‘What names! What beauties!’
‘Laura di Audiberto [Hugo de Sade’s wife], Laura di Sabran, Laura di Chiabu, Laura Colonna …’
‘An all-star cast.’
‘All star-crossed women.’
‘The Happy Few rather.’
Or are human beings just recordings made by some terrifying voice from elsewhere?
In my half-sleep I was reminded of a story by Queba the Lebanese in which a famous writer manages to project his heroine to such good effect that the public believes her to be based on some real women. Scents are named after her, and streets, and newborn children. But the author himself has never been seen out with a woman. Always alone. Scenting a story, in the manner of journalists, a woman editor asks her newspaper to announce a ballot — the public must vote for a real or imagined original for the famous heroine. They vote overwhelmingly in favour of an imagined heroine. The auther is beside himself with anxiety and sorrow. ‘She is not real enough, then, and she will never arrive.’ So he goes home in despair and takes his own life, having at last realized the truth. Of his last story nothing remains save the enigmatic title it was to bear Death Has Blue Eyes.
The water went on, rubbing and polishing its own echoes, drumming upon the darkness, upon the soft wadded walls lining the convolutions of some marvellous sea-shell. The thread which I held in my fingers I had first picked up — the clue, the inkling — from the great stone Gorgon in the island of Corfu — her cartoon of gay madness, ecstasy, hypomania — call it what you will. The clues led steadily on, and upon them I had threaded these experiences, all related and all congruent to a poetic life and practice. Where would it next lead me? I did not know, I did not care. Somewhere in Africa Vega would be writing me a letter, probably reproaching me for some un-Roman weakness, for she was a girl who did not spare her friends. I had written, saying: ‘I am beginning to feel like some very old and moulting penguin left upon a small and rapidly melting ice-floe — call it European culture. Lord God, send the bomb, I sometimes cry! Then I think of Vega, and, with a gesture, I stay the blow! Not yet, for Vega lives!’ In her last letter — so many months ago — she enclosed the French text of a Chinese poem called ‘Woman’ which I Englished for a friend in the following manner. She did not say where she got it, and I have hunted in every likely place and asked my friends to hunt in Paris. I apologize if I have broached a copyright.
WOMAN
How sad it is to be a woman!
Nothing on earth is held so cheap;
When boys stand leaning at the sill,
Like Gods tumbled out of Heaven.
Their hearts compass the Four Oceans,
The dust and the wind of a thousand thousand miles.
But no one is glad when a girl is born –
By her the family sets no store.
When she grows up she hides in her room
Scared to look a man in the face.
Nobody cries when she leaves her home, save she.
As suddenly as clouds when rain pauses,
She bows her head, composes her face, her teeth
Are pressed into her red lips, she bows and kneels
O! countless times. She must humble herself even to servants.
His love is as distant as a star,
Yet always the sunflower turns towards the sun.
Her heart is more sundered than water from fire,
A hundred ills are heaped on her; her face will follow
The changes of the years, will wear its age.
Her Lord will find new treasures.
They that were once like substance and shadow
Are now as distant as Hu from ch’in [two places]
Or as Ts’an is from Ch’en [two stars].
3rd Century Chinese
How odd that these apparently disparate incidents were all held together in my mind by a slender chain of echoes, a predisposition which stretched back to my twenty-third year in the remote (then) island of Corfu where I had taken up residence with the intention of trying my hand at being a poet — or at least a writer of some sort. It seemed clear now, as I thought back to that prehistoric time, that the main inhibition against giving Chang’s book a conventional review (what I had promised) was the echoes it had set off in my memory. I could not bring a coolly critical intelligence to bear on his text. This sense of indecision had been helped by the fact that I had also been trying to compile some sketchy autobiographical notes for an American friend who was anxious to trace what he called ‘the inner autobiography’ of my poetry. It dawned on me in answering his letters that the central preoccupation of the then unfledged young poet of Corfu has been always somehow linked with childhood dreams of Tibet which had at last concretized themselves about the Tao — the great poem of Lao Tsu. In the Black Book written around 1936, I find a Tibetan epigraph. The novel was published in 1938, the year before the war; already my poems were gathered into a bouquet to present to this amor fati from Lhasa, the tantric dakini who had guided and inspired me. It was a life sentence and it helped me to put a calm face upon the despair of the war years with their wanton murders of time and talent and truth. When the war came I had just turned twenty-seven. Among my papers, long after it had ended, I found a forgotten article I had contributed to the Aryan Path, called ‘Tao and Its Glozes’. The old Aryan Path, published from 51 Mahatma Gandhi Road, Bombay, was even then the most distinguished journal of the day devoted to theosophy, and my amateur article was published as a sort of little preface to the issue of December 1939, by which time my island life had ended and I was adrift in Athens waiting upon fate, waiting upon the Axis.
I reprint it here for old times’ sake, and also as evidence of my constant attachment to the principle of non-attachment as outlined in the poem! It was not a bad way to greet a world war. I note also the use of the adjective ‘heraldic’ for which I have often had to answer the critics. It means simply the ‘mandala’ of the poet or of the poem. It is the alchemical sigil or signature of the individual; what’s left with the ego extracted. It is the pure nonentity of the entity for which the poem stands like an ideogram! It sounds rather enigmatic put like that, though in fact it boils down simply to the crucial smile which I exchanged with Chang over the kitchen sink, and which needs no gloze. Language confronts this sort of reality with despair which rapidly turns to humour and, in the face of earnest or too earnest questioners, to slapstick. Another way of going about it would be to look up the Saxon word ‘ullage’ in the dictionary; the definition of it — ‘what a cask wants of being full’ — will exercise your reason to the snapping point — especially if your cask contains wine! It is another sort of koan — or can be used as one! The war was a time of hesitant stock-taking for all of us, and my little article with all its solemnity and youthful lack of experience — not to mention its inexactitudes — was a humble attempt to greet it with an act of affirmation. It may be a bit boring to read now, but for the young man in question it was a capital document.
TAO AND ITS GLOZES
(Lawrence Durrell in the following article suggests a method whereby the real Tao can be differentiated from that which is not the Tao. He rightly perceives that Tao is a philosophy, but also much more. Indeed it is ‘the uncreate unborn and eternal energy of nature, manifesting periodically. Nature as well as man when it reaches purity will reach rest, and then all become one with Tao, which is the source of all bliss and felicity. As in the Hindu and Buddhistic philosophies, such purity and bliss and immortality can only be reached through the exercise of virtue and perfect quietude of our worldly spirit; the human mind has to control and finally subdue and even crush the turbulent action of man’s physical nature; and the sooner he reaches the required degree of moral purification, the happier he will feel.’ — EDS)