What kind of turtle can stay under water a hundred years?
How many of them must there be when you look at all the human life around you?
Did they mean joke?
What is this story?
Actually, it’s quite pleasant thinking about this crackpot Buddhist stuff instead of my own miseries. Maybe I should launch an esoteric religions list as ultimate escapism — Beginner’s Guide to Tantric Meditation. A Hundred Reincarnations To Avoid At All Costs.
Bet there’s a market.
I’m enjoying this too, Mr Diarist. Maybe if you and me just got together and chatted and smoked and had a quiet drink and a game of pool we could forget all the shit that has been driving us mad.
No daydreams of sex now the curse has arrived.
It never bothered Jonathan.
First time we made love I was bleeding like a pig.
He said …
Stop.
Breathe.
The time I came to get my stuff having said I was leaving. I was leaving for ever. She had cooked big tomatoes stuffed with couscous. She had bought a bottle of whisky and chocolates. Susie was excited about an audition. I sat in my chair and ate the tomatoes and the couscous, which was flavoured with nutmeg and pinoli. I sat in the garden on the bench beneath the wisteria and poured a shot of whisky, chose a chocolate. I never got up again. Maybe that is what bourgeois means. Birthright sold for a few liqueurs.
Then the coldness. The rancour.
Mum used to make Dad steak tartare when he threatened to leave. And shush the cats into the spare bedroom.
Dream. I’m on the floor wrestling with some kind of man-animal-monster that is also part of me, in me, and I’m trying to push him away, but it’s dark and I can’t see what’s me and what isn’t. It’s a wild struggle. I’m making a superhuman effort to push this creature inside me, indistinguishable from me, away from me. Woke in a sweat with the word ‘exorcism’ on my lips. Exorcism, exorcism. Not ready yet. I don’t feel ready. So many dreams. All intense. The locked room with the broken Christmas tree. The car crash.
My dream is I’m walking along the seashore with Jonathan. The breakers thunder and rush right up to where we’re walking. He has his arm round me and we’re in love. It breaks my heart, that dream. It sets me back weeks.
Suppose for the sake of argument I’m reborn as a newt. Of course I don’t know I was previously a man. I don’t know I was previously married to L. Relief. I don’t know it was Everests of negative marital karma that led to this humiliating downward transformation. Prince to newt. Actually, I don’t feel transformed or humiliated at all. I don’t even realize I’ve been spared the frog. I’m a newt. I’m very happy slithering in and out of the weedy pond. Don’t even have to decide between earth and water. I’m amphibian. It’s a great life being a newt. Dukkha is for humans. Humans suffer, not newts. Humans make themselves miserable with their thoughts, their need to decide things. Newts are in nirvana from day one. Without even trying. Is there anything that makes me suffer aside from my thoughts, my impossible decisions? Nothing. I have a dreadful pain in my back. That’s not suffering. I have merciless haemorrhoids. A joke. Not a yoke. My haemorrhoids are old pals. Give me a lobotomy and I’d be happy as Larry. If I don’t want a lobotomy, it means I don’t want happiness, or Larriness. I don’t want nirvana. I want to be alive and suffering with a messy, mixed-up personal story. My little intruder with the cute cantaloupes was spot on there: ‘You love your pain too much.’ She really did look
Cute cantaloupes!
At least I remember what I wrote now. It must have been in the previous exercise book. In four days he’s finished one and scribbled half another.
Who would ever think of returning as a newt?
Zoë said everyone over forty had haemorrhoids. She was thirty-three.
interestingly animal, with that funny, screwed-up little mouth and long teeth. Small hands, dirty nails. Not unlike T in a way. An odd sort of nibbliness.
Too bad this diary paper isn’t absorbent. I could tear the pages out, clean up between the legs and flush.
My mouth is not screwed up. It’s pursed.
‘Pretty pursed lips, my sweet little rodent.’
I’ll use some bog paper for the moment. There’s always plenty of bog paper at the Dasgupta.
Judging by where she sits she must be a server. So still and straight-backed, hour after hour. I wish I could.
How much did she read? Do they check our rooms? Surely not a woman in the men’s, though.
Anyway, that’s definitely what they’re trying to teach here. Stop identifying with your pain. Detach, de-dramatize. When they asked the woman who was crying to leave the meditation room, the first vipassana session, I was worried for her, sobbing away, some kind of breakdown, and Harper just tells her to leave if she can’t stop crying. In his super-dead bureaucratic voice. How can he be so uncaring? I’m thinking. Then I saw the sense of it.
You love your pain too much.
Stop crying. Stop dramatizing. Concentrate on the breath going in and out of the lungs. A matter of the utmost importance for you.
Newts don’t cry.
Damn, I’ve finally seen that’s what he meant by the second arrow being optional. How slow can you be?
All our marriage I’ve been afraid. That’s the truth. Did you know how terrifying you are, Linda? Your coldness, your rigidity, your rages. Have you any idea? Or is it just me? You’ve been married to a spineless weakling, a newt, when what you needed was a man.
I live like a widower haunted by his wife’s angry ghost.
Very funny. There was a spider on the floor today between my cushion and the guy to my left. Didn’t know what to do since we’ve taken the vow not to kill any living creature. Couldn’t communicate with this guy, who seems a much more experienced meditator than me since he never seems to move. The spider didn’t know which mat he’d prefer to climb on and neither of us could shut our eyes and just let him go where he wanted. Why not? What could happen? It went on and on, the spider moseying back and forth, back and forth. Must have wasted half an hour watching a creature that is completely harmless, waiting no doubt to be reincarnated as human so he can take his first step on the Dhamma path. Eventually the guy behind us saw the thing, got it to climb on his hand and took it out. Hard to think the spider was suffering any more than us, or in any way inferior to us. It must be quite fun spinning your way down from the roof and disturbing the meditators.
Spiders don’t bother me at all. I could meditate with spiders crawling all over me. But I remember a wild scene with Zoë in a motel bathroom.
Question: can we keep the conditioned arising theory and dump the reincarnation?
You have no self. Last night’s video. What you experience as self is an amalgamation of five basic chemical elements (forgotten what they are). Constant fluctuation of said elements, or aggregates, conditions the circumstances in which, at any one moment, consciousness arises. Hence instability. Hence difficulty making decisions. Hence difficulty knowing who you are.
Makes sense.
In my case, then, what are/were the conditions that led to how things are in my head now? The conditions of this arising that is me.