Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

‘“The queen awaits you, my liege, my Lord,” she said. It was this time not Madeleine who spoke but someone else, superior, simple.’

November 17. “Today I will just copy the following verse of Baudelaire:

L’éphémére ébloui vole vers toi, chandelle,

Crépite, flambe et dit: Bénissons ce flambeau!

L’amoureux pantelant incliné sur sa belle

A l’air d’un moribond caressant son tombeau.

Que tu viennes du ciel ou de l’enfer, qu’importe,

O beauté! monstre énorme, effrayant, ingénu!

Si ton oeil, ton sourire, ton pied, m’ouvrent la porte

D’un infini que j’aime et n’ai jamais connu?’

November 20. “Again I copy from Baudelaire:

Je te hais, Océan! tes bonds et tes tumultes,

Mon esprit les retrouve en lui! Ce rire amer

De l’homme vaincu, plein de sanglots et d’insultes,

Je l’entends dans le rire énorme d la mer.

Comme tu me plairais, O Nuit! sans ces étoiles,

Dont la lumiére parle un langage connu!

Car je cherche le vide, et le noir, et le nu’

I could thus go on quoting from my endless diary. But I will stop here.

I shall only add I left for England at the end of the month and that Madeleine seemed not unhappy with herself.

I took Savithri back to Cambridge. At the station we jumped into a taxi and I left her at Girton College; then I went on to the Lion Hotel (in Petty Cury) where a room had been reserved for me. The short porter, called John, led me up the staircase to my little room under the roof. It was somewhat triangular, but with the Bible beside the bed and the cross above me I felt what I always know I am, a pilgrim. The night was not long, and dawn broke very early. I went to the library and with some difficulty got a card to work there.

Libraries always speak to me; they reveal me to myself— with their high seriousness, their space, and the multiple knowledge that people have of themselves which goes to make a book. For all books are autobiographies, whether they be books on genetics or on the history (in twenty-two volumes) of the Anglican Church. The mechanics of a motor-car or of veterinary science all have a beginning in the man who wrote the book, have absorbed his nights and maybe the nerves of his wife or daughter. They all represent a bit of oneself, and for those who can read rightly, the whole of oneself. The style of a man — whether he writes on the Aztecs or on pelargonium — the way he weaves word against word, intricates the existence of sentences with the values of sound, makes a comma here, puts a dash there: all are signs of his inner movement, the speed of his life, his breath (prana), the nature of his thought, the ardour and age of his soul. Short sentences and long sentences, parentheses and points of interrogation, are not only curves in the architecture of thought, but have an intimate, a private relation with your navel, your genitals, the vibrance of your eyesight. Shakespeare, for ought we know, may have had hypertension, Goldsmith stones in the gall-bladder; Dr Johnson may have been oversexed like a horse, just as Maupassant was a hypochondriac and Proust had to lie in bed with asthma, and weave out long sentences like he eked out a long curve of breath. Breath is the solar herdsman of the living, says the Rig Veda, and hence yoga and all that.

Therefore the biography of Dr Norman Coleman is not in the scientific ‘Who’s Who’, but in each rhythm of his heading: ‘Orbitoethmoidal Osteoma with Spartaneous Pneumocephalus.’

So many men have lived and breathed and written books. What a breath it gives you! With my poor weak lungs a library is always a place of a broad, a propitious breath, and so books are not only my professional need, but also my respiratory, my spiritual need. And in between the tomes, in that blue of space — as though wisdom were hid; some mysterious, unwritten, unknowable knowledge — in that blank, that silent, wise blank between books and behind them I felt the presence, the truth, the formula of Savithri. She was the source of which words were made, the Mother of Sound, Akshara-Lakshmi, divinity of the syllable; the night of which the day was the meaning, the knowledge of which the book was the token, the symbol — the prophecy.

I would meet her by the staircase of the university library at five, and wander along over sluices and bridges, showing her the spots of silence as in between the two purrings of the Cam, or the broad sheet of space that the sun lit up from Clare Bridge to the tower of St John’s. It was as if some swallow had curved out this space, for the game of its young ones. The Cam had flowers floating on it, and boats and the laughter of the very young. The Cam seemed never to have grown old, even though the buildings were so aged, for the Cam like us men and women flows right in herself, outside of history. Who, after all, could write the history of the Cam, for she was certainly there before man came to the British Isles, and she will be there even if the whole of England joined the European continent, by geological upheaval, and the Thames flowed again into the Rhine or Britain be frozen in because the Arctic regions began to get warmer for life, and this belt of the earth, too cold for man to inhabit. The Cam is silent and self-reflective. It teaches you that history is made by others and not by oneself. I am history to you, not so to myself. You make my biography, I live my own autobiography. Trinity may have a bridge over the Cam, but the Cam has no bridge. I might call Savithri, but Savithri speaking to Savithri did not call herself Savithri. The sound is born of silence and the river is of space. Love has nothing to do with loving, for ‘I’ itself is love.

Night has a great, a tender innocence. No one harms another in the night but with the convictions and irritations of the day. Those who speak of the dark night think of the dark day which precedes it. The night of Cambridge had an absolute silence, as though paths and roads had stopped suddenly, and time had passed by them, and into Hertfordshire. The trees, though, made time, for winter had covered the earth with a grey, remembered existence. Man has a fire within, a substance, a light, and he illumines his night not with the stuff electric, with a touch that is no touch, a lip that is no lip, but a smell, a curve of breath and silence, as if truth is a presence, an instant, an eye. Words are made of such stuff as breath is made on.

The impossible is the reality, the fervent is the intrepid, the passionate, the high. Fruits are made of space; grass is made of light; mankind makes paths and roadways; all, that night be measured in her own silence. King’s Chapel was not made by workmen but by the prayer of pilgrims; colleges were built not by the donations of noblemen and kings but by the leap of light within, by the aura of substantialities within man’s blood and becoming, in which God floats as a castle, builds a bridge and shapes a tower. And in between the archway’d walls are studious boys — and far away, the girls, that weave into life the space of thought, the substance of sight, and movement of the moon, that a better England, a better India, a better world be circumscribed. The Cam is a river that lives on giving dreams.

Savithri was shy, very shy. Her touch was simple and had no name, she spoke as though she were covering her head with her sari, and throwing the palow more amply over her breast. She was shy of no one, she was shy of herself. There were moments when one wondered if she were afraid to touch her own waist, or hear her own words. I think she liked best to hear her own heart, and you felt that was where you could meet her if you dared, but you dared not, for to do this you needed the humility of a saint. Saint I had to become if I would know Savithri, not a saint of ochre and bone-bowl, but one which had known the extinction of the ego. Just as reading poetry at the break of day is like remembering the feel of one’s dream but not the acts of one’s dream, to know Savithri was to wake into the truth of life, to be remembered — unto God. She never pushed you away, but you drew away from her, because there was no common knowledge, no language in which one had similar symbols to exchange. Her simplicity was her defence, and her laughter — for she laughed so widely but softly — was like the laughter of the clown in a circus, when his body ripples with merriment before the lion: Savithri was just afraid. My courage was a failure turned into strength, her laughter was fear turned into simplicity. There was no Clare Bridge to link us together, and we looked at each other from opposite banks, like the duck on one side and the cycle on the other, lamplit and churring on its gear, forlorn.