2

Crystal couldn’t sleep. Interrupted on the plane, and by her arrival at Brooke’s, her thoughts returned compulsively to Utah and to the events which seemed to have tipped Jean-Paul into madness. They had talked in almost hallucinatory detail about that trip.

He had told her afterwards that he had found the landscape of Canyonlands overwhelmingly strange even before they had taken the psychedelics. Everything had been all right at first, driving through a semi-arid landscape of rolling hills and Ponderoso pines familiar to Jean-Paul from the countless Western movies he had devoured as a child.

It was only when he got out of the Cherokee and walked to the edge of the canyons that he was thrown by the complete strangeness of his surroundings. His first reaction was incomprehension and nervous laughter. From that height the wind seemed to have caressed the pink and yellow sandstone into sinuous and elliptical shapes, flying saucers and waves and mushroom caps. More than the vast scale and the exotic colour, he was overwhelmed by the fact that he had never seen or imagined such a landscape before. Without the consolations of history or analogy he was unable to make anything of it and so he resisted letting it make anything of him.

He realized that he had come in a predatory frame of mind. Like the trappers and the miners after whom the West was so often named, he had come to pillage. He was looking for echoes of the American codes he had already deciphered, fresh troops of imagery to enforce his arguments and observations, and ‘typical’ American experiences, such as the cult of the wilderness, which he could deconstruct, exhume and subvert with his tireless intellectual audacity. Ideally, he would have written the book in Paris, as Fredric Prokosch had written The Asiatics in Chicago, but Crystal had persuaded him to get a pair of hiking boots.

Every millimetre of Europe had been drained, ploughed, terraced, built on, fought on, named, hedged or written about, but this American ‘wilderness’ was the site of irony and scandal. To begin with, it was inaccessibly expensive. By the time planes had been caught, a Cherokee, tents and sleeping bags hired, permits acquired, new clothes bought, three hotel rooms taken at the Ramada Inn on the way in and the way out, and a guide engaged at three hundred dollars a day, he worked out that they could have stayed in the Plaza Hotel in New York for the same number of nights. Instead of sleeping in stinking clothes under a swirl of snow in the company of Robert, the would-be extinct Native American white boy, they could have been channel-surfing in matching dressing gowns, searching for the Westerns whose Oedipal substructure he had written about in some of his most magisterially impertinent paragraphs.

Jets and smaller planes flew over constantly. The ‘wilderness’, he reflected, had no vertical extension, it was only a thin layer of the biosphere, a symbol of freedom subject to more prohibitions and regulations than Parisian traffic. The most ordinary acts – cooking, drinking, excreting – were subject to detailed methodologies enforced by a special bureaucracy of rangers. Walking around freely was fiercely discouraged. A trail scarred the canyon and along it they must trudge.

When they had gone to collect their permits, the rangers at the station, immigration officers for this land of harrowing novelty, had warned them not to walk on the ‘kryptobiotic soil’, a living soil which took eighty years to grow and could be destroyed by the brush of a boot. The true lover of the wilderness would avoid visiting it altogether. Once wilderness turned into ‘The Wilderness’ it became the most officious and fragile aspect of nature. Even Robert referred to his business as the ‘wilderness industry’.

On the third day of camping in this controversial landscape, they’d left Robert behind and taken the psychedelics.

About an hour later, Jean-Paul’s legs started to shake uncontrollably and he collapsed on the ground. The light, he told Crystal, was flashing swiftly over the tops of the sagebushes, like helicopter blades catching the sun. Realizing that he’d fallen through a trapdoor into a realm in which anything could happen, he sank lower on the ground, retreating from the menace of the steely sun.

When he turned to Crystal again and tried to speak he could only manage a solitary gasp.

‘Strong.’

She nodded, speechless too.

He pictured antechambers of unease starting to honeycomb the universe, each crowded with petitioners pushing one another aside to secure his attention.

He was dying of cancer. He was going mad. He had never known and would never know the real meaning of love. The rotten floorboards of his pride gave way one after another and he fell through clouds of dust into a bottomless basement. Small hypocrisies cut into him like axe blows, and unacknowledged vanities rose up in all their monstrous plumage.

Just as a man releases millions of sperm to fertilize one egg, Nature spawned millions of human beings for the glory of one breakthrough in consciousness, one watershed in the history of sensibility, one invention like the alphabet, that made a real difference, one song that might be remembered, one book that might be read in a hundred years. What was he but one of those doomed sperm, part of the numerical pressure of evolution, unable to step personally into history, unable to define the nature of its emergence, let alone to shape it? Knowing he could leave no vivid trace of his passage, and shocked by the absurdity and strength of his desire to do so, he writhed as he watched the part of him that had not accepted his own historical impotence accept it now.

He spun as he sensed his own death encoded in the spirals of his DNA. It was his own cells and organs that would kill him, his own heart that would break him in the end.

He longed for Nature to rise up and, with the cool precision of a lizard’s flickering tongue, eliminate an arrogant and parasitical human race, but at the same time he could not bear the thought of the smallest thorn scratching the thickest skin of the dullest person on earth.

All these thoughts assaulted him instantly, and intensely, with the same aggressive rapidity as the blades of light that strobed across the landscape. He realized with white panic that each second contained a lifetime of horror, that the most intimate sadness could become universal and the most universal proposition intolerably personal, that the many winding paths between the mind and body had been blasted into thundering motorways. He did not relish watching his mind and body locked into each other’s decline, like a pair of pitbull terriers biting furiously into each other’s bleeding mouth as they spiralled down over the edge of a precipice.

‘Oh, la vache,’ he gasped.

He had to take a break, the images were too strong. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. Fluorescent dodecahedrons whistled past him in a thick meteor shower which was clearly about to smash apart the spaceship of his identity. Even geometry was out to get him, even Euclid could not cool the fever of his unhappiness. He opened his eyes again and burst into flame.

Oh, fuck.

Should he tell Crystal that he’d burst into flame? What was the etiquette of insanity? How could he ask her to save him when he had no idea who she was? He knew something about her back there in the other world, but now that he was on Pluto having his teeth examined by Dr Mengele, while the laws of physics were being redefined several times a second, whatever he had thought he knew meant absolutely nothing.

‘Where are we?’ asked Crystal with a breathtaking mastery of language. ‘It all looks the same.’

‘Whuh,’ he managed, dragging the water bottle out of his backpack. Being on fire was thirsty work.

Why had she said that? Why had she introduced the further disturbance of pointing out that they were lost? Everything did look like everything else. They were in a fractal landscape: the smallest cracked pebble contained canyons that lay on the ground of canyons that branched off wider and wider canyons in a land of wide canyons. And those cracks led to gulleys that ran into streams that flowed into tributaries that disgorged into the churning ochre drain of the Colorado. Seen from above, he knew that this vascular system, contained within the echoing canyons, created another layer of resemblances to various anatomical, botanical, crystalline and zoological formations.

There were star-shaped flowers and, no doubt, flower-shaped stars, but these multiplying resemblances which might at other times have spoken to him of an intricate design, or at least of an intelligible vocabulary, now crushed him by annihilating the space between what had become purely mental objects.

A more primitive and chaotic collapse of space took place when he tried to make out where they were sitting. The pink and yellow rock shimmered and shifted like an exasperating piece of optical art, but instead of being able to step out of the pretentious gallery in which it hung and into the visual liberation of the street, he was installed in the centre of this little conceptual joke, caught like a loose hair from the paintbrush in the pigment that surrounded him on every side.

Surrounded and invaded: his own flesh was also a pink and yellow landscape which he could not help imagining flayed in a butcher’s window, a few sprigs of sagebrush arranged at the base.

These thoughts, which would have taken so long to formulate, took no longer to think than a wasp’s sting to sting.

As if this weren’t enough, he seemed to be in a landscape crowded with debris from an era of reptilian giants. Its petrified iguanas, tortoises, lizards and dragons were swapping positions at high speed, receding and rushing forwards like the garish chariots of a funfair ride.

‘I see what you mean,’ he said.

Each gasped word, particularly ‘I’, ‘see’, ‘you’ and ‘mean’, seemed to lead down hazardous mineshafts of communication designed by narrow conventions, held up by rotting props and filled with dead canaries. ‘What’ preserved a comparative innocence.

He knew that the only way to gauge real time was to move through real space, that the only way he could stop the poisonous vine of malaise from strangling him completely was to pit his most fundamental resources against it. This was not an experience to relax into but an enemy to defeat at any cost.

A low bank of earth rose nearby. If he could get to the top of it he might see something that would lead them back to base camp, to water, to food, to someone whose mind was not ravaged by psychedelic drugs, although he secretly believed that the disappointment of these consolations would tip him into permanant madness.

Crystal hoped the trip wouldn’t get any stronger. The beauty of the psychedelic realm was eluding her right now. She felt she was being taken further away from her centre, not deeper into it. The truth was she had wanted something for Jean-Paul.

When she had introduced him to Lama Surya Das at the New York Open Center he had said how many interesting questions he had about the nature of meditation. Surya Das silently made the gesture of unscrewing Jean-Paul’s head and throwing it away.

‘Ah, so you understand that I think too much,’ Jean-Paul said with satisfaction.

‘A lama understands everything,’ Surya Das replied with a self-mockery as gentle as everything else about him, except his passionate desire for full realization.

She’d thought that Jean-Paul might get ‘out of his head’ in a constructive way but now she wasn’t sure, watching him sway on all fours like an infant on its first crawl.

Jean-Paul clutched at the ground as if it was the last bush on the lip of a precipice, his fingernails filling with dirt. When he reached the top of the little mound he turned around and sat down heavily on the ground. The busy landscape, dancing with strobe lights, was as indecipherable as before, apart from the distant green haze of the first leaves breaking out on some cottonwood trees. He could remember seeing cottonwoods in the creek that ran parallel to the trail. He raised his arm and pointed in their direction.

‘There,’ he said.

Ostensive definition, was that all he could manage? He, whose student essay on Hegel had been the talk of the philosophy faculty of the Sorbonne for one heady week, was now reduced to pointing. He whose commentaries on Lacan were considered seminal by the analytic community in Paris was unable to form a sentence. Drugs had reduced him to an imbecile.

Crystal turned slowly and smiled at him. Maybe being a real man and finding the way home would help. There she was again, more focused on the other person than on herself. With this hint of self-reproach she felt the eruption of old feelings about her father. He had loved her even when he wasn’t there, he had never stopped loving her. Therapy had taught her to name and map her abandonment, but Poonjaji had shown her that he had loved her even when he wasn’t there, that he had never stopped loving her. For years she had been angry and filled with mistrust, but after seeing Poonjaji last year in Lucknow, she had gone down to Goa and spent a week lying on the beach alone feeling wave after wave of liberation. Every suffering turned into a teaching, and when she pulled at the oldest and heaviest chains of her soul, they tore like paper decorations in a child’s hands.

Turn the mind back to the source, that’s what Poonjaji always said. Yes, it was there, that humming, that deeper reality. It was there all the time, all she had to do was turn her mind back to the source. She felt the turning like a muscular contraction at the centre of her brain, and her attention vaulted over the thoughts that sensation provoked, over the thinking that enabled those individual thoughts to exist, and plunged itself into a limitless field of light. And then she knew, without needing to argue or to formulate it, that thinking was a degradation, a falling away, a clamorous and vain insistence on distinctions which had their conceptual charm, but no ultimate reality. The ruling force was not argument, or logic, or personality, or the individual manifestations of life, but life itself, the organising principle that germinated seeds, exploded novas, and deserted the body at death without leaving it any lighter. This mysterious, weightless and invisible force pointed to a genealogy more fundamental than the history of the things that had happened to her. She experienced it as not only transcendently grand but touchingly personal. Her whole body was taut but completely relaxed, as if she were locked into and held gently at the first stages of an unstoppable orgasm.

‘There,’ Jean-Paul reiterated hoarsely.

He was pointing to something.

‘Is that the way home?’ she asked.

He nodded. Crystal, while overflowing with loving kindness towards Jean-Paul, couldn’t help taking a mischievous pleasure in his speechlessness. When she had tried to tell him what happened when her sense of self was wedded to a sense of life that didn’t require her to think in the normal sense, he had scolded her, ‘But this pure Being is a linguistic scandal! There can be no thought without language and no language without culture. Even being asleep is a cultural act! We bring to it our expectations of the language of dreams, we bring to it quotations from a thousand books. When we say we are in a state of Being we place ourselves at the centre of a complex cultural argument, not beyond that argument.’

God, the French were crazy. All she’d been able to say was, ‘It doesn’t feel like a cultural argument. It feels great.’

‘But culture is great, culture is fantastic,’ he’d said. ‘Also, it’s all we have.’

Jean-Paul half rolled and half crawled back down to Crystal’s side, and with the awful defiance of a dying king heaving himself from his bed to sign the orders for a last batch of executions, staggered to his feet. The price he paid for this effort was to burst again into clear yellow flame. His skin prickled with pinpricks of sweat and he stumbled forward, supported by unreliable knees, his arms outstretched to catch a fall. He imagined his blackened flesh peeling like curled butter and falling softly to the ground. He felt everything false and shallow and cunning falling away with that burning flesh, and wondered nervously what was left.

Crystal resigned herself to following Jean-Paul’s wavering return. He obviously needed to be going home in some sense, even if home was a tent where he’d only spent one night. Guilty about the pleasure she’d taken in his speechlessness, Crystal started chanting to the female Buddha, OM TARE TUTARE TURIE SOHA, and immediately felt a downpour of reassurance, falling like a pelting rain of honey into the starving mouths of humanity. OM TARE, she imagined it falling onto Jean-Paul, TUTARE, she imagined it falling onto her, TURIE SOHA, their blood turned to liquid gold.

Jean-Paul’s flesh burnt away again and again. What was left? What was essential? He longed for a diamond body, an incorruptible and incombustible diamond body, but he could see only a charred corpse, a black-and-white war photograph as banal as it was hideous. In the burning ghats of Benares, beside the Ganges, the only other time he’d travelled exotically, he’d seen the bandaged corpses sit up as they burnt, sit up and burst from their bandages, resurrected by the medium that consumed them, but that was just a moment when fact and symbol made an amusing marriage. It meant nothing, nothing.

Sinking deeper into scepticism he started to contemplate with fresh anxiety the substructure of language, hidden like the submerged section of an oil rig under the opaque and frothing sea that separated the conscious from the unconscious mind. The garrulous and busy platform was language itself, the site of visible industry, but underpinning it was Chomsky’s deep grammar, the web of relations that made the acquisition of language possible. In the beginning was not the word but the grammar, a skeleton waiting for semantic flesh and giving it order. If the eye socket was not waiting for the eye, the eye might turn up on a kneecap or in an armpit. He’d too often glibly equated thought and language by expanding the term ‘language’ to include all patterns of imagery, but there could certainly be no thought without grammar. It was the hard wiring of the subject–object relation, and the thinker was always a subject even if, or perhaps especially when, he was the object of his own thoughts.

The reason Jean-Paul found these otherwise familiar reflections disturbing was not only that he experienced his own analogies with complete conviction, feeling his eyeball sliding down to his kneecap, or squinting out of the steamy and hirsute darkness of his armpit, but also because he felt his own deep structure being exposed to the danger of alteration. If his grammatical core was being corroded, if some fundamental girder was being removed or replaced, then a sense of self that went far beyond education, nationality, personal history or sexuality could be disrupted and he would lose not just himself but his opportunity to regain himself by reading the world in a way that made sense.

He had taken a drug, his body would metabolize it and everything would be all right. He had taken a drug, his body would metabolize it and everything would be all right.

Crystal felt engulfed in the golden cascade of her first mantra and, just as an espresso can be welcome after a rich meal, for those who still eat rich meals and haven’t given up caffeine, she chose to switch to the Dzogchen mantra, the ultimately laconic ‘Ah’. She immediately felt the change of energy. Clarifying, all-accepting, Ah, immersed fully in the moment, Ah, all the rocks vibrating with the same frequency, Ah, expression of wondrous surprise and deep simplicity, Ah, all sounds, all mantras, all colours converging in that one syllable, Ah, her chakras flowering in time-lapse bursts, like the purple convolvulus untwisting in the morning sun, Ahhhhhhhh.

Jean-Paul’s paranoia was relentless, but he staggered on. If he was left only with madness, it would be his own madness. The thing he could call his own in an inferno of alienation was the alienation itself! Hadn’t Nietzsche said that the measure of a person was his ability to embrace contradictions and hold tensions in place? He forced himself to look up from the dusty tips of his hiking boots and try to admire the landscape.

Crystal was exquisitely aware of every footstep she took as she wove her way mindfully among the patches of kryptobiotic soil and bare rock and fruitless sand. She felt the Earth calling to her and to millions of others, to rise to this level of kryptobiotic mindfulness. With one careless footstep she could disrupt the habitat of the tiny creatures that made up this living soil. She was deep into the interconnectedness of everything, tendrils of desire springing from her feet and webbing with the roots of all the plants of the Earth.

The silence now was as deep as a cathedral bell. The colours, the blue sky washing over the yellow stone and running into the pale-green sagebrush, spoke of a subtle harmony. She felt herself joining the landscape, not in some vaporous interfusion but with a groan of surrender.

They had just hit a patch of brilliant grass, each porcelain blade streaming with light.

‘Look,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘A Colorado bluebird.’

And yet we are in Utah, thought Jean-Paul, and still it persists in its scandalous blueness. This bird is a disrupter of nomenclature, a categorical dismemberment, a crosser of borders, an inhabitant of the margins.

Crystal sat down on the grass and watched the bluebird. Perched in a thornbush, it looked to her as vivid and brilliant as a painted tile from Isfahan, a songbird in the jewelled tree of a Persian paradise. She willed it to come closer and the bluebird dipped towards them and came to rest on a nearby bush. She imagined its darting perspective and felt she had entered the mystery of its consciousness, seeing the world reflected in the dark beads of its eyes. The bird flew closer still and turned at the last moment, revealing the darker blue plumage of its back, its radiant feathers dyed with a concentrated solution of the sky against which it moved.

The flight of this complex bird moving from bush to bush, thought Jean-Paul, traces the line of a telephone wire dipping and rising outside the window of a train. But what message does it bring along the wire? For two days he had been trying to impose comparisons and extract metaphors from this landscape. When the rocks, with their usual disturbing plasticity, had conjured up a city of minarets, pyramids and camels, he had pondered both the coincidence of this constellation of imagery – had one image triggered another? – and the inescapable fact that the Anasazi, the now extinct ‘original inhabitants’ of these canyons, could not have seen any camels or minarets or pyramids, unless of course they were Egyptians, as Robert no doubt believed. How had these unmistakable signs appeared to the Anasazi? Did they see things which resembled those objects in their own culture, or did they read the elements of the picture with a radically different gaze?

Just as the vapour trails of jets criss-crossed overhead in the lost wilderness of the sky, the traffic of analogy moved from one object to another, plundering every language, every culture, every landscape, and creating an ever more opaque web of connections, a mirror increasingly scratched. But out of this apparent reduction of resources, hybrids would arise, increasingly complex combinations of increasingly exhausted elements. Would these images constitute novelty or merely decadence?

Crystal watched the low white clouds beginning to flow into the canyons. Although the weather had been extreme and unseasonal, scorching for an hour and then snowing heavily, these clouds had a decorative innocence. Near the camp there was a large round cactus that reminded her of a geodesic dome made of tightly packed segments. She had seen it the morning before, beads of dew clinging to its steely spikes, and in the seams between its segments, the buds of red flowers gleaming like drops of blood. Two of the flowers were open and blazed with astonishing intensity against the grey-green of the cactus’s skin. When she returned from her hike these blood-red cups were filled with crystals of snow. It was so beautiful.

God, she could feel the mushrooms starting to come on. The urgent luminosity of the mescalin was giving way to the more sumptuous eruptions, the hesitating fountain of the psilocybin. An iridescent sheen played over the mother-of-pearl surface of a cloud. She watched it shifting lazily from a baby’s sleeping face – it was her own face, how peaceful she looked – to a team of heavily maned white horses kicking up a cloud of mauve dust with their galloping hooves. Oh, yes, it was like a slow fuck, this erotic divulgence of Proteus to her fervent imagination. The unfurling leaves of the cottonwood trees were now a few yards to the right, the slender branches pulsing with spring, leaves like unclenching fists surrendering to the warmth and generosity of life.

Another jet flew overhead and she remembered Thich Nhat Hanh saying how you could use the ring of the telephone like a meditation bell to cut through to mindfulness, and so she imagined the passage of the jet through the sky like a blade cutting through the canvas of a tent and opening outwards on to the sparkling darkness.

Yes, that sound was her mantra. The mushrooms contained such extraordinary teaching. She was deep into the sacred nature of psychedelics which revealed the sacred nature of everything else. They were one of the gateways into the luminous field.

‘The mushrooms are coming on,’ she called quietly to Jean-Paul.

‘Mushrooms!’ said Jean-Paul. The word alone was enough to infuse his bloodstream with the spoors of a deeper paranoia. ‘This trip will get stronger?’

‘Different,’ said Crystal. ‘Sexier.’

‘Sexier? You mean the first part was sexy for you? For me it’s not so sexy to have an angry man with a blowtorch trying to dismantle the structure of my identity! Even le Marquis de Sade, with an unusual but imperative continence, would have resisted the concept of sexual excitement on this occasion.’

‘Don’t use so many words,’ smiled Crystal, ‘just look at stuff.’

‘But when I look at stuff I see “stuff”.’

Crystal walked over to him and kissed him on the mouth. ‘Calme-toi,’ she whispered.

Jean-Paul smiled back. He was far too anxious to think of making love to her. Besides, rangers were no doubt on the ridge with their government binoculars, ready to shoot them for rolling around in the kryptobiotic soil. He pretended to be persuaded by her kiss and resumed his homeward march.

Where was the eternally derailed train of his thought? Oh, yes, this landscape, this obligation to be in awe. If he fell to his knees, what would he be worshipping? Wind erosion? Sandstone? The weather? The relative scale of human and inhuman phenomena? No, he would be worshipping the spirit which Rousseau had marketed so cunningly for the Western mind, the spirit of egotistical sublimity. But surely the essence of this landscape was its inhumanity, its harshness, the way in which it stood just out of range of the eager reach of pathetic fallacy. The civilized landscapes of Europe, the Alps, Provence, Tuscany and so forth, were the nymphomaniacs of the sublime, constantly accommodating the sensitivities and reflections of every visitor, lying down and gasping as one after another they brought their intimations of immortality, their sighs of appreciation, or their easy conviction that, as Rosanov had said, happiness consists of picking one’s nose while watching the sunset.

Canyonlands, on the contrary, was the coldest of virgins who could only be approached on her own terms, through a grille in the convent wall. She was not interested in one’s longings, only in one’s worship, and in the end she was not interested in that either. She simply embodied something so strange and extravagant that the road of Rousseauesque communion with Nature forked towards incomprehension on the one hand and self-annihilation on the other.

How would one ‘surrender’, what mental act was involved in that ‘awful daring’? Was it something to do with humility, a subject on which he was no expert, or was it, on the contrary, a sense of special destiny which filled one with universal awe?

He tried to force himself again to look at his surroundings rather than read them, and then to feel them rather than look at them. He only had to make these decisions for them to be fulfilled, but he found himself feeling something other than universal awe. He and it, subject and object, inside and outside, seemed to be superimposed on each other, as if he were looking at a glazed painting through a shop window on a sunny day, but instead of the vitreous ghosts being effects which he witnessed from a known centre, he felt that there was no part of the ghostly scene that was not animated by his presence. By the same token this dispersal of himself into the shimmering fabric left him utterly lost, as if the echoed flash of sunlight caught on the bumper of a passing car and reflected in the window could steal his soul, so dangerously thinned by being interfused with everything.

Was the problem that he needed to describe what was happening and the description contained the very terms, like ‘subject’ and ‘object’, that were abolished by the experience he was attempting to describe? He must know the answer now!

‘It’s called “Don’t know mind”,’ said Crystal, pausing on the trail. ‘Sometimes you have to stay with the position of not knowing. I don’t know why I said that … I guess I have to stay with the position of not knowing. God, it’s one of those loops.’

‘But it’s incredible,’ said Jean-Paul. ‘I was thinking how I must know what things mean when they are happening.’

‘I guess I picked that up.’

‘What does it mean to “pick that up”? We are having telepathic communication?’

‘Don’t know,’ Crystal had said, hearing the scepticism and alarm in his voice.

Contemplating the changes that had swept over Jean-Paul after that day, Crystal had often wondered if it was the idea of telepathic communication and the permeability of his own mind which had disoriented him beyond recovery.

She sat up in bed. It was three in the morning in San Francisco, and she had to see a bunch of people the next day. She crossed her legs and breathed out deeply, trying to dispel a feeling of guilt and abandonment. Eventually she relaxed into meditation, and from there into exhausted sleep.