A Smile in the Mind's Eye (6 page)

‘Have you any food you don't want?' The question brought me back to myself. ‘Because I could take it with me. I eat very lightly when I am travelling.' Together we examined the fridge. He took a lascivious sip of milk to see if it had turned or not. No! Could he take it with him? He reverently poured it into his little hot-water bottle. There were a couple of apples, a small fragment of cheese and a couple of biscuits and a tomato. I calculated that it would just about have kept a mouse alive for a night or so. ‘This will last me three days at least,' said Chang running his eye over the assembled items. I pictured him in the wastes of Cambridge nibbling at this fare and blowing on his fingers for warmth; but like all good yoga men he hardly felt the cold. ‘I shall be all right.' I had intended to take him to a station myself but at the last moment I had a notification for a long-distance telephone call which I could not countermand. So I called the village taxi which came scratching and scrawling into the drive on all the loose gravel. ‘Well,' he said, giving me the benefit of a final Taoist look accompanied by a smile of friendly complicity. ‘Thank you for the whole trip. It's been a memorable meeting, no?' Indeed it had, and I felt so despondent at the sight of him leaving that I quite forgot to give him a farewell Chortle. He strung his belongings around him and donned his light overcoat and the ski bonnet of soft wool. ‘We'll meet again in London,' he said, and I agreed. Then the taxi bore him off into the night while I stood in the garden for a while, thinking of his book and listening to the whistle of the owls as they came whirring down in search of field-mice or bats.

So ended my first Taoist visitation, and as the spring wore on to summer I began to be increasingly taken up with other problems of the ordinary kind. But from time to time I received a call from Jolan Chang to report progress on the book. He had found some delightful and appropriate illustrations, the preface and postface were excellent, and so on. I contributed a note for the sleeve, but I promised more substantial help later on which, by a series of trifling mishaps, I was unable to supply at the right time. But the book appeared and did well, receiving a serious if slightly reserved English press. In France, however, its critics were more enthusiastic and its public, for the most part young, very enthusiastic. Apparently it made sense, even to people habitually subjected to the fraudulent cat's cradle of the dialectic or to the hiccups of Tel Quel! But it was too simple and unpretentious a book to get up powerful tensions of an intellectual kind. In fact, one would have to have an inkling of the value of breath to be struck by it, I suppose; or to have taken soundings already and come to some conclusions about the meaning of silence … But at all events the little bookshop which abuts the old Sorbonne told me that it was much in demand. Chang went back to his great flat and his collection – not to mention his tiny gnome of a daughter – and our correspondence lapsed; I had several journeys ahead of me. But I was sorry to have failed him at the London end. Happily the support of Joseph Needham had given the book the prestige it needed for its launching.

4

The desultory autumn set in – the economy of France had begun to founder with the resulting labour troubles due to the high cost of petrol. The Arabs had overturned the apple cart of our economy and there would be no way back to prosperity and full employment in my lifetime. Well, what did it matter after sixty? In Paris, sauntering the
quais,
I came upon a Collected Oscar Wilde and to my astonishment saw it in a review of the
Tao Te Ching
by his hand; paradoxically enough it had been written for a ladies' fashion magazine of which he had once been editor. It was, if my memory serves me right, a review of the first London translation, by Giles. And Wilde's sympathetic little notice suggested that he had thoroughly understood the doctrines of the old sage. It must have dated from his more impecunious period when he was forced to turn to journalism to make ends meet. (He wasn't the only one. Mallarmé among other great poets was also forced once to edit a fashion magazine for the same reasons.)

I returned south. Came the harvest, the bullfighting, the wine, followed by the morose period of storms and mists which heralded a premature winter. It was to be hard, according to the weather forecasts. So it proved to be. Once more I spent it alone with the owls – they uttered no complaints. There must have been plenty of stranded mice and bats in the old park with its tall trees. I was trying to write two books at once, and it wasn't the sort of thing one should try. Then came a summons from the Tibetans to share their New Year celebrations in early February. I had followed with interest the fortunes of this little monastery whose existence (now in financial danger) was due to the sudden influx of refugees after the fall of Tibet.
⁴
It was certainly the most interesting and forceful centre of Buddhism in France and the old chateau which had been made over to the order was ideally situated (by its remoteness among rather melancholy woods, not far from Autun) to the introspective studies and retreats and initiations which the Tibetan lamas promised a virgin audience of students. I had never so far been able to go – my travels had always drawn me out of France during the period when the Abbey was in full activity. But the link was firm – after all, the Kagu Ling clan had descended directly – by word of mouth, by breath to breath, by
bouche a la bouche,
of initiation – from the national poet of Tibet, Mila Repa, whose poems and teachings I had known since I was sixteen, and which summoned up for me at once the strange life I had lived in Darjiling, with its scripture classes, its Sunday School excursions to Tiger Hill (no tigers now!). Then, too, my father was curious and adventurous, and during the period while he looked after the tiny railway (Siliguri-Darjiling) he took us on many excursions, rides and walks in the wide Teesta valley. Once he went as far as Kalimpong, and often we were visitors to Buddhist monasteries when they were
en fête.
But from that early epoch onwards I had had no direct contact with things Tibetan. The little pamphlet came at a time when I was much in need of it – for my personal affairs were in disorder and I was plagued by a dozen different nagging contingencies. In spite of the weather – the whole of France was under snow and the long tally of snow damage and flood catastrophe completely filled the news bulletins – I decided to motor up in my little camping-car, hoping that if I went cautiously I could avoid trouble and arrive safely at my destination.

As usual, the reality seemed a good deal less dramatic than journalism suggested, though the autoroute was indeed swept by the wind and a dense thistle-swishing rain, with packets of visibility floating about, punctuated by white blackouts of sheer mist. One had the curious illusion that whole chunks of landscape were being shifted about by invisible scene-shifters, now advancing, now receding. At Lyon the usual smog-stained darkness set in as it always does, winter or summer. What ugliness, what ‘urban growth'! Moreover what a fate to have overtaken the Mecca of gastronomy in France! Everyone dreads Lyon now, dipping into the great squat hollow in which the city lies – and on this beautiful arm of the river, too! It is no more a provincial capital but a suburb to end all suburbs. One comes out the other side with a sigh of relief – like a patient emerging from an anaesthetic. But its spirit is creeping down southwards and even my own little village is sending souls north to Lyon in search of work – hostages to the smog and smoke. In five years Sommières itself will be simply a dormitory for pale aspirin-ravaged city workers who wonder why they cannot sleep … North of Lyon the skies darkened and dense patches of fog called for headlights over long stretches; I had calculated on a landfall around five in the evening and I saw that I would not be far out in spite of these hazards which imposed caution and stealth.

The whole Maconnais seemed to be under water – the flooding of inland lakes had altered the prevailing topography in the most dramatic fashion. Just the tops of the tall poplars stood out above the water which had risen to their necks. In this way one could trace the course of major roads which had now disappeared. Pylons have been overturned like ninepins, electric wires trailed everywhere. The
Pompiers
and the army were out in force – transformed, for the emergency, into sailors, rescuing floating cattle or individuals marooned on their own rooftops. Fortunately the great parapets of the autoroute rode high above these water-ravaged valleys, and by the time I quitted it, the land was much higher and drying, though under deep snow. They were not very high, the hills I had to traverse to reach Autun, but they were high enough for snow. Yet mercifully the snowploughs had turned out, and a light thaw had set in to help them. One could see the holes in the tarmac sucked by the spring-thawing snow as it drained away into the valleys. It had turned very cold. I had entered a melancholy land with winding roads running through dense areas of forest thick with unburnt leaves and rotting loam. Farms were few and far between, traffic nil, petrol pumps far apart. I tanked up with some care, and lowered pressures on my little battle-wagon. When not fully loaded she tends to float off into the sky at the slightest excuse – particularly when there is a high wind on the autoroutes. Now came Autun with its old-fashioned and solemn architecture and its pale population huddled into overcoats against the cutting wind which blew down upon them from the direction of Dijon. It is a market-town of some importance and rather beautiful in its cold way. The accent is somewhat sharp and rocky – it smells of the Dauphiné, of Grenoble. The people are brisk and brusque, indifferent to visitors, dreaming perhaps of selling up and moving south to where the sun shines. I traversed the old town and moved off into lowlands now – they formed a kind of pocket as if on a green billiard table, and cut off by a range of hills from the main body of France; down at the bottom of the pocket lay the remote chateau of Plaige in its cold woodlands. It took some finding. Hereabouts, too, there were streams which had jumped their banks, roads cut off, fallen trees and broken wires – but the road itself was clear, though by now night was signalled by fading light, and quite heavy snow was falling. It was appropriate, the snow; to rediscover the ambience of my childhood by any other element would have left something lacking. Moreover when, after coasting about among the white fields and asking my way of the occasional mortal I encountered in all the whiteness, I at last saw the tall prayer-masts of the chateau with their sodden drooping flags, I realized with a pleasant pang that the place the monks had been donated was itself a piece of old Nepal, of old Bhutan. It was precisely the sort of country-house-chateau which might be inhabited even today by a hill-Rajah. We had known some who lived in just such chateaux around Kuyseong and in the hills around Darjiling. Yet despite this tinge of Oriental appropriateness the old building still insisted, by its vast stables, hangars,
greniers,
that it was really an overgrown farm, and typical of the Norman north. I limped up towards it upon an execrable private road made viscous by the typical farm mud of the region, and after unearthing the monk in charge of the bookings signed the book and made myself known as a visitor for the weekend. There was some accommodation, and very pleasant too, in the well-heated chateau but I elected to sleep in my little car. I was used to it and liked the feeling of independence it conferred on me at night. So they allowed me to anchor it inside the walls of the grange, just outside the kitchen and refectory, an ideal strategic point. It was rather like being back at school again; dozens of people were arriving with every kind of transport and there seemed few who knew each other. Indeed it was very much like the first day of term at a public school. People floundered about, hunting down their accommodation, examining the premises, or else encountering friends last seen in India or Katmandu. The place was beautifully heated and the shrine room delightful. The hall notice-boards were sprinkled with announcements concerning the services to be held and more urgent if more mundane appeals against taking muddy boots upstairs. The atmosphere was one of calm elation, that special joy when Dharma-crafting beings meet together. There were one or two also who had not broken the chain of tobacco as yet, and they hid themselves among the snowy trees in the park to take a last drag at a Gauloise Bleu. I was so grateful to the yoga which had liberated me (I used to be a heavy smoker) from this cruel addiction for some eight years now, without relapse. Dinner passed with friendly animation and I made a couple of contacts, one a rather grim looking man with a long nose who looked as if he were an extreme sceptic. He did not actually say anything but his way of examining wall notices and looking around at his fellow diners (and sniffing) suggested that he was thinking to himself: ‘This is all my eye and monkey's fur!' No need to say that the food was good; the French lamas must have cooked it for some of the dishes were very superior – cream of chestnuts was one. But I was tired after my long drive, and glad that I had opted for the privacy of the car where I could roll down my bed, light a candle for pleasure, read a few lines of Donne or Mila Repa before falling into a hushed sleep, dimly aware of movements about me in the darkness – for the dormitories in the barns were slowly filling up with sleeping-bag novices who had arrived after dark. The snow hushed and lulled all sharp sound. But the frost was heavy, and when I woke about three and crawled out to express myself in the snow, the sky was brilliant with stars – dagger-points of frosty light – and a chill crackling wind whirled down from the north bringing more snow. Incoherent and unpatterned memories and impressions of the past filled my mind. I was glad that it was snowing, for in my memories it always snowed and always the white fangs of the Himalayan Alps across the valley held the blue glass-glitter of ice all the year round. Plaige was like a small yet faithful miniature of those grandiose landscapes of my extreme youth – it was the stage version, so to speak, of an epic scenery.