I won't send this in case D. does read our mail, but I so much wanted to reach out and touch you now. I'll slip it to you when you and Yajna pick me up in Forrest. I can't wait but must. I am, indeed, your devoted nayika,

K.

Gentlemen:

Enclosed find an endorsed check for eighteen thousand dollars ($18,000) for deposit to my account, #0002743-911. Your earlier receipts and statements are hereby acknowledged. My address continues as you have it.

Yours sincerely,

Sarah P. Worth

Dear Dr. Podhoretz-

Thank you for your cordial response. No, a July appointment will not do either, as I am staying in Arizona for a while longer. I am not living at this motel, by the way, but at an agricultural community about forty miles away. The drugstore there does have unwaxed dental tape and I have been fairly diligent, though sometimes at night I am so tired I can't make myself believe flossing matters as much as you say. Do Africans and Afghans always floss? They seem to have lovely teeth and gums, in photographs.

I bit down hard on a betel nut the other day and ever since then there has been not an ache exactly but a sort of apprehensive tenderness-not exactly tenderness, more of a vague funky feeling-in the lower right quadrant, where you said there tended to be tissue inflammation in any case. I.do hope I don't have to go through another root canal! If worse comes to worst, I'll have the endodontist out here send you an X-ray for your records. The dental facilities are surprisingly adequate in this agri-commune, though I believe they use an outside lab for their gold and porcelain crown work.

Warm regards,

Sarah Worth

Dear Dr. Epstein-

I enclose a check for $180 to cover our last two appointments as billed by you. I trust that this clears up our accounts. I feel 7 should render an accounting of what I've been up to-as if the pseudo-daughterly guilty feelings that you led me to override in regard to Charles remain undischarged in regard to you. Looking back at my years of therapy, I confess that it all now seems much more patriarchal and Judeo-Chris-tian than it did at the time. Far from being my ally-against Charles as I fantasized, you were his ally against my liberation. Not that I blame you: I, too, was resisting my liberation, since I had no confidence of my finding a place in any world but the atrophied Puritan theocracy in which I had been raised, by parents whose sense of their own worth was inordinately tied to ancestral achievement, to being "our sort" of New Englanders. My father took, I think, real and dimly perverse pleasure in doing the absolutely predictable thing, in doing his piddling trust-officer thing in Boston and going to his clubs and dressing like a Harvard undergraduate to the day of his death, in striped tie and gray flannels and oxblood cordovans with little waxed laces.

Even at the time when I was most enchanted with our process it did cross my mind that Freud's notion of what went oh inside Viennese women was somewhat absurd. I was once a little girl, for example, and until I was four, when my brother was born, I had no idea that little boys had penises, let alone that I should envy them for it. His looked like quite a comical little button, as I remember. My father always dressed in his room and once forbade me to go with him and Mother to a nudist beach on Martha's Vineyard, as I more than once told you. You never commented on whether or not this had been repressive of them.

I wonder now if the precious classic therapeutic silence isn't just another version of the Victorian father's silence, his awe-inspiring absence except at dinnertime, with the same disciplinary implications, at 'least as regards women. My knowledge of Hindu and Buddhist psychological thought is very imperfect but the notion of the subconscious as a pool of eddies (vasanas) that originate in memory and feed the conscious eddies (cbittavrittis) and which certain exercises can eventually erase in a blissful motionless (nirvana = without wind) state of samadbi has-this way of putting things-a certain intimate, non-terroristic simplicity that appeals to me. Western psychology interfaces-to use a fashionable term-with society and morality, and Eastern with the body, with physiology-which rather better fits with the way, most days, I feel. I mean, should the game be to referee the war between superego, ego, and id, or to relax the whole system, by letting the ego and its harassing entangle^ ments just fade away?

At any rate, you did your best by your lights and that is all any of us can do. I don't want to harass you with a long letter-though your bill gave me a shock, arriving out of a world of petty finance I had rather forgotten and showing by its resubmission that Charles has abandoned his responsibilities toward his wife's medical care. In fact, I can't write a long letter, since this motel where I am waiting for some friends to pick me up isn't very generous with its stationery to those who are not staying here as guests. I obtained my presqnt supply by sauntering around outside and then nipping into a room that the Mexican maid had left open and stealing from the desk. Our old Sarah wouldn't have done that, would she? But once you perceive that all material and intellectual phenomena are just threads in a great weave of illusion (maya, samsara) it becomes oddly easy to act on your impulses. Property is not only theft, it's nonsense.

My best to Mrs. Epstein. All those years of Mondays * I used to wonder and wonder what she was like and what it was like being married to such a marvellous-understanding man. I suppose I was madly jealous of her-I know that's the kind of thing you people like to hear, it's all grist to your "transference" mill. But now she can be Bianca Jagger for all I care, and good luck to you both.

With warm regards,

Sarah Worth

Dear Martin-

Your mother in a nice letter to me thought it would help if I sent you a card. I'm sorry you're in jail but I have recently learned that all the material world is a jail. Develop inner peace.

Your well-wisher,

Sarah P. Worth

June 18

Dear Eldridge-

This is a mesa, which is Spanish for "table." There are a lot of them here, and you've probably seen some in television commercials-the one with the Nissan truck.

Your friend,

Sarah P. Worth

[tape]

"Sarvasam eva mayanam, strimayaiva vishishyate." This is from an ancient Mahayana text and says, "Of all the forms of illusion, woman is the most important." For Buddha and his followers, woman is the portal of release. She is that within the world which takes us out of the world. She is that being through whom is made manifest the karuna, the compassion, of nirvana, of non-being. She is the living wonder of the world. The mounds of her body are like temple-mounds; they symbolize nirvana. The lotus of her body is the lotus of Sahasrara, of final illumination. "Buddhatvam yo-shidyonisamsritam." That is a very important saying. Repeat, please. "Buddhatvam yoshidyonisamsritam." [Responsive mumble.] It means, "Buddhahood is in the female organ." The yoni. The cunt. Buddhahood is in the cunt. OM mani padme HUM. The jewel is in the lotus. The jewel is the mind. The lotus is nirvana. The mind dissolves in nirvana. But also the jewel is the linga, the cock. The lotus is the cunt. The cock in the cunt. This is bliss, rasa. This is samarasa, the bliss of unity. This is Mahasukha, the Great Bliss. This is Mahabindu, the great point, the Transcendental Void. This is maithuna-fucking. This is Shiva and Shakti united, purusha and prakriti united to make bliss; this is sahaja. Sahaja is the state of non-conditioned existence, of the pure spontaneity. We must learn to acquire the pure spontaneity. When Kundalini unites with Atman, this is also sahaja. That is why we learn our mantras, learn our mudras. That is why we learn pranayama. That is why we strive to cleanse ourselves inside and out. To be nonconditioned, to have the pure spontaneity. Ommmm!