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.
