God — blank — My Light. It’s more or less on the level of Spike Milligan’s Crossword Puzzle for Idiots (One Across: first letter of the alphabet, One Down: the indefinite article).
Any guesses? You there, at the back…
And the winner is. Is.
Est. Though actually … why shouldn’t it be Sit, or Fit or Fiat? Let God be my light, God becomes my light, Let God become my light. Not a bad little mantra, when I think about it. But given the cultural atmosphere in 1970 I suppose Sit would be the obvious candidate for runner-up. Let It Be.
Perhaps there was something subtler involved in the whole elliptical-motto business than I noticed at the time. It’s rather suggestive: if even the motto of the place doesn’t make sense unless you supply what’s missing, then perhaps this is a sort of manifesto for the education being offered, where nothing will be served up on a plate. Nothing in fact can happen until you throw yourself into the void. More things than verbs can be ‘understood’ even when they’re not there.
Bit late to understand that now! It wasn’t that I was expecting to be spoon-fed even at the time, in fact that was just what I didn’t want. And I was unusual as a freshman in that I had actually spent time in (theoretically) educational institutions where some of my fellow pupils had very much needed to be spoon-fed, helped to masticate and swallow.
I didn’t need a welcoming committee, but I wouldn’t have minded a welcome. No doubt this is an impossibly subtle distinction, and I was just being difficult.
If you encounter difficulties for long enough, you become ‘difficult’ yourself. Karma-particles migrate from situations to the persons who find themselves in them, and before long people are saying, ‘John’s a terrific character, of course … but he can sometimes be rather hard work, don’t you find?’ I hadn’t yet found the means to reverse the current, to install myself at a hub of radiant ease.
The first Saturday of term found me at a real loose end. I had great difficulty filling my time. Suddenly I was overwhelmed by a feeling of confinement far more intense than I had ever experienced during the years when I was kept in bed. Entrapment clamped its lid down on me and sucked out all the air. Time crashed down on me in a tidal wave of stone. I would be struggling in this room — with this room — for a little eternity.
According to Hindu cosmology we live in the Kali Yuga, a Dark Age many thousands of years long. I had absorbed this as an outlying part of my faith, but now I began to experience it as real.
During the Bathford years of bed rest I was isolated by a body that was turning against itself, and by doctors’ orders that banned any sort of adventure — but now some more obscure force was holding me under, so that I experienced my liberty as house arrest.
At that moment there came into my mind a strangely soothing set of injunctions: You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
It sounded like Ramana Maharshi’s voice murmuring in my ear. The only thing was, I had read it and been struck by it before I had read a word of his, before I had even heard of him. It was actually Kafka, a favourite writer of Eckstein’s and someone he was always quoting to baffled students at Burnham Grammar School. He had written it on the blackboard, that sentence about the world rolling in ecstasy at your feet. He knew how to get me intrigued.
Now, though, established as a student of German and Spanish at an ancient university, I gave the passage a fresh mental reading. It didn’t sound like Kafka at all, however well attested. It sounded like the opposite of Kafka, who was so attuned to the negative. That’s why it sounded like Ramana Maharshi, who was as far from Kafka in temperament and background as it was possible to be. Here was Kafka, of all people, preaching on a text of Ramana Maharshi, and expounding the liberating principle that you don’t have to change your life to change your life.
Kafka’s wooden head
Was it really Kafka, though? I mean, I know that passage is by Kafka now, but was it by Kafka before Eckstein wrote it on a school blackboard in 1968? Perhaps Ramana Maharshi had reached across time and space to send me a message of encouragement. It would be very much in his character as a worker of miracles to manage something so discreet, something which blended into its mundane surroundings. A miracle in camouflage. No commandments in skywriting for Ramana Maharshi, no burning bush, just a nudge of Eckstein’s chalk. Divine intervention as sly and cryptic as the crossword clues (not for idiots) which I could never manage to crack. ‘Gangster ducks five hundred and fifty in the general buzz (7)’. Answer: hoodlum, apparently. Please explain.
The question that always gets asked in such circumstances is this: how do you get the nerve to think you’re worthy of a miracle, however low-key? Over time I’ve learned to give myself the answer: where would I get the nerve to think I’m not?
I remembered the saying of Ramana Maharshi, which Ganesh had quoted to me in India. He who is in the jaws of the tiger cannot be rescued; so also a person who has fallen into the grace of a guru cannot escape from it … Grace is a serious business. So, yes. Perhaps Ramana Maharshi turned ventriloquist on my behalf, and made comforting words emerge from Kafka’s wooden head.
In any case I decided I would take the hint, whether it was transmitted from an æthereal or mundane source. I would make the experiment. I would stay in my room and see what happened. After lunch I installed myself in the Parker-Knoll, but then I mounted an expedition to the door, which I opened and left open. Nothing had been said by Ramana Maharshi / Kafka about the door, but it seemed sensible to give the world some encouragement in its unmasking of itself. Then I returned to my chair.
Every few minutes someone passed my door, but no one came in. Few even glanced inside. Perhaps I hadn’t learned to be properly quiet and still.
The next day, Sunday, I left the door open all day. I was baffled by the lack of interest shown by my staircase-mates. If I myself had been free to wander at will round a building, really free, I would have investigated everything just as thoroughly as I could, but clearly I was an exception in this respect. I could only think that curiosity declines proportionately with ease of access. People to whom doors had yawned open all their lives seemed to take no interest in what lay in front of their eyes.
I fought the urge to get in the car and explore my surroundings in that way, but my mobility was more apparent than real. Either the wheelchair stayed where it was, in A6 Kenny, or it came with me in the car — in which case it needed firstly to be installed there, and then to be unfolded and put at my disposal when I had arrived wherever it was that I was actually going. The smallest trip had to be planned like a military campaign. I stayed in, waiting for the world to make its move. There was space for it, just, to roll in ecstasy in front of the Parker-Knoll. If need be I would pull the lever and lift my legs out of the way, to make sure the world had enough room to disport itself.
Finally on Sunday afternoon there came a shy tap on the open door. It was a student with creamy skin and pale splotched freckles. He looked deeply into my eyes. That’s such a rare thing that it can be very stirring when it happens. His own eyes were very green.
Perhaps I really hadn’t seen such colouring since my brief glimpse of one of the ambulance men who accompanied me from my Bathford home to the train that took me to CRX. Since then it had reverberated in my mind, steadily acquiring a sexual overtone, but this newcomer somehow didn’t prompt sexual thoughts. He wasn’t exactly beautiful, but his looks had the unreal quality that often goes with beauty. He asked if he could sit with me a bit. I said he should suit himself, and we exchanged names. His was Colin Moulton. He lived on B staircase.