A Smile in the Mind's Eye

5

So it fell out. I crossed the wide plain of Novarra one late afternoon; all the corn had caught alight on both sides of the road and a racing fire seemed to stretch away to the horizon on either side of me. It was a dramatic vision of destruction! But it was so very hot that I did not linger but raced through, fearing an exploding petrol tank or some such mishap. After a very few more kilometres the green Alpine meadows and foothills started to rise ahead of me and suddenly it was there — a modest green signpost directing me to the tiny kidney-shaped lake I was hunting for: Nietzsche’s Orta. (‘Our Orta’ he had written in a love letter to Lou.) The approaches grew narrower, more sinuous, and densely wooded — nightingales sang everywhere, just as they do in Provence. The lake came up, as if presented upon the palm of an invisible conjuror’s hand, and upon it the sacred island with its monastery and tall trees, all so toy-like and so calm and so small and homely in scale. The green lake edge was Irish green. As for Orta, Balzac described it once with a simile that I had thought suspect, as altogether too plump, ‘a pearl in a green jewel case’… Quite the contrary. It is not. He was stirred by the strange opalescent quality of the light and the translucent shifts of colour on the mountains which cradled and framed the island. This hazy misty feeling throws everything in and out of focus and gives a feeling of unreality, or iridescence, to the whole waterscape. Moreover, the whole thing is double for when the water is calm the mountains repeat themselves in it and one does not know which side up one is; you have the feeling sometimes of walking on the sky. No, Balzac’s image is very exact, and cannot be bettered.

I rolled down these shadowy inclines, round a dozen curves, and came to rest in the tiny square with its two inns, its pleasant arcades and small cafes. The Dragon was a pleasant little auberge as well with its rooms opening on the lake. Vega was to lodge at the Catello opposite, twenty yards away. We would be able to wave from our respective balconies over the water! I would have liked to send flowers to her room but I did not have her name, like the fool I was. I went however and consulted the visitor’s book — a very vague document kept in pencil by a near-analphabetic — in the hope of discovering it, since she said she had booked there. I supposed that she was German by marriage though I knew her to be French by birth. Which name then? There was only one person expected for the next evening and she was called Chantal De Legume. My heart sank. Just the thought that she might be called Chantal De Legume made me burst into a sweat of apprehension. It would spoil everything — such a name comprised everything! I know it is irrational but I hoped desperately that she was not called Chantal De Legume. (She is not called Chantal De Legume!)

I renounced the flowers, and took a boat to drift on that quiet water for an hour or so before dinner time, reflecting idly on that long-lost philosopher whose name nobody in Orta would know today — except perhaps the curé (and then only as an anti-Christ). The old man who rowed me was calm and polite but not voluble; his father would have been of an age to ferry Nietzsche and Lou out upon the waters of Orta, to take them to the island of San Julio; or perhaps his grandfather? But no, for Lou lived on until the beginning of the Nazi epoch in Germany. I could actually have met her. The water was so warm that I knew I should be tempted to take a silent night-swim in it later on. I had brought my own little Zodiac dinghy with its motor, but Orta is too small a lake to poison with outboard motors. It is made for the slow sweep of oars, the slow creak of wood not properly imbibed by a winter of submersion. The little awnings and the gay frills of the boat were rather dusty and damp. Summer was not yet here. High above me as I lay in the sheets of the boat rose the Monte Sacro — I could see St Francis hanging off a wooded balcony and waving to me. I waved back but I wanted to save him until Vega came. The twenty little chapels — each as big as a Swiss chalet — house twenty tableaux — scenes from the life of St Francis — enacted by life-size statues in gutta percha, appropriately dressed and painted, each different, and all grandiose. Vega was sure that Nietzsche, being a man, would have sought the aid of one such shrine when he proposed to Lou! (For a great man he was extraordinarily timid.) The problem was which one — she had come here to find that out. But I had other fish to fry — for I had been reading Nietzsche and discovering what had really been ailing him here in Orta, the gestation of his critical books in which he declared war on Christianity in the name of Heraclitus and the ancient Greeks. His target was no less than the Christian god, God the Father.

Night fell, the mists closed in and filtered eerily among the mossy vegetation, trailing long tentacles; the lake began to creep about, as it were, for such was the illusion given by moving mists and waters forever rubbing out and correcting images of sky and mountain. The sky full of stars burned furiously in the water, broken up by belfries and cupolas and the slow planetary trails carved by the boats (now lit like fireflies) as they crawled about the lake. Never have I experienced such a sense of peace, suspended upon a narrow balcony between sky, mountain and water — feeling as if I myself had become a trail of vapour slowly drifting about at the behest of a current of wind, of water. The sky turned slowly through its arc as if projected by a stage diorama. Time filled the heart like an hourglass. I had an early dinner and turned in, though for a long moment before sleeping I watched the shifting spectacle offered by the polished water outside the balcony window. I wondered whether Vega would find what she was seeking — the chapel where the timid but brilliant (though neurotic: all those migraines!) professor plucked up his courage to propose not marriage but … concubinage to the slim and graceful Slav whose brilliance he so admired. And then, the tragic enigma posed by his collapse into mania; surely Lou in her old age must have seen the rationale of the whole thing through the lens of Freudian theory — it still holds firm. The old sage Freud considered her one of his most brilliant pupils. He addresses her, in a letter, as ‘My indomitable friend’. He was no Zarathustra either, though he preserved his inquisitorial sanity to the end. As for Nietzsche, it was war to the knife against three fathers — or rather against God the Father (the Christian God), God the Son (his own father and all he stood for in the realm of ideas) — he never forgot hearing his mother hiss at him: ‘You are a reproach to your father’s grave’; the words had bitten deep into his sensibility — and then God the Holy Ghost, was Wagner of course, whom he also had to deny and destroy. Was it not the shock of this tremendous struggle that overturned his reason? Sometimes when he was mad he spoke of Cosima Wagner. ‘My lady Cosima sent me here …’ Of course in the turbulence of his broken mind the wife of the Holy Ghost must have been a highly desirable muse in the Oedipus context! And finally, of course, Mother won out, his own earthly mother; triumphantly she gathered all this human wreckage into her arms, while the sister quietly betrayed him by falsifying the text of his work with anti-Jewish interpolations … What a fate, what a man, what a place! I fell asleep thinking of the little chapels on the wooden hill above me. Next day was clear, but by evening a thick mist came down, and this time in a definitive manner — you could not see your hand before your face. My heart sank. Stresa was only a quarter of an hour’s drive — I knew the way by heart. But never have I seen such dense fog. The hotel proprietor told me curtly that it would not lift until morning; I stood no chance of climbing out of the hollow where Orta lies so I had better give up the notion of driving to the station and stay put. It enraged me. I closed my eyes at the dinner table and mentally rememorized every inch of the road round the lake — I had done it several times now. It was extremely foolhardy, I knew, but I thought I would try and get up on to the main road, travelling blind. I got pitying looks from everyone. They said that after a hundred yards I should be forced to leave the car and walk back to the hotel. Nevertheless I set off. It was terrifying, I could not even see my own headlights; I was travelling by memory purely, as if in a dream. I was guided by a strip of cobbling on the side of the road, the vibration it made on my tyres. But the gods heard my prayers. Suddenly, like a veil snatched away, the whole fog was peeled back to reveal a bright pure sky with ardent stars and with Vega overhead giving me the fixed-star look — almost turquoise this time. I shouted with joy and put on speed, to arrive in Stresa with an hour to spare which I happily spent in the empty buffet, reading.

How eerie her arrival was; a light and wholly irrational snowstorm of light flakes had started. The snow melted as it touched ground. You could hear the train far away in the darkness somewhere, the mesh of wheels and its little apologetic foghorn. An answering bell somewhere in the station started to echo, started to throb. Then in the further darkness of the hinterland, upon the velvety screen of night, as if in response I saw a sudden line of yellow lights moving slowly across the skyline, softly tinkling as the whole chaplet came slowly and sinuously down to the level of the plain. The little station bell went mad now. It throbbed as if it had a high temperature. I waited on the dark platform with this very light snow — a mere swish-like spray — caressing my neck. The train arrived with a clamour and a final sprint, a rush. It came to rest in the station; it was apparently empty. There was not even a guard on board. In my disappointment I was about to turn away and set off back to Orta when at the very end a carriage door opened, a bar of light fell on the snowy platform, and Vega stepped out. She stood there smiling with the snow on her furs, on her blonde head, a little hesitant and questioning, but with the firm blue regard of happiness. Enfin! I ran forward, seized her bag and led her back to the car. She had not expected to be met and so was a little pleased and confused.

The memory of those few days — the smooth lake at night, the polished mountains and the vernal hills where the nightingales sang night and day — has become a fused up continuum where the details have all melted into one overwhelming impression of divine attachment and friendship. The little chapels we explored were so extraordinary and so various, the hills so green, the wine so good, our hosts so tender and welcoming. There was nothing to mar the felicity of this intellectual adventure — not a false note or a false sentiment to break or bruise this calm and content, as of brother and sister meeting by the lake of Zarathustra. We recognized each other through Nietzsche and Lou, sharing like them an attachment which was as ardent as it was limpid. When it was time to part she said, somewhat maliciously, ‘Shall I sign all my letters Chantal De Legume so that you can identify me?’ But I had already mentally allocated to her the name of my protecting star, for her eyes were of the same fine colour. Vega it should be. All this came suddenly back to me now as I negotiated the green fields and sodden meadows of Montfavet and l’Isle-sur-Sorgue. I compiled those ancient memories with happiness and reserve, remembering also the long silences we shared, swimming at night in the lake. Once she went for a long walk alone. Our documents littered the floor of her room. I had brought photostats of the thunderous handwriting of Nietzsche’s letter to Strindberg, the mad declarations of his Godship. At night, late at night, the smoke of candles which had long expired drifted over our arguments and filled the room, with its high ceilings decorated by plaster nymphs and scrolls. She slept with her face on her arm and I watched her sleep, so contentedly, so thoroughly. She had found the chapel that she sought — but who would ever be able to prove her contention that it was here in Number 14 that Nietzsche had taken Lou’s hand in his and asked her to live with him? And why did Lou refuse? We will, I presume, never know the truth, for she has not deigned to tell us. But she was a fiery Slav and he was, after all, a timid German professor condemned by his health to premature retirement. And he lacked humour. What he sought for himself — he had recognized full well that Heraclitus and the early Greeks held the key he so frantically sought — was simply The Look, the equable look of the Tao which contains the salt of humour and complicity and irony in its depths. ‘Nobody trusts art any more,’ said Vega sadly.

So the time came to part and I made my slow way home across the midriff of Italy, camping a night on the way in order to savour the delight and simplicity of this prime event. It was not the last; whenever I got a telegram signed Vega it offered me a landfall somewhere in Europe which concerned her steady search for the essence of Nietzsche’s thought. I got used to crossing Europe, slithering back and forth across the map, with the delightful knowledge that just for a few hours or a few days I would see her again. Meanwhile we exchanged books and documents and photos of our two subjects, Wagner and Cosima. And she introduced me to the marvellously sensitive trilogy of musical studies by Guy De Portalès — why isn’t his Nietzsche en Italie still available among the paperbacks? It’s a shame! And so at last we came to the end of our search and to say farewell we came here, to the Fontaine De Vaucluse. The years passed. We still met in this strange unbroken intimacy in far-away places — Salzburg, Silz Maria, Eze. But Orta had marked us both and it would be long before we managed to disentangle Nietzsche from our mental lives. Vega visited Russia, and then Greece, and though I was not there to show her round, friend Nietzsche was, and he did her the honours. The visit opened up another magic casement in the pre-Socratics, notably on Heraclitus and Empedocles about whom he had projected a book. Alas! only the notes he made for it remain for us, with here and there a typical thunderflash of thought which shows us in which direction it might have gone. Of Empedocles he says: ‘He looked for Art and only found science. Science creates Fausts!’ She now fully understood and approved my interpretation of Zarathustra’s struggle as well as the pity of his failure to grasp the Heraclitean quiddity; he saw it, he reached out his hand to grasp it, but … His art remained. But art is a second-best, however great, and he knew this now when it was too late! With him a whole epoch nose-dives into the bottomless pit of matter and is lost. It was in Orta that despite Lou’s kind and tender refusal, Nietzsche was able to swallow his mortification and go on to outline his coming work to her — including the theory of ‘eternal recurrence’ which he claimed to have developed upon an ancient Greek basis. What he sought however was much more like an eternal simultaneity — the continuous eternal and simultaneous presence of everything mortal or material or in essence, wrapped into a package with all Time included in it — and the whole of it present in every thought, in every drawn breath, an incandescent Now!

Our visit to the country of Petrarch was more fortuitous though Vega was after all an Avignon girl with relations in the town whom she wished to see before going on a long journey which would take her far from France for several years. Happily, I lived so close by that I was able to profit from this descent into the Vaucluse, and we spent some time travelling together to the smaller villages, the more evocative corners of Provence. I personally would not have risked such a tourist spot as the fountain of Vaucluse but she insisted, and the trip as it turned out was delightful; it was in mid-winter. There was not a soul — not even the ghost of Laura rising from the foam. Was it Vega’s local patriotism that made her put up such an effective plaidoyer for Petrarch? I had been rather inclined to see in him one of the cry-babies of love-poetry. But thanks to her I now saw beneath the trappings of romance and realized him as the great and deeply responsible humanist, fully aware that he had stirred a whole culture to its roots and struck chords deeper than any poet before him. She rounded out the portrait in some detail — the courtier, the diplomat, the dispirited lover of another’s wife. Then all the sudden excursions into the neighbouring countries, followed always by a retreat to this sunless ravine where he could polish his verses to the rushing of the waters. The great poem on Africa, and the essay on solitude, the passion for St Augustine … I had no idea he was an artist of such stature — I owe the knowledge to Vega. Moreover, it was due to her that I hunted down texts of his little autobiographical dialogues entitled Secretum Meum as well as the touching and poetic statements in De Vita Solitaria in which he deals with the heralidic solitude of the artist. This last document was sent to me some months later from Geneva as a Christmas present. It was beautifully bound in scarlet vellum — a fitting setting for a great poet’s confession.

Well, all this was in the past now, but my memories of these episodes were still fresh, and the time of day I had chosen to descend on the sacred fountain was appropriate to the theme of my reflections. Moreover it was snowing, and heavily snowing at that. Ice crunched under my wheels. The villagers were shuttered and huddled upon themselves with only plumes of smoke from cottage chimneys to suggest human habitation. I could hear the roar of the distant fountain as it crashed out of the rock-face into the great circular pool where it lashed and writhed, for all the world as if it were boiling hot. The town was in darkness save for a glim here and there; one point of light shone from the little hotel where we had once stayed. I laid the car up in the snowy park and with my nose well tucked into my scarf ran down the pathways by the racing river to the glassfronted door of the place where I knocked once or twice rather sharply, in order to be heard above the roaring water. The madam of the establishment who was busy somewhere in the depths came short-sightedly towards me with a torch. Who could it be at such a time, on such a night? She did not at first recognize me but, good trusting soul, came towards me to parley through the glass door. It did not take long to recall who I was and she let me into the bar where I drank a welcome hot grog while she sat and kept me company. The place had not yet opened for the tourist season but she had come over for the weekend to test the heating and water systems; and indeed the heating was on and the whole place cosy. She offered to lodge me for the night but I preferred to sleep high up by the fountain in my little camper; but I would not say no to a sandwich. ‘A sandwich!’ she cried indignantly. ‘You shall dine properly in my hotel.’ It did not take long to prepare; she served me a trout with almonds — the trout grows à domicile here — followed by a good cheese with a bottle of Côte de Ventoux. And while I ate she came to talk to me in her kind and desultory fashion. Where was the blonde lady, she wanted to know? She was in Africa. ‘Once after your visit she came back here alone.’ I knew this for Vega had written to me from here, and in the same sort of season, for she described the heavy snow falling and being smoothed away in the racing water — and then an unusual touch which I had just come upon myself; the great trout were rising to the snowflakes and taking them as if they were bait! ‘A strange place to bring an unhealed love-affair.’ That was how she had once put it, referring to Petrarch. After dinner I ploughed my way up into the ravine as far as the macadam goes, and then turned off with my nose to the cliff to doss down. The intense white glare of the snow reflected so much light that one had the illusion that there was still a lingering twilight. The roar of the water was deafening; it was like being in the engine-room of some great ship, sleeping between the pulsing sweating turbines as they drove one rushing through the sea. What a lapidary’s wheel on which to polish the first elegaic poems of an entire epoch! One’s whole consciousness was quite engulfed in this steady drumming — as if upon a heavy vellum drumhead. The snow was falling in great meshes and wreaths and chaplets, and the water was swirling and polishing the black cliffs as it streaked for the sea. The river hereabouts is too fast for the fish, but a little lower down it is dark and pithy with trout. I made up my bed, heated up and then switched prudently off before turning in. It was wonderfully healing, the boom of the river — the dense cocoon of sound swaddled every nerve. Old conversations came back to mind, lazily, as if projected upon the darkness, wrestling with the desire to sleep.

‘And Laura, was she real?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Yes and no.’

‘If invented she was still as real as any of his readers — as you or I are.’

‘And if real she was only the ghost of an echo of a mood. In the book she dies, remember?’

‘Africa! Sitting here in this roaring nautilus of sound he dreamed of Africa and read St Augustine.’

‘And so for Laura there were many candidates for the part.’

‘What names! What beauties!’

‘Laura di Audiberto [Hugo de Sade’s wife], Laura di Sabran, Laura di Chiabu, Laura Colonna …’

‘An all-star cast.’

‘All star-crossed women.’

‘The Happy Few rather.’

Or are human beings just recordings made by some terrifying voice from elsewhere?

In my half-sleep I was reminded of a story by Queba the Lebanese in which a famous writer manages to project his heroine to such good effect that the public believes her to be based on some real women. Scents are named after her, and streets, and newborn children. But the author himself has never been seen out with a woman. Always alone. Scenting a story, in the manner of journalists, a woman editor asks her newspaper to announce a ballot — the public must vote for a real or imagined original for the famous heroine. They vote overwhelmingly in favour of an imagined heroine. The auther is beside himself with anxiety and sorrow. ‘She is not real enough, then, and she will never arrive.’ So he goes home in despair and takes his own life, having at last realized the truth. Of his last story nothing remains save the enigmatic title it was to bear Death Has Blue Eyes.

The water went on, rubbing and polishing its own echoes, drumming upon the darkness, upon the soft wadded walls lining the convolutions of some marvellous sea-shell. The thread which I held in my fingers I had first picked up — the clue, the inkling — from the great stone Gorgon in the island of Corfu — her cartoon of gay madness, ecstasy, hypomania — call it what you will. The clues led steadily on, and upon them I had threaded these experiences, all related and all congruent to a poetic life and practice. Where would it next lead me? I did not know, I did not care. Somewhere in Africa Vega would be writing me a letter, probably reproaching me for some un-Roman weakness, for she was a girl who did not spare her friends. I had written, saying: ‘I am beginning to feel like some very old and moulting penguin left upon a small and rapidly melting ice-floe — call it European culture. Lord God, send the bomb, I sometimes cry! Then I think of Vega, and, with a gesture, I stay the blow! Not yet, for Vega lives!’ In her last letter — so many months ago — she enclosed the French text of a Chinese poem called ‘Woman’ which I Englished for a friend in the following manner. She did not say where she got it, and I have hunted in every likely place and asked my friends to hunt in Paris. I apologize if I have broached a copyright.

WOMAN

How sad it is to be a woman!

Nothing on earth is held so cheap;

When boys stand leaning at the sill,

Like Gods tumbled out of Heaven.

Their hearts compass the Four Oceans,

The dust and the wind of a thousand thousand miles.

But no one is glad when a girl is born –

By her the family sets no store.

When she grows up she hides in her room

Scared to look a man in the face.

Nobody cries when she leaves her home, save she.

As suddenly as clouds when rain pauses,

She bows her head, composes her face, her teeth

Are pressed into her red lips, she bows and kneels

O! countless times. She must humble herself even to servants.

His love is as distant as a star,

Yet always the sunflower turns towards the sun.

Her heart is more sundered than water from fire,

A hundred ills are heaped on her; her face will follow

The changes of the years, will wear its age.

Her Lord will find new treasures.

They that were once like substance and shadow

Are now as distant as Hu from ch’in [two places]

Or as Ts’an is from Ch’en [two stars].

3rd Century Chinese

How odd that these apparently disparate incidents were all held together in my mind by a slender chain of echoes, a predisposition which stretched back to my twenty-third year in the remote (then) island of Corfu where I had taken up residence with the intention of trying my hand at being a poet — or at least a writer of some sort. It seemed clear now, as I thought back to that prehistoric time, that the main inhibition against giving Chang’s book a conventional review (what I had promised) was the echoes it had set off in my memory. I could not bring a coolly critical intelligence to bear on his text. This sense of indecision had been helped by the fact that I had also been trying to compile some sketchy autobiographical notes for an American friend who was anxious to trace what he called ‘the inner autobiography’ of my poetry. It dawned on me in answering his letters that the central preoccupation of the then unfledged young poet of Corfu has been always somehow linked with childhood dreams of Tibet which had at last concretized themselves about the Tao — the great poem of Lao Tsu. In the Black Book written around 1936, I find a Tibetan epigraph. The novel was published in 1938, the year before the war; already my poems were gathered into a bouquet to present to this amor fati from Lhasa, the tantric dakini who had guided and inspired me. It was a life sentence and it helped me to put a calm face upon the despair of the war years with their wanton murders of time and talent and truth. When the war came I had just turned twenty-seven. Among my papers, long after it had ended, I found a forgotten article I had contributed to the Aryan Path, called ‘Tao and Its Glozes’. The old Aryan Path, published from 51 Mahatma Gandhi Road, Bombay, was even then the most distinguished journal of the day devoted to theosophy, and my amateur article was published as a sort of little preface to the issue of December 1939, by which time my island life had ended and I was adrift in Athens waiting upon fate, waiting upon the Axis.

I reprint it here for old times’ sake, and also as evidence of my constant attachment to the principle of non-attachment as outlined in the poem! It was not a bad way to greet a world war. I note also the use of the adjective ‘heraldic’ for which I have often had to answer the critics. It means simply the ‘mandala’ of the poet or of the poem. It is the alchemical sigil or signature of the individual; what’s left with the ego extracted. It is the pure nonentity of the entity for which the poem stands like an ideogram! It sounds rather enigmatic put like that, though in fact it boils down simply to the crucial smile which I exchanged with Chang over the kitchen sink, and which needs no gloze. Language confronts this sort of reality with despair which rapidly turns to humour and, in the face of earnest or too earnest questioners, to slapstick. Another way of going about it would be to look up the Saxon word ‘ullage’ in the dictionary; the definition of it — ‘what a cask wants of being full’ — will exercise your reason to the snapping point — especially if your cask contains wine! It is another sort of koan — or can be used as one! The war was a time of hesitant stock-taking for all of us, and my little article with all its solemnity and youthful lack of experience — not to mention its inexactitudes — was a humble attempt to greet it with an act of affirmation. It may be a bit boring to read now, but for the young man in question it was a capital document.

TAO AND ITS GLOZES

(Lawrence Durrell in the following article suggests a method whereby the real Tao can be differentiated from that which is not the Tao. He rightly perceives that Tao is a philosophy, but also much more. Indeed it is ‘the uncreate unborn and eternal energy of nature, manifesting periodically. Nature as well as man when it reaches purity will reach rest, and then all become one with Tao, which is the source of all bliss and felicity. As in the Hindu and Buddhistic philosophies, such purity and bliss and immortality can only be reached through the exercise of virtue and perfect quietude of our worldly spirit; the human mind has to control and finally subdue and even crush the turbulent action of man’s physical nature; and the sooner he reaches the required degree of moral purification, the happier he will feel.’ — EDS)

It has become a commonplace in. literary criticism today to refer to the disparities which exist between certain portions of Lao Tsu’s Book of the Simple Way: to accept, with the limpid resignation of the scholar, the apparent confusions (the word is repeatedly used) of which the text seems so full. So far, it seems, no one has tried to disentangle the conflicting fibres of doctrine and statement. Indeed, the task is not one to attract the boldest of textual scholars, for properly speaking no text exists which would offer the reader any canon on which to build an analytical or critical scheme. Yet it seems to me that a method may be found — perhaps not stable or exhaustive enough to satisfy the pedant, but sufficiently exciting to interest the student of Tao — a method by which one may catch glimpses of the original work among the glozes and shifting emendations of later scribes. The clue lies embedded like a diamond in the body of the text itself; a clue sufficiently cardinal to allow one a firm working foundation.

Now Tao has been defined as a philosophy which remains always in sharp contradistinction to the Confucian (more generally the ‘Socratic’) dialect of the ethic; but it is more than that. (The word ‘Philosophy’ still carries with it the taint of method given it by the Greeks, from which it has been impossible to free it.) It is an attempt to localize an experience, which itself is too comprehensive to be included in the mere confines of language. Throughout the book one can feel the language probing, like a pair of giant callipers, attempting to circumscribe a realm, for the expression of which we have nothing between the madman’s idiom and the A minor Quartet. The searchlight of the ratiocinative principle is too weak to light up this territory: words themselves are used as a kind of sculpture, to symbolize what cannot be directly expressed: the heraldry of language is called into play to accentuate, to attest to, to pierce through the rind of the merely cognative impulse and delineate once and for all the mystery, the resting place of the Tao.

‘The true Tao is not the subject of discussion.’ In your opening statement you are faced with an attitude which, more exactly expressed as the text proceeds, ends in a complete and final denial of principle; a denial, in fact, of polarity, of schism. The affirmation here is that of a total personality, speaking from its totality. In the symbol of the Simple Way, expressed once and for all, you will find no trace of that abruption of the personality from its cosmos which has hallucinated European thought ever since pre-Socratic times. There is, to write nicely, no human entity; it is merged in the All. Here there is no trace of the rupture between the individual and his scenery. Fused, there remains only the gigantic landscape of the spirit, in which our Aryan problem (‘To be, or not to be’) is swallowed up, exhausted, sucked dry by the eternal factor — the Tao. The house admits its resident: the tenant is absorbed, like a piece of tissue, into the very walls of his spiritual house. The world of the definition is exploded. All this is so exhaustively written out in the book that it seems a little difficult at first to locate those areas in which the conflicting ideas enter. But with this profound clue (the denial, the absolution of principle) it would seem possible to retrace one’s steps; and against this rule, measure the various phases of the text.

One thing becomes clear: if the denial of the dogmatic principle is the key-note of the document, then what confusions there are operate always in the realm of the ethic. It is only here that the voice becomes muffled, that the statement, otherwise so pure in its lingual evasions of the rule, become muddy, ambiguous.

The struggle is directed always against the Confucian scheme, the precocious assumption of man over men, over God, over the spiritual landscape; and luckily for us the Confucian contribution serves admirably to light up for us those precise departments of the idea which might as yet remain obscure.

When a man with a taste for reforming the

world takes the business in hand, it

is easily seen that there is no end to it.

For spiritual vessels are not fashioned in

the world. Whoever makes, destroys;

whoever grasps, loses.

And again:

A sage is one who is full of rectitude,

but he does not, on that account, hack and

carve at others … He is upright and yet

does not undertake to straighten others.

In these two extracts from Lao Tsu his stance seems clearly enough defined. He refuses the dogma with its sharp black and white tones. Within the experience of which he talks there is room for infinite adjustment, infinite movement. The imposition of the iron scheme is a violence from which he utterly dissociates himself; his method is a wingless flying — an act which operates along a line where the mere mechanics of the act is lost; is irrelevant. His refusal to transform the flora and fauna of his world is a direct challenge to the world of dogmatic relations, where good is balanced against evil, black against white, being against non-being; the world of opposites, from which alone flowers the ethic, the canon, the principle. In his refusal to accept the limited concepts of language, he shows his wariness against the destroying, limiting effect of definition.

It is when we come to speak of Beauty as a thing

apart that we at once define Ugliness. So

when goodness is seen to be good, then we

become aware of what is evil … For this

reason the Sage only concerns himself with

that which does not give rise to prejudice.

He will not place himself at the mercy of the dogmatic principle, which, he realizes, can carry embedded in it the poisons of the divided personality, against which the volatile principle of being is at war. Consequently he sees that the ratiocinative principle itself must go; and as the document closes, this is the note which is sounded in a last exhaustion; the last attempt to speak coherently from the very heart of Tao.

If we accept this as the ultimate statement from which the Tao lives, then it at once becomes obvious that we have in our hands a clue which relates to the actual text. For it is precisely where there occur abrupt expressions of dogma that the same ‘confusions’ also arise of which our scholars have talked for so long.

But let us pause for a moment to consider those to whom we owe the impurities in the test. What concerned them was never the Tao itself (the inexpressible IT): but merely a means of realizing it, tapping reservoirs for Peace; transforming it into an ideal easily attainable by religious practice. The history of this book: the subsequent erection of a huge and corrupt dogmatic theology around it — these prove our point beyond all doubt. What concerned the men who came after was a practice of Tao — a thing which could never exist in something whose theme was merely the localization of The Experience, with which language could deal, at the best, imprecisely. Their concern was credo; a credo that carried with it the iron imperative.

If we go back, then, keeping this fact in mind, we at once fall upon passages which carry the strange theological imperatives bedded in them.

The pride of wealth and glory is companied

with care, so that one should come to a full

stop when a good work is completed, and when

honour is advancing.

The imperative here is barbed with implication; the theological overtone slightly too obvious.

By expelling impure things from the mind

it is possible to remain untainted and to

continue in obscurity …

Quotation in bulk would be tiresome. The object of this note, impertinent enough in itself, is not to provide a hunting ground for the contentious scholar; rather I have suggested an exciting game which would interest those for whom the Book of the Simple Way is still confused, still a little obscure. By striking at the ethic wherever it appears in the text, one is suddenly faced with a genuine clearance of all the ‘confusions’. The book is empty of dead wood, the tree itself stands out, free and glowing, as it must have been originally.

Empty the document of these bewildering volte-faces and the circle finds itself harmoniously closed once more; we enter the centrum again. The ‘confusions’ have gone.

* * *

Have the ‘confusions’ really gone? What a preposterous last sentence, for while I continue to write, their continued existence must be supposed. A long way from the enigmatic smile of Kasyapa I am still at work taking bearings and keeping my humble Ship’s Log up to date. Poetry creates these clear imperatives — not thinking so loud, letting the heartbeats break the codes embedded in the vowels. And then, in daily life, others created out of the tensions of events; to be the equal of reality you must learn how to ignore it without danger!

So the search must go on, poem by poem, until one strikes the obvious disengagement strategy so as to enter the stream of the Heraclitean time at last. Great truths, one discovers, are not necessarily Facts — Facts are dreams.