Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

According to Hindu cosmology we live in the Kali Yuga, a Dark Age many thousands of years long. I had absorbed this as an outlying part of my faith, but now I began to experience it as real.

During the Bathford years of bed rest I was isolated by a body that was turning against itself, and by doctors’ orders that banned any sort of adventure — but now some more obscure force was holding me under, so that I experienced my liberty as house arrest.

At that moment there came into my mind a strangely soothing set of injunctions: You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

It sounded like Ramana Maharshi’s voice murmuring in my ear. The only thing was, I had read it and been struck by it before I had read a word of his, before I had even heard of him. It was actually Kafka, a favourite writer of Eckstein’s and someone he was always quoting to baffled students at Burnham Grammar School. He had written it on the blackboard, that sentence about the world rolling in ecstasy at your feet . He knew how to get me intrigued.

Now, though, established as a student of German and Spanish at an ancient university, I gave the passage a fresh mental reading. It didn’t sound like Kafka at all, however well attested. It sounded like the opposite of Kafka, who was so attuned to the negative. That’s why it sounded like Ramana Maharshi, who was as far from Kafka in temperament and background as it was possible to be. Here was Kafka, of all people, preaching on a text of Ramana Maharshi, and expounding the liberating principle that you don’t have to change your life to change your life.

Kafka’s wooden head

Was it really Kafka, though? I mean, I know that passage is by Kafka now , but was it by Kafka before Eckstein wrote it on a school blackboard in 1968? Perhaps Ramana Maharshi had reached across time and space to send me a message of encouragement. It would be very much in his character as a worker of miracles to manage something so discreet, something which blended into its mundane surroundings. A miracle in camouflage. No commandments in skywriting for Ramana Maharshi, no burning bush, just a nudge of Eckstein’s chalk. Divine intervention as sly and cryptic as the crossword clues (not for idiots) which I could never manage to crack. ‘Gangster ducks five hundred and fifty in the general buzz (7)’. Answer: hoodlum, apparently. Please explain.

The question that always gets asked in such circumstances is this: how do you get the nerve to think you’re worthy of a miracle, however low-key? Over time I’ve learned to give myself the answer: where would I get the nerve to think I’m not?

I remembered the saying of Ramana Maharshi, which Ganesh had quoted to me in India. He who is in the jaws of the tiger cannot be rescued; so also a person who has fallen into the grace of a guru cannot escape from it … Grace is a serious business. So, yes. Perhaps Ramana Maharshi turned ventriloquist on my behalf, and made comforting words emerge from Kafka’s wooden head.

In any case I decided I would take the hint, whether it was transmitted from an æthereal or mundane source. I would make the experiment. I would stay in my room and see what happened. After lunch I installed myself in the Parker-Knoll, but then I mounted an expedition to the door, which I opened and left open. Nothing had been said by Ramana Maharshi / Kafka about the door, but it seemed sensible to give the world some encouragement in its unmasking of itself. Then I returned to my chair.

Every few minutes someone passed my door, but no one came in. Few even glanced inside. Perhaps I hadn’t learned to be properly quiet and still.

The next day, Sunday, I left the door open all day. I was baffled by the lack of interest shown by my staircase-mates. If I myself had been free to wander at will round a building, really free, I would have investigated everything just as thoroughly as I could, but clearly I was an exception in this respect. I could only think that curiosity declines proportionately with ease of access. People to whom doors had yawned open all their lives seemed to take no interest in what lay in front of their eyes.

I fought the urge to get in the car and explore my surroundings in that way, but my mobility was more apparent than real. Either the wheelchair stayed where it was, in A6 Kenny, or it came with me in the car — in which case it needed firstly to be installed there, and then to be unfolded and put at my disposal when I had arrived wherever it was that I was actually going. The smallest trip had to be planned like a military campaign. I stayed in, waiting for the world to make its move. There was space for it, just, to roll in ecstasy in front of the Parker-Knoll. If need be I would pull the lever and lift my legs out of the way, to make sure the world had enough room to disport itself.

Finally on Sunday afternoon there came a shy tap on the open door. It was a student with creamy skin and pale splotched freckles. He looked deeply into my eyes. That’s such a rare thing that it can be very stirring when it happens. His own eyes were very green.

Perhaps I really hadn’t seen such colouring since my brief glimpse of one of the ambulance men who accompanied me from my Bathford home to the train that took me to CRX. Since then it had reverberated in my mind, steadily acquiring a sexual overtone, but this newcomer somehow didn’t prompt sexual thoughts. He wasn’t exactly beautiful, but his looks had the unreal quality that often goes with beauty. He asked if he could sit with me a bit. I said he should suit himself, and we exchanged names. His was Colin Moulton. He lived on B staircase.

Small talk could get us only so far. When he had said, ‘What are you reading?’ and I had said Languages, and I had asked him back (he was an engineer), there was nowhere much to go conversationally. There was no point in pretending that these disciplines reached out strong hands of greeting to each other.

We sat in silence, which I found very soothing. The world might not be rolling on the dishonoured carpet just yet, but it was sitting with me in companionable silence. Finally Colin asked, ‘Shall we pray together?’ It turned out that this visitor wasn’t an answer to prayer after all — he was a summons to it instead. And with that the whole event went prayer-shaped.

Foolishly I avoided conflict by saying that my body did not permit kneeling, instead of coming out honestly with ‘Not today, thank you.’ As a result I received a long lecture on the unimportance of physical posture since God knew what was in my heart. I was exasperated to be proselytised by someone who only lived on the next staircase — I know I can be a bit fussy about mobility and its obligations, but does it really count as missionary work if you’re still under the same roof as when you started out?

Fat drops of grace upon his tongue

I couldn’t help noticing, all the same, that Colin Moulton wasn’t as sure of himself as a man who intends to make converts needs to be. He didn’t use set prayers, and this may have been a matter of pride with his sect, to speak to God without a script, but he fumbled badly in his choice of words. ‘God, whose eye is on the sparrow and the hawk, God who heareth the lion and the lamb … we thy unworthy …’ His voice trailed away. He had none of the professionalism I remembered from the travelling Billy Graham spectacular I had attended as a teenager, where the acolytes had the brimstone verses ready marked up in red. He was making it up as he went along, and eloquence wasn’t raining down in fat drops of grace upon his tongue.