There was no word spoken, and all was said. You just see the counting of beads. Then you ride and say to God, even unto the Buddha Himself, many, many angry things. ‘Lord Buddha, my Lord, O you abode of Compassion, O you who talked even unto the courtesan Ambapalli and partook of the meal of Chunda, the untouchable, do you hear me? May love be as fat-bosomed as the olives in Aix be ancient.’ (‘Ah, cela vient du temps des Romains,’ said Scarlatti, as though, being Italian, he still was a Roman, and as though he had conquered France.) Lord Buddha, did you make the cypress grow grey, and the skin so pale? Must one shine only because one is desperate, that man and husband had to take the steps out of the garden, counting the marks he’d made, on the pure winter snow? Must the bead be the ladder of intelligence? Must truth grow fat with fasting? It smells bad, Lord Buddha, it smells very bad, that the kingdom of earth be shut in with a garden gate.
India, my Lord, is a vast and lost land; a beloved land of many mountains and cliffs, of cedars and deodars, of elephants and tigers, of pigeons that sing and owls that hoot. We grow mangoes in India, Lord Buddha, and the women of my country worship trees. Buddha, Lord Buddha, quit the sanctum, come through vision and dream; come like that statue of you, brought to London in some British Governor’s box, which came night after night with tears in its eyes, and body grown fat with fasting, saying, ‘Send me back, send me back, send me back to my own Land’; till one day the lady sent the Buddha away and all was peace and brilliance in the air of Brighton. Buddha, Lord Buddha, do not traffic with the Black Virgin; do not sing those Tibetan mantras; do not fast, do not preach, do not count beads; open the door and walk out to the India that is everywhere about, marking the footsteps on the snows.
The river Rhone flows like the Ganges, she flows does Mother Rhone into the seven seas, and she built herself a chapel, that the gay gypsies might come and sing and worship Sarah in her sanctuary. Ships go, rushing ships go now to India, to far India, to quick India. Go there Mother Earth, go there Mother Rhone! Do not devastate your being with fast, tear, and prayer. India is the kingdom of God, and it is within you. India is wheresoever you see, hear, touch, taste, smell. India is where you dip into yourself, and the eighteen aggregates are dissolved. Even Bertrand de Born I take with me. I would take even Péguy to my India. Come… Mother, Mother Rhone…!
I must have gone round and round the post office six or seven times, then I went down to the Place de la République and jumped into a taxi. I said ‘Tarascon’—and what a night of love it was, with the moon and the snow, and then the Rhone.
I went back to work. I now understood why the boat of Iseult which carried the white sail first and then the black, was seen by the people of Loonois as though the black came first. Iseult with the lovely hands had to remain a widow. The potion of love was made of the eighteen aggregates. The limb and the lip spoke to one another. King Mark was not fooled, he was wise and he knew, knew that being a king, a Principle, he could not admit sin. Where sin is admitted death is true. Tristan took Iseult of the white hands as bride, but he did not take her maidenhead. Between adultery and virginity is the river Rhone. The gypsies who marry and dance at Stes Maries-de- la-Mer know there is no sin. When you have a gipsy king, and the long road, you play with life distributing destiny cards to yourself. King or queen, Diamond or Heart, they are so many dimensions of one’s living. But when you live in dimension itself, the world is yours. You reap and you enjoy, you breed children and you grow fat, you live in a palace or you give away prizes at a football match (‘Savithri prize at the Allahabad football finals,’ I had read in some Indian newspaper, and seen Savithri giving away a prize to some sturdy fool), but love is continuous with dimension, love is the light of space. Objects are articulated in space, so go right, go left, go north, go east, you cannot go beyond yourself. Love, my love, is the self. Love is the loving of love.
Harmonieuse Moi…
The train came from Sete, and took me away through the night and by the Rhone, to the severe clarity, the austere benignity of Paris.
~
I have now taken a room off the Boulevard St Michel, just where the Rue de Vaugirard goes up by the Lycée St Louis. My room is on the seventh floor — I had long been waiting to live up here, and had asked for it week after week at the hotel. Now, I have it. It’s a small mansard room but from my window the whole of Paris lies spread like a palm-leaf fan under me. Beyond the terrace of the Lycée St Louis line after line of walls, towers and coloured chimneys rise into the air, and then suddenly down below you see the green Seine under the bridges, and to the right, as though abruptly put aside, the parvis of Notre Dame.
Et nous tiendrons le coup, rivés sur notre rame,
Forçats fils de forçats aux deux rives de Seine
Galériens couchés aux pieds de Notre Dame.
Behind me I can feel, though I cannot see, the history— almost the architecture of time — out of which the garden and the Palace of Luxembourg were born. I often walk there, breathing the clean sane air of the park, and see the children play about, setting their ships to sail all over the waters. They must indeed wander through many lands, encircle many continents:
Vaisseau de pourpre et d’or, de myrrhe et de cinname,
Double vaisseau de charge aux pieds de Notre Dame.
And when I am tired, I come and sit by one of those stiff chairs that seem especially reserved for lovers, by the Medici fountain. The water drips and seems to make us forget time, as if it were a cravat pulled loose to one side. For here, woman whispers to man seated on the lap of the sun. I close my book and go down the Boulevard St Michel, feeling that between the top of the hill and the parvis of Notre Dame is the real sanctuary of Europe.
‘When we speak in universal terms of class and category, do these terms correspond to realities existing outside the mind?’ asked scholars at the beginning of the Middle Ages. ‘When we speak of the species man and the species animal, do these terms awaken ideas of collection? And does the idea of collection correspond to a reality outside the mind, or is it a mere concept of the mind? And if these terms, or universals are not mere concepts, but do correspond to realities, what is their nature? Are they corporeal entities? And further, what is their mode of existing? Do they have their being outside the sensual domain, that is outside the individual, or do they lodge within?’ Thus and for a thousand years, through Abelard, St Thomas Aquinas and Dante, and all the monks and poets, going down the centuries, through the alleyways and hard earth of the Sorbonne, you feel the western world has breathed and shaped itself; and he who walks in Paris here, walks somewhere in the steady light of recovered Truth.
Now and again, when I am stuck in my work and I can dip into silence and find nothing to say, nothing to sound, to illumine me, I seek over the walls for an answer, I seek through the space above the river for an answer, I look at the twin towers of Notre Dame. I say a prayer to the Mother of God, at such times: ‘Marie pleine de grace, Mere de Dieu.’ And she always knows and she always answers, for the womb of the world is She.
And when I have shaped a sentence to my satisfaction, word after word repeated back to silence, rediscovered through a backward movement and made whole, reverberant and true, I leave the authenticity of it on the page, and wonder that these round and flat shapes could name meaning as they do. I shiver at the thought that one can speak. I repeat some verse from a troubadour, and then tell myself that only half a century ago, perhaps, Verlaine walked these very streets, drunk, and not knowing how to say his own name. It is good to forget one’s name, it makes one a saint.