A Smile in the Mind's Eye

3

The question of immortality also raised its head early on in the conversations and I found that my guest was absolutely convinced that it was not a figure of speech, that it was on the menu, so to speak, though factually it could only be achieved by the greatest sages. There existed records, however, which pointed the way. As far as he was concerned all he wished to illuminate in the text under consideration was the fact that if a man adapted himself to the Taoist view seriously — he could easily top the hundred, and might expect without being specially gifted to live to 150. In such a life there was no reason why he should not expect to make love happily well into his nineties, as well as keep all or most of his teeth. Everything was connected to his diet, both spiritual and physical. ‘I myself propose to live to 120 years at least. If I had started this technique much earlier I could expect to go the full way. But the question of food and of sexual love is paramount, and here the book has something to teach us. You will understand that I have assembled and translated these texts first for my own pleasure and then as a work of advocacy for a world which quietly accepts to be flung on the scrap-heap around the age of fifty; which loses its sexual abilities soon after forty in many cases; and which uses the orgasm as a sort of yardstick of well-being, when it can, after forty, be restrained and reeducated in the service of insight rather than trivialized in mere pleasure …’

This, then, was a sort of treatise on coitus reservatus and the transmutation of physical love into a delight based in physical contact, cherishing rather than ravishing. I could see too that he believed that we in the West used the orgasm rather as a weapon; it proved to the individual’s ego that he was dominating his partner. Sex could be used assertively. In these ancient texts it was emphasized over and over again that the man’s sperm (the same Chinese character stands for sperm and essence, just to confuse the western wits) was extremely precious; it should be treated as such and conserved as much as possible after the age of forty if one was going to take the long haul towards immortality. Chang himself had adopted the ancient technique. He limited himself to one orgasm per one hundred love-encounters, approximately, and he managed to make love to several girls in the same day! It sounded absolutely outlandish to my western mind; yet here in the text was the advice and guidance of the ancient Love-Masters who counselled this method of preserving health and longevity. The organization of the woman is so different that she is fortified rather than depleted by the orgasm and consequently she did not play so great a part in the book, except as a fully responsive and cherishing partner for the man. But it was clear that she would profit handsomely from this system! Chang felt that with the important changes in the sexual scene based on the invention of the Pill in the West, the time was ripe for a work of Chinese scholarship along these traditional lines. But how to get over his meaning without giving the impression of lubricity or indelicacy? For the Chinese mind sexuality was the rarest flower of the spiritual gai savoir — and compared to the odious prurience and brutality of the western attitude it is difficult to situate it clearly for what it is — the meeting ground of two perfections. That is why, for example, there was nothing in the text about oblong considerations like homosexuality, lesbianism, deviations so dear to the contemporary mind. In the context of the Tao (for the purposes of his text) they did not really exist. Or if they did, they did not concern his theme — for the love-partners described in the text enjoyed the functional polarity of male and female with the Tao. The sexual act was a love act which meshed them into the whole of cosmic process; not a pillow-fight between egos determined to dominate each other. The whole sexual gymkhana of the West — the eternal plucking at the ego — filled Chang with sadness, and I could very well see why.

The image he used, the simple analogy which in a way echoed the double snakes twined round the shaft of the spine (caduceus-wise), was the ordinary light bulb with its twining filaments which between them rise to the base of the skull and confer light. Why write a treatise to include everything that was out of this phase — all the gynandromorph forms which produced only darkness wherever nature had slipped? The treatise was upon love achieved, not love among the ruins of our sexual culture. I am afraid that his analysis of our sad state seemed perfectly accurate when he laid the blame at the door of Christianity — with its cult of the ego, of original sin, of the wrathful God, and so on. How pure and kindly the simple Chinese ordinances seemed when one thought of our plight in the West. It was most instructive to me to see ourselves through his Chinese eyes. The aesthete in Chang was disgusted and terrified when he thought of the sexual atmosphere of cruelty and ugliness which he found in the arts; but he was just as shocked when he thought of the bulging dustbins of Los Angeles and London, the reckless improvidence which led us to pollute and devastate our natural inheritance upon earth in a perverse almost deliberate search for unhappiness. The question of sexual deviation led him on his side to question me about such matters. Was there much homosexuality in Tibet? No, but plenty in Mount Athos and the Vatican! Could it be that the element of narcissism which is at the base of it in the Freudian analysis is vastly strengthened by the Christian code, the cult of the Luciferian will to power? He laughed, and admitted that it could be true.

‘People want to have done with sex because it has brought them nothing but shame and disappointment; and its misuse has brought them to a premature old age. They lack desire themselves and because of the fearful things they eat they smell so awful that nobody feels like caressing them. Old age is a dreadful thing in the West. No wonder it is feared, no wonder the old are put away in remote flats or old-age communities and left to die. They have no further function, and they have forfeited the joy which should be theirs.’ (I thought to myself: Why has the Dalai Lama got no Oedipus Complex? Answer: Because he has no mother and no father. The buck stops there!) But meanwhile what of the lovers — the Taoist lovers caught up in their eternal embrace, gathered into the spiral momentum of the All, the cosmic rhythm as it ripples slowly along its trajectory of yang and yin, back and forth, the pendulum of mother nature? What about Jack loves Jill? Chang grew irritated. ‘The lovers in the books are simply the representatives of a natural process. Of course Jack can love Jill and write love poems to her, not to mention to recite acrostics with rather questionable meanings, in order to make her laugh. But that aspect of things concerns their personalities, it is in the domain of the novel. This treatise presumes them to be The Perfect Couple, perfectly slotted into the science of the love-yoga: The Tao. It is beyond the man-eat-dog stage in human affairs. My lovers are the Nonpareil, the Peerless Lovers of the Taoist scheme. We shouldn’t address silly questions to people about them. Theirs is a condition to be aspired to, even if we never reach it.’ Simple as the sap travelling through the veins of a tree. Sadism, masochism, why be bothered with them except to regret that with them nature went out of true, and it was our fault? You become what you believe. The Taoist lovers, then, were ego-less; they were human embodiments of cosmic process; one was silly even to want to call them Jack and Jill when in reality they were sleepwalking yangs and yins … At this moment there was a power-cut and I thought of Chang’s pleasure and wonder every time he switched on the electric light with its ‘filaments of gratified if disembodied desire’. The gratification of the lovers lay on a different plane; by dint of mastering the orgasm one raised love to a higher frequency. One prolonged life, the immortal life which one was in honour bound to try and realize upon earth … How difficult it was to express all this in a way which might make good sense to someone brought up in the West, by the canons of a culture whose language was based on dichotomy. But perhaps more important even than this was that the ancient Taoist view of sexuality suggested that they considered it to be the basic mechanism upon which the happy and healthy functioning of the whole man depended. Hence the role of the Love-Masters whose field of investigation was the whole psycho-physical situation. ‘It is after all not so far from the psycho-somatic approach of modern medicine — only that contains no built-in cosmic doctrine designed to pull out the thorns of the ego.’

Talking, arguing and eating thus in little bits we tackled the text piecemeal — there was so much to explain to me about the language of the original and the attitude of its ancient therapists. Behind the whole science lay a theory of fulcrum and realization which made the Buddhist adventure — even the Indian — one of the most extraordinary intellectual forays into the unknown. In the world of living things devoted to preying upon one another — and full of the savage defence mechanisms engendered by fear — the Buddhist proposed to make himself ever more defenceless against fate, thus unlocking the karmic spring, ‘the will power of desirelessness’ in E. Graham Howe’s phrase, which in fact modified his field of action by submission. To move thus towards the moon of his non-being, rolling with the punch, so to speak, he found an inner mechanism which ensured that he came back into his fair course at last by the law of the opposites. But all this to us was apparently going against the laws of evolution and causality as they seemed to be constituted in the theories of the survival of the fittest. Was the law of the jungle now what we had been led to believe? It was as if the yogi wished to re-establish an anterior state of mind, a plant-like acquiescence which perhaps had dominated early man — before the Aristotelian gift of consciousness bugged him, bogged him down with its cogito-ergo-impulse-inhibition-machine. I wondered if that was what Old Empedocles of Sicily had meant by saying that the first men were trees — perhaps he meant plants? After all, man came out of the water originally. The jewel of intuition realized from the lotus anchored in the mud of the primal consciousness?

Snap! the lights came on again and simultaneously Chang brought his great heap of whistling vegetables to table and we fell to, while he told me how strange he had found the New World at first, how difficult the language — not grammatically but conceptually. And how funny! Ah! the blessed irony of the Chinese mind! I realized then that it was quite different from that of the bandylegged and banausic Japs on one side, and the twanging tingling Indian sophists on the other. The man who can see the world with wondering irony tends to be a good conductor, someone on whom one can count! ‘Tell me about Christianity,’ he said, with his mouth full. ‘Well, to. begin with the Last Supper — it was not a vegetarian meal, you will have noticed.’ I uncorked a wholesome bottle of St Saturnin and loaded my glass. Chang shook his head and said, ‘You are drinking a little too much. We must try something on you.’ I did not know what he meant, and I hoped it would be Chinese hypnotism which would influence my subliminal self to start cutting down. But all these ideas had excited me immeasurably and I needed the wine to carry out the architectural design of this simple but delicious meal, combining China, France and India in almost equal parts. ‘Tell me about your education,’ I said, and he laughed. He had heard the voice of the schools in full bombination. He had heard dons in California ‘explicating’ Shakespeare; he had seen chain-smoking American yogis reverently watching television in the Lotus pose … He was funny about it and quite unmalicious. And now from his little air-bag he produced, somewhat to my surprise, a formidable collection of tubes of various vitamins with which he proceeded to dose himself. ‘Well, who would have thought it?’ I said in a shocked tone, and he grinned. He said, ‘There are many good things here in the West, and I see no reason why I should not use them. Your science has done some excellent work on diets, the role of cholesterol, the carbohydrates and so on. I do not propose to be bigoted. They are indeed a great help if you want to stay as slim as I am — short cuts, if you like, but useful.’

He had already spent some years in the field against the Japanese when his family decided to send him to the Americas; he was a bold and very industrious boy, and soon learned English and became a Canadian citizen. He also made his disastrous excursions into the dietary system of the Anglo-Saxons with the results already recorded. He had obviously retarded his immortality a bit by this lapse! But in part it all served a purpose, for while he was engaged in trying to cure himself he started to look up old Chinese texts which he found in the libraries of the New World and of England, which he frequently visited. He discovered that there was more to Taoism than just a religion or philosophy; there was a medical rationale as well, and an index to the frugal joys of whole living on earth. The texts had all been widely dispersed and he had had a task assembling them into what he hoped might be a coherent whole — a theory of health within the concept of the universal Tao. This, then, became the subject-matter of our long and scattered conversations. The few days he spent with me seemed endless, they passed in beguiling slow motion — time in full extension, so to speak. When I say ‘long discussions’ I mean really long: we knocked off only to light a fire and cook a meal — we ate about five times a day. I suppose we slept for a few hours — he found the guest room cold and asked if he might make a hot-water bottle. This was a sign of degeneracy I told him — surely his yoga kept him warm? It did, but unfortunately he had had a tiny sip of wine, and alcohol was fatal for the balance of the organism. He disdained however my offer of a massive rubber water bottle in favour of his own tiny one. I found that he carried a small supply of milk in one of those containers that campers use to ice their meals — thermic sacks I think they are called. He drank away his milk with reverence before filling the container with boiling water. I had the impression that night and day had become one — after a short sleep one might get up to discuss the text once more. Once we absently went for a walk. (As for the tiny hot-water bottle, it hardly covered the soles of his feet.) But discuss the text as we might, he was always shooting down my rhapsodic fancies and pulling me down to earth with a typically Chinese sense of priorities. ‘To hell with nirvana and fulcrums and all that,’ he would say. ‘That is all self-evident, but what we must not lose sight of is that the book deals with exploiting this life on earth to the absolute full, so that we leave nothing behind, not even a sigh. The ordinary life-span is too short to fully enjoy this world; we could and should expand it immeasurably to give ourselves time. It is down to earth all this, and extremely practical.’

He had had the luck during the course of these studies to win the acquaintance of Joseph Needham, our greatest Sinologue, whose multi-volumed study of Chinese science is almost complete and is certainly one of the great books of our time.² Needham had promised him a preface and a postscript to his own book if he would assemble it in scholarly fashion and clear terms. This of course was a great compliment and he appreciated its full extent. But of course the trouble was that one part of this theme was highly abstract, and the other almost elementary. The basic problem on the practical side was the culture of the orgasm — a culture characterized by premature emission on the part of the male and a corresponding frustration on the part of the female. This could and should be righted, and the ancient texts of the Love-Masters gave precise hints and rules, while diet and religious observance framed and illustrated the whole matter of love-making as part of a cosmic science. From the so-called Cartesian point of view (so much valued by the French) all this seemed highly aberrant; but I found it made good sense to me. I was able to verify from my own personal experience the fact that there was, as Chang says, a great difference between an ejaculation and an orgasm. In the love-making in which the Taoist doctrine spoke there could supervene an orgasm without loss of the vital Taoist essence. It was a question not only of conscious practice but of rapport, of attachment — the whole precious transaction was lifted to a new height of intensity which could endure for hours at a time, if necessary, because the two spirits remained enmeshed in each other. I had twice realized this experience — which presupposes an attachment so intense, so profound that if it did not meet with its response, its opposite, the resulting spring-back, the disappointment, would imperil reason itself!

It came, it seemed to me, as the result of the right kind of piety in love — piety which had nothing to do with a conventional religiosity. I had known it with one person — she had carried the tantric look with her, right into the midst of her death, like a standard. For a whole night the blue eyes continued to regard me with their impish felicity — the sapphire-blue regard with its privileged smile. In the whole of this fine transaction, I realized then there had been no place for self-gratification of a selfish kind. I was face to face with the blue flower of perfected knowledge. Only towards dawn the look became first sea-green, and then softly vitreous, it began to lose its pollen, to cloud over. I woke from those hours of riveted attention feeling profoundly informed by that serene tantric regard from the other side of death. To have been loved — I suddenly realized what a great compliment it was! Yet amusingly enough so often we had not been aware whether we had actually made love or not — so rapt had been the insight, so dense the communion of presence and touch. Yes, I knew what Chang’s text was getting at, though I wondered whether such notions would make any headway in an age such as ours, where such a spiritual state was as rare as the physical one was — orgasm without ejaculation! How could one put this over to monotheistic Christians who had been twisted by sanctimoniousness into the arthritic form of crucifixes? It had died with the last cathar, that look!

The quiddity of the Tao is in its quizzical stance. (The little god is called Coitus Absconditus!) My friend sat so perfectly still, watching me as I paced up and down, that I thought he had perhaps fallen asleep, ‘You are very hard on Christianity,’ he said at last, and I knew he was right. But it was all due to the mental jolt I received in my seventh or eighth year in Darjiling, where for a couple of years I had been placed in a Jesuit public school. It was a very good school and the good fathers were fine men — there was no propaganda. They preached by example only, and the example they gave was a high one. No, it was not they who gave me the shock. We Protestants numbered about forty children, and we were supposed to worship in town at the Church of England chapel. But one day while passing the Jesuit school chapel I found the door ajar and tiptoed inside, curious as children are. In the deep gloom I came upon a life-size figure of Christ crucified hanging over the altar, liberally blotched with blood and perfectly pig-sticked and thorn-hatted. An indescribable feeling of horror and fear welled up in me. So this was what those austerely garbed and bearded priests worshipped in this dense gloom among the flowers and candles! It was hardly a logical sequence of feelings and sentiments — it was quite spontaneous and unformulated. But the horror remained with me always; and later on, when my father decreed that I must go to England for my education, I felt that he was delivering me into the hands of these sadists and cannibals, men who could worship this brutal and savage effigy on the Christian cross. Naturally I could not put all this into words for many a year, but at that precise moment I knew that henceforward I would never bring myself to trust anyone who called himself a Christian and so invoke this doom-laden symbol of unhappiness! How right I was! So far nothing has ever come my way which might persuade me to modify this somewhat decisive though perhaps absurd view.³ The main road which passed the school in Darjiling ran along the side of the playing-fields; the sight of Tibetan lamas setting off on their long pilgrimages to the distant plains of India was a familiar one. Smiling, as if sauntering through the pages of Kim, they whirled their small prayer-wheels. I have had them on my mind ever since and can still hear the noise of the little brass wheels as they whirred out their prayers. But I had to make a wide detour to rediscover them, the lamas! A lion, I was thrown to the Christians!

* * *

So page by page, the text opened itself to our study, while the arguments and explanations spread out sideways from it, like crabs. Chang was delighted to hear that even old Rabelais had devoted thought to the matter of longevity, wondering if one could not ‘try how long an ingenious and agreeable man might last, if taken good care of’. Presumably the same sort of formula would apply — breathing, diet, husbanding of sexuality. Chang’s Taoist answers must have seemed on the face of it somewhat extravagant; yet here in the book were texts and pronouncements by the old masters of this love-craft which suggested quite the contrary. I was cutting up leeks as these ideas came under scrutiny and inadvertently threw out large sections of the outer leaves as I prepared them. Horrified, Chang gave a sort of little chirp — a Chinese sob — and dived down to the dustbin to recover them crying angrily: ‘You are wasting again; and you know how firm my Taoist principles are!’ There was heartbreak in his voice and I felt chastened and sorry. He took the discarded leaves and smoothed them delicately out with his fingers — as if they might have had a precious message graven on them. He washed them. ‘They are too coarse and old, Jolan,’ I remonstrated, but he shook his head and pursed his lips. He rolled them as one would a big tobacco leaf and taking the sharpest of the knives he cut them as finely as possible. He repeated for the hundredth time, ‘Anything is eatable if cut up small enough!’ I was proud of one thing however: to have reconverted him to ginger — it was a long time since he had used any in his cooking; also curry, I had some fresh curry from Madras — fresh from the armpits of Krishna, so to speak. He was less charitable to the wines in the house, and would not touch coffee. But he watched me indulgently as I drank, and toasting him I said, ‘I am suffering from a case of repressed longevity.’ But he only smiled and shook his head sadly, saying: ‘You are drinking too much; it makes you reason falsely and disturbs your yoga balance — not to mention making you fat …’ He was right, of course, but then the Good God gave us reason to make fools of ourselves with, and I did not want to be left behind. In a certain subterranean way this talk of the Tao — of the prelapsarian déclic which would enable one to turn the key of immortality in the lock — chimed in my mind with some old ideas I had had once about the nature of the poetic act. I felt that it was as if one were making the orgasm more and more conscious with each poem, exhausting, so to speak, the simple amnesia provoked by the ejaculation per se. Perhaps, without knowing it, I had been very close to the heart of the Tao of sex, as preached by my friend here, who was now sitting at the kitchen table looking at me in rather a curious way. He wore a look of devoted concentration on his face. Then I saw with surprise that there was a glass of wine before him. ‘I am going to drink with you,’ he said, ‘just to see what you see in it, if anything.’ Knowing his principles, and the highly strung and delicate state of health he enjoyed from the exercise of such radical precautions against gluttony, I did not believe him at first. I drank off a swig. He at once followed suit. I drank another. So did he. He made an awful face as he did so, but he seemed quite determined to commit suicide in this nauseating way — was it to register a reproach or a warning? I said nothing but went on talking of the pre-Adamic structure of the psyche and other matters, of the same sort, drinking all the while. He was imitating me. When I replenished my glass he held his out for a refill. ‘Come off it,’ I said, ‘I know it’s bad for you. Are you just trying to shame me?’ He shook his head and answered, ‘No, I am just trying something on you.’ I took a swig; he took a swig. In this way we finished dinner together drinking glass for glass. Of course it was an unequal struggle for I was in training while he, poor Taoist … He began to get unsteady and giggly; he found my jokes inordinately funny. I began to wonder if I should have to carry him up to bed. I felt that it was about time that the West made some cultural contribution to the Taoist scene, so I gave the Great Vampire Chortle — the sound with which I greet every unforeseen adversity in life. ‘What an extraordinary sound,’ he said. ‘What does it do?’ I answered. ‘It clears the air and clears the head; I have adapted it from Greek and Tibetan sources. Those who learn the Great Chortle are saved. Try it.’ He poised himself as if about to jump over a precipice and produced a very tolerable imitation of my chortle. Together we practised it a bit while we drank, until the plaster began to come off the ceiling. It was lucky that the morose existentialist gardener did not choose that moment to peer in from the balcony …

Altogether it was a splendid evening, full of variety, and yet full of this directed concentration with which my friend sought to imprint my psyche. I could feel the fall-out getting into the wine — but not fast enough to prevent my drinking the statutory amount for a great evening. Afterwards he explained to me the dynamic of this little act — which is called just ‘sitting’ in Chinese. It is part of a health-giving mechanism which is within the powers of anyone and everyone. The aim is to modify conduct in a fruitful sense — if you have a friend who is harming himself by a certain line of conduct. By sitting close to him and concentrating on that conduct you can, so to speak, meditate him into another groove, another shift. Like switching points on a railway. It has nothing to do with professional medical healing where the doctor imposes his will and his treatment on the sick man; nor is it the imposition of one’s own will-power upon the patient. As he explained it, in the sitting technique one simply mentally steps into the character of your friend as one steps into a boat and starts trying to steer it. Obviously wind and current play their part. But by an act of friendly passivity one sometimes can prod them to modify fruitless conduct and reorient themselves … I labour this point because for a whole month and a half after the departure of Jolan my intake of red wine dropped back equably, without stress, to four or five glasses a day — against a customary four or five pints. But the influence wore off after a while. Yet it was like post-hypnotic suggestion, and I have since tried it myself on someone — just sitting, meditating, not saying anything — with distinct results in the right direction. I must say though that the wine gave a rosy glow to the text and its ideas of harmony and bounty; it made men and women natural allies, sexual partners in a cosmic technique. Indeed I saw some of the great Love-Masters to the Emperors were in fact women whose advice was sought. Great Love-Consultants, their names have come down through these texts full of the fragrance and ardour of a language which has never known prudishness or prurience in matters of love. We spoke of the breathing and yoga side of the matter (it was in this field that the wine was robbing me of control). But I had grasped the central notion as far as I could judge, in the Chinese context. I asked myself what differentiates the conduct of the acrobat from that of the yogi. The acrobat can perform feats of physical skill superior to the yogi’s postures however complicated, yet it leads him nowhere because the issue of his skill is not one of virtue involving a cosmic principle. He is unaware of the poetic lodestar the yogi captures — the magnetic field which he enters.

Jolan Chang gave a chortle. It was sad, but also in a strange way consoling, to find that during a whole historic period in China itself the notation of the Tao had been lost, the link between men and women had been broken. They had become vampires, the women; and the men lost and effeminate; the whole cultural and political scheme of things had lost its equilibrium. The states foundered in anarchy and dissolution. The germ in the wheat had gone bad. A dark age settled over the whole land. According to my friend Chinese history could offer more than one example of this sort of collapse of the historic consciousness together with the corresponding recovery which followed with the swing of the pendulum, for nothing lasts for ever. Would we live to see our own age recover its wits? I wondered. Everything in nature hangs by a hair …‘Embark on the Tao and you won’t have a moment’s peace, because it demands unremitting application and comprehension and balance.’ (That is what Lao Tsu was saying.) You are like a tightrope-walker high above a city; yet with practice you can one day do the walk blindfold, without vertigo. Against reason I have always believed so. It was encouraging that Chang also supported this interpretation of the poem.

Before we turned in that evening for the usual shortened sleep I witnessed an amusing outbreak of Chinese humour, which came over my friend in a wave at the sight of an ashtray. By some singular coincidence the gypsies and traders had been bringing all sorts of esoteric trinkets into the village for the Saturday market. Esoteric in the sense that there were flower vases of glass marked ‘Birmingham’, marvellously life-like Indian roses made of silk, and so on. Among all this stuff I happened upon a couple of little bamboo ashtrays, pleasant of shape and with a colour-wash design on them depicting a bush, a river, the figure of a girl holding a fishing rod. The style was very debased but the idiom was quite inescapably Chinese. In a search for matches by the kitchen sink Chang hit upon one of these trinkets. He uttered an exclamation of curiosity and picked it up to examine it. He turned it over. On the back it had a legend in English which read ‘Made in Taiwan’. Something came over him as he read the words and he turned to me, helpless with laughter, pointing at the phrase with his finger, speechless with mirth. In a sort of way I could follow the contours of this cosmic joke — if one thought of the immensity and complexity and age of China and the triviality of contemporary power politics in the hands of American cowboys, or evangelical tycoons with Las Vegas souls … Yes, it merited the laughter. It was so infectious, his laugh, that I was forced to join in, and together we doubled up laughing until our sides ached and I implored him to stop.

‘Taiwan,’ he gasped helplessly.

‘Taiwan,’ I echoed, just as helpless. There was no need for a further gloze on the matter, though what the gardener would have made of our behaviour I have no idea. For some time afterwards whenever Jolan caught sight of this little saucer with its debased and disinherited scribble he gave an involuntary chuckle.

He had brought a certain amount of ancillary documentation with him of the Kinseyfied kind, and while I have nothing against the statistical approach I know how untrustworthy it can be when used as a basis for analysis, and also how few questionnaires are ever really truthfully filled in. Chang did not agree about this. He had seen some good results in the quantitative field. Yes, but were we harking back to a lost innocence or forward to a shift in principle in the West which might modify, not merely conduct, the inward dispositions of the psyche — given the new permissive (so-called) changes of sexual behaviour? Chang said, ‘Look, I am not selling anything. I offer you here a sheaf of texts which adds up to a fairly coherent system devoted to health and psychic balance.’

We spoke, I remember, a good deal about Henry Miller and his ailments which interested Chang very much, for he admired his work and had grasped the central implication in it which so many people still miss. Miller himself has said it somewhere in an interview: ‘My books are not about sex, they are about self-liberation.’ Chang was delighted to hear that he was in his eighties and convinced that with a little care he might top the hundred — after which, apparently, things got very much easier. He said he would like to give him some free advice strictly as a gerontologist, and to this end I dug out a typewriter and started to take dictation — which resulted in a long and detailed letter about how to conserve his energies and faculties. There were some Chinese herbs he mentioned like the Gin Seng root — but Miller was already taking these. The marvellous thing was the old writer’s joyful optimism in spite of a wonky leg with a plastic artery which didn’t really do the work of the real one which they had removed; and then one eye was also giving him trouble. Chang assured me that all this was quite remediable if his advice were followed, so we packed off a long letter to Miller with all speed.

After this we started cooking again and my companion said, ‘After we have eaten I shall give you a very special pleasure. I had the luck to pick up a piece of Sung ceramic in an antiquary’s shop in London for a few pence — he had not recognized it.’ Duly, when we had finished our meal, he hunted through his little air-satchels, taking, in passing, a fanatical sip of milk from his bottle, and then produced a small dark-brown vase; there was nothing on it in the way of engraving or decoration, and indeed, there seemed to be little enough to it — one has seen lathe-turned objects of precision which have a certain snug efficiency of shape without being aesthetically haunting. I said so, but he only smiled. ‘But you are not looking. Just look at it, like a shape, like a shadow or a cloud.’ He picked it up on three fingers and with a turn of the wrist presented it towards the window with its sunlight. ‘How do you know it is a Sung piece?’ He smiled again. ‘The proportions — there is no other distinguishing mark. That is why the antiquary missed it. He is like a blind man who has to proceed from the familiar touch of things. Here, if one only had to touch one could not tell what it was. Try looking into it and feel the proportions, feel the way it was potted like a bird’s egg.’ After a while I began to see in a dim way what he saw; it was rather like a theorem in geometry. Then I realized that what he was admiring was the way the little object filled itself with empty space — he was not admiring the skilful manipulation of matter, the beauty of function only. Thus one might, from our point of view, find the little memento without much significance while from his it was an exquisite trap set to decorate the circumambient space without and around it. The Chinese aesthetic — well, talk about negative capability! The counterweight to matter was space, the counterpoise to music, silence. The aesthetic lay in the appreciation of the magic fulcrum. Moreover, it weighed aesthetically while working practically! Yes, I had begun to see in a vague sort of way what constituted a delicious aesthetic experience for Jolan Chang. China had moved that much closer to me.

He was specially struck by the fact that in the gloomy hall of my tumbledown old house I had stuck up four beautiful Chinese panels of wood which I found being auctioned off at the public auctions in Nimes. They had cost almqst nothing. Each one was the height of a man and the wood appeared to be some very stout and beautiful slice of teak. He recognized unhesitatingly that they came from Peking, though in fact the French doctor who had sold them off in Nimes had brought them back from Saigon. They were coloured panels which, so I was told, hang outside the pharmacies in the Far East — advertising, in fact, designed to attract custom. Two were red and two black — the yang and the yin, the two principles of nature. The red had poems engraved on them, and the black medical captions. But just what they said was anyone’s guess, and I had been waiting for someone Chinese to come and translate them for me. I had waited about six years, but when one knows that one is going to live for ever one can afford to wait on time with happy resignation. Now Chang had given these the most meticulous and delighted examination, and proposed to translate them for me in good round English. They did, he said, indeed hang outside Oriental pharmacies. The red had some health-giving poetry upon them while the black carried a sort of admonitory caption citing the name of some great medical master of the past. It was as if one saw on such a panel in Europe the legend MEDICAL PRINCIPLES AS OUTLINED BY PARACELSUS. Nor had I been wrong about the two colours standing for the two cosmic principles. It was the old rocking-chair of the Tao. I had by now realized that all the Chinese, without exception, were Taoist in their philosophical and aesthetic aspect and Confucian in their dogmatic and theological aspect. The great penetration and balance of Chinese intellectual and aesthetic life was centred upon this fruitful marriage. In just such a way, too, the French have managed to arrive at a fruitful and harmonious marriage of Rabelais and Pascal, of Montaigne and Descartes, in their basic natures. My panels themselves were handsome in the extreme and I was glad that at last — even in an inadequate foreign translation — they would be able henceforward to speak to me.

LEGEND ON RED PANEL

Four wells full of clouds and smoke spreading the grasses.

LEGEND ON RED PANEL

A full courtyard with the wind and the dew engendering flowers.

LEGEND ON BLACK PANEL

The Art of Medicine will profit by taking into account the skill of Wah To in opening stomachs and cleaning them.

LEGEND ON BLACK PANEL

The Art of Surgery profits by recalling the techniques of Pian Cha in opening the chest and in transplanting hearts.

Chang did not have the books to hand to fill in the biographical details about the two doctors, but he promised to repair the omission the moment he got to Cambridge where he was going to spend ten days consulting about the avant-propos he had been offered for his book and various other matters. Apparently there was a very choice if small Chinese reference library at Cambridge — I did not know this. Yet true to his word he rang me up about a week after his departure and said that he had looked up the two doctors. He was very excited by the panel devoted to PIAN CHA because of its unique reference to heart transplants. He had never seen such a reference before on any such comparable panel. PIAN CHA had been a famous surgeon indeed and his downfall had been brought about by palace intrigue, presumably by jealous competitors. This was the most interesting of the panels from his point of view. But I was delighted that he had found the name of WAH TO also. He had been a famous Taoist physician who practised in the second or third century. So at last my health-giving fetishes of panels were intelligible; it was clear also that the scarlet poetry panels had been influenced by Ezra Pound a bit!

So the day wore on into night and I switched on the lights in the verandah, with its weird ‘retro’ coloured glass; and whenever we practised a Vampire Chortle or an Outer Mongolian eldritch shriek the owls flew snickering down from the tower, while the little Scops (the Athenian owl) enchanted by the light through the coloured glass gave out its plaintive whirp. We walked up and down like bears arguing and discussing. ‘Virginity is not the issue; the thing is that from the Chinese point of view natural modesty which is delightful in woman or man should never be allowed to degenerate into prudishness or prurience, for that is an illness in Taoist terms. Our pretty erotic pillow-books are the answer for it, and young lovers use them in that sense, to rid themselves of any morbid surplus of guilt or fear.’ Of course, I realized the difference now — in a sense the Taoist never escaped from the sense of belonging to the whole human and cosmic process, neither when he was breathing nor when he was making love. It was the negative capability again; he was free of the ergo sum complex. Nevertheless there was still much more that one wanted to know after reading his texts — in my case very much more. It would have been most interesting to have some discussion of the kind of typology that Chinese astrology would offer to the couple, a science which, after all, stood once for something as comprehensive as our so-called psychology; indeed, when you think of the poverty of our modern psychological typology which boils down to about three human types physical or mental, in all … Even if astrology is highly arguable as an exact science, it does try to circumscribe the vast variety of the human dispositions and the contingencies surrounding their appearance on earth at one time and place. But of course this was outside my friend’s brief; and he didn’t want to give the impression that he was in any way interfering with the plain and fair scholarship of his book by staking claims — beyond the fact that he had tried the precepts and found that they made supersense.

A mark, too, of our developing intimacy which had grown out of the idea emanating from his text was his sudden explanation of what he was doing in Sweden. The girl he loved, and by whom he had had a child, was a native of Stockholm and had decided to return there from the States. Chang, who had become very well known in Canada as a photographer who specialized in child portraiture, had found life increasingly void in the New World and had decided to follow her. He showed me some delightful pictures of the little girl — she was as pretty as a cherry-tree in blossom. Having daughters myself I understood his decision perfectly.

We spoke too of mandalas and the range of the symbolic logic contained in this sort of blueprint, as well as in the pure and unalembicated poetry of all classical forms. (Modern poetry and logic seemed to us suspect, though I tried to convince him that in apparently negative works or thoughts there was also a fruitful disgust engendered by the non-participation, as in the plays of Ionesco and Beckett). Or was their non-participation, their refusal to join the dance, their fashionable scepticism, a mark of the intellectual poltroonery which characterizes the age? I wondered. I was at any rate grateful to see Chang’s little Chinese ladies taken seriously somewhere and not relegated to the status of mere point-events rather than souls. I was happy, too, in a way that only an old man can be, that I had lived through a period when woman was not a mere happening but a wholesale Event. When She came into a room we all sprang to our feet to find her a chair; we sat down and waited for her to speak. And when she left we all bounded to open the door for her. And when it closed behind her we all sighed in unison and gazed at one another, exclaiming ‘By Jove! What?’ and fingering out beards and moustaches. Her value to us was far greater than that of a machine à plaisir in the conventional seaside picture-postcard sense. Nor was she just an earth-Mama — for in those days fathers existed, had duties, were accorded a role to play. They were not the burnt-out cases one sees today, incapable of engendering the sexual magnetism which might justify their social role, or of providing a fertile field where a woman could deploy the grand powers of her warmth, her cherish, and the profound intuition which makes her such an incomparable tutor and uncanny guide for a man. When the knack is lost, of course, the children pay the price in psychic deprivation. This too was what the Tao was all about, for the couple and its rapport constituted the basic biological brick out of which society was constructed. If the brick lacks straw … the whole sexual methodology of the cosmos was faulted. When the couple didn’t work, nothing worked.

Walking about among the sunny vines we also spoke about the Ox-Herding pictures and their symbolism of the soul condensing its apprehensions, turning off the cinema in the head, capturing the herd. For me, however, I preferred the imagery from another context — I think Arabic — of the religious instinct like a caged bird which one day escapes into the room. Thenceforward the problem is how to get it back into the cage again. The bird, of course, is intoxicated by this new-found freedom, yet it has no inkling that there is more empty space outside the room, outside the house, outside the solar system. It does not know the meaning of pure space, only a conditional space, as well as a certain longing for the security and certainty of the cage from which it has escaped. But most of these excursions into the outer reaches of philosophy were of no use to the present manuscript which he preferred to keep quite simple, as a monograph, without didactic or ethical overtones. As for the Tao and the whole complex of Chinese thought: it was I who was to benefit by leading him far afield in the moments when we broke off to eat, sleep, discuss, walk. It was enriching for me to discuss these old life-shaping passions like Lao Tsu and Chuang Tzu with someone who had fully grasped the original.

In a general sense too I had repaid my debt to him precisely because in talking round and round the whole subject as we had done I had illuminated for him many areas of our Occidental thought which needed his consideration if he was to make his subject matter clear and penetrating to his western reader. I tested the text, in some aspects somewhat sketchy, against every kind of objection, and he was glad that I had not found it wanting. Time, too, was running out and he was expected at Cambridge, where he would be put up by a friend under rather Spartan conditions, which sometimes resulted in his having to sleep on the floor! But he looked after his clothes and his general tenue as punctiliously as a cat. Despite all offers of the maid to wash his clothes or iron them he preferred to tend them himself, passing a wet cloth over them, or a warm iron. When I thought of the simple way he travelled, sleeping sitting up in trains, and so on, I was struck by how spruce he managed to keep himself. I of course regretted his going so soon. His book had formed a sort of bond between me and my own youthful preoccupations which had all got themselves crystallized round the notion of Tao. It led me back like a plumbline to that remote and far off day by the blue Ionian Sea when I said to myself with astonishment, ‘Why goodness me, I must be a Taoist!’ It explained also the nagging sense of disjunction I had always felt in the West, the sense of being a savage; and also the guilt of feeling that I was playing a part and was unequal to my responsibilities as a Christian believer, and I longed to conform since I loved my mother and father. Yet the awakening, pour ainsi dire, was not just of a poetic order — though if I call it ‘religious’ I mean it rather in the anthropological sense and not in the denominational. After I awoke into poetry I had the feeling that from thenceforward I could do nothing that was wholly frivolous, everything made sense; even if I were to commit evil it would still be purposeful … Then there came another thought which was equally gratuitous, arriving from nowhere. ‘The poet is one whom death cannot surprise, for he has taken up an imaginative emplacement within it by his poems.’ A kid, I had fallen into milk with a vengeance!

‘Have you any food you don’t want?’ The question brought me back to myself. ‘Because I could take it with me. I eat very lightly when I am travelling.’ Together we examined the fridge. He took a lascivious sip of milk to see if it had turned or not. No! Could he take it with him? He reverently poured it into his little hot-water bottle. There were a couple of apples, a small fragment of cheese and a couple of biscuits and a tomato. I calculated that it would just about have kept a mouse alive for a night or so. ‘This will last me three days at least,’ said Chang running his eye over the assembled items. I pictured him in the wastes of Cambridge nibbling at this fare and blowing on his fingers for warmth; but like all good yoga men he hardly felt the cold. ‘I shall be all right.’ I had intended to take him to a station myself but at the last moment I had a notification for a long-distance telephone call which I could not countermand. So I called the village taxi which came scratching and scrawling into the drive on all the loose gravel. ‘Well,’ he said, giving me the benefit of a final Taoist look accompanied by a smile of friendly complicity. ‘Thank you for the whole trip. It’s been a memorable meeting, no?’ Indeed it had, and I felt so despondent at the sight of him leaving that I quite forgot to give him a farewell Chortle. He strung his belongings around him and donned his light overcoat and the ski bonnet of soft wool. ‘We’ll meet again in London,’ he said, and I agreed. Then the taxi bore him off into the night while I stood in the garden for a while, thinking of his book and listening to the whistle of the owls as they came whirring down in search of field-mice or bats.

So ended my first Taoist visitation, and as the spring wore on to summer I began to be increasingly taken up with other problems of the ordinary kind. But from time to time I received a call from Jolan Chang to report progress on the book. He had found some delightful and appropriate illustrations, the preface and postface were excellent, and so on. I contributed a note for the sleeve, but I promised more substantial help later on which, by a series of trifling mishaps, I was unable to supply at the right time. But the book appeared and did well, receiving a serious if slightly reserved English press. In France, however, its critics were more enthusiastic and its public, for the most part young, very enthusiastic. Apparently it made sense, even to people habitually subjected to the fraudulent cat’s cradle of the dialectic or to the hiccups of Tel Quel! But it was too simple and unpretentious a book to get up powerful tensions of an intellectual kind. In fact, one would have to have an inkling of the value of breath to be struck by it, I suppose; or to have taken soundings already and come to some conclusions about the meaning of silence … But at all events the little bookshop which abuts the old Sorbonne told me that it was much in demand. Chang went back to his great flat and his collection — not to mention his tiny gnome of a daughter — and our correspondence lapsed; I had several journeys ahead of me. But I was sorry to have failed him at the London end. Happily the support of Joseph Needham had given the book the prestige it needed for its launching.