A Smile in the Mind's Eye (2 page)

But how he carried all that he did in his two little satchels was a puzzle because, apart from his food (three apples, a carton of milk, some honey, nuts, and several packs of assorted vitamins) he also had a change of trousers and another pullover, as well as a dressing-gown and other sundries. I began to see him in the light of a Chinese conjuror perhaps, simply making things vanish into the little bags. He spent a long time enjoying the water and cleaning up his clothes, brushing them scrupulously and removing stains with a damp cloth. But though he proclaimed himself much restored by the bath I could see little trace of a change – he had shown no fatigue in the first place. ‘The sun is shining,' he said. ‘How about a walk?'

It was a good idea. He wanted to see the little medieval town and to get the feeling of his whereabouts – he was excited to be in Provence for a while. He smelt the vivacity in the French air, he said, looking about him like a precious insect.

What was more engaging still was that there was the usual Saturday market-day display laid out, bright as a bed of flowers, in the arcaded Place du Marché. This was a piece of local colour which had my friends in raptures – indeed with the vivid awnings of the
forains
and the banks of brilliant vegetables and fruit on the stalls the sight is delightful in all its sunny variety. And vegetables! Chang practically did a two-step with joy as we loitered down the great stone staircase into the little square, going slowly in order to take in the beauty of the scene. He would, he said, shop there and then for the evening; and as good as his word, he began a microscopic investigation of the vegetables on display, with the single-mindedness of a bird of prey – a keen shopper's attitude which won the instant admiration of all the village vendors for whose benefit I translated his questions. Furthermore his purchases when he made them were of a most modest kind – I did not see how two fully grown men could exist on this meagre handful of stuff which he loaded with care and love into a string bag. I said as much but he only smiled; and indeed when the time came I was astonished to find that living his way there always seemed more than enough to eat of the delicious light fare. But when he took over the entire cuisine, allocating to me simply the task of cutter-up, we ate about five times a day – ate when we felt like it. Each meal was different, each a sort of hot snack.

*  *  *

So we returned triumphantly to the house to despatch our French lunch and to make preparations for the cooking of the evening meal. Chang looked over my display of knives and found them wanting. Indeed, some of them would not cut at all, and then, where, he asked, was there a suitable cutting-board? At last I found him a slice of olive-wood which he thought might do and the best of the knives, and he fell to work to clean and pare his vegetables exercising the utmost economy, using every scrap of leaf and rind. I realized then that, as he said, anything and everything is eatable if cut up in sufficiently tiny quantities. He gave me part of his loot and showed me how to operate on it, talking the while rather gravely about how Chinese cooking takes the simplest way round things. Even the teeth are spared hard use because the food is so finely chopped, while compared to all the western kitchen lumber that we use – knives, forks, and so on – the Chinaman has only two expendable sticks for his chop and one small bowl. One knife that is sharp and a cutting-board are all that is really necessary. I guiltily swore to have all my knives resharpened at the earliest opportunity. This deft and youthful Chinese presence brought a touch of exoticism to the kitchen, and I promised myself a few days full of discussion and self-cultivation – as the Taoists would have it!

But first to our muttons. Chang spread out his fat typescript upon the table for me to read at my leisure. But to begin with he proposed to fill in the background to the work of compilation he had brought to bed. I should add here that by now I had found that Chang, despite his Canadian nationality and perfect English, was not (what I had feared when I heard him on the telephone) a Chinaman born abroad; he was a homegrown specimen of contemporary China, who had borne arms against the Japanese. He had been brought up and educated in China. He was, therefore, thoroughly representative of Chinese culture today, while, like all cultivated men, he was soaked in the poetry and history of China's long and variegated classical past.

He seemed somewhat anxious to underline the fact that though vegetarian and teetotal himself it was by deliberate personal choice and not in obedience to some abstruse conviction; busily dicing up his load of vegetables, he explained that there was in reality no such thing as a generalized diet which suited everyone. Diet was an individual affair and if one were a serious person – serious about one's mind and body and their part in the general ground-plan of the universe as a whole – then one was in honour bound to experiment and establish a suitable individual diet of one's own. He himself had only realized this relatively recently; on his arrival in Canada from China he had fallen in with the eating habits of his adopted country with disastrous results. He had become so out of condition that he was hardly able to walk upstairs. He realized that he must revert to the national frugality of his homeland if he was to recover his good health and spirits; and this he did, making a painstaking study of his needs in the way of food. The result had been a vegetarian diet for the most part, though he might from time to time have a glass of wine as a politeness; he cut down starch to the minimum, and cut out meat, though not fish. But this was strictly a health plan, and had nothing to do with any special religious bias; or only in the sense that the Taoist notion of immortality was implicated as a long-term consideration. Of this I was eager to learn more, and was delighted to find someone who had read these philosophers in the original and could orient my thinking in their regard.

This of course had a direct bearing on the genesis and structure of his book, which lay there waiting for us, spread out upon my work-table. But while we ate he gave me, so to speak, a background sketch of the recent history of the ideas it embodied.
¹
He began with the invasion and conquest of China by the Manchurians. These fine gentlemen with their Spartan philistinism had ruled for a matter of eighty-eight years, and during their tenure had most successfully succeeded in muffling, indeed practically eradicating, all outward manifestation of Taoism and burned all Taoist books except the
Tao Te Ching,
possibly because it was too profound for the barbarians to recognize its significance. Luckily also for the Taoists they did not have the propensity for certain set factors – temples, rituals, uniforms, etc. There was nothing to pinpoint them for persecution. ‘The true Taoists … there was no distinguishing feature about them except, if you like, a certain look in the eye – a Taoist look! A look in the eye of the mind, so to speak! You could hardly persecute a mere Look!' So saying, Chang gave me a Taoist look as a sample, and I saw at once what he meant. It was a great little look, full of mischievous impudence, of irony and laughter. It was a look of sardonic complicity – it shared an amused and slanting consciousness of how precious the Unspoken was. It was like the first link between human beings acknowledging their partnership in the whole of process.
Diable!
It was the damnedest look I have ever shared with a human being – leaving aside two women who seemed to be naturally endowed the whole time with such a look by the gods. I realized that I was looking into the eyes of Chuang Tzu, my favourite philosopher – the Groucho Marx of Taoist philosophy. It was the eye of the Great Paradox, so to speak. There is nothing to be said about this sort of thing – it is Taoism, and the minute you try to say something explicit about it you damage it, like clumsily trying to pick up a rare butterfly in your fingers. Here you are in the region of the Indian
non-this-non-that business.
What we made and shared as we talked thus was a magnificent meal – the amused, penetrating, conspiratorial Look seemed to have got into the very food and by now we had already begun to chaff each other, which is the best mark of friendship.

Taoism is such a privileged brand of eastern philosophy that one would be right to regard it as an aesthetic view of the universe rather than a purely institutional one. A Taoist was the joker in the pack, the poet on the hearth. His angle of inclination depended upon a simple proposition, namely that the world was a Paradise, and one was under an obligation to realize it as fully as possible before being forced to quit it. The big imperative in the matter was that there should be no waste, not a drop, in the course of this great feast of innocent breath. In an obscure sort of way the concept of immortal human
bonheur
had crept into the Taoist mind. They chose to leave the grand question of supreme bliss, of perfect beatitude, to the higher grades of the religious hierarchy, and stick to the world as IS – or that is what they seemed to say. But how was this desirable state of immortality in this life to be brought about? One could not just guzzle the world away, for mental indigestion would soon supervene. The greatest delicacy of judgement, the greatest refinement of intention was to replace the brutish automatism with which most of us continue to exist, stuck like prehistoric animals in the sludge of our non-awareness.

The realization comes at the point where the Taoist experiences inside himself a new state of pure heed – the notion that the whole eternity could be compromised by a careless word, by a mere inattention, by the untimely trembling of a leaf! We speak of people who have realized themselves because we know that Real things only happen to Real People, though it seems very unlucky. As for the perfect rapture – it was towards the poem (the ideogram of a perfected apprehension) that Taoism of this kind tended. That was why Chang was slightly irritated by the heavy conceptual lumber, the wearisome prolixity of Indian thought with its eternal accretion of detail, its overwhelming density. Such an apparatus often bred scholars not sages, pedants not poets. What the Chinese mind had brought to this over-elaborated marvel was precisely the resilient humour which it lacked. The difference lay not in the end but in the means. I could see that the Taoism of Chang was born of the smile of Kasyapa – the none too diligent student whom Buddha sent to the top of the form because, while he, the Master, was still in full discourse, he happened to catch the eye of this young man, and to surprise upon his face the Taoist smile! There was no need to go on talking for it was clear from this one smiling glance that Kasyapa had twigged the whole matter. Buddha handed him the flower he was holding in his hand and told him to get the hell out of the class. So Kasyapa, who found the Indians such fearful bores and so lacking in humour, set out for China with only the Taoist smile for baggage. And out of this exchange of looks grew the Far Eastern variety of the Buddhist reality – and later the remarkable short cut of the Zen jump which completely bypassed the jungle of Indian metaphysics while encapsulating the real essence of the teaching. Somewhere in the heart of the matter was a principle of right apprehension which was there for the discovering; after that one could breathe in the whole universe with every breath. Treat the earth as a perfume? Well, a scent does not try to get itself appreciated by an act of will, even though it ‘knows' in its essence that it was born just for that. Congruence, appropriateness, it was our job to capture the whole thing when it was bliss side up, so to speak. I read all this into Chang's text. To become at long last accredited to the whole of nature!

But these and other matters got themselves quite entangled in the question of cookery – for Chang had now begun to feel his feet in the pleasant kitchen with its red-tiled floor. To me he delegated the task of cutter-up for the carefully washed vegetables; in defence too of my gallant Indians, among whom I spent the first ten years of my existence, I introduced a few touches of India to the sauce – curry and ginger – which met with approval. We had found nuts and raisins in the market as well, while my guest was eager to explore a few of the cheeses of France. It was a pleasant and fruitful work, assembling all these deliciously steamed still crunchy vegetables. It was also a symbolic meeting place of the two great cuisines of the world – French and Chinese.

2

Among so many subjects we were apt to lose our way from time to time – Chang replying to my eager questions no less eagerly; he seemed glad to have someone at hand with whom he could discuss these matters, albeit in English. My knowledge though highly provisional and sketchy was quite a help towards my understanding of his text, which was an outline of a sort of love-therapy – not rigidly schematic and fossilized like the Kama Sutra, though much upon the same lines. I asked him about yoga and told him I dabbled in the Indian method. ‘I do Chinese yoga,' he said. ‘it's a bit different – more fluent, less static.' Waving a wooden spoon he did a couple of swooping figures, not unlike ballroom dancing, gliding out into the old glassed-in verandah like an ice-skater. I tried to copy him to see how it felt. At that moment the morose existentialist gardener who sometimes works for me came down the drive, and peering in saw me apparently waltzing with a Chinaman. We did not see him ourselves. But his nerve was badly shaken by the sight and he retreated to the village tavern. Oblivious to all this we danced on, Chang and I, until a simmering noise called us back to the cooking pots.

3

The question of immortality also raised its head early on in the conversations and I found that my guest was absolutely convinced that it was not a figure of speech, that it was on the menu, so to speak, though factually it could only be achieved by the greatest sages. There existed records, however, which pointed the way. As far as he was concerned all he wished to illuminate in the text under consideration was the fact that if a man adapted himself to the Taoist view seriously – he could easily top the hundred, and might expect without being specially gifted to live to 150. In such a life there was no reason why he should not expect to make love happily well into his nineties, as well as keep all or most of his teeth. Everything was connected to his diet, both spiritual and physical. ‘I myself propose to live to 120 years at least. If I had started this technique much earlier I could expect to go the full way. But the question of food and of sexual love is paramount, and here the book has something to teach us. You will understand that I have assembled and translated these texts first for my own pleasure and then as a work of advocacy for a world which quietly accepts to be flung on the scrap-heap around the age of fifty; which loses its sexual abilities soon after forty in many cases; and which uses the orgasm as a sort of yardstick of well-being, when it can, after forty, be restrained and reeducated in the service of insight rather than trivialized in mere pleasure …'