A Smile in the Mind's Eye

by Lawrence Durrell

  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!

  It came, it seemed to me, as the result of the right kind of piety in love – piety which had nothing to do with a conventional religiosity. I had known it with one person – she had carried the tantric look with her, right into the midst of her death, like a standard. For a whole night the blue eyes continued to regard me with their impish felicity – the sapphire-blue regard with its privileged smile. In the whole of this fine transaction, I realized then there had been no place for self-gratification of a selfish kind. I was face to face with the blue flower of perfected knowledge. Only towards dawn the look became first sea-green, and then softly vitreous, it began to lose its pollen, to cloud over. I woke from those hours of riveted attention feeling profoundly informed by that serene tantric regard from the other side of death. To have been loved – I suddenly realized what a great compliment it was! Yet amusingly enough so often we had not been aware whether we had actually made love or not – so rapt had been the insight, so dense the communion of presence and touch. Yes, I knew what Chang’s text was getting at, though I wondered whether such notions would make any headway in an age such as ours, where such a spiritual state was as rare as the physical one was – orgasm without ejaculation! How could one put this over to monotheistic Christians who had been twisted by sanctimoniousness into the arthritic form of crucifixes? It had died with the last cathar, that look!

  The quiddity of the Tao is in its quizzical stance. (The little god is called Coitus Absconditus!) My friend sat so perfectly still, watching me as I paced up and down, that I thought he had perhaps fallen asleep, ‘You are very hard on Christianity,’ he said at last, and I knew he was right. But it was all due to the mental jolt I received in my seventh or eighth year in Darjiling, where for a couple of years I had been placed in a Jesuit public school. It was a very good school and the good fathers were fine men – there was no propaganda. They preached by example only, and the example they gave was a high one. No, it was not they who gave me the shock. We Protestants numbered about forty children, and we were supposed to worship in town at the Church of England chapel. But one day while passing the Jesuit school chapel I found the door ajar and tiptoed inside, curious as children are. In the deep gloom I came upon a life-size figure of Christ crucified hanging over the altar, liberally blotched with blood and perfectly pig-sticked and thorn-hatted. An indescribable feeling of horror and fear welled up in me. So this was what those austerely garbed and bearded priests worshipped in this dense gloom among the flowers and candles! It was hardly a logical sequence of feelings and sentiments – it was quite spontaneous and unformulated. But the horror remained with me always; and later on, when my father decreed that I must go to England for my education, I felt that he was delivering me into the hands of these sadists and cannibals, men who could worship this brutal and savage effigy on the Christian cross. Naturally I could not put all this into words for many a year, but at that precise moment I knew that henceforward I would never bring myself to trust anyone who called himself a Christian and so invoke this doom-laden symbol of unhappiness! How right I was! So far nothing has ever come my way which might persuade me to modify this somewhat decisive though perhaps absurd view.3 The main road which passed the school in Darjiling ran along the side of the playing-fields; the sight of Tibetan lamas setting off on their long pilgrimages to the distant plains of India was a familiar one. Smiling, as if sauntering through the pages of Kim, they whirled their small prayer-wheels. I have had them on my mind ever since and can still hear the noise of the little brass wheels as they whirred out their prayers. But I had to make a wide detour to rediscover them, the lamas! A lion, I was thrown to the Christians!

  * * *

  So page by page, the text opened itself to our study, while the arguments and explanations spread out sid
eways from it, like crabs. Chang was delighted to hear that even old Rabelais had devoted thought to the matter of longevity, wondering if one could not ‘try how long an ingenious and agreeable man might last, if taken good care of’. Presumably the same sort of formula would apply – breathing, diet, husbanding of sexuality. Chang’s Taoist answers must have seemed on the face of it somewhat extravagant; yet here in the book were texts and pronouncements by the old masters of this love-craft which suggested quite the contrary. I was cutting up leeks as these ideas came under scrutiny and inadvertently threw out large sections of the outer leaves as I prepared them. Horrified, Chang gave a sort of little chirp – a Chinese sob – and dived down to the dustbin to recover them crying angrily: ‘You are wasting again; and you know how firm my Taoist principles are!’ There was heartbreak in his voice and I felt chastened and sorry. He took the discarded leaves and smoothed them delicately out with his fingers – as if they might have had a precious message graven on them. He washed them. ‘They are too coarse and old, Jolan,’ I remonstrated, but he shook his head and pursed his lips. He rolled them as one would a big tobacco leaf and taking the sharpest of the knives he cut them as finely as possible. He repeated for the hundredth time, ‘Anything is eatable if cut up small enough!’ I was proud of one thing however: to have reconverted him to ginger – it was a long time since he had used any in his cooking; also curry, I had some fresh curry from Madras – fresh from the armpits of Krishna, so to speak. He was less charitable to the wines in the house, and would not touch coffee. But he watched me indulgently as I drank, and toasting him I said, ‘I am suffering from a case of repressed longevity.’ But he only smiled and shook his head sadly, saying: ‘You are drinking too much; it makes you reason falsely and disturbs your yoga balance – not to mention making you fat …’ He was right, of course, but then the Good God gave us reason to make fools of ourselves with, and I did not want to be left behind. In a certain subterranean way this talk of the Tao – of the prelapsarian déclic which would enable one to turn the key of immortality in the lock – chimed in my mind with some old ideas I had had once about the nature of the poetic act. I felt that it was as if one were making the orgasm more and more conscious with each poem, exhausting, so to speak, the simple amnesia provoked by the ejaculation per se. Perhaps, without knowing it, I had been very close to the heart of the Tao of sex, as preached by my friend here, who was now sitting at the kitchen table looking at me in rather a curious way. He wore a look of devoted concentration on his face. Then I saw with surprise that there was a glass of wine before him. ‘I am going to drink with you,’ he said, ‘just to see what you see in it, if anything.’ Knowing his principles, and the highly strung and delicate state of health he enjoyed from the exercise of such radical precautions against gluttony, I did not believe him at first. I drank off a swig. He at once followed suit. I drank another. So did he. He made an awful face as he did so, but he seemed quite determined to commit suicide in this nauseating way – was it to register a reproach or a warning? I said nothing but went on talking of the pre-Adamic structure of the psyche and other matters, of the same sort, drinking all the while. He was imitating me. When I replenished my glass he held his out for a refill. ‘Come off it,’ I said, ‘I know it’s bad for you. Are you just trying to shame me?’ He shook his head and answered, ‘No, I am just trying something on you.’ I took a swig; he took a swig. In this way we finished dinner together drinking glass for glass. Of course it was an unequal struggle for I was in training while he, poor Taoist … He began to get unsteady and giggly; he found my jokes inordinately funny. I began to wonder if I should have to carry him up to bed. I felt that it was about time that the West made some cultural contribution to the Taoist scene, so I gave the Great Vampire Chortle – the sound with which I greet every unforeseen adversity in life. ‘What an extraordinary sound,’ he said. ‘What does it do?’ I answered. ‘It clears the air and clears the head; I have adapted it from Greek and Tibetan sources. Those who learn the Great Chortle are saved. Try it.’ He poised himself as if about to jump over a precipice and produced a very tolerable imitation of my chortle. Together we practised it a bit while we drank, until the plaster began to come off the ceiling. It was lucky that the morose existentialist gardener did not choose that moment to peer in from the balcony …

  Altogether it was a splendid evening, full of variety, and yet full of this directed concentration with which my friend sought to imprint my psyche. I could feel the fall-out getting into the wine – but not fast enough to prevent my drinking the statutory amount for a great evening. Afterwards he explained to me the dynamic of this little act – which is called just ‘sitting’ in Chinese. It is part of a health-giving mechanism which is within the powers of anyone and everyone. The aim is to modify conduct in a fruitful sense – if you have a friend who is harming himself by a certain line of conduct. By sitting close to him and concentrating on that conduct you can, so to speak, meditate him into another groove, another shift. Like switching points on a railway. It has nothing to do with professional medical healing where the doctor imposes his will and his treatment on the sick man; nor is it the imposition of one’s own will-power upon the patient. As he explained it, in the sitting technique one simply mentally steps into the character of your friend as one steps into a boat and starts trying to steer it. Obviously wind and current play their part. But by an act of friendly passivity one sometimes can prod them to modify fruitless conduct and reorient themselves … I labour this point because for a whole month and a half after the departure of Jolan my intake of red wine dropped back equably, without stress, to four or five glasses a day – against a customary four or five pints. But the influence wore off after a while. Yet it was like post-hypnotic suggestion, and I have since tried it myself on someone – just sitting, meditating, not saying anything – with distinct results in the right direction. I must say though that the wine gave a rosy glow to the text and its ideas of harmony and bounty; it made men and women natural allies, sexual partners in a cosmic technique. Indeed I saw some of the great Love-Masters to the Emperors were in fact women whose advice was sought. Great Love-Consultants, their names have come down through these texts full of the fragrance and ardour of a language which has never known prudishness or prurience in matters of love. We spoke of the breathing and yoga side of the matter (it was in this field that the wine was robbing me of control). But I had grasped the central notion as far as I could judge, in the Chinese context. I asked myself what differentiates the conduct of the acrobat from that of the yogi. The acrobat can perform feats of physical skill superior to the yogi’s postures however complicated, yet it leads him nowhere because the issue of his skill is not one of virtue involving a cosmic principle. He is unaware of the poetic lodestar the yogi captures – the magnetic field which he enters.

  Jolan Chang gave a chortle. It was sad, but also in a strange way consoling, to find that during a whole historic period in China itself the notation of the Tao had been lost, the link between men and women had been broken. They had become vampires, the women; and the men lost and effeminate; the whole cultural and political scheme of things had lost its equilibrium. The states foundered in anarchy and dissolution. The germ in the wheat had gone bad. A dark age settled over the whole land. According to my friend Chinese history could offer more than one example of this sort of collapse of the historic consciousness together with the corresponding recovery which followed with the swing of the pendulum, for nothing lasts for ever. Would we live to see our own age recover its wits? I wondered. Everything in nature hangs by a hair …‘Embark on the Tao and you won’t have a moment’s peace, because it demands unremitting application and comprehension and balance.’ (That is what Lao Tsu was saying.) You are like a tightrope-walker high above a city; yet with practice you can one day do the walk blindfold, without vertigo. Against reason I have always believed so. It was encouraging that Chang also supported this interpretation of the poem.

  Before we turned in that
evening for the usual shortened sleep I witnessed an amusing outbreak of Chinese humour, which came over my friend in a wave at the sight of an ashtray. By some singular coincidence the gypsies and traders had been bringing all sorts of esoteric trinkets into the village for the Saturday market. Esoteric in the sense that there were flower vases of glass marked ‘Birmingham’, marvellously life-like Indian roses made of silk, and so on. Among all this stuff I happened upon a couple of little bamboo ashtrays, pleasant of shape and with a colour-wash design on them depicting a bush, a river, the figure of a girl holding a fishing rod. The style was very debased but the idiom was quite inescapably Chinese. In a search for matches by the kitchen sink Chang hit upon one of these trinkets. He uttered an exclamation of curiosity and picked it up to examine it. He turned it over. On the back it had a legend in English which read ‘Made in Taiwan’. Something came over him as he read the words and he turned to me, helpless with laughter, pointing at the phrase with his finger, speechless with mirth. In a sort of way I could follow the contours of this cosmic joke – if one thought of the immensity and complexity and age of China and the triviality of contemporary power politics in the hands of American cowboys, or evangelical tycoons with Las Vegas souls … Yes, it merited the laughter. It was so infectious, his laugh, that I was forced to join in, and together we doubled up laughing until our sides ached and I implored him to stop.