Oh. It's not too big. Not quite. Not quite quite.
Kundalini was impatient for this stage.
Keep talking to me, please.
Concentrate. Think of ida. Think ofpingala. Energy is rising.
Mm.
Think of Muladhara to Svadbisthana. Now she leaves the belly and files to the solar plexus, to Manipura.
Mmm.
From Manipura to Anabata, the heart. Up, up, to beyond the heart.
Nn.
Beyond the heart to Visbuddba, the throat. There are many throats.
To Midge
Dombi dances in the sambbogakaya. The washerwoman dances in the throat. From Visbuddba-
[Unintelligible.] Oh. My God. Goodness me. Now you.
No. I do not do. You do again, Kundalini. And again.
Really? Isn't that unfair?
Unfair to you. It puts you into time. It puts you into the clutches of Kali, while I am in samarasa. I have the bliss of vajrolimudra. The energy of the suspended semen enters my spirit and makes me immortal. You die again and again. You are cruelly used.
If you say so. I keep going?
Keep going.
Mm. Nn. Oh. Oh yes, yes. God. How do you do it?
Advanced technique. It is called "ujjana sadbana," "against the current."// brings, through samarasa, sabaja. It brings the non-conditioned. It brings advaya. Sbakti and Shiva, vajra and padma, jiva and ajiva are one. You and I are one. What I will, you become.
Yes, Master.
If I scratch your fat rump, it is pleasure.
Pleasure.
If I slap you thus, that too.
That too.
Come once more.
Darling, I'm exhausted.
Come. Come, you sopping cunt.
[Click: end of tape, side one.]
Midge, that was the most magical thing of all, the way that side of the tape got used up just as I did. I think my moan drowned out the click in the drawer, but / heard it. I really probably should erase that side, but I have this feeling about it that it's bigger than I am somehow, that my personal modesty is totally unimportant and it wasn't me in any case but a kind of goddess actually and that what really is important is the Arhat's voice on tape, his fantastic capacity for love. I don't know how he held it but it stayed just as hard as a rock, only of course smooth-a jewel just like they say. He was the jewel and I was the lotus. It felt just like that, on and on into eternity. And it wasn't just that once, I've been with him a few times since. I'm not sure, though, you should play the tape for Irving and the other girls-only if you think they can take it in the yogic spirit and not as just titillation and gossip. It m«jf n't get back to Charles. I'll leave it up to you, I've been away so long now I can't be the judge of anybody's spiritual progress and maturity. Please keep it safe for me, 'though, so some day when I'm old and gray and sitting in some nursing home or Florida condo like my grotesque mother I can play it and remember the times when I was Shakti and Radha with the best of them. I wonder whose Radha she ever was, by the way. It's awfully hard to picture Daddy being Krishna.
What other news? I don't know what sort of stuff gets onto television back East-I suppose it depends pretty much on what the Russians and Iranians did that afternoon-but Durga and Agni and the rest of her hard core, mostly the guys from security and some of the younger women in PR, stayed up in the canyon a few more days, until their pills and water ran out, but when nobody came after them they began to dribble back to the Chakra and the cafeteria, looking dusty and underweight and sheepish. Durga had expected some kind of shootout, like they have I guess in Belfast with the British soldiers, but the IRS and Immigration don't work like that, it's more a matter of form letters with that dotty kind of printer that only the government still seems to use, these utterly machine-made-looking letters you can keep ignoring because it looks like junk mail until some morning months later the sheriff shows up with handcuffs. These shots I kept hearing were I guess Durga and Satya and the guys having fun, practicing with their infrared gunsights and these other fancy armaments that have been costing the Treasury of Enlightenment an arm and a leg. To avoid an ambush in the pass she came down the Sachchidananda on a rubber raft they had up there, and though there was her old kind of dash in that, she looks basically discouraged. She talks about deporting herself back to Ireland rather than fight the INS. We've had a couple of long talks, she and I, now that I use her old office in the Uma Room, and the odd thing is I'm beginning to like her, rather-though of course not the abso/«fely comfortable way I like you and Donna and Ann Turner and Liz Belling-ham. We have a language in common, we went to the same sort of schools and dated the same boys more or less and made the same klishta compromises, but a lot of the women here, frankly, are like people from the moon. It's like they skipped a beat somewhere, and really don't much care about either death or sex. Maybe it's an East Coast / West Coast thing, or a generation kind of gap, but I don't think so exactly. Maybe I've been standoffish. I came here, face it, to get close to the Arhat, and now that I couldn't get any closer except by crawKng up his asshole-sorry, that's the way he talks, once you get to know him, with almost a tough-guy kind of American accent, God knows where he picked it up-and now that I've achieved my objective and satisfied my really pretty deplorable phalatrishna, I'm able to relate to these people on more relaxed terms. Durga's always frightened me but she says now I frightened her from the start, and if you think of her as just this little Irish village girl you can see I might be frightening. She says she could see at a glance that I had the kind of energy the Arhat eats up. She says he eats people up, psychologically, without meaning to-it's just that his prana and mahat are so strong they suck you in and spit you out, he's so incredibly intuitive that he gets impatient, and she and Prapti and Nitya and Alinga and the inner circle were wearing out around him. So she sensed I was going to take over, though of course I haven't, I still don't know the half of what goes on around here. She said, Durga, to finish up with her, that she was raised with this terribly restrictive Irish Catholicism and hated it and thought what the Arhat was offering, this free-form Buddhism, would release her but she wonders now if it didn't actually make her more uptight, all these spiritual possibilities so she was constantly having to choose, and maybe the real way to be free is just to do whatever the priest or husband or boss or whoever says while deep inside scorning it-that this is real asanga, real detachment from your life, instead of coming here and trying to make a new social model and the desert bloom and so on. All I could tell her was that it's been wonderful for me so far but that I rather did doubt if I or any woman would ever be able to do vajrolimudra, because of the anatomical differences, and so would always be swept along by time. She kissed me then, this big white face of hers swooping down, she said I looked so sweet saying that, when I had just been trying to be serious. I mean, really kissed me, but it wasn't like with Alinga-I have the funny feeling Durga doesn't have much of a sex life in any direction. Her eyes get softest when she talks about Ireland and her mother and the two cows they used to keep in the village, the way their spotted big sides steamed just after it rained. She was some sort of artiste in Dublin -I don't know, do they still have music halls?-but it's the village and the cows that turn heron. The warm milk-that steamed, too.