Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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“The light,” Vijaya elaborated, “of the last hour before dusk. It’s just stopped raining and the sun has come out again, brighter than ever. Bright with the praeternatural brightness of slanting light under a ceiling of cloud, the last, doomed, afternoon brightness that stipples every surface it touches and deepens every shadow.”
‘Deepens every shadow,’ Will repeated to himself, as he looked into the picture. The shadow of that huge, high continent of cloud, darkening whole mountain ranges almost to blackness; and in the middle distance the shadows of island clouds. And between dark and dark was the blaze of young rice, or the red heat of ploughed earth, the incandescence of naked limestone, the sumptuous darks and diamond glitter of evergreen foliage. And here at the centre of the valley stood a group of thatched houses, remote and tiny, but how clearly seen, how perfect and articulate, how profoundly significant! Yes, significant. But when you asked yourself, ‘Of what?’ you found no answer. Will put the question into words.
“What do they mean?” Vijaya repeated. “They mean precisely what they are. And so do the mountains, so do the clouds, so do the lights and darks. And that’s why this is a genuinely religious image. Pseudo-religious pictures always refer to something else, something beyond the things they represent — some piece of metaphysical nonsense, some absurd dogma from the local theology. A genuinely religious image is always intrinsically meaningful. So that’s why we hang this kind of painting in our meditation room.”
“Always landscapes?”
“Almost always. Landscapes can really remind people of who they are.”
“Better than scenes from the life of a Saint or Saviour?”
Vijaya nodded. “It’s the difference, to begin with, between objective and subjective. A picture of Christ or Buddha is merely the record of something observed by a Behaviourist and interpreted by a theologian. But when you’re confronted with a landscape like this, it’s psychologically impossible for you to look at it with the eyes of a J. B. Watson or the mind of a Thomas Aquinas. You’re almost forced to submit to your immediate experience; you’re practically compelled to perform an act of self-knowing.”
“Self-knowing?”
“Self-knowing,” Vijaya insisted. “This view of the next valley is a view, at one remove, of your own mind, of everybody’s mind as it exists above and below the level of personal history. Mysteries of darkness; but the darkness teems with life. Apocalypses of light; and the light shines out as brightly from the flimsy little houses as from the trees, the grass, the blue spaces between the clouds. We do our best to disprove the fact, but a fact it remains; man is as divine as nature, as infinite as the Void. But that’s getting perilously close to theology, and nobody was ever saved by a notion. Stick to the data, stick to the concrete facts.” He pointed a finger at the picture. “The fact of half a village in sunshine and half in shadow and in secret. The fact of those indigo mountains and of the more fantastic mountains of vapour above them. The fact of blue lakes in the sky, lakes of pale green and raw sienna on the sunlit earth. The fact of this grass in the foreground, this clump of bamboos only a few yards down the slope, and the fact, at the same time, of those far-away peaks and the absurd little houses two thousand feet below in the valley. Distance,” he added, parenthetically, “their ability to express the fact of distance — that’s yet another reason why landscapes are the most genuinely religious pictures.”
“Because distance lends enchantment to the view?”
“No; because it lends reality. Distance reminds us that there’s a lot more to the universe than just people — that there’s even a lot more to people than just people. It reminds us that there are mental spaces inside our skulls as enormous as the spaces out there. The experience of distance, of inner distance and outer distance, of distance in time and distance in space — it’s the first and fundamental religious experience. ‘O Death in life, the days that are no more’ — and O the places, the infinite number of places that are not this place! Past pleasures, past unhappinesses and insights — all so intensely alive in our memories and yet all dead, dead without hope of resurrection. And the village down there in the valley so clearly seen even in the shadow, so real and indubitable, and yet so hopelessly out of reach, incommunicado. A picture like this is the proof of man’s capacity to accept all the deaths in life, all the yawning absences surrounding every presence. To my mind,” Vijaya added, “the worst feature of your non-representational art is its systematic two-dimensionality, its refusal to take account of the universal experience of distance. As a coloured object, a piece of abstract expressionism can be very handsome. It can also serve as a kind of glorified Rohrshach ink blot. Everybody can find in it a symbolic expression of his own fears, lusts, hatreds, and daydreams. But can one ever find in it those more than human (or should one say those other than all too human) facts that one discovers in oneself when the mind is confronted by the outer distances of nature, or by the simultaneously inner and outer distances of a painted landscape like this one we’re looking at? All I know is that in your abstractions I don’t find the realities that reveal themselves here, and I doubt if anyone else can. Which is why this fashionable abstract non-objective expressionism of yours is so fundamentally irreligious — and also, I may add, why even the best of it is so profoundly boring, so bottomlessly trivial.”
“Do you come here often?” Will asked after a silence.
“Whenever I feel like meditating in a group rather than alone.”
“How often is that?”
“Once every week or so. But of course some people like to do it oftener — and some much more rarely, or even never. It depends on one’s temperament. Take our friend Susila, for example — she needs big doses of solitude; so she hardly ever comes to the meditation room. Whereas Shanta (that’s my wife) likes to look in here almost every day.”
“So do I,” said Mrs Rao. “But that’s only to be expected,” she added with a laugh. “Fat people enjoy company — even when they’re meditating.”
“And do you meditate on this picture?” Will asked.
“Not on it. From it, if you see what I mean. Or rather parallel with it. I look at it, and the other people look at it, and it reminds us all of who we are and what we aren’t, and how what we aren’t might turn into who we are.”
“Is there any connection,” Will asked, “between what you’ve been talking about and what I saw up there in the Shiva temple?”
“Of course there is,” she answered. “The moksha-medicine takes you to the same place as you get to in meditation.”
“So why bother to meditate?”
“You might as well ask, Why bother to eat your dinner?”
“But, according to you, the moksha-medicine is dinner.”
“It’s a banquet,” she said emphatically. “And that’s precisely why there has to be meditation. You can’t have banquets every day. They’re too rich and they last too long. Besides banquets are provided by a caterer; you don’t have any part in the preparation of them. For your everyday diet you have to do your own cooking. The moksha-medicine comes as an occasional treat.”
“In theological terms,” said Vijaya, “the moksha-medicine prepares one for the reception of gratuitous graces — pre-mystical visions or the full-blown mystical experiences. Meditation is one of the ways in which one co-operates with those gratuitous graces.”
“How?”
“By cultivating the state of mind that makes it possible for the dazzling ecstatic insights to become permanent and habitual illuminations. By getting to know oneself to the point where one won’t be compelled by one’s unconscious to do all the ugly, absurd, self-stultifying things that one so often finds oneself doing.”
“You mean, it helps one to be more intelligent?”
“Not more intelligent in relation to science or logical argument — more intelligent on the deeper level of concrete experiences and personal relationships.”
“More intelligent on that level,” said Mrs Rao, “even tho
ugh one may be very stupid upstairs.” She patted the top of her head. “I’m too dumb to be any good at the things that Dr Robert and Vijaya are good at — genetics and biochemistry and philosophy and all the rest. And I’m no good at painting or poetry or acting. No talents and no cleverness. So I ought to feel horribly inferior and depressed. But in fact I don’t — thanks entirely to the moksha-medicine and meditation. No talents or cleverness. But when it comes to living, when it comes to understanding people and helping them, I feel myself growing more and more sensitive and skilful. And when it comes to what Vijaya calls gratuitous graces …” She broke off. “You could be the greatest genius in the world, but you wouldn’t have anything more than what I’ve been given. Isn’t that true, Vijaya?”
“Perfectly true.”
She turned back to Will. “So you see, Mr Farnaby, Pala’s the place for stupid people. The greatest happiness of the greatest number — and we stupid ones are the greatest number. People like Dr Robert and Vijaya and my darling Ranga — we recognize their superiority, we know very well that their kind of intelligence is enormously important. But we also know that our kind of intelligence is just as important. And we don’t envy them, because we’re given just as much as they are. Sometimes even more.”
“Sometimes,” Vijaya agreed, “even more. For the simple reason that a talent for manipulating symbols tempts its possessors into habitual symbol-manipulation, and habitual symbol-manipulation is an obstacle in the way of concrete experiencing and the reception of gratuitous graces.”
“So you see,” said Mrs Rao, “you don’t have to feel too sorry for us.” She looked at her watch. “Goodness, I shall be late for Dillip’s dinner if I don’t hurry.”
She started briskly towards the door.
“Time, time, time,” Will mocked. “Time even in this place of timeless meditation. Time for dinner breaking incorrigibly into eternity.” He laughed. Never take yes for an answer. The nature of things is always no.
Mrs Rao halted for a moment and looked back at him.
“But sometimes,” she said with a smile,” it’s eternity that miraculously breaks into time — even into dinner time. Goodbye.” She waved her hand and was gone.
“Which is better,” Will wondered aloud as he followed Vijaya through the dark temple, out into the noonday glare, “which is better — to be born stupid into an intelligent society or intelligent into an insane one?”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“HERE WE ARE,” said Vijaya, when they had reached the end of the short street that led downhill from the market place. He opened a wicket gate and ushered his guest into a tiny garden, at the further end of which, on its low stilts, stood a small thatched house.
From behind the bungalow a yellow mongrel dog rushed out and greeted them with a frenzy of ecstatic yelps and jumps and tail-waggings. A moment later a large green parrot, with white cheeks and a bill of polished jet, came swooping down from nowhere and landed with a squawk and a noisy fluttering of wings on Vijaya’s shoulder.
“Parrots for you,” said Will, “mynahs for little Mary Sarojini. You people seem to be on remarkably good terms with the local fauna.”
Vijaya nodded. “Pala is probably the only country in which an animal theologian would have no reason for believing in devils. For animals everywhere else, Satan, quite obviously, is Homo sapiens.”
They climbed the steps to the verandah and walked through the open front door into the bungalow’s main living-room. Seated on a low chair near the window, a young woman in blue was nursing her baby son. She lifted a heart-shaped face that narrowed down from a broad forehead to a delicately pointed chin, and gave them a welcoming smile.
“I’ve brought Will Farnaby,” said Vijaya as he bent down to kiss her.
Shanta held out her free hand to the stranger.
“I hope Mr Farnaby doesn’t object to nature in the raw,” she said. As though to give point to her words, the baby withdrew his mouth from the brown nipple, and belched. A white bubble of silk appeared between his lips, swelled up and burst. He belched again, then resumed his sucking. “Even at eight months,” she added “Rama’s table manners are still rather primitive.”
“A fine specimen,” said Will politely. He was not much interested in babies and had always been thankful for those repeated miscarriages which had frustrated all Molly’s hopes and longings for a child. “Who’s he going to look like — you or Vijaya?”
Shanta laughed and Vijaya joined in, enormously, an octave lower.
“He certainly won’t look like Vijaya,” she answered.
“Why not?”
“For the sufficient reason,” said Vijaya, “that I’m not genetically responsible.”
“In other words, the baby isn’t Vijaya’s son.”
Will looked from one laughing face to the other, then shrugged his shoulders. “I give up.”
“Four years ago,” Shanta explained, “we produced a pair of twins who are the living image of Vijaya. This time we thought it would be fun to have a complete change. We decided to enrich the family with an entirely new physique and temperament. Did you ever hear of Gobind Singh?”
“Vijaya has just been showing me his painting in your meditation room.”
“Well, that’s the man we chose for Rama’s father.”
“But I understood he was dead.”
Shanta nodded. “But his soul goes marching along.”
“What do you mean?”
“DF and AI.”
“DF and AI?”
“Deep Freeze and Artificial Insemination.”
“Oh, I see.”
“Actually,” said Vijaya, “we developed the techniques of AI about twenty years before you did. But of course we couldn’t do much with it until we had electric power and reliable refrigerators. We got those in the late twenties. Since when we’ve been using AI in a big way.”
“So you see,” Shanta chimed in, “my baby might grow up to be a painter — that is, if that kind of talent is inherited. And even if it isn’t, he’ll be a lot more endomorphic and viscerotonic than his brothers or either of his parents. Which is going to be very interesting and educative for everybody concerned.”
“Do many people go in for this kind of thing?” Will asked.
“More and more. In fact I’d say that practically all the couples who decide to have a third child now go in for AI. So do quite a lot of those who mean to stop at number two. Take my family, for example. There’s been some diabetes among my father’s people; so they thought it best — he and my mother — to have both their children by AI. My brother’s descended from three generations of dancers and, genetically, I’m the daughter of Dr Robert’s first cousin, Malcolm Chakravarti-MacPhail, who was the o d Raja’s private secretary.”
“And the author,” Vijaya added, “of the best history of Pala. Chakravarti-MacPhail was one of the ablest men of his generation.”
Will looked at Shanta, then back again at Vijaya.
“And has the ability been inherited?” he asked.
“So much so,” Vijaya answered, “that I have the greatest difficulty in maintaining my position of masculine superiority. Shanta has more brains than I have; but fortunately she can’t compete with my brawn.”
“Brawn,” Shanta repeated sarcastically, “brawn … I seem to remember a story about a young lady called Delilah.”
“Incidentally,” Vijaya went on, “Shanta has thirty-two half-brothers and twenty-nine half-sisters. And more than a third of them are exceptionally bright.”
“So you’re improving the race.”
“Very definitely. Give us another century, and our average IQ will be up to a hundred and fifteen.”
“Whereas ours, at the present rate of progress, will be down to about eighty-five. Better medicine — more congenital deficiencies preserved and passed on. It’ll make things a lot easier for future dictators.” At the thought of this cosmic joke he laughed aloud. Then, after a silence, “What about the ethical and religious aspects of A
I?” he asked.
“In the early days,” said Vijaya, “there were a good many conscientious objectors. But now the advantages of AI have been so clearly demonstrated, most married couples feel that it’s more moral to take a shot at having a child of superior quality than to run the risk of slavishly reproducing whatever quirks and defects may happen to run in the husband’s family. Meanwhile the theologians have got busy. AI has been justified in terms of reincarnation and the theory of karma. Pious fathers now feel happy at the thought that they’re giving their wife’s children a chance of creating a better destiny for themselves and their posterity.”
“A better destiny?”
“Because they carry the germ plasm of a better stock. And the stock is better because it’s the manifestation of a better karma. We have a central bank of superior stocks. Superior stocks of every variety of physique and temperament. In your kind of environment, most people’s heredity never gets a fair chance. In ours, it does. And incidentally we have excellent genealogical and anthropometric records going back as far as the eighteen-seventies. So you see we’re not working entirely in the dark. For example, we know that Gobind Singh’s maternal grandmother was a gifted medium and lived to ninety-six.”
“So you see,” said Shanta, “we may even have a centenarian clairvoyant in the family.” The baby belched again. She laughed. “The oracle has spoken — as usual, very enigmatically.” Turning to Vijaya, “If you want lunch to be ready on time,” she added, “you’d better go and do something about it. Rama’s going to keep me busy for at least another ten minutes.”
Vijaya rose, laid one hand on his wife’s shoulder and with the other gently rubbed the baby’s brown back.
Shanta bent down and passed her cheek across the top of the child’s downy head. “It’s father,” she whispered “Good father, good, good. …”
Vijaya administered a final pat, then straightened himself up. “You were wondering,” he said to Will, “how it is that we get on so well with the local fauna. I’ll show you.” He raised his hand. “Polly. Polly.” Cautiously, the big bird stepped from his shoulder to the extended forefinger. “Polly’s a good bird,” he chanted. “Polly’s a very good bird.” He lowered his hand to the point where a contact was made between the bird’s body and the child’s, then moved it slowly, feathers against brown skin, back and forth, back and forth. “Polly’s a good bird,” he repeated, “a good bird.”