It’s on account of this, and exclusively on account of this, that he can perform any number of ‘immoral’ acts, but they won’t taint him; he can ‘sin’ and still remain pure.
Amongst these pure sins, one very important sin worth committing for a revolutionary is hate.
The capacity for an immense, comprehensive love is certainly within the repertoire of the revolutionary, but another element is also necessary, essential, alongside it—the ability to hate. An enduring, burning, terrible affliction, but despite being all of these things an objective, pure hatred, by which I mean the kind of hate you can experience with an attentive mind, not the kind that completely destroys us or drives us crazy and enslaves us.
This is something that the Nihilists understood. Hatred played a central role in their all-consuming, fiery passion, and they drank it like strong liquor and lost their personalities in it and used it as a model. This was the mistake they made, it came from the flood of their passion, carried in on a wave, a flood which initially rises high on a shore and slowly, hiding itself in a spray of foam, returns to its natural boundary. But still, they had taken this fierce, intellectual hatred to have significance, and made full use of its driving force, took full advantage of it.
The world still doesn’t understand this; the everyday ethical order of ordinary society considers this quite despicable. That’s why they think hatred is an unnatural tendency which destroys humanity, which prevents everything else. They don’t understand the power of this feeling, this epoch-changing power, if it can be used properly and rationally!
I fantasize about the day when our nation’s—our world’s—people who call themselves revolutionaries will be filled with a fierce but calm, rational hatred and they won’t be afraid of it, and will accept its inspiration and place their stamp on the world, and then plant yet another seed for an epoch-altering revolution . . .
Because revolutions are endless, permanent, because amongst their mechanisms, the most productive tool after love is this rational hatred.
Except for suffering—terrible suffering. Because suffering is also a high quality and very pure weapon.
But why write about suffering?
To describe a house and the specific landscape13 around it one has to survey it. Not by simply standing outside close at hand, but from quite a distance . . . so where can I go to talk about suffering, from what vantage should I weigh and measure it, determine its worth and significance?
*
Since then, I’ve felt as if my mind has been cleft into two parts. Sometimes it feels like more than two, but there are at least two parts. And as far as I can tell, the cause of this unbreachable rift is that imaginary image which my mind saw as it penetrated the walls of that kitchen, at the moment when Mother said—‘I don’t trust this one, either.’
This rift could have a reason, a cause, but only a psychologist could really know. At a minimum, though, I know that it exists. Because sometimes I myself have felt those two parts of my mind at war with each other, fighting for control over my conscience. And sometimes one has more influence than the other, sometimes the other, and the result is that there is a contradiction in my work, an incoherence that manifests itself, which people who only know me from the outside fail to understand, but which has entered into my personality and become one with it, dissolved in it like a solution. Sometimes it happens that neither side has priority, at which point they lay claim to the various centres of my brain, and so if one controls my hands, the other controls my mouth, or one will have the reins of my consciousness and the bodily apparatus will be run by the other. At such moments I must appear like a machine whose wires have got crossed but which is still in motion.
I’m not crazy! But sometimes I think that the line which keeps me on this side of insanity, the line which prevents crossing over, is extremely thin!
Perhaps it is just as thin as the line separating love from hate, cruelty from suffering, affection from renunciation.
Because these cannot be separated, everywhere that love is strong, hate is just as sharp. Suffering is not merely the result of cruelty, it is a manifestation of it, and the lover not only loses himself in love, but also loses the object of affection.
Love is such a slippery and sweeping emotion that individual personality ceases to exist. The lover never ‘remembers’ the object of his affection because he never forgets her. He becomes so accustomed to the idea of her that he never thinks ‘I should see her’, that I should make a separate, special effort to see her. When we look at a very well-lit scene we won’t notice the light, but when looking at a dark scene, we will involuntarily ask, ‘What part of this is supposed to be lit?’
*
Someone has sent me flowers.
If sunlight and shade complete one another, then shouldn’t a feeling well up when I look at these flowers? In this cell five paces long and three paces wide, in this piece of darkness enclosed by iron bars, why don’t I feel the glory of realization when I look at these flowers? Why do I feel entirely incomplete, totally empty, when I look at their scattered white beauty and their wide yellow eyes? Is there an overly zealous rebel, a destructive desire arising in me?
Break break break the prison,
strike upon strike.
Hey, what song have the birds sung today,
The rays of the sun have arrived.14
What must the person who sent me these flowers be thinking about these things she has sent me—what is it that scorches me for which I am nevertheless grateful?
She was a student of mine, but I wasn’t her teacher. I simply used to teach her, but she never thought of me as her teacher. I was like an older brother to her—but the kind of brother that could be loved, who could be leaned on, on whose support dreams could be woven . . .
And who could wreck them with indifference!
I need to teach her, work hard at teaching her. But she was never able to learn a thing! I used to ask her, ‘Do you remember the last lesson?’ That’s when she’d hang her head, meaninglessly smile and grow silent.
At that point, I would question her over and over, and then reprimand her, ‘You won’t learn anything this way.’ Then I’d sit her down to recite the last lesson again.
And she would completely refuse to read. She’d place the book in front of her and stare at it intently. Her eyes would fill with large tears and she couldn’t see anything.
Then I would say lovingly (but with only the slightest amount of love), ‘All right, I’ll do today’s lesson with you. Tomorrow, make sure you’ve learned both lessons!’ And then she’d read. And the next day, it was the same problem all over again.
Once I got really angry. When I looked at her tearful eyes I got irritated and said, ‘You don’t read or write anything, and then when I say something you start crying! I give up. I’m not coming back any more.’
I got up to go. Then she said, pathetically, ‘Where am I supposed to find the time? Mother works me to the bone every day.’
How could a teacher tolerate this? Her mother came out. I asked her, ‘How much time does she get to study?’
‘She spends the whole day with her nose in that book. I never say anything to her for fear that it will disturb her studies. Why, is she not studying properly?’
I should have told her the truth, but I said, ‘No, she studies, but if she got a little more time, then perhaps . . .’
She left. So I asked her again, ‘So?’ What could she say? There should be a limit to how long one can daydream while staring at a book!
I said in a sterner voice, ‘So now?’
‘I’ll study harder from now on.’ I started teaching her again.
Then one day I didn’t go to teach her. Missed the next day and the next. On the fourth day I wrote a letter to her father saying I couldn’t teach her any more. He sent me a cheque with my name on it the next day.
The story was finished. But the next day their servant, a young boy, came to me and said, ‘The mistress wants to know wh
ether you’ll come and teach her.’
I barked back, ‘What mistress?’
‘The young mistress. She called for you.’
I asked again, ‘Sheela?’
‘Yes.’
She probably didn’t know that her lessons had been cancelled. I said, ‘Tell her I can’t come. Her father has cancelled her lessons.’
He left. I didn’t think for a second about what kind of a coward I had been for lying. I just kept thinking that I had won.
That victory was in fact my defeat. Had I told her the truth about my refusing to come, perhaps she would have considered herself the victim of injustice and found some consolation in that notion—I didn’t even leave her that possibility. Ever since then, her accusing spectre has been following me, crying, saying, ‘Liar! Liar!’
I run away, avoiding her. I’ve been running ever since. And now looking at these flowers I think, where will I run from these wilting blossoms?
But why should I run?
Sheela, I didn’t lie to you. I have, for sure, been lying to myself all these years. The lie that I told you didn’t mislead you; it misled me. But I understand my mistake now. Today, I, the brother who caused you pain, who gratefully acknowledges your devotion, who forgets his embarrassment and says that I didn’t lie to hide myself from you, ended up hiding from myself. This is the settling of that account whose payment you haven’t received yet, which perhaps you will never receive, but which has been settled and redeemed.
*
As long as the flowers were fresh, it never seemed as if they were bound. I had tied them to the iron bars of my cell, but the piece of cord that I used to bind them can’t be seen. Soft, white flowers tied to rods of black iron, a pleasant way to remember a very unpleasant truth . . .
Today, the rods remain. The dried flowers remain in their unceasing grip, leaving their own memorial, and hanging there helplessly. They are trying to make me remember something—who knows what! They say lust is fleeting, it wilts and then the fibres of love provide constancy in life . . . or perhaps it’s the other way around! They’re saying that when love dies, then lust carries its corpse around, hoping to hide itself in deception . . . they say, and they’re reminding me of something, they’re hinting at something . . .
On one of ‘the charming banks of the Ravi’—but whatever it is it isn’t charming—is a dense forest of small shrubs and stumps of trees. Like a long, drawn-out sigh, the warm, dead night. Above, a few stars, tangled in the dried branches of the trees, below, the vapours of the dried moans of dead and disintegrating leaves. And in front . . .
The scattered remains of a corpse. Both of its arms have been cut off. One of its feet has been cut off. The belly has been sliced open and the entrails are spilling out. Eyes wide open, piercing into the web of branches above, they’re looking, at some star. The mouth is smiling a warped, agonized smile.
He’s been dead for some time. There were a few witnesses present at the precise moment when that specimen of humanity fell like a broken column from a terrible explosion, but when he died, there was no one to help him disentangle the knotty turmoil of his life. They went to get help—leaving him behind. But it was getting dark, and the waiting one could bear it no longer . . . so he began searching for the last night watchman.
And when he returned with him, when everyone regrouped to pick him up and carry him away, had they lost him? He had gone away, leaving his distorted smile, a symbol of his pain and suffering, his hopes and works.
Those four or five men are standing over that body. They aren’t crying, they aren’t shedding tears. They are shedding their long-held ambitions because their goal had dissipated like the smoke after an explosion. He escaped, slowly finding his way through the tangled web of the branches of the dense jungle, writhing but quietly, leaving a full smile behind in that impervious solitude, and when the last night watchman left him behind, his own internal anguish had turned into a solitary watchman and was aimlessly watching over the dead lump of isolated hopelessness.
If we could ever uncover what the blindness of his wide eyes made out in that wilderness . . .
Those four or five men are standing over him. Standing in a line, at attention, heads bowed. With a feeling of respect, they all raise their hands in salutation and stand like that for quite some time.
They are all silent, the morning raag (Bhairavi) that would complete the scene is echoing in a mute voice from some place inside them . . .
These are the last rites of this soldier with a poet’s heart; the last shudder of that revolutionary’s revolution.
The scene fades out. The only thing left behind in that boundless white sky is that body left in a pool of clotting blood . . .
On either side of him are two figures—a woman and a man. They are looking at each other. Their eyes do not look down to see the corpse, their hearts do not feel as if they are desecrating the grave of some beautiful sacredness. They meet, wrap each other in their arms and copulate out of some bestial hunger, all right next to that corpse. And then . . .
Illusions! I am looking at the bouquets of narcissus flowers hanging on the iron bars and the pieces of cord that are binding them together.
For humans, lying, fraud and deception come extremely naturally because God made them in his image and according to our wisdom God is the biggest liar, fraud and con artist . . .
Otherwise, what other explanation could there be for the image that I see? Can humans sink this low—and so low right in front of such glorious self-abandon?
When I recall the circumstances in which that explosion and that death occurred and when I think about how at that moment that person was desperately blowing at the dying embers of his life to try and keep his nearly dead dreams alive a little longer, and how there were conspiracies plotted around him, and how wildly nakedness was dancing while taking cover in the lowest weaknesses of the human heart, then suddenly I no longer have faith in myself or the things that I’ve done . . . was this the stream of inspiration feeding everything?
I think that although conventional wisdom seems ready to accept the idea that every human impulse stems from a material need, I believe instead that humans have a metaphysical force within them, some kind of natural, genuine inspiration. Our biggest problem is to resolve these two mutually opposed principles. After this is resolved a thousand other questions. But this question is so big, obscure and sweeping that you can find examples of it at each step, and so we could spend our entire lives trying to resolve it, but the problem remains just as it was before.
*
Alas for all the loves that youth lets fall
Like the beads of a told rosary15
But why don’t I feel any sadness in recalling all of these scattered loves?16 Why don’t I feel feelings of failure or deceptiveness welling up? An angry rebellion wells up in me not because I’ve lost something or because I’ve borne so many burdens, but because I’ve inflicted so much suffering, so cruelly wounded so many innocent hearts . . .
What is my life’s realization? What is its purpose? All lies—nothing, nothing, nothing! Actually, less than nothing, a negative debt that I mistook for a treasure.
But what am I doing? Am I not making their affliction worse by offering up such base excuses for such immense wounds? Because there is really only one salve for the deepest cuts and that is the indifference of the cutter; mercy scrapes at the wound and reopens it . . .
What am I? What sense do I have of myself? What is the truth of a life on which so much energy has been spent, so much effort expended, in order to destroy it? A line drawn across dust flying through the wind, was that it?
It can’t be! All of my dreams cannot be worthless even if my life was worthless. I may be nothing, my works nothing, my life nothing, but how can my revolutionary impulse vanish? I have brought about a record of deep transformation, the ideal of a radical revolution in every object in the world—or at least as far as my reach went in the world—tirelessly. Will they be choked to death b
y the gallows? I may not survive, and no sign of me may remain, but will this force also be wiped out? Will the thrill of its illumination also be lost?
Science tells us that nothing happens, nothing will happen. Whatever has happened will remain until the end of the future and what is yet to happen was there at the onset of the past because the past and the future are nothing, because time is nothing, like height, width and length. It’s just a vector of motion, a form of it. And so even when I die I will be alive, but even as I live I am already dead . . .
I shouldn’t be so attached to life. But how am I being attached to life? Attachment happens when life has a realization. And I’ve been thinking that death is its realization!
But what? Science also says that you only get one life, that there is no part of human existence that is eternal. It is completely destroyed in death, nothing remains to be reincarnated . . .
And energy? Can energy also be destroyed? No, energy cannot be destroyed. It merely changes form. But energy is impersonal, and energy and matter are not separate—they are two aspects of the same thing. What today is my revolutionary energy will turn into a chain of irons to bind someone else tomorrow—some revolutionary who, like me, wanted to change the future, and who will be chained for the rest of his future.17
Alas, the small minds of men and, alas! The immense truths of existence!
But isn’t there some solace in this thought? Doesn’t it contain the essence, truth and success of all our activity and our evolution? In this utter destructibility are infinite reincarnations, limitless transformation—under the principle that no two moments can ever be the same and that in the tiniest fraction of time he can die and in the immediate next fraction of time is the possibility of his birth . . . I die because my life is merely an introduction to my death, in which reside thousands and millions of future lives.
Shekhar Page 4