache and the tongue may protrude from the mouth. There may be a feeling of having no head. There may be the feeling of seeing things all around even though the eyes are closed. The sexual organ may become very erect and hard and painful. All this agony and embarrassment while Kundalini ascends. The lotus of Manipura has ten blue petals and on them are written da, dha, ha, ta, tha, da, dha, na, pa, and pha. Its principle is that of sight.

Kundalini must travel on. She must continue her ascent. She is merciless upon herself. She wishes to become perfection. She travels upward to Anahata, located at the level of our hearts. Now there is the music of a flute. The music of a single flute. Now there is a golden triangle, as bright as ten million flashes of lightning. Now there is a lotus of vermilion and of twelve petals bearing ka, kha, ga, gha, na, cha, chha, ja, jha, na, ta, and tha. Now there is the god Isha, who is brick-red, dressed in shining white. He represents the whole world system. Space and time now are revealed; they are interlocked. Two triangles represent male and female; they are united. Now purus'ha for the first time is glimpsed, the unmoving essence beyond phenomena. The principle of this chakra is air, which is invisible. Its name, Anahata, means "unstruck," which means "without sound," which is silence. The animal here is the black gazelle, symbolizing lightness, symbolizing Vayu, the god of winds. Air, wind, brightness are all around. Brightness! It is frightening, it is immensity. Kundalini 'dashes from side to side, she desires to ascend in a straight line but must each time untie the knot of the Chakra. Kundalini burns, she makes the yogi to feel very heavy and dizzy and hungry. The saliva pours from his mouth. His jaws, they stick together. His throat feels very dry, as dry as a dead prickly-pear cactus. Isha makes the gestures granting boons and dispelling fear. Isha's energy is called Kakini, who is bright yellow and holds a noose and a skull. These are not such pleasant things.

Kundalini is now halfway through her voyage, in the material body up through the spine, but in the subtle body the sushumna, the central channel around which twine the pingala and the ida in that basic pattern of life called the double helix. Kundalini's voyage is half done and has reached the throat chakra, which is called Vi-shuddha, which means "pure," but resistance remains; the next step is very difficult for it means the dissolving of the apparent union of matter and psyche, the recognition that external facts have nothing to do with internal facts. The yogi, the sannyasin, feels dreadful heat and the flashing of many little lights. Also deep numbness. Also the feeling of poison having been inserted in the body: this is energy, which must burn until the channels have been cleansed and can carry the terrible energy, the terrible shakti. There are many undoubted accounts of these feelings in the writings of the sages. The fifth chakra is located at the base of the skull and is very complicated. The lotus here is a smoky purple, like perhaps the fuzz of grapes, and has sixteen petals, holding the sixteen vowels a, a, i, I, u, u, r, r, j, 1, e, ai, o, au, am, and ah. There is a white triangle and the sound is nothing but Om, Om, the sound of the cosmos. The god here is of two halves, Shiva and Shakti, the two gods male and female combining into Ardhanarishvara, the right half Shiva and glorious white, the left half Shakti and lovely golden. A god of both sexes. No man is just man. No woman is just woman. Men hold the seeds of womanhood within themselves and women hold the seeds of manhood within themselves. Ardhanarishvara represents this. He-let us say he-she-he-she has five faces and three eyes and ten arms. In his-her ten hands he-she holds nine things: a. trident, an 'axe, a sword, a thunderbolt called in Sanskrit "vajra," an endless serpent with uncountable heads called Ananta and upon whom sleeps the great god Vishnu, a bell, a pointed stick with which to urge on a beast, fire (ouch! that must be hot to hold!), and a noose. With the tenth hand Ardhanarishvara makes abhayamudra, the gesture dispelling fear, which our dear friend Kun-dalini surely needs when she looks at those other terrible things being held up [polite laughter}. Ardhanarishvara has his-her hands most full [again, the polite response muted by a certain impatience in the audience, a desire to get on with the ascent}. The element of this Chakra is ether, the element that is to the subtle body as air is to the material body. Its animal is Airavata, the white elephant with six trunks. He is a funny-looking fellow. The heavy, heavy earthy elephant of Muladhara has become etherealized. And that is Vishuddha.

The sixth Chakra is located between the eyebrows. It is called Ajna. It has only two petals. They say ha and ksa. They are white. Everything is moon-white. There is an inverted triangle and it is moon-white. Inside there is the linga. Linga means "phallus" and also the subtle space, the ether. "Li" means to dissolve,and "gam" to go out. There is the mantra Om. Om. OM. OM. It is the vibration from which all things emerge and into which all things are absorbed at the end of the cosmic cycle. There is a bindu-that is a very tiny point where everything is concentrated. The god is Parama-shiva, which means Shiva and Shakti come together in a wonderful fucking. That makes the Mahabindu. Also the energy now is Hakini; he is moon-white and holds a book, a skull, a drum, and other such stuff. Here at Ajna the ida and pingala nadis meet the sushumna nadi and then separate again, running into the right and left nostrils. It tickles the yogi's nose. He has to sneeze: acboo! Ajna is a very high-up Chakra. Kundalini must be very tired when she gets there. She is tired of bells ringing. She is tired of burning sensation. She is tired of sound of waterfall, of being lost in an ocean of light. But she must go on, go on ascending.

The seventh chakra is Sahasrara. It is located four finger-breadths above the top of the head. To get to it Kundalini must jump [laughter, as if at a sudden gesture]. Now, where is she? All colors are merged into one. All sounds into one. All senses into one. The lotus is now of a thousand petals holding the fifty letters of the Sanskrit alphabet many times. Little Kundalini, she is now Shakti. She is now also Shiva. She knows everything and that everything is nothing. She is very happy and yet feels nothing. There is nothing but Brahman. From the inverted lotus cosmic radiations fall upon the subtle body. Kundalini is possessed with glorious insights into the indefinable depth-dimension of existence. She becomes Kula, the all-transcending light of consciousness. She inhabits Mahabindu, the metacosmic Void.

Then she must descend. She comes down. Like an elevator, she comes down. She goes back between the eyes. Sixth floor, wisdom center. Next floor, throat chakra. Then still lower to the heart chakra, and to Manipura, that is called the power center. As she slithers down she sheds wisdom, speech, love, and power. She sheds them one by one. She arrives at the level of the genitals, where libido lives, and sheds that too, coiling around Muladhara again, three and one half times. Muladhara is earth, it is childhood. We all come from earth, from childhood. So does Kundalini.

She is the female energy in things. In some biological women she is very weak. In some biological men she is very strong. The burning sensation we feel as she ascends, the blinking lights and roaring like a waterfall which many sages have seen and heard, this is the male garbage being burned from the system. It is obstruction. This obstruction comes at knots, called "granthis." It is especially thick at the Muladhara chakra, and Anahata, and Ajna, called the Brahma, Vishnu, and Rudra knots." These places are clogged with ego and conscious thought and obstruct Kundalini from finding realization of oneness with totality, of transcending samsara and entering samadhi. She burns them through. She burns away garbage. We all come burdened with much garbage and it must be burned away. Our minds must become pure like fine ash, or like the sand of the seashore in the dawn when the tide has erased all the footprints and carried away all the Coca-Cola cans, all the candy wrappers. Kundalini herself, she is a candy wrapper. Did you believe the story of her journey? [Sounds of assent.] If you believe her journey, you will believe any foolishness. Modern science shows her journey cannot exist; Einstein showed there is no ether, medicine shows there are no nadis. All a lie. [Silence.] The story of her journey is a very detailed lie, like the horrible cosmology of the Jains or the Heaven and Hell of Dante, but so many endless details do not make such stories true. The more details they hold, the more lies they hold. They are like old newspapers. They are garbage. They are like organized religion, like the Holy Bible and Talmud and Koran. They are old newspapers.They are like the bound collected works of Sigismund Fried and Carlos Marx; they are garbage, full of details that are lies. Details obstruct us from enlightenment, from samadhi, from surrender of ego. We must forget. We must drive out foolishness from our systems. We must use foolishness to drive out foolishness. If you were not foolish, you would not have come across the sea to India. You would be in Germany drinking beer [startled laughter]. You would be in America eating steak and whiskey [more of same; an undertone ofrelief\. That is why I have told you the fairy story of Kundalini, the little snake that lives at the bottom of our spine. While you were hearing it, no other garbage was in your hearts or heads or stomachs; little Kundalini burned it all away.

[end of tape]

Dearest Pearl -

How I loved receiving your letter!-though it could have been longer. The courses you are completing are still vague in my mind. What exactly are Deconstruc-tional Dynamics, and how can they be applied to Paradise Lost and the Faerie Queene? As you remember, Granddaddy Price had lovely editions of both classics-much too expensive, though, to be deconstructed. And you say the man teaching it is a Communist! I'm sure it doesn't mean in England quite what it does here-something much more woolly and amusing, like George Bernard Shaw-Hut still I do wonder why Mrs. Thatcher and the Queen would give such a man control of young minds when there are so many honest and intelligent loyal Britons out of work.

I am pleased you are not coming home for the summer. I think it's a very mature decision. You would find the house very gloomy with just your father in it showing up now and then to change his shirt, and of course Europe has so many delights and you are so close to it, just a Channel away! And you are a bit old to go beach bumming and wind-surfing all day the way you could with perfect propriety when you were seventeen (not to mention the hideous damage you can do your lovely fair skin) and, though it makes me sad to think it, I do agree that your old job as lifeguard at the club pool (such a vision you were in that high chair, in your bikini and sombrero, with that cord of braided gimp holding the whistle around your neck) should go to someone younger. So Europe is fine, darling. But- Holland ? Isn't it just the dullest country on the Continent? Or at least the flattest. Surely once you've seen one little genre painting and one windmill you've seen them all. Your friend promises all this boating in the canals but it sounds very buggy to me, like bumping about in the Ipswich marshes. And I can't believe the beaches there aren't just coated with oil from all the tankers going by Sn the Channel. And when I try to picture these lumpy Dutch women in bathing suits I shudder.

Your friend sounds charming, perhaps too charming. Charm is what European men are famous for, but there are qualities our ungainly native boys have that are worth treasuring-trustworthiness, for one, and the willingness to work to support a family. If Jan's father is a count, why are they in the brewery business? And why was Jan at Oxford studying economics when the London School is the one you always hear about, where the Arabs and everybody go? I know you're finding my motherly concern tiresome but one does read stories here of the goings-on in Amsterdam, right out in that big main square-it's the drug capital of Europe, evidently, and still has boys with hair down to their shoulders and wearing buckskin and all that that went out here when Nixon finally resigned. Do be careful, dearest. You were sweet to reassure me that Jan is not a homosexual, but in a way it would be a relief if he were. You are all of twenty and very much feeling your womanhood. The strange thing about womanhood is that it goes on and on-the same daily burden of constant vague expectation and of everything being just slightly disappointing compared with what one knows one has inside oneself waiting to be touched off. It's rather like being a set of pretty little logs that won't quite catch fire, isn't it? Though every day when the sun shines in the branches outside the window or the fruit in the bowl matches the color of the tablecloth or your favorite Mozart concerto pours out of WGBH at the very moment when you pour yourself a cup of coffee, you feel as if you are catching or have caught, after all-somebody held the match in the right place at last. Really I shouldn't be putting being a woman down-it has its duhkha but I wouldn't be a man for anything, they really are numb, relatively, wrapped in a uniform or plate armor even when their clothes are off-or so it has seemed to me in my limited experience. And I sometimes wonder if my limited experience, limited really to your father for twenty-odd years and a bit of hand-holding and snuggling before that, wasn't enough after all, and if for your generation more wasn't less. I mean, we all only have so much romantic energy with which to rise to the occasion, whether one man or two dozen makes up the occasion. Of course your Jan seems to you to be a fully feeling and responsive human being now, just as Fritz did to me a month ago. But afterwards, if you can bear to talk to them-these meaningful men-it turns out that their minds even at the height of the involvement were totally elsewhere-were not really in the relationship at all! They were only and entirely what we in our poor fevers made of them.

From my tone you might gather that I have moved out of Vikshipta's and Savitri's A-frame. I am living instead in a nicer, newer one, with two of the women I work with in the ashram offices-Alinga, a tall blonde from Iowa (tall, but without your beautiful generous figure with its long swimmer's muscles and your lovely push) and Nitya, who is the head accountant here. Nitya is rather small and dark and nervous and has been quite sickly lately. I can't quite tell if she and Alinga are lovers or just like sisters, but they spend a lot of time in the tiny kitchen, with the curtain that separates it from the room where I'm sitting drawn, murmuring and even arguing about this other woman called Durga and drinking jasmine tea. Vikshipta was furious when I told him I was leaving and-don't be alarmed, my sweet-became a bit violent. It turns out that far from being Durga's lover as I once imagined, he bates her for having (he imagines) corrupted the Arhat and shifted the emphasis away from hard-core psychotherapy to large-scale utopianism. He was always going on about the good old days in Ellora before the Arhat became so soft, when they were really making breakthroughs in consciousness-smashing, using Jung and tantra and human potential and "cathartic physicality," which seems to mean people got beaten up. Besotted as I was with love-a woman's drug-I slowly realized that he was really sounding very compulsive and fanatic about it. I said to myself, This man is a Hun. He can't tell tantra from a tantrum. He had a lot of unresolved anger and, looking back at that first encounter (did I tell you about it, or was that Midge?), I wonder if Yajna wasn't acting out Vikshipta's desires, in trying to break my jaw and the rest of it. (If this is news to you, don't worry about it, darling, I feel fine now, never better in fact, though I was afraid for a while my molars were shaken loose and I'd have to fly back to dear fussy Dr. Podhoretz.) I've gotten to know Yajna a lot better now and he's extremely suggestible-just a boy, though he's something like twenty-three or -four, perfect for you, in a way-his family is nice old railroad money from Saint Louis and I think if his head weren't shaved his ears wouldn't seem to stick out so much, and in a seersucker coat or a quiet tweed he would be quite presentable.

But, my darling, you are on the other side of the world and have your own life to lead and I mustn't be matchmaking even in my silly head. I do wish I had more positive associations with the Dutch, instead of clumsy wooden shoes and leaky dikes and Dutch treats and that awful way they treated the natives in Java when they had a chance, and still do in South Africa. You say Jan is lean and speaks English perfectly and plays the keyboard (is that really a musical instrument now or still just part of one?) beautifully, and if he pleases and amuses my Pearl I will find it in my heart to love him. I mustn't love any of your gentlemen friends too much, for I expect there will be many.

The young men here are rather realer to me than the beaux who with sneaky sheepish looks on their faces would appear at the door to carry you off in their convertibles and pickup trucks. Isolated as the ashram is, and united as we all are by our love of the Arhat, the generational barriers that at home (but this is my home now, I must remember!-they have a droll way here of talking about the United States, the country we after all live in, as "the Outer States") prevent us from seeing one another except as the stereotypes that television and advertising wish upon us melt away here, the barriers, and a not-at-all-uncommon sight is to see a young sannyasin in his violet robes and running shoes walking hand in hand with a gray-haired woman in her fifties. The other combination, the one we all know about in the outer world, the young chick and the old guy, is oddly rarer-their superior shakti perhaps gives the women here the upper hand that money gives men outside. At any rate, the boys would not by and large do for my Pearl. The gay ones have that gay way of walking so there's no up and down to their heads, just this even floating even when they're moving along very briskly, and their voices have that just perceptible fine-toothed homosexual edge that used to get my hackles up when I'd hear it in Boston (though of course I knew it shouldn't) but that here I've become quite happily used to. They're basically so playful, at least in regard to someone like me who is not quite ready to stand in for their all-powerful mothers but getting there, and good-hearted actually (they've suffered, after all, much as women do) and so devoted in their love of the Arhat, not to mention clever, truly handy at making the place run, in regard to things like electricity and irrigation and drainage and security and surveillance and counter-propaganda, which we have to put out or be crushed. They tend, incidentally, to be pro-Durga-she appeals to their sense of camp. Then the other type of young men, and they probably overlap but I'm never sure how, much, are the thoroughly habituated-the outside world says brainwashed-adepts at yoga and detachment and biospirituality and holism, young men who when they wait on you in the Varuna Emporium or the drugstore have this ghostly sweet hollowness in their voices as though nothing you did would break their tranquillity or alter their karuna for you. It makes me want sometimes to throw a fit or spit in their faces to get their reaction, but I fear that's the old devil in me-the prak-riti in me, the impure transitory nature that hasn't yet been burned away in self-realization. I sometimes feel as if I have traded being mother to one beautiful long-legged heartbreakingly intelligent and emotionally sound daughter for a tribe of shadowy, defective sons. As I write that, I sense your father's homophobe prejudices-he sees them as all diseased-speaking through me, and that is the old me, from the Outer States, terribly unworthy of all the love and trust showered upon me in this divine place by both the sexes.

I wish you could meet Alinga and get to know her. Like you, she has blond hair, but with less body and radiance than yours. How I used to love, when you were little, to give you a shampoo in the tub, just for the tingly way your clean hair smelled afterwards and the angelic way it fluffed out about your head as it dried!-we assume little girls play with dolls in anticipation of motherhood but it could almost be we become mothers just so we can play with dolls again. Up to about the age of eight you did resist it so, screaming about the soap in your eyes. Children feel everything so much more keenly than adults-a bad taste is mountainous, and a single particle of soap in your eyes was the horrid blinding end of the world. I bought something for you called baby shampoo (No More Tears, the label said) but I could never make it lather near as well. Alinga's hair lies flat to her elegantly narrow little skull and falls utterly without a curl away from a central parting so bone-white it's like a chalk line drawn in a diagram. I love that innocent prim straightness, it reminds me of how we girls used to look in the morning at Miss Grandi-son's Day School before the day mussed us up. She-Alinga, of course-is I believe thirty-one and has been around the world several times since leaving Cedar Rapids and arriving here, and I know you and she could share so much-through her, my dear elf-child, I often feel drawn closer to you. She can be very funny and irreverent, even about the Arhat, and you would enjoy that, with your wicked sense of humor that you inherited from my sly father. From almost the time you could toddle and babble you used to poke fun at me a bit, mimicking my expressions, I was such a serious mother, so earnestly playing with my doll, my poor paperback copy of Spock consulted absolutely to tatters the way people's Bibles used to be.

Of course I was amazed and chagrined to hear that your father is flying to England to see you. In all the years of our marriage I could never persuade him to take the time off to.go to Europe with me, except that disastrous trip to Florence, when he couldn't find the Uffizi or any place to park the car we had rented and clung to the strange idea that The Last Supper should be somewhere nearby and complained he couldn't sleep because of all the motor scooters echoing off all those stone walls-it became my fault because I could fall asleep-I was so tired after all day of trailing around behind him getting lost every minute and assuring him that the Italians weren't cheating him as much as he thought, I could have slept in an auto-body shop. Even with the Cape house that you and your friends enjoyed so much (remember all those potato chips!) his idea seemed to be to park me in it among all those gloomy pines whose needles everybody's bare feet kept tracking into the house while he stayed up in Boston-ministering to the sick and, I'm afraid, to the healthy too. He is of course your father and you must love him. Love him if you must, but don't show him my letters. I very absurdly keep feeling guilty about this rented car of mine that disappeared when I arrived here and I know is costing our charge card forty-five dollars a day at least. His ability to instill guilt in me was always tremendous, don't let him do it to you. His very courtship began in the odor of guilt I was supposed to feel over a few dates with this sweet shy boy Myron Stern and, looking back at it, I see that Charles took up right where my parents left off, as enforcers of the stale old order. I do hope we never struck you as such ogres as our parents appeared to us. They bad to, I suppose, since they had all these imaginary ogres leaning over them-not just the Russians but outsiders of any sort who might push or tempt them and their children into falling off the creaky old bandwagon of respectability. Well, your mother has done gone and fallen.

But I'm letting my "wiggles" run away with me. I am so happy, darling. This A-frame looks directly across the flat rooftop of the Chakra mall at the scrubby rocky hills that separate us from the territory on the north, where a lot of our legal trouble comes from. The rocks have this strange soft globby look and the Saguaro cactuses instead of being green and formidable as I pictured are weathered and blackened and battered like rather pathetic old giants. You rarely see one in good condition. A hummingbird comes to visit the little cactus flowers in the rock garden Alinga and Nitya made in the shade of this hairy old box elder. It's lovely to sit out here in the evening cool before dinner, feeling serene and changeless purusha underneath and at the beginning of all things and thinking of you in wet green England with its meadows and mossy spires and iron fences and layer upon layer of the human presence-generations, each doing their busy little bit to cover purusha up. You can talk to your father when he comes about the expenses of your jaunt to Holland -he has total charge of the family finances now, when he never so much as balanced a checkbook before in his life. I did all that for him, without pay and without thanks. He has all the worldly possessions we once supposedly shared, and I live here as free and as poor as the gray-throated flycatchers that dip about in the lengthening lavender shadows-poorer, since I'm not quick enough to catch flies in my bill. In my day, of course, a young man would either pay for such an excursion as the one Jan proposes or else not invite the young lady to come on it. I must leave it to your judgment, to what extent it is still true that a young woman compromises and cheapens herself by openly lending herself to the companionship of young men, with all that that implies. Boys pretend to scoff at such things but I don't think they do really-they like us to be pure and at their mercy or else whores who needn't trouble their consciences. But whores at least get paid. To me you are a pearl of great price whose value will never diminish, but, then, I am your intensely loving

Mother

Vikshipta-

Your conduct toward me during meditation today was unforgivable. It is one thing to "let the garbage out of your system" and another to spew it all over another person. Our relationship was always somewhat primitive and tinged with your acculturated hysteria and sadism but your remarks spoken before the entire appalled group were beyond all bounds. I am no doubt the humblest of fledgling sannyasins; the other person, however, whom you named in your grotesque fit of jealousy and abuse is close enough to the Arhat, I believe, to see you removed from your present pseudo-psychiatric position of petty tyranny and stationed instead for your own therapy in the farthest, hottest artichoke field, where the Sachchidananda can just barely be coaxed to insert its trickles. I will not mention this degrading incident to her. In return for my tact I ask-demand-respect, restraint, and relinquishment from you.

Sincerely,

Kundalini

Dear Mother-

'"Please don't send me any more trashy clippings from the Miami and Fort Lauderdale papers. It is sensationalist untruth based on third-hand rumors, by reporters who wouldn't know a spiritual value if it came and bit them on the ankle. If Charles hadn't somehow found out where I was and told you and you hadn't told all your neighbors they wouldn't be upsetting you by showing you all these stupid clippings. There are no orgies here. There is just love in its many forms. The only hot tubs are for religious purposes, to give sensory-deprivation drills and to encourage people already inclined that way to have out-of-body experiences. If you knew anything about yoga or Buddhism you would know the idea is to get out of the body for good, not to achieve physical pleasure. The state we all strive for here is perfect indifference. As to the Arhat's legal troubles back in India, which these so-called "investigative reporters" keep digging up, any government now has so many rules and regulations that if the officials get it in for you they can hound you into jail or out of the country if they want, as happened in his case. It's the same sad story here. The immigration people and the land-use technocrats and the local ranchers' hired legal guns are doing everything to crush our beautiful experiment in non-competitive living. The Arhat preaches peace and serenity in a world whose economy is based on war and agitation. The commercials on all those shows you poison your mind watching all the time (did you get the packet of the Arhat's pamphlets I sent you?-try for starters Transcending Abbinivesba: Beyond the Will to Live, or maybe the one on the three gunas and the fifteen sub-modalities, to give you a necessary frame of reference)-what are they all doing (the commercials) but agitating you to want something you don't have? Not you personally-you should have all the things you want and need, thanks to Daddy and both my grandfathers, not to mention all the ancestors before thenv piling up earthly goods to signify divine election-but people in general, the American people. No other people in the world is expected to get as whipped up over wanting as we are. The consumer society needs people in a constant state of material agitation but not so much so that the agitated people violate others' property rights-if you can't hold on to a thing you have less motive to acquire it, and that's what drugs and all the crime with them are doing, de-materializing America to an extent. That's why every city keeps a police force the size of an army, to keep the wanting and buying feasible. Our police force does nothing but guard our fences and screen visitors. People at peace within themselves and non-attached from material things don't steal and don't need laws. We do what we want, but under the Arhat's gorgeous influence we all want the same thing-his love and approval. One of your articles, I forget which-I got so mad I threw the whole batch into the shredder the office has here at the back, in case the federal authorities ever descend-called us brainwashed yuppie slaves but the fact is work is worship for us, and when you are in the right space spiritually the more you give the more you have. It's even in the Bible but no Christian believes it any more.

What made me absolutely the most indignant and heartsick, though, was that snide piece about the Arhat's limousines and wristwatches with diamond-studded bands and his shoes ordered by the dozen from a London bootmaker and the rest of it. The fact is the Arhat is absolutely penniless-everything goes into the Treasury of Enlightenment and is incorporated or set up as a trust and he has no idea of what comes in and goes out. He is so truly beyond material things that he just innocently assumes whatever he needs or desires will materialize. He really does live like the lilies and the birds of the air. Furthermore, his diamonds are meant to symbolize for his followers the jewel trees of the Buddha Realm, the incredible Land of Bliss that we meditate upon to break down the logical mind so nirvana can enter in. As it happens, I see the Arhat fairly often now in connection with my work-not just taking dictation as I was but giving advice sometimes (something Charles incidentally never asked for, my advice) and other times just sitting and sharing his silence-and there has never been a sweeter, gentler, wiser, saner man. One half of me wants to get the entire world to love him as I do, and the other half selfishly wants to keep him all to myself. Not that that's possible: he is surrounded by love, he gives off so much love-energy himself. "Luff-enerchee" is the way he says it. He even says that I-7, Mother, whom you raised to be such a proper little Bostonian female prick-have this luff-enerchee. One of the things he likes about me (you will die) is my skin, which you always said was so disgustingly dark and oily, so I looked dirty even after I'd had a bath-you wanted me to have your own rice-paper complexion, with a few tasteful freckles across the shoulders and on the back of the hands just to let us know you were real, and you did use to look stunning, like some powdery woman from Marie Antoinette days, going out to a formal do in a low-cut dress, leaving me all lumpy and plump and adolescent and miserable and dirty-looking behind in the house. I do hope, on this subject, you've given up your absurd attempt to get a tan and are using a Number 15 sunblock even if you're just going outdoors to get into the car and go shopping. With PABA-not only does it prevent further damage but it helps mend the DNA damage that has occurred, along with the zinc and A and JE you should be taking as I think I wrote you before.

Charles, as you may know-I have no idea how much you two are communicating behind my back, I can't bear to think of it, it's too klishta, too duhshama as we say-has gone to England to press his side of the story on Pearl, who seems infatuated with a very unsuitable-sounding boy from the Lowlands. I've always hated the Dutch ever since that sadistic Mrs. Van Liew you used to stick us with while you and Daddy went off on one of your cruises or precious New York or Tanglewood weekends. She had these really delusional things about germs and God and kept making us wash our hands before even having a graham cracker and would go into these religious raptures at bedtime that got me so upset I would wet the bed. Jeremy I don't think ever did recover, that's why he went to South America-so he could have a graham cracker without washing his hands. Only down there they call them tortillas.

Ymglad you rolled over the CDs as I suggested. The stock market really isn't for people advanced in age with short-range goals; don't forget that, buy or sell, the broker takes a commission, and that's all he cares about. If you're frantic to get rid of some of all that old IBM and AT &T Daddy bought for a dollar a share, the head accountant here, a very clever woman called Nitya Kal-pana, with as it happens some nervous problems at the moment, has developed a really advantageous method of giving whereby you sign over shares and take a tax deduction for the full market value somehow twice, without paying for any of the capital gains-strange as it sounds I think you'd show a better profit giving it'to us than by selling it. And besides which, you'd make your little daughter very proud.

Isn't that & crime that that admiral is so shameless and obtuse? Isn't there a rules committee or some such body you could complain to? It seems a pity to call the Boca police but he does sound unbalanced and not merely senile and though I know most crimes of passion are committed by Hispanics there's always the exception that makes the papers. Keeping your hurricane shutters down on the side where he comes knocking is all very well but as you say it cuts out the cross-draft and the view of the courtyard. Could you move to a second-floor condo? If he's as infirm as you describe him I don't see how he could climb the stairs. Really, aren't most men just terrible? Charles has got this new tough lawyer called Gilman who keeps writing me these rather comically officious letters about a Hertz car I mislaid and some other financial details that you can bet if a man had done them wouldn't strike him as nearly so highhanded. But the head cold I came with is quite gone at last and I feel quite aklisbta (undisturbed, empty of impurities, only like every Sanskrit word there's more to it than that, there's a whole lotus of meanings). Without even trying I've lost five pounds (I think it's the not drinking that does it, and the no meat with its fat) and got my hair cut rather short-a friend of mine says I feel now like a nylon teddy bear. Don't forget to take calcium, and A not only for your skin but thyroid and eyes too-the best pills are the ones made from fish-liver oil-and to keep especially the Perkins silver out of the Florida air, in the bottom of the breakfront.

Many hugs,

Sare

P.S.: I was just joking about you and Mrs. Van Liew being responsible for Jerry's going off to South America. Don't brood about anything I write. I'm absolutely hyper with happiness these days, in spite of Charles and his clammy shadow, and have to let off steam.

Dearest, dearest A.-

It's so horrifying out here I have to drop you a note, on this motel stationery that amuses me so much I keep stealing it. What Babbling Brook? And who is this child dabbling in it? And these dark ominous trees? The real world hit me like a big hot fist. Traffic jams! Men in suits! Filthy sidewalks! Ugly unloving looks on all sides! The girl at the Hertz counter in Phoenix looked utterly bored to have the car back-thank you once more for finding it for me, and the keys-it was on my old-fashioned Puritan conscience*and now I'm finally cleansed of my last, last iota of guilt toward Charles-and they will be billing the poor man thousands of dollars. She told me I should have gotten the long-term rate, I said I thought I would have it only a day or two. Now I'm terrified of taking the bus back to Forrest. I can't deal with outside people any more. The terminal is sheer hell-plastic bucket seats bolted to the floor, a whole row with individual television sets screwed into the arms so we can all keep up being cretinized while waiting, hideous non-music blaring, greasy people eating greasy tacos and cheese-and-onion subs-the pathetic stench of unenlightenment, of avidya. Obese morons in cowboy boots and profoundly drunken Indians stare at me as I sit scribbling this, trying not to tremble-I don't look to the right or left, everybody looks so rough and savage and purposeless, while this huge rude incomprehensible male voice keeps announcing bus departures-it's as if I'm inside something horrible, churning and stinking and grinding, it's as if I'm being digested, or will be if I don't hold fast to the peace of the ashram. And of you. I can't stop wanting to be with you. The quiet of it. The non-speaking. The lightness of the speaking when there is some. I keep touching my hair, that I cut to please you, and the bristle and tingle of it startles me, as if I'm not touching my own body, and I think of your hair, its severely straight parting and the shimmer of it brushed flat against your perfect skull, and the startling darkness of it at the nape of your neck-like some animal glimpsed asleep in the dark of his burrow-when your head nestles at the bottom of my abdomen, my tummy you call it, your nape hair at its roots the same raven-blond shade as that where there is, so beautifully and refreshingly, no linga. Was he thinking of that when he named you? He knows so much, even into the future. I wish I could have sometime that tape of his you mentioned, on Woman as the Portal to Moksha. Now I think my bus is being growled over the loudspeakers, people are milling at the gate already, crowding around as if to gobble up the carbon monoxide. What a trashy death pit the world truly is!

I won't send this in case D. does read our mail, but I so much wanted to reach out and touch you now. I'll slip it to you when you and Yajna pick me up in Forrest. I can't wait but must. I am, indeed, your devoted nayika,

K.

Gentlemen:

Enclosed find an endorsed check for eighteen thousand dollars ($18,000) for deposit to my account, #0002743-911. Your earlier receipts and statements are hereby acknowledged. My address continues as you have it.

Yours sincerely,

Sarah P. Worth

Dear Dr. Podhoretz-

Thank you for your cordial response. No, a July appointment will not do either, as I am staying in Arizona for a while longer. I am not living at this motel, by the way, but at an agricultural community about forty miles away. The drugstore there does have unwaxed dental tape and I have been fairly diligent, though sometimes at night I am so tired I can't make myself believe flossing matters as much as you say. Do Africans and Afghans always floss? They seem to have lovely teeth and gums, in photographs.

I bit down hard on a betel nut the other day and ever since then there has been not an ache exactly but a sort of apprehensive tenderness-not exactly tenderness, more of a vague funky feeling-in the lower right quadrant, where you said there tended to be tissue inflammation in any case. I.do hope I don't have to go through another root canal! If worse comes to worst, I'll have the endodontist out here send you an X-ray for your records. The dental facilities are surprisingly adequate in this agri-commune, though I believe they use an outside lab for their gold and porcelain crown work.

Warm regards,

Sarah Worth

Dear Dr. Epstein-

I enclose a check for $180 to cover our last two appointments as billed by you. I trust that this clears up our accounts. I feel 7 should render an accounting of what I've been up to-as if the pseudo-daughterly guilty feelings that you led me to override in regard to Charles remain undischarged in regard to you. Looking back at my years of therapy, I confess that it all now seems much more patriarchal and Judeo-Chris-tian than it did at the time. Far from being my ally-against Charles as I fantasized, you were his ally against my liberation. Not that I blame you: I, too, was resisting my liberation, since I had no confidence of my finding a place in any world but the atrophied Puritan theocracy in which I had been raised, by parents whose sense of their own worth was inordinately tied to ancestral achievement, to being "our sort" of New Englanders. My father took, I think, real and dimly perverse pleasure in doing the absolutely predictable thing, in doing his piddling trust-officer thing in Boston and going to his clubs and dressing like a Harvard undergraduate to the day of his death, in striped tie and gray flannels and oxblood cordovans with little waxed laces.

Even at the time when I was most enchanted with our process it did cross my mind that Freud's notion of what went oh inside Viennese women was somewhat absurd. I was once a little girl, for example, and until I was four, when my brother was born, I had no idea that little boys had penises, let alone that I should envy them for it. His looked like quite a comical little button, as I remember. My father always dressed in his room and once forbade me to go with him and Mother to a nudist beach on Martha's Vineyard, as I more than once told you. You never commented on whether or not this had been repressive of them.

I wonder now if the precious classic therapeutic silence isn't just another version of the Victorian father's silence, his awe-inspiring absence except at dinnertime, with the same disciplinary implications, at 'least as regards women. My knowledge of Hindu and Buddhist psychological thought is very imperfect but the notion of the subconscious as a pool of eddies (vasanas) that originate in memory and feed the conscious eddies (cbittavrittis) and which certain exercises can eventually erase in a blissful motionless (nirvana = without wind) state of samadbi has-this way of putting things-a certain intimate, non-terroristic simplicity that appeals to me. Western psychology interfaces-to use a fashionable term-with society and morality, and Eastern with the body, with physiology-which rather better fits with the way, most days, I feel. I mean, should the game be to referee the war between superego, ego, and id, or to relax the whole system, by letting the ego and its harassing entangle^ ments just fade away?

At any rate, you did your best by your lights and that is all any of us can do. I don't want to harass you with a long letter-though your bill gave me a shock, arriving out of a world of petty finance I had rather forgotten and showing by its resubmission that Charles has abandoned his responsibilities toward his wife's medical care. In fact, I can't write a long letter, since this motel where I am waiting for some friends to pick me up isn't very generous with its stationery to those who are not staying here as guests. I obtained my presqnt supply by sauntering around outside and then nipping into a room that the Mexican maid had left open and stealing from the desk. Our old Sarah wouldn't have done that, would she? But once you perceive that all material and intellectual phenomena are just threads in a great weave of illusion (maya, samsara) it becomes oddly easy to act on your impulses. Property is not only theft, it's nonsense.

My best to Mrs. Epstein. All those years of Mondays * I used to wonder and wonder what she was like and what it was like being married to such a marvellous-understanding man. I suppose I was madly jealous of her-I know that's the kind of thing you people like to hear, it's all grist to your "transference" mill. But now she can be Bianca Jagger for all I care, and good luck to you both.

With warm regards,

Sarah Worth

Dear Martin-

Your mother in a nice letter to me thought it would help if I sent you a card. I'm sorry you're in jail but I have recently learned that all the material world is a jail. Develop inner peace.

Your well-wisher,

Sarah P. Worth

June 18

Dear Eldridge-

This is a mesa, which is Spanish for "table." There are a lot of them here, and you've probably seen some in television commercials-the one with the Nissan truck.

Your friend,

Sarah P. Worth

[tape]

"Sarvasam eva mayanam, strimayaiva vishishyate." This is from an ancient Mahayana text and says, "Of all the forms of illusion, woman is the most important." For Buddha and his followers, woman is the portal of release. She is that within the world which takes us out of the world. She is that being through whom is made manifest the karuna, the compassion, of nirvana, of non-being. She is the living wonder of the world. The mounds of her body are like temple-mounds; they symbolize nirvana. The lotus of her body is the lotus of Sahasrara, of final illumination. "Buddhatvam yo-shidyonisamsritam." That is a very important saying. Repeat, please. "Buddhatvam yoshidyonisamsritam." [Responsive mumble.] It means, "Buddhahood is in the female organ." The yoni. The cunt. Buddhahood is in the cunt. OM mani padme HUM. The jewel is in the lotus. The jewel is the mind. The lotus is nirvana. The mind dissolves in nirvana. But also the jewel is the linga, the cock. The lotus is the cunt. The cock in the cunt. This is bliss, rasa. This is samarasa, the bliss of unity. This is Mahasukha, the Great Bliss. This is Mahabindu, the great point, the Transcendental Void. This is maithuna-fucking. This is Shiva and Shakti united, purusha and prakriti united to make bliss; this is sahaja. Sahaja is the state of non-conditioned existence, of the pure spontaneity. We must learn to acquire the pure spontaneity. When Kundalini unites with Atman, this is also sahaja. That is why we learn our mantras, learn our mudras. That is why we learn pranayama. That is why we strive to cleanse ourselves inside and out. To be nonconditioned, to have the pure spontaneity. Ommmm!

Buddha was not a nice boy. He was not a nice quiet boy with fat cheeks always sitting with his hands folded in his lap. He conquered Mara by the technique of maithuna, of fucking. Mara means "death." First Mara came to Buddha in the form of Kama, desire. When Buddha was not deterred from enlightenment by seductive desire, Mara got rough. Mara assailed Buddha with visions of many horrors, demons, animals, monsters with very bad-smelling breaths and armpits, shrieking ghosts. Among these horrors danced a little naked black woman bearing in her hand a skull and wearing a necklace of many little tiny skulls. This was Kali. She is death. Also she is desire and delight. She is the goddess of time. Death and desire are the children of time.

But our Lord Buddha had done his maithuna, his fucking. He had fucked his wife, Yashodhara, and made Rahula, his poor abandoned son. A prince in those days had many other ladies also. His father, Shuddhodana Gotama, had built for his son, called then Siddhartha Gotama, a pavilion of much luxury and equipped it with many ladies skilled in the ways of music and dance and love. So Mara could not shake Buddha. He who has known love has passed through the center of the world and cannot be shaken. Krishna among the Gopis knew endless love. Radha, his favorite mistress, became a goddess, bruised as she was by love, scratched and bloody with love, her clothes torn by love, her hair tangled, her body wet with the sweat of love, which is sweet. Again and again Radha faints. Again and again the touch of Krishna restores her to vigor and to love. Then he multiplies himself nine hundred thousand times and copulates with nine hundred thousand Gopi women. The gods and the goddesses and the sages in the heavens watch with dumbfoundment. The goddesses faint many times while watching but in the desire to learn maithuna ask to be born all over India in the form of little princesses in the palaces of kings. They are born then. This is the fact. This is what happened in the glades of Vrindavan, as reported faithfully in the Brahmavaivarta Purana. OM mani padme HUM.

Once a Brahmin sage comes to Buddha very indignant. "What is all this fucking?" he says. "It is not in the Vedas!" Buddha says to him, "Women are the gods. Women are life. Be ever among women in thought!" This is a true historical saying. There is this evil thought in religion: Women are impure. Women distract men away from God. They are like dirt on the lens. Their rajas are impure. This is evil superstition. The rajas of women are no more impure than the sukra of men. Sukra is bindu, the point from which all comes. All life comes from sukra and rajas. They are joy. The lotus has its seed deep in the muck of the pond, and then its flower blooms on the surface, in air. That is why the lotus is the symbol of wisdom as well as the symbol of woman. The lotus is the symbol of Lakshmi, the wife of Vishnu. She is the Mother Goddess. Now, what does a mother do? She sends the children out to play, then she calls them back in, back home. She calls them home to earth, to death. The lotus is nothingness. You in the West fear nothingness. "Save me from nothingness, great bearded Jehovah!" you 'cry and imagine He says from the cross, "Today thou shalt be with Me in paradise," when in fact He says only, "I thirst." You in the West fear nothingness and the beauty of the lotus. You must learn to worship the lotus. Men and women alike must learn to worship what a woman has at her root. There is this phrase, "lotus-eaters." It means someone who is asleep. But in fact the lotus-eater is not asleep, he is wide awake, his consciousness has ascended to its limits, his consciousness is no longer captive to his ego. What is ego? It is ahamkara. "Aham" is the sound "I," ego is making the sound "I." As soon as in evolution prakriti learned to say "I," it first felt fear, and then desire. That is ahamkara.

He who learns to worship the lotus, to dissolve his chittavrittis in consciousness of the lotus/that man-or woman, it might be, for woman is in the man and man is in woman-that man or woman says "thou," knowing that "thou" is the same as "I." Tat tvam asi: that thou art. Thou art atman, thou art brahman, thou art adipurusha, the Universal Man. He or she who knows that is wide awake. He or she eats the lotus. He or she drinks the rajas, which means not just blood but all female secretions. The rajas are nectar. The rajas are angel food. The rajas are rasa, which means "bliss." Rasa also means "sap." The divine sap rising in the woman, that is rajas. A man who is not enlightened has this fear of nothingness that comes from saying "I." When a man has this fear, he turns to woman. She is mother. She is common sense. She has no fear. She is prakriti before it thought "I." He turns to her. He makes love to her. He inhales her aroma. He looks into her black eyes and sees the redness of her mouth when she laughs. There is a poem that says, "Put away the idea of two and be of one body." The fear that he has goes away. She is maya, she is nothingness. Who knows the name of the mother of Buddha, whose father was called Shuddhodana? [Distant shout.] Yes. It was Maya. Buddha was born of Maya.

You in the West fear nothingness because you think God is a big bearded fellow in the sky who will crush you. You think, "How can I make that Big Guy like me better?" You think, "I will hate myself, then He will like me. I will hate all cunts, because they give me bliss. Then God will like me very much." In India too, they torture themselves, to burn away the ego and its fear. They sit naked on burning rocks. They stare at the sun until the eyeballs are all white and quite blind. They make fists until their fingernails grow out the other side. You ask, "Is it hurting?" They say, "No, it feels fine. I am enjoying samadhi." That is one way. That is the way of "neti neti"-"not this, not that." Not anything, and then what is left will be good. That is the way of yoga. There is another way, the way of bhoga. Bhoga means "pleasure." The way of bhoga says "iti iti"-"it is here, it is here." Buddha and Brahman are in everything. In kama, pleasure. In rasa, sap. Say no to nothing. Brahman, Buddha are in you also. You are the same mystery. When ego dissolves, purusha is there. Eat the lotus. No Big Guy will crush you. You are Brahman. [Loudly] OM. Buddha is yours. You carry him about like a little fetus curled in the shadow of your mind, and in this same way he carries you. [Louder still] OMMM.

[end of tape]

Gentlemen:

To follow up our letter of May 24: our former chief accountant, Ma Prem Nitya Kalpana, has due to the mental stress of her responsibilities taken a permanent leave of absence, and the matter of your unpaid bills for six Lincoln limousines is being investigated by her successors. The disorder of the accounts is formidable, but we hope to be getting back to you soon.

With every good wish,

Shri Arhat Mindadali, M.A., Ph.D.

Supreme Meditator, Ashram Arhat

/k

Dear Jerry-

What a pleasant surprise to hear from you! Yes, I am well, and trust you are the same. Caracas must be lovely this time of year-but, then, it's lovely all the time of the year, isn't it, being on the equator and a plateau and near the sea all at once? Here it is hot, 110° is not uncommon, but as I work in an air-conditioned office I don't really mind it, except that in changing from the chilly indoors to sizzling outdoors I've caught one of my wretched colds. When we were growing up-I used to blame the germs you brought home from the boys' gym or locker room-I can't do that now, can I?

I don't know what alarming stuff Mother has been feeding you but your implied chastisements are really rather amusing. And old-hat! This is a spiritual place but also a hard-working place, and my colleagues are not outmoded flower-children and drug-dazed losers as you sweetly put it but well-educated and highly integrated men and women trying to create here an alternative life-style for so-called Homo sapiens, based on our higher instead of our baser attributes. We are not the first and won't be the last to beat against the tide of consumeristic materialistic capitalistic garbage, but the effort is at least as worth making as your life which as far as I can tell is spent sucking up to the Venezuelans who are getting rich sucking the oil out of poor helpless Lake Maracaibo. I don't judge you, and when you made the South American move it was I, at that time Mommy's good little girl, the typical doctor's wife tending the garden of her typical lovely North Shore home, who stuck up for Kid Brother and suggested, albeit timidly since Mother was still in her fearsome prime, that approaching thirty maybe you had a right to your own life. You're welcome, though I don't recall getting any thanks.

The person you should be writing sly advisements to is our dear madre. Never, really, the most acute manageress of her affairs, family or otherwise, she is flipping her lid down there, in my opinion-acting and dressing like a seventy-year-old beach bimbo (she watches with inane delight something called "Golden Girls" on television), going out on disgusting dinner "dates" (I think at that age the thrill is mostly in just the eating, but God knows) with some octogenarian former admiral she's lured into her sun porch, and doing unspeakable things with what little of Daddy's money she hasn't already wasted. She's fallen in with some smooth young broker who's got her to believe she's the Hetty Green of South Florida-by the time the two of them get done "adjusting" her portfolio there won't be so much as a treasury bond left. There is a whole tribe of people in Florida-brokers, podiatrists, chiropractors, faith healers, home helpers, seductive practical nurses-who prey on the old and senile, and one of my. fears as Mother gets battier is she'll give all the silver away as a tip to the boy who trims the palm trees in her patio.

You're just a little blue water away from her, and all of your fancy hidalgo friends have fail-safe apartments in Miami in case the Sandinistas take over-couldn't you go visit her and see what's going on? My intuition is she's being taken terrible advantage of by men. She always was man-crazy, let's face it-all those nights dragging poor Daddy off to some party or other so she could flirt and flash her boobs while all he wanted was to sit home marinating in his old books and having yet anotKer whiskey, leaving us in the care of some evangelical monster like Mrs. Van Liew or that girl from Needham whose boyfriends tried to keep us quiet with tokes of pot. Think of it if she gets married again-Daddy's ashes whirling in their grave, and all those lovely Perkins and Price and Peabody antiques distributed among our step-siblings,-of whom I'm sure the admiral will supply a greedy passel. I'd go myself but I'm very tied up here-I've become rather important in running the place, funnily enough.

Happy Independence Day, if you remember what that is, and devocidn mucbo to Esmeralda and the six little ones from their loving tfa and bermana politico. The Latin element you see in the Southwest isn't as classy as your set in Monte Avila. Actually, Jere, you'd like it here-lots of after-hours action, and more opportunities for wheeling and dealing than you might imagine.

Fondly in spite of all wrongs past and present,

Sis

[tape]

Oh my goodness, dear Midge, what a time we've been having! Loved hearing all your news, it brought me back to the real world. How awful that Irving 's framing shop was robbed! Well, as you say, it should strengthen his non-attachment. Thank God he never has any real works of art in there. And how sad about Donna's husband! They really had no warning? It's hard to believe we're all getting to that age, when the wheel of karma takes us for another spin. Of course, he was ten years older than she, and Donna a bit elderly herself. I used to worry about her noisy breathing during the Sun Salutations-it was rather distracting, to be frank. As to Ducky Bradford, I'm not surprised. There was always something not quite right there, even when he and I were closest and I suppose you could say I was in love with him. I wouldn't have admitted that four months ago, but needless to say I've shed some inhibitions. Tell Gloria being left for a gay is no worse than being left for another woman, in fact it's better, since it shows you were fighting a losing game all along. Foolish is what she must feel, mostly-men do make you feel foolish, unless you watch your step with them every inch. What a woman has to realize is that as far as she's concerned she's number one, too, just like a man. I don't mean number one-two, I mean number one also. You know-we're conditioned to think of ourselves as number two, like Eve and Avis.

Where was I when we left off? I can't believe I was still in love with Vikshipta and bumping around on a backhoe. I'm living now with two other women-one other woman, really, since the third woman, Nitya, has had a kind of nervous breakdown or overdose of something and is in the infirmary here. She was the head accountant and juggled all the finances-you have no idea, Midge; they have investments everywhere, and Kali Club discos in places like West Germany and Israel, and meditation-and-massage centers, and of course bookstores and video outlets in a lot of malls and downtowns now across the entire U.S., around the world in fact-there's a very important bookstore, in the Bahamas, on one of the outer islands where you wouldn't think people would read much, but apparently they must, or maybe it's mostly mail-order business. The way it seems to function, the publishing end of it, including all the tapes of the Arhat like the one I sent to Irving-evidently free of charge since I haven't received any check from you yet-and the therapy and yoga lessons you can take from video cassettes, all this end of it does its accounts through this one store because banking in the Bahamas is somehow easier, I guess because, being so tiny, it doesn't have all the usual oppressive regulations and wants to encourage dollars. As a businessman, the Arhat is wonderfully open and permissive-whenever a group of sannyasins start up a car-wash business or a restaurant or an escort service, he lets them use his name and picture and the sunset colors. I guess anybody could put on a purple jumpsuit and a mala and perform the same services, but people like to see the Arhat's name on the front door or up in lights or wherever, because it signifies that the people-the people operating the businesses-are always so serene and cheerful and don't drink or do street drugs, and of course, because work for us is worship instead of slave-wage labor, we can charge a little less. It's a beautiful philosophy, as you can see from the fact that it works. I mean, it works in the world as well as here. Anyway, poor dear little Nitya, who used to be a stock analyst in Seattle before she saw the Arhat being interviewed on "Donahue," has been under the weather mentally, and the various medications that Ma Prapti-she's the head of the clinic here, and a very impressive woman, absolutely dedicated and the direct opposite of all Charles's money-hungry pretentious colleagues at MGH-the different pills and injections she was giving Nitya to keep her on an even keel began to work at cross-purposes, and my friend Alinga, I think I mentioned her briefly before, is training me to take over. You know I used to be good at numbers, I used to do all of Charles's billings and insurance-claim forms, before he got a secretary to take over, that slut Marce-lene Rabinowitz as it turned out. Well, I'm all over that now, and beyond anger, really, of any sort, or any emotion except love and acceptance. Charles now just seems impossibly small, like one of those bugs you see crawling across a piece of paper or a bathroom tile and though it looks like a mere dot you know if it was magnified enough would show fangs and hairy legs and long pokey things, but who wants to bother? He's been rather quiet since he went to spy on Pearl -I bet she told him off. Do tell me if he approaches you again, and don't not be rude to him for my sake. You can be as rude as you want.

I'm sitting here in my office, it used to be Alinga's but she's moved up to Nitya's, which is next to where Durga, when she's here and not on the road doing talk shows and promotion, has a kind of anteroom to the Arhat's ranch house, which I think I told you about last time, with all this silvery fat cheap furniture in it, and the bleached-wood desk. Everybody else is off for their siesta but, you know me, I never could take a nap in the middle of the day, I'm too hyper- Irving used to say my subtle body was tuned up too high for my sthula one. Also there's a lot of sludge to work through in Nitya's account books and records-heaps of papers and figures, and nothing quite matching up, as far as I can see-it's really too much for anyone to make total sense of. I shouldn't talk, I guess, even to you, about the finances, but, in a nutshell, on the one hand there really are substantial assets and income and some very generous donors, mostly these women and widows who either live in Beverly Hills or in Canada, oddly enough, which you don't think of as much of a place normally either for money or for Buddhism, and then on the other side of the ledger a lot of leakages that aren't just the Arhat's limousines and diamond wristwatch bands. Even though everybody works free as a form of worship, the ashram still didn't come out of thin air; there were millions spent on the A-frames and the trailers and the mall and now the Hall of a Millionfold Joys-the steel is all in place but they're waiting now for the sunset-colored vinyl panels-and all the kinds of construction-just one backhoe costs sixty thousand dollars, did you know that!-and the irrigation and septic systems, even though both could be better, let me tell you, especially the latter. Now that the really hot months are here, there's a stink comes up from where they buried the septic tanks, and the creek is so low they've turned off the Fountain of Karma except for half-hours at sunset and dawn, and the fields are baking hard as clay even though Hanuman, our agricultural supervisor, who used to teach plant synergy at Michigan State, bought miles and miles of gauze and had the artichokes and hybrid tomatoes and experimental poppies covered with it to make shade. Also all the fencing and armaments and surveillance equipment our security forces need costs more than a penny, believe me, Midge. Their chief, this nice young man Agni, is very close to Durga and in her office all the time, murmuring and shouting and laughing, and I suppose there can be no arguing that we do need all this security, there is so much hatred in the world against simple love and peace. The lawsuits are another expense-these various pompous self-important authorities are pretending we've infringed water rights, zoning laws, land-use regulations, even immigration laws-they want to send Fritz back to Germany and the Arhat back to India! Really, this is what you get nowadays for making the desert bloom and offering our poor poisoned world an example of life-style a notch or two above the rat race. I'm telling you all just so you'll have an idea of the tangle I'm trying to deal with in my new capacity.

You ask about the Arhat. What can I say you don't already know from his publicity?-except that, up close, he seems a little sad, and I have this ridiculous instinct to mother him. I see him quite often now, usually along with Alinga or Durga or Satya, who's in charge of PR, and it seems often they have to put.the words in his mouth, since he does nothing when they describe this or that emergency to him but smile and look as if he wishes he were elsewhere. Of course, he is a jivan-mukta, which means he's really in nirvana and is staying on earth only to be polite, in a way-about the only thing that perks him up is getting more publicity for the ashram, even publicity that seems adverse to the rest of us. For instance, he insists on being driven every afternoon way over to Forrest to get a Diet Coke from the machine in the bus station there-not actually a station, just a cement shelter next to the motel-and every time he does it there are more picketing people there, local rednecks and Pentecostal Chicanos angry about one thing or another and most of all about the Arhat's being so simply beautiful, and so now Agni has to send a vanful of security personnel along in case there's an attack, which in turn brings out more rednecks, with shotguns and clubs and ropes-it's not as if we don't have Diet Coke right here at the ashram, but when Durga pointed out all this to him he just smiled and said-I wish 1 could do his accent-"We must rup the bastards' noshes in it. It amushes me and it amushes Buddha."

[Leaving off attempted accent and becoming conspiratorial.] Midge. I just had the most excising ide &. It's scary, it's so exciting. If the next time I go in to see him I could carry this little tape recorder in my bra under my sari, so the little grid that picks up sound sticks up so only the one layer of silk is in the way, maybe I can get something of his actual casual conversation for you and Irving and the girls to hear! It would be strictly private, of course-you mustn't make or sell duplicates or anything-but I do so want to share with you his precious presence while I still can. It would also be for history-I don't really think, entre just nous, the ashram is going to last forever. I think it's too big a step up for the way the world is now. The outside pressure-all these lawyers and reporters and visiting firemen and county officials in suits, they've become so common around the Chakra we don't even chant and shake tambourines at them any more-all this outside pressure is beginning to tell, everybody acts antsy and spooked-Ma Prapti says she has no more beds for bad drug trips, and Durga goes around with this icy-white face and staring green eyes looking like the Gorgon, and my dear friend Alinga spaces out more and more-sometimes, honestly, I feel I'm the only sane one left. The heat, no kidding, is terrific! A hundred twenty, twenty-five every day from eleven to four. That place I used to go out by the red rocks to be by myself is like an oven now, even after the sun goes down. I don't know how the lizards keep from getting fried. Be grateful for your sea breeze and all those leafy oaks and maples. To think, we used to sleep under a puff even this time of year! If I sound homesick, maybe I am. I miss the sea and also frankly I could do sometimes with a pop of Jack Daniel's, the way we used to do after yoga, to settle the shakti and stirred-up vrittis, after Irving had left. Oops. I shouldn't have put that bn tape, in case you play it for him. And I've never figured out how to erase. Well, anyway, I've said plenty for now, let's leave some tape for later, for what I said.