From the Elephant's Back (6 page)

Paris as usual was humming with ideas, like a beehive, and here at last I found people with whom I could discuss these ideas—albeit in the shadow of the swastika, for the war had almost arrived. Yet the portrait I had sketched of our intellectual predicament proved to be accurate—both the outside world, the world of matter, and the inside world, the world of the self, had been completely transformed by advances in science. As for atomic physics, the very language used today to try and describe the debris of the atom—for it has disintegrated into some two hundred sub-particles—is taken from Joyce and reminds one of Lewis Carroll. As the particles become increasingly diminutive in size and enigmatic in function a kind of literary hysteria set in; the smallest so far have been christened “quarks,” a word borrowed from Joyce. A quark has three forms: “up,” “down,” and “strange.” This is not all. They have another quality which the same looking-glass minds have christened “charm.” Finally, to complicate the picture further, they must be considered as either “top” or “bottom” and to have yet another quality called “spin.” The first DADA manifesto
[45]
is nothing to this extraordinary parade of scientific categories borrowed from literature! Poor Joyce! Even though his Finnegan,
[46]
a real curiosity of literature, is really a potentially protracted pun! The important thing for me was the dissolution of the fiction of the stable discrete ego. Despite the apparent originality of Freud's discoveries, the majority of his ideas had been anticipated years before by another Viennese doctor whose work, while popular, did not cause the same sort of revolution. His name was Von Feuchtersleben.
[47]
We see I think from this that each great man is really a syndicate of several other great men. He matches and accords dissimilar views and finds a new synthesis from old ideas. He is a joiner and harmoniser more than an inventor. There is no need to go further with this sort of exposition; the question was this: could such material influence literary form, and provide a sort of frame? It was certainly more topical and more typically modern than so much which the modern novel was treating.

I began to dream of a sort of novel-as-apparatus (
un roman-appareil
) which one could use as a historic or poetic “conscience,” as portable as a pocket-compass! I did not wish (even had I ever had the talent) to build a word-cathedral like Joyce; you must be a dispossessed Catholic for that. I wanted to build something like a cave-cooperative with perhaps Dionysus as manager!
[48]

It was years before I dared to begin on such a book and, meanwhile, I went into training for the big fight by learning how to write. I wrote in many different styles and on many topics. I felt that not only the world was coming to an end but also language—for the new visual age had begun to arrive. I felt that one day we should communicate in grunts like black jazzmen! I was too pessimistic I now see, but nevertheless the trend is still apparent. But side by side with this merely scientific interest I was also reading the
Upanishads
translated by Yeats,
[49]
and discovering the Chinese philosophers who one day would teach me their magic, which is the art of manipulating the inevitable! What seemed evident to me was that all disciplines, all styles, were gradually moving closer to each other, whether East and West, or simply mysticism and logic. It has not gone as fast or as far as I expected but already in this contemporary world the trend has become a marked one.

I am not sure, but I think there is a faint hope of a great synthesis which will conjoin all fields of thought, however apparently dissimilar, making them interpenetrate, inter-fertilise.
[50]
This is the sense in which it is worth being a poet. We must learn from such doctor-mystics as Groddeck
[51]
to treat the whole of reality as a symptom!

I went back to Greece to wait for the coming of the expected war. I took Miller with me for a holiday.
[52]
In this Greek island one felt very strongly that ancient Greece had its roots in Egypt, whence India. For my part I also had one foot in Vienna, so to speak, with Freud and Jung and Groddeck.
[53]
I began to see what becoming a European meant!

While I was wondering about this, the Germans made a useful contribution to my thinking by chasing me all the way down Greece, into Crete, and thence into Egypt.
[54]
I would have been too lazy to visit Alexandria myself—I was not interested in Egypt, I was happy in Greece. But in Alexandria I found myself at the cradle from which the whole of our civilisation had sprung. The roots of all our theologies as well as the roots of mathematics and physics had been hatched here. The first measurements of the earth—something as exciting as going to the moon—had been made here. Between Plotinus, Philo, and Euclid
[55]
all aspects of human thought had been enriched here. It was the ideal frame for a book which might try, in a modest way, to touch the contemporary reality. It was impertinent, I suppose, to invoke the Gods, like Einstein
[56]
and Freud, but that was the way I saw things, and I was quite pleased when in the book
[57]
I saw the stereo effects, and the slight bending of time and space—like Einsteinian space being curved!

The success was astonishing and very pleasing; I was amply rewarded for the thought and reflection which had gone into the book.

Nothing has changed today in the world picture, but what is apparent is that the two metaphysics, Eastern and Western, are moving steadily together and given time will meet in many essential fields. Numen and phenomenon were made to be complimentaries and not opposites. It is so obvious that this is happening that I decided two years ago to celebrate this marriage, which I foresaw, by making a small group of novels, interlaced and interdependent based on the five-power system of the Buddhist psychology—the five aggregates, so to speak.
[58]
A five-part book, independent but linked in a new way, a somewhat haphazard way, but occupied with much the same material as the last. One's experience of life is very limited. In this book I proposed to return to India—to move from the four dimensions to the five skandas.
[59]
The old stable ego had already gone, reality has realised itself there, so to speak. In a sense all my new people are aspects of one great person, age, culture. I would like to make a metaphor for the human condition as we are living it now. I have dug sideways also to make a tunnel back into the
Quartet
, for part of the action of this new novel takes place in Egypt, and one meets characters and places from the old
Quartet
, but they are not named. But passionate fans—
les fervents
—will recognise them. I like to think that there is a family feeling about my books and here and there a character from an early book may stray into a later book without warning. I like this sort of continuity which hints at an inner progression from the
Black Book
onwards. I need two more years for the last three books. I am not of course sure that my idea will work, but if it does I will have two floating structures, poems of celebration drawn from the East and the West. Imagine two Calder-mobiles.
[60]
After that I shall be happy to retire. I have a few things more to say about the destiny of woman, the fate of the world, and the second law of thermodynamics—the law of divine entropy. I would like to say them as an Indian this time!

Time and causality have very much preoccupied our age, and science has so much overflowed into the field of artistic creation that it has provided new forms, new moulds for the fiery magma. Proust, Joyce were both time-intoxicated artists, soaked in history and the historic consciousness. They were hunting for the
Nunc Stans
,
[61]
the permanent Now of the philosopher.

Often, effects and causes seem not to be joined, not to depend on each other, when it is simply that the distance is too great to discern the connection. Yet they are.

Once upon a time, Aristotle, who only pronounced upon nature when he was sure of the truth of his statements, asserted, “
Natura non Facit Saltus
,”
[62]
thus upholding the unbroken chain of causality. “
Nature does not do Anything in Jumps
.” It moved in orderly process, link by link, respecting a perfect determinism—that is how he saw it. Then after two thousand years Darwin timidly, haltingly puts down in his private notebook a tentative repudiation of this flat assertion. He writes, “One species does not
change
into another, it does so at one blow,
per saltum
.”
[63]
The jump! It was a treacherous thought to harbour, for it compromised the rigid determinism of the pure Aristotelian thought. Nature could jump, nature could, if she wanted, syncopate! Quanta!

I like to compare these two views of reality in symbolic terms by imagining the contrast between a European cathedral and an Asiatic pagoda; my own word-pagoda is to have five faces. But the cathedral is built like a boat or a bird; you have to enter it to reach its centre of gravity which is the altar which an Asiatic would see as a sort of telephone booth. By putting in the right coin (prayer) one could contact God, the presiding personage or principle, and bargain with him. The altar is the bar or the counter at which the transaction takes place, where your soul is tested for its qualities and defects. Heaven and Hell are the two possibilities which are offered to it; bliss or eternal anguish. It is a very simple and brutal view of the human option; moreover among the extreme dangers or sins is human sexuality. Well, the cathedral seems to have had its day. Once they were prayer-factories generating good behaviour and a kindly disposition towards men; now they seem like out of work computers. The belief in Christian prayer has been very much eroded. It seems to have been replaced by a communal will to unhappiness which I think we can read into our architecture which breathes confinement, regimentation, heralds of insanity. If this goes on, within a short time it will be hard to decide whether a building is a residence or a barrack or a factory or an insane asylum…They are getting to look so alike.

By contrast to this attitude, the five skanda pagoda mind, which has begun to enjoy a great vogue, is perhaps equally full of traps though for us it seems to represent a blissfully calm view of reality. This is because it seems to offer a relief from materialist thought. The non-ego attitude is its ideal, and its science emphasizes the insubstantiality of matter, and posits a kind of energy over mass state of mind which perhaps is what Einstein really meant, for he was as deeply religious in a pantheistic way as Newton!
[64]

I am trying to move in my selfish and hesitating way from the fourth dimension to the five skanda view, using the same old equipment of the domestic novel, as a kaleidoscope uses the same bits of glass for different patterns. I would like to try and use the by-products of Asiatic philosophy as I tried in the
Quartet
to use the by-products of relativity philosophy. I think the new form I am chasing will be less schematic and more floating, to fit the oriental notion of reality; slowly already some of the characters who only exist in the imagination of the others, are coming on to the stage to compromise the orthodox ideas of “reality.” I wonder if it will work satisfactorily, and produce a group of books which satisfy as an organic whole? In this new Asiatic domain the passport is the “mandala” (which Jung kept finding in the unconscious of his patients!). It's a sort of cardiogram of the human being's destiny. My cast is more or less the same—the two women blonde and dark, two clowns, lovers, poets, warriors, monks, villains, and seers.
[65]
The old stuff of fiction and Christmas pantomime, under different names. Looked at in this way one should ask oneself not if they are “real” but if they are “true”; that is to say true to this prismatic poetic reality. A single individual's experience of people and places is extraordinarily limited, and if he is an artist he feels forced to accept these limitations and do his best within them. But certain sharp contrasts of a formal kind will impose themselves; the moving staircase of the “linear” progression will be replaced by something closer to the “flying carpet” of the fairy tales. And people? They will be spare parts of one another from the cosmic point of view, though quite real and discrete from a worldly, novelistic point of view.
[66]
Underneath the action will, I hope, be the Asiatic notion of a world renewed afresh with each thought; therefore, man as a Total Newcomer to each moment of time. It will need readers indulgent to this rather sphinx-like way of thinking; but then the “real” reader has always known that he or she must read between the lines. That is where the truth hides itself. Process in scientific terms is irreversible, though not in Asiatic, while truth as such is ambivalent. The sages appear to have co-opted it successfully for use as a pivot, so that it gives cosmic balance to the human animal. It would be a wonderful thing to feel that, having paid my respects to Europe and its relativity principle in the
Quartet
, I could now, as my star is sinking, touch my forelock to the Indian view of life. I would like to plant this
Quintet
at the point of tangent between these two cultural principles, so that it could be fruitful as well as entertaining.

In conclusion it is worth stressing that the abstract symbols one uses in a disquisition of this kind—words like “relativity” or “Tao” or “matter” or “Maya” are to be regarded as road signs which indicate the destiny and direction of the intellectual traffic. They are not absolutes. I imagine that the sage considers them to be simply the paint rags upon which the artist wipes his brushes once the painting is complete. We must not let philosophy become a self-caressing machine.