Judith (15 page)

Beyond the framework there were the men in their white robes laughing and lounging by their bicycles; the Indian boy was on his own in the middle of the road, watching; it was as if I were seeing them beyond a transparent wall. I thought – That line, thrown out, was from an umbilicus? I have come home?

A girl came out of the hut and knelt in front of me and started to tell me about arrangements. It was true there was no more accommodation available in the Garden, but there were huts just outside, and one could come in for the activities each day. There was such and such a timetable; the costs were this and that; arrangements might be made if one had no money. The woman who had welcomed me kept her arm round my shoulder; I thought – This is to do with that second picture in the National Gallery: Mary and the angel facing each other across a courtyard.

Then – I will learn, in this strange world, how things begin again as if within a picture? And God, in this dimension, is a woman?

The girl kneeling in front of me said ‘All right?' I nodded.

She went back into the hut. The older woman went on holding me: she put her head down against mine.

I thought – But where is that bird; that finger coming down?

For some time I had been conscious of a sound, of a voice, as if it were something blown on the wind: not the chatter of the men with their bicycles outside the gates: not the information
of the girl who had knelt before me in the dust: but something almost not there, how could you distinguish it? it was when you stopped trying to pick it out that you heard it; when you concentrated on it it went away. It seemed to be coming from somewhere deeper in the Garden. The woman who had her arm around me pulled her head back from mine. When I looked at her she had this golden face with very fine wrinkles like something containing heat: like salt, like something you could lick. She had white teeth with a slight gap between the front two as if it were the opening into a cave. She looked away from me in the direction from which the voice seemed to come. She stood up. She held my hand. I thought – You mean you do not speak: you listen; you are led? We walked along a path together.

There were oleanders, and hibiscus, and tall eucalyptus trees like feathers. Within them or arising out of them, there was the roof or low dome of an enormous hall. The voice seemed to be coming from the area of this dome: as if the dome were some device for receiving and transmitting messages between stars. I could not at first make out the words that the voice was saying: it had a strange sibilance, as if making use of uncustomary frequencies of sound. The building had no walls: the roof was supported on thin pillars past which air blew: the voice fell from loudspeakers in the ceiling. There were figures seated or lying on the floor of the enormous hall: they were quite still: it was as if they had dropped there like seeds; as if it were being seen (or heard, since this was to do with the voice coming down) whether or not they had landed on fruitful ground.

The woman who was with me smiled: she seemed to indicate that I should join the seated and lying figures. I sat with my back against a pillar on the edge of the floor of the hall. I wanted to ask the woman not to leave me: but I thought that when I needed her she would be there, or would have come back; this would be one of the attributes, I felt, of being inside a picture.

I don't know how much you know (you, who bump into these letters, these messages, on your way through the maze)
about this commune thing, this
ashram
thing, this Garden thing: you who presumably (or why are you here?) have some interest in ways within the maze. What was known as the Garden was an
ashram
, or commune, set up on the shore of this hot sea: a thousand or so people lived and worked here; they tried to find, to build, to heal themselves; having come half-way round the world and in as it were at the back way. The maze was in their minds; they had become lost; what distinguished them from others was that they had known they were lost: if you do not know this, how can you know that you are in a maze? People who came to the Garden were like dogs or cats who had had tin cans tied to their tails; they had gone round and round; the tin cans were echoes from their past such as, perhaps, the sounds of bodies falling from windows. You chase your own tail until – what? – there are small circles in the dust that might be nothing; or they might be the faint marks that are made by wing-beats, or stones.

At the centre of the Garden was God: I mean there was this guru who was known as God: I mean some of the inmates of the Garden referred to him, at least part-jokingly, as God: I am going to go on calling him God because one of the points of the Garden, as I have said, was to do with jokes – how to make jokes come alive like a finger or a bird. God had once been a professor of philosophy at somewhere like Madras: he had seen people around him setting themselves up as makeshift gods – telling people what to do, deciding the world was this or that or the other, shutting their eyes or blaming others when the world went its own way. So what do you do about this absurdity (yet terrible necessity?) of human beings setting themselves up as gods: for do you not, after all, if you think you know, have to tell others what to do? You can make a joke of it, perhaps: you can let yourself be called God: but then laugh at yourself and tell others to laugh when the world, as it does, goes its own way.

God had set himself up five or six years earlier by this hot sea and when I arrived a thousand people lived in the Garden constructing, maintaining, expanding, making it work:
another two thousand or so came in from outside each day to listen to God, to laugh, to try to learn about themselves and perhaps by this – by seeing themselves as something of a joke – by this part of them, at least, to become like gods. The Garden was set in about ten acres of grounds within which, as well as the enormous hall, were dormitories, eating places, meeting places, workshops – mostly prefabricated buildings set among paths and shrubs. People from outside came in each day on foot, by ferry, by bicycle, by rickshaw: they came from the town and from the village which was on the road to the bridge inland over the estuary. There was also an encampment of thatched huts where people stayed between the Garden and the sea. Each morning it was the custom for God to appear in person to talk to his acolytes: there were also sessions each afternoon (it was during one of these that I had arrived) when his recorded voice came down from loudspeakers in the ceiling like seeds or birdshit from trees.

In some respects I suppose the Garden was not so different from other
ashrams
that have sprung up by this hot sea: I mean there have always been teaching communes in India, but recently there have been kinds flocked to by the people from the West – where gurus talk about what they say cannot be talked about; where people treat them like gods the more they say they are not gods. What was different about the Garden, I think, was just that the people there saw so much of all this in terms of a joke: how could it not be? in what other style, indeed, could one talk about the godliness that one said could not be talked about – a joke being that which brings together, illuminates, things which rationally remain separate; which releases energy like a spark between poles. You would be walking along a path in the Garden and you would see people with their somewhat mad archaic faces suddenly double up with laughter; as if they had been struck by some sort of lightning within; the lightning being the flash that lit up both their own absurdity and their wonder, I suppose, at their seeing this. Words are ridiculous: you have got to use words: so use them for what they are. Then, with luck, you are
happy. And perhaps there are wing-beats swirling up the dust: the finger pointing from somewhere just outside the frame of trees.

So when I arrived that hot afternoon and there was the voice coming down from the ceiling of the enormous hall – the bodies spread out on the concrete floor like things fallen haphazardly but also precisely arranged: like pieces of sculpture (for what else is art except that which gives the impression of something fallen from heaven and yet exact: is it not this that happens when you are painting a picture? what you discover is what is already there, and yet you have been free, it is your creation) – when I arrived that hot afternoon I sat with my back against a pillar of the enormous hall and the woman who had brought me there left me; but I felt as if she were around some corner; and the voice was like bits of light coming down.

‘Humans have reached a moment in their history when for the first time they can destroy themselves: destroy themselves not just as individuals or as groups but as a species utterly. Humans, of course, have always had the ability to destroy: they have had to, to stay alive. Enemies have had to be fought; forces that would have destroyed humans have had to be destroyed. But now, the forces that would destroy humans are humans themselves.

‘Two thousand five hundred years ago humans began to glimpse something of this: it has been said – There is a moment when the world stopped smiling. You can see it in their works of art, their sculpture. Before this, humans had represented themselves as walking forwards like proud animals: what does it matter if they destroy? they have to, to live: this is their nature. Then some darkness, some realisation, comes down on them quite suddenly. There has evolved some inward eye: some knowledge that if you destroy others you are in the process of destroying yourselves: you are connected. But still, is not destruction in your nature? Is it not true you have to destroy in order to stay alive?

‘Two thousand five hundred years ago you see the pain coming down; there is an impossibility here, humans sense they are trapped by the very same mind, the rationality, that sees that they are trapped. There have been these patterns instilled into them from childhood – to defend yourself you have to attack; to protect yourself you have to blame others and not yourself. Yet you also see, suddenly, that it is yourself that you attack: you look around – it is by yourself that you are trapped. Things both are your fault, and are not: you are free, but you cannot order things.

‘People in the West saw this most tragically – that they were helpless, yet they had the impression of being free. They were driven by the forces of animals, and yet there was part of them that could see this and did not want it: this part of them was like gods. But what could they do? – cut out eyes, liver, heartbeat? They could make up rituals, blinkers, dogmas, to comfort the terror and pain. There were many in the West at this time who said it would have been better never to have been born.

‘But two thousand five hundred years ago, just at this time when humans at large seemed to become aware of the trap they were in in their minds, there were also one or two, in the East mainly – mutations, perhaps, who had managed to remain alive in an environment that must have seemed hostile to them – who saw from their very consciousness of the predicament what might be done to make it bearable; even to transcend it. For is not this also an observable pattern of humans, of the world, that each catastrophe, or awareness of it, seems to have within it seeds that might fall on to new ground and grow? There were these few people scattered throughout the world – Buddha, Lao-tzu, Mahavira, Zoroaster – who saw that, of course, you destroy yourself by destroying others; you do not get wholeness by antagonism; you do not use the mind to get out of the traps of the mind. You need to give up, give over, to drop or rise to another level. You have to become detached in the way that you now know one part of you is able to be detached – that part which can see how you are trapped. You can float free, as it were, with the whole
of you like this: you can become an observer, a listener, a witness: you can become a watcher of yourself in the way that you can be a watcher of others. Then you find a whole new landscape has opened up; it is not, after all, that you are detached; you are part of a whole network of that which is detached; and so you are both detached and not detached. It is difficult to talk of this because words have evolved to deal with the past life that you will have forsaken: but what were old impossibilities, predicaments, can now be held in paradoxes.

‘This knowledge has been there, available for those who choose, for two thousand five hundred years. Always there have been teachers. But people have been free to choose for themselves, or not.

‘Now, if humans are to survive, this is no longer a matter of individual choice.

‘What is happening now is something of the kind that happened two thousand five hundred years ago: either humans will make a leap, a quantum leap, in their consciousness of the world and of themselves – or they will not. But this time if they do not, they will be destroyed.

‘When humans took the jump of seeing themselves and their predicament, they evolved their social rituals and blindnesses to make bearable what they saw: there also grew the possibilities, secretly, of change. But there was always the going to and fro – between illusion and light: between what was bearable and unbearable about light, and what was bearable and unbearable about darkness. Now we can no longer go to and fro: the oscillations themselves have become unbearable: we will blow ourselves up. The part of us that is animal, and the part that cannot bear to see this, have created weapons and substances that can destroy the whole: there is no chance of parts living detached. We cannot take refuge in the god-like parts of us: we have to move to where the god-like parts can become the whole.

‘Have you noticed how in paintings it is sometimes the animals – the horses, the dogs, the tigers – who look out from the frames as if they know much more, and are wiser, than the humans – as if it were not they, but the confusions of humans,
that cause the trap? There is a Christian myth that by humans accepting the redemption of themselves the animal kingdom will be redeemed: but it is also the other way round: we need not fear our animal nature; it is by our recognition of it that we will not be trapped and may become whole; part of the whole.