A Smile in the Mind's Eye

by Lawrence Durrell

  ‘Taiwan,’ he gasped helplessly.

  ‘Taiwan,’ I echoed, just as helpless. There was no need for a further gloze on the matter, though what the gardener would have made of our behaviour I have no idea. For some time afterwards whenever Jolan caught sight of this little saucer with its debased and disinherited scribble he gave an involuntary chuckle.

  He had brought a certain amount of ancillary documentation with him of the Kinseyfied kind, and while I have nothing against the statistical approach I know how untrustworthy it can be when used as a basis for analysis, and also how few questionnaires are ever really truthfully filled in. Chang did not agree about this. He had seen some good results in the quantitative field. Yes, but were we harking back to a lost innocence or forward to a shift in principle in the West which might modify, not merely conduct, the inward dispositions of the psyche – given the new permissive (so-called) changes of sexual behaviour? Chang said, ‘Look, I am not selling anything. I offer you here a sheaf of texts which adds up to a fairly coherent system devoted to health and psychic balance.’

  We spoke, I remember, a good deal about Henry Miller and his ailments which interested Chang very much, for he admired his work and had grasped the central implication in it which so many people still miss. Miller himself has said it somewhere in an interview: ‘My books are not about sex, they are about self-liberation.’ Chang was delighted to hear that he was in his eighties and convinced that with a little care he might top the hundred – after which, apparently, things got very much easier. He said he would like to give him some free advice strictly as a gerontologist, and to this end I dug out a typewriter and started to take dictation – which resulted in a long and detailed letter about how to conserve his energies and faculties. There were some Chinese herbs he mentioned like the Gin Seng root – but Miller was already taking these. The marvellous thing was the old writer’s joyful optimism in spite of a wonky leg with a plastic artery which didn’t really do the work of the real one which they had removed; and then one eye was also giving him trouble. Chang assured me that all this was quite remediable if his advice were followed, so we packed off a long letter to Miller with all speed.

  After this we started cooking again and my companion said, ‘After we have eaten I shall give you a very special pleasure. I had the luck to pick up a piece of Sung ceramic in an antiquary’s shop in London for a few pence – he had not recognized it.’ Duly, when we had finished our meal, he hunted through his little air-satchels, taking, in passing, a fanatical sip of milk from his bottle, and then produced a small dark-brown vase; there was nothing on it in the way of engraving or decoration, and indeed, there seemed to be little enough to it – one has seen lathe-turned objects of precision which have a certain snug efficiency of shape without being aesthetically haunting. I said so, but he only smiled. ‘But you are not looking. Just look at it, like a shape, like a shadow or a cloud.’ He picked it up on three fingers and with a turn of the wrist presented it towards the window with its sunlight. ‘How do you know it is a Sung piece?’ He smiled again. ‘The proportions – there is no other distinguishing mark. That is why the antiquary missed it. He is like a blind man who has to proceed from the familiar touch of things. Here, if one only had to touch one could not tell what it was. Try looking into it and feel the proportions, feel the way it was potted like a bird’s egg.’ After a while I began to see in a dim way what he saw; it was rather like a theorem in geometry. Then I realized that what he was admiring was the way the little object filled itself with empty space – he was not admiring the skilful manipulation of matter, the beauty of function only. Thus one might, from our point of view, find the little memento without much significance while from his it was an exquisite trap set to decorate the circumambient space without and around it. The Chinese aesthetic – well, talk about negative capability! The counterweight to matter was space, the counterpoise to music, silence. The aesthetic lay in the appreciation of the magic fulcrum. Moreover, it weighed aesthetically while working practically! Yes, I had begun to see in a vague sort of way what constituted a delicious aesthetic experience for Jolan Chang. China had moved that much closer to me.

  He was specially struck by the fact that in the gloomy hall of my tumbledown old house I had stuck up four beautiful Chinese panels of wood which I found being auctioned off at the public auctions in Nimes. They had cost almqst nothing. Each one was the height of a man and the wood appeared to be some very stout and beautiful slice of teak. He recognized unhesitatingly that they came from Peking, though in fact the French doctor who had sold them off in Nimes had brought them back from Saigon. They were coloured panels which, so I was told, hang outside the pharmacies in the Far East – advertising, in fact, designed to attract custom. Two were red and two black – the yang and the yin, the two principles of nature. The red had poems engraved on them, and the black medical captions. But just what they said was anyone’s guess, and I had been waiting for someone Chinese to come and translate them for me. I had waited about six years, but when one knows that one is going to live for ever one can afford to wait on time with happy resignation. Now Chang had given these the most meticulous and delighted examination, and proposed to translate them for me in good round English. They did, he said, indeed hang outside Oriental pharmacies. The red had some health-giving poetry upon them while the black carried a sort of admonitory caption citing the name of some great medical master of the past. It was as if one saw on such a panel in Europe the legend MEDICAL PRINCIPLES AS OUTLINED BY PARACELSUS. Nor had I been wrong about the two colours standing for the two cosmic principles. It was the old rocking-chair of the Tao. I had by now realized that all the Chinese, without exception, were Taoist in their philosophical and aesthetic aspect and Confucian in their dogmatic and theological aspect. The great penetration and balance of Chinese intellectual and aesthetic life was centred upon this fruitful marriage. In just such a way, too, the French have managed to arrive at a fruitful and harmonious marriage of Rabelais and Pascal, of Montaigne and Descartes, in their basic natures. My panels themselves were handsome in the extreme and I was glad that at last – even in an inadequate foreign translation – they would be able henceforward to speak to me.

  LEGEND ON RED PANEL

  Four wells full of clouds and smoke spreading the grasses.

  LEGEND ON RED PANEL

  A full courtyard with the wind and the dew engendering flowers.

  LEGEND ON BLACK PANEL

  The Art of Medicine will profit by taking into account the skill of Wah To in opening stomachs and cleaning them.

  LEGEND ON BLACK PANEL

  The Art of Surgery profits by recalling the techniques of Pian Cha in opening the chest and in transplanting hearts.

  Chang did not have the books to hand to fill in the biographical details about the two doctors, but he promised to repair the omission the moment he got to Cambridge where he was going to spend ten days consulting about the avant-propos he had been offered for his book and various other matters. Apparently there was a very choice if small Chinese reference library at Cambridge – I did not know this. Yet true to his word he rang me up about a week after his departure and said that he had looked up the two doctors. He was very excited by the panel devoted to PIAN CHA because of its unique reference to heart transplants. He had never seen such a reference before on any such comparable panel. PIAN CHA had been a famous surgeon indeed and his downfall had been brought about by palace intrigue, presumably by jealous competitors. This was the most interesting of the panels from his point of view. But I was delighted that he had found the name of WAH TO also. He had been a famous Taoist physician who practised in the second or third century. So at last my health-giving fetishes of panels were intelligible; it was clear also that the scarlet poetry panels had been influenced by Ezra Pound a bit!

  So the day wore on into night and I switched on the lights in the verandah, with its weird ‘retro’ coloured glass; and whenever we practised a Vampire Chortle or an Outer Mongolian
eldritch shriek the owls flew snickering down from the tower, while the little Scops (the Athenian owl) enchanted by the light through the coloured glass gave out its plaintive whirp. We walked up and down like bears arguing and discussing. ‘Virginity is not the issue; the thing is that from the Chinese point of view natural modesty which is delightful in woman or man should never be allowed to degenerate into prudishness or prurience, for that is an illness in Taoist terms. Our pretty erotic pillow-books are the answer for it, and young lovers use them in that sense, to rid themselves of any morbid surplus of guilt or fear.’ Of course, I realized the difference now – in a sense the Taoist never escaped from the sense of belonging to the whole human and cosmic process, neither when he was breathing nor when he was making love. It was the negative capability again; he was free of the ergo sum complex. Nevertheless there was still much more that one wanted to know after reading his texts – in my case very much more. It would have been most interesting to have some discussion of the kind of typology that Chinese astrology would offer to the couple, a science which, after all, stood once for something as comprehensive as our so-called psychology; indeed, when you think of the poverty of our modern psychological typology which boils down to about three human types physical or mental, in all … Even if astrology is highly arguable as an exact science, it does try to circumscribe the vast variety of the human dispositions and the contingencies surrounding their appearance on earth at one time and place. But of course this was outside my friend’s brief; and he didn’t want to give the impression that he was in any way interfering with the plain and fair scholarship of his book by staking claims – beyond the fact that he had tried the precepts and found that they made supersense.

  A mark, too, of our developing intimacy which had grown out of the idea emanating from his text was his sudden explanation of what he was doing in Sweden. The girl he loved, and by whom he had had a child, was a native of Stockholm and had decided to return there from the States. Chang, who had become very well known in Canada as a photographer who specialized in child portraiture, had found life increasingly void in the New World and had decided to follow her. He showed me some delightful pictures of the little girl – she was as pretty as a cherry-tree in blossom. Having daughters myself I understood his decision perfectly.

  We spoke too of mandalas and the range of the symbolic logic contained in this sort of blueprint, as well as in the pure and unalembicated poetry of all classical forms. (Modern poetry and logic seemed to us suspect, though I tried to convince him that in apparently negative works or thoughts there was also a fruitful disgust engendered by the non-participation, as in the plays of Ionesco and Beckett). Or was their non-participation, their refusal to join the dance, their fashionable scepticism, a mark of the intellectual poltroonery which characterizes the age? I wondered. I was at any rate grateful to see Chang’s little Chinese ladies taken seriously somewhere and not relegated to the status of mere point-events rather than souls. I was happy, too, in a way that only an old man can be, that I had lived through a period when woman was not a mere happening but a wholesale Event. When She came into a room we all sprang to our feet to find her a chair; we sat down and waited for her to speak. And when she left we all bounded to open the door for her. And when it closed behind her we all sighed in unison and gazed at one another, exclaiming ‘By Jove! What?’ and fingering out beards and moustaches. Her value to us was far greater than that of a machine à plaisir in the conventional seaside picture-postcard sense. Nor was she just an earth-Mama – for in those days fathers existed, had duties, were accorded a role to play. They were not the burnt-out cases one sees today, incapable of engendering the sexual magnetism which might justify their social role, or of providing a fertile field where a woman could deploy the grand powers of her warmth, her cherish, and the profound intuition which makes her such an incomparable tutor and uncanny guide for a man. When the knack is lost, of course, the children pay the price in psychic deprivation. This too was what the Tao was all about, for the couple and its rapport constituted the basic biological brick out of which society was constructed. If the brick lacks straw … the whole sexual methodology of the cosmos was faulted. When the couple didn’t work, nothing worked.

  Walking about among the sunny vines we also spoke about the Ox-Herding pictures and their symbolism of the soul condensing its apprehensions, turning off the cinema in the head, capturing the herd. For me, however, I preferred the imagery from another context – I think Arabic – of the religious instinct like a caged bird which one day escapes into the room. Thenceforward the problem is how to get it back into the cage again. The bird, of course, is intoxicated by this new-found freedom, yet it has no inkling that there is more empty space outside the room, outside the house, outside the solar system. It does not know the meaning of pure space, only a conditional space, as well as a certain longing for the security and certainty of the cage from which it has escaped. But most of these excursions into the outer reaches of philosophy were of no use to the present manuscript which he preferred to keep quite simple, as a monograph, without didactic or ethical overtones. As for the Tao and the whole complex of Chinese thought: it was I who was to benefit by leading him far afield in the moments when we broke off to eat, sleep, discuss, walk. It was enriching for me to discuss these old life-shaping passions like Lao Tsu and Chuang Tzu with someone who had fully grasped the original.

  In a general sense too I had repaid my debt to him precisely because in talking round and round the whole subject as we had done I had illuminated for him many areas of our Occidental thought which needed his consideration if he was to make his subject matter clear and penetrating to his western reader. I tested the text, in some aspects somewhat sketchy, against every kind of objection, and he was glad that I had not found it wanting. Time, too, was running out and he was expected at Cambridge, where he would be put up by a friend under rather Spartan conditions, which sometimes resulted in his having to sleep on the floor! But he looked after his clothes and his general tenue as punctiliously as a cat. Despite all offers of the maid to wash his clothes or iron them he preferred to tend them himself, passing a wet cloth over them, or a warm iron. When I thought of the simple way he travelled, sleeping sitting up in trains, and so on, I was struck by how spruce he managed to keep himself. I of course regretted his going so soon. His book had formed a sort of bond between me and my own youthful preoccupations which had all got themselves crystallized round the notion of Tao. It led me back like a plumbline to that remote and far off day by the blue Ionian Sea when I said to myself with astonishment, ‘Why goodness me, I must be a Taoist!’ It explained also the nagging sense of disjunction I had always felt in the West, the sense of being a savage; and also the guilt of feeling that I was playing a part and was unequal to my responsibilities as a Christian believer, and I longed to conform since I loved my mother and father. Yet the awakening, pour ainsi dire, was not just of a poetic order – though if I call it ‘religious’ I mean it rather in the anthropological sense and not in the denominational. After I awoke into poetry I had the feeling that from thenceforward I could do nothing that was wholly frivolous, everything made sense; even if I were to commit evil it would still be purposeful … Then there came another thought which was equally gratuitous, arriving from nowhere. ‘The poet is one whom death cannot surprise, for he has taken up an imaginative emplacement within it by his poems.’ A kid, I had fallen into milk with a vengeance!

  ‘Have you any food you don’t want?’ The question brought me back to myself. ‘Because I could take it with me. I eat very lightly when I am travelling.’ Together we examined the fridge. He took a lascivious sip of milk to see if it had turned or not. No! Could he take it with him? He reverently poured it into his little hot-water bottle. There were a couple of apples, a small fragment of cheese and a couple of biscuits and a tomato. I calculated that it would just about have kept a mouse alive for a night or so. ‘This will last me three days at least,’ said Chang running his eye ove
r the assembled items. I pictured him in the wastes of Cambridge nibbling at this fare and blowing on his fingers for warmth; but like all good yoga men he hardly felt the cold. ‘I shall be all right.’ I had intended to take him to a station myself but at the last moment I had a notification for a long-distance telephone call which I could not countermand. So I called the village taxi which came scratching and scrawling into the drive on all the loose gravel. ‘Well,’ he said, giving me the benefit of a final Taoist look accompanied by a smile of friendly complicity. ‘Thank you for the whole trip. It’s been a memorable meeting, no?’ Indeed it had, and I felt so despondent at the sight of him leaving that I quite forgot to give him a farewell Chortle. He strung his belongings around him and donned his light overcoat and the ski bonnet of soft wool. ‘We’ll meet again in London,’ he said, and I agreed. Then the taxi bore him off into the night while I stood in the garden for a while, thinking of his book and listening to the whistle of the owls as they came whirring down in search of field-mice or bats.

  So ended my first Taoist visitation, and as the spring wore on to summer I began to be increasingly taken up with other problems of the ordinary kind. But from time to time I received a call from Jolan Chang to report progress on the book. He had found some delightful and appropriate illustrations, the preface and postface were excellent, and so on. I contributed a note for the sleeve, but I promised more substantial help later on which, by a series of trifling mishaps, I was unable to supply at the right time. But the book appeared and did well, receiving a serious if slightly reserved English press. In France, however, its critics were more enthusiastic and its public, for the most part young, very enthusiastic. Apparently it made sense, even to people habitually subjected to the fraudulent cat’s cradle of the dialectic or to the hiccups of Tel Quel! But it was too simple and unpretentious a book to get up powerful tensions of an intellectual kind. In fact, one would have to have an inkling of the value of breath to be struck by it, I suppose; or to have taken soundings already and come to some conclusions about the meaning of silence … But at all events the little bookshop which abuts the old Sorbonne told me that it was much in demand. Chang went back to his great flat and his collection – not to mention his tiny gnome of a daughter – and our correspondence lapsed; I had several journeys ahead of me. But I was sorry to have failed him at the London end. Happily the support of Joseph Needham had given the book the prestige it needed for its launching.