Читать книгу Turtle Planet - Yun Rou - Страница 12

Wired for Story

I stand in meditation as I always do, in a cosmopolitan park, in the shade, near a lake, motionless as a tree, my feet shoulder-width apart, my eyes closed, my hands folded over my navel. Usually in these sessions, which I have been doing for decades, I exist in both interior and exterior worlds, my thoughts bouncing between the two. The frequency of that bouncing is not particularly related to the success of my meditation, for the idea of forcing my mind to do anything is antithetical to my tradition. I might, therefore, feel the ache in my thigh muscles from standing so long while hearing the zing of bicycle tires on the path nearby. I might feel a chill on the back of my neck because the wind has picked up while at the same time hearing the multilingual chatter of nearby park-goers. I might get a whiff of beer and notice a heavy, gauzy feeling in my palms. I might feel a drop in barometric pressure as a storm approaches while noting that my respiration has dropped to a mere two breaths per minute.

This time, I experience something new. It is a form of noticing, that’s true, but it’s noticing an absence rather than a presence. Rather than something changing, shifting, or appearing, I notice that I suddenly don’t hear anything at all. It’s as if I’ve got water in my ears, but I haven’t been swimming. It’s as if the familiar buzz of an air-conditioner or refrigerator has suddenly abated, as if during a power failure, say, leaving me with a sudden awareness of silence. It’s as if I’ve entered a sensory deprivation tank, but I have not; I’m still here, standing in the park. The silence is disorienting. Heavy. Unnerving. It makes me realize just how much I depend upon binaural hearing to locate my place in the world, to substantiate my presence in space. Honestly, it’s a bit nauseating.

To reassure myself, I open my eyes. My intention is to reground myself, to remind myself where I am, and then to close them again and resume my meditation. Instead, when I loose my lids, I find myself in a field of frosted light. There is no park. There is no lake. There are no tourists, pastoralists, or revelers. All is quiet and glowing. I blink and try again. Still nothing. I wipe my eyes. I can feel the pressure of my fingers on my lids and see the darkening my proximal flesh causes, but as soon as I stop rubbing and open my eyes again, I’m back in the silent, frosted world.

I feel a bit of panic coming on. I wonder if I’m having a stroke. I inhale deeply through my nose, hoping to pick up a whiff of something familiar or at least orienting. That’s when I realize that my sense of smell, too, has fled, or at least is offering no hint that I am any longer in my familiar park. It’s not that I smell nothing, but rather that I smell something vaguely familiar yet most definitely not the smell of my meditation park. Sighing, breathing, trying to steady myself, I focus on the pressure of the ground underfoot. There’s always feedback to be found there, even if it’s my toes being squeezed too tightly by my shoes. Usually, in this favorite spot of mine, a couple of tree roots make themselves known to me even though they are well underground. How do I usually know they’re there? Maybe it’s some energetic effusion. Maybe it’s that my weight compacts the overlying soil just enough for my sensitive monk’s feet to feel them. In any case, this time they are not there. In fact, the ground underneath feels slippery, hard, unyielding.

In fact, it feels wet. I open my eyes again, look down, and see that I’m standing in water up to the level of my calves. My monk’s slippers, along with my white leggings and the bottom hem of black robes, are wet. Not knowing what else to do, I start to walk. That in itself is a first. I’ve meditated in the rain before, accepted being a bit sodden rather than break my mental momentum, but actually moving while in a meditative trance has only happened when I was doing tai chi, and in that case, I was very much in the waking world. After a few steps, I discover I’m headed up some kind of rise. I proceed using a martial arts technique called inch-stepping, in which I lift the front foot and slide forward, propelled by the rear. Keeping my weight on my back foot this way, I minimize the risk of slipping on the smooth surface below me.

This seems to go on for a while, and as it does, I don’t think about the spiritual transmissions of Daoist immortals to deserving sages. Instead, I just wonder where I am and wonder again, at least fleetingly, if I’m perhaps suffering a stroke. I’ve heard that pathological cerebral events can cause this kind of synesthesia, this kind of strange experience. Maybe, it occurs to me, no time has passed at all and nothing has actually happened other than the strangling of the blood supply to some tiny portion of my brain.

It’s at the end of those thoughts that I suddenly realize where I am. I’m not in the park, but neither am I in Stroke Land. I am, in fact, standing inside one of those little plastic turtle bowls that used to be sold at the circus (along with baby turtles) or featured in the back of Mad Magazine, National Lampoon, or comic books I used to read, right alongside brine shrimp billed as “Sea Monkeys.” The difference is, obviously, that it’s a bowl big enough for me to stand in, and it features, I now see, a monk-sized plastic palm tree. I experience a small frisson of excitement. This, truly, is a new level of meditative experience for me.

It is when I relax into my surroundings that I see a turtle snoozing beneath the plastic palm. She raises a white eyelid and regards me.

“Finally and at last,” she says in a twee voice.

I recognize her to be a red-eared slider, the most common and widespread of all the world’s turtles, and precisely the one most people put into these little plastic houses before eventually flushing them, dead or dying, down the toilet. Her carapace is green. Her plastron, reflected in the plastic below us, is bright yellow with dark figures. They might be intertwining Renaissance-painting nudes.

“What is this? What’s going on?”

“You’re a Daoist seeker, are you not? A monk?”

“I am.”

“And you have questions that burn in you and a desire for both deeper and broader understanding of how things are?”

“I do.”

“And you’re familiar with spirit-writing? With the phenomenon of receiving transmissions, via trances or travels, from enlightened immortals, and then sharing the information?”

I am momentarily thunderstruck. “You’re saying—”

“Yes, yes,” the slider says impatiently. “It’s happening to you.”

“But I thought—”

“What, that you’d rise up on a cloud to a heavenly garden and eat peaches with bent-over old men? There are many immortals besides the proverbial eight, you know, and we appear in different forms according to what is expected, according to what will get the job done.”

I feel a tremendous joy arise in me. “Is this really true?”

“As true a transmission as any,” the slider answers. “The first, but not the last for you.”

“How many will there be?”

“Are you sure you want to know that? Wouldn’t you rather live in the moment, never knowing when another will happen, preserving a state of joyous expectation for the rest of your life?”

“Never mind how many,” I say.

“What I will tell you is that we immortals will all come to you in the forms of turtles. At least for now.”

I find a dry spot on the hard, clear plastic under the tree and sit down next to her. “Here?” I ask. “In this plastic bowl? I’ll receive all my transmissions here?”

“That would be boring. Besides, this sterile, plastic world is a terrible place.”

I shift positions, trying to get comfortable but unable to manage it. At every angle, something unyielding seems to find a soft spot in me, a buttock, a hip, an ankle, a knee. “It is,” I say. “I hate plastic. When I wear plastic shoes, my feet sweat. Drinking from plastic bottles makes me feel vaguely off. And it’s so hard to get comfortable here.”

“Don’t I know it. Turtles have their hard parts, but they have their soft parts, too. Imagine the millions of us who suffered such a cruel fate over the decades they were sold along with these terrible plastic prisons.”

“You’re saying all turtles are immortals?”

“Don’t be dull. Among the famous human Eight Immortals (we immortals inhabiting turtle bodies think those eight are overrated, by the way) there was one who was transgender, another who was a poet, another a warrior, another a cripple. Does that mean all such people are immortals? We appear as we must to those who need us. Anyway, I’m the one we turtle immortals agreed would be the first to meet you and explain that our transmissions to you are going to be in story form.”

“Story form? I haven’t heard of that before.”

The slider does a classic turtle stretch, spreading her claws and extending her neck and limbs to show the beautiful patterns of her skin including the oblong, tell-tale red patches behind her ears.

“If you’re referring to tradition, I remind you that story is what distinguishes human beings from so many other creatures and has been an essential part of your biology since your very early days. Long before there was what you call Daoism, your ancestors would sit around fires and share tales of nature and of doom, of excitement and sex and kindship and war. Those tales established what you call archetypes, the building blocks of your culture, those ideas and values and principles that you all handed down from one generation to another, mostly inside clans, even before there was any kind of writing. In those archetypes were to be found the rules that made your societies work, along with the paragons and saints, sinners, too, who served as models for what to do and not to do, how to live and how not to live. Stories in those days were consummately relevant to the listeners. They addressed everyone’s hopes and fears and desires, their longing to believe they went on after dying. Storytelling was the chief means of bonding when bonding meant survival, when the only other thing worth doing was to make babies or hunt food or sit quietly and observe the unfolding of nature.”

“So is that what we’re doing now? Bonding?”

“We’re preparing you to accept the transmissions to follow. The lessons. You’ll soon discover that each session will not only have a different message and content but will unfold in a unique and interesting way for you. Don’t get me wrong. They may be challenging, but that is the nature of spirit work.”

“You’re taking about spirit-writing.”

“Yes. And I’m only here to remind you of the power of the narrative you will derive from your experiences and share. Narratives define reality for human beings. If you lose your narrative, you lose everything, and the ultimate source of narrative—the wellspring that is always there for you no matter how lost you think you are—is nature. Despite widespread fantasies about a cloud-sitting beard-stroker running the show, nature is actually all there is, all there ever has been, and all there ever will be.”

“Very Daoist,” I say.

“Yes, indeed.”

“Would you tell me where we are?” I ask. “This plastic place? You must have chosen it for some reason.”

“You really don’t know?”

I frown. I don’t know quite what she means.

The slider sees my confusion. “You had it for a moment,” she says. “You recognized the smell.”

Once again, as I did a few minutes ago, I inhale deeply. There is something there. Something familiar. Not one odor but a complex. I search my memory. My grandmother’s potato knishes? Carpet soap? Furniture oil? A shaving cream I used at puberty, something special that my father gave me that numbed my tender young skin against the razor? Just as I’m beginning to puzzle it all out, a shadow appears between me and the turtle, cast by whatever source of light illuminates this place. The shadow moves, resolving first into the head of a wolf, then a dancing chicken, then the jaws of a crocodile spread across the sky above me, then the tall ears of a prancing rabbit, and finally, double-sized, a flying, predatory dinosaur with a probing, fearsome head.

“Someone’s making hand animals,” I say.

The Red-ear’s beak does its best imitation of a smile. “And who do you suppose it is?”

I see the boy right before I answer. He’s charmingly buck-toothed, with bright, kind eyes and long eyelashes, a generous nose, thin lips, and a thatch of thick, black, much-missed hair. He’s humming as he makes the hand animals, and, before long, he’s crooning a Bob Dylan tune. I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans. His voice isn’t bad. In fact, it’s rather good. On pitch. Strong. I take some pride in it, because he is me—perhaps half a century ago.

“Remember anything?” the Red-ear asks.

“Of course. I’ve always loved that song.”

When the boy bends closer, the world behind him resolves into my childhood bedroom, the first place where I kept and loved turtles. The white bookshelves are there, full of books about animals, and there are photos, my own, of salamanders, frogs, snakes, and landscapes that calm me. Since I’m obviously in my boyhood home, all those smells now make perfect sense.

“Do you remember that it was your allergy to animals with hair that first drew you to turtles as pets?”

“Of course I remember. I’ve got a Mexican hairless dog now.”

“You killed a lot of your turtles,” says the Red-ear. “Some died of lack of calcium, their shells paper thin. You flushed them down the toilet. Others died because you kept them too cold, and they never ate quite enough. One died because you thought he had escaped, didn’t realize he was buried in the dirt, put the tank away, and let him waste to nothing in your clothes closet. You killed some more when you used too much poison, or the wrong kind, when trying to rid them of parasites.”

“Stop,” I say.

“A few burned in that accident where you left scalding hot water running while they teetered in Tupperware on the edge of the sink. That was the worst. They suffered so much. And you. You cried and cried.”

I find myself crying now, even as the young version of me continues to sing. Tears for the animals nobody cares about, tears for all the turtles dead on the road, tears for the ones that ended up in my own toilet, tears for my own ignorance of what my pets needed, tears for not understanding their needs, feelings, and worlds.

“Please,” I say.

“None of it was intentional,” says the turtle. “We know that or we wouldn’t be here. We know how much you love our kind.”

I let out an anguished howl. “I’m so sorry! I didn’t know better! I’ve spent thousands of hours taking care of turtles since and I’ve done a much better job!”

“We know that, too. You’ve redeemed yourself a bit, and this spirit-writing will redeem you further.”

Together, we watch the boy with all that beautiful hair dance around his bedroom, circling the little plastic lagoon in which we huddle. I think about how fleeting life is, and how we can do nothing with the days we have but take care of each other and live in daily, hourly, minute-by-minute grateful appreciation of nature.

“What do I need to do to make it happen?” I ask.

“Stand in meditation. Wait patiently. One of us will appear. Each visit will be different.”

“What can I expect to happen?”

“Well, all we really know of all those famous episodes of spirit-writing is the result. Neither of us was there for the process. We don’t actually know what went on between the immortal and the sage, between the deity and his or her recorder. We can presume to know, figure there was a vision or a voice or some other kind of visceral experience, but in truth we have no idea.”

“That doesn’t really help me prepare.”

“Ok, how about this? In some visits, a turtle immortal will tell you things you need to know by speaking of them directly. In others, the teacher will show you the lesson. And in other cases, you will be learning or living right along with your teacher. How’s that?”

“Not very specific,” I say, half worried and half excited.

“But you agree?”

“Oh, I agree,” I say. “In fact, I’m honored.”

“As you should be,” says the Red-ear. “Writing the things you will write is the Daoist path to immortality.”

“That sounds great,” I say, “but I actually want to help turtles.”

Yet because my old bedroom has quickly gone fuzzy, and I am back in my meditation park, I’m not entirely certain she hears me.