A Chorus of Stones

by Susan Griffin

  This brutality precipitates a crisis in Gandhi. The old order through which he had organized his perceptions is being challenged. But it is through this crisis that he begins to see and finally commit his life in the direction of a larger principle. In this way an insight which has been unnamed but still growing for years comes finally into being, as if made visible by an inner burst of light, set off by an event that punctured the veil of an old unknowing. It is in this time that Gandhi accepts the gravity of his undertaking. Believing that abstinence will help him focus his energy on his work, he takes a vow of celibacy. He begins to pray daily, and this habit sharpens his awareness of an inner voice from which he will henceforth accept guidance. Listening to his inner voice, he perceives the first configuration of what will soon be named Satyagraha, the principle of standing by the truth, by which he will lead his life.

  But there is more in this history that does not immediately meet the eyes. Looking back, as I do now, on that point of illumination, I begin to wonder if Gandhi’s revelation was fed not only by the injustices he witnessed but because he witnessed them as a nurse. I can make out his image now. He is bending over the body of a Zulu man whose wound has been untended for days and is now so infected that a sweetly sour odor surrounds the two. The wounded man is feverish. If he had any words of English they have faded now in the extremity of pain. This couple has no common language except the look in the wounded man’s eye when, from time to time, he returns to what we call consciousness and focuses his gaze on the man who tends him.

  Is it that time has blurred the form, or have two men fused in some mysterious way, for they appear, one bending over the other, almost as one seamless curve, breathing together, the boundary between them erased? Does nurse join patient or patient blend with nurse? One cannot tell. The entire atmosphere has softened. All around them boundaries appear to be dissolving.

  They can hardly know that at this date, somewhere to the north, the blurred edges of a projected beam of alpha particles discovered on a piece of photographic paper points to the dissolution of the boundary between matter and energy. As Ernest Rutherford notes, The atoms of matter must be the seat of intense electrical forces.

  Yet, though news of this has not yet been broadcast to the world, the two who are dissolving must have some sense of it. Phenomena exist long before they are observed by scientists. They can be felt. Outside the scope of vision, they continue, vivid and uncompromised, except perhaps by the silent wish to be known. So it is that, looking even further backward through time, one finds that Walt Whitman, nursing wounded men during the Civil War, senses the same fusion. Images of suffering, wounds, stumps of amputated limbs enter his dreams, the course of his daily thoughts, even his silences.

  And turning to look just a few years into the future, after the First World War has begun, one can see a young German stretcher-bearer. The man he is carrying has a gaping wound in his stomach. Just as the stretcher-bearer begins to find the cries of the man unbearable, the man himself calls out that he can no longer bear his pain. The stretcher-bearer stops and, laying the stretcher down, begins to stroke the wounded man all over his body, as if he were a mother, moved now not only past the boundaries of separation but also beyond any circumscribed idea of self. The voices of dying and wounded men will never leave him. Later, in his most vulnerable moments, these voices will haunt him as nightmare and hallucination.

  This fusion does not stop at some imagined borderline between mind and body but enters also into flesh and bone. Looking still further into the future, one can see a nurse leaving a field hospital in Vietnam. She has just cleaned the wounds of a man burned over most of his body. Each time his image returns to her mind, even hours later, she retches. The odor of a green bacterial slime covering the wounds she dressed, mingled with the smell of napalm, will linger in her nostrils for nearly a year.

  In this world of frailty at the edge of the battlefield the line between I and not I has a dangerous tremor. But it, too, like the phenomenon of the laboratory, has existed all along, everywhere, and at all times. Only in this world is it suddenly made more visible. With a simple shift in focus, the bounded self appears to blend with others. Dualities fade. And those things we take to be opposite can be seen on closer view to be mingled. One might take any pair as an example. But my mind, at this moment, is resting on Mohandas Gandhi and Hugh Trenchard. Could they have existed without each other? Gandhi educated in England, raised in a country colonized by the British Empire. Trenchard shaped from an early age to the purposes of that Empire. An Empire which in a curious way began to shape itself like a dominating and possessive lover around Gandhi’s homeland calling it the jewel in the crown.

  At a certain angle, the gem cannot be distinguished from the setting. How alike from this vantage point are Trenchard and Gandhi! Both leaders. Both courageous, alike even in their asceticism. Yet here in the midst of this sameness, were we to shift our point of view just slightly, a kind of shimmer begins to appear, changing alternately from dark to light, from similarity to difference again. For there is a dimension in one that is not in the other. Gandhi longs for a certain state of mind. He has tasted it more than once, even occasionally dwelled in it. It is not the warrior’s state of mind. It exists more in a world traditionally considered female: the world of reception, stillness, surrender.

  Did Gandhi suspect that this bliss might be discovered in and through the pathways of desire? This is not a question I can answer here, except to note that I am amazed by the persistence of paradox. I am beginning to fathom the wisdom of the Ibo way of thinking. Nothing stands alone. Each person on earth is accompanied by another, the chi, who belongs to the spirit world. And this world is not so distant as we in our cosmology imagine it to be. Dichotomies, such as life and death, are, for the Ibo, impossible. Life moves into death which moves into life. Nor is the geography of death remarkably different from life. The two worlds are continuous and the chi transport themselves back and forth with ease.

  It is a movement the culture of Trenchard has forgotten. A movement of which I, too, growing up in postwar years in California, knew little. Until I was sixteen, when the death of my father gave me my first entry into the terrain between life and death. It was his death above all that made me feel unprotected in the world. I felt him, even if silently and without effect, as an ally. So in the shadowy aftermath of death, a shadow self was born to me, stricken with grief and rage. The vast order of life had somehow excluded me, placed me shaking at its edges, a provisional, unlicensed player. Yet the hinterland of death has its own power, and soon I began to recognize that forbidden, unspoken knowledge in the rare others I encountered who had it also.

  What is it that breaks open? There is a kind of radiance surrounding this passage. In the proximity to death, extraordinary capacities are revealed. The sensual world grows more vivid. Life, even in the ordinary conjugations of events, is enlarged. The stretcher-bearer, who will later become famous as a music teacher, listens with a different part of himself to the voices of the wounded and dying as they cry for help. He begins to understand that the human voice has a far wider range than he had ever known before. This singing near the edge of death travels far beyond even the capability of celebrated singers, and at the same time passes outside the limits circumscribed by gender. In the moment of crisis, social sanction dissolves. Men sing like women. And to hear this truly is to pass into an undiscovered country. Sensual perception becomes an event of transmutation.

  But we are still in 1907. The First World War has not yet begun. That is seven years off into the future. The European nations are not entirely ready yet to experience a continuity with other selves and other worlds. If there is a wave that travels through us all as we ourselves travel through time and space, we sometimes keep this motion from consciousness. Is it fear that keeps us so disjointed? In the year of Gandhi’s return to South Africa from Natal the government breaks a promise to the Indian community. Jan Smuts (who will one day be President) introduces legislat
ion requiring all Asians in South Africa to register. Identification once again is required. Free movement is restricted. Following the principle of Satyagraha, Gandhi will be among those who will protest this policy through passive resistance.

  Satyagraha. Gandhi translates the second part of the word, graha, as firmness. But it can also mean grasping. To grasp the truth is a delicate gesture, like taking a hand in greeting. A lightness of touch is needed if one is to feel the presence of another being. This is very different from another meaning, which is to seize, and grip, as in wrest power from the grasp of or to grasp a woman by her waist. In this other life of the word, the power of dominion over India had been grasped by the British Empire. And Africa is in the process of being grasped.

  To imagine the whole shape of this gesture, one must take a few steps back. At the beginning of the century, somewhere near the Niger River, English troops thrust outward in every direction. They are warning away the French and the Germans, claiming for themselves alone this territory of two hundred and fifty tribes who speak nearly four hundred languages. Through these rough, frenetic gestures the British claim to own a space they now call Nigeria.

  Though outwardly the quality of this movement appears powerful, if not brutal, inwardly, as I imagine myself voyaging inside the body of the British Empire, the experience of this grasping motion is above all one of desperate hunger. The raid on resources and avarice for trade, long associated with this movement, is visibly present. But beneath that another kind of hunger can be felt too, in another, more subtle dimension, perhaps almost forgotten. It is a hunger I can see on the faces of European visitors to the tribal exhibit which was part of the Paris World Exposition of 1900. A rare desire haunts the outward expressions of curiosity, wonder, derision shown by the men, women and children who press themselves against the barbed wire, getting as close as they can to Africa: the people of another color, the reassembled village huts, the instruments, clothing, dance, fire. Is something here to draw them? Something within these strange people from this strange place? Slowly at first, and then with a burst almost of revelation, the images made by these strangers begin to emerge in European painting and sculpture. Silently and surely they will continue to work their way to the core where finally they will reshape the very idea of beauty in European art.

  1907. Why is it we linger so long at this date? A kind of hiatus occurs here. As if the breath were held. It is what I imagine the painter doing, Pablo Picasso, in the late spring of the year, as he stares transfixed at the African art in the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro. From this encounter, from even this very moment, for he uses the word suddenly, he understands why he is a painter. The masks he is looking into, he realizes, are magical. They possess real power. They are weapons to use against the dangers of life.

  But there is another weapon on the horizon. Imitating at least one aspect, Blériot’s famous flight across the English Channel, let us make another leap in space and time now. It is 1909. Staring in a direction that he calls the future, the poet F. T. Marinetti is transfixed by what he calls this intoxicating spectacle, the performance of this machine that defies gravity. We strong Futurists, he writes, have felt ourselves suddenly detached from women, who have suddenly become too earthly. In his love of flight, Marinetti joins a long tradition, and one that will extend into the future. In just three decades Il Duce himself, dressed in the costume of an aviator, will appear in the pages of a Futurist magazine.

  In the year my daughter was born, 1968, I photographed her posed next to a newspaper that showed the first footstep on the moon. Is the cherished dream to reach the stars also part of a desire, as Marinetti writes, to abandon the earth? Flight is an ancient symbol of release from earthly limitation. But it is also a symbol of new possibility, opened as the mind is freed from certain restraints. One speaks thus of a flight of the imagination.

  The Futurist thought of himself as a victorious hero, who claimed as part of his victory both women and the earth as his possessions. But the life of the mind is never solitary. In 1909, the year of Blériot’s flight, women cause the social imagination to shift in another direction. Insisting on the right of petition, they force their way into the House of Commons, where they are arrested. Once in prison, some of these women embark on the first hunger strikes. Are they aware, these women who struggle for constitutional rights, that Gandhi is visiting London? He has come for the same purpose. To argue for liberation, he must convince the British Parliament that the South African constitution, which this Parliament legislates, ought to respect the rights of its Asian citizens.

  This vision of such a possible future eludes the Houses of Parliament. Gandhi’s arguments, and the arguments of women, are made in vain. But in this year another future, the future of the flying machines, does begin to make a claim on their minds. Lord Montagu vividly describes the possibility of a raid on London by a fleet of airships: a destroyed capital, post office, telephone exchange, and even Parliament itself. In a debate in the House of Commons it is suggested that aerial bombardment might be used in the future to terrorize civilians. As the argument continues, it becomes a probability. Something must be done. What was unimaginable becomes certitude. Britain must develop the capacity for such bombardment, as a defensive measure.

  Is the path to the present inevitable? So it would seem only later, looking back over a chain of events. Yet at each moment of every life a series of other choices can be felt hovering, even singing a cacophonous chorus of advice, over every decision. It is 1910. Trenchard’s life is once again thrown off its course. He will need to find a new direction. By the measure of the Empire he serves, he has done well in Africa. With his last expedition he has added 8,000 square miles to the official maps of British territory. To the best of his ability, he has carried out the order of the governor of Nigeria: Give me roads, good broad straight roads straight through the jungles … then we’ll be able to let in the light.

  What was it like then to witness the transformation wrought by this construction? A geometric idea of precision suddenly imposed on a landscape, lived on and in for centuries. The land itself like a body submitted to military discipline. Or like a mind, tutored along certain acceptable pathways, so that finally all that lies outside certain avenues of thought begins to assume an air of unreality.

  The land of course is still there. Only now it has receded into the background. It is what you see in your peripheral vision as you speed down the highway. The complexity of it, the intricate presence of it, has been reduced now to a single word, jungle. If once you breathed its breath or slept surrounded by its dark or wakened with its light, you no longer remember. You tell yourself life has improved. The jungle is in the past. To enter it is to stray from the path, or to be pulled down into some unknown depth. It is an exotic place, intriguing but also unpredictable, uncontrolled, threatening the well-paved order of existence.

  Yet even the most carefully governed lives become unpredictable. By 1910 Trenchard has fallen seriously ill. He must return to London with an abscess of the liver. His heart flutters at the least exertion. His legs buckle under him. Yet because he will not rest enough, the time of his convalescence is extended.

  According to Trenchard’s biographer, he had mapped and tamed the forest. Yet some things eluded him. In his reports on the features of Nigeria it is doubtful that he included any of the Ibo stories, so plentiful in the region. Had he known the famous tale of the man who wrestled with his chi, he might have been a better patient. For the Ibo, the chi who accompanies each being is different than the self, and sometimes at odds. In this story, the wrestler, like Major Trenchard or the British Empire, is invincible. He has wrestled all his tribesmen, all his countrymen, all the animals. And still no one defeats him. Looking for a better match, he crosses into the spirit world. And there he wrestles all the spirits, once again defeating every possible opponent. Still unsatisfied, he cries out, Is there no one else? Everyone begs him to leave but he will not listen. Finally a thin, frail-looking man
appears ready to do battle with him. It is his own chi. Laughing, the wrestler begins as if to crush this weak foe, but his chi lifts him easily with one hand and, dashing him to the ground, destroys him.

  It is still 1910. Through a labyrinthine route, shaped by a complexity of ideas and events, the continent of Africa has become the proving ground for European and American masculinity. In this way the image of Teddy Roosevelt, rifle in hand, posed against the supine body of an elephant, resembles an icon. Like the gold-embossed likeness of a saint, it is to be studied and imitated. In this year, descending from the train at Oak Park, Illinois, Roosevelt is hoisted onto the shoulders of admiring men and taken through streets filled with cheering crowds. Among those who carry him are Anson Hemingway and his grandson Ernest, now eleven years old. Ernest wears his khaki suit, modeled after the clothes Teddy wears on his safaris. He will wear the same suit whenever he goes to visit his favorite room in Chicago’s Museum of Natural History: the Hall of African Mammals.

  What is it that draws him here to gaze at these strange, huge creatures, standing absolutely still against painted backdrops of the veldt, lit up, and staring implacably from glass eyes? Will it be the same force that draws him later, as a just grown young man, to enlist with the ambulance corps in the First World War? He will be wounded in this war, and come home to write about this wounding, and the war, and battle. In one book a young man is injured in the leg. The leg heals but his life is forever changed. In another, the hero is emasculated in battle, but this wound never heals. It informs the voice of the novel, and, in a sense too, the voice of a generation, disillusioned, trusting no belief or purpose. But that voice belongs to a future we have not yet reached.