A Smile in the Mind's Eye (3 page)

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!