Wreck and Order (5 page)

I stayed at Rose Land for weeks, setting out on foot each morning to explore the temples and gardens, then coming home to eat rice and curry out of plastic bags I bought from the Muslim restaurant in town, which Sarasi told me was the cleanest. I took a trip to the seashore, as I giddily thought of the south coast, feeling like a sweet little girl in a children's book. Bikini-clad Europeans posed for sexy photos alongside Sri Lankan families—husbands gaping as they splashed with toddlers in the shallows, women in saris holding babies in one hand and umbrellas in the other, to keep their skin from turning darker in the sun. I didn't want to be reminded that I was just another white girl on vacation. So I headed back to Rose Land, where I could spend my evenings helping the boys with their English homework and letting Sarasi paint my nails. (“You have pretty hands,” she said. “You should maintain.”) The Italian couple had returned to India, so I took their room—two twin beds pushed together beneath a window lined with bars to keep the monkeys out, usually filled with flashes of orange robes swooshing around bare feet. There was a monastery uphill from Rose Land, and the top of the window met the very bottom of the courtyard. As I laid out my clothes on one of the beds, fully unpacking for the first time, the monks began chanting. “So beautiful,” I said when Mary passed my open door. She smiled indulgently. “The government pays them to live there,” she said. “Most easy job in Sri Lanka.”

Still, I lay on my bed every night at sunset, listening to the oceanic crooning of unknown words, watching the square of sky deepen to black. Only someone unlovable could love aloneness this much. I didn't know whether this was a good thought or a bad thought, but I didn't much care either way.

I never used the blank moleskin notebook I'd brought with me, intending to record scenes and conversations for some future self, scavenging for the vaguely imagined article I planned to write or desperate to recall past joys. So I don't remember many specific moments or sensory details from that first trip, just that I was barreled down constantly by their combined force. The manic city streets, the koel birds crooning at dawn, the ancient stone Buddhas nestled at the base of heavy fig trees, the huge white beaches with huge green waves and huge pink sunsets and huge clouds slicing a huge sky. Sri Lanka did feel like freedom—from trying in general, if not from Jared specifically.

I met an Irish girl at Rose Land, who'd just come back from a silent meditation center in the mountains. “Most beautiful place in the world,” she said, and wrote down the name of the town for me, in the back of my empty notebook.

Gongs woke us before dawn; we dressed, peed, and brushed our teeth by candlelight; followed a trail of slowly moving flames to the Buddha hall; sat still for one hour; drank tea while watching the sunrise; stretched slowly for an hour; ate porridge with dates and roasted peanuts; sat still some more; stretched; ate rice and vegetables; sat; stretched; drank tea; watched the sunset; chanted; slept. This was every day at the silent meditation center in the mountains above Kandy.

Sometimes during the morning meditations, a man at the front of the Buddha hall spoke into the darkness about ordeenearness and realeetee. He had just returned from a trip to Germany; a couple invited him to stay at their house and teach their friends about meditation. When the couple went out one night, they thought their Buddhist teacher might be amused by watching television. He flipped through the channels for hours. “More than one hundred programs,” he said to the candlelit room of solitary sitters. “So many choices, all the time, night and day. This is dukkha. This is suffering.” He asked us to experience instead our ordinary human forms, to feel friendly toward our ordinary human lives. What I experienced for the first few days was a barrage of thoughts demanding that I scratch my lower back, extend my legs, stand up, get the hell out of Shirmani, take a lifelong vow of silence and stay at Shirmani forever, fall in love with my breath, buy myself a new dress, burn all my clothes, become a lesbian, notice my breath without subjecting it to conceptual thinking like love, use the working meditation period to hunt down and kill that squirrel that wouldn't shut the fuck up, do something, anything, just make it better, make it better, make it better. I did not feel friendly toward this vain urgency.

“Please feel your heart,” the man in white said as our candle flames disappeared into pale early light. “Please feel your heart deeply.” I tried to scoff at his corny command, but the mere mention of that place brought my desperate attention there anyway and just like that my heart was feeling me, grasping at my throat from the inside, pulling taut the skin around my collarbones and neck. All those times I failed to contain my childish urges, drank too much and humiliated myself with some public display of rage or sorrow and so drank more; all the days in Paris I wasted with my misery; all the times I shrieked and punched and clutched at Jared instead of walking away; all the times I failed to take myself home. Impossible to contain the memories of the bad things I'd done, more terrible for their stupidity, for being average, repeatable badness, not even—

“Can you forgive me, heart?” said the man in white. For the first week of this question, spoken always into the gradually lightening room as the morning meditation came to an end, I did succeed in scoffing and shutting out his voice, or else becoming sensually distracted with the stream of water from my nose and eyes pooling at the hollow between my collarbones. The word “sorry” felt just as stupid as the actions that invited an apology. “Can you free the heart from the past?” His voice was slow and oddly unaccented. He repeated the question, speaking to himself. And because there was the same secret weight to his voice day after day, finally, out of solidarity, I repeated the words to my own—whatever it is, not the physical heart but the writhing tangle of remembered words and gestures underneath the wishbone center of my rib cage. After a few more days, it wasn't that I felt that place as freedom, like the man in white suggested. But at least it was no longer clamoring for my attention.

“Only silence can feel the realeetee,” said the man in white at the front of the Buddha hall.

Realeetee at Shirmani was constant, various birdsong (long beaks tapping a crystal vase, a mechanical kitten crying out for a real live mama cat, the final note of a radio ad for something tasty and fattening and cheap); monkeys sitting on the roof of the kitchen hut, disdainfully gorging on stolen jackfruit; a tornado of cicadas that enveloped us in their throbbing hum each night as the sun descended; stone pathways dappled in sunlight and lizards and, one time, a frog no bigger than my pinkie nail; pastel sheets draped on a sunny laundry line; exquisitely seasoned rice and curry and spicy-sweet tea; stone benches overlooking a valley of every possibility of green rising into a sky of every possibility of white, overlaid with charcoal smudges of mountain ranges whose visibility came and went with the fog, palest blue at the horizon giving way to pure light in a measured spectrum that revealed the dome overhead; “biscuits crunching in the night,” the phrase that tolled in my mind—so easy to amuse oneself when speech is outlawed—during the evening meal of what was presumably once a bread product, before it was sun-dried in a desert and then baked in a kiln, and for which, at the end of the final meditation before bedtime, we were all ravenous and gratefully consumed in the dark, under the stars, surrounded by millions of insects playing their wee violins, no match for the collective crunch our evening snack released into the reigning peace of the nighttime forest; thick, small leaves that fell from the tops of impossibly tall, thin tree trunks, twirling so quickly they seemed frozen midair at each interval of their languid descent; a saggy-breasted, elderly Sri Lankan woman who came to every evening meditation wearing an oversize T-shirt emblazoned with a steaming cup of coffee and the words
CAREFUL, LADIES…I MAY BE HOT
; a brightly dressed, exuberantly gestured young white man, either gay or Italian, who attended none of the group activities except for meals, to which he was always first in line, heaping his plate with a mound of food fit for a starving family, consuming this mound with his hands—hunched over, legs crossed, eyes intently downcast—and then refilling his plate with such brazen greed that it seemed he earnestly believed we were at this secluded meditation center on an island in the Indian Ocean to eat as much as possible of the healthy foods harvested and prepared for us for pennies.

Mostly, there was sitting. And when I had sat still long enough that my attention was, at last, consumed by the flicker of my breath—a candle pulsing in a slight, steady breeze—and my body was so light I could only sense it as the line of contact between palm and thigh; when I felt a large insect tickle my neck and still did not move until the tickle became a shooting pain that made me reflexively flick a large caterpillar with poisonous feet off of my Adam's apple and then resume sitting still, concentrating now on the web of stinging nettles emanating from the center of my neck to the crown of my head; when I opened my eyes slightly and saw a monk's brown feet moving slowly across the floor and was overcome with a full-body sorrow for all of us meditators doing all of this sitting and slow walking and listening to the mind's harangues, for what?; when I had convinced myself that whatever I was doing in that room was irrelevant to who I should be as an individual, which was the same way I felt when I was depressed; when, snot running into my mouth and tears dripping off my chin, I kept on sitting still; when the heavy, wet sorrow of effort was suddenly, mysteriously replaced by the brightness and gratitude of this same effort—so this is sitting; this is walking; this is breathing; this is lying; eating; shitting; seeing; drinking; feeling wind and heat and cold—and sensing finally that this was enough, to pay attention was enough; when I noticed how the tiny muscles pulsed across the top of the monk's foot with each step, like the pulse of the tiny flame of my breath, to which my whole being was, in that moment, reduced; when I felt a peace that seemed unshakable, that would surely last forever, even as the memories and plans and judgments oozed back in, because the peace-feeling understood that these thoughts came out of nowhere, or somewhere unseen, like the sounds from the forest all around—outside my control, having little to do with me, unstoppable but not at all terrible; when the seemingly unshakable peace-feeling did fall away, replaced by shrieking protests from my knees and hips as my numbed lap came back to life all at once; when I extended one leg, then the other, slowly, slowly, unfurling vein and muscle and bone—ah, a new kind of perfect peace, one that quickly dispersed, replaced by the thought that all of this was just one more experience and led nowhere and would give me nothing I thought that meditation ought to give me, unless I just hadn't done it enough or hadn't done it the right way—the candle flicker still there, though, the urge to come back to it still there—and on and on and on until at last, still entirely at a loss as to how to be a human being, I leaned back.

Watched. Watched myself watching. Watched the watched self being watched. So who was the watcher, ultimately? Fuck if I knew. I leaned back again. This was what meditation had given me. Not what I wanted. What I wanted was a new kind of extreme experience—freedom, bliss, transcendence. The man in white robes—he didn't seem to be a monk, but he didn't seem to be a regular person either—was actually enlightened. You saw it in the tranquil openness of his face, even though he was nearly one hundred and his feet and knees were perpetually swollen and his eyes were red and oozing. Constant comfort divorced from circumstance—a possibility I had not considered real before. But one that came from what seemed like impossible effort. The man in white spent most of every day of most of his life meditating; he had achieved enlightenment after sitting perfectly still for two full days in a row. He explained this to us during a sort of question-and-answer session one night. Bulbous feet extending from beneath the folds of his robe, he smiled out at us and waited for us to speak. People asked many questions: I have been meditating for so long and am still unhappy—what will make me happy? I was not loved as a child and now I find it difficult to love others—how can I heal? I hate my job but I need the money—should I quit and live as a pauper? The monk answered them each the same way: Be earnest. If you want to be free, do not let anything stop you. Examine every thought, desire, sensation until you fully understand its source. Expect nothing from the world. Then you will naturally wake up to your true state. Remain open and quiet. That is all you can do.

I loved the prohibition against speaking, loved waking up before dawn and falling into sleep soon after sunset, loved the signs everywhere reminding us not to read or talk or wear clothing that revealed the contours of our limbs, reminding us that we were HERE TO MEDITATE. No other reason. The only point to my life at Shirmani was to notice my thoughts and sensations as I carried out basic acts of survival. I felt a kind of happiness I'd always believed was reserved for other, simpler people.

I thought about Jared a lot, of course. But I aggressively labeled the thoughts “thinking” until they dissolved, which made me proud of myself. I was not yet up to the task of liberating myself by examining every desire. But rejecting something does not make it disappear. During one of the half hours allotted daily for right speech—timely, useful, gentle, and true—I spoke with an Australian woman who had lived at Shirmani for fifteen years. She had recently gone to renew her visa; the authorities pressed her on her reasons for staying in Sri Lanka. “They treated me like I was criminal! And I'm not! I'm not!”

“Imagine how you'd feel if the man you loved told you to get the fuck out of his face when you were crying because he had his arm around another girl,” I unfortunately said out loud. Hardly timely, useful, or gentle. Silence had impaired my already feeble filtering abilities. The woman opened her mouth in a sad O. “I just mean—my boyfriend makes me feel like a criminal too. And I'm not. A criminal. So, like, I know how you feel.”

After several weeks at Shirmani, I started waking up with a little prickle of fear. What was I doing with my life? It seemed that I had been HERE TO MEDITATE for long enough; wasn't I meant to experience other things, to make the best use of this trip halfway across the globe? I was in a recent war zone, assailed by humanitarian concerns. This was my chance to act on some of my depressing, lonely knowledge. I didn't know what that action would be exactly, but I was sure I shouldn't leave Sri Lanka without seeing the north, where most of the fighting had occurred. Only a couple of weeks remained before my flight home.

When I told the man in white I would be leaving for Jaffna the next day, he said, “If you are earnest, it does not matter where you go.” Idealistic words, but I trusted them. It was impossible not to, after spending time in this man's presence. But how to be that single-mindedly earnest? Even the people who had been on retreat for many years—long-term meditators, they were called—had clearly not achieved this state of constant quietness and openness, free of all expectations. Certainly they were closer than I was. But when I watched them inching along the stone pathways and taking a full minute to bring their spoons from their plates to their mouths and breaking Noble Silence only once a week to discuss the need for more toothpaste or batteries, I knew that being a long-term meditator was one more thing I was not and would probably never be. One of the long-term meditators was a Buddhist nun from England who couldn't have been more than twenty-five. She watched the sunrise in the same spot every morning, wearing the same clothes, with the same look of awe brightening her soft, round face. I envied her certainty. My personality is ill-suited to my ideals.