Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Madame Blavatsky's Baboon

Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon
A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America

by Peter Washington 
Schocken Books, 1995

At the moment, Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon is out of print -- which seems unfathomable, since this tremendously entertaining book is also one of very few resources if you wish to puzzle out the cast of characters that launched the “New Age” in America.  If you despair of ever untangling the Rosicrucians from the Vedantists, Gurdjieff from Ouspensky, or St Germain from the Secret Masters, here is your book.

As a prospective reader, the most important thing to know about this book is that it is NOT primarily about Madame Blavatsky.  She is dead on page 100.  The primary pleasure and benefit of this book is Peter Washington’s ability to sketch out compelling life sketches of the main characters who brought spiritualism to America.  These include: Helena Blavatsky, Annie Besant, Charles Leadbeater, Krishnamurti, Rudolf Steiner, Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, J.G. Bennett, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood and Idries Shah.

Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon is packed with rollicking jaw-dropping good stories and tremendously fun to read.  At the same time, it also presents a painfully bare view of human nature.  As you may have already discovered, our capacity for self-delusion turns out to be entirely perfectly limitless.  There is nothing so ludicrous, so obviously wrong, or so thoroughly debunked that we cannot believe it and go on believing it as long as we live.  If a belief makes us feel special or part of a group, we will sign on to absolutely utterly anything.  This book proves that on nearly every page.

For example, how amazing it is to learn how much of Helena Blavatsky’s worldview and philosophy is based, not on the teachings of disembodied Tibetan masters, but on the novels of Edward Bulwer Lytton.  In other words, a good part of what you’ll find in your local New Age bookstore originates from the man who wrote “It was a dark and stormy night.”

As a lifelong student of alternative spiritual traditions, I know that scandals are part of the territory.  Still, it is sobering to learn that the tradition of “renouncing the teacher but keeping the teaching” goes right back to the beginning.  In fact, it is very nearly universally practiced.  Almost every one of the teachers profiled here knew that their own teacher was painfully duplicitous, if not downright fraudulent.  The most charming teachers wore their own fraudulence lightly.  As Peter Washington writes, “Much of HPB’s life is a glorious comedy, as the tone of her letters often tacitly recognizes, but it could have tragic consequences for those who trusted her”. (86)  This turns out to be even more true of Gurdjieff and Krishnamurti than of Madame Blavatsky.

The life sketches Peter Washington paints are generally but not always well-rounded.  It is jarring to move from his scathing depiction of Charles Leadbeater to his almost reverential portrait of Rudolf Steiner.  (Peter Washington is not entirely to be blamed for this: Leadbeater the proselytizing pedophile is a remarkably despicable character.)  Washington is at his best when he tells the story of Krishnamurti, who comes across as a gifted spiritual teacher, a pathetic prisoner, and an aristocratic spoiled brat.  I simultaneously wished to bow to him, to embrace him, and to slap him across the face.

I hope very much that this book will one day be re-issued in a revised expanded version.  It often seems to me that the names of Blavatsky, Gurdjieff, and Krishnamurti are revered by people who often don’t know the first thing about who they actually were.  Or even wish to know.  What passes for respect is often just laziness and the desire to have an empty slate for our own projections.

For example, it’s much easier to revere Ouspensky and Gurdjieff if you can forget that they loathed each other.  Both claimed the other was a fraud.  (Ouspensky even came out at the end of his life and proclaimed himself to be a fraud, which his students piously ignored.)  

Ask your local mystic, intoning about the enneagram, who Gurdjieff actually was, and you’ll likely be offered a soy chai latte and told to listen to your own inner wisdom.  Don’t be bought off.  The truth is complicated, and not infrequently pathetic, but also fascinating.  It is necessary, too, to be reminded of the high cost of delusion.  Everyone who professes to be “a deeply spiritual person” should swap their rose-tinted lenses for reading glasses and sit down with this book.

Hazelnut

When I was a child I believed that the hazelnut tree growing on the side of the dirt road just past the cemetery was actually a mystic portal, a secret door to other worlds. When I was eighteen I knocked three times on the side of the tree and walked, through the trunk, into Bombay. It was still called Bombay then. I was immediately cheated by taxi men and put on a one-way non a/c bus to Hyderabad. Some people will know exactly which tree I am talking about. Two-thirds of the way down the dirt road, with the farmhouse behind you and orchards on both sides, there is a solitary hazelnut tree that juts out from the right side of the road, that stands there like a sentinel. The wide smooth space on the side of the trunk of the tree is actually a secret door, though there is no telling when it will open, or for whom, or where it will lead. The smooth space extends between hip and eye level. When the secret door opens it is just big enough to squeeze through. It is possible the hazelnut tree was struck by lightning many years ago. A not unreasonable possibility, considering the tree’s height and position. More likely it is only a space from which a wide branch fell long ago. It took the bus sixteen hours to get to Hyderabad. I sat in the very back of the bus, in the middle, and was thrown into the air with each bump. I knew that I had made the very biggest mistake of my life and now would most probably die. I got off the bus only once, at a roadside dhaba where men sipped tea out of clay pots, then crushed them beneath their sandals. I looked around. The only thing that was familiar was the Moon. Even compared to most eighteen year old boys, I was quite exceptionally helpless. Nothing prepared me: I had only walked through the trunk of the hazelnut tree. I was not in any way brave, strong or resourceful. A lot of what gets called accomplishment is just accidentally not dying. A circumstance for which I cannot take credit. Many years later, not yet old but with white in my beard, I returned to the farm, to the dirt road, to the hazelnut tree. At least it appeared to be the same tree, on the same road, on the same farm, but it could not have been because I had passed through the door in the tree to the other world, when the other world was still called Bombay, and it occurred to me that in all the years following I had never passed again through the door. I had never returned. I considered it. But what could be done with me now in the world I had left long ago? I would only be in the way, like an oddly shaped tool with no obvious use. (What is it actually? I think it’s a pineapple knife.) Nothing that came out of my mouth would ever make any sense. Just the same I rested my cheek on the smooth place on the trunk and listened to the hazelnut tree, breathing heavily as it dreamt.

the poor animal

it

is

hard-

ly

to

be

blamed

if

it

goes

a

lit-

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mad

Forthcoming: Zymbol

My story "Pa, Randy and the Sugarhouse Fire" is forthcoming in Zymbol, a print magazine out of Boston focusing on the tradition of surrealism and symbolism.
Thank you to everyone who encourages me.  (Despite their better judgment.) 

A Tokyo Love Story

(from A Forest Ten Feet Wide, Tokyo, 2013)

As you can imagine, it’s a terrifically delicate business. A challenge. To spend an entire evening at the neighbors’, across the table from the luminous red-headed wife, her blouse low-cut, her voice like drinking bourbon, her smile dazzling, a smile in which an invitation may or may not be concealed, her businessman husband at her side, overworked but affable, with the easy confidence of the incorrigibly successful, and their radiant girl-child, as bright and warm-hearted a child as ever lived. It’s a tremendous challenge, as I’m sure you can imagine, to sit there all night, apparently enthralled by their antics and exploits, their charm and cuisine, with my composure impeccable, my demeanor irreproachable, when in fact I don’t give a damn about any of them. Not a whit. I care only for their pet rabbit. The rabbit wears his resplendent brown fur in the style commonly referred to as “fluffy”. His name is Bunny. Bunny is five years old. Imagine having one’s own rabbit! He is the most adorable and beguiling creature I have ever in my life beheld. Could other rabbits possibly be like him? Bunny is the only rabbit I have ever been with. I mean that platonically, you understand. But other rabbits must not be so magnificent. Not like my Bunny. Because otherwise the news would be full of rabbits and people would stay home with their rabbit instead of spending their entire lives going here and there on the trains, staring all the time into their phones. Tokyo with a rabbit. Well, it just changes everything, doesn’t it? Here in Tokyo we have no animals. That’s not true. We have crows and cockroaches and dogs who wear shoes. A bunny rabbit in Tokyo is something downright revolutionary. No doubt this will knock the bottom out of the market for pet beetles. All night I remain at the neighbors’ table. My voice subdued, my expression rapt, my eyes where they ought to be: on the crudites, on the girl-child’s origami, on tops of the wife’s freckled breasts, composed even as my chest feels fit to burst and my heart is forever and always with Bunny, who is allowed to roam freely through the downstairs in the evening. Bunny prefers shadowed corners. It’s one of the things we share in common, Bunny and I. But now and then Bunny comes around to survey the perimeter, to visit the humans and make a show of his boundless tolerance to adult and child alike. I endeavor to keep my breath slow and calm. I speak as long as I am able to speak. When I can no longer speak I do my best to amiably nod. I remain at all times a gentleman. It’s not my fault. Bunny toys with me. Nothing about life in Tokyo ever prepared me for a rabbit. Now and then Bunny will even run figure-eights around my stocking feet. I myself am faultlessly discreet. But not Bunny. Bunny is shameless.

Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Flann O'Brien

The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien

Edited by Neil Murphy and Keith Hopper

Translations from the Irish by Jack Fennell

Dalkey Archive, 2013

Often a collection of short fiction is the place to start if you wish you wish to begin to discover a writer unfamiliar to you.  For example, you could begin to explore Joyce with Dubliners, or Beckett with the Complete Short Prose.  Not so in this case.  This book is for fans and scholars.  If you are not yet a fan, you will be shortly, but please: start with At Swim, Two Birds.

That said, Dalkey Archive has done great service by rescuing these stories.  Several of them are so vivid and appealing that I expect that they will now be anthologized for as long as the human race hangs on.  I am thinking of “John Duffy’s Brother” and especially “Scenes in a Novel”, which experiments with the device of characters in rebellion against their novel, prefiguring At Swim, Two Birds.

The story that impressed me most was “Drink and Time in Dublin” -- a relentless and unsparing account of going on a bender.  My god, but the man tells a lot of the truth.  (When I visited the Writer’s Museum in Dublin, I went up to the attendant and said very earnestly that I wished to visit all the places in Dublin associated with the life of Flann O’Brien.  The gentleman shook his head at me and said, “You couldn’t possibly, you’d die a’ alcohol poisoning.”)

“Slattery’s Sago Saga”, the forty-one page manuscript of O’Brien’s last unfinished novel -- about a plan to remove all the potatoes from Ireland and replace them with sago -- is a joy and a frolic.  If there turns out to be an afterlife, you will find me in the pub of that establishment, begging Flann O’Brien to tell me the rest of the story.

Résumé

I have almost no skills whatsoever. It happens that I can write a little. Not nearly as well as an educated person could write a century ago, but since nowadays many people can hardly write at all, it is useful and (very rarely) even a slightly big deal that I can write a little. Also I am able to read. Nothing special about that either. Except that nowadays almost no one reads, particularly not in the traditional fashion, considered now to be archaic: in a straight back chair, in a silent room, for three hours, with a blank page to copy out admirable sentences. People are too connected now. People are too important. There are so many exciting things on which to click. It is possible that I have somehow become stranded in the 19th century. Telephones I find spooky and unnerving, like a person who never leaves home without a Ouija board. Driving an automobile, no matter how cautiously, seems to me a rash and reckless act. I say that I am able to write and I am able to read. However, it often happens that I am unable to write or read. I am not a reliable person. I admit it. I could never get a job as an automated teller machine or a commuter train. When I cannot write and I cannot read, I try to pay attention. Of course this is exactly nothing. Paying attention cannot be said to be a talent, not even in the slight way that writing or reading might be said to be. Just the same, there are fewer and fewer people paying attention. So few that the ability itself appears endangered. So many things clamor for our attention now. So many noisy, bright, and unpleasant things. No small number are downright terrifying. I am not in any way a special or talented person. I am only taking advantage of the general decline.

Account Information

(from A Forest Ten Feet Wide, Tokyo, 2013)
Here in Tokyo, My husband and I went to the bank to sort a few things out. The bank teller explained that I had been out of the country so long that my account had fallen asleep. Unfortunately, there was no way to wake it up. It was entirely impossible because a) I’d lost my card (just a few years back) and b) I’d lost my bankbook (forever ago, before I ever understood what bank books are for and why they are so important to Japanese people) and c) I had no valid work visa. There was money in the account. Not a lot of money. A lot of money for me. “There is no way to do anything?” I asked the bank teller. Meanwhile, my husband was already getting mad. “So now we just lose everything?” “It is difficult”, said the bank teller. He asked us to return to the seating area and he would see what he could do. Twenty minutes later he called us back to the counter, presented me with my new bankbook (Winnie the Pooh!), told me I’d get my card in the mail, and in the meantime, would I like some cash? “Special case”, he said. The degree to which Tokyo is rule-bound can hardly be over-stated. At the same time, things like this do happen far more often than is generally admitted. After all, there are so very many rules. If you’re going to break one of them, you might as well break them all. Addendum: My husband reads over my shoulder and is flabbergasted. He insists that I have missed the entire point, omitted the primary point of interest, skipped the heart, soul, and flesh of the matter. Please excuse me. I will try again. The bank teller was absurdly impossibly gorgeous. Not handsome, not striking, I am talking about breathtakingly global celebrity gorgeous.*  While we waited, we watched advertisements for the bank’s services on the video in the waiting area. Not one of the famous people shown was anywhere near as good-looking as our actual bank teller. Fortunately we had been required to fill out the forms in advance. Otherwise we would not have been able to remember why we were visiting the bank.
Imagine an angelic yet masculine clean-cut boy-band star who has unfathomably decided to devote himself to courteous banking. You must know this moment: when you think, oh so obviously photo-shopped and then realize oh no, wait, this is actual life. He could have sent us away with nothing. We would not have made a fuss. We would have come back cheerfully, every three days, for the remainder of our lives, to see if he’d changed his mind. He also spoke excellent English. Almost perfect. Of course my husband spotted an error. “We do not say the account is sleeping”, my husband said. “We say it is dormant.” My husband went on to explain that he just happened to be a tutor, teaching English privately, professionally, casually, for a very reasonable rate, at his home, and here was his business card, which he presented at once with smile and a flourish. That dog.

_______________

* Please contact me privately for branch information.

A Forest Ten Feet Wide

(from A Forest Ten Feet Wide, Tokyo 2013)

“Don’t laugh at Tokyo,” my husband says.  But I wasn’t laughing.  That sound I made just now was the involuntary squeak that accompanies the truth when it abruptly comes into view.  When it passes through me suddenly, like a chill.

We are walking through the forest from Ookayama to Jiyugaoka.  This is Tokyo.  The forest is ten feet wide.  Let’s be specific.  The concrete path is four feet wide.  Then there three feet on either side for trees.  Some of the trees are hundreds of years old.  The path is interrupted, every fifteen feet or so, by curved aluminum barriers, so that bicyclists must dismount.  It’s a highly managed forest, you might say.  It is the forest of Tokyo.

Look at these trees.  Some of them are really tremendously old.  What was this place before?  It is impossible to imagine now, but I remember hearing Donald Richie insist that this was once one of the most beautiful places in the world.      

The Party of the Visible World

(from A Forest Ten Feet Wide, Tokyo 2013)

As my husband and I walked together, in Tokyo, through a forest ten feet wide, we passed Midorigaoka station.  A young man with a prominent mole on his chin was giving  a speech on the dangers of nuclear power.  Not one of the commuters hurrying in and out of the station even glanced at him.  Two fellow organizers struggled to hand out leaflets.  I took one.  I read: The Communist Party of Japan. 

I admit that I had no idea it still existed.  I asked my husband, “In this day and age, how does a young person end up running for office in the Communist Party?”

My husband explained, “His grandfather was very important in the party.  His father was important, too.  Now it is his turn.”

If the world we live in was decided by a vote, like a presidential candidate or celebrity contestant, the ordinary visible world would not even be one of the main contenders.  The ordinary visible world would be, at best, a dark horse candidate.  Only a few radicals would be in favor of it.  They would all be looked down upon and called reactionaries. 

The main candidates might be perhaps the phone world and the shopping world, with strong showings by meat world, sex world and pharma-world. 

But of course the worlds would not actually be called that – it would all be brand names and genius marketing.  Voters would check the box beside Monsanto Pleasure Pavilion and iPhone Paradise Access.  Further down the ballot would be the Good Times with Coors party and the XTube Triple-X Personal Freedom party.  Just imagine the delights and the gadgets, the distractions and gimmicks.  You need not imagine very hard.  How easily you might forget that there was any world but theirs. . .

Meanwhile the party of the ordinary visible world would just stand around pointing at things.  No PowerPoint, no laser pointers, just pointing with their actual fingers.  And pointing at what?  Not much that’s appealing.  It’s not like we live in a garden, here in Tokyo.  Asphalt and electric wires, convenience stores, pachinko – and you’re likely to get your toes run over if you stand around staring too long.  The ordinary visible world does not need to be lovely in Tokyo.  I mean, seriously -- who looks at it?

Who are those unpleasant and awkward people, the members of the party of the ordinary visible world?  Musty old hippies by the look of them, old apple pickers who can’t even get up their ladders anymore, unseemly outdated liberal academics who joined after the Actual Book party’s unseemly collapse.  The party of the visible world, or “reality fundamentalists”, as they would swiftly be dubbed, extremists in favor of experiencing the world without multiple apps, magic glasses and pharmaceutical enhancements.

The party of the ordinary visible world would be held in complete disdain.  The other parties would be united against it.  Almost everyone would agree: those people are nothing but partisans of an unimproved world, Luddite extremists in favor of a world we’ve left far behind, despite the fact we happen to go on standing in it, in our ishoes.

The party of the ordinary visible world would be as unpopular as anything else that makes people uncomfortable.  Indeed, that is the essential promise of all the other parties: we will make you comfortable.  And what kind of masochistic freak doesn’t want to be comfortable?  The Communist Party would be popular, in comparison to the party of the ordinary visible world.  Hell, climate change would be popular in comparison. . .

“It’s just another kind of prejudice,” people will say.  Racism, sexism, realism.  Eventually it will be a highly offensive term.  “How dare you accuse me of being a realist!”

This run-down scuffed and sullied world.  Concrete, wires, and smog.  The lines are long.  The weather is inconvenient.  No birds but crows.  Who wants this world? 

Excuse me.  I am only playing make-believe.  None of this is the case.  The world is not decided by a vote.  Not by my vote and not by yours.  Not even by a trillion votes of inattention, of turning away. 

Even without care, the ordinary world languishes but does not disappear.  Even as it goes on losing, the ordinary visible world cannot lose.  It is the only contender. 

No matter how long you stare into your phone, you remain standing here, in the ordinary visible world, as a storm nears, as the first drops land on the back of your bent neck, and still you do not look up.

Holy Books of Guttersnipe Das: Marie Redonnet

Marie Redonnet, Hôtel Splendid
University of Nevada Press, 1994
European Women Writers Series
Translated from the French by Jordan Stump

Life is always evolving, society is forever progressing and we are all getting better and better in every way -- claim certain religious types and all advertising men. But, as you may have noticed, it sure as hell doesn't feel that way and that is where Marie Redonnet steps in, as Beckett did, to give us a taste of what life actually feels like: a hotel on the edge of swamp with one sister who is perpetually ill and another who dreams uselessly of being an actress. Life keeps looping around and the toilets never remain unblocked for long. We firmly intend to give up and somehow we don't get around to it.

In Hôtel Splendid, things getting slightly better is always a set-up for things getting significantly worse. Redonnet's staccato sentences, usually 5 to 10 words long, pile up like problems or bills to be paid and patter like rain on the roof. It is very likely that this elegant French novella contains more blocked lavatories than any in the history of literature.

This book is nothing but problems one after another and I can honestly say that I enjoyed it more than anything else I've read all year. It is absolutely transfixing. I laughed out loud so many times and I cannot provide a single example because you have to read it and fall into its strange rhythm and world until reading the words "The head foreman was bitten right in the calf by a rat" provokes you to laughter in spite of yourself.

Here's one taste. (Redonnet works in blocks of text approximately three to six pages long without paragraph breaks.) From page 17: "The swamp deserves more attention. It is a real nature preserve. There is always more of it to explore. Ada seems to be convalescing. The empty hotel is good for her. Even though she has always hated the swamp, she asked me to take her there for a walk. I was sure the swamp would do her good. That is the first time Ada has asked to go out. But she was disappointed by her walk. She couldn't bear the odor of the swamp. She thought it was always the same, no matter which way you turned. She couldn't stop shivering, in spite of the blanket she was wrapped in. When we got back, she went right to bed. She had a high fever. I had to give her a hot-water bottle. It did not warm her at all. She says her limbs are like lead. She blames the swamp for her relapse. She will never go back there again. The walk was not a success."

I discovered this book by reading Dalkey Archive's Best European Fiction 2013, which contained some lively stories and some pretentious ones but nothing that compared to the story "Madame Zabee's Guesthouse" by Marie Redonnet. Searching online, I found three short novels (Hôtel Splendid is the first) translated almost twenty years ago and another translated ten years later. (There is also a collection of short stories, now so rare a copy of it will cost you five hundred dollars!) Reading Hotel Splendid made me hope that new work will soon be available, including a collection of short fictions. Redonnet's work is weirdly irresistible, like an unsettling dream you can't stop dreaming.

My Career

(from A Forest Ten Feet Wide, Tokyo 2013)

At last I have settled on a career.  People who know me are sure to be relieved.  Everyone must find a path through the world.  As for me, I am going to be a Japanese society lady.  Naturally it’s not the career path I intended.  Not originally.  It’s not what I went to school for.  At least it’s not what I thought I was in school for, back when I was in school.  Just the same, I’m qualified. 

I have proven that I can spend time in cafes every day.  I have demonstrated this time and again.  Can I obsessively scrutinize my appearance?  Yes, I can.  My nature is already very highly reserved.  I am innately discreet.  While I do not attend movies, I do like to read.  Heavy reading, though by no means required, is at least permitted, the titles discretely shielded by white linen book covers.

I will be my husband’s ornament, his jewel.  I will be beautiful or invisible, as the situation requires.  When my husband comes home exhausted, late at night, I will present his slippers, stir his miso, grace his table.  I will be the fluorescent light of his life.  All he need ever give me in return is a tremendous amount of money.

I warn my husband that my career will be intensely demanding.  Although there are aspects which may appear pleasant – the Dior uniforms, the chitchat, the brunches – there are other aspects which are highly exacting: to eat continually and never gain an ounce, to persist in permanent youth.  Not for nothing do society ladies almost inevitably require heavy-duty psychotropic medications and extensive plastic surgery.  Counseling certainly.  Exotic vacations unquestionably.

I will be a Japanese society lady seven days a week, eighteen hours a day.  Even in my sleep I must aim to dream of Audrey Hepburn, her hands folded in her lap, her expression pleasant, sitting on a white sofa on a white carpet in a room with white walls.

It’s a JOB, I tell my husband.  I can’t just choose the parts I like.  It’s true that I have options.  I have exactly two options.  A set is one option.  The other option is B set.

A set: I will need a dog, a teeny-tiny dog, an adorable itsy-bitsy dog, vicious and prone to ailments.  I will buy my little dog suits and boots and raincoats.  I will treasure my dog above all, I will kiss him, clutch him to my chest, and cry when he sneezes.  Oh my little itsy-bitsy precious puppy dog, my baby, fragile as a blown-out egg and fierce as an  attorney.

My husband says he does not wish to have a dog.  Especially not a little yippy-yappy nasty dog.  In fact, he refuses.  Absolutely not, he says.  And that is OK.  That’s all right.  There is still another option.

B set: I must have long, doomed, drawn-out, hopeless, squalid, sordid affairs.

It’s that or a little dog.

Just Interesting

Tokyo, 2013

It sounds odd to call Taro my student, since he was eighty-seven when he died and  already over eighty when he started coming to my English class.  He was old enough to have been a soldier in World War Two – a very young, near-sighted, and perhaps slightly eccentric one. 

I can report that although Taro’s English was slow and halting, he didn’t make many mistakes and he could say what he wanted to say.  He did not, however, participate in discussions.  While the other students related their ailments, holidays and grandchildren, Taro sat still as a statue, without seeming to move even his eyes, so becalmed you could be excused for thinking that he’d maybe gone a little soft in the head.

Each week, when the discussion had slowed down a little, or when I saw that class would soon be over, I’d turn to Taro and ask, “So, Taro, any news?”

If it sounds like I wasn’t a very good English teacher, that’s the truth.  I was lazy.  I was too tired and too busy, like the rest of the population of Tokyo.  On the plus side, I was not very important.  A focused and energetic English lesson -- would only have gotten in the way.  I was just an excuse.  I was just an excuse and I knew it.  The English language was just an excuse.

There we were, in Tokyo.  Tokyo is the number one loneliest city in the world.  I’ll arm-wrestle anyone who says otherwise.  But these old people weren’t lonely.  They were having a good time and, if their grown grandchildren sometimes laughed because grandma was taking English lessons, and maybe had been taking English lessons since almost the Occupation, even though her English never improved much and she continued to say I go to shopping despite being corrected three times every Wednesday, still, I’m telling you, these old people were very clever, they knew a thing or two about living.

Just because some people remain immune to wisdom all their lives does not mean that wisdom can be ruled out.  Some people do become wise in their old age and some of those people, it turns out, go to English class, even when they are eighty-five years old.

Whenever I called on Taro his magnified eyes would blink behind the heavy lenses of his  glasses and he’d rub his lips together to moisten them.  Then he would open his spiral notebook and cough to clear his throat.  Using his notes to assist him – there were always a few words he’d needed to look up – he would tell the class a story.

In my life so far, Taro is my favorite storyteller.  If I tell you one of his stories, you will be disappointed and you will think that I am not a good writer.  That is the truth, but I know, too, that I am not very important and that counts as a skill nowadays.

For example, the story of when Taro went to Paris with his wife.  They went to celebrate their 50^th wedding anniversary.  I’m not sure, it may even have been their 60^th.

“Wonderful, Taro!  How romantic!  What did you and your wife do in Paris?”

Taro explained that it was raining in Paris and they did not feel very energetic.  The chambermaid was a single mother raising two children on her own.  She taught Taro and his wife to count to ten in French.

“That’s great, Taro!  And what did you do in Paris!”

At that point Taro nodded to the other students.  They all smiled broadly to each other.  I think it actually pleased them that their American teacher understood nothing whatsoever about life. 

It was a long time before I understood that. . . nothing special needed to happen.  Taro and his wife went to Paris to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary.  It was raining and they didn’t feel well.  They stayed in the hotel and the friendly chambermaid taught them to count to ten in French.  That was it.  And that was enough.

Or the time Taro found a dead cat on his roof.  A cat corpse saturated in cooking oil.  Taro’s wife thought she smelled something, Taro got on his ladder and, sure enough, there was a large dead oil-soaked cat on the roof.  There were a lot of restaurants around where he lived.  They poured used cooking oil into a barrel, but they didn’t always put a lid over it.  The cat must have been lured by the smell and fallen in, then been overwhelmed when it tried to clean itself.

“Oh, Taro!  I am so sorry!  That’s terrible!  That’s disgusting!” 

For that matter, what the hell was an eighty-five year old man doing on a ladder?

Again, Taro looked to his classmates.  Again, the knowing smiles and nods.  Like I said, I think they really appreciated the fact that I could be relied upon to be dumb and insensitive.

The point was not that the cat was disgusting – it was all just interesting.  Whether it was a dead cat on the roof or learning to count to ten in French, here was reality, and Taro attended to it.

Nothing bad ever happened to Taro.  I was his teacher for years and I can attest to the fact.  Nothing good happened either.  Everything was just interesting.  Whatever it was, he took care of it, and wrote an account in his notebook, always with a few new words which he forgot almost as soon as he looked up from the page.

What a very interesting world it was.  For example, it was interesting that he was constantly being arrested by the police.  As a young man he’d never been arrested, not even once.  Now he got arrested all the time. 

This was because of his bicycle.  He liked his bicycle very much, although it was just the ordinary heavy kind of bicycle which Japanese use to get back and forth from the grocery store.  He had built it himself, from the parts of many different discarded bicycles, and it was several different colors.

In Tokyo, when something breaks, you get a new one.  Even if just one small part is broken, you get a new one.  It is not usual to fix something, much less to make something from what others have discarded.

The police took one look at Taro’s multi-colored bicycle and assumed that he had stolen it, part by part.  They put him in the squad car, drove him to the station, and accused him of being a bicycle thief.  It took him a long time to convince him that he was just someone who liked to fix things.

This happened multiple times.  It happened so often that the police chief, the moment he saw Taro, would rush over and start apologizing.  The chief would apologize profusely, then lay into the patrol cop for having nothing better to do than accuse an octogenarian of stealing a bicycle.

The truth was, Taro didn’t mind.  He didn’t mind being arrested any more than he minded finding a dead cat on the roof or traveling to Paris.  He was not at all displeased.  He was not neutral either and certainly he was not unfeeling.

Taro lived to be 87.  He was an art teacher and a painter.  His canvases were abstract and enormous and people who saw them invariably said that they seemed like the work of a much younger man.

Taro was the best storyteller I have ever known.  His life was ordinary and also uncommonly rich.  He was the kind of person who finds everything interesting.

Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Giedra Radvilavičiūtė

Giedra Radvilavičiūtė, 
Those Whom I Would Like to Meet Again

Translated from the Lithuanian by Elizabeth Novickas

Lithuanian Literature Series
Dalkey Archive Press, 2013





Giedra Radvilavičiūtė isn’t well-known in English and that’s a shame because this is a marvelous book and I can imagine many people loving it, if only they could discover it.  These are stories in the form of essays, or fictional essays – it doesn’t matter what you call them, you’ll catch the drift at once, I promise.  (The people who used to be obsessed with classifying genre appear to have finally exhausted themselves, thank God.)

These stories have the suppleness of stream of consciousness – and a sense of precision suitable for a legal secretary.  What sort of reader will be fond of this book?  Off the top of my head: fans of W.G. Sebald or Julio Cortazar or Lydia Davis.  Actually, I predict that there are fans of Lydia Davis who will like Radvilavičiūtė even better.  She has what I think of as “the Jane Bowles gift” – there’s no guessing what sentence will come next.  These essays are a cure for literary claustrophobia.

Although the longer essays are impressive, I confess that I was especially fond of the shorter ones, which are still plenty complex.  For example “Awakenings”, which begins with the narrator chatting with her dead mother, whom she discovers standing beside her bed.  When she says she wants to talk, her mother says,

“Well, be quick about it.  Just until I’ve finished my cigarette.”

She tells her mother, “This past fall I went to Kaunas.  Your granddaughter, looking out the window of the bus, saw a cow and asked, Does that cow belong to anyone, or is it Nobody’s?  I said, Cows always belong to someone, only people can be Nobody’s.  Mom. . . Now, when I wake up in a pool of sweat, most often at daybreak, I start to feel quite clearly that I myself belong to Nobody.  My eyes are Nobody’s.  My arms are Nobody’s.  My legs, skin, nails, lungs, breath, and hair – Nobody’s.  It makes me feel terrible.”

Her mother responds, “How did your daughter’s semester go?” (40)

Radvilavičiūtė is a master of the aside, the parenthetical.  When the doctor asks, “By the way, how are your relations with men?”, here’s the response:

“’Very good,’ I said, thinking of men generally, as a sort of aggregate. (As half of humanity.  Or like penguins in a snowstorm, huddled in a pile in distant Antarctica.)” (43).

This must have been a difficult book to translate, but it doesn’t read that way – it is engaging, clear and smooth.  Perhaps Novickas took the advice of the narrator in the final essay: “I think you can really only translate good prose smoothly when you’re a bit drunk.  And during a full moon.”

This book needs to be discovered!  Please read it, enjoy it, then spread the word around.

Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Machado de Assis

Machado de Assis, Epitaph of a Small Winner

Published in Brazil in 1880 as Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas

Translated from the Portuguese by William L. Grossman

Foreword by Susan Sontag

This book is an example of a genre woefully under-utilized: the posthumous memoir.  As Bras Cubas reports, “I am a deceased writer not in the sense of one who has written and is now deceased, but in the sense of one who has died and is now writing” (5).  If only this could happen more often.  Just think of all the people who would almost unquestionably be more interesting from the other side of the grave than they are on this side.  Kissinger springs to mind. 

(A little more seriously: can you think of other novels that use this device?  I would love to make a list.  Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, with Penelope in Hades giving her side of the story, is the only one I know, though I’m sure that there are many more.  If you think of one, could you respond in the comments?)

“But in death, what a difference!  what relief!  what freedom!  How glorious to throw away your cloak, to dump your spangles in a ditch, to unfold yourself, to strip off all your paint and ornaments, to confess plainly what you are and what you failed to be!” (57)  This is the energy that inhabits the 160 very short chapters of this book, as Bras Cubas recounts, in extraordinary style, the rather ordinary life of a 19^th century Brazilian aristocrat.

When I first spotted this book, in the library of a monastery, I chose it because it seemed the most worldly book available.  However, it is so relentless in stripping away human vanity, pretension and self-delusion that it nearly qualifies as a spiritual text.

The book had grabbed my attention because I instantly loved its title.  In fact, “Epitaph of a Small Winner” is actually the subtitle of the original novel.  Although I noticed that other people disliked this translation, I found it very readable. 

That said, plenty of people over 35 are going to reject this book as soon as they open it for the simplest reason.  This is obviously a reprint of a printing done in the Fifties – and it appears to have been done on a mimeograph machine from that period.  Letters are fuzzy, blotchy and blurred.  Unworthy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux!   

It seems condescending to applaud a 19^th century book for being “modern”, but, I’m sorry, I can’t avoid it.  This is a post-modern text, written in 1880, which may be a bigger trick than a memoir written from the grave. . .  Fragmentation, a peculiar viewpoint,  commentary on top of commentary – it is all so lively and so much fun.  Fans of Rushdie or Saramago (or even Vonnegut or Murakami) will feel immediately at home.

I loved this book both times I read it and I'm grateful it's in print.  If it was in print we could actually easily read, that’d be even better.

The Function of the Shopping Cart, In This Life and the Next

When I was a child I believed that when I went to sleep a witch arrived to carry me off to the land of dreams.  The means of transportation was a clattering shopping cart, same as at Ferretti’s Grocery.  The witch herself was somewhat craggy.  She was downright geologic.  In profile she looked exactly like a solitary volcano on Mars, as depicted on the poster on my bedroom wall from the Boston Museum of Science.  The witch looked just like that volcano.  Her hat was a Martian cloud.

After death the shopping cart ascended.  The wheels ceased to clatter.  The witch only went part way.  In structure the afterlife resembled two parking garages, one on either side, extending as far as the eye could see.  Worlds were stacked one on top of each other, all the way up and all the way down, innumerable worlds.  Heaven and Hell (there were many of both) were not above and below but right beside each other.  The shopping cart rose in a column of air between them.

Heaven was on the left side.  Hell was to the right.  Or else it was the other way round.  (Was it possible my shopping cart was spinning?)  Here was the crux of the problem: Heaven and Hell kept switching sides.  Countless heavens, countless hells.  You had to choose between them.

This was extremely difficult because Hell mimicked Heaven and did all it could to seem like a really good time.  Hell promised homemade cookies, unlimited pinball and the company of the Strawberry Quik bunny.  Not until too late did you learn that the cookies had pond slugs in them, that you were the ball in the machine, that the evil pink bunny would never ever stop tickling.

Heaven couldn’t help but seem a little dull.  It was the sort of place you loved once you got there, like Aunt Pilar’s house, but without the cactuses.

Which to choose?  Which was the real Heaven?  Which was torture?  I couldn’t decide.  I wished the witch was still with me, perhaps she could advise. 

Meanwhile the shopping cart continued to ascend.    

Half-Digested

I am now forty years old.  That’s four and a zero.  Another way of saying this is: I am now half-digested.  Although I often find fault with myself, the truth is that I look pretty good for something half-digested, something halfway through the gullet of the world – though of course I may be shot out at any time. . .

Some people say that I am dissolute.  I say that this is highly appropriate for one half-dissolved.  Excessive self-regard is absurd at this stage.  I don’t let that stop me.

I am in the process of being digested.  Gradually I am broken down and dispersed.  To tell the truth, it is a highly peculiar situation.  Actually, I was never born.  Not quite.  The appearance was a ruse.  I never emerged.  Not for a moment have I been anything separate.  Just the same I am falling apart quite nicely.  Falling apart has proven to be something I can actually do, unlike riding a bicycle.

Ideally I would like to be nutritious.  You’ll laugh, but -- actually I would like to be wholesome.  At least fibrous.  I would somehow like to compensate for all the waste my appearance has occasioned, from the first diaper to this morning’s milk carton.  That is why I have such high literary ambitions.  I aspire that my contribution to literature will be at least half as significant and enduring as the little white cups of creamer I dump into my coffee.  I am a highly ambitious and indeed reckless person.

I am now forty years old.  (I am guessing this is now the intestines?)  The world is the solvent into which I am dissolving my body, this packet of nonsense.

In Praise of Distraction

No question but that it saves lives every day.

I decided to kill myself.  Unfortunately the gas had been turned off.  It took me nearly an hour to find the bill.  Here in Tokyo, we pay our bills at the convenience store.  While I was there, I discovered that there is now a grape chu-hi with eight percent alcohol.  Grape Zero Strong!  This was highly encouraging, but it was not enough to save my life.  Just then the football team came in for Cokes, in sweat and grins and sleeveless shirts.  You must keep in mind that you yourself cannot know the extent of your good works.  It may be that one day in high school your armpit saved someone’s life.

Holy Books of Guttersnipe Das: Robert Walser

Robert Walser

A Schoolboy’s Diary

Translated by Damion Searls

New York Review of Books, 2013

To pretend that I am a sedate and demure fan of Robert Walser, in hopes of thereby seeming reasonable, would be misleading to the point of dishonesty. Robert Walser is my very favorite writer (indeed, a word like master or guide seems more appropriate) and I should admit up front that my opinions are those of a fanatic.

Although Robert Walser remains under-appreciated, there is also a growing group of Walser devotees who seek out everything available. Some of these ardent fans seek, as I do, to create new work informed and inspired by Walser.

Unsurprisingly, I've sought out everything by Walser that is available in translation and I feel strenuously grateful to NYRB for this new series of thematic collections of Walser's short prose. (Berlin Stories translated by Susan Bernofsky is another delightful book in this series, and I hope ardently that there are more to come.)

Still, as years pass, and collections appear, I begin to worry that new collections of short pieces from Walser's vast un-translated work will begin to seem "picked over", just gleanings or scraps. Although it is true, as Walser writes, that "Enthusiasts are happy with little, in fact often extremely miniscule things" (163), I came to this book hoping that truly beautiful and first-rate work is yet to appear.

In this hope, I was not disappointed. Above all, what A Schoolboy's Diary makes clear is that Walser's trove of un-translated work is nowhere near to being picked over. The stories here are as necessary and enchanting as those to be found in any of the 5 collections of short prose currently available. (Fellow Walserians, please correct me if I have miscounted.)

Although I think readers new to Walser would do well to begin with a "general" collection of the short prose such as Selected Stories, translated by Christopher Middleton, or Masquerade, translated by Susan Bernofsky, these thematic collections are a great pleasure and you would not be wrong to start your exploration of Robert Walser right here.

Fanatics tend to disapprove of innovations and new arrivals. I admit that I questioned, as I picked up this book, whether Damion Searls could possibly be as worthy a translator as Middleton and Bernofsky, to whom readers of Walser in English are wholly indebted. ("Some young upstart", I assumed. Totally wrong. Although his appearance is youthful, he has an august list of translation credits a mile long.)

Though I came to this book armed and ready to disapprove, I found myself unable to - these are beautiful and flowing translations, like one of the sparkling lakes or streams that Walser often seems to be ambling alongside.

As usual, I read aloud and copied out passages that enchanted me. How is it possible to resist a writer who announces, "To give you an opportunity to see me would mean introducing you to a person who cuts off half the rim of his felt hat with scissors to give it a wilder, more bohemian appearance. Is that the kind of strange being you really want to have before you?"(51)

At a time when most people seem to consider themselves so terribly important, Walser's sauntering humility has a special resonance. How good it is to be reminded, "Tact and discretion are never anything over than attractive. Modestly stepping aside can never be recommended as a continual practice in strong enough terms." (161) Or simply: "Envy is a form of insanity." (53)

Pieces like "From My Youth" made me feel that I could see and understand Walser more directly than I had before. "Early spring was magnificent. All the houses, trees and streets gleamed as though they had come from some higher state of being. It was half dream, half fever. I was never sick, just always strangely and seriously infected with a longing for extraordinary things." (124)

As someone who seeks to emulate Walser, I endlessly compose short pieces, endlessly send them out, and endlessly receive friendly and baffled rejection notes. Admittedly, I often suspect that my uselessness as a human being is unsurpassed. How imperative therefore to read "The Last Prose Piece", in which Walser warns me against his profession in the strongest possible terms. How wrenching to find that Walser felt as discouraged as I feel as he endlessly wrote and submitted work -- indeed he writes, "The extent of my submissions will probably never be matched." (146) May these reminders of work and suffering banish my squirrely self-pity.

Above all, it is painful to read Walser's repeated desire to simply give up - though of course he cannot and will not, not until he enters the last sanatorium in 1933. "At last I have drawn a firm line under the truly astoundingly great column of figures and am done with pursuing that for which I am not sufficiently intelligent" (149).

What I would give for a time machine, so that I might rush back in time and encourage him. I'd also like to buy him a new hat.

Old and new fans of Robert Walser will revel in this book. As Walser reminds us, "When you are faced with a happiness that is not forbidden, you must seize and enjoy it." (177)

Envelopes & Cards

When I was a child I believed that when you died you arrived at the foyer of Heaven and were presented with a stack of white envelopes.  In these envelopes were all your harmful actions, on glossy paper, comprehensively described and depicted, or, as salesmen say, lavishly illustrated. 

The first thing you must do when you die is go through all these envelopes.  (Although it is not generally known, all people when they die are given a letter-opener.)

For some people the envelopes and their contents are a simple operation, just tidying up, like going through the mail after a long day at work.  Others receive such a deluge of envelopes that they must spend much of eternity opening them.  In these envelopes, you see, not one nuance can be overlooked and not one detail missed.  Eternity’s post may not be skimmed.  You have no choice but to see everything.

I think now of these white envelopes, as I look around to find that I have surrounded myself with white note cards, on which I endlessly compose, although to no clear purpose.  These stammering cards now fill half the house in their weird profusion. 

As I sit here, it seems that I can almost see a mountain of white envelopes, the envelopes which are all the time arriving in the other world, like the senseless ceaseless proliferation of white note cards in this one.

I think it is not unreasonable of me to fear that there may be some correlation.

Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Spiritual Ecology

Spiritual Ecology, The Cry of the Earth

Edited by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

The Golden Sufi Center, 2013

If you arrive suddenly in a foreign city, a city where you do not know the landmarks and do not speak the language, you may find yourself urgently in need a city guide.  In the same way, this book is vitally necessary, now that we find ourselves in a changed and unfamiliar world.  If we wish to survive as a civilization, we need to find new paths – and we need to find them quickly.  You would do well to call in sick to work – and stay home to read this.

A few of the texts here I’d found previously, including one that blew open my mind when I read it aged 19: Joanna Macy’s “Greening of the Self”.  It is even more amazing than I remember.  Thich Nhat Hanh is here as well and just because he’s a beloved Zen master who knows the right way to eat an orange doesn’t mean he pulls his punches: “In my mind I see a group of chickens in a cage disputing over a few seeds of grain, unaware that in a few hours they will all be killed.”  He knows we may not make it.  Even acknowledging we may not survive, there is a way forward, a way to take action and not be paralyzed by helplessness.

Of the thinkers I discovered for the first time while reading this book, the most helpful and inspiring was Sister Miriam MacGillis.  The interview here with Sister Miriam, a contemplative inspired by Thomas Berry, was stunning – perhaps the most profound example of skillful means united with a vast perspective that I have ever come across.  Her understanding is so vast – and she brings it to bear on the farm that is in her stewardship.  I read it three times in a row.  It is magnificent.

I loved, too, Susan Murphy’s essay, “The Koan of the Earth”.  Susan Murphy is a Zen teacher in Australia and her gaze is stark and clear.  When the situation is as serious as this one, it is best to have a physician who does not mince words.  In order to survive, we will need vast compassion, and it is compassion like this, tough as nails.  (After reading this essay, I wanted very much to read ‘Minding the Earth, Mending the World’, Murphy’s book on this subject, but it appears to be unavailable.  Somebody please bring this book back to print!)

 I was particularly grateful to Geneen Marie Haugen and the essay “Imagining Earth”.  Haugen writes about how the imagination can be used to reacquaint ourselves with the sacred in the land and how this practice, which involves some “make-believe”, might turn out to be essential for our survival. 

Haugen helped me a lot to understand my own experience.  As a boy in New Hampshire, I experienced my family’s farm as a place vastly alive and full of spirits.  Certain places had certain powers; there was even an area I believed to be “the heart of the farm”.  I grew up, thought myself foolish, and it was years before I was able recognize how correct I’d been as a child!  This essay is a beautiful guide to this practice.  She helped me understand, too, why I find the unfortunate fate of my family’s farm (and life in Tokyo) so wrenching.  Haugen writes, “A practice of attending an animate world may have a cumulative effect of rearranging our own consciousness in a way that we cannot later withdraw from without pain”(166).  Yes, indeed.

Anthologies like this one aim to reach many people by providing many styles and approaches.  I admit there were a few essays here that seemed to me “keynote addresses” – general statements aimed at an audience already convinced.  I hope that this book will serve as a sort of general introduction for a series of books on this subject.

Hopefully these essays will serve to fuel discussion.  Admittedly, I did not agree with all the approaches found here.  A few, like the essay by Sandra Ingerman, seemed to be examples of cheesy, old-style New Age thinking that is too busy being airy and optimistic to actually be useful.  This sort of thing was good enough for 1987 (when “The Aquarian Conspiracy” was going to save us all) but – we’re going to need to think a lot harder now.

In a book of excellent essays, there was one essay that dismayed and even offended me:  Satish Kumar’s “3 Dimensions of Ecology: Soil, Soul, Society.”  As a keen student of Hinduism and Buddhism, I think the ecological perspectives of these traditions are both fascinating and urgently necessary.  This essay, however, is an embarrassing concoction of platitudes, generalities and sentimentality.  This is not 1893, Mr. Kumar is not Swami Vivekananda, and we do not need dumbed-down, platitude-ridden, soft-serve presentations of Hinduism anymore.  Pardon me for being rude, but I think this is an argument worth having! 

Kumar translates yagna, tapas and dana as soil, soul and society.  I’m sorry, but that’s not what those words mean.  If he wishes to give a creative translation or reinterpretation, that’s great, but he should give the traditional meanings and the reasons for his reinterpretation – not just assume that we are ignorant and cannot handle the actual definitions of words.  It is no longer necessary to gloss over what is complicated in these faiths -- we can handle the complexity of the real tradition.  For a brilliant discussion of how Hindus see the divine as manifest in the land around them, please read Diana Eck’s marvelous book India: A Sacred Geography, a book that is as necessary for ecologists as it is for students of religion.

I am grateful to this wonderful collection of essays for giving me so much to investigate and ponder – as well as a few things to argue about!  May there be more books like this one – and fast!  May the conversation continue deep into the night.            

Forthcoming: Outside In

My essay "News of My Triumphant Return to India" is forthcoming in October's Outside In Literary & Travel Magazine.  Come wander Paharganj, New Delhi with me -- but watch out for the cycle rickshaws!

A Few Words About Madame Aster

I’d like to take this opportunity to say a few words regarding Madame Bhagavati Aster.  Although I have not met her and doubtless never will (I am most certainly not a millionaire) I have come to know a few things about her life prior to fame and fortune which, though not far-removed in time, are not commonly known.

Now, of course, Madame Aster has become one of the wealthiest and most sought-after women in the world, as well as perhaps the most famous psychic of all time.  The world has grown enamored of her bright red bouffant, of her sweeping rainbow-swathed pigeon-toed gait, of her close-set blue eyes so keenly penetrating. (Only the envious say beady.)  

Master Aster is known to all, though few indeed will ever have the privilege of an audience with her: the chance to be subject to her all-seeing vision and her curious methods.  For Madame Aster looks not into the eyes, but into the ears, and what she sees are not visions of the future, but your very most hidden desires. 

Personally speaking, I admit that to me this just seems unnerving.  If I was the person delivering her green tea soy latte and gluten-free macaroons I might well show up wearing earmuffs.  Yet nowadays people will do almost anything for the chance to spend fifteen minutes with Madame Aster.  Nowadays if you ask people what they want most in the world, they won’t even hazard a guess.  They only say that what they want most is for Madame Bhagavati Aster to look into their ears.

Those who have been present at an audience say that Madame Aster really peers in, with a gaze like a Q-tip.  She gazes in as though she were peering down a hole a mile deep.  For a minute or two she stares, then nods her head.  That’s it.  You can get her to bless you if you want (that’s optional) and she does it by tapping her long sparkling silver-blue acrylic nails on your head.  Then you go back to the receptionist.

You wouldn’t think such a simple service would be worth a million dollars, but people pay it.  Nowadays they pay even more.  The people who paid two million dollars go in front of the people who paid one million.  And still they have to wait for the folks who paid three million.  Three million, plus maybe they threw in a yacht.  People say that they love Madame Aster but, if you ask me, it’s just ordinary desire, which nowadays takes ever-stranger shapes.

Anyway, you go back to the receptionist and she verifies your contact information.  (The payment has already been received.)  Two to four weeks later (eight at the most) you receive a card in the mail.  Naturally people are always in a hurry.  They want a call or an email; they want to hurry right in at once.  But that’s not how it works.  It has to be a card.  You must wait for your card in the mail. 

There is some disagreement about what happens next.  (Is there, anywhere in the world, a group of people more close-lipped than those who have been to see Madame Aster?)  Of the few accounts that have been given, and the fewer still that may be considered reliable, most describe being led, by a very tall and aloof man in white gloves, to a door.  The door is said to be balsam green, of the traditional cross and bible design.  The doorknob is antique white porcelain, perfectly smooth and subtly luminous, like a pearl.

The few accounts we have tend to go on and on about that damned doorknob, about what it’s like to stand there and wait, to try to steady your breath, before –

They say nothing more.  You turn the doorknob, push slightly, and enter at last into your desire, your deepest truest one, which you could not possibly admit to anyone, which you do not even dare to think. 

I don’t know anything about what goes on behind that door.  (Sorry!)  But I do know a little about the life of Madame Aster, before she was the wealthiest and most sought-after woman in the world.  

Hard as it is to imagine now, this was only about three years ago.  Three and a half.  Four at the most.  Back then, Madame Aster wasn’t yet an icon.  She wasn’t famous.  Actually hardly anyone knew her.  She wasn’t the sort of person anyone seemed to notice much, or consider all that important.

A friend of mine knew her during that time.  His name is Stan.  Back then, he was a poet for hire on Pearl Street in Boulder – on the pedestrian mall.  Actually, he’s still there.  For five dollars he’ll write you a poem on any subject.  (You should give more if you can and, frankly, you should.)  He’s a really good poet.  Sometimes he’s downright remarkable.

For awhile Stan seemed to me a romantic and semi-tragic figure.  We’d been roommates twenty years previous.  I worried about him. Worked on the street, lived on the edge, even though neither of us are all that young anymore.  Then it occurred to me that, if Stan makes twenty dollars a day on his poetry – and he’s been given as much as a hundred dollars for a poem – then, statistically speaking he earns more for his poetry than 99.9% of the poets in America.

Enough about Stan.  (If you see him, tell him I said, Hi!)  The point is that he knew Madame Bhagavati Aster.  No doubt it was her, though her hair wasn’t brightly dyed in those days.  (Stan says it was still reddish, and not nearly so tall.)  Of course back then she wasn’t swathed in Hermes scarves and flanked by Scandinavian attendants.

Her name was Deb.  Or Debbie.  Anyway that’s what people called her.  Regardless of what she said her name was.  Please understand. Everyone in Boulder has a name that was given to them on a mountain top during a fire ceremony by a lama, shaman, or countess.  And it was the most beautiful-amazing-spiritual thing ever, and there was a total double rainbow, and they got a new name, which they will translate for you, and you will never be able to pronounce.

If you want to stay sane in Boulder, you must ignore all these names.

I asked Stan if it was evident, even then, that there was something very, very special about Madame Bhagavati Aster.

“No way,” Stan said.  “As psychics go, she was totally Boulder Standard.  Everything wrong in the world is wrong because of Mercury in retrograde and mono sodium glutamate.  You always get the same advice: follow your bliss, buy organic, and take Vitamin C powder till it gives you the shits.”

Please excuse Stan.  Like all interesting poets, he is a complicated mix of courtly sublimity and unabashed earthiness.

I asked, “But wasn’t it obvious that she had second sight?”

“Nope,” Stan said.  “She got it wrong.  Even compared to the other crystal-wearing, patchouli-wafting ladies.  She was even more often than usually wrong.  She was always telling some chick with a buzzcut a prince would come soon for her.  She talked about dogs to people who were very obviously cat people.”

Actually, it is well-known that Madame Aster does not see the future.  She admits as much herself.  What she sees is desire, and she sees it in the ear. 

It is said that she discovered her gift entirely by accident. (I don’t know this for a fact, but I imagine this happening on a bench, in the shade, on the Pearl Street pedestrian mall.)  One day a friend had an earache and asked her if she could see anything.  And Madame Aster found that not only could she see something, she could see everything. 

Madame Aster is now perhaps the richest and most famous woman in the world.  Certainly she is the most mysterious.  Little is known, either, of the staff which surrounds her and occupies her vast estate, the monumental walled compound which now encompasses nearly seven square kilometers between Swanton, VT and the Canadian border.

It is presumed that the staff  has some role in the enabling, staging, and construction of the fulfillment of desires, as dictated to them by Madame Aster.

Critics assert that Madame Aster has given rise to unbridled licentiousness – as though that blue-eyed red-haired lady is to blame for all she sees.  More than a few assume that it’s an orgy all the time, a frolicking free-for-all on the party grounds of Madame Aster. 

This is the best some wan imaginations can concoct: a sordid procession of identical twins, trained pets and downy pubescents.  That has to be what’s really going on – the reactionaries are convinced – it has got to be a enormous international pedophile sex scheme!       

For these ugly accusations, so oft-repeated, no basis has ever been found.  Not the slightest.  As for allegations of a sexual nature – it is true that the few staff members in public view are exceptionally attractive.  Breath-taking is the word.  I do not contest that they are utterly stunning. 

But then again, you’ve got to figure that they are presumably the best paid office staff on the entire planet.  Their discretion is unrivaled and, thus far, entirely unbroken. 

Those who have been through Madame Aster’s door say nothing.  Most make another appointment at once.  Although it is true that there have been high-profile cases of financial ruin –  can the lady herself fairly be held to blame for that?  Particularly considering that the millionaires reduced to beggary remain cheerful and steadfastly insist it was totally worth it?

Other than that, what can be said?  Who has right to condemn?  No one has complained of mistreatment.  No one at all.  No children have gone missing.  The critics and cynics, naysayers and misanthropes, aggrieved fathers and sleepless mothers, members of the clergy, have nothing whatsoever on which to base their accusations besides the highly predictable fantasies found in the shallows of their own minds.

Who can say what is there behind the door? 

I do not know.  Do you? 

What do you really want?  What is your deepest desire -- most secret, dark and true?  Can you name it?  Could you call its name in the street?  Would you recognize it, if it suddenly showed up at your door?  Would you embrace it, or slam shut the door?  Is your deepest desire the same as mine, or are there many?  What is there, in the depths of our minds?  As D.H. Lawrence wrote, “It takes some diving.” 

 

Those of us who are not millionaires can only dream and guess. 

All right, one more thing from Stan. 

(Full disclosure: this was the deal, between Stan and me.  Stan granted me permission to write this story.  In return he asked that I include the following message, since this article will presumably have an extremely broad audience, which may even come to include Madame Bhagavati Aster herself.) 

Stan asks me to say that, since he’s an old acquaintance of Madame Aster’s (“I’d like her to know that I consider her a friend,” Stan says), since he knew her back when she was Deb, he hopes that he might receive a free, complimentary session.  Better still, he suggests, he could pay with poems.  After all, who but a poet could transmit the experience?  Who but a poet could reveal what’s on the other side of the door? 

Stan mentioned he delivered a tall green tea soy latte to Deb’s folding table on several occasions.  At least once, he’s pretty sure, she never paid him back.  (“Totally cool with me”, says Stan, “True friends don’t keep track.”)  Stan and I agree that there ought to be fair play and evenhandedness for poets, for poets who have given their life to poetry and are even actually good poets.  At least once or twice in human history, there ought to be justice for poets.

OK, Stan.  I delivered your message.

As for Madame Aster, I have a theory of my own.  And I do not doubt that whatever I can imagine is only the dullest, driest, nth-percentage, namby-pambyish simulacrum of whatever is behind that door, that yearned-for green door with its old-fashioned pearlescent porcelain doorknob. 

My best guess is that joy of Madame Aster’s paradise does not lie in having your fantasy fulfilled.  Not primarily at least.  The rich, after all, can have whatever they want, excepting only freedom from old age, sickness and death.

My best guess is that the joy of Madame Aster’s paradise lies not so much in the fulfillment of desire as it does in not having to ask. 

On the other side of Madame Aster’s door, it is not necessary to inquire.  You need not request, admit or beg.  The sad soft belly of longing and craving need not be exposed.  You will not be made to feel humiliated.  You will not be held responsible for hungers you never sought and can’t appease.  The depth of famishment need not be spoken of or admitted.  No measurements will be taken: neither of the intensity of voracity, nor of the volume of emptiness.  

Instead you will be comprehensively understood without explanations – a thing which is more commonly known by the name of ‘love’.

Imagine that.  It might well be worth a million dollars.  More.

You may turn the knob and pass through the door without a word.  You don’t have to be afraid.  You don’t have to be ashamed. 

Madame Aster knows what you want.