VOYAGINGS

Ireland, Japan, India

by
Ciaran Murray

Castle Quarter Press

Zuisenji, Kamakura

Ireland shifts in focus as it vanishes sternward, then reappears from unexpected angles as one negotiates the farther destinations. Japan provides serendipitous perspectives, but requires India to complete them; the course as a whole thus describing a spiral.

IRELAND

Enamelled Sea ‘”We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves”. “Each below his stone with name in branching Ogham And the sacred knot thereon”. “Nothing is whole that could be broke; nothing Remains to us of all that was our own”. “Sailing home together, from the last great fight, Home to Clare from Fontenoy, in the morning light”. “For in far foreign fields, from Dunkirk to Belgrade, Lie the soldiers and chiefs of the Irish Brigade”. “I alone am left of my name and race; I will go to Wexford and take their place”. “He shall not hear the bittern cry In the wild sky, where he is lain”. “This song is secret. Mine ear it passed In a wind o’er the plains at Athenry”. “A parrot sways upon a tree, Raging at his own image in the enamelled sea’. “You who have never known The heart set wild with a word”. “There are two in this house tonight Whose eyes do not hide their secret”. “Ask not that ghost to ghost shall go, Essence in essence merge and cease”. “I little thought that night Our ties of love would ever loosen”. “And fallen petals lie wind-blown, Unswept upon the courtyard stone”. “Deep-red the bracken, its shape all gone – The wild-goose has raised his wonted cry”. “Burning as ripened rowan berries Through the white winter air”. “A city with its men and books, With treasures open to the wise”. “Fearsome the forms he courts me in, Myriad and strange the arts he plies”. “A ship of gold under a silver mast… And a fine white court by the side of the sea”. “And love the goal for which we start More than the tale of what has been”’.

Caesar’s Day of Crisis ‘Held upright between sheets of glass in a museum above the wooded gorges of Luxembourg is a coin that calls up, fresh and clear, what was already ancient history when Shakespeare alluded to it: “That day he overcame the Nervii”… What ended on that day and the days that followed was, not a polar opposition between the classical and the Celtic societies, but centuries of creative interaction: which can be followed as it occurred through the medium of coinage; and which culminated, for Gaul, in the images of antagonists whom Caesar portrays from the other side: Vercingetorīx, leader of the resistance to him, executed in Rome in connection with his triumph, whose name is “made up of uer ‘over’, cinget- ‘warrior’ and rīx ‘king’”; and Dumnorīx, whom he had put to death when he refused to serve as a hostage, and whose name “goes into Irish as rí an domhain ‘king of the world’”. The prototypes were classical. Prominent among them were Hellenistic specimens: “the obverse depicting the head of Apollo with short hair, and the reverse, a two-horse chariot at full gallop”. In Celtic adaptations such as those of the Parisii – who, then as later, produced designs of particular sophistication – the hairstyle becomes ornamental, a pattern of spirals that predominates over the features, pushing them into a corner. Such pieces “illustrate the transformation of borrowed forms by…a complex disintegration of naturalistic Hellenistic portrayals into more characteristically abstract and ambiguous Celtic forms”. On a coin showing horse and rider from Slovakia, the “derivation is still clear, though the figure is altogether livelier”. The “riderless horse on a coin” from Austria “is much more stylised and abstract; the mane becomes pattern only”: a series of pointillistic dots. In examples from Switzerland, horse and rider alike have been transformed from a prototype resembling an equestrian statue into sequences, again, of stylised dots, clustering into an expression of the animal’s inherent energy: as with – to move to Britain – the White Horse cut into the chalk of the hillside at Uffington’.

Cricket without a Bat ‘One night when I came upstairs, the bar was shuttered, and there wasn’t a drink in sight. One group was standing around a dart board; others sat at the tables, intent on games like chess. It looked for once like the social club it was supposed to be. “Sit down”, hissed a colleague; “it’s a raid”. Sure enough, there was a policeman in the centre of the room, writing down what he saw in a notebook… The policeman read aloud slowly as he pencilled in the last of his report: “…no…sign…of alcoholic beverages…being consumed…on the premises”. Then he folded the notebook, replaced it in his breast pocket, and addressed the barman: “I’ll have a pint”’.

Osiris in Ireland. ‘In keeping with the Janus heads of Roman coins, the Celtic have figures with two heads or faces. And sometimes they have three: the latter expressing a persistent religious, mythological and iconographic motif. In the Celtic context, states Miranda Green, the number three transcended all other replications... “A three-faced image…is unreal and therefore supra-natural”. However, there are coin images which body forth a multiplicity and a mystery transcending even these. Writes Robert Van Arsdell: “A hidden face on an ancient British stater has eluded numismatists for two hundred years…and it took me only seven years of owning one of them to see it. Celtic artists liked to hide faces on their artwork. They had a fine appreciation for the surreal. They loved now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t images. The art tied in with their religion. Things are not what they seem”. On one coin you will find, between two realistic profiles back to back, and combining the single eye of each, a third face, uncanny… These miniature icons, then, suggest an entire psychological world: below the surface text a subverting subtext; and, within and intertwined with and beyond both, the inexplicable. It is as if their only law was anomaly; and then, out of apparent chaos, comes a glimpse of the mystery of things’.

The Man Behan Knew ‘The last time I saw him, I was back on a visit from Japan. When I ran into him at the office and he invited me over to Bewley’s, I was puzzled. Bewley’s served teas such as Earl Grey and Lapsang Souchong... I was still more surprised when he insisted on treating me. It must have shown, because he told me that Trinity College had engaged him for a series of lectures on jazz, and he was in funds. He smiled. “I was hoping to catch you while you were in town”’.

Secret Agent ‘However, even when things were what they seemed, or seemed to be what they seemed, they could be equally unreal. It was the age of the youth movement, when the air held an exhilarating certainty that anything was possible, and it did not seem strange to take off on impulse for places like India or Japan. Intimate relationships had become informal; establishments were on the defensive. The pub was a gathering-place for subversives of all kinds, from purveyors of pot to opponents of the opium of the people. So that when, among the glasses hued like ebony or oak, one stood out in flaming orange, the story went that it belonged to a government spy prohibited by regulations from drinking on duty. This sounded too good to be true: until the morning I was seated at the next table when one of the regulars, and so presumably a subversive of one kind or other, stopped in front; and something like the following dialogue ensued. Subversive: “How are things up at the Castle?” – Dublin Castle being the headquarters of the Irish secret service – Spy: ”Oh grand, grand. Can’t complain”. Subversive: “Give me best to the missis”. Spy: “I will indeed”’.

The Last Etruscan ‘Peter…had…been in charge the night the prime minister sacked some of his cabinet… To blunt the impact of this revelation, a member of his parliamentary party was sent with a minimal handout to each of the major newspaper offices at 1:00 in the morning. It was known that the country editions went out at 1:30, so there was just time to put it in a box on the back page. That would make it look like a minor episode; and by the next issue it would no longer be news. It was also known that only enough people were kept on for the city editions to supervise its transfer to the front page. There would be no time for any digging. It was a very clever piece of news manipulation. Or would have been, except for Peter. Peter got on the phone, called up the editor and all the relevant reporters, and soon the place was frantic with the clack of typewriters. By 4:00, when the city edition came out, there was a new front page and new inside comment, including an editorial. But we continued working until 6:00, and the last edition for the city centre. Peter drove me to the television station at Donnybrook, where I left in a copy; then to the markets on the north side, where the pubs opened early. We were watching the morning news programmes in one of them when a bemused reader noted that, while the other papers printed the official handout on what became known as the Arms Crisis, ours carried in-depth commentary. It was one of the moments journalists live for: we had called the government to account, and incidentally scooped the opposition’.

Looking-Glass Landscapes. ‘Muireann Ní Bhrolcháin is known world-wide as the leader of an impassioned protest against the state-sponsored vandalising of Tara, sacred centre of the kingship of Ireland, on pretexts that made no sense even in the terms alleged by its perpetrators: who seemed, writes Fintan O’Toole, “to take a perverse pleasure in rejecting alternative routes... The sheer glee with which this was done was a symptom of a deeply neurotic kind of temporal arrogance. Nothing mattered except now”. Some may have thought that because they were cynical they must be clever; or because cunning, competent; but the subsequent economic collapse saw the yokel strut replaced by a run for cover, with abject pleas for understanding to the people whose present and future had been compromised with their past… However, those who lose their centre can scarcely be expected to show soundness anywhere else. Myth is not about what happened; it is about what happens. It tells of archetypal situations and their inevitable consequences. The counterpart of Conaire, king of Tara, in Joyce’s version of the tale (“The Dead”), loses a metaphorical kingdom: the imagined place he holds in the affections of his wife. In the original version, related by Ní Bhrolcháin, he loses a literal kingdom: because, though he may not be personally corrupt, he allows his cronies to plunder the land at the expense of his people: “Everyone should kill his son; my foster brothers shall be saved”. Who will say that this tale has nothing to tell us? Over against this image is its positive counterpart, again described by the author. Cormac, also king of Tara, returns from the otherworld with “a golden goblet that will tell the difference between truth and falsity; three lies will break it, and three truths will unite it… The goblet is the reason for Cormac’s mission; it is the physical proof of his ability to give good judgements, and it reinvigorates his prince’s truth”. Ní Bhrolcháin devotes a chapter to the governing myth of Tara: that the ruler enters into a sacred marriage to the land in the person of the goddess of its sovereignty, with authority thereby rooted in the otherworld – if you like, integrity or imagination – and that it flows reciprocally between that reality and this, the land flourishing when reverenced and when outraged laid waste: a living relationship we ignore at our peril’.

Submarine Serenade. ‘There was the night in World War II when he was arrested by a policeman for playing his clarinet on Sandymount Strand. The constable was newly arrived from the country, presumably a part of it where such doings were unknown, and the only explanation he could think of was that Hoddy was passing coded signals to a German submarine. So he entered the clarinet as evidence, and clapped the culprit in a cell. Next morning, he expounded his theory to the sergeant, and displayed his catch. “German spy me arse”, said the sergeant; “It’s Hoddy! Get that fella outa here”’.

Light in the Castle of the Grail. ‘It is at this point that he is accorded a vision of the Grail, ‘of pure gold and richly set with precious stones, from which streams such a brilliant light that the lustre of the candles is dimmed’. Here also, however, he is initially at a loss, in his failure to ask the question about its significance which would have released its hidden power. That this, too, Perceval will in the end accomplish, Emma Jung sees prefigured in his name as “pierce the valley”, finding here the implication that “the hero was destined to penetrate the dark valley of the unconscious”. His quest is for the Self, the “psychic totality of the human being which transcends consciousness and underlies the process of individuation and which gradually becomes conscious in the course of this process…thus leading to a widening of the continually changing horizon of awareness”’.

Celtic Cross ‘I continued along the river to the lakeshore, and got off at an insignificant station. Snow was falling as I made my way to the house that Jung built to express himself. But when I arrived at the avenue leading up to it, I saw that the snowdrifts under the shadowy trees had lain undisturbed for some time. There could be no-one inside; and it struck me that this was the message. The core of Jung’s work is that there is a unique path to the centre for everyone, and that no following in the footsteps of others will lead to it. It is there, in brightness as of snow, or darkness as under the shade of trees, untrodden.’

Dream of the Dim Professor ‘That Perceval is not alone in failing to apprehend the significance of the quest is intimated in a dream recorded by Carl Jung: “I understood that this was the castle of the Grail, and that this evening there would be a ‘celebration of the Grail’ here. This information seemed to be of a secret character, for a German professor among us…knew nothing about it. I talked most animatedly with him, and was impressed by his learning and sparkling intelligence. Only one thing disturbed me: he spoke constantly about a dead past and lectured very learnedly on the relationship of the British to the French sources of the Grail story. Apparently he was not conscious of the meaning of the legend, nor of its living presentness… he behaved as though he were in a classroom, lecturing to his students… He did not see the stairs or the festive glow in the hall”. He has expanded on the type elsewhere: “Struggle as I may to give an objective orientation to my train of thought, I cannot shut out the parallel subjective process… without extinguishing the very spark of life… When objective data predominate over thinking to any great extent, thinking is sterilised… I do not mean ‘reflection’, but a purely imitative thinking which affirms nothing beyond what was visibly and immediately present in the objective data in the first place… The materialistic mentality is an instructive example… This type of man elevates objective reality, or an objectively oriented intellectual formula, into the ruling principle not only for himself but for his whole environment… for their own good, everybody around him must obey it too, for whoever refuses to obey it is wrong – he is resisting the universal law, and is therefore unreasonable, immoral, and without a conscience… the more rigid the formula, the more he develops into a martinet, a quibbler, and a prig… The fact that an intellectual formula never has been and never will be devised which could embrace and express the manifold possibilities of life must lead to the inhibition or exclusion of…all those activities that are dependent on feeling… If the repression is successful, the subliminal feeling then functions in a way that is opposed to the conscious aims… Anything new that is not already contained in his formula is seen through a veil of unconscious hatred and condemned accordingly… The dogmatism of the intellectual formula…even supplants that general view of life we call religion”. Ultimately impotent, a Fisher King of the intellect, he is consumed by vanity and arrogance. Endlessly professing his admiration for others, he somehow contrives to mention what may be calculated to discredit them. Endlessly professing his own unworthiness, he nevertheless puts forward arguments which represent him as the only reliable authority on his subject. But the same vanity over what he thinks he knows will sooner or later tempt him into pretensions over what he does not, and he will perpetrate blunders ghastlier by far than those he spends so much time hunting down in others. And the same arrogance which led him to choose his targets on the basis of whether they could be attacked with impunity will sooner or later tempt him to override all caution and jump on the wrong person: the one who will see through him. But nemesis works most effectively from within. He mistakes obsession with the surface of his subject for understanding in depth: blinded by what he regards as the inadequacy of others, he fails to see his own. The life of things inevitably evades those who would anatomise it. And so we get those dead books, repositories of knowledge he is incapable of shaping in accordance with myth or significant story. He is never more than a compiler. Even when his avowed topic is the spirituality of his subject, he fails to get beyond a materialist assemblage of facts unrelated by any feeling for its numinosity. Inescapably banal, whatever he touches turns to a handful of dust. Sterile in himself, he lays waste the land for which he is responsible’.

JAPAN

One Lion Only. ‘When I saw it at Brussels airport, it seemed a sign. Back in Dublin, Hesse had been something of a preoccupation; and here was a book of his I had not seen there: The Journey to the East. Though you could say that it was too late to learn from it, since that was what I was already on; and, through the kindness of a newspaper colleague, I had been given an affordable route that zigzagged through Brussels, Bucharest, Baghdad, Bombay and Bangkok… A poem of Hesse’s describing a visit to Ravenna might also be regarded as a kind of journey to the east: since this was the capital in Italy of the eastern empire, ‘the great imperial city, full of all the strange wonder of Byzantium’. For the poet, initially, it holds nothing but the moribund and the melancholy; but when he intuits an analogue for its opulent stillness, then suddenly, out of the body of this death, blossoms intimate epiphany. Oh yes, I too have lingered at / – ruins, and churches in decay – / Ravenna: that stagnant little town / of which books have so much to say. // Faltering on past overgrowth / of moss and grass, the pilgrim hears, / amid the damp and muddy streets, / the silence of a thousand years. // It’s like when people listen to / old songs, and you will hear no sound / of laughter; but they sink within / themselves until the night comes round’.

The Long Way Home. ‘There is always a sense of the incongruous. You get it when you visit the apartment building in Zürich where Joyce lived and wrote. It is modern, faceless, antiseptic: difficult to believe that it was here he dreamt his dreams of a mythic, personality-ridden, odoriferous Dublin. You get it again at Sankt Gallen: the cloud-like rococo library in white and gold, and in the middle the insular scribings out of which the rest of it grew, and in which you touch the soil from which the pilgrim sprang a thousand years ago. And you get it at Matsue, in the wooden walls of the Japanese house worn paper-thin by the years, with its melancholy garden and its memorial hall… here, leaning over a showcase containing his seal, I had a shock of recognition. He had had his name engraved upon it in the Japanese phonetic syllabary. Nowadays, this is rendered Haan (ハーン): “Hearn” in a British accent. But what he called himself was Herun (ヘルン): two syllables, with a rolling of the “r”. It is an Irish voice, a voice that has resisted blandness and assimilation. There is no contradiction here: one is never more Irish than as a scottus peregrinus’.

Ebb Tide. ‘This drama reaches its audience by keeping its distance from it. The actors do not acknowledge applause. Around the stage is a border of white gravel, symbolising water: the audience has no more right to participate in the events on stage than it has to enter a sanctuary. This reaches back to the religious origins of Noh. The earliest of the plays tells the story of the Kasuga Shrine at Nara, the ancient capital, and the sacred pine-tree of this shrine is painted on the back of every Noh stage. The plays, then, were performed as religious rituals, and the resulting deliberation intensifies every move. The exact qualities of a mask under the lights may be a matter for connoisseurs; but one can be bowled over by the final mimetic dance at one’s first performance. In one play, this is a fight between a priest and the ghost of a jealous woman: behind the actors a drummer works his arms into a rhythmic crescendo before they actually descend on the big drum. In another, a drowned sailor re-enacts his death before the man who murdered him. He holds a thin bamboo in both hands while he dances: but what he makes you see is a body caught and swaying in the currents of an ebb tide’.

Getting There from Here. ‘And so she set out on the shifting and shimmering path between Belfast and Babylon. For this was the provocative title she gave to her city of the imagination. Provocative in terms of her religious affiliation, in which Babylon was the secular city, set over against the Jerusalem of the spirit, and identified in later centuries with Rome. Yet Waddell preferred to see it in terms of the rhyme in which it is reached by candlelight, the subtle illumination of the unconscious. What troubled her about her own antecedents, though she remained true to them all her life, was their puritanism; and the aesthetic dimension she missed there she found in another tradition. “The Middle Ages”, she declared, “are the Babylon of the religious heart”. So it was that her reliving them fulfilled her two most urgent needs: her need for ultimate meaning and her need for beauty’.

Alphabetic Discrimination. ‘André Kawada, in a moving memoir of his grandfather, tells of how, at the end of the Edo period, the latter set out for the shipyards of Glasgow, and there fell in love with a young Scotswoman whom, tragically, he was not allowed to marry. Her – Jeanie’s – letters to him – Ryōkichi – have survived; and…a…glance through this volume reveals a predilection for, in fact a positive discrimination in favour of, a single letter of the alphabet. It starts when, having missed a meeting with him, she writes: “XXXXX instead of last Saturday”; and goes on through “special” (in return for a locket with his portrait) to “real kissies”, meaning she has touched the paper with her lips and smudged the ink. They are circled, disposed in the shape of a heart, or grouped into lines and squadrons; they range from a handful to over a hundred. In their prodigality they recall certain poems of Catullus, such as that in which he likens the number of kisses he desires to the sands around a desert place of pilgrimage, or pinpoints of light when the night holds its breath’.

Arthur and the Dragon. ‘It was in a London bookshop, since closed down, that I came across Arthur. It was a place with a bare wooden floor on which footsteps echoed, and stairs to an overflowing basement; but the more valuable items were on shelves behind the counter, and it was here that the owner located the title I had been looking for. A quick glance at the volume suggested that its previous owner was an Arthur someone-or-other. I had been searching for the book after seeing a film based on one of its episodes. The film was A Summer Story, which opens on an image of wild horses galloping over Dartmoor in bright sunlight. My own experience had been of them drifting in and out of mist, though it was summer then also. But the summer of the story is an idyllic season, seen in retrospect: “a wild sweet time”. So it is described in its source, “The Apple Tree” by John Galsworthy, the book I found it in being his collection Caravan… Siegfried Sassoon recalled…: “Galsworthy…was essentially modest and unegotistical”. The kind of person, indeed, who would speak of himself in the third person, and who would refrain from inscribing his name even on a book of stories he himself had written. For this is the secret of the volume I picked up in London: that what had seemed on a cursory glance to be something like “Arthur Cope”, when looked at more closely resolved itself into “Author’s Copy”’.

A Case of Identity. To the Japan Times: ‘I was most interested to learn that the place I knew as the land of Joyce and Yeats was so largely given over to leprechauns. But I am afraid the writer flatters St. Patrick by making him English. He was British at a time when this meant Celtic. The people later known as English were still – I don’t quite know how to break this – Continentals’.

Vampire as Victim. ‘Amy followed a similar pattern, which in time brought her alone to Ceylon. Not that it changed anything radically: when she sailed to Asia, it was to British Asia that she came, to what is described as an “aristocratic and autocratic milieu”; and here, effortlessly, she took up the threads of her privileged existence at home… For all her professed happiness in Ceylon, Amy moved on after a few months to Japan, perhaps because, in words later attributed to her, “the horizon attracts me”. This country had in any case been her original destination, ever since she had read a book by Lafcadio Hearn… Nothing, however, is known of her visit here except that she docked at Yokohama, went on to Kyoto, and sent “lovely things” home. From here, with an unnamed “friend”, she continued through Korea to China, then circled back to Ceylon… Daphne Gaskell is remembered as a formidable if dotty old lady who held up her skirts by the fire for half an hour after meals with the claim that it aided her digestion, and cycled in the rain to save her car from getting wet. But why should she care what anyone thought? She had lost everything long before. Having lived in the shadow of the glamorous Amy, she had found at last, as it seemed, ecstasy: “mad with joy” was how she described herself, tempted to stop people in the road to tell them of her happiness. When her soldier husband was abroad, her hunger for him was painful, with a repeated “I want him” at the end of diary pages. Then he is home for a few weeks, and they steal an hour or two in hotels or in the woods, out of which she becomes pregnant. A few weeks more, and he is killed in action; and it is months before she can bring herself to unpack his effects. When she does so, it is to the horrific discovery that his belt is still stained with his blood. Worse, if possible, follows. She finds the keys to locked diaries which confirm that he too had been hopelessly in love with her sister, now dead as well; and she surrenders him in spirit as in body.’

Rocky Road. ‘The Farrers were considered good landlords – that is to say, benevolent despots. The mere appearance of questioning an order by a worker on their estate could lead to immediate dismissal, simultaneously from job and the house that went with it. Farrer’s mother was thought of as kindly, feeding the ill and clothing the poor – who were, however, expected to show a becoming deference. “Woe betide…any man or boy who did not doff his cap as she passed”. Absence from church on Sunday resulted in an inquisitorial visit to one’s home. So that Farrer did not merely question a system of religious belief, he questioned a social order of feudal obligation and privilege, when he breezed about the village in his robes from Asia. There were further forays to this part of the world: strenuous and perilous expeditions to China, Tibet and Burma, always in pursuit of his beloved plants. On the last, after months of incessant rain at high altitudes, Farrer took ill and died; and there he lies buried. Of his more intimate experiences, it seems unlikely we shall ever know more, for much the same reason as operated in the case of Amy Gaskell. His diaries, to which he had referred confidently as the greatest of English autobiographies, were cut up with scissors by his mother’.

Of Hadrian and Hong Kong. ‘Clementi’s edition of the Pervigilium Veneris contains reproductions of the manuscripts, together with his collation of the two. He then makes the minimum of alteration – emendations already argued for by other scholars, and printed red in this edition – and comes up with a text both structured and coherent. He even reconstitutes, with great plausibility, the stages by which the errors occurred… What has any of the above to do with Asia? That Chinese records speak of envoys to their emperor from his Roman counterpart “Antoun”? Or that a medallion of Marcus Aurelius has been discovered near Saigon? Or even that one might find a very Japanese suspension of the moment in the image of the glistening raindrop “unfallen, but about to fall”?... No; simply that this splendid edition of a European classic was compiled at Hong Kong, of which Sir Cecil Clementi was Governor. He had been born in India to an officer of Bengal cavalry, and at Oxford distinguished himself in Sanskrit, Latin and Greek. But he was no mere peruser of the past. He acquired both Mandarin and Cantonese, established a school of Chinese literature and philosophy at Hong Kong University, and advocated alliance with Japan as essential to the peace of Asia. He worked for the federation and independence of the Malay states, and died a few months too early to witness that of India’.

Replacing a Signpost. ‘Cleo McNelly Kearns, in her magisterial investigation of the subject, …concludes: “Eliot’s use of the image of the lotus at the beginning of “Burnt Norton” is deeply informed by its central place in Buddhist tradition and its close connections to shunyata: “And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight, And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly, The surface glittered out of heart of light… Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.”’.

When Heaven Was Falling. ‘When the Asiatic Society of Japan was preparing to move out of OAG Haus, the German cultural centre in Tokyo, I was asked to go through some old files stored in the basement. Discarded cabinets held drawers overflowing with routine correspondence and receipts for what had become infinitesimal sums. Hour after hour of working through these seemed to confirm the task as an exercise in garbage disposal: when suddenly, a bottom drawer disclosed treasure trove. Here lay a battered volume which not only described but embodied a crucial episode in the society’s history – indeed in Japan’s… But the most forceful reflection that came out of that battered volume was not about continuity in itself; it was about meaningful continuity. Here, from the middle of the greatest war in history, was a page of business, gravely recorded by a handful of Germans and Japanese in the language of their technical enemies, but whom they insisted on regarding as absent friends. What it embodied, it seemed to me, was that without which scholarship in itself means nothing’.

Hidden Faces. ‘Long-term members of the Asiatic Society of Japan will recall Fr. Thomas Immoos: bespectacled, soft-spoken, of wide-ranging erudition… He had visited Ireland in the year I was born, working for the Red Cross to repatriate German-speaking internees at the end of World War II; and, on a train to Cork, found himself sitting opposite a local who provided a briefing on the more lurid passages of Irish history. And this disturbed Fr. Immoos’ sense of the fitness of things: i.e., the way things fit together in Switzerland. “How”, he demanded, “can you say such things about the English and still fight for them?” Because his informant was clad in the uniform of the Royal Air Force. I see the warrior lean forward confidentially as he explains in a solemn tone: “Ah but you see, Father, the Germans were trying to do away with our enemies”’.

In the Lee of the Rising Sun. ‘The word for “doctor”, isha, was the only Japanese Aidan MacCarthy knew, and he repeated it, pointing to his Red Cross armband, on the invasion of Indonesia, when he was interned as an RAF medical officer… After their ship had been torpedoed by an American submarine, the survivors were picked up by a Japanese whaler, and desposited on the dock at Nagasaki… American air-drops provided clothing, food and medicine, including the new drug penicillin; and with this MacCarthy saved the daughter of a local police chief. “I stayed at the bedside of the young girl all night, watching and checking. As dawn broke I was rewarded by seeing the fever begin to fall”. As he continued to visit his patient daily, her parents would meet him at the front door; and, as he removed his shoes, bend down and kiss his feet’.

On the Train to Nagoya. ‘“I reckon Ireland’s a lot like Texas”. “???” “The kind of place that if you come from, there just never is any place else”’.

The Last Word. ‘Every year, when I travelled to Europe, I had a long list of sources to be consulted at the British Library, then housed in the British Museum… This…stayed open late in midweek. You could read your books in the morning, go out for whatever else you needed to do, and return to them in the evening. It was with the anticipation of coming back fresh to the treasures that awaited that I climbed the steps to the portico and entered the lobby, now dim and quiet since the daytime hordes of tourists had gone. And here I saw a couple that no-one could fail to recognise. They had evidently arrived for some meeting or other, and were waiting to be accompanied to it. On seeing them, a vision came to mind of finding the doors barred next morning, with a notice saying the site had been sold to developers. In the event there was a proposal to make the collection turn a profit; but this was dropped eventually, like its instigator. The two were standing by a modern statue; but, as I passed nearby, I heard a pronouncement in that unmistakable tone which admitted of no appeal. “Look, Denis”, said the lady in an iron voice, “there’s an ancient sculpture”’.

Enigma of the Russian Garden. ‘Hayden observes that the great Soviet achievement was, paradoxically, the restoration of these imperial monuments after World War II; and the present author can attest to the fact. A visitor to these stunning creations in the course of that era was…instructed with deadly – and deserved – seriousness about the woman who found, behind a fireplace in a burnt-out room, a fragment of Chinese silk, and from this recreated the entire wall-covering, which was what we saw. The reconstitution of eighteenth-century Chinese silk hangings had become a lifetime vocation, as had the work of the man sent to Italy so that he could restore the marble fireplaces. Hayden’s is a book which matches that devotion. It contains all the detail which the garden historian may desire… But the concentration is, very properly, on the beauty of these creations: a beauty brought out in the photographs, from the blue shadows, matching the tone of the palace, of trees on the snow at Tsarskoe Selo to a subtle symphony in which the greys and browns of birches, again in the snow, frame a vision of the pale yellow palace at Pavlovsk’.

Keeper of Souls. ‘The result was electrifying: “The first evening when Margot and Rudolf did Giselle together was a magical evening which I think nobody who saw it could ever forget”… “What we were watching was a kind of seduction… She responded to his advances – which is what they were – with a tremendous quiver of excitement which we all felt in the theatre”… “Gazing down at him for a long time as if transfixed by his beauty, Margot then half-swooned when he recovered, and he carried her forward, his face brushing against hers. At the climax, when she cradled his face in her arms, a quick intake of breath was heard”… “As the two stars of the evening came out to take their bow, a roaring was heard from above and was gradually caught by all those other and more expensive and usually less demonstrative parts of the house”... Nureyev’s combination of “Tartar…faun, and a kind of lost urchin” went on to become an icon of the time, as surely as Jacqueline du Pré tossing her long hair above the cello, or bearded hippies swaying to Tchaikovsky in the Albert Hall’.

Date for a Goddess. ‘Istanbul, the one-time Byzantium, spans the two continents; and, as you wander down the waters that divide them, and the light glances and dances off the waves of the Dardanelles, a line of Vergil may surface from the distant depths of schooldays: O lux Dardaniae, spes o fidissima Teucrum. Aeneas’ address to the spirit of Hector, killed before Troy. And tomorrow we were to go there… I woke to the sound of waves. At least I thought I did, and wondered if we were about to be carried off in some sudden flood: it seemed so terribly close. But it turned out to be the trees, soughing and crashing in a storm. This was still going on when we reached Troy. The guide buttoned up his windcheater as he stepped off the coach, and I took advantage of his distraction to slip away. It was not a place for talk. And the day was ideal for the place. A weak sun struggled behind the overcast, the ghostliness of the light intensified by the unceasing strife of the gale. And that was just as Homer had described it: in my favourite translation of the Iliad, “windhammered”. Walking about in that shadowed turbulence, by tower and rampart, past citadel and gate, it was easy to understand why it was thought to be haunted by the events believed to have happened there. One could fancy that one knew where Helen stood, or Hector fought, or the fateful horse went in’.

In Search of Suleika. ‘Our town lacked a dedicated record shop; but an enterprising electrician, who worked from a Georgian house set back from its neighbours, had adorned the blank wall along the approach to it with a long showcase. And there, amid the hits that have long since missed, appeared the name I sought. It was a recital of lieder to do with Goethe, which has since become available on CD; but at that time you had a choice between the long-playing record (LP) and extended play (EP). You had to be careful to set the player properly – 33⅓ revolutions per minute for an LP, 45 for an EP – otherwise you got gobbledegook or Boris Karloff. This one was merely extended play, a handful of settings by Schubert, one of them titled “Suleika” (Arabic Zulaikha, “beautiful, brilliant”, the passionate lover of Islamic tradition invoked by Hafiz). This was the first of his two Lieder of that name: the one that begins: “What betokens this disturbance?’ (Was bedeutet die Bewegung?); and one did not need to know that Brahms thought it the loveliest song ever written to realise that something extraordinary was going on: a conviction undimmed by the passage of half a century. So now I was looking for the locus of the poem of which it was the setting, the place to which Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Marianne von Willemer came in the autumn after Waterloo. The gingko by which they met had long since gone; but its site…was marked by another of the same species… That that was so was indicated…by an inscription on the wall opposite. In the first of Schubert’s Suleika songs, the rhythm of the carriage-wheels taking the poet to her beloved rises to a climax on the word describing her destination: “there”, dort; a word the composer intensifies by repetition. “There” is here: “where lofty walls are glowing”. Dort wo hohe Mauern glühen. Straight ahead stand the walls of Heidelberg Castle: the afternoon light that strikes them from over the hill behind casts the valley below into shadow, its warmth absorbed and reflected by the rose tinge of their sandstone; glühen, then, is exact: the obsessive memory of an unforgettable occurrence. Where the first of the Suleika songs is frantic in the throes of possession, the second (Ach! um deine feuchten Schwingen) is hushed before the autocracy of love. Echoing the theme of the book in which they occur, the first hymns the east wind, the second the west: the first the dawn of anticipation, the second the dusk of parting. In the first, the final stanza is given three times, the last time incompletely, as excitement subsides into gentler longing, almost into somnolence. However, the repeated hammering of the piano underscores the singer’s insistence that reawakened life can come only from her lover. This pattern is reiterated in the second of the songs; though here it is not the last line which is sung over and over, but the third-last, that which states her feelings most explicitly: “his love is my life”. Seine Liebe sei mein Leben… These…two poems by von Willemer, together with that by Goethe on the gingko-tree, appear in the West-östlicher Divan. It might be imagined, then, that all three could be taken as dramatic projection rather than personal statement; of fiction rather than fact: that what is spoken of here is the love, not of Goethe and von Willemer, but of Hatem and Suleika. However, there is a fourth poem which, like the other three and forming a unity with them, is centred around the gingko-tree, the western and eastern synthesis of which it recapitulates. Yet it is unlike the others in that its application to the personal lives of its protagonists is indisputable. Von Willemer addressed it to Goethe years afterwards, recalling their encounter and specific about its locale. Das Heidelberger Schloß. And it is lines from this that are inscribed on the wall by the tree. They conclude: Hier war ich glücklich, liebend und geliebt. “Here was I blessèd, loving and beloved”’.

Heart Sutra at Hanging Rock. ‘Weir conveys the mystery of the tale through means other than those of the novel. The nearest he comes to explicit statement is the opening quotation from Poe: “What we see, and what we seem, are but a dream. A dream within a dream…” Otherwise, he prefers suggestion: as with the exquisite cinematography, which captures the strange atmosphere you sense on the Rock, caught in the somnolent hush of a summer’s day; or the gradual approach of the theme from Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, that trancelike movement of which the tempo is stipulated as “deliberate, barely in motion” – adagio un poco mòsso – in which sound is just on the near side of silence. In the early morning at Daisen-in, light falls gold through the trees. Oblique, it models the twin cones into miniature mountains, pointing up the ridges of the gravel I have just shaped. When I appeared, the monk gestured to me to jump in, handing over a large wooden rake and showing how to wield it: if you ease backwards at a slow run, you get lines with motion in their stillness. Adagio un poco mòsso. The garden at Zuisenji is a cave in a cliff behind a pool. On its surface – as in a glass, darkly – the void quivers. A dream within a dream’.

INDIA

Tipperary Rajah. ‘In his ground-breaking volume White Mughals, which restored to mainstream history those Europeans – including ancestors of his own – who allied themselves with Indians before this became a form of social suicide, William Dalrymple speaks in passing of George Thomas, alias the Rajah from Tipperary. Thomas was born on a farm in the vicinity of Roscrea, a town notable for a square castle, a round tower, an ancient monastery and an illuminated gospel-book; arrived in India as a sailor; deserted; fought for the local rulers, and then became one: in which capacity, he “built himself a palace, minted his own coins and collected about him a harem… though Thomas was uneducated ‘he spoke, wrote and read the Hindoostany and Persian languages with uncommon fluency and precision’; indeed his Anglo-Indian son, Jan Thomas, became a celebrated Urdu poet”… There could be no place in the Governor-General’s “new British India” for a soldier of fortune, or for such a career as George Thomas had enjoyed. As for any ultimate significance in that career, one recalls Schiller on Wallenstein: Ein ruheloser Marsch war unser Leben, Und wie des Windes Sausen, heimatlos, Durchstürmten wir die kriegbewegte Erde. In the version by Coleridge: “Yea, our whole life was but one restless march; and homeless, as the stirring wind, we travelled O’er the war-wasted earth”’.

Shampoo for the Duke. ‘Dean Mahomed was a contemporary of George Thomas, and moved to Ireland at about the time the latter moved to India. He served in the Bengal Army of the East India Company, in the course of which he was stationed at Bahrampur, where Thomas’ adventures were to come to an end. His superior and patron was…an Anglo- Irishman from Cork; and, when the latter returned to his native city, Mahomed accompanied him… Of his wife, little is known beyond the record of their marriage in the Church of Ireland which lists her name as Jane Daly, and the advertisements which identify her as Mahomed’s partner in the…Indian restaurant, of which today he is regarded as the pioneer. A plaque, I understood, marked the site of his establishment at no. 34, George Street, Portman Square; but this was not easy to locate. The staff of the Japanese restaurant at the present no. 34 knew nothing of it; nor, when they helpfully enquired of their customers, did any of these. Further research indicated that Mahomed’s 34 was the present 102, and back we went. But still there was nothing to be seen: at least not on the exterior of the building, where one might reasonably have expected to find the plaque. Closer examination, however, revealed it in an entrance-hall, behind a glass door that reflects a delusive image of the Georgian houses across the way’.

Sound over Silence. ‘When Michael Kelly…informs us that Mozart’s favourite number in Figaro was the sextet in which the stuttering lawyer, Don Curzio, has a role – a role Kelly himself created – the statement is not inherently improbable: it is the scene in which, with true operatic plausibility, Figaro discovers his long-lost parents, and the varying reactions this provokes are woven into heart-easing melody. As well as singing songs, Kelly composed them; and he was greatly flattered when Mozart wrote a set of variations on one of these. However, when Kelly asked if he ought to study counterpoint, Mozart was vehement in opposition: taken up in later life, this might affect the spontaneity of his lyrical gift. It is what one might expect from that empathy with the deepest emotions expressed by the composer of Non piu de’ fiori and Soave si al vento, of Dalla sua pace and Deh vieni non tardar. Mozart’s great cathedrals of sound, then, however elaborate their structure, and whatever shiftings of light they modulate, are oriented to the spirit which breathes where it will. For this there is further evidence in something else he said to Kelly: “Who knows most, knows least”. The phrase is cited as an Italian proverb; but it might just as well have come from a Zen parable, or the Upanishads’.

Lotus and Papyrus. ‘It is a land of quiet rivers, their banks overhung by coconut palms. When you reach the seashore, the defining image is of the cantilevered nets that lean out over the water like giant webs, in a design attributed to the Chinese. These were not the only people to have left traces of their impact. The classical interaction with India is amply documented, from Tamil text to Catullan lyric; and here, near Kochi, the former Cochin, excavation has found physical evidence – Roman pottery, glass and cameo blanks – of trade with the Mediterranean. However, indications of a deeper influence have been uncovered…nothing less than the survival in India of the mysteries of Isis and Osiris. The tale is familiar through Plutarch, who…was himself an Osirian initiate: how Osiris was dismembered, how Isis searched for the fragments, reintegrating them long enough for him to make her conceive, and how he reigned as lord of the underworld… Is it the case, then, that, long after the rituals of Isis were finally discontinued at the island temple of Philae, their only living witness is in India? Not quite. In the account by Plutarch, together with that by Apuleius describing the mysteries, the myth lived on inert… It comes to life again in Mozart, …who, in Die Zauberflöte, enables one to feel as if one stood once more amid columns in the form of papyrus or of lotus – closing its flowers at evening and opening them in the morning, thus emblematic of death and rebirth – a witness to the liturgy of antiquity… Through multiple sources, obscure rewritings and confused interpretations – every sort of muddying – he brings these deities out of the shadows in the succession of great hymns which punctuate, underline and indeed constitute the deep meaning of the story; as in that which implores Isis and Osiris to confer their insight on his young initiates… And these divinities are credited with the power to bestow steadiness of purpose amid the perils of the path… Here, on behalf of the “wanderer”, is the invocation of Isis Pelagia: who, by virtue of her own wanderings in search of her husband, was patron of wayfarers; and of that husband who, as lord of the underworld, was guide to the individual spirit, psychopomp: “a god whose knowledge of darkness carries us gently through the night”. In the awestruck O Isis und Osiris, welche Wonne!, the gloom of night is banished by the glow of the sun. Osiris had come to be identified with the solar deity: in the words of the Metternich stela, the “Great Phoenix that was born in the branches of the tree at the…House of Princes in Heliopolis”. And so, during “the nocturnal journey of the sun, the being of light and the lord of the depths met one another half way, blending into a single entity”. The Pyramid Texts declare: “Thou passest the night in the evening-barque, thou wakest in the morning-barque; for thou art he who overlooks the gods; there is no god who overlooks thee”; while the Book of the Dead propounds a formula of Indian sophistication: “I am Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, and I have the power to be born a second time; I am the divine hidden soul who created the gods”’.

On the Train from Norwich. ‘“It is because I am an Indian engineer. If I was a Japanese engineer, they would have given me the job”. “You cannot give up; you must keep trying. Remember what they say in this country: you only live once”’.

Cruel Dawn. ‘With that inclusivism which has been described as characteristic of Indian thought, an assimilation had taken place over the centuries in which local gods or goddesses came to be seen as differing manifestations of the same reality. The divinity worshipped under the aspect of form (saguna) may be male or female, a divine couple or an androgyne, but all of these are to be subsumed in the divinity which is formless (nirguna). So it is that the Great Goddess (Mahādevī) manifests herself under multiple aspects. As warrior, she can be seen as destroyer of illusion and so transcendent (Durgā, “Beyond Reach”). In her association with anger, lust, intoxication and bloody sacrifice, she represents the disintegration (Kālī, “Power of Time”) which leads to detachment. As Shakti (“Energy”), she is defined by André Padoux as “the dynamic power that manifests, animates, sustains, and finally reabsorbs the cosmic manifestation”, and her worship a harnessing of “kāma – desire – (in every sense of the word) and all of its related values” to “reach the divine, to experience it within” – “not to sacrifice this world to deliverance, but to reintegrate it somehow in the perspective of salvation”, described as “the Godhead’s taking possession of the adept…an implosion of the individual self within the Self of the deity, a fusion into cosmic energy, therefore an identification with the force that moves the universe”. As Vāc, “Speech”, the Word that was with, and that was, God in the beginning, and is, and will be in the end, she is mantra, where the sacred syllables emerge from and are absorbed into silence. And, as the process of liberation is seen as a divine coupling in the spirit of the devotee, it is hardly inappropriate that Tantra should enact it on the sacramental plane: that is to say, as a form of yoga’.

The Raj as Romantic Vision. ‘King George resolved that, unlike his father and grandmother, he would personally attend the elaborate pageant to celebrate his accession to the imperial throne. In the event, the editor of the Times of India thought it “dazzling”: …it overawed in the resplendent uniforms of its tens of thousands of troops, blazed in the gold-embroidered robes of its princes, with their “myriad hues of purple and scarlet, rose, pink, light blue and green, delicate orange or flamelike yellow”, and glittered with “the ransom of many kings in diamonds, rubies, and emeralds”. What made the spectators gasp, however, and rang through the length and breadth of the land, was the new emperor’s revelation that, not only was Bengal to be reunited, but the capital to be returned from the city associated with British rule, Calcutta, to Delhi. This, it was believed, would fire the Indian imagination. So it did… To the Hindus, it was the Indraprastha of their ancient epic Mahābhārata; to the Moslems, the Shāhjahānābād of the builder of the Taj Mahal. The result of the king’s initiative was a domed viceregal palace, set on a “stupendous platform” like Darius’ Persepolis, and the climax of such a great “processional axis” as the Champs-Élysées…Christopher Hussey noted: “The conception and proportions are classical, but of an order creatively assimilating Indian elements suited to the climate and light; for instance the polychrome Moslem tradition, expressed in the contrast of the red sandstone base with white above, and the shadow-casting Indian cornice (chujja) are integrated with the classic formula in a synthesis of East and West which is of original beauty”. To this one might add the chhattris, miniature rooftop pavilions modeled on those in the fort at Agra and Akbar’s ruined city of Fatehpur Sīkrī; while the massive dome which completes the edifice, with a stone railing round its base, is taken from that prototypical monument of Buddhism, the Great Stūpa at Sānchī… And it seems altogether fitting, in terms of the fusion of east and west, that the Durbar Hall underneath, where the viceroy once held court, should since have been occupied by a Greco-Indian Buddha from Gandhāra’.

Choreography of the Void ‘Bhairava is the aspect of Shiva – Mahādeva, the Great Lord – who, in the yogic ecstasy of his cosmic dance, destroys one world to create another, obliterates illusion to uncover reality. These seemingly paradoxical attributes are bodied forth in the radiant three-faced image of the cave at Elephanta. Writes Stella Kramrisch: “Right and left of Mahādeva’s ‘face of eternity’, the contorted virile visage of Bhairava and the dreaming femininity of Umā represent the mystery of the coexistence of the absolute together with the fundamental pair of opposites of male and female as they exist in God”. That is to say: behind the appearance of muddle lies mystery; behind that of multiplicity, a numinous void. The iconographic tradition sees, behind the three faces, a fourth, “uncarved and unmanifest”. As, at the heart of the temple of the same god as dancer, lies an empty room. Or, to unpack the meaning still further: the pairs of apparent opposites in the manifest world, represented by the faces to left and right, are united by the unmanifest bodied forth in the yogic bliss of the central image, by which they too are infected. “Gazing with a deep and everlasting rapture”, declares Heinrich Zimmer, “they are imbued with the secret knowledge that, though seemingly two, they are fundamentally one. For the sake of the universe and its creatures, the Absolute has apparently unfolded into this duality, and out of them derive all the life polarities, antagonisms, distinctions of powers and elements, that characterise the phenomenal world”’.

Gate of Heaven. ‘Said the ancient warrior: “Bhisma and Drona are noble and ancient, worthy of the deepest reverence. How can I greet them with arrows, in battle?... Which will be worse, to win this war, or to lose it?” In the death-cell, the rebel was possessed of like melancholy. But the elegy he was writing was not for himself. Sunset, or the ebb of the tide, awaited all living things: it was the world itself that was condemned. “…These will pass, Will pass and change, will die and be no more”. It was just such melancholy that the god addressed. “Your words are wise, Arjuna, but your sorrow is for nothing. The truly wise mourn neither for the living nor for the dead. There never was a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor any of these kings. Nor is there any future in which we shall cease to be”… Said the god: “Happy are the warriors to whom a battle such as this comes: it opens a door to heaven. But if you refuse to fight this righteous war, you will be turning aside from your duty… People will speak ill of you throughout the ages… Realise that pleasure and pain, gain and loss, victory and defeat, are all one and the same”. Said the rebel: “I fully understand…that my…life is forfeit… I admit that I was…General Commanding in Chief the forces of the Irish Republic which have been acting against you for the past week… We seem to have lost. We have not lost. To refuse to fight would have been to lose; to fight is to win. We have kept faith with the past, and handed on a tradition to the future”. The secret the god imparts to the warrior is to contend without animosity: “free from dualism, rooted in the real, detached, possessed of one’s soul”. It was what the rebel had said to the general: “…My aim was to win Irish freedom… I assume that I am speaking to Englishmen, who value their freedom”. And what the general said of the rebel: “I have just done one of the hardest tasks I have ever had to do. I have had to condemn to death one of the finest characters I have ever come across”’.

No Fire in Hell. ‘You walk in semi-darkness between two cliffs, guided by the light at the end. Under it sits a woman reading: for the cliffs are cliffs of books, piled up on their sides to the height of your head, and she is the owner of the narrow bookshop attached to the Hotel Connemara. When she asked why I was staying there, I said it was because of the name. What I meant was that, having spent summers under buckets of rain in the Connemara of the west of Ireland, I was intrigued by the idea of one on which the sun shone. However, her rejoinder that he treated his wife very badly put us at cross-purposes till I realised that the hotel’s name had to do with the Lord Connemara who was Governor of Madras. She pressed further on the purpose of my visit (“You must excuse me: we Indians are very inquisitive about people”; “That’s fine; it makes me feel right at home”); and, when I spoke of pilgrimage in the hinterland, slipped between the cliffs, extracting one layer of sediment which, she told me, was what I wanted to read. I tend to be sceptical of people who tell me this; but she was right. The book was The Smile of Murugan, by Michael Wood. Wood and his wife were visiting the great pilgrimage temple of Chidambaram when a woman detached herself from her group, approached and said: “This is the…golden hall of Nataraja, the place of his sacred dance. Lord Nataraja is here; he is very beautiful”. “On this spot”, comments Wood, the dance “takes place forever, to those who can see it”’.

The Labyrinth as God’s Script. ‘Meaningful space is…a feature of that very peculiar tale, “Death and the Compass”, in which a detective named Lönnrot, investigating the murder of a Talmudic scholar, finds a note reading that the first letter of the Name – the ineffable appellation of divinity – has been uttered. On the site of the second murder, a month later, a similar note is found; so also, a month after that, with the third. Each occurred at a different point of the compass, enabling Lönnrot to anticipate the time and place of the next murder. But when he arrives there, he hears from the criminal Scharlach that the first murder was an accident, the second and third staged to lure him to this lonely villa, where the fourth murder is to be his own. “In your labyrinth there are three lines too many”, he said at last. “I know of one Greek labyrinth which is a single straight line… Scharlach, when in some other incarnation you hunt me, pretend to commit (or do commit) a crime at A, then a second crime at B, eight kilometres from A, then a third crime at C, four kilometres from A and B, halfway between the two. Wait for me afterwards at D, two kilometres from A and C, again halfway between both. Kill me at D, as you are now going to kill me at Triste-le-Roy”. “The next time I kill you”, replied Scharlach, “I promise you that labyrinth, consisting of a single line which is invisible and unceasing”. The critique of a quaternary labyrinth by a unitary one, together with the reference to reincarnation, suggests that juncture in Hindu philosophy at which the principles of both labyrinths combine in the primordial syllable ŌM (ॐ). This includes both the fourfold structure of the first – the vowels merging into a diphthong, this into nasalisation and that into silence – and the movement into infinity of the second: the endurance and eventual dissolution of the word of creation into the ultimate, which is also the original, condition of divinity’.

INDIA & JAPAN & IRELAND

Dance of the Spiral. ‘When the lord of yoga passed this way in the guise of an ash-smeared beggar, he was treated with ignominy by the local priests. So he won over their wives, and they went for him in a rage. At that moment, he appeared in his glory; blinded, they bowed down before him. And then, with their backs as a floor, he commenced the cosmic dance. He danced the universe out, and he danced it back in again. In the first of four hands, he holds the drum which inaugurates it: the sound or word to which it throbs; in the second, the flame in which it will end. A third hand is raised in the gesture which says, “Fear not”; a fourth points to a foot poised serenely off the ground (the other treads down a dwarf, that contracted state in which we apprehend nothing but the visible). This is Chidambaram, from ambalam, a hall; and chit, awareness beyond intellect. The latter appears in the compound sacchidānanda: sat being transcendent reality, and ānanda the ecstasy that the awareness of it brings, and that you see on the dancing god’s face. That is, when you do see it. For the image is sequestered, and can be approached only by devotees. For passing travellers, there is but a distant glimpse; and it was among these I now stood, not daring to hope for admission to the sanctuary. But, my guide explained to the priest, I was there as a pilgrim; and I can only explain that through another story. On an earlier visit to India, I saw what one sees: the dream-like, disembodied Taj Mahal, much as Sherlock Holmes saw it in “The Treasure of the Black Taj”; dawn over the Ganges, the lights of worshippers floating out on that inland sea, silken harlots rustling on houseboats, holy men immobile in yoga postures, or brushing their teeth briskly in the unspeakable filth; or, at nearby Sarnath, where the Buddha preached the Fire Sermon, a gigantic brick stupa amid the ruins of his monastery, in its shadow the path he walked, still redolent of a gracious presence. Or a huge orange sun glimmering behind tall dark-green trees along the road past the ghost city of Fatehpur Sikri, while a priest in flame-coloured robes sang devotion to his god. It seemed a song from the dawn of the world, and I sought it for a long time; but I never did find it. You could say it found me. The quest is, or seems to be, disjunctive. Blind alleys, wrong turnings, irrelevancies: they form a pattern only in retrospect. It is like the labyrinth of dreams, where one scene shifts into another, seemingly unrelated; and, while an underlying meaning may be traced in the sequence afterwards, no conscious mind could have composed it. And so I was back as a follower of the tradition I had met as a song of the road’.