Murray Cork by Helen Carr
I first met Murray Cork when I was travelling in Nepal, years ago, in my youth. He was an earnest seeker after truth even as a young man. Back then he had set his sights on visiting certain monasteries and meditating in Himalayan caves. What are you doing with your life? he asked me often, in cafes, on the road, under the stars, on mountain sides below fluttering prayer flags. Where is your ambition? I beg you, don’t waste your precious life. His life was kind of pilgrimage and I didn’t really get it. We shared a dusty room in Kathmandu for a few weeks. He would sit for hours in meditation while I smoked cannabis and gazed at the mountains. There were a lot of crazy people on the road that summer. The last word he said to me as we parted was Ambition.
Somehow we kept in touch. I returned to the west, to a job and family. Murray kept on following his dreams. Every few years I got a card from him with an update – he was in south America where his ambition was to collect water from some sacred lake and carry it to a sacred lake in Tibet – he was on retreat on a Scottish island and his ambition was to remain silent for three years – he was in Japan pursuing his ambition to become a Zen priest – in India building a temple. The last we’d heard, his ambition was to become an enlightened being.
My wife joked that Murray and I must be karmically connected, and it wasn’t all that surprising when he turned up on our doorstep. He had a long beard and a dusty backpack and looked as if he’d walked all the way from India. His intense blue eyes were more intense than ever. Murray explained that he had come to communicate something special to us. Apparently, during an hallucinated dose of dysentery, he had achieved a vivid realisation – that the only worthwhile ambition was to free himself of all ambition.
All those years he said, his eyes blazing, all those years of striving, it was ego my friends, pure ego. I have come here, my friends, come to you, I throw myself at your feet (Murray had absorbed an eastern spiritual style of expressing himself). I have come here to give it all up.
To give up what exactly? said my wife, who has an eye for detail.
To cast off all ambition, said Murray, is my ultimate and great ambition.
But Murray, began my wife; then she stopped.
If he didn’t get it, who were we to point it out?
Simon says:
I love this as a character study, and I particularly like the subtle shift in the narrator’s perspective. For most of us, there is something daunting about spirituality. When we encounter it in another person, we tend to feel marginally inferior. There’s me just getting on with my ordinary, mundane life, you think… and here’s this person who is aware of greater complexity, greater resonance in existence. And that seems to be the narrator’s feeling at the start. That Murray Cork’s endless questing shows the depth of his personality. But in the course of this short piece we, the readers – slightly ahead of the narrator – realise that Murray Cork is just a vacuous poseur. It takes the practical good sense of the narrator’s wife (‘who has an eye for detail’ – lovely phrase) to reveal the mystic’s true nature. This strikes a particular chord with me because I have a friend who, just like Murray, is always picking up the latest trendy health fad or belief system. I once described him (not to his face) as being ‘ankle-deep in everything’. He remains a friend, though. I’m not sure whether I’d fancy Murray Cork’s friendship. I’ve a feeling he’s the kind of bum who might fancy landing on the couple and abusing their hospitality for quite a long time… though I’m confident the extremely sensible wife would soon put a stop to that.