Motel Nirvana. Melanie McGrath

shake my head.

      She opens her eyes in mild surprise, as if offended by my unconventional behaviour.

      ‘You must go! The life force there! I mean, the whole desert energy thing roots you into this amazing consciousness of your interconnectedness with all beings.’

      ‘What,’ I suggest, recalling the texts of the lost week, ‘transformative at the soul level?’

      ‘We’re talking molecular.’

      ‘So you’re saying it acts as a kind of metaphor for the holographic universe?’ I persist.

      ‘Right.’

      ‘Biocosmic resonation?’

      She smiles a smile a highway wide. ‘Hey, you’re into that too.’ Then leaning in close enough for me to be able to smell the tang of grease in her hair. ‘Tell me, did we meet in a past life?’

      ‘Uh huh,’ I reply, returning the smile.

      ‘I knew I’d seen your face before.’

      I’m driving to Chris Griscom’s Light Institute in Galisteo, about twenty miles south of Santa Fe, for a ‘Knowings’ in which people gather ‘knowing’ from themselves and ‘apply it from a place of enlightenment’. I had always imagined wisdom to be an accumulated quality, only now I am told it can be taught in Knowings workshops.

      South of Santa Fe, the sky unfurls to an artificial blue, scribbled over with cirrus. Last night’s roadkill still lies moist and filleted on the highway, as yet undiscovered by the ravens sunning themselves in the squawbush on either side of the road. It is the first day of summer heat. The sun is yellow now; by noon it will shine as whitely as magnesium flare.

      The highway passes right through Galisteo then out onto the other side, across the Galisteo basin. At speed, you might pass the village of Galisteo altogether before your eyes had even registered it. The main street is little more than a strip of dry clay messed up into troughs by the winter rains. A black mongrel dog tied to a loop set into an adobe wall pulls at its chain and howls. Caboose draws up and slides into the verge, too early for the ‘Knowings’. On the pavement lies an old fake swiss army knife, handle picked at by ants, blade sound enough. Near to the place where the dog is tied, two hispanic women and a man in a straw hat sit in the shade of a mesquite tree still covered in the papery casings of its lost blossom. Across the road towards the Spanish church, the plastic honeycomb from a six-pack drifts in the breeze. A car runs over it, slows momentarily then flows south leaving its image slipping into the heat shine.

      The patrona of the local store is stationed on a wooden chair outside brushing away the dust with a Spanish fan. A radio tuned into a Santa Fe station spits out part of the signal. She follows me into the store, lined along one side with Uncle Ben’s; she smoothes her hair, lifts the plastic cover from a plate of danish pastries, wipes off a fly and moves along the counter. Taking my five-dollar bill and making a little show of it, she opens a wooden drawer where there are five-dollar bills and one-dollar bills, fixed together with an iron bulldog clip and passes back some coins. I sit up against a wall hard from the sun, sip from a bottle of warm, sweet soda and watch the black dog shivering on its chain. A boy with worn down shoes comes by carrying a bunch of mint with the leaves dragging in the dust.

      Over the wall in someone’s garden two cockerels are doing violence to each other, throwing pieces of flinty stone up into the air and a chestnut horse with a paper fringe over its head to keep away the flies rubs its neck against a little bothy built into the wall. The chickens don’t bother it, the dog doesn’t bother it. A man passes in a tow truck, makes a wide turn at the end of the road and cuts the engine. He sits and waits for something to happen, but nothing does. Around the town in each direction lies almost silent a fauvist bowl of bluegreen laterite edged in navy where the sky scrolls down onto its beginning.

      The world headquarters of the Griscom global enlightenment enterprise is a collection of modest little buildings surrounded by cottonwood bosque up a remote and self-effacing dirt track to the east of Galisteo. By six-thirty, fifty people or so have gathered in a prefabricated building on one side of the main administrative building, behind an adobe barn. To the front of this building a line of cars waits to park: Mercedes estates, Mitsubishi four-wheel-drives, GM minivans, the odd station wagon. A waspish woman in linen tells me she makes the round trip (seven hundred miles or so) from Denver each week. It costs her $50 in gas, plus the $15 Light Institute fee. Chris Griscom is a very fine person, and a very famous person she says. It occurs to me that since my last visit to America celebrity has become a moral value as well as informing the predominant popular ideology.

      We sit and wait in silence. Every now and then Wasp’s stomach chirps. An Institute assistant, also dressed in linen, begins setting up tape machines and microphones by the door, and after a wait of a few minutes Griscom herself hovers in, head-to-toe white silk robes with white silk hair and golden tan, smiling an abstracted, internalized kind of smile, and stands with arms outstretched for the assistant to wire her up. Fully wired, she processes to a chair at the front of the room, lowers herself into it and does something Hindu with her hands.

      ‘Enlightenment is really the recognition …’ Griscom pauses, regarding with indulgent modesty the microphone clipped to her breast. The chic assistant grapples with the connection, the tape rolls, the microphone picks up and Griscom begins again. ‘Enlightenment is really the recognition and acceptance of all energies and the capacity to be where they intersect, where those spin points are, where the negative pushes itself into the light, or is drawn into the light, so that there is a correspondent intersection between the doing and the being.’

      Her audience shifts, then settles. The wasp leans forward and starts to take notes.

      ‘Enlightenment’, continues Griscom, voice creamy, sweeping long silver hair languorously from her face, ‘has to do with freedom of choice. When you are looking at the incarnations that you’re looking at this week you’re having an opportunity to be the killer and the lover at the same time.’

      A man behind kicks the back of my chair, causing a cold rill of sweat to leave its source between my legs and begin a journey across the thigh. Others fan themselves with their hands and purses. In my row about three along, someone struggles against sleep.

      ‘So, once we realize that even if you are there in the place of wrong there’s still a spark in there, there’s still something that, if you can look at it from a witnessing position which is what you’re sort of doing here, you can see that you did what you could with the consciousness you had, and that being didn’t understand wrong the way you might now, and so through that experience they gained some recognition.’

      ‘Does that mean we can go away and do anything we like, and still get enlightened?’ I whisper across to my neighbour.

      ‘Shh,’ she replies.

      ‘One of the lessons that has stopped human evolution at this point is the incapacity to see the purpose of all experience and therefore to embrace and comprehend what we would call the meditative. Everything is there exactly as it needs to be in order to allow the motion to continue because evolution is a part of the pulse, it is the pulse, of the universe. So, if we can sit in that space, letting even a flicker of the master that we have been, that we can recognize, that comes from our recognition from our incarnations, just a flicker of that to sit with us …’

      A toddler runs over to the Griscom throne and attempts to mount. Griscom smiles and pushes it off.

      ‘… then we can perceive in a totally different way. The difficulty with linear is that it’s always out in front or behind instead of here, right here now. And with that, the scope to see its purpose, because it either hasn’t come yet, or it’s already shut off, then we can’t recognise purpose. Purpose is a living thing, it’s life itself, that ecstasy, when it needs no more explanation, it just is.’

      I turn to my neighbour who is trying her best to balance the demands of note-taking and staring intently ahead.

      ‘I’m completely