Free Maya by C. W. Huntington Page A

called the beautiful, and abides therein, at that time he regards the whole world as ugly.” But I never taught such a thing. This is what I say: “When one reaches nirvana, called the beautiful, then he knows for the first time what beauty is.”
    Robert Frost wrote somewhere that there are no two things as important to us in life and in art as being threatened and being saved. And it was right around this time in December, absorbed in Becker’s grim visions of nature and the teachings of the Buddha, that something did change. I would not call it nirvana, nor was I saved. But something changed.
    Since coming to India I had been increasingly troubled by a peculiar feeling—for lack of a better word—that I could not escape from myself. This feeling was epitomized in the dream where I stood, paralyzed, wanting desperately to get rid of the dead child in my arms. I recalled the dream one morning while laboring to unravel a particularly convoluted Sanskrit compound. I had by then entirely forgotten it and had in fact wanted to forget. But now, from wherever lost dreams are hidden, the memory of that dream returned along with the recognition that this urge to escape from myself was nothing new. Since long before Judith and I were married, I had fantasized about being someone other than who I was, someone wiser and more compassionate.
    But who is this person who so craves to be someone else?
    Dominated by this longing to be someone more spiritual, I had never thought to ask myself this simple question. Not, Who do I wish to be? But rather, Who am I? I had never really looked at myself without blinders or filters, prejudices or fantasies. To see myself as I was, however, I needed to accept myself as I was, for the two were, in practice, no different.
    I looked down at the dead child in my arms, no longer anxious to push him away, and as I watched he gradually came to life. He was, in a sense, resurrected from the shadows of night into the light of day, moving with me from one kind of dream to another, until all that remained of the unsettling image from Agra was his fair complexion. It was still me, but in this new vision I appeared to myself in the guise of Pierrot, the sorrowful, whiteface clown, pining away for his lost love, peddling his black Atlas bicycle along a tightrope stretched high in the air, his bland features branded with a greasepaint frown: pitiful and absurd, and in constant danger of falling from his lofty perch.
    It was not a particularly agreeable self-image, but it was entertainingin its fashion, and not altogether without romantic appeal. The character of Pierrot is, after all, an icon with a long pedigree: painted by Watteau, Fragonard, Chagall, Modigliani, Picasso, given breath and movement in Deburau’s mime, literary subject of Janin and Gautier, bourgeois citizen of post-revolutionary France, devotee of Schopenhauer, disillusioned hero of the Symbolists. Watching the clown perform—going about my daily business with classes, dealing with people at the Fulbright office—I began to come to terms with my role. Little by little the desire to be someone else no longer monopolized my attention, for my attention was now drawn of its own accord to the sheer spectacle of this tragic, alienated naïf who took himself and his troubles so very seriously, doing his clever tricks so far up there above the ground.
    Sitting alone in my room, a barrage of new questions pressed in. Where had this clown come from? Did he have any other life, before his life on the wire? Who was he when the costume was removed? Who was he at night, all by himself in the dressing room, seated without his makeup in front of the brightly lit mirror?
    Who was he, really?
    I resolved to see clearly who was incapable of love, who was lonely and filled with contempt, who was so dreadfully fragile, so eager for attention.
    All my life I had been told a story about myself—I had told myself a story—which,