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Heresy, I continued, was the near-Truth seen as Truth. Heresy is romantic, as Petit Avignon is romantic, heresy is the promise of Paradise. Heresy is the masculine turned feminine for protection, for fear of the real — like the solid golden England under Queen Victoria. Paradise is a feminine continuity in a cul-de-sac, it is the deification of death, the immortality of mortality; Paradise, therefore, is full of angels. Eternity is a masculine concept. To accept eternity is to dare annihilation. To be dissolved is not to be reborn. But Paradise is to continue as one is — as a ghost is supposed to be — only not in darkness but in light. Not to dare annihilation but to continue is to affirm the tangibility of the object. In a Paradise created outside of time, isolate and blue, as in some of the medieval manuscripts — with queens, gardens and palaces, and turrets; white horses, storytelling pygmies, the unicorn, and angels trumpeting; with the river of paradise flowing as milk — you create the isolation of love. You keep your body pure for Paradise, come la carna gloriosa e santa. You jump into fire and become pure, because you will go to Paradise. So Paradise becomes the fulfilment of love.

On a green emerald

It carried, the desire of Paradise:

It was the object called the Holy Grail.

Turrets, blue skies, and the music of angels are promised. So you isolate your love and put her into a turret, into a palace. You can go as far as the end of the broken bridge, and look at Petit Avignon. And standing on this side you can sing ditties. Being un-deflowered the virgins in Paradise will be exalted. Their bosoms will be full, their limbs straight and lovely, and on their heads will be crowns. There is no pain and there is love. Meanwhile you go, on horse and foot, to fight the Turk. The Holy Land shall be free. There be many lovely women there. You might marry them, give children to them, and return heroes with booty, with your limbs stilled of passion. Then lay your sword before your Lady, and offer her your worship. She smells it, and you sing to her.

Sans coeur suis et sans coeur demeure

Je n’ai membre, ni pied, ni main.

Sans amour en amour demeure,

Vivant, faut-il donc que je meure.

That is the perfect picture of Paradise.

To be orthodox, to be a smartha, I said to myself, is to accept the real. Stalin is orthodox; he is crude and smelly like some Jesuit father, he the product of a seminary. But Trotsky promised us beauty, promised us paradise. There is a saying that when Trotsky was talking of the beautiful world revolution, Stalin was making statistics of the bovine riches of Soviet Russia. He wanted to know whether the peasants had enough to eat and drink, and their children had enough milk.

Again, Bonaparte turned the French Revolution and made it realistic. He built roads and bridges, started a military academy, established jurisprudence, innovated the system of education and turned Robespierre’s Republic into a total human experience. (‘Robespierre himself,’ said Péguy, ‘that royalist. ‘) But Bonaparte went wrong when, after changing his world, he established himself as the cause of the change; from the Consul Bonaparte he made himself the emperor of the French. From an impersonal revolutionary he made himself into a hero; as a person, an ego, he entered history. This he knew to be improper, which explains his desperate desire to be crowned by the Pope, to be sanctified, to recover the impersonal — the thief of the Absolute, to become identical with the Absolute. And thus on to the emperor N-N-N-N… Otherwise Napoleon would have ended, almost as Hitler did, on the bunk of a dug-out.

The Cathar, the pure Hitler, who ate only green vegetables, lived in some Montségur (remember Tristan and Parsifal) and ended in the crudity of his own myth. He married Eva Braun: that had to be his death. Paradise ended on that bunk.

Beatrice, O Beatrice is beautiful in Paradise. But what an impossible tyrant she becomes. It is she who wants to show the Truth to Dante.

Apri gli occhi e riguarda qual son io;

tu hai veduto cose, che possente

sei fatto a sostener lo riso mio.

She who should see light through him, now wants to show the light to him. It is the inversion of Truth. Where the world cannot annihilate itself, whether it be in Buddhism or in Christianity, it has to make the world feminine. Just as progeny is through woman, child after child, generation after generation, you may have as many paradises as you care to have. Buddhism went to Tibet, and gave itself many paradises. Tantra entered Hlinduism, and worshipping the women, made the world real. Man became thus the everlasting, the Superman, the slave of himself, and all such supermen must end in stink and on the bunk of a dug-out. Eva Braun showed the world was real. The ogre, the superman Hitler, inventor of the gas-chambers and the concentration camps, died a simple man. Almost an anonymous person. Ravana was defeated by his ten heads. The miracle must for ever end in emptiness.

But the smartha — some Innocent III — knows this world is intangible, and all worlds therefore are intangible, and turns his vision inwards. Paradise vanishes where you are — the interior intimo meo of St Augustine. And the world continues as it is. The two are not distinct experiences, but it is experience seen as the totality of Experience. Whether you see the world or you do not see the world you are.

Writing this I am reminded of a very moving story of Radha and Krishna:

‘One day Radha had a very possessive thought of Krishna. “My Krishna,” she said to herself, as though one could possess Krishna as one could possess a calf, a jewel. Krishna, the Absolute Itself, immediately knew her thought. And when the Absolute knows, the knowing itself as it were, is the action of the act, things do not happen according to his wish, but his wish itself is his own creation of his wish, as the action is the creation of his own action.

‘So, Durvasa the Great Sage was announced.

‘“He is on the other side of the River, Lord,” spake the messengers, “and he sends his deep respects.”’

‘Then Krishna went into the inner chambers and said to Radha, “Radha, Durvasa the Great Sage is come, my dear. We must feed him.”

‘“Oh, then I will cook the food myself,” said Radha, and Krishna was very happy at this thought. So he went back to the Hall of Audience, and not long after, Radha came in with all the cooked food. “Yes, the meal is ready, my Lord. And I will take it myself to Sage Durvasa.”

‘“Wonderful, wonderful!” exclaimed Sri Krishna, pleased with the devotion of his wife to the sages.

‘“I’ll go and come,” said Radha, and hardly had she gone to the palace door, than she remembered the Jumna was in flood. No ferryman would go across. She came back to Krishna and begged, “My Lord, how can I take the food? The river is in flood.”

‘“Tell the river,” answered Krishna, “Krishna the brahmachari5 wishes that the way be made for you to pass through.”

‘And Radha went light of heart, but suddenly bethought herself it was a lie. Who better than she to know whether Krishna be brahmachari or not? “Ah, the noble lie, the noble lie,” she said to herself, and when she came to the river, she said, “Krishna, the Lord, the brahmachari, wishes that the way be made for me to pass through.”