ition does not say everything: to conceive the call of God as an expressed order to carry out a task certainly is not always false, but it is only true after a long interior struggle in which it becomes obvious that no such constraint is apparent. It also happens that the order comes to maturity along with the one who must carry it out and that it becomes in some way this very being, who has now arrived at full maturity. Finally, the process of maturing can be a mysterious way of dying, provided that with death the task begins…. There has to be a dizzying choice, a definitive dehiscence (rupture) by which the certitude he has gained of being called is tom asunder. That which-as one says, and the word is rightly used here—consecrates a vocation and raises it to the height of the sacrifice which it becomes is a breaking with the apparent order of being, with its formal full development or its visible efficacy.]”72
I wanted to copy a few more lines from Pierre Emmanuel in the Kurseong scholasticate but some people came in to see me and I was occupied until 8:15, when I went down to the front door to get in the jeep and go down to the main road. There I was eventually picked up by the Mount Everest Taxis’ car 291, which was full-only room for one man in the front seat-and moreover the driver was determined to get to Bagdogra without using gas. He coasted most of the way down the hill with the motor off, and in the end conked out fifty yards from the gate to the airport. We walked in. There are about two hours left until plane time (flight 224 to Calcutta). I sit in the relatively cool restaurant. Fans are going slowly. Army types are shouting in Bengali-or is it Hindi?
A last sight of Kanchenjunga, bright and clear in the morning sun, appearing over the hills of Ghoom as I came out into the corridor with my bags. Good view from the front of the monastery. A surprise.
Kurseong has a big, cold, solid, Belgian-type Jesuit scholasticate. One gets the impression of a well-ordered and “fervent” community in the old style, a typically good Jesuit house in the familiar tradition. I talked about prayer and Job arguing with God, basically from notes I’d used in Alaska and California with quite a few added notions about a possible Indian contribution to a renewal of the Catholic theology of prayer. I also spoke of bhakti sacrifice, the contemplation of the Trinity and the theological idea of the Person. Many liked it, though some of the faculty may have misunderstood it, and a few of the questions were critical. The best of the Indian group, especially Fr. Cherian Curiyikad, the scripture man, and quite a few scholastics seemed much in favor. On the whole it was a good response.
I was in the room of Fr. Volkaert, another scripture scholar, whose Revised Standard Version of the Bible I borrowed for use in my lecture. I had a couple of talks with Fr. Louis Schillebeeckx, S.J., the brother of Fr. Edward Schillebeeckx, O.P. He has notes on prayer and on the Holy Spirit from the days when he was Magister Spiritus, and they are quite good. He is a contemplative. In his last words to me he urged me to see his brother in Nijmegen. It was a concelebration in English in a renovated chapel. “Om” was inscribed over the lectern.
Calcutta- “A-a-a-a-chya!”
If is a city I love. Flying out today was beautiful. I don’t mean the bizarre, macabre beauty of the disintegrating slums, the old fallen splendor, but the subtle beauty of all the suburban ponds and groves, with men solemnly bathing in the early morning and white cranes standing lovely and still amid the lotuses and flying up in twos and threes against the fresh green of the coconut palms. Yet the city, too, its crumbling walls alive with Bengali inscriptions and palimpsests of old movie posters. And the occasional English spires, 18th-century domes-I do not tire of Calcutta. But perhaps it was only because I was there only a few hours; I stayed overnight in Bob Boylan’s apartment and read all the mail that had piled up for me. There was one from Dom Leclercq, who is now in Delhi, at the Oberoi Intercontinental. He is going on to Tokyo. I wired him from the Calcutta airport. And contact prints had come from John Griffin of the photos I had taken at Dharamsala. The one of the Dalai Lama is especially good, also the one of Khamtul Rinpoche, and the little tulku in his cell was very visible. Mother Myriam of the Redwoods writes that the commission of bishops to take care of contemplatives has been set up. Fr. Flavian says “Come home if you get sick.” (This written before he received my request to prolong the trip!) Fr. Eudes is going to Rome. Fr. Chrysogonus is out on some commission. Naomi Burton is going ahead with the publication of My Argument with the Gestapo at Doubleday. She wants a preface by W. H. Auden or Robert Lowell, the poets. The Time-Life Bible with my piece in it is coming out after ell,73 so I will have some money. Dan Walsh has sent a big check for my travel fund. Most generous! Bob Lax says Emmett Williams wants some of my stuff for an anthology of concrete poetry. My talk at Bangkok is to be on December 10th; address: c/o Mission Étrangere le Pacis, 254 Silom Road.
I had a long wait in the airport talking to a man from Melbourne who had been to Rishikesh-and was disappointed-and who had been looking for lamas in Darjeeling. He had met a couple I did not know. He knows the Mouni Sadhu-Arthur Osborne set in Melbourne.
November 26, 1968 Madras
Flying into Madras is lovely. The city is all self-evident, spread out along the ocean with its vast beach, its harbor, its rivers, its broad avenues. Then the plane swings inland over the hot fields, neat, cultivated, green flat land. Many coconut palms. Many huts made of palm-leaf matting. Poor as they are, they weather much better than the somewhat pretentious “modern style” houses that are shiny and bright for a month and go black or gray-green in the first monsoon.
Madras is a bright and leisurely city. The people are less desperate than the Bengalis. It is more truly India than Delhi or Calcutta (whatever “truly India” might be-as if I were capable of knowing and defining it!).
Coming in, I spotted St. Thomas Mount-again bright, neat, self-evident. I have not yet seen the cathedral, which is probably confusing rather than evident.
“The discovery of a violently active star, the hottest known and apparently newly created, was reported by Leicester University scientists. The star is considered an important find for X-ray astronomy….”
“A snake weighing over two maunds [25 lbs. in Madras) and twenty-five feet long and two feet in diameter was caught by two villagers in the Buat-nagar District of Nepal on Sunday….”
“When the train was passing through a jungle area…he removed a hose pipe and brought the train to a halt. His accomplices hiding in the jungle came out and looted forty bags of peas. The guard and other crew were made to keep silent, being threatened with dire consequences….”
“Ho Dons in front of us, my father on our trail behind us: what can you do now, tailless one?” (Tarzan)
“Butar-listen! If I untie you will you guide this Ben-ko while I battle your enemies on the gryf?”
Butar: “I will guide.” (Tarzan)
(The Indian Express, Madras)
November 27, 1968. Madras
There is cholera in North Madras. And in many places in South India attacks are made on police stations or houses of merchants by gangs of Naxalites-presumably Maoist Communists.74 Brutal killings in any case. Yet nothing can change the loveliness of this city of which I saw something last evening with Dr. Raghavan.75 He came over from the university, where a Gandhi seminar is in progress. We had some tea and then drove around in the dusk. And then the dark of nightfall.
Today there is rain outside; it is one of the monsoon seasons here.
“Many hundreds and thousands of years ago, during an epoch, not yet definitely determined, of that period of the earth’s history which geologists call the Tertiary period, most likely toward the end of it, a specially highly developed race of anthropoid apes lived somewhere in the tropical zone—probably on a great continent that has now sunk to the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Darwin has given us an approximate description of these ancestors of ours. They are completely covered with hair, they had beards and pointed ears, and they lived in bands in the trees.”
“Perfectly white cats with blue eyes are always, or almost always
, deaf.”76
Some important dates in history of the East India Company:
1639 Fort St. George, which became Madras.
1659 Fort William, a “factory,” to become the city of Calcutta.
1661 The British acquire Bombay from Portugal.
1686 The Company is at war with Aurangzeb, the Mogul emperor.
We drove past Fort St. George in the shadows, with a large garden around it. Stairways and walls and windows and a steeple. The old East India Company headquarters. University of Madras-a long line of spanking new buildings on the sea front. Dr. Raghavan pointed out his office. The old law college is fantastic, a Saracenic Coney Island, but dignified.
The beach is the finest thing in Madras. There was a new moon and a strong, steady breeze off the water; people sitting in small scattered groups, cooling off in the dark. Hulls of fishing boats (“country boats”) pulled up on the sand. A very wide beach. Dr. Raghavan and I watched the surf roll in and looked at the stars. He told me the names of some of the constellations in Sanskrit. The moon prevented our seeing the Southern Cross clearly.
Then we went to San Thome. Smaller than I expected, the cathedral is in an entirely Christian quarter. Its architecrure is standard 19th-cenrury Gothic, spacious, full of the old-style starues, and over the chancel arch the words “Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus.” I find the inscription strangely touching. I kneel for a while looking up to the shadows of the sancruary where all is still as it was before the Council. Then we depart. An Indian Christian beggarwoman displays a dramatically spread-eagled sleeping baby on her lap. I give her a few paise. But Dr. Raghavan stands no nonsense from other beggars and is particularly severe with the ones in the Shaivite temple in Mylapore, not far from San Thomé. It is called Kapaleeswara, the temple of Shiva, whose goddess consort took the form of the peacock to worship him. Extraordinary life and seeming confusion of the temple, full of people milling around barefoot (I too) in the sand, children playing and yelling, dozens of shrines with different devotions going on-especially one with waving camphor torches for Ganesha, who has a prominent well-lighted booth facing the entry. Less going on at the Shiva lingam which stands alone, half draped, black, heavy, tumescent. Other shrines and porches and halls. A group of women doing a puja of their own. And a group of Vedic scholars chanting the Vedas strongly in another place. Over it all the chant of ancient Devaram hymns in Tamil comes over a public address system. We trace the music to its source and find an affable temple singer, a friend of Dr. Raghavan’s seated in a small cell before a microphone, accompanied by an acolyte with cymbals. Handsomeness of the Tamil chant. Then other shrines, and two dowdy peacocks in a big enclosure with iron railings. Finally out the back to the dark broad tank full of lotuses. This was my first real exposure to South Indian Hinduism. Very alive-especially the many young pilgrims dressed in black, as a sign of their vow to go to Sabarimalai, a holy place sacred to Ayyappan [Hindu deity] in the jungles of Kerala.
Mass this morning at St. Thomas Mount. I drove out there in pounding rain, the monsoon is running late here, and the car climbed the hill by a back way. Otherwise you go up a long flight of steps. I entered the little church and found the high altar prepared. It was delightful, a perfect hermitage, with a few Indian women and a couple of Italians-a priest and layman visiting their relative, the pastor. I said the Mass of St. Thomas, looking at the ancient gray carved stone that was found on the site. The altar is a sort of folk-art baroque, with a folk-type icon of the saint in a quasi-Franciscan tunic, being pierced by a spear. Then another folk-art-type Virgin and Child, garlanded by the faithful, ascribed to St. Luke, naturally, but obviously 17th or 18th century. The old pulpit was charming, too. A very lovely little church, so quiet, so isolated, so simple, so fresh. It stands on an abrupt hill overlooking an army camp and the airport. One of the nicest things I have found in India or anywhere. I felt my pilgrimage to it was a great grace. Next door there is a crèche for abandoned children, run by some Franciscan sisters. I saw the little dark-eyed babies, drank some lemonade, signed the visitors’ book and escaped before the sisters could read it. More rain, and we drove on to Mahabalipuram.
I got Lawrence’s Twilight in Italy in Darjeeling and now, here in Madras, a little way down Mount Road, a thin volume of his Selected Poems (edited by J. Reeves). I’m curious to read again after so many years his “Virgin Youth” when today I have seen the Shiva lingam at Mahabalipuram, standing black and alone at the edge of the ocean, washed by spray of great waves breaking on the rocks.
He stands like a lighthouse, a night churns
Round his base, his dark light rolls
Into darkness, and darkly returns.
Is he calling, the lone one? Is his deep
Silence full of summons?
There is no “problem,” however, in the black lingam. It is washed by the sea, and the sea is woman: it is no void, no question. No English anguish about Mahabalipuram. How right the “lighthouse” stanza of Lawrence is, though, for this lingam on the rocky point! Night and sea are the same: so they are transferable. Lawrence’s experience is convincing though his poetry is usually bad. Does rasa apply here? Not really. Something else perhaps. Too much mother, too many wrong words. I mean now in some of the other poems. (“But when I draw the scanty cloak of silence over my eyes…”) Beautiful things in his prose, such as the two monks walking in a yard above Lago Maggiore, reminding me somehow of Kurseong. I forget where I read this-maybe while waiting in the room at Darjeeling, waiting to leave that Sunday morning.
Much more sophisticated than Lawrence is a love song of Vidyapati in which Radha complains that Krishna is a “country boy” and rough, and does not know the art of love. Yet she hears her ankle bells buzzing like bees.
This morning two Indian nuns gave away the secret of how to get to St. Thomas Mount. I had looked in vain in the phone book. Quite by chance I ran into them in the corridor by my room just as I was getting ready to leave. They were setting up a table of linens and purses to sell. They said they were of the same order as those at the Mount and one fished out a little address book with the phone number. When I came back late in the afternoon, they were tired and smiling, getting their things together. I asked if they had a good day and they said yes.
November 28, 1968. Madras
The trip to Mahabalipuram was fine. Especially the South Indian landscape under monsoon clouds. Dark green foliage, bright green paddy, thousands of tall palms, sheets of bright water, blue mountains in the south with fine shapes. I asked the Catholic driver if those were the mountains where Ramana Maharshi77 had been. He said yes and smiled. Then the sea, and the little thatched huts of the fishing villages. In a way all this was more charming than anything I had seen in India—more peaceful, more relaxed, better kept. Here one finally got some sense of what rural India might once have been.
Mahabalipuram is the remains of a culture such as I have not seen before. A complex of shrines carved out of, or built into, a great ancient rock formation—not cliffs but low rambling outcrops and boulders, smoothed and shaped by millions of years. Caves, porches, figures, steps, markings, lines of holes, gods and goddesses—but spread around without too much profusion.
I remember the black cat on the roof at Darjeeling, with two crazy little kittens playing and sliding on the green corrugated iron, and grabbing at her, tackling her while she stared at me fixedly, her tail slightly twitching. Cat on the kitchen roof, amid the coal smoke from the hotel chimney. The mountains and the deep valley and the big blue flowers, the view from the toilet window of room 14!
Bob Lax wants me to come to Greece. I still don’t know if I can get to Europe at all. I looked today at the JAL, Air France, and Lufthansa schedules. Probably better not to try a direct flight—not that there is one really. But say, via Moscow? (JAL and then what?) Or come back through India. Bombay-Athens, Delhi-Athens, all reasonable. But not in May! Better perhaps Tokyo-Anchorage-Amsterdam. Then Switzerland-Athens, and then back to England for Wal
es, and Scotland. What about the letter from the man at Orval [Belgian abbey] about the old Grandmontine [hermit order] priory that is falling into ruins?…(At Puy near Chevier in the Indre.)
On personal Isvara, the only means of realization of atman. “…Steadfast devotion to a personal isvara who is but the highest expression of the Absolute, the crystallization of the formless. The personal isvara, in the fullest measure of his grace, reveals his highest nature which lies far beyond all predications and form, to that devotee who has merged his entire being in the Lord.”78
A sense of silence and of space, at Mahabalipuram, of unpredictable views, of the palms and nearby sea. I would have liked to wander a long time among the rocks, but the kids selling postcards and trying to act as guides were a nuisance, so I moved on. To the beach, which is also admirable. Bright blue of the Bay of Bengal. A cool wind coming in strong off the sea. The shore temple, smaller than I expected, very weatherbeaten, but a real gem. It is especially interesting when seen in relation to the rest of the complex. And in relation to Sankara, a contemporary of this shrine, who lived at Kancheepuram, which I did not see.
Dr. Raghavan had had quite a bit to say about his guru, Sankaracharya of Kanchi, whom I have not met—he is traveling in the villages. I forgot I had read about him in Koestler’s (bad) book The Lotus and the Robot. Rereading an excerpt—I find Sankaracharya saying: “Adaptations have no place in the standards of spiritual discipline.”
The Other Side of the Mountain Page 36