Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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“Attention.” Through a ragged counterpoint of crowing the injunction was insistently repeated. “Attention. Attention. Atten …” The inhuman voice broke off in mid-word.
Attention to her hands on his face? Or attention to this dreadful glare of the inner light, to this uprush of tin and plastic stars and, through the barrage of vulgarity, to this packet of garbage that had once been Molly, to the whore-house looking-glass, to all those countless corpses in the mud, the dust, the rubble. And here were the lizards again and Gongylus gongyloides by the million, here were the marching columns, the rapt, devoutly listening faces of Nordic angels.
“Attention,” the mynah bird began to call again from the other side of the house. “Attention.”
Will shook his head. “Attention to what?”
“To this.” And she dug her nails into the skin of his forehead. “This. Here and now. And it isn’t anything so romantic as suffering, or even pain. It’s just the feel of finger nails. And even if it were much worse, it couldn’t possibly be for ever or to infinity. Nothing is for ever, nothing is to infinity. Except, maybe, the Buddha Nature.”
She moved her hands, and the contact now was no longer with nails but with skin. The finger tips slid down over his brows and, very lightly, came to rest on his closed eyelids. For the first wincing moment he was mortally afraid. Was she preparing to put out his eyes? He sat there, ready at her first move to throw back his head and jump to his feet. But nothing happened. Little by little his fears died away; the awareness of this intimate, unexpected, potentially dangerous contact remained. An awareness so acute and, because the eyes were supremely vulnerable, so absorbing that he had nothing to spare for the inner light or the horrors and vulgarities revealed by it.
“Pay attention,” she whispered.
But it was impossible not to pay attention. However, gently and delicately, her fingers had probed to the very quick of his consciousness. And how intensely alive, he now noticed, those fingers were! What a strange tingling warmth flowed out of them!
“It’s like an electric current,” he marvelled.
“But luckily,” she said, “the wire carries no messages. One touches and, in the act of touching, one’s touched. Complete communication, but nothing communicated. Just an exchange of life, that’s all.” Then, after a pause, “Do you realize, Will,” she went on, “that in all these hours we’ve been sitting here — all these centuries in your case, all these eternities — you haven’t looked at me once? Not once. Are you afraid of what you might see?”
He thought over the question and finally nodded his head. “Maybe that’s what it was,” he said. “Afraid of seeing something I’d have to be involved with, something I might have to do something about.”
“So you stuck to Bach and landscapes and the Clear Light of the Void.”
“Which you wouldn’t let me go on looking at,” he complained.
“Because the Void won’t do you much good unless you can see its light in Gongylus gongyloides. And in people,” she added. “Which is sometimes considerably more difficult.”
“Difficult?” He thought of the marching columns, of the bodies in the mirror, of all those other bodies face downwards in the mud, and shook his head. “It’s impossible.”
“No, not impossible,” she insisted. “Sunyata implies karuna. The Void is light; but it’s also compassion. Greedy contemplatives want to possess themselves of the light without bothering about compassion. Merely good people try to be compassionate and refuse to bother about the light. As usual, it’s a question of making the best of both worlds. And now,” she added, “it’s time for you to open your eyes and see what a human being really looks like.”
The finger tips moved up from his eyelids to his forehead, moved out to the temples, moved down to the cheeks, to the corners of the jaw. An instant later he felt their touch on his own fingers, and she was holding his two hands in hers.
Will opened his eyes and, for the first time since he had taken the moksha-medicine, found himself looking her squarely in the face.
“Dear God,” he whispered at last.
Susila laughed. “Is it as bad as the bloodsucker?” she asked.
But this was not a joking matter. Will shook his head impatiently and went on looking. The eye sockets were mysterious with shadow and, except for a little crescent of illumination on the cheek bone, so was all the right side of her face. The left side glowed with a living, golden radiance — praeternaturally bright, but with a brightness that was neither the vulgar and sinister glare of darkness visible, nor yet that blissful incandescence revealed, in the far-off dawn of his eternity, behind his closed lids and, when he had opened his eyes, in the book-jewels, the compositions of the mystical Cubists, the transfigured landscape. What he was seeing now was the paradox of opposites indissolubly wedded, of light shining out of darkness, of darkness at the very heart of light.
“It isn’t the sun,” he said at last, “and it isn’t Chartres. Nor the infernal bargain basement, thank God. It’s all of them together, and you’re recognizably you, and I’m recognizably me — though, needless to say, we’re both completely different. You and me by Rembrandt, but Rembrandt about five thousand times more so.” He was silent for a moment; then, nodding his head in confirmation of what he had just said, “Yes, that’s it,” he went on. “Sun into Chartres, and then stained glass windows into bargain basement. And the bargain basement is also the torture chamber, the concentration camp, the charnel house with Christmas tree decorations. And now the bargain basement goes into reverse, picks up Chartres and a slice of the sun, and backs out into this — into you and me by Rembrandt. Does that make any sense to you?”
“All the sense in the world,” she assured him.
But Will was too busy looking at her to be able to pay much attention to what she was saying. “You’re so incredibly beautiful,” he said at last. “But it wouldn’t matter if you were incredibly ugly; you’d still be a Rembrandt-but-five-thousand-times-more-so. Beautiful, beautiful,” he repeated. “And yet I don’t want to sleep with you. No, that isn’t true. I would like to sleep with you. Very much indeed. But it won’t make any difference if I never do. I shall go on loving you — loving you in the way one’s supposed to love people if one’s a Christian. Love,” he repeated, “love … It’s another of those dirty words. ‘In love’, ‘make love’ — those are all right. But plain ‘love’ — that’s an obscenity I couldn’t pronounce. But now, now …” He smiled and shook his head. “Believe it or not, now I can understand what it means when they say, ‘God is love’. What manifest nonsense! And yet it happens to be true. Meanwhile there’s this extraordinary face of yours.” He leaned forward to look into it more closely. “As though one were looking into a crystal ball,” he added incredulously. “Something new all the time. You can’t imagine …”
But she could imagine. “Don’t forget,” she said, “I’ve been there myself.”
“Did you look at people’s faces?”
She nodded. “At my own in the glass. And of course at Dugald’s. Goodness, that last time we took the moksha-medicine together! He started by looking like a hero out of some impossible mythology — of Indians in Iceland, of Vikings in Tibet. And then, without warning, he was Maitreya Buddha. Obviously, self-evidently Maitreya Buddha. Such a radiance! I can still see …”
She broke off, and suddenly Will found himself looking at Incarnate Bereavement with seven swords in her heart. Reading the signs of pain in the dark eyes, about the corners of the full-lipped mouth, he knew that the wound had been very nearly mortal and, with a pang in his own heart, that it was still open, still bleeding. He pressed her hands. There was nothing, of course, that one could say, no words, no consolations of philosophy — only this shared mystery of touch, only this communication from skin to skin of a flowing infinity.
“One slips back so easily,” she said at last. “Much too easily. And much too often.” She drew a deep breath and squared her shoulders.
Bef
ore his eyes the face, the whole body, underwent another change. There was strength enough, he could see, in that small frame to make head against any suffering; a will that would be more than a match for all the swords that fate might stab her with. Almost menacing in her determined serenity, a dark Circean goddess had taken the place of the Mater Dolorosa. Memories of that quiet voice talking so irresistibly about the swans and the cathedral, about the clouds and the smooth water, came rushing up. And as he remembered, the face before him seemed to glow with the consciousness of triumph. Power, intrinsic power — he saw the expression of it, he sensed its formidable presence and shrank away from it.
“Who are you?” he whispered.
She looked at him for a moment without speaking; then gaily smiling, “Don’t be so scared,” she said. “I’m not the female mantis.”
He smiled back at her — smiled back at a laughing girl with a weakness for kisses and the frankness to invite them.
“Thank the Lord!” he said, and the love which had shrunk away in fear came flowing back in a tide of happiness.
“Thank him for what?”
“For having given you the grace of sensuality.”
She smiled again. “So that cat’s out of the bag.”
“All that power,” he said, “all that admirable, terrible will! You might have been Lucifer. But fortunately, providentially …” He disengaged his right hand and with the tip of its stretched forefinger touched her lips. “The blessed gift of sensuality — it’s been your salvation. Half your salvation,” he qualified, remembering the gruesomely loveless frenzies in the pink alcove, “one of your salvations. Because, of course, there’s this other thing, this knowing who in fact you are.” He was silent for a moment. “Mary with swords in her heart,” he went on, “and Circe, and Ninon de Lenclos and now — who? Somebody like Juliana of Norwich or Catherine of Genoa. Are you really all these people?”
“Plus an idiot,” she assured him. “Plus a rather worried and not very efficient mother. Plus a bit of the little prig and day-dreamer I was as a child. Plus, potentially, the old dying woman who looked out at me from the mirror the last time we took the moksha-medicine together. And then Dugald looked and saw what he would be like in another forty years. Less than a month later,” she added, “he was dead.”
One slips back too easily, one slips back too often … Half in mysterious darkness, half mysteriously glowing with golden light, her face had turned once again into a mask of suffering. Within their shadowy orbits the eyes, he could see, were closed. She had retreated into another time and was alone, somewhere else, with the swords and her open wound. Outside, the cocks were crowing again, and a second mynah bird had begun to call, half a tone higher than the first, for compassion.
“Karuna.”
“Attention. Attention.”
“Karuna.”
Will raised his hand once more and touched her lips.
“Do you hear what they’re saying?”
It was a long time before she answered. Then, raising her hand, she took hold of his extended finger and pressed it hard against her lower lip. “Thank you,” she said and opened her eyes again.
“Why thank me? You taught me what to do.”
“And now it’s you who have to teach your teacher.”
Like a pair of rival gurus each touting his own brand of spirituality, “Karuna, attention,” shouted the mynah birds; then, as they drowned out one another’s wisdom in overlapping competition, “Runattenshkarattunshon.” Proclaiming that he was the never impotent owner of all females, the invincible challenger of every spurious pretender to maleness, a cockerel in the next garden shrilly announced his divinity.
A smile broke through the mask of suffering; from her private world of swords and memory, Susila had returned to the present. “Cock-a-doodle-doo,” she said. “How I love him! Just like Tom Krishna when he goes around asking people to feel his muscles. And those preposterous mynah birds, so faithfully repeating the good advice they can’t understand. They’re just as adorable as my little bantam.”
“And what about the other kind of biped?” he asked. “The less adorable variety.”
For all answer she leaned forward, caught him by the forelock and, pulling his head down, kissed him on the tip of his nose. “And now it’s time you moved your legs,” she said. Climbing to her feet, she held out her hand to him. He took it and she pulled him up from his chair.
“Negative crowing and parroted anti-wisdom,” she said. That’s what some of the other kind of bipeds go in for.”
“What’s to guarantee that I shan’t return to my vomit?” he asked.
“You probably will,” she cheerfully assured him. “But you’ll also probably come back again to this.”
There was a spurt of movement at their feet.
Will laughed. “There goes my poor little scrabbling incarnation of evil.”
She took his arm, and together they walked over to the open window. Announcing the near approach of dawn, a little wind fitfully rattled the palm fronds. Below them, rooted invisibly in the moist acrid-smelling earth, was a hibiscus bush — a wild profusion of bright glossy leaves and vermilion trumpets, evoked from the double darkness of night and over-arching trees by a shaft of lamplight from within the room.
“It isn’t possible,” he said incredulously. He was back again with God-the-fourteenth-of-July.
“It isn’t possible,” she agreed. “But like everything else in the universe, it happens to be a fact. And now that you’ve finally recognized my existence, I’ll give you leave to look to your heart’s content.”
He stood there motionless, gazing, gazing through a timeless succession of mounting intensities and ever profounder significances. Tears filled his eyes and overflowed at last on to his cheeks. He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped them away.
“I can’t help it,” he apologized.
He couldn’t help it because there was no other way in which he could express his thankfulness. Thankfulness for the privilege of being alive and a witness to this miracle, of being, indeed, more than a witness — a partner in it, an aspect of it. Thankfulness for these gifts of luminous bliss and knowledgeless understanding. Thankfulness for being at once this union with the divine unity and yet this finite creature among other finite creatures.
“Why should one cry when one’s grateful?” he said as he put his handkerchief away. “Goodness knows. But one does.” A memory-bubble popped up from the sludge of past reading. “‘Gratitude is heaven itself’,” he quoted. “Pure gibberish! But now I see that Blake was just recording a simple fact. It is heaven itself.”
“And all the more heavenly,” she said, “for being heaven on earth and not heaven in heaven.”
Startlingly, through the crowing and the croaking, through the insect noises and the duet of the rival gurus, came the sound of distant musketry.
“What on earth is that?” she wondered.
“Just the boys playing with fireworks,” he answered gaily.
Susila shook her head. “We don’t encourage those kinds of fireworks. We don’t even possess them.”
From the highway beyond the walls of the compound a roar of heavy vehicles climbing in low gear swelled up louder and louder. Over the noise, a voice at once stentorian and squeaky bellowed incomprehensibly through a loud speaker.
In their setting of velvet shadow the leaves were like thin shavings of jade and emerald, and from the heart of their gem-bright chaos fantastically sculptured rubies flared out into five-pointed stars. Gratitude, gratitude. His eyes filled again with tears.
Snatches of the shrill bellowing resolved themselves into recognizable words. Against his will, he found himself listening.
“People of Pala,” he heard; then the voice blasted into amplified inarticulateness. Squeak, roar, squeak, and then, “Your Raja speaking … remain calm … welcome your friends from across the Strait …”
Recognition dawned. “It’s Murugan.”
“And he’s with Dipa
’s soldiers.”
“Progress,” the uncertain excited voice was saying. “Modern life …” And then, moving on from Sears Roebuck to the Rani and Koot Hoomi, “Truth,” it squeaked, “values … genuine spirituality … oil.”
“Look,” said Susila. “look! They’re turning into the compound.”
Visible in a gap between two clumps of bamboos, the beams of a procession of headlamps shone for a moment on the left cheek of the great stone Buddha by the lotus pool and passed by, hinted again at the blessed possibility of liberation and again passed by.
“The throne of my father,” bawled the gigantically amplified squeak, “joined to the throne of my mother’s ancestors … Two sister nations marching forward, hand in hand, into the future … To be known henceforth as the United Kingdom of Rendang and Pala … The United Kingdom’s first prime minister, that great political and spiritual leader, Colonel Dipa …”
The procession of headlamps disappeared behind a long range of buildings and the shrill bellowing died down into incoherence. Then the lights re-emerged and once again the voice became articulate.
“Reactionaries,” it was furiously yelling. “Traitors to the principles of the permanent revolution …”
In a tone of horror, “They’re stopping at Dr Robert’s bungalow,” Susila whispered.
The voice had said its last word, the headlamps and the roaring motors had been turned off. In the dark expectant silence the frogs and the insects kept up their mindless soliloquies, the mynah birds reiterated their good advice. “Attention, Karuna.” Will looked down at his burning bush and saw the Suchness of the world and his own being blazing away with the clear light that was also (how obviously now!) compassion — the clear light that, like everyone else, he had always chosen to be blind to, the compassion to which he had always preferred his tortures, endured or inflicted, in a bargain basement, his squalid solitudes, with the living Babs or the dying Molly in the foreground, with Joe Aldehyde in the middle distance and, in the remoter background, the great world of impersonal forces and proliferating numbers, of collective paranoias, and organized diabolism. And always, everywhere, there would be the yelling or quietly authoritative hypnotists; and in the train of the ruling suggestion-givers, always and everywhere, the tribes of buffoons and hucksters, the professional liars, the purveyors of entertaining irrelevances. Conditioned from the cradle, unceasingly distracted, mesmerized systematically, their uniformed victims would go on obediently marching and counter-marching, go on, always and everywhere, killing and dying with the perfect docility of trained poodles. And yet in spite of the entirely justified refusal to take yes for an answer, the fact remained and would remain always, remain everywhere — the fact that there was this capacity even in a paranoiac for intelligence, even in a devil-worshipper for love; the fact that the ground of all being could be totally manifest in a flowering shrub, a human face; the fact that there was a light and that this light was also compassion.