The Eden Express_ A Memoir of Insanity - Mark Vonnegut [47]
There was nothing at all unreal about that face. Its concreteness made the Rock of Gibraltar look like so much cotton candy. I hoped I could get enough rest simply by lying motionless. In any event, the prospect of not sleeping frightened me far less than the possibility of losing contact with the world.
The sun came up as I was lying quietly, listening to the stream. Everything seemed fine. I felt a little strung out but figured I had passed a crisis point and come through all right. I got up and started the morning chores, building the fire, getting water, starting breakfast. As I got water from the stream I paused and listened to it, smiled to myself, said, “Thanks for last night,” and carried the water back to the house.
Everything seemed just as beautiful as before but somehow the beauty was more solid, less trippy. I felt warm and good. Well, I thought, last night I paid my dues. I faced death. Now I can stay.
I thought about the things I had studied in religion, and about how much more of it seemed to make sense now. I had somehow touched what Jesus, Buddha, and others had been talking about. Formerly confusing phrases out of various scriptures came to me and each seemed perfectly beautifully clear. I became aware of a harmony and wholeness to life that had previously eluded me. Disconnectedness was very clearly illusory.
Jack had told me that according to the Zen Buddhists, after enlightenment you go back to doing whatever it was you did before—selling shoes, farming, whatever. It seemed like pretty good advice, so I tried to keep doing all the usual things I had always done around the place, cutting firewood, pruning the fruit trees, feeding the goats. But things started happening that made it increasingly difficult and finally impossible to keep functioning.
Small tasks became incredibly intricate and complex. It started with pruning the fruit trees. One saw cut would take forever. I was completely absorbed in the sawdust floating gently to the ground, the feel of the saw in my hand, the incredible patterns in the bark, the muscles in my arm pulling back and then pushing forward. Everything stretched infinitely in all directions. Suddenly it seemed as if everything was slowly down and I would never finish sawing the limb. Then by some miracle that branch would be done and I’d have to rest, completely blown out. The same thing kept happening over and over. Then I found myself being unable to stick with any one tree. I’d take a branch here, a couple there. It seemed I had been working for hours and hours but the sun hadn’t moved at all.
I began to wonder if I was hurting the trees and found myself apologizing. Each tree began to take on personality. I began to wonder if any of them liked me. I became completely absorbed in looking at each tree and began to notice that they were ever so slightly luminescent, shining with a soft inner light that played around the branches.
I’ve lost patience. I’ve lost my brakes. I’m willing to make sense as soon as the rest of the world does. There were lots of things I just plain wasn’t going to put up with any more. A lot of what I decided to chuck was my old way of doing things, my old way of being, the big part of which seemed to be patience. I was patient with this and patient with that. Patient with Virginia, patient with my parents, patient with the farm. Patient with Nixon, patient with the pulp mill, patient, patient, patient.
I figured I had taken patience about as far as it could go and it didn’t seem to be working. Nothing good seemed to come out of it. It seemed the more patient I was, the more I had to be patient with.
Sometime in the next few days I gave up food.
“Are you sure you’re not hungry, Mark? You haven’t eaten anything for the last three days.” Kathy.
I remember trying to eat some bread to make her feel better. I really wasn’t hungry. The bread had a sharply bitter taste. The texture was awful, sticking