Soft Conversation

Whatever faith exists it will not be altered by human affairs. Those who believe deeply in the Buddha consider it possible that when he arrives the wind and waves will be calmed.

—Inscription in Cave 323, Tang dynasty

Their conversations were always so soft they didn’t get anywhere, but then neither did either get really upset or disoriented as happens sometimes when there is direct disagreement or tension between the two parties who are trying to agree about what to do about a specific problem, a hard one, or what should they do in general, even harder. It was as if they had entered into a room lined with soft materials and moved about effortlessly and easily, bumping into one another softly.

The shape of their conversations goes something like: what do you think, and yes I agree with you, and I’d be happy to try if you’d like to, and you certainly are right. The entire conversation has a sort of ritualized shape to it, organized around repeated phrases, and a rather respectful even reverential manner. If anyone thinks this is an exaggeration, just try eavesdropping once in a while. It is rather as if what one hears, rather than the individual voices, is a sort of echoing drone, a circling around a central tone of accord.

What is being set in motion by their engaged endeavor at agreement is not however only agreement but rather the process of perpetual becoming, each of them dedicated to the idea, although neither has a need to speak of it, of never reaching a conclusion and thereby slowing time to the eternal present by means of never arriving but always rearranging the terms of the agreement. If one comes into conflict, on the other hand, as they both recognize, one of the parties will win and one will lose and time will be reinstated. It will be 3 A.M. and one of them will exult, I win.

But if they keep on having the same or nearly the same conversation about, as it happens this time, a trip they might take in the future, they will possess that trip endlessly since they will never arrive at the moment of decision, will never buy the tickets, will never experience liftoff or jet lag and will never regret that the trip has come to an end.

Thus far they have successfully prolonged time through Thailand, Japan, and China, all places they thought they had wanted to visit and certainly they had read the guidebooks about, wanting especially to encounter what they believed would be a different sense of time, a sense of time slowed and prolonged towards which they aspired. They would, they thought, be encouraged to recognize the transitoriness of all human endeavor and the need to avoid attachments to the paltry things of this world.

She had been especially drawn to the Chinese caves at Dunhuang since time there was layered over itself again and again, walls originally painted in the 4^TH century, then repainted in the 6^TH and afterwards partially destroyed and repainted until the encrusted present was an emblem of multiple times overlapped into the present moment that they would see once they got there. It was the color she especially wanted, the hallucinated and druggy turquoise of the ceilings and, she thought, it must have helped those long-ago believers touch the eternity they chanted about while circling round and round the center pole. The Buddhist angels floated up there, holding bowls of timelessness in their outstretched hands. This was the trip they had most agreed upon; it seemed to them at the exact moment during which they were discussing it to be the most perfect trip in the world. Their voices grew soft and quiet as they came into perfect accord. The moment seemed to extend. The room fairly hummed with unity and pleasure. It will be perfect, they said.

But of course once they had agreed on the perfection of this specific plan and walked in circles about the living room, saying yes it seems exactly right, and I agree about the length of the stay, and what a good idea you’ve proposed, they were unable to move out of the perfection they already had in hand. It seemed a travesty to disrupt it. They could see the whole so completely that the thought of leaving this perfection for the imperfection of dusty travel stopped them dead in their tracks. And so they gathered themselves into the agreed-upon rituals of chanted accord. They pulled the caves of their own making in close and agreed that it would be best, yes, she echoed, for the time being, not to rush into anything, but to go over the same ground again and again, trying to get a sense of having already been where they had thought to go so that they could finally agree on how much they had thoroughly enjoyed the moment of standing still in the middle of Magao Cave 323 where they could almost hear the distant chanting of believers.