Authors: John Updike
Mother
June 8
Vikshipta—
Your conduct toward me during meditation today was unforgivable. It is one thing to “let the garbage out of your
system” and another to spew it all over another person. Our relationship was always somewhat primitive and tinged with your acculturated hysteria and sadism but your remarks spoken before the entire appalled group were beyond all bounds. I am no doubt the humblest of fledgling sannyasins; the other person, however, whom you named in your grotesque fit of jealousy and abuse is close enough to the Arhat, I believe, to see you removed from your present pseudo-psychiatric position of petty tyranny and stationed instead for your own therapy in the farthest, hottest artichoke field, where the Sachchidananda can just barely be coaxed to insert its trickles. I will
not
mention this degrading incident to her. In return for my tact I ask
—demand
—respect, restraint, and relinquishment from you.
Sincerely,
Kundalini
June 15
Dear Mother—
Please
don’t send me any more trashy clippings from the Miami and Fort Lauderdale papers. It is sensationalist untruth based on third-hand rumors, by reporters who wouldn’t know a spiritual value if it came and bit them on the ankle. If Charles hadn’t somehow found out where I was and told you and you hadn’t told all your neighbors they wouldn’t be upsetting you by showing you all these stupid clippings. There are no orgies here. There is just love in its many forms. The only hot tubs are for religious purposes, to give sensory-deprivation drills and to encourage people already inclined that way to have out-of-body experiences. If you knew anything
about yoga or Buddhism you would know the idea is to get out of the body for good, not to achieve physical pleasure. The state we all strive for here is perfect indifference. As to the Arhat’s legal troubles back in India, which these so-called “investigative reporters” keep digging up, any government now has so many rules and regulations that if the officials get it in for you they can hound you into jail or out of the country if they want, as happened in his case. It’s the same sad story here. The immigration people and the land-use technocrats and the local ranchers’ hired legal guns are doing everything to crush our beautiful experiment in non-competitive living. The Arhat preaches peace and serenity in a world whose economy is based on war and agitation. The commercials on all those shows you poison your mind watching all the time (did you get the packet of the Arhat’s pamphlets I sent you?—try for starters
Transcending Abhinivesha: Beyond the Will to Live
, or maybe the one on the three gunas and the fifteen sub-modalities, to give you a necessary frame of reference)—what are they all
doing
(the commercials) but agitating you to want something you don’t have? Not you personally—you should have all the things you want and need, thanks to Daddy and both my grandfathers, not to mention all the ancestors before them, piling up earthly goods to signify divine election—but people in general, the American people. No other people in the world is expected to get as whipped up over wanting as we are. The consumer society needs people in a constant state of material agitation but not so much so that the agitated people violate others’ property rights—if you can’t hold on to a thing you have less motive to acquire it, and that’s what drugs and all the crime with them are doing, de-materializing America to an extent. That’s why every city keeps a police force the size of an army, to keep the wanting and buying feasible.
Our
police force does nothing but guard our fences and screen visitors. People at peace within themselves and non-attached from material things don’t steal and don’t need laws. We do what we want, but under the Arhat’s gorgeous influence we all want the same thing—his love and approval. One of your articles, I forget which—I got so mad I threw the whole batch into the shredder the office has here at the back, in case the federal authorities ever descend—called us brainwashed yuppie slaves but the fact is work is worship for us, and when you are in the right space spiritually the more you give the more you have. It’s even in the Bible but no Christian believes it any more.
What made me absolutely the
most
indignant and heartsick, though, was that snide piece about the Arhat’s limousines and wristwatches with diamond-studded bands and his shoes ordered by the dozen from a London bootmaker and the rest of it. The fact is the Arhat is absolutely penniless—everything goes into the Treasury of Enlightenment and is incorporated or set up as a trust and he has no idea of what comes in and goes out. He is so truly beyond material things that he just innocently assumes whatever he needs or desires will materialize. He really
does
live like the lilies and the birds of the air. Furthermore, his diamonds are meant to symbolize for his followers the jewel trees of the Buddha Realm, the incredible Land of Bliss that we meditate upon to break down the logical mind so nirvana can enter in. As it happens, I see the Arhat fairly often now in connection with my work—not just taking dictation as I was but giving advice sometimes (something Charles incidentally never asked for, my advice) and other times just sitting and sharing his silence—and there has never been a sweeter, gentler, wiser, saner man. One half of me wants to get the entire world to love him as I do, and the
other half selfishly wants to keep him all to myself. Not that that’s possible: he is surrounded by love, he gives off so much love-energy himself. “Luff-enerchee” is the way he says it. He even says that I—
I
, Mother, whom you raised to be such a proper little Bostonian female prick—have this luff-enerchee. One of the things he likes about me (you will die) is my skin, which you always said was so disgustingly dark and oily, so I looked dirty even after I’d had a bath—you wanted me to have your own rice-paper complexion, with a few tasteful freckles across the shoulders and on the back of the hands just to let us know you were real, and you
did
use to look stunning, like some powdery woman from Marie Antoinette days, going out to a formal do in a low-cut dress, leaving me all lumpy and plump and adolescent and miserable and dirty-looking behind in the house. I
do
hope, on this subject, you’ve given up your absurd attempt to get a tan and are using a Number 15 sunblock even if you’re just going outdoors to get into the car and go shopping. With PABA—not only does it prevent further damage but it helps mend the DNA damage that has occurred, along with the zinc and A and E you should be taking as I think I wrote you before.
Charles, as you may know—I have no idea how much you two are communicating behind my back, I can’t bear to think of it, it’s too klishta, too duhshama as we say—has gone to England to press his side of the story on Pearl, who seems infatuated with a very unsuitable-sounding boy from the Lowlands. I’ve always hated the Dutch ever since that sadistic Mrs. Van Liew you used to stick us with while you and Daddy went off on one of your cruises or precious New York or Tanglewood weekends. She had these really delusional things about germs and God and kept making us wash our hands before even having a graham cracker and would go into these
religious raptures at bedtime that got me so upset I would wet the bed. Jeremy I don’t think ever did recover, that’s why he went to South America—so he could have a graham cracker without washing his hands. Only down there they call them tortillas.
I’m
glad
you rolled over the CDs as I suggested. The stock market really isn’t for people advanced in age with short-range goals; don’t forget that, buy or sell, the broker takes a commission, and that’s all he cares about. If you’re
frantic
to get rid of some of all that old IBM and AT&T Daddy bought for a dollar a share, the head accountant here, a very clever woman called Nitya Kalpana, with as it happens some nervous problems at the moment, has developed a really advantageous method of giving whereby you sign over shares and take a tax deduction for the full market value somehow twice, without paying for any of the capital gains—strange as it sounds I think you’d show a better profit giving it to us than by selling it. And besides which, you’d make your little daughter
very proud
.
Isn’t that a
crime
that that admiral is so shameless and obtuse? Isn’t there a rules committee or some such body you could complain to? It seems a pity to call the Boca police but he
does
sound unbalanced and not merely senile and though I know most crimes of passion are committed by Hispanics there’s always the exception that makes the papers. Keeping your hurricane shutters down on the side where he comes knocking is all very well but as you say it cuts out the cross-draft and the view of the courtyard. Could you move to a second-floor condo? If he’s as infirm as you describe him I don’t see how he could climb the stairs. Really, aren’t most men just terrible? Charles has got this new tough lawyer called Gilman who keeps writing me these rather comically
officious letters about a Hertz car I mislaid and some other financial details that you can bet if a man had done them wouldn’t strike him as nearly so high-handed. But the head cold I came with is quite gone at last and I feel quite
aklishta
(undisturbed, empty of impurities, only like every Sanskrit word there’s more to it than that, there’s a whole
lotus
of meanings). Without even trying I’ve lost five pounds (I think it’s the not drinking that does it, and the no meat with its fat) and got my hair cut rather short—a friend of mine says I feel now like a nylon teddy bear. Don’t forget to take calcium, and A not only for your skin but thyroid and eyes too—the best pills are the ones made from fish-liver oil—and to keep especially the Perkins silver out of the Florida air, in the
bottom
of the breakfront.
Many hugs,
Sare
P.S.: I was just joking about you and Mrs. Van Liew being responsible for Jerry’s going off to South America. Don’t brood about anything I write. I’m absolutely
hyper
with happiness these days, in spite of Charles and his clammy shadow, and have to let off steam.
June 18
Dearest, dearest A.—
It’s so horrifying out here I have to drop you a note, on this motel stationery that amuses me so much I keep stealing it.
What
Babbling Brook? And who is this child dabbling in it? And these dark ominous trees? The real world hit me like a big hot fist. Traffic jams! Men in suits! Filthy sidewalks! Ugly unloving looks on all sides! The girl at the Hertz counter
in Phoenix looked utterly bored to have the car back—
thank you
once more for finding it for me, and the keys—it was on my old-fashioned Puritan conscience and now I’m finally cleansed of my last, last iota of guilt toward Charles—and they will be billing the poor man thousands of dollars. She told me I should have gotten the long-term rate, I said I thought I would have it only a day or two. Now I’m terrified of taking the bus back to Forrest. I can’t deal with outside people any more. The terminal is sheer hell—plastic bucket seats bolted to the floor, a whole row with individual television sets screwed into the arms so we can all keep up being cretinized while waiting, hideous non-music blaring, greasy people eating greasy tacos and cheese-and-onion subs—the pathetic
stench
of unenlightenment, of avidya. Obese morons in cowboy boots and profoundly drunken Indians stare at me as I sit scribbling this, trying not to tremble—I don’t look to the right or left, everybody looks so rough and savage and
purposeless
, while this huge rude incomprehensible male voice keeps announcing bus departures—it’s as if I’m inside something horrible, churning and stinking and grinding, it’s as if I’m being
digested
, or will be if I don’t hold fast to the peace of the ashram. And of you. I can’t stop wanting to be with you. The quiet of it. The non-speaking. The lightness of the speaking when there is some. I keep touching my hair, that I cut to please you, and the bristle and tingle of it startles me, as if I’m not touching my own body, and I think of your hair, its severely straight parting and the shimmer of it brushed flat against your perfect skull, and the startling darkness of it at the nape of your neck—like some animal glimpsed asleep in the dark of his burrow—when your head nestles at the bottom of my abdomen, my tummy you call it, your nape hair at its roots the same raven-blond shade as that where there
is, so beautifully and refreshingly, no linga. Was he thinking of that when he named you? He knows so much, even into the future. I wish I could have sometime that tape of his you mentioned, on Woman as the Portal to Moksha. Now I think my bus is being growled over the loudspeakers, people are milling at the gate already, crowding around as if to gobble up the carbon monoxide. What a trashy death pit the world truly is!
I won’t send this in case D.
does
read our mail, but I so much wanted to reach out and touch you
now
. I’ll slip it to you when you and Vajna pick me up in Forrest. I can’t wait but
must
. I am, indeed, your devoted nayika,
K.
June 18, 1986
Gentlemen:
Enclosed find an endorsed check for eighteen thousand dollars ($18,000) for deposit to my account, #0002743-911. Your earlier receipts and statements are hereby acknowledged. My address continues as you have it.
Yours sincerely,
Sarah P. Worth
June 18
Dear Dr. Podhoretz—
Thank you for your cordial response. No, a July appointment will not do either, as I am staying in Arizona for a while longer. I am not living at this motel, by the way, but at an
agricultural community about forty miles away. The drugstore there does have unwaxed dental tape and I have been fairly diligent, though sometimes at night I am so tired I can’t make myself believe flossing matters as much as you say. Do Africans and Afghans always floss? They seem to have lovely teeth and gums, in photographs.
I bit down hard on a betel nut the other day and ever since then there has been not an ache exactly but a sort of apprehensive tenderness—not exactly tenderness, more of a vague
punky
feeling—in the lower right quadrant, where you said there tended to be tissue inflammation in any case. I do hope I don’t have to go through another root canal! If worse comes to worst, I’ll have the endodontist out here send you an X-ray for your records. The dental facilities are surprisingly adequate in this agri-commune, though I believe they use an outside lab for their gold and porcelain crown work.