Therefore the biography of Dr Norman Coleman is not in the scientific ‘Who’s Who’, but in each rhythm of his heading: ‘Orbitoethmoidal Osteoma with Spartaneous Pneumocephalus.’
So many men have lived and breathed and written books. What a breath it gives you! With my poor weak lungs a library is always a place of a broad, a propitious breath, and so books are not only my professional need, but also my respiratory, my spiritual need. And in between the tomes, in that blue of space — as though wisdom were hid; some mysterious, unwritten, unknowable knowledge — in that blank, that silent, wise blank between books and behind them I felt the presence, the truth, the formula of Savithri. She was the source of which words were made, the Mother of Sound, Akshara-Lakshmi, divinity of the syllable; the night of which the day was the meaning, the knowledge of which the book was the token, the symbol — the prophecy.
I would meet her by the staircase of the university library at five, and wander along over sluices and bridges, showing her the spots of silence as in between the two purrings of the Cam, or the broad sheet of space that the sun lit up from Clare Bridge to the tower of St John’s. It was as if some swallow had curved out this space, for the game of its young ones. The Cam had flowers floating on it, and boats and the laughter of the very young. The Cam seemed never to have grown old, even though the buildings were so aged, for the Cam like us men and women flows right in herself, outside of history. Who, after all, could write the history of the Cam, for she was certainly there before man came to the British Isles, and she will be there even if the whole of England joined the European continent, by geological upheaval, and the Thames flowed again into the Rhine or Britain be frozen in because the Arctic regions began to get warmer for life, and this belt of the earth, too cold for man to inhabit. The Cam is silent and self-reflective. It teaches you that history is made by others and not by oneself. I am history to you, not so to myself. You make my biography, I live my own autobiography. Trinity may have a bridge over the Cam, but the Cam has no bridge. I might call Savithri, but Savithri speaking to Savithri did not call herself Savithri. The sound is born of silence and the river is of space. Love has nothing to do with loving, for ‘I’ itself is love.
Night has a great, a tender innocence. No one harms another in the night but with the convictions and irritations of the day. Those who speak of the dark night think of the dark day which precedes it. The night of Cambridge had an absolute silence, as though paths and roads had stopped suddenly, and time had passed by them, and into Hertfordshire. The trees, though, made time, for winter had covered the earth with a grey, remembered existence. Man has a fire within, a substance, a light, and he illumines his night not with the stuff electric, with a touch that is no touch, a lip that is no lip, but a smell, a curve of breath and silence, as if truth is a presence, an instant, an eye. Words are made of such stuff as breath is made on.
The impossible is the reality, the fervent is the intrepid, the passionate, the high. Fruits are made of space; grass is made of light; mankind makes paths and roadways; all, that night be measured in her own silence. King’s Chapel was not made by workmen but by the prayer of pilgrims; colleges were built not by the donations of noblemen and kings but by the leap of light within, by the aura of substantialities within man’s blood and becoming, in which God floats as a castle, builds a bridge and shapes a tower. And in between the archway’d walls are studious boys — and far away, the girls, that weave into life the space of thought, the substance of sight, and movement of the moon, that a better England, a better India, a better world be circumscribed. The Cam is a river that lives on giving dreams.
Savithri was shy, very shy. Her touch was simple and had no name, she spoke as though she were covering her head with her sari, and throwing the palow more amply over her breast. She was shy of no one, she was shy of herself. There were moments when one wondered if she were afraid to touch her own waist, or hear her own words. I think she liked best to hear her own heart, and you felt that was where you could meet her if you dared, but you dared not, for to do this you needed the humility of a saint. Saint I had to become if I would know Savithri, not a saint of ochre and bone-bowl, but one which had known the extinction of the ego. Just as reading poetry at the break of day is like remembering the feel of one’s dream but not the acts of one’s dream, to know Savithri was to wake into the truth of life, to be remembered — unto God. She never pushed you away, but you drew away from her, because there was no common knowledge, no language in which one had similar symbols to exchange. Her simplicity was her defence, and her laughter — for she laughed so widely but softly — was like the laughter of the clown in a circus, when his body ripples with merriment before the lion: Savithri was just afraid. My courage was a failure turned into strength, her laughter was fear turned into simplicity. There was no Clare Bridge to link us together, and we looked at each other from opposite banks, like the duck on one side and the cycle on the other, lamplit and churring on its gear, forlorn.
I walked Savithri back to Girton College, one evening, feeling we were laughing in a cinema. At the hotel John the Porter gave me a letter. It was from Madeleine. It was a rigmarole of aches and anxieties. But it gave me self-assurance: man needs a woman to stand on his pedary bones. You must have a spot, a centre — to run away from.
People have asked me — Georges among them — what indeed it was that happened between Savithri and me in Cambridge. Nothing more had happened, in fact, than if you see deep and long at silence you perceive an orb of centripetal sound which explains why Parvathi is daughter of Himalay, and Sita born to the furrow of the field. I heard myself say I heard myself. Or I saw my eyes see that I saw. She became the awareness behind my awareness, the leap of my understanding. I lost the world and she became it.
For whatever I gave her she accepted, as the Ganges receives the waters of the Himalayas, that go on down to the sea and come again as white flakes of snow, then blue, then very green; and as, when the sun comes northward again, the ice melts and once more the Ganges takes the waters down to the sea — so we gave love to each other, as though it did not belong to us, but to a principle, an other, an impersonal reality, from which we saw gifts emerge in each of us, and gave each other with ceremony. For us therefore all was celebration, festival…
Truth is the fact of existence. That is, truth is the essence of fact; and as such truth and existence are one and the same. Man sees himself in woman as essence, the fact of womanhood is the meaning of his life. If there were nothing other, you could not know that you are. If Parvathi had not sat and prayed that Shiva would open his eyes, Shiva would never have opened his eyes and there would never have been a world. Love is the honey of knowledge, knowing is sweet because woman is.
A man’s world would have led all of us, one by one, to the top of Himalaya; and like the Cathars, who hated mating and the making of children, we would have taken consolamentum and flung ourselves over the precipice, singing hymns on the Void: ‘No aias merce de la carn, mais aias merce del esperit pausat en carcer.’ Buddhism died in India because it became ascetic, and so denied womanhood its right to exist. Those who hate woman — who debase woman — must end themselves, as the Cathars did, fasting unto death. Mahatma Gandhi respected women as sisters, and not as mates — he too disliked the process of loving and of having children — and so he made them into little men. The world of man is the denial of the earth, it is just like a country with a President and not a king.