Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

Kingship is an impersonal principle; it is like life and death, it knows no limitations. It is history made carnate, just as this Thames is the principle of water made real. And when a king apologizes for being a king he is no king; he establishes a duality in himself, so he can have no authority. ‘The king can do no wrong,’ comes from the idea that the principle can do no wrong, just as Communists say, ‘the Party can do no wrong.’ Talking of the Communists the other day in Cambridge, I forgot to say that Communism must succeed; happily for us, to be followed by kingship. Look at the difference between Hitler and Stalin. Stalin, the man of iron, the mystery behind the Kremlin, the impersonal being; to whom torture, growth or death are essentials of an abstract arithmetic. As the Catholics looked for omens in the Bible, Stalin looked to impersonal history for guidance. Stalin lives and dies, in history as history, not outside history. Hitler, on the other hand, lived in his dramatic Nuremberg rallies, visible, concrete, his voice the most real of real; his plans personal, demoniac, his whims astrological, his history Hitlerian-Germanic, if you will — dying a hero, a Superman: Zarathustra. Duality must lead to heroism, to personality-development, to glory. The dualist must become saintly, must cultivate humility, because he knows he could be big, great, heroic and personal, an emperor with a statue and a pediment.’

Here, silently Savithri led me on to Chelsea Bridge, and looking down at the river, I continued:

‘But the impersonal is neither humble nor proud — who could say whether Stalin was humble or proud? But one can say so easily and so eminently of another Cathar, another purist, Trotsky — that noble revolutionary of perfect integrity — that he was vain. He would gladly have jumped into the fire, down the campo di crémars, smiling and singing, “I am incorruptible, I am pure, I am the flame.” Stalin would have the Kremlin guarded with a thousand sentries, a few thousand spies, killing each one when he knew too much, first a Yagoda, then a Yezhov. For him history killed them, just as an Inca chief believed his god, not himself, wanted a sacrifice. Stalin bore no personal enmity to Trotsky, for this was real history. Even if Stalin the man was jealous of Trotsky “the flame of pure Revolution” (and Stalin might have admitted this), Stalin who is history, had to kill Trotsky the anti-history. The pure, the human, the vain-glorious leader’s personal magic was an unholy impediment to the movement of history. In the same way Marshal Tukhachevsky had to die — the impersonal cannot allow that any man be a hero. Stalin was no hero: he was a king, a god.’

‘How well you hold forth,’ teased Savithri, tugging my arm. She wanted me to look at the barges as they floated down, or at the clear moon that played between the clouds and delighted Savithri as it might have a child.

‘Moon, moon, Uncle Moon,’ I chanted a Kanarese nursery rhyme, ‘Mama, Chanda-mama, and then we went back to history.

‘The Superman is our enemy. Look what happened in India. Sri Aurobindo wanted, if you please, to improve on the Advaita of Sri Sankara — which was just like trying to improve on the numerical status of zero. Zero makes all numbers, so zero begins everything. All numbers are possible when they are in and of zero. Similarly all philosophies are possible in and around Vedanta. But you can no more improve on Vedanta than improve on zero. The zero, you see, the sunya is impersonal; whereas one, two, three and so on are all dualistic. One always implies many. But zero implies nothing. I am not one, I am not two, I am neither one, nor two: “Ahām nirvikalpi nirākara rūpih.” I am the “I”. So, to come back to Sri Aurobindo, he shut himself in Pondicherry and started building a new world. If you can build a house of three storeys, you can build one of five, eight, ten, or twelve storeys — and go as high as the Empire State Building or any other structure, higher and yet higher. And just as aeroplanes at first went fifty miles an hour, then eighty, then a hundred, two hundred, three, and now go far beyond the speed of sound, similarly you can build any number of worlds, can make the mind, the psyche so athletic that you can build world after world, but you cannot go beyond your self, your impersonal principle. And just as the materialism of Stalin and not his impersonal sense of history, but his material interpretation of history made him end up like the Egyptians in being embalmed and made immortal as history, Sri Aurobindo tried to make this perishable, this chemical, this historical body, this body of eighteen aggregates as Nagarjuna called it, permanent. Moralism and materialism must go together. The undying is a moral concept — for death is a biological phenomenon, an anti-life phenomenon, against the nature of the species. Not to die, to drink the elixir of life, is moral — it is to transcend the phenomenal as celibacy is the transcending of nature. The moral must end in mummification and the pyramid.’

‘I am breathless,’ said Savithri; ‘you take me too far and too quickly.’

‘Just a moment,’ I begged, ‘I’ll soon finish. The Superman is the enemy of man — whether you call him Zarathustra, Sri Aurobindo, Stalin, or Father Zossima.’

‘That’s a new gentleman in history,’ laughed Savithri.

‘Oh,’ I remarked, a little irritated by her disturbance, ‘it’s a saintly character in Dostoevsky: he smells — he decomposes— when he dies, and thus disturbs the odour of sanctity his miracles had brought to him. When Sri Aurobindo died his disciples must have felt the same: the deathless master, who wanted to consecrate his body, consign it to immortality, died like any other. His breath must have stopped, his eyes must have become fixed in their sockets, but being a yogin he may have been sitting in a lotus posture, and that would have given him beauty and great dignity.’

‘And now?’ begged Savithri. The damp of the river was rising. ‘I am a biological phenomenon, and food and warmth are necessary. Besides,’ she added, pulling her sari over her breast as though it was she who would suffer, ‘besides, I am terrified of your lungs.’ So I obeyed and we slowly strolled along the Embankment.

‘You know,’ I said, ‘Julietta is probably at the Stag.’

‘Ah,’ she burst out laughing, ‘so you remember geography and biography do you? Come let us go.’

‘Oh, never, never!’ I shouted. ‘You, Savithri, in a pub?’

‘Pub or no pub, take me anywhere, my love,’ she said, so gently, so dedicatedly and with such a pressure of her fingers on my arm that the whole world rose up into my awareness renewed; ‘take me anywhere, and keep me warm.’ Was it I, the foolish schoolteacher, this miserable five foot eleven of Brahmin feebleness, this ungainly, myopic overbent creature, to whom she had said those two tender, commonplace, but perfect words? It was the first time she ever said them to me, and perhaps she had never said them to anyone else. History and my mind vanished somewhere, and I put my arms round that little creature — she hardly came to my shoulder — and led her along alleyways and parkways, past bus-stop, bridge, and mews — to a taxi.

‘Let’s go to Soho,’ I said, and as I held her in my arms, how true it seemed we were to each other, a lit space between us, a presence — God. ‘Dieu est logé dans l’intervalle entre les hommes,’ I recited Henri Frank to her.

‘Yes, it is God,’ she whispered, and we fell into the silence of busy streets. After a long moment, she whispered again, ‘Take me with you, my love.’

‘Will you come, Savithri?’

‘Take me with you, my love, anywhere.’

‘Come,’ I said; ‘this minute, now…’