June 26
Who are you, U.G.? What is going to happen?
This last journal entry comes from the following summer in Gstaad, in 1991. It represents a turning point, a moment of truth. At that time I was no longer staying in Chalet Sunbeam with U.G., but in a studio in Shonried, a nearby village.
6 p.m. Have just been thrown out again, for the third time today. First off this morning I ran into U.G. downtown at the post office. He showed me some letters from India, one of them from Poornachandra Rao who said, "You are my life," and, "Your health is our wealth," and other (what U.G. calls) sentimental things. But U.G. says they are sincere, these Indians, that these things come from the heart. While everything I say, he says, is false, phony.
It's a losing game for me. I'm almost out of steam, out of tricks. He says all I can do for him is to leave, to get out, to go back to New York, go to the island, bake bread, take care of my mother. It's such a koan, such a condemnation.
I drove to Zweissimin and bought the pineapple juice he had asked for. I brought it back to him, ready to leave immediately but he made lunch and we ate together. After lunch I did the dishes, and then when he went for a rest, I took a walk in Gsteig. Didn't make it all the way up the mountain because I was alone, not a soul to be seen, the trail was steep and slippery. I was scared. Didn't feel I needed to conquer this fear, it was well-founded.
I stopped by U.G.'s on my way home, and went on, at his encouragement, to Simmenthal, to see another waterfall. Beautiful but too many people. So I walked up to the bottom of it, looked at it for a while, then returned to my place and took a shower.
Went over to U.G.'s at 5 p.m., and he immediately blasted me, saying he absolutely wants me to get out of here, to go away, he doesn't know how to get this across to me, to convince me. He says I am disgusting and horrible, the worst person he has ever known. I left and walked sadly through town, and came home to hang up wash. Am going for a short walk and then will call him and see if he has softened. But I have to be ready to leave, to go away. He doesn't want me here.
At 7 p.m. I called and no, he had not softened. He said he didn't want to see me today, that I could call in the morning. I didn't even feel that much resistance. Mostly it is just the idea of having a whole evening on my hands, but I realize that is a paltry reason for being with U.G. I have plenty to do to keep busy, my computer, a book, letters, the telephone, laundry. What is that but living your life, anyway? I'm doing it here, or wherever I am.
Now, later at night and I'm beginning to see in a different way. It may be that he is right about me, that I am vicious and arrogant and disgusting and dishonest (with myself). That I am trying to be other than I am, to do things I can't and don't want to do. I have some image of how I should be, how U.G. wants me to be, and I am trying to live up to that. Trying to be silent and passive when he tells me to shut up. And to not care about money, to be generous to a fault.
I think about money all the time, try to figure out my relation to it, how I should handle it, what it means. I try to use money to get what I want. And here, of course, with U.G., it doesn't work. Nothing works here. None of my strategies. My strategies to be other than as I am. And what am I? Perhaps I am just those things he says I am, all those unpleasant adjectives.
I am headstrong, opinionated and want to get my own way! And I am frustrated, here, because I can't. U.G. can’t be pressured or bought. Forget it. It's a relief. Maybe I am not really that interested in liberation, in becoming free and throwing away the past. Otherwise it would happen spontaneously. I am, as U.G. says, more interested in holding onto what I have.
To say to U.G. that being with him is the most important thing to me is just not true, he says, because if it was, everything would be easy for me, I would just drop all bogus ideas and attachments without a backward glance. But I think twice, thrice about everything and then regret, rethink.
He is right, U.G., and I might just as well admit it to him, to myself, and to the world. I don't want to give up these limitations, they are me, precious me. I like my dependencies and weaknesses and addictions. For they are me. My paranoid mind is me. I would rather suffer and worry than just drop those thoughts Now, right now.
Earlier today I begged U.G. to help me, squirming in an agony of despair and confusion.
"I am helping you by telling you to go back to New York," he said quietly.
He means that. I have no place with him. My place is with my attachments until they are gone. U.G. has been patient beyond any reasonable expectation. What an abominable misuse of his energy and power, my petty concerns and insecurities, wanting company, something to do. God.
Perhaps this will be the last entry, who knows. This morning my crazy, impetuous, desperate nature surfaced with all its potency. U.G. had told me to call him at 9, but I couldn’t wait that long. At 8:30 instead I called him, no answer. I immediately felt he had left and gone to Zurich. I was desperate, wounded, abandoned, dejected. Drove right to his place and found the curtains drawn, the door locked. Knowing I was doing the unmentionable, I went inside by the back door anyway, just to know for sure. There were his shoes.
I didn't know if he had left or not. I went down to the village and paced around until just before 9. Looking up the hill I saw that the curtains were now open. I called him exactly at 9 from the pay phone and he said, "You get out. The price for this is too high for you." And he hung up.
Mortified and aghast, I drove up to his place anyway, though I had been told to stay away. He was like ice, eating his breakfast, telling me it's over, get out, go back to New York, bake bread on the island. He said, "If you really wanted this, no power in the world could stop you, no guilt or worries about the children, nothing."
"Here everything will be destroyed. You don't want that."
I pleaded and threw dramatic acts, apologized, begged for another chance, a perfect idiot. He said, "You are not a coward, but you are a liar, a cheat, a fraud." A cheat because I say I want to be with him more than anything, then don't deliver.
Finally, after a ridiculous length of time, I left. He said, "First, go." And that first gave me a shred of hope. But I'm pretty convinced that that is just his syntax and my mind trying to make something positive and hopeful out of it.
I'm resigned to leaving. Probably should go to New York and see what happens. If I want to be with U.G. more than anything, everything else will just drop away, there won't be a struggle. If I don't want it, I will learn from this and see.
Will go for a walk and see how I feel at the end of it.
~ ~
Right after that last paragraph, suddenly I called U.G. and said, "Okay, I will call British Airways tomorrow. I will go." In a flash I had seen that I have no choice, that I can't fight him or myself any longer. I asked him if he wanted me to take the extra thousand dollars in Swiss Francs so I can send a check to Moorty, as he had asked me to do.
"Yes," said U.G. "Come in the evening."
"What time?" I asked.
"Five," he replied.
So I set out on a marvelous walk carrying an umbrella because it rains off and on, walked to Turbach from Gstaad, covering J.K.'s old pathways. But this time, I went off on my own, alone, taking paths I had not been on before, risking getting lost, not wanting to return the way I had come, no turning back.
And I felt at peace in the mountains, alone with myself, glad no one else was there with me. The first time I have felt this wild, free roaming instinct.
When I returned after nearly three hours, I was hungry and drove up to Hornberg and ordered rosti and apple cider in the restaurant, completely enshrouded in fog, like Maine. Again I felt good alone, not self-conscious, nothing. Just the way it was, and my aloneness was satisfactory.
I can't say that I don't hold out some hope of being allowed to stay when I go over there tonight. I don't want to go back to New York. But this is not U.G.'s problem. I see very clearly that if I hold onto anything, money, property, ideas about things, even one cent, I cannot be with him. The price is high indeed and I don't know if I have the resources, inner and outer. He assures me I don't.
But we'll see. Part of me feels ready to go for broke, to give up everything, to see everything destroyed, the other part can't fathom what that means.
"Everything will be destroyed," he said to me this morning, warning me away. The price is very high.
I realized, sitting on a bench at the end of my walk, overlooking the valley and the swirling clouds in the sky, that I was sitting there waiting to realize something, waiting for a sign of some kind, waiting to find a message somewhere, somehow, a modification of my understanding that I have to go away from U.G. But then I realized that there was nothing to realize, nothing was going to happen, nothing would become clear. Or the moment it did, it would be superceded by another thought, an alternative of some kind. This is the way my mind works, period.
So, I said to myself, just get up from the bench, get off the bench, go on, there is no going back, no returning over bridges, they have all been burned.
If he says go to New York, go to New York. Do as he says. If you have given him everything and he says sell Maine, it is his, sell it. Do the necessary. Don't be an Indian Giver. Particularly not to an Indian.
Over and out.
~ ~
No, not over and out until it's over. It's midnight, and it may well be over, but I don't even know what that means unless I kill myself.
I spent the evening with U.G., programming the Word Tank, trying to show him how to use it, having spaghetti with him, doing the dishes afterwards. But he didn't let me off the hook for a moment, insisting I go tomorrow. "Go to New York, go to the island, bake bread."
I don't know what to do, am out of ideas and strategies, freaked out. He mentioned Australia tonight and what he had said to me then, and I re-read the diaries from that time a year and a half ago. Nothing has changed, really, except that he is telling me to go now, he wasn't then. Then he said it was up to me, I could go, he wouldn't stop me. Now he says I have to go, it's not up to me. It's up to him. So he must mean it. He does mean it.
I think I can't be with him until I have unloaded Maine, until it is sold. That's terrifying to me, it could take a long time to do it. How can I hurry it up? What can I do?
U.G. also said to me in Australia that the person who was with him could not be answerable to anyone else, and in that sense I still have work to do. As long as I have this money coming from S. in the form of a handout, not legal and binding, I am answerable. People monitor my business, my spending.
I gave him my little radio/tape deck. He said I should keep it until I leave, and I said if I have to leave tomorrow he might as well have it.
I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do. I don't want to leave him.
He asked me a 'why' question tonight, something he didn't really want an answer to, and he said, "The Void doesn't need an answer." It was a definition of himself that I haven't heard before, that he is the Void. Then he said there are other 'why' questions to which he does want an answer. What on earth does he mean?
July 15
Well, I'm humiliated and head deep in my own shit. But I'm glad, in a way, and I can hear U.G.'s voice saying "You had it coming to you."
Yes I did. It has taken a long time. And it all hinges on money, just as U.G. said everything does. But I, arrogant, deluded, self-righteous, I thought I was different. I thought that I was generous and not hung up on money, though U.G. has been berating me with the opposite view for well over a year now. I thought I was better than others, all those mean, petty people.
And I thought this, really, in my heart of hearts even though U.G. has told me (and everyone else) again and again, that I am mean, petty and cheap.
But today was the real show-down. This morning I arrived at 9 and instantly became lulled into false security. He asked me about my room, and I said I could stay or go, that I had paid the phone bills and the taxes, but that I could have it on a daily basis. He said this is a rough life for anyone, but especially for me, with my tendencies. That I am just phony through and through.
We went down to the village together, I to mail a check to Moorty, covering the Swiss francs U.G. has given me, and the check that bounced for the Indian phone bill. We walked peaceably through town, then returned to the chalet, where U.G. said, "I haven't changed my mind, you still have to go." At the coop we bought four yogurts and he asked me if I was leaving. "No," I said, thinking that perhaps it is just that simple, all I have to do is say I am staying here. Imagine.
He asked me to do some wash for him before going, so I went to my place. And while the machine was going, suddenly I had the inspiration to write a letter of intent, giving all my money to U.G. on July 27th, the day of my astrology prediction that he will get lots of money. Here is the letter:
LETTER OF INTENT
I do hereby state that it is my heartfelt desire to give all of my assets to my friend U.G. Krishnamurti on (and thereafter) July 27, 1991. These assets and any income derived therefrom are his to do with as he wishes, with no conditions.
This decision has been taken in sound mind (insofar as that exists) and body, and must be executed according to whatever legalities are necessary and appropriate.
I owe U.G. Krishnamurti my life, and hereby confer it to his keeping.
Signed,
Shonried, Switzerland
July 21, 1991
At the time it seemed sincere. I really thought I was ready to give him everything, that this was the radical move required of me to stay with him, that he would only take from the one who was with him, from no one else, and this had to be me. How smug, arrogant of me! Valentine's gesture had been held up to me so many times, how she just turned over everything to U.G., with no thought to herself. I felt a gesture of that magnitude was called for.
I returned to U.G.'s place and hung up his wash with him. Then he called me to lunch, a delicious Gnocchi alla Romana he called it, made by him, and he had set the table nicely with our places rather unusually close together, conspiratorially. I fell into the trap, and felt he knew about my letter, approved, and was perhaps even touched.
After I finished the dishes, I told him I had drafted a letter of intent, that I was a little afraid to give it to him because of what he said about Parveen Babi trying to buy him with dollar bills, that this was such a sensitive time for me that it would look like I also was trying to buy him.
Well. He got his glasses and read the letter. Then he began to laugh. He said this one is going to go in the biography. This will be sent all over the world. The paper this was written on isn’t even good enough for toilet paper. Now, he said, I have a good reason to tell you to leave. He laughed, but there was wrath behind the smile.
I knew I was doomed, though I too laughed about it. He told me to leave. I said I would go take a walk.
I went back to Turbach, but my mind wasn't on the glorious mountains, except fleetingly. Instead it worked over the not so pretty inner landscape, and dished up some real filth. Many things began to dawn on me. It's as if the game is at last being played out, the last act of Deathtrap of the Mind. I began to see that he had possibly not taken anything from me in fact, that he had probably kept very careful count of every penny I spent over the two years and that perhaps he intended to throw it back at me after this transgression. I was burning with this realization, that I who have kept such careful count in my way (though I deny heatedly that I keep tabs, try to pretend that I spend as if it were someone else's money, as Adri put it), have been upstaged by U.G. who also has, and that he will not keep a penny because my money is tainted. It has a price tag.
I felt I had seen through the whole thing, that my own meanness and pettiness was obvious, and there was nothing I could do but accept it, there and then. That any humiliation I would suffer over the letter I had coming to me. In a way I no longer cared.
When I went to his house at 4, after the walk and a shower, there was a Dutch fellow there who had come to see U.G. in Amsterdam. I sat down and listened quietly. Then a French couple came. Later I had supper with U.G. and all was peaceful.
Then I told him about my realization, and he exploded. "You have seen, understood nothing. But that's what you wish would happen, that I return this money."
I demurred. Then he told me to get out, that I had no place with him. That he was going away the next day (he had said this to the others too), that he didn't need me to drive him, that I should go, and not to call or come back the next day, that I absolutely had to check out of my room. That he wouldn't go away until he knew I was gone.
I went through the most intense struggle at night, my mind burning, burning. There was no way out. I had to check out, I couldn't go to his place, I couldn't call. There was no strategy possible. I couldn’t sleep, had not slept in nights, my night death terrors back with a vengeance.
In the morning, I numbly packed up and moved out, leaving money with the concierge. I went to U.G.'s at 7:30, daring to enter and told him immediately that I had checked out, I had my stuff in the car.
He was fierce, telling me over and over again that I had to go, had to get out.
Finally I agreed. And the tone changed, suddenly. He became gentle, friendly. He told me I had to be firm with my family, stand up for what I want, that I had to do this for myself, not for him.
When I got ready to go, we were both laughing (can't remember what about) and he shook my hand (giving me energy). He said, "I am still your friend." I was choked up, a little teary. He came up to the parking area to see me off, told me to call him from Geneva. I was rummaging around in my bags looking for a last chocolate bar to try to give to him, and when I turned around, he was gone.
6 p.m. Have just been thrown out again, for the third time today. First off this morning I ran into U.G. downtown at the post office. He showed me some letters from India, one of them from Poornachandra Rao who said, "You are my life," and, "Your health is our wealth," and other (what U.G. calls) sentimental things. But U.G. says they are sincere, these Indians, that these things come from the heart. While everything I say, he says, is false, phony.
It's a losing game for me. I'm almost out of steam, out of tricks. He says all I can do for him is to leave, to get out, to go back to New York, go to the island, bake bread, take care of my mother. It's such a koan, such a condemnation.
I drove to Zweissimin and bought the pineapple juice he had asked for. I brought it back to him, ready to leave immediately but he made lunch and we ate together. After lunch I did the dishes, and then when he went for a rest, I took a walk in Gsteig. Didn't make it all the way up the mountain because I was alone, not a soul to be seen, the trail was steep and slippery. I was scared. Didn't feel I needed to conquer this fear, it was well-founded.
I stopped by U.G.'s on my way home, and went on, at his encouragement, to Simmenthal, to see another waterfall. Beautiful but too many people. So I walked up to the bottom of it, looked at it for a while, then returned to my place and took a shower.
Went over to U.G.'s at 5 p.m., and he immediately blasted me, saying he absolutely wants me to get out of here, to go away, he doesn't know how to get this across to me, to convince me. He says I am disgusting and horrible, the worst person he has ever known. I left and walked sadly through town, and came home to hang up wash. Am going for a short walk and then will call him and see if he has softened. But I have to be ready to leave, to go away. He doesn't want me here.
At 7 p.m. I called and no, he had not softened. He said he didn't want to see me today, that I could call in the morning. I didn't even feel that much resistance. Mostly it is just the idea of having a whole evening on my hands, but I realize that is a paltry reason for being with U.G. I have plenty to do to keep busy, my computer, a book, letters, the telephone, laundry. What is that but living your life, anyway? I'm doing it here, or wherever I am.
Now, later at night and I'm beginning to see in a different way. It may be that he is right about me, that I am vicious and arrogant and disgusting and dishonest (with myself). That I am trying to be other than I am, to do things I can't and don't want to do. I have some image of how I should be, how U.G. wants me to be, and I am trying to live up to that. Trying to be silent and passive when he tells me to shut up. And to not care about money, to be generous to a fault.
I think about money all the time, try to figure out my relation to it, how I should handle it, what it means. I try to use money to get what I want. And here, of course, with U.G., it doesn't work. Nothing works here. None of my strategies. My strategies to be other than as I am. And what am I? Perhaps I am just those things he says I am, all those unpleasant adjectives.
I am headstrong, opinionated and want to get my own way! And I am frustrated, here, because I can't. U.G. can’t be pressured or bought. Forget it. It's a relief. Maybe I am not really that interested in liberation, in becoming free and throwing away the past. Otherwise it would happen spontaneously. I am, as U.G. says, more interested in holding onto what I have.
To say to U.G. that being with him is the most important thing to me is just not true, he says, because if it was, everything would be easy for me, I would just drop all bogus ideas and attachments without a backward glance. But I think twice, thrice about everything and then regret, rethink.
He is right, U.G., and I might just as well admit it to him, to myself, and to the world. I don't want to give up these limitations, they are me, precious me. I like my dependencies and weaknesses and addictions. For they are me. My paranoid mind is me. I would rather suffer and worry than just drop those thoughts Now, right now.
Earlier today I begged U.G. to help me, squirming in an agony of despair and confusion.
"I am helping you by telling you to go back to New York," he said quietly.
He means that. I have no place with him. My place is with my attachments until they are gone. U.G. has been patient beyond any reasonable expectation. What an abominable misuse of his energy and power, my petty concerns and insecurities, wanting company, something to do. God.
Perhaps this will be the last entry, who knows. This morning my crazy, impetuous, desperate nature surfaced with all its potency. U.G. had told me to call him at 9, but I couldn’t wait that long. At 8:30 instead I called him, no answer. I immediately felt he had left and gone to Zurich. I was desperate, wounded, abandoned, dejected. Drove right to his place and found the curtains drawn, the door locked. Knowing I was doing the unmentionable, I went inside by the back door anyway, just to know for sure. There were his shoes.
I didn't know if he had left or not. I went down to the village and paced around until just before 9. Looking up the hill I saw that the curtains were now open. I called him exactly at 9 from the pay phone and he said, "You get out. The price for this is too high for you." And he hung up.
Mortified and aghast, I drove up to his place anyway, though I had been told to stay away. He was like ice, eating his breakfast, telling me it's over, get out, go back to New York, bake bread on the island. He said, "If you really wanted this, no power in the world could stop you, no guilt or worries about the children, nothing."
"Here everything will be destroyed. You don't want that."
I pleaded and threw dramatic acts, apologized, begged for another chance, a perfect idiot. He said, "You are not a coward, but you are a liar, a cheat, a fraud." A cheat because I say I want to be with him more than anything, then don't deliver.
Finally, after a ridiculous length of time, I left. He said, "First, go." And that first gave me a shred of hope. But I'm pretty convinced that that is just his syntax and my mind trying to make something positive and hopeful out of it.
I'm resigned to leaving. Probably should go to New York and see what happens. If I want to be with U.G. more than anything, everything else will just drop away, there won't be a struggle. If I don't want it, I will learn from this and see.
Will go for a walk and see how I feel at the end of it.
~ ~
Right after that last paragraph, suddenly I called U.G. and said, "Okay, I will call British Airways tomorrow. I will go." In a flash I had seen that I have no choice, that I can't fight him or myself any longer. I asked him if he wanted me to take the extra thousand dollars in Swiss Francs so I can send a check to Moorty, as he had asked me to do.
"Yes," said U.G. "Come in the evening."
"What time?" I asked.
"Five," he replied.
So I set out on a marvelous walk carrying an umbrella because it rains off and on, walked to Turbach from Gstaad, covering J.K.'s old pathways. But this time, I went off on my own, alone, taking paths I had not been on before, risking getting lost, not wanting to return the way I had come, no turning back.
And I felt at peace in the mountains, alone with myself, glad no one else was there with me. The first time I have felt this wild, free roaming instinct.
When I returned after nearly three hours, I was hungry and drove up to Hornberg and ordered rosti and apple cider in the restaurant, completely enshrouded in fog, like Maine. Again I felt good alone, not self-conscious, nothing. Just the way it was, and my aloneness was satisfactory.
I can't say that I don't hold out some hope of being allowed to stay when I go over there tonight. I don't want to go back to New York. But this is not U.G.'s problem. I see very clearly that if I hold onto anything, money, property, ideas about things, even one cent, I cannot be with him. The price is high indeed and I don't know if I have the resources, inner and outer. He assures me I don't.
But we'll see. Part of me feels ready to go for broke, to give up everything, to see everything destroyed, the other part can't fathom what that means.
"Everything will be destroyed," he said to me this morning, warning me away. The price is very high.
I realized, sitting on a bench at the end of my walk, overlooking the valley and the swirling clouds in the sky, that I was sitting there waiting to realize something, waiting for a sign of some kind, waiting to find a message somewhere, somehow, a modification of my understanding that I have to go away from U.G. But then I realized that there was nothing to realize, nothing was going to happen, nothing would become clear. Or the moment it did, it would be superceded by another thought, an alternative of some kind. This is the way my mind works, period.
So, I said to myself, just get up from the bench, get off the bench, go on, there is no going back, no returning over bridges, they have all been burned.
If he says go to New York, go to New York. Do as he says. If you have given him everything and he says sell Maine, it is his, sell it. Do the necessary. Don't be an Indian Giver. Particularly not to an Indian.
Over and out.
~ ~
No, not over and out until it's over. It's midnight, and it may well be over, but I don't even know what that means unless I kill myself.
I spent the evening with U.G., programming the Word Tank, trying to show him how to use it, having spaghetti with him, doing the dishes afterwards. But he didn't let me off the hook for a moment, insisting I go tomorrow. "Go to New York, go to the island, bake bread."
I don't know what to do, am out of ideas and strategies, freaked out. He mentioned Australia tonight and what he had said to me then, and I re-read the diaries from that time a year and a half ago. Nothing has changed, really, except that he is telling me to go now, he wasn't then. Then he said it was up to me, I could go, he wouldn't stop me. Now he says I have to go, it's not up to me. It's up to him. So he must mean it. He does mean it.
I think I can't be with him until I have unloaded Maine, until it is sold. That's terrifying to me, it could take a long time to do it. How can I hurry it up? What can I do?
U.G. also said to me in Australia that the person who was with him could not be answerable to anyone else, and in that sense I still have work to do. As long as I have this money coming from S. in the form of a handout, not legal and binding, I am answerable. People monitor my business, my spending.
I gave him my little radio/tape deck. He said I should keep it until I leave, and I said if I have to leave tomorrow he might as well have it.
I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do. I don't want to leave him.
He asked me a 'why' question tonight, something he didn't really want an answer to, and he said, "The Void doesn't need an answer." It was a definition of himself that I haven't heard before, that he is the Void. Then he said there are other 'why' questions to which he does want an answer. What on earth does he mean?
July 15
Well, I'm humiliated and head deep in my own shit. But I'm glad, in a way, and I can hear U.G.'s voice saying "You had it coming to you."
Yes I did. It has taken a long time. And it all hinges on money, just as U.G. said everything does. But I, arrogant, deluded, self-righteous, I thought I was different. I thought that I was generous and not hung up on money, though U.G. has been berating me with the opposite view for well over a year now. I thought I was better than others, all those mean, petty people.
And I thought this, really, in my heart of hearts even though U.G. has told me (and everyone else) again and again, that I am mean, petty and cheap.
But today was the real show-down. This morning I arrived at 9 and instantly became lulled into false security. He asked me about my room, and I said I could stay or go, that I had paid the phone bills and the taxes, but that I could have it on a daily basis. He said this is a rough life for anyone, but especially for me, with my tendencies. That I am just phony through and through.
We went down to the village together, I to mail a check to Moorty, covering the Swiss francs U.G. has given me, and the check that bounced for the Indian phone bill. We walked peaceably through town, then returned to the chalet, where U.G. said, "I haven't changed my mind, you still have to go." At the coop we bought four yogurts and he asked me if I was leaving. "No," I said, thinking that perhaps it is just that simple, all I have to do is say I am staying here. Imagine.
He asked me to do some wash for him before going, so I went to my place. And while the machine was going, suddenly I had the inspiration to write a letter of intent, giving all my money to U.G. on July 27th, the day of my astrology prediction that he will get lots of money. Here is the letter:
LETTER OF INTENT
I do hereby state that it is my heartfelt desire to give all of my assets to my friend U.G. Krishnamurti on (and thereafter) July 27, 1991. These assets and any income derived therefrom are his to do with as he wishes, with no conditions.
This decision has been taken in sound mind (insofar as that exists) and body, and must be executed according to whatever legalities are necessary and appropriate.
I owe U.G. Krishnamurti my life, and hereby confer it to his keeping.
Signed,
Shonried, Switzerland
July 21, 1991
At the time it seemed sincere. I really thought I was ready to give him everything, that this was the radical move required of me to stay with him, that he would only take from the one who was with him, from no one else, and this had to be me. How smug, arrogant of me! Valentine's gesture had been held up to me so many times, how she just turned over everything to U.G., with no thought to herself. I felt a gesture of that magnitude was called for.
I returned to U.G.'s place and hung up his wash with him. Then he called me to lunch, a delicious Gnocchi alla Romana he called it, made by him, and he had set the table nicely with our places rather unusually close together, conspiratorially. I fell into the trap, and felt he knew about my letter, approved, and was perhaps even touched.
After I finished the dishes, I told him I had drafted a letter of intent, that I was a little afraid to give it to him because of what he said about Parveen Babi trying to buy him with dollar bills, that this was such a sensitive time for me that it would look like I also was trying to buy him.
Well. He got his glasses and read the letter. Then he began to laugh. He said this one is going to go in the biography. This will be sent all over the world. The paper this was written on isn’t even good enough for toilet paper. Now, he said, I have a good reason to tell you to leave. He laughed, but there was wrath behind the smile.
I knew I was doomed, though I too laughed about it. He told me to leave. I said I would go take a walk.
I went back to Turbach, but my mind wasn't on the glorious mountains, except fleetingly. Instead it worked over the not so pretty inner landscape, and dished up some real filth. Many things began to dawn on me. It's as if the game is at last being played out, the last act of Deathtrap of the Mind. I began to see that he had possibly not taken anything from me in fact, that he had probably kept very careful count of every penny I spent over the two years and that perhaps he intended to throw it back at me after this transgression. I was burning with this realization, that I who have kept such careful count in my way (though I deny heatedly that I keep tabs, try to pretend that I spend as if it were someone else's money, as Adri put it), have been upstaged by U.G. who also has, and that he will not keep a penny because my money is tainted. It has a price tag.
I felt I had seen through the whole thing, that my own meanness and pettiness was obvious, and there was nothing I could do but accept it, there and then. That any humiliation I would suffer over the letter I had coming to me. In a way I no longer cared.
When I went to his house at 4, after the walk and a shower, there was a Dutch fellow there who had come to see U.G. in Amsterdam. I sat down and listened quietly. Then a French couple came. Later I had supper with U.G. and all was peaceful.
Then I told him about my realization, and he exploded. "You have seen, understood nothing. But that's what you wish would happen, that I return this money."
I demurred. Then he told me to get out, that I had no place with him. That he was going away the next day (he had said this to the others too), that he didn't need me to drive him, that I should go, and not to call or come back the next day, that I absolutely had to check out of my room. That he wouldn't go away until he knew I was gone.
I went through the most intense struggle at night, my mind burning, burning. There was no way out. I had to check out, I couldn't go to his place, I couldn't call. There was no strategy possible. I couldn’t sleep, had not slept in nights, my night death terrors back with a vengeance.
In the morning, I numbly packed up and moved out, leaving money with the concierge. I went to U.G.'s at 7:30, daring to enter and told him immediately that I had checked out, I had my stuff in the car.
He was fierce, telling me over and over again that I had to go, had to get out.
Finally I agreed. And the tone changed, suddenly. He became gentle, friendly. He told me I had to be firm with my family, stand up for what I want, that I had to do this for myself, not for him.
When I got ready to go, we were both laughing (can't remember what about) and he shook my hand (giving me energy). He said, "I am still your friend." I was choked up, a little teary. He came up to the parking area to see me off, told me to call him from Geneva. I was rummaging around in my bags looking for a last chocolate bar to try to give to him, and when I turned around, he was gone.
