Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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“Oil?”
“Oil,” she confirmed. “I’ve just received a very disquieting communication from my Personal Representative in Rendang. Very Highly Placed,” she added parenthetically, “and invariably Well Informed.”
Will found himself wondering which of all those sleek and much be-medalled guests at the Foreign Office cocktail party had double-crossed his fellow double-crossers — himself, of course, included.
“Within the last few days,” the Rani went on, “representatives of no less than three Major Oil Companies, European and American, have flown into Rendang-Lobo. My informant tells me that they’re already working on the four or five Key Figures in the Administration who might, at some future date, be influential in deciding who is to get the concession for Pala.”
Will clicked his tongue disapprovingly.
Considerable sums, she hinted, had been, if not directly offered, at least named and temptingly dangled.
“Nefarious,” he commented.
Nefarious, the Rani agreed, was the word. And that was why Something must be Done About It, and Done Immediately. From Bahu she had learned that Will had already written to Lord Aldehyde, and within a few days a reply would doubtless be forthcoming. But a few days were too long. Time was of the essence — not only because of what those rival companies were up to, but also (and the Rani lowered her voice mysteriously) for Other Reasons. ‘Now, now!’ her Little Voice kept exhorting. ‘Now, without delay!’ Lord Aldehyde must be informed by cable of what was happening (the faithful Bahu, she added parenthetically, had offered to transmit the message in code by way of the Rendang Legation in London) and along with the information must go an urgent request that he empower his Special Correspondent to take such steps — at this stage the appropriate steps would be predominantly of a financial nature — as might be necessary to secure the triumph of their Common Cause.
“So with your permission,” the voice concluded, “I’ll tell Bahu to send the cable immediately. In our joint names, Mr Farnaby, yours and Mine. I hope, mon cher, that this will be agreeable to you.”
It wasn’t at all agreeable, but there seemed to be no excuse, seeing that he had already written that letter to Joe Aldehyde, for demurring. And so, “Yes, of course,” he cried with a show of enthusiasm belied by his long dubious pause, before the words were uttered, in search of an alternative answer. “We ought to get the reply some time tomorrow,” he added.
“We shall get it tonight,” the Rani assured him.
“Is that possible?”
“With God” (con espressione) “all things are possible.”
“Quite,” he said, “quite. But still. …”
“I go by what my Little Voice tells me. ‘Tonight,’ it’s saying. And ‘he will give Mr Farnaby carte blanche,’ carte blanche.” she repeated with gusto. “‘And Farnaby will be completely successful.’”
“I wonder?” he said doubtfully.
“You must be successful.”
“Must be?”
“Must be,” she insisted.
“Why?”
“Because it was God who inspired me to launch the Crusade of the Spirit.”
“I don’t quite get the connection.”
“Perhaps I oughtn’t to tell you,” she said. Then, after a moment of silence, “But after all, why not? If our Cause triumphs, Lord Aldehyde has promised to back the Crusade with all his resources. And since God wants the Crusade to succeed, our Cause cannot fail to triumph.”
“QED,” he wanted to shout, but restrained himself. It wouldn’t be polite. And anyhow this was no joking matter.
“Well I must call Bahu,” said the Rani. “A bientôt, my dear Farnaby.” And she rang off.
Shrugging his shoulders, Will turned back to the Notes on What’s What. What else was there to do?
Dualism … Without it there can hardly be good literature. With it, there most certainly can be no good life.
“I” affirms a separate and abiding me-substance, “am” denies the fact that all existence is relationship and change. “I am.”
Two tiny words; but what an enormity of untruth!
The religiously minded dualist calls home-made spirits from the vasty deep: The non-dualist calls the vasty deep into his spirit or, to be more accurate, he finds that the vasty deep is already there.
There was the noise of an approaching car, then silence as the motor was turned off, then the slamming of a door and the sound of footsteps on gravel, on the steps of the verandah.
“Are you ready?” called Vijaya’s deep voice.
Will put down the Notes on What’s What, picked up his bamboo staff and, hoisting himself to his feet walked to the front door.
“Ready and champing at the bit,” he said as he stepped out on to the verandah.
“Then let’s go.” Vijaya took his arm. “Careful of these steps,” he recommended.
Dressed all in pink and with corals round her neck and in her ears, a plump, round-faced woman in her middle forties was standing beside the jeep.
“This is Leela Rao,” said Vijaya. “Our librarian, secretary, treasurer and general keeper-in-order. Without her we’d be lost.”
She looked, Will thought as he shook hands with her, like a browner version of one of those gentle but inexhaustibly energetic English ladies who, when their children are grown, go in for good works or organized culture. Not too intelligent, poor dears; but how selfless, how devoted, how genuinely good — and, alas, how boring!
“I was hearing of you,” Mrs Rao volunteered as they rattled along past the lotus pond and out on to the highway, “from my young friends, Radha and Ranga.”
“I hope,” said Will, “that they approved of me as heartily as I approved of them.”
Mrs Rao’s face brightened with pleasure. “I’m so glad you like them!”
“Ranga’s exceptionally bright,” Vijaya put in.
And so delicately balanced, Mrs Rao elaborated, between introversion and the outside world. Always tempted — and how strongly! — to escape into the Arhat’s Nirvana or the scientist’s beautifully tidy little paradise of pure abstraction. Always tempted, but often resisting temptation, for Ranga, the arhat-scientist, was also another kind of Ranga, a Ranga capable of compassion, ready, if one knew how to make the right kind of appeal, to lay himself open to the concrete realities of life, to be aware, concerned and actively helpful. How fortunate for him and for everyone else that he had found a girl like little Radha, a girl so intelligently simple, so humorous and tender, so richly endowed for love and happiness! Radha and Ranga, Mrs Rao confided, had been among her favourite pupils.
Pupils, Will patronizingly assumed, in some kind of Buddhist Sunday School. But in fact, as he was now flabbergasted to learn, it was in the yoga of love that this devoted Settlement Worker had been, for the past six years and in the intervals of librarian-ship, instructing the young. By the kind of methods, Will supposed, that Murugan had shrunk from and the Rani, in her all but incestuous possessiveness, had found so outrageous. He opened his mouth to question her. But his reflexes had been conditioned in higher latitude and by Settlement Workers of another species. The questions simply refused to pass his lips. And now it was too late to ask them. Mrs Rao had begun to talk about her other avocation.
“If you knew,” she was saying, “what trouble we have with books in this climate! The paper rots, the glue liquefies, the bindings disintegrate, the insects devour. Literature and the tropics are really incompatible.”
“And if one’s to believe your Old Raja,” said Will, “literature is incompatible with a lot of other local features besides your climate — incompatible with human integrity, incompatible with philosophical truth, incompatible with individual sanity and a decent social system, incompatible with everything except dualism, criminal lunacy, impossible aspiration and unnecessary guilt. But never mind.” He grinned ferociously. “Colonel Dipa will put everything right. After Pala has been invaded and made safe for war and oil and heavy industry, you’ll
undoubtedly have a Golden Age of literature and theology.”
“I’d like to laugh,” said Vijaya. “The only trouble is that you’re probably right. I have an uncomfortable feeling that my children will grow up to see your prophecy come true.”
They left their jeep, parked between an oxcart and a brand new Japanese lorry, at the entrance to the village, and proceeded on foot. Between thatched houses, set in gardens shaded by palms and papayas and bread-fruit trees, the narrow street led to a central market place. Will halted and, leaning on his bamboo staff, looked around him. On one side of the square stood a charming piece of oriental rococo with a pink stucco façade and gazebos at the four corners — evidently the town hall. Facing it, on the opposite side of the square, rose a small temple of reddish stone, with a central tower on which, tier after tier, a host of sculptured figures recounted the legends of the Buddha’s progress from spoiled child to Tathagata. Between these two monuments, more than half of the open space was covered by a huge banyan tree. Along its winding and shadowy aisles were ranged the stalls of a score of merchants and market women. Slanting down through chinks in the green vaulting overhead, the long probes of sunlight picked out here a row of black and yellow water jars, there a silver bracelet, a painted wooden toy, a bolt of cotton print; here a pile of fruits, and a girl’s gaily flowered bodice, there the flash of laughing teeth and eyes, the ruddy gold of a naked torso.
“Everybody looks so healthy,” Will commented, as they made their way between the stalls under the great tree.
“They look healthy because they are healthy,” said Mrs Rao.
“And happy — for a change.” He was thinking of the faces he had seen in Calcutta, in Manila, in Rendang-Lobo — the faces, for that matter, one saw every day in Fleet Street and the Strand. “Even the women,” he noted, glancing from face to face, “even the women look happy.”
“They don’t have ten children,” Mrs Rao explained.
“They don’t have ten children where I come from,” said Will. “In spite of which … ‘Marks of weakness, marks of woe’.” He halted for a moment to watch a middle-aged market woman weighing out slices of sun-dried bread-fruit for a very young mother with a baby in a carrying bag on her back. “There’s a kind of radiance,” he concluded.
“Thanks to maithuna,” said Mrs Rao triumphantly. “Thanks to the yoga of love.” Her face shone with a mixture of religious fervour and professional pride.
They walked out from under the shade of the banyan, across a stretch of fierce sunlight, up a flight of worn steps and into the gloom of the temple. A golden Bodhisattva loomed, gigantic, out of the darkness. There was a smell of incense and fading flowers, and from somewhere behind the statue the voice of an unseen worshipper was muttering an endless litany. Noiselessly, on bare feet, a little girl came hurrying in from a side door. Paying no attention to the grown-ups she climbed with the agility of a cat on to the altar and laid a spray of white orchids on the statue’s upturned palm. Then, looking up into the huge golden face, she murmured a few words, shut her eyes for a moment, murmured again, then turned, scrambled down and, softly singing to herself, went out by the door through which she had entered.
“Charming,” said Will, as he watched her go. “Couldn’t be prettier. But precisely what does a child like that think she’s doing? What kind of religion is she supposed to be practising?”
“She’s practising,” Vijaya explained, “the local brand of Mahayana Buddhism, with a bit of Shivaism, probably, on the side.”
“And do you high-brows encourage this kind of thing?”
“We neither encourage nor discourage. We accept it. Accept it as we accept that spider web up there on the cornice. Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can’t help making flytraps, and men can’t help making symbols. That’s what the human brain is there for — to turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols. Sometimes the symbols correspond fairly closely to some of the aspects of the external reality behind our experience; then you have science and common sense. Sometimes, on the contrary, the symbols have almost no connection with external reality; then you have paranoia and delirium. More often there’s a mixture, part realistic and part fantastic; that’s religion. Good religion or bad religion — it depends on the blending of the cocktail. For example, in the kind of Calvinism that Dr Andrew was brought up in, you’re given only the tiniest jigger of realism to a whole jug-full of malignant fancy. In other cases the mixture is more wholesome. Fifty-fifty, or even sixty-forty, even seventy-thirty in favour of truth and decency. Our local Old Fashioned contains a remarkably small admixture of poison.”
Will nodded. “Offerings of white orchids to an image of compassion and enlightenment — it certainly seems harmless enough. And after what I saw yesterday, I’d be prepared to put in a good word for cosmic dancing and divine copulations.”
“And remember,” said Vijaya, “this sort of thing isn’t compulsory. Everybody’s given a chance to go further. You asked what that child thinks she’s doing. I’ll tell you. With one part of her mind, she thinks she’s talking to a person — an enormous, divine person who can be cajoled with orchids into giving her what she wants. But she’s already old enough to have been told about the profounder symbols behind Amitabha’s statue and about the experiences that give birth to those profounder symbols. Consequently with another part of her mind she knows perfectly well that Amitabha isn’t a person. She even knows, because it’s been explained to her, that if prayers are sometimes answered it’s because, in this very odd psycho-physical world of ours, ideas have a tendency, if you concentrate your mind on them, to get themselves realized. She knows too that this temple isn’t what she still likes to think it is — the house of Buddha. She knows it’s just a diagram of her own unconscious mind — a dark little cubby-hole with lizards crawling upside down on the ceiling, and cockroaches in all the crevices. But at the heart of the verminous darkness sits Enlightenment. And that’s another thing the child is doing — she’s unconsciously learning a lesson about herself, she’s being told that if she’d only stop giving herself suggestions to the contrary, she might discover that her own busy little mind is also Mind with a large M.”
“And how soon will the lesson be learned? When will she stop giving herself those suggestions?”
“She may never learn. A lot of people don’t. On the other hand, a lot of people do.”
He took Will’s arm and led him into the deeper darkness behind the image of Enlightenment. The chanting grew more distinct, and there, hardly visible in the shadows, sat the chanter — a very old man, naked to the waist and, except for his moving lips, as rigidly still as Amitabha’s golden statue.
“What’s he intoning?” Will asked.
“Something in Sanskrit.”
Seven incomprehensible syllables, again and again.
“Good old vain repetition!”
“Not necessarily vain,” Mrs Rao objected. “Sometimes it really gets you somewhere.”
“It gets you somewhere,” Vijaya elaborated, “not because of what the words mean or suggest, but simply because they’re being repeated. You could repeat Hey Diddle Diddle and it would work just as well as Om or Kyrie Eleison or La ila illa ‘llah. It works because when you’re busy with the repetition of Hey Diddle Diddle or the name of God, you can’t be entirely preoccupied with yourself. The only trouble is that you can Hey-Diddle-Diddle yourself downwards as well as upwards — down into the not-thought of idiocy as well as up into the not-thought of pure awareness.”
“So, I take it, you wouldn’t recommend this kind of thing,” said Will, “to our little friend with the orchids?”
“Not unless she were unusually jittery or anxious. Which she isn’t. I know her very well; she plays with my children.”
“Then what would you do in her case?”
“Among other things,” said Vijaya, “I’d take her, in another year or so, to the plac
e we’re going to now.”
“What place?”
“The meditation room.”
Will followed him through an archway and along a short corridor. Heavy curtains were parted and they stepped into a large whitewashed room with a long window, to their left, that opened on to a little garden planted with banana and bread-fruit trees. There was no furniture, only a scattering on the floor of small square cushions. On the wall opposite the window hung a large oil painting. Will gave it a glance, then approached to look into it more closely.
“My word!” he said at last. “Who is it by?”
“Gobind Singh.”
“And who’s Gobind Singh?”
“The best landscape painter Pala ever produced. He died in ‘forty-eight.”
“Why haven’t we ever seen anything by him?”
“Because we like his work too well to export any of it.”
“Good for you,” said Will. “But bad for us.” He looked again at the picture. “Did this man ever go to China?”
“No; but he studied with a Cantonese painter who was living in Pala. And of course he’d seen plenty of reproductions of Sung landscapes.”
“A Sung master,” said Will, “who chose to paint in oils and was interested in chiaroscuro.”
“Only after he went to Paris. That was in 1910. He struck up a friendship with Vuillard.”
Will nodded. “One might have guessed as much from this extraordinary richness of texture.” He went on looking at the picture in silence. “Why do you hang it in the meditation room?” he asked at last.
“Why do you suppose?” Vijaya countered.
“Is it because this thing is what you call a diagram of the mind?”
“The temple was a diagram. This is something much better. It’s an actual manifestation. A manifestation of Mind with a large M in an individual mind in relation to a landscape, to canvas and to the experience of painting. It’s a picture, incidentally, of the next valley to the west. Painted from the place where the power lines disappear over the ridge.”
“What clouds!” said Will. “And the light!”