All the world is spread for woman to be, and in making us know the world woman shows that the world is oneself seen as the other. Union is proof that the Truth is non-dual. ‘As one embraced by a darling bride,’ says the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, ‘knows naught of “I” and “Thou”, so self-embraced by the foreknowing (solar) self knows naught of “myself” within or “thyself” without.’ Not one is the Truth, yet not two is the Truth. Savithri proved that I could be I.
One cannot possess the world, one can become it: I could not possess Savithri — I became I. Hence the famous saying of Yagnyavalkya to his wife, ‘The husband does not love the wife for the wife’s sake, the husband loves the wife for the sake of the Self in her.’
Thus the king is masculine to his kingdom, and feminine in relation to the Absolute, the Truth.
That ugly revolutionary word ‘Capitalist’ took on a new significance for me: clearly it was born of the man-proud nineteenth century, century of inventions, empires. Man, the hero of man: Clive more proud to be the obedient servant of Company Directors than of some Azalais des Baux. And after the death of the Prince Consort how much more Queen Victoria incarnated in him than as herself. Victorianism was born of her widowhood — in the contemplation of him. Gladstone and Disraeli were her alternative symbols. She the sovran of the empire, to whom Gordon of Khartoum knelt as to a liege. How different the lovers of Queen Elizabeth I, and the world of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Armada! The ascetic world of Queen Victoria disintegrated into many man-kingdoms, and the last was the one created by Mahatma Gandhi. Victorianism died not in London or Melbourne but in New Delhi, cremated there by a distinguished representative of the Germano-British Royal Family. Godse, who killed Mahatma Gandhi, was like Saint Dominic. But the inquisition was born to justify life not to kill life.
Strange, it seemed to me, on those days walking by the Cam, singing Sankara’s hymns to myself, waiting for some bus or car that would deposit Savithri by my side, how my thoughts took corporeality, how I understood the rhythm and meaning of history through her. My thoughts turned to Christianity. How curious that it starts — even in the catechism — with Eve and the Fall, and that Hinduism, too, glorifies the Mother. How beautiful are those hymns to the Mother, of Sankara:
Annapurné Sadapurné
Sankara prānavallabhé
She, ever full and plenteous,
Sankara’s divine lady.
But alas decadent Hinduism led pure Vedanta to end in the concretization of womanhood — the Tantriks.
I suddenly remembered Father saying that one of my ancestors in the sixteenth century or thereabouts was a great Tantrik, who had written some textbook on the yogachakras. The story goes how he brought a virgin to the house, for adoration and worship, and when he had sat hour after hour in mantra and meditation, milk was brought and honey, camphor and kadamba flowers. Then the young lady — someone of the concubine class, called Radha — was made to stand naked, and sixteen men came in, who had all fasted for eleven days and prayed for eleven nights, white as muslin in their skin, bright- eyed as the sacrificial fire that burnt in front of them, with ashes on their foreheads, and with filigree at their waists and ankles. They poured the honey first, then the milk and the flowers, on the young head and breast and limbs of the girl, and how it flowed over her womanhood, as though the world was made of the true substance of woman, just as honey is made of the true stuff of flower. And the girl herself stepped forward, singing:
I have no body, I have no mind,
I am the essence of creation;
Myself uncreate,
The world my dwelling place;
My Lord, is he who dwells in Kailas,
Lord of the Trident,
He with the moon in his hair;
My spouse, the origin of Sound.
Now she stepped towards the fire, went round and round it, seven noble times, smeared her body with ashes, and borrowing a cloth from one of the Brahmins walked out an ascetic, a nun fulfilled. The woman needs our worship for her fulfilment, for in worshipping her we know the world and annihilate it, absorbing it into ourself. We should be Shiva that woman be dissolved — and with her the world. For the world is meant not for denial but for dissolution.
The object, I said to myself, is woman. Hence the concupiscence of ascetics for their loin-cloth, their kamandala, their stick, or naked feet. And Georges, eating marmalade or chestnut jam, how he sucked it, rolled it over and over his tongue, then swallowed it, little by little, making glougloutinating sounds, and looking innocently at Madeleine. And the Abbé de Grefonville, when he came to visit us, rubbed his snuff as though it gave him a self-exciting sensation, a release of himself. When it went up his nose he closed his eyes, surely not in fear of burning his eyes, but because it was such joy to feel himself in. No sinner, no Don Juan can have come back to the world as ghost, but most cenobites must have. No wonder then that mostly women are possessed by ghosts and not men. Ghosts prefer — in India at least — girls of sixteen or widows.
One afternoon how long the path between the main road and Clare Bridge seemed to me, waiting in the dark and cold for Savithri. Knowing she must be having some dubious and interminable discussion with her Communist comrades— for she saw a great deal of them, liking their sincerity, their disinterestedness, their cleanliness, ‘not smelly like the bourgeois’ was her definition — I began to think of bourgeois and Capitalist.
Nazism, I said to myself, must have been born of the He- principle: Nietzsche, that great ‘prophet of Nazism’, thought of superman because Lou Andreas-Salomé alas had jilted him. Refuting the she-world Nietzsche took Zarathustra to the top of the mountain, whence he imprecated the world. The Jews belong to the world — they are great world builders — hence the hate of the he-man for the Jew. More men marry Jewesses — Savithri’s best friend was a Jewess, daughter of a German refugee, and an Englishman from one of the best families, the bluest of blue blood, was in love with her — than Jews marry gentile women — in Cambridge at least, where Betsy once heard a Jewish boy say, ‘At least let us have some Jewish girls for ourselves! We might have to take to evil ways, if all the Cambridge Jewish girls fall in love with the sons of dukes and lords.’
That Marxism was born of a Jew seemed inevitable. That Marxism was succeeding in China also seemed inevitable — who but the Chinese accepted the reality of the world with such full authenticity? If the world is to be lived in, the world has to be accepted: woman has to be accepted. The quarrel between Nazism and Communism, between Hitler and Lenin, was one between the ascetic of Godsberg, and the little, heavy Slav, with bicycle and book, returning from the British Museum to the warm fire and Krupaskaya. Whoever talks of the wife of Danton, the purist, but who does not know the princess from Austria? Communism is the acceptance of life, the justification of life: Nazism the denial of life, its destroyer. I am sure more Nazis gloated at the thought of London on fire, than Communists on the burning of Hamburg. When the Germans entered France, there were still officers who made the Le Silence de la Mer possible: when the Russians entered Berlin they raped every woman they could. The one ran to the fulfilment of life, the other glorified himself by denial. Mephistopheles was a solipsist. Lenin was a Saint-Francis turned inquisitor. If I were not a royalist, I should have become a Communist. After all Stalin was an usurper, a Césarévitch who succeeded Rasputin. Ivan Karamazov was a fine disciple of Christ — an enemy of the inquisition. Alyosha was a true Christian. When the Mother of God replaced the Son of Man Catholicism became a universal religion.