Heart Gift 1: My father’s reflections on the beauty of life
This is one of my favorite parts of a letter that my father wrote in 1978 that I just found. It reminds me of the way my father saw beauty in the world.
“Panache and fantaisie have been foremost in directing my steps across life. Fantaisie in the French sense, which stretches and enlarges on reality, rather than in the English connotation of the word which implies departure from reality. To drink deep of the bitter-sweet cup of life. To seek out its challenges and measure oneself against them. To dream its wondrous dreams. To scale its peaks. To stride through like with eyes of zest and wonder. And youth of heart. Nothing stands ‘larger than life’, for life is as large as one’s urge, vision and daring forge it.
Chase butterflies and dream and wonder. Reach out for the stars. Avec panache et fantaisie. Sunlight in my lungs, marvel in my eyes. It is in this spirit that I went up the Himalayas and thumbed my nose at the wheelchair. Years earlier, shephered Beduin goats down the broad vistas of Mesopotainian desert. And lugged an old gramophone far, far into its blistering dunes to play Beethoven’s Fifth. In loud, loud ripples of sound across far, far stretch’t ripples of crimsoned dunes. Shared a broken paving-stone for pillow with he street-dwellers of Calcutta. Burnus-wrapped in a moonless night, with gun-laden ‘Fellaghas’ slipped from Libya into French-held Tunisia, in the djebel to share their strife-torn days, wary days and quicksilver nights of tense, silent march — deadly swoop. Built up a Centre for the disabled in the heart of India. Climbed Mount Parnassus, reading aloud from Theocritus’ ‘idylls’; and drunk with the scent of thyme, laughed at the blood of my thorn-scratched legs, whooping for joy as I gazed far, far below at the marbled ruins of Delphi where Pythia had mumbled oracles.
But I don’t make myself clear. I quest not time off from life’s tedium to climb a distant mountain or sail solo the seven seas. That is but a grand fling, vain respite, brief escape. In essence no different to picking up a volume of poetry at the end of a dayful of care and chore; — and relax down its couplets. No, what I seek is not such escapades, but to live every day, each second and act of my life a poem. Heart awonder, plunge into this fount-head of mysteries glory which pervades all creation. And consecrates each Life with uniqueness, a unsullied. Not at the rainbow’s end but here and now. Infinite unfolds the panoply of life and nature, and if its vistas pall or seem hackneyed, ’tis when one’s spirit sickens, the inner eye shrinks jaded into ruts of the the habitual.
And I wake up unto mornings, mists of slumber gently stirring over consciousness. And my eye tightly closed, I tell myself:- “Now — any moment now! You shall open eyes alive to a wondrous marvel, miracle beyond ken. For the first time in all Time — any moment now!” And I catch my breath, my soul vibrant in awed anticipation. Outside a laurel. Green, green fleshy leaves holding pears of dew. Rocked by breeze into flashes of glistening light, cascading symphonies of iridescence. A maze of tawny branches stretching seeking, stretching stretching down down, up up towards the blue — blue. A thrush restless in the foliage. Inside the room a spider’s web, suspended gossamer, yet murmuring permanence in its motionless fixity, a whisper of eternity from beyond the behind of time. A shaft of sunlight, oblique across the room, lending stage to opalescent specks pirouetting down paths of whimsay. My senses aglow, my eyes wide receptacles to the wonder flooding flooding, suffusing my soul, at one at one-with the speck dancing dancing, with the lustrous leaf. Ah you, sun-dappled mite of graceful eddy. I thirst thy secrets. You, random alley of atoms, witness to Eternity in whose serried ranks beyond number you have danced the cosmic dance. You partook in that astral blast which sired this universe. Through countless avatars you transmogrified, in transient garb of sea and pumice, of beasts long extinct, of plants Pleistocene, meadow flowers and men of flesh and bone who loved, strove and yearned but to shed their lives onto the dust that pirouettes iridescent before my eyes. Ah you envied puny mite, thou art a window unto God.
The infinite, holding an infinity of potential manifestation, never rests in its play. A brook might seem changeless in its flow. But the waters it emits at any point in time are never the same waters, its volume, the trajectories of its spray, the particles of life and matter never rests selfsame.
Language is the unwitting culprit — and the life-sucking harpies of lassitude. To be intelligible words must convey concepts fixed and circumscribed — but in a deeper sense eventually dead, dead to heart’s afflatus. Arrested in this fixity, words become drained of that living, vibrant ever-changing marvel immanent in the reality, the ‘things’ they are meant to represent. Steeped in mawkishness, the spirit loses verve and freshness. Grown vapid, wearied down in the struggle for living, it sheds zest for life, the urge for wonder. That Creation gurgling all around us of marvel and mystery untold, always pure and resurgent, to the purblind soul in apathy lies profaned, shrivelling into clichés of deja-vu. With the lowly cares of living this glorious many-splendored life is atrophied, mutilated into a pitiable dwarf floundering in the humdrum and the hackneyed spewed of his decayed perception. And if the spark of the sublime gimmers still in his graying depths, this man may yearn to escape, to escape up some distant mountain, or sail away solo the seven seas — yonder to seek the heritage forfeited in the here and now. Oh, by all means scale the peaks and sail oceans wide. But not to quest escape from inner palsy, but to embrace the world — and grieve it be not yet the universe — and take it for arena to waltz the glorious dance of life and consecrate its mysteries.
Thus the quiddity of the emotion in my waking moments cannot be readily expressed in words. When I write ‘leaf’, the object thus denoted is one we have seen a million times over, something green which grows on trees, its colour changed to brown when autumn plucked. Something so trite, so commonplace as to be seen but hardly noticed, and certainly not expected to quicken the heart. Thus the word ‘leaf’ robs the object it represents, the individual Leaf of sap and molecule, of its immanent marvel, of the ultimate mystery locked up in its essence; in the sap-pulse along the exquisite pattern of its nervure, never identical to that of another leaf, in the perfection of which it breathes, synthesises, nourishes… And therein arises the paradox well-thumbed by pundits of Zen, Tao, Sufism, and mysticism generally:- to become a receptacle open to deeper reaches of wisdom, first the accumulation of knowledge must be swept out. To marvel at and commune with this wonder in which life steeps us, the spirit must first be cleansed down to pristine innocence and purity of wonder. To convey more accurately that rapture of my waking moments I’d have to strike out the nouns, verbs and adjectives used in my description. Banish the words ‘laurel’, ‘green’, ‘leaf’, ‘breeze’, ‘glisten’, ‘stretch’, ‘seek’, ‘blue’, ‘thrush’, ‘spider’, ‘fixity’, ‘speck’, and the rest of them. For inevitably they hold the blight of deja-vu, words to which the reader may bring merely the dead shell of the entities they are meant to denote, shells emptied of their intrinsic spirit, their immanent wonder.
How to bring consciousness to apprehend its surroundings, the surroundings of the here-and-now, with that virgin gaze of wonder of, say, a being just arrived from another planet, a totally different planet? Mystics do so in ecstasy, but the state of ecstasy in incommunicable. Luminaries of Zen went for short sharp blows of pun and paradox with which to wrench and hurl consciousness into higher perception. Like that Zen master, who while walking with disciple past a shrine, spat on the holy image within. And asked his scandalised followers:- “Show me where there is no God so I may spit there. But what is my spittle in God?” Exponents of Sufism availed themselves of tools of allegory and mind-vaulting contradiction. Like that Sufi master, who, promising his pupils an essay holding key to the mysteries of Eternity, handed them a blank sheet of paper. Idries Shah, that exponent of Sufism to Western readership, has done just that in a recent book of his. India evolved meditation with which to still the mind into pure mirror held up to the Absolute. And meditation is the path over which in my very humble and faltering ability I steep consciousness in those walking moments.”
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