vita contemplativa

In Bengal, landscape and mind seem to meet naturally in a state of contemplation. This is not an epic country. South of Darjeeling, there are no dramatic peaks and falls, no mist-swathed hills, not even the romance of the desert. But the flat plain has an expansiveness and an imaginative tinge to it that one might miss in the north German plateau or the East Anglian fens. The land is still occupied, in a full sense, and the occupants are waiting always, for the transformations brought by the weather that sweeps across the plain, the grand and yet subtle sequence of the Bengali calendar's six seasons.

In consequence the country's literature seems also to have a lyric, contemplative quality. Pather Panchali (1929) is celebrated as the greatest Bengali novel of the past century not for plot, complex psychology or social critique, but for its rootedness in a child's vivid experience of his place in the world, defined by personal relationships of course, but also by space and the power of imagination. For Opu, the horizon of his knowledge and vision is tinged with a vague wonder, a sense of imagined distance that appears at dusk in the illumined beauty of the tops of the palm trees standing furthest away from his house, in the bewitched, nervous sense of strangeness as he passes the buildings of an old, deserted British indigo plantation on a walk with his father at the outskirts of the village, or in the inconceivable excitement of the railway line which his sister takes him to see (one of the most memorable scenes in Ray's celebrated film adaptation). Naturally Opu is "imaginative" in the conventionally childlike way too - he loves swashbuckling stories from the old epics, and the jatra, the travelling village theatre - but that Bibhutibashan gives him this more numinous, more immanent vision of the wonder of his surroundings seems to me not just poetizing wishfulness, but an understanding of the freshness of a child's perceptions, of how exactly scenes in one's life become meaningful, memorable.

And despite his majestic adult appearance, Tagore too could see with the eyes of a child. Among the prose works of his that I have read, the ones that appeal the strongest to me (and to many other commentators also) are not the big social-issue novels, but the slim memoirs of his early life - My Reminiscences and Boyhood Days. His early childhood was more confined than Opu's: from the dark family house in Jorasanko in north Calcutta, only his gaze and his fancy could go out roaming. They did not immediately scramble in search of stories. Young Rabi was a patient observer, willing to dwell, like a Dutch old master, on homely details of life on the streets, courtyards and rooftops of the town. As he wrote in a letter of 1930:

"A greater part of my early years was spent in observing the world of nature. It gave me intense joy to watch things. I would sit quietly by the window, or climb on a packing-box to peep over the wall of our balcony to feast my eyes upon a host of things - the early morning sun touching the top of a row of coconut palms, the drove of ducks diving in and out of the water of the tank, the deep blue grandeur of the rain-laden clouds rising suddenly from behind the balcony, the walls of varied sizes of a neighbouring house, across the lane looking mysterious in moonlight, the low sheds where lived the milkmen with their cattle beyond the walls of the inner apartments, the sun glistening on a shallow pool of water where the buffaloes bathed, the deep green of an avenue of trees that stood atop a long line of roofs of assorted heights to the east - all of them seemed to fascinate me. The first idea that came the instant I left my bed was that there was no end of things to see..."

In the last years of life - when Tagore began to paint - his visions became more symbolically charged. He wanted to find a meaning or even a moral in what he saw; as in the description of a train ride (from Calcutta to Madras) from the same letter –

"My mind is content with the thought that I had taken in all there was to see. The train moves on fast and I cannot go over the once reconnoitred ground. Those who counsel giving up the world because nothing in it lasts, should take a lesson from the man in the moving train... As I look out of the compartment and observe a thing of indescribable beauty on this sunbathed noon of early spring - I realise at this very instant that this will not last, that this will vanish out of my line of vision. And yet...is my present experience an illusion? I am not prepared to accept this to be so. This picture that I see this instant is not merely a source of joy to me personally, as to an unrelated individual. My response does not depend on my flitting fancy...it is an experience I share with my fellow man, as part of humanity... The joy that Kalidasa poured into his verses, on seeing the beauty of the earth bathed in the deep shadows of the early monsoon clouds, will live... It is a cumulative joy to which all of us contribute our share."

Kalidasa, the great Sanskrit poet whose work "The Cloud Messenger" (Meghadutam) Tagore had in mind in writing this, also described, in that greatest of his poems, a journey across the Indian landscape – not by a train but by a drifting monsoon cloud. It is an extended and yet entirely contemplative poem, the likes of which one will scarcely find in ancient European literature ( – just as, conversely, ancient Indian literature contains no tragedies). For the Sanskrit aestheticians, literature and the arts were vehicles of the rasas, aesthetic emotions which should be "tasted" and dwelt upon rather than cathartically discharged in shocks. The connection when one's eyes and mind are held by an image, the essential timelessness of that moment of appreciation, are what the artist aims to engender. Hence why a single north Indian raga can be "developed" for an hour or more (and here one should best understand that word in something like the sense of the "development" of a photographic image, a gradual emergence into clarity); or why south Indian forms of dance-drama such as Kathakali will dwell on a single tableau or gesture for lengths of time that in the Western theatre would seem absurd. As teachers will sometimes express it, a raga is like the remembered image of a beautiful face; what you play must outline and manifest this inner vision, not distort it.

Tagore's opening "preamble" to My Reminiscences suggests a similarity to the writer's task in dealing with his memories. Chronology is merely external: the rasa is in the images laid down under the flow of time.

"I do not know who has painted the pictures of my life imprinted on my memory. But whoever he is, he is an artist. He does not take up his brush simply to copy everything that happens; he retains or omits things just as he fancies; he makes many a big thing small and small thing big; he does not hesitate to exchange things in the foreground with things in the background. In short, his task is to paint pictures, not to write history. The flow of events forms our external life, while within us a series of pictures is painted. The two correspond, but are not identical."

To "make many a big thing small and small thing big" - a procedure that might work for more than just reminiscence. Other writers of the period in Europe believed in it - Joseph Roth was one, as I've written on this blog, Proust (appearances to the contrary notwithstanding) another. It carries on in Bengali literature, for me most convincingly in the work of Amit Chaudhuri. The first of his novels, A Strange and Sublime Address, was autobiographical. Here is an especially beautiful passage, in the course of which Chaudhuri describes his own view of fiction and its “stories”:

“...why did these houses seem to suggest that an infinitely interesting story might be woven around them? And yet the story would never be a satisfying one, because the writer, like Sandeep, would be too caught up in jotting down the irrelevances and digressions that make up lives, and the life of a city, rather than a good story — till the reader would shout ‘Come to the point!’—and there would be no point, except the girl memorising the rules of grammar, the old man in the easy-chair fanning himself, and the house with the small, empty porch that was crowded, paradoxically, with many memories and possibilities. The ‘real’ story, with its beginning, middle, and conclusion, would never be told, because it did not exist.”

Many scenes in Chaudhuri’s books dwell on "memory pictures", episodes, impulses, or routines, quite insignificant from a narrative point of view – the rituals and inconveniences of Indian household life, the homesickness of the young Indian student in England, the middle-class housewife's modest determination to take music lessons. They are not there to give “body” or a sense of location to a story, a story in terms of which people’s lives take on meaning. It is rather as if the characters are waiting for a story to shape itself (for the housewife to realize her dreams as a successful singer, perhaps). And when time flows on and that still does not happen, it is these “images” from their life which, redeeming their quiet disappointment, absorb the meaning instead, gently soaking up the rasa of passed time.

child and city

I wrote this "imaginary memoir" ("imaginary" meaning not fictitious, but that it deals solely with images and imagination) a few years ago.

I could have called this “Reminiscences de Londres”, as Liszt called his operatic fantasies “Reminiscences”, being as they were patchworks of vivid, remembered highlights and invented, reflected shadows and transitions, not memory but a mask for forgetfulness. There are no grand themes, however – I would be deceiving the expectation. I will dig, and hope to find images under my feet.

To begin, the ground itself is an image, for the child. Much more than for the adult – how we like to find ourselves in the sky, to see the city and the infinite calling to us in the dawn. In my second decade I became entranced by lights and by skies: I would fall on my bed on returning home and leave the blind up so that the amber glow of midnight would be the backdrop to my dreams. Sounds only acquire their magic because they create a vision of lights unseen: birds calling at daybreak, the swish of cars with their headlights in the rain; and the rattle of the train two images, not only lighted empty compartments glowing on the viaduct, but the view one has, perhaps, just experienced from them on one’s journey home, of constellations of light spread over the city, detached from material objects, floating as if on water. For a true city-dweller, the constellations of the night sky will never hold the mind so strongly – the astronomy of lamps is his avocation. He will not escape it; they are rediscovered wherever he goes, on ferries leaving the French coast, on Cornish hills, on a plane above Mumbai, India, the same glimmering net. There is that Pisarro that hangs in the National Gallery, of the Montmartre boulevard, from a perspective at once impossible and ideal, for the spectator is there in the space right over the cafés and cabs and life of the street, its lamps smudged and winking in the rain, while the night sky, dominating the upper half of the canvas, reflects the whole in luminous, towering obscurity. Only van Gogh still painted stars.

But in my first years I may have seen the stars, or felt them; as I felt the ground. For I only began to look up quite recently. I try and remember what it was like to be pushed in a pram, and it isn’t the sensation of lowness, looking up at the world, that comes back to me. No, it’s the foot-strap, a piece of stretched plastic I kicked and worried at. It even had a texture, maybe a logo of some sort, that I tried to feel with the soles of my shoes. Textures were the real world, the real experience – tarmac, skin, cork on the bathroom floor. (I imagined faces or patterns in that for a long time, as I did in sheets or jumpers tossed onto chairs.) I can recall the waxed floors of school corridors, where they gave way to carpet in the library, and yet what was on the walls or what colour they might have been escapes me entirely. We dug in the soil, grubbing around the bases of the little avenue of trees that ran along the side of the playing field, uncovering roots, digging up occasional bits of plastic or pottery that we would use to scrape away more of the earth.

I rediscovered this pleasure much later, on a boating holiday at the age of fourteen. While friends disappeared to search for a field to host their kick-about, I was attracted by a tree near the mooring place, with its bole and clumped knot of roots awakening something again, a need to burrow and feel the intimacy of the earth with its comforting closeness, its restful presence to the fingers. I was too old to indulge those sensations; my returning companions found and mocked me. But my interest was in any case by then tainted with archaeology – I had unearthed a fragment of blue and white ceramic, I wondered what dish it had belonged to, who had owned it, how it had found its way among the roots of this tree. Capitulating to the power of distance, of the grown-up dream of conquering time through the object, I was beginning to raise my eyes, to look far off and see Rome on the horizon. My grandfather, a retired palaeologist, assumed I would be interested in dinosaurs and cavemen, and gave me picture books on them. I never read these, since I preferred his explanations of how to make flints and the boxes of them he had collected from Oxford gravel pits; at home I would gather pebbles from the terrace, assort them in wooden printer’s boxes, and when I tired of them, pulverize them with a heavy stone, which I called my “anvil”.

It was not the collecting instinct that drove me to put each pebble in its own compartment, although I was aware of it, and knew that were I made differently, the unique difference and character of every item in my collection would exert an unparalleled fascination; rather, it was the order in miniature, over which one had power, including the power to destroy. There would be no point in having a collection of large things, like my parents’ books in their tall cases that stood against the wall of my room – and similarly an aversion developed in me towards “large” games or rituals. Thus for many years I would have rather (and did) construct model or board games of tennis or basketball, than attempt to play those sports myself, which seemed, in a curious inversion of logic, to be somehow pointless. My passion for military history was likewise focused on toy soldiers and diagrams in books, their logical purity, miniature ranks and columns intersecting, outflanking, eliminating each other. The helmets and life-size dioramas in the museums certainly formed no part of it; and yet I resisted, then, the stage of final abstraction represented by chess or geometry, where the visual is no more than a point of access to an order composed of concepts.

If I began by associating the image of the city with skies and distances, then my ground-loving child’s mind was unable to grasp it. But then it never really encountered it, since the essence of the city is the night, all that a child cannot know. There is only one way to picture his fearful security of unknowing: the strip of light under the bedroom door, and although Walter Benjamin asserts that this, too, belongs to the city, I cannot agree with him. For all my pastoral soil-digging, the incomprehensible, contemptible worldview of adults was paradoxically their appreciation of the country, the walks and picnics and “isn’t it beautiful up here”, to which I would respond with brief, sullen words, finding my enthusiasm only in plotting the terrain like a military strategist, filled with cannon and units of cavalry. Sublimity for me was quite impossible.

I say this to counteract, finally, the effect of my revisiting the scenes of my childhood, through which I sought a kind of Proustian, synoptic memory, a total image or Idea that could somehow encompass a decade in a brief flood of feeling. I did not receive it, needless to add; either because it could not exist there or because I needed it too much – first love still fresh, treading the grey North London afternoon, a fragment of a Chopin sonata that seemed to possess the secret of nostalgia in its few notes circling and imprinting itself on every vision of the streets. On the road with the house where I used to go after school to play, I passed a girl of my own age, and realised suddenly that it could have been my playmate of ten years before; I could not tell whether the shock was of recognition or of startled, vertiginous pleasure in the mere possibility. I wished the moment could expand and fill with the Romantic pathos of time and memory, like that wonderful, disconcerting episode recounted by Berlioz towards the end of his memoirs, in which he met again by chance the object of his childhood adoration, now an elderly spinster, and tried in vain in despairing, unanswered letters to express and even to live over again in retrospect the passion he had once felt. Such a recuperation may be impossible, the connections broken – it is as if one meddled in the affairs of someone else, a self entirely past.

I wonder now whether the infant’s gaze is completely lost, whether it survives among the broken images of our culture. As a city-dweller, and a myopic one at that, the stars were not a field for my speculation – but they have been, still are for the astronomers, astrologers, constellation-finders. Does their stare not fix itself eventually on the galaxies of the night sky just as mine did on the cork tiles in the bathroom or the stains on the wet pavement? This stare is in reality not seeing but feeling, a sensation not a vision: it brings things close and one is ‘amongst the stars’ as if they were under one’s fingers like Braille. Leonardo advised the painter in search of inspiration to look at the plaster on the walls of old rooms – for him this way of seeing was not a reduction of the imaginative power but the first, preparatory stage in its development.

Yet confinement threatens us when our childish impulse puts the larger world into miniature illustrations, traces inconsequential patterns and then arbitrarily rejects the world outside them; is this the link between fundamentalism and kitsch, that they are both too small, cautious, and blind because they have no wish to open their eyes? There are afternoons after rain in the city when clouds part and sky and streets are filled with light; and although this scene means much to me now, I sense also its proximity to those mechanical, Victorian symbols of transcendence and breakthrough, the sinner redeemed by a glimpse of God’s radiance, Senta and the Flying Dutchman transfigured in levitating embrace, the cheap Catholic icon paintings of Lourdes. The point at which the Turnerian sublimity of light drops into cliché is when the scene loses its depth, and the sky and the buildings are seen insubstantially as if they were the thin paper backdrop to a staged tableau.

Similar is that other childhood conception of the world according to the geometry of a snow-shaker paperweight, a little glass dome that goes over one’s head and stops at the horizon; asking oneself what is behind the glass like wondering what is at the end of the rainbow, but to be contemplated only on a clear summer’s day whilst lying back in the grass and gazing straight up at the ‘infinity’ of deep blue sky that isn’t infinite at all, only impenetrable like the bottom of a pond you might try and poke with a stick but would never succeed in reaching. This is as little connected with the city as the adult who gazes not straight up but towards the horizon is immersed in it, seeing only the cold dawn above the chimney-pots or the final hints of colour on the traces of cloud at dusk, the sounds and perfumes already turning in the evening air. Perhaps I must conclude, in the end, that I did not find the city as a child, that the memories I have from before my tenth year are not of London, the city I came to love afterwards, and that they will not even coalesce into one image, but remain stubbornly separate, each still buried under its own stone.