Sacred Mountains
Brendon IJ McLeod
I often warm to the notion expressed by so many world religions of sacred mountains. To some extent the concepts of metaphor and allegory begin to crumble precisely at the moment that some prophet or god is said to have stood on the pinnacle of the mountain that brims with such holy mana, a mana that is literally tangible in the might of the mountain. Modes of being and knowing are taken out of the abstraction of the institutions where they are pondered and a strange magnetism, which we feel in the iron of our blood, draws us to something numinous, something those who suffer unenlightenment deny exist.
On a major highway in a major regional centre, between the big chain liquor store and the police station, lived Corey Wakefield, sometime musician and uninitiated shaman, (or—perhaps it is more prudent to say that experiences with psychedelics, tantric sex, trance states from musical jams and physical labour, as well as meditation and communing with spirit, had caused him to view the world in more divisible and at once unified terms, that his sense of the lack of importance, and at once the supreme importance of every event had led him to a vague notion of the dualistic superimposition, but not yet the integrated dialectical system of truly practicing shamanism) who had once had a vision of a rotating yin-yang which seemed to him to last for an hour, but was informed that it had only been two and a half minutes.
This was back when I had been a gronk myself. I had asked him via messenger if he could sort me out for a fifty, or even just a stick, on tick, because because I was going through it. His roommate, apparently, had heard of the deal by the time I arrived with the cash, and had chastised him. By this stage in Corey’s life I understood him to be waning in his once legendary sexual prowess, nearing forty and still a regular doper, drinker, toker, and smoker. He would not let me leave without talking to me first. He insisted the exchange happen not in the safety of his living room, but on the front veranda where he could smoke a durrie and talk to me. He expressed some regret about youthful misdemeanours, sneaking out of school, vandalism, things like that. He told me the junkies had tried to turn the old abandoned gasworks into a rocket. He told me that he wanted to climb mount Kailash.
Now, before the time at which I began to research esoteric knowledge which I was in a constant ethical struggle about whether or not such a search would draw me nearer or further from my Almighty Good Creator, a search perhaps facilitated by or influenced by the herb, I did not have any idea what Corey was talking about. I asked him to explain and it seemed he began to describe a chasm in the centre of a magnetic rock in the Himalayas, where he wanted to go to ‘get back to his roots.’ I asked him if he had ethnic heritage from the Himalayas—his face was browned, his nose was prominent, I possessed a respectful and uncertain curiosity and perhaps confusion, and Corey merely told me that the roots he was talking about were spiritual roots, roots that involved his participation in Samsara as a deliberate sufferer of the illusions of reality, and that thus his true mission was as an ascended Bodhisattva. I didn’t know what he was talking about. Years later, I found that climbing Mount Kailash, which is sacred to Shiva and his holy family, is impossible, and many climbers have died in the attempt. Even circumnavigation of the peak, an established pilgrimage, is perilous to the extent that people who set out regularly do not return.
Philosophically I was on another mountain. I was on Sinai. I had so consistently accused myself of unforgivable sin that I was beginning to believe it. The predominant evidence of such sin was present in the data I am sure they were saving with earmarks of condemnation from the posts and comments on my social media accounts. I made memes. I would grow upset about people who didn’t understand me or where I was coming from, and because I was so overwhelmed by the guilt of drunken misdemeanours and soul mistakes, which I turned inward as punishment, I argued with the impotent verbal violence of one whose soul was in grave danger, I made light of other people’s suffering out of ignorance, I lecherously begged for sexual healing, which sent the ladies running, screaming. I frequently suffered mutes and bans from groups. How would Moses, who received the formidable system of ethics known as the Torah, whose people have struggled with conceiving and misconceiving sin and justice ever since, say I should atone for the consequences of my self-loathing and drug addiction? Sacrifice.
At one of those occasions for inebriation that passed for parties at the house of a girl on whom I was crushing hard, in a ‘my ancestors would weep’ sort of way, I discovered more about the life story of Corey Wakefield. I had shown up stoned, and about an hour and a half early. Not realising that this was a faux pas for cocktail parties, I knocked on the door, and when it was opened, I cracked some jokes and made my way into the living room, where our hostess pulled a bong, and said half with mumbling in the chamber and half with telepathy, I can read minds. Thinking myself somewhat proficient in telepathy, I echoed mentally: Oh, you can read minds? I want to fuck you! and repeated it, in my selfish foolishness. She, overwhelmed, perhaps by my telepathic message, perhaps by the strength of the herb, fell, collapsed, onto the other end of the same couch as me, but, decidedly, not seductively. She looked as though she were freaking out, which was another thing with which I had had a distinct amount of experience. I knew that a conversation would not be possible. I asked her if she had been smoking before this, and she said she had. I asked her if there were beers in the fridge and if she wanted a cigarette, and she said she did, but not yet. So I took a draught and rolled a dart, and smoked it on the back veranda and heard people begin to arrive, but, chained by my cigarette, I could not go greet them. The cigarette was pulling very slowly, I had rolled it too tight. But my obsession caused me to need to smoke it to the nub, for it was compulsion that was why I was drugging my senses beyond comprehension, and for it I was estranged from the social life of the party.
Later in the evening, she asked me and some others if I knew Corey Wakefield. The others did not but I said I did. She told me that she used to sleep with him, and that when she was at his house, there was always a sheet of acid on the table, and that people would tear off pieces at will and dose. He used to have friends, she said, who would greet them by bashing on the door with a firm knock and yelling: B—— Police. They always used to have the screen door shut and the wooden door wide open, so the noise and threat of such a greeting, for the first couple of times, was somewhat frightening. Eventually, they stopped caring. One night, they heard a knock on the door. B—— Police. To which they responded: Come in you wankers, it’s open. Silence, until, B—— Police. Open up. Again, they called Are you mutton jeff, dickheads? Come in and stop fuckin’ around. Silence, until, B—— Police. Open up. That was how Corey got a criminal record. Do you love him? I asked. Everyone around the coffee table told me that that was an inappropriate question to ask and that I was being rude for asking it.
I was reading Molloy with a schooner at a hotel which backed onto the carpark for the local Coles and smelled, as indeed the whole city did, of car exhaust and burning rubber, when I heard a number of young men who looked old before their time, wearing dirty, muted earth-tones, brown, green, mustard, grey, whose matted hair, ashen-expressions and calloused hands expressed sorrow, poverty, but not indigence, rather hard work. I was distracted by their conversation from Beckett’s pettifogging and quibbling (though I later discerned he did seem to tackle the big questions), and while my eyes pretended to move along the page I was really listening to what they were saying. I could tell that indeed they had worn high-vis, but that most of their labour was in painting and carpentry of the superficial edificial construction kind, and also in scaffolding. Why was I interested in their conversation? I could not place it. I had been initially distracted, and I had learned from experience it was best to follow threads which drew the attraction of my soul until I was repulsed by them in some way, at which point, if I was then at liberty to do so, I would abandon it. They began talking about music, and how they were playing for a recording of a psychedelic Celtic folk-rock outfit who recorded in a farmhouse at Flat Rock, which was barely a village. I understood that this was the reason my soul drew me to this conversation. They started talking about Corey, as he had been on some of the early takes of the album but was unavailable to lend his guitar playing to the later tracks, and they left it ambiguous as to why it was that he had done so. At this point my interest was reaching its zenith, so I, broke and honestly fanging, went over and introduced myself politely, and asked for a durry, to which one of them presented me with my a pouch and asked me if I knew how to roll. By this question I was slightly pleased that my debauchery had not wizened me yet, and slightly offended that I looked such a greenhorn as to be unable to roll. I pushed past this mild offence and casually mentioned that I had overheard them talking about Corey, and asked them if they knew where he was. I had not seen him in months and he would not respond to my messages.
They had told me the last time that they saw Corey there had been a falling out. I had had my back turned to them, and I instantly recognised the one of the three men who was telling the story as a player for a few grades above me on the association football team I had played on, the Goats. Saying he was a few grades above me should not suggest he was a good player, I had played in the lowest grade, and my training primarily consisted of a hard run, then a couple of donkeybutt gaspers, then a kick to kick, then off to the pub. I noticed from the smell that his teeth were rotting.
The falling out was of the following nature. They had been clearing bramble bushes on Mount W——, just out of B——, their hometown, a mountain that is sacred to the local Aboriginal people, the W———. In the last few weeks they had been using poison which stained their hands pink and now they were pulling the dead brambles away. They used gloves which went all the way up their arms, but they were still getting stung with the thorns. Those who had not shown up stained by the poison were looked down on by the others. Corey was one of those marked, and he was filled with the most vicious distain for the newcomers. But all of them were to suffer the thorns. They cried in pain. There was some divergence of opinion after this point in the telling of the story. The one who was telling the story said that Corey had become fed up with the painful and unpleasant labour, and was interrupted by one of his friends saying that no, he had found a rare, endangered lizard known as the B—— Dragon, and began protesting that they were disturbing its habitat. The third man, who had not been there, said that they were clearing a noxious weed. Anyway, Corey apparently began yelling, and other people were mocking him, then arguing with him, and Corey ranted and raved in indignation, he brought up his parents’ divorce, his brief homelessness, and eventually claimed to be an avatar of Shiva. To which one of the men who were there had googled: does Shiva have avatars, which resulted in the answer: No. He stormed off, scorning the bus, walking down the mountain into town, and was never seen again.
By now I was on Gethsemane. Soon I would be on Golgotha. I was meditating, pondering this truth, but I had not yet accepted it. I knew that suffering and sin were part of man’s divinity, because Creator God had suffered and died and rose again to life, and that divinity and humanity was another dualistic tension we held within ourselves. That even habitual sin, sexual selfishness, drink driving, drug addiction, were things that made us divine, with certain conditions. They are sin, if we try not to do them, we are divine. But we suffer them, we suffer because of them, they are a suffering we undergo, and by that suffering we unite ourselves to God. God wants to heal our suffering. We have to hold many dualisms in our beings to embody that unity—human, divine; pain, joy; living, dying. Holding dualism in yourself is agony. God is one, and whole.
I looked up the same question about Shiva’s avatars. It turns out he does not have avatars, he has descents. I looked up the meaning of the word avatar. It means descent. At a party, Corey’s roommate, who thought, rightly, that I was a dipstick, told me later that he had abandoned his contract on the lease and flown to India. He had apparently whispered something about the Himalayas, as though it was too sacred to speak out loud. To love we must suffer for the beloved, for the beloved suffers, and by that unity the beloved comes and lives in us. I can tell from the way she looked at her shoes that she loved Corey. Everyone does. I can only hope that Corey is in the cavern of the ascended sages within Mount Kailash, smoking Ganja and achieving moksha and sainthood and no longer in pain of the world, but I know that that is not possible, that experiencing more perfectly the pain of the world is the true way we unite ourselves to the divine. Still I wonder if he felt that love.
