Oliver Benjamin
CHAPTER 10
He who has need of knowledge about the inner life
Cannot be hindered,
But must be helped in his search.
He will be continually reading books and asking questions
Of those who are learned.
He will always be feeling
About the perfectness of death.
Sometimes he will travel around
Meditating quietly in wild places,
Searching for a message from God.
from CLIFFORD GEERTZ’Religion of Java
1. Fish Meal
Yak sat on the beach, washed over by the white noise of the waves,
the din of Roy and Sprout’s lovemaking having driven him from the
house. To his ears their frenzied engagement sounded like a battle, as
if they were struggling to wrest something from each other. A
collision of forces, followed by gross depletion, detente, and then a
gradual rearming which led to a fresh conflagration or two. Yet no
matter how hard they struggled the borders of their territories would
remain forever unchanged.
Many called this love. So had he once, briefly. Loving another
human being intensely was no different in his mind than loving a
country; someday you would have to fight to stem its loss, corrupt it,
sacrifice your ideals and ultimately be cast into an exile. He was no
robot; he loved—enormously, in fact. But broadly now, diffused,
unspecific. The way he had loved the world as a youth.
It had been easy for him to live that way in Java, a place to which
he could never truly belong, a territory beyond consequence. But as
Roy once reminded him, it was easy to be a holy man on top of a
mountain. He had come to Los Angeles to see if he could truly be a
holy man in hell.
It had not been so hard at the beginning. Now suddenly there
was turmoil everywhere: attachment, fear, greed and temptation.
And of course, the girl. Desire had come back into his world.
He had trained himself not to react to beauty, to tread the middle
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