I once had neighbours whom a psychiatrist might not have called ‘well-adjusted.’
At around 3 a.m., the older lady of the pair, a time-bitten seventy-something with a Don King ‘fro, would routinely drag her caffeinated poodle into the garden for their nightly symposium of politics, current affairs, theology. She’d mutter. He’d bark. She’d bark. He’d mutter. This rigmarole, in which she’d harangue and praise, praise and harangue, reconvened at lunch and dinner.
Armed with a pair of fence pliers, I plotted a coup d’état. I’d chop a dog-sized hole in the fence and liberate the harried pooch from its captor. The poor chap was too far gone. Rather than welcome his selfless liberator, he looked at me as if I were hiding enemies of the state beneath my floorboards. He barked. She muttered. He muttered. I ran.
When tired of bickering with the dog, she’d laser in on her son. His eyes carried the watery line between nervous breakdown and murderous rampage. She’d swap the dog’s name for his.
One summer evening, the sight of mother and son loomed over the fence. Their clammy faces were a riot of beetroot. In their paws dangled a titanic, American-style fridge twice the width of the doorframe through which they determined to squeeze it. I’d usually have offered to help, but six months of savaged sleep runs dry one’s reserves of goodwill. Besides, it was Sunday—the day of rest. So, I cracked open a life-affirming can of Bombay Sapphire, rolled a cigarette, and perched at the window.
“Mother, I am bloody-moving-it-that-bloody way.”
“No. You. Are. Not. You’re not even bloody trying. I told you to move it that way.”
“It won’t go that way!”
“It bloody-well-will if you try!”
“Mother,” he begged. “I am trying!”
“No, you are not,” she growled. “You never try anything.”
“Oh, starting this again, are we?”
“Just get this fucking fridge through the fucking door!”
“IT WON’T FIT!”
“OF COURSE IT WILL FUCKING FIT.”
“I am SICK to DEATH of YOU!”
“Well, I AM sick to DEATH of YOU!”
The scene was an observation of pure folly: like watching two lawyers fight over a conscience.
As the cans piled up around my feet, the pair litigated the founding document of their existence. They were condemned to exorcise the bad karma of a thousand lifetimes—in what Buddhists call ‘Naraka’—the hell realms.
Meanwhile, I gloried in my relatively good karma, and my rudimentary grasp of earthly physics: A mass larger than the space into which it is trying to fit—won’t fit.
Buddhists say the sticky residue of our former lives smears the current. Every cruel word, every small mercy, each action good or bad, authors a ripple on which we will one day ride.
If that’s true, these doomed puppets had a thousand dress rehearsals behind them and a thousand ahead. Perhaps in previous lives they were medieval tyrants, or human traffickers, or worse—venture capitalists. Maybe they hoarded grain from hungry orphans or invented sub-prime mortgages.
Their punishment is to endure life without the adequate means to live. That fridge was their Sisyphean boulder. An eternity of futility enamelled in gun-metal grey. Every heave pleaded for release from this karmic cul-de-sac. The doorframe was their dharma gate. But they would never pass.
They say that hell is fire, pitchforks, and low-tar cigarettes. In a book about mysticism, its title forgotten, I read about a man condemned to a hell of his own imagination. A gifted but reluctant artist in life, the gods condemned this slothful soul to stand before a perfect Parisian street scene: spring light dappled cobblestones; zinc rooftops glinted like glass shards.
Our artist had everything: talent, time, canvas, brush. Everything except courage. His earthly frustrations followed him. Each stroke smudged. Lines wavered. Colours bled. As on earth, he could sense and accept only perfection. Refusing his artistic duty to surrender, our artist drowned in his own ego.
I think of his insidious fate whenever I hear a neurotic dog bark into the night.
Of course, watching the pair flounder with that fridge no doubt chalked up a few karmic bad points on my tally. The gods might not approve of my gleeful voyeurism.
Whatever. I’ll take my chances. If the wheel of rebirth must spin, then let it land where it may. If I keel over, reborn as a tormented poodle with a lunatic captor, then so be it.
Perhaps a kind, gin-soaked neighbour will punch a hole in the fence and allow my escape. I’ll scarper down the street, yelping and barking and wagging my tail. And I’ll gleefully cock my leg on the first lawyer I see.
Coming up on Oxford Sour:
The Murder of the English Language: George Orwell and Charlie Kirk
You have a thing about lawyers?
Anyway, to the point: HH the Dalai Lama suggests that a most effective way of building up good karma (to even the balance if you like) is to acquire (buy in our case, I should suppose) many worms and then release them. Besides the obvious horticultural benefits the unit cost is low cf e.g. hares , and their lives post release relatively long as they quickly evade predatory birds through burrowing into the ground; hares are quickly picked off by airborne predators, etc. and, as well as being fewer in number for your money, don’t survive as long in such numbers (each one a life). I am not sure of the prevalence of moles and their kin in the high plateaus - but I assume they are factored in vis à vis the worms.
I haven’t tried it myself yet.
Haha, as Bill would say, “let’s kill all the lawyers.”