bed together and we-all can go home and get some rest.’
Was that it? No. Maybe. No. I don’t know. No.
What a picture: a double portrait of self-deceivers. Eliot the occultist pretending to be an academic, with me, more prosaically, perhaps, half-lost in occult love.
Was that it?
When I met Eliot I was a little unhinged myself – suffering from a disharmony of my personal spheres. There was the Laura episode, and beyond it a number of difficult questions about home and identity that I had no idea how to answer. Eliot’s instinct about Mala and me was one answer that I was grateful for. Home, like Hell, turned out to be other people. For me, it turned out to be her.
Not Martian, but Mauritian. She was a ninth-generation child of indentured labourers brought from India after the black exodus that had followed the end of slavery. At home – home was a small village to the north of Port Louis, and its largest edifice was a small white Vishnu temple – she and her family had spoken aversion of the Indian Bhojpuri dialect, so creolised over the years as to be virtually incomprehensible to non-Mauritian Indians. She had never been to India, and my birth and childhood and continued connections there made me, in her eyes, ridiculously glamorous, like a visitor from Xanadu. For be on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.
Even though she was, as she put it, ‘from science side’, she was interested in writing, and liked the fact that I was trying to be a writer. She took pride in ‘Romeo and Juliet of Mauritius’, as she called Bernardin de St Pierre’s Paul et Virginie ; and insisted that I read it. ‘Maybe it will influence,’ she said, hopefully.
She had a doctor’s unsqueamishness and practicality, and like all people ‘from arts side’ I envied her knowledge of what human beings were like on the inside. What I had to imagine about human nature, she gave every appearance of knowing. She wasn’t a big talker, but I felt that in her I had found my rock. And the warm dark tides of the Indian Ocean rose nightly in her veins.
What angered her, it seemed, was Eliot, and my closeness to him. Once she was installed as my wife – we honeymooned in Venice – her unease prompted what was, for her, a major speech. ‘All that mumboing and jumboing,’ she snorted, full of science-side contempt for the Irrational. ‘So phoney, God! Listen: hecomes round too much, it’s bad for you. What is he? Some English mess-head, only. Get my drift, writer sahib? I mean, thanks for the intro etcetera, but now you should drop him, like a brick.’
‘Welsh,’ I said, very surprised. ‘He’s Welsh.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ snapped Doctor (Mrs) Khan. ‘Diagnosis still applies.’
But in Eliot’s enormous, generously shared mental storehouse of the varieties of ‘forbidden knowledge’ I thought I’d found another way of making a bridge between here-and-there, between my two othernesses, my double unbelonging. In that world of magic and power there seemed to exist the kind of fusion of world-views, European Amerindian Oriental Levantine, in which I desperately wanted to believe.
With his help, I hoped, I might make a ‘forbidden self’. The apparent world, all cynicism and napalm, seemed wholly without kindness or wisdom. The hidden realm, in which Sufis walked with Adepts and great secrets could be glimpsed, would show me how to be wise. It would grant me – Eliot’s favourite word, this – harmony.
Mala was right. He couldn’t help anyone, the poor sap; couldn’t even save himself. In the end his demons camefor him, his Gurdjieff and Ouspensky and his Crowley and Blavatsky, his Dunsany and his Lovecraft long ago. They crowded out the sheep on his Welsh hillside, and closed in on his mind.
Harmony? You never heard such a din as the ruckus in Eliot’s head. The songs of Swedenborg’s angels, the hymns, the mantras, the Tibetan overtone chants. What human mind could have defended itself against
Was that it? No. Maybe. No. I don’t know. No.
What a picture: a double portrait of self-deceivers. Eliot the occultist pretending to be an academic, with me, more prosaically, perhaps, half-lost in occult love.
Was that it?
When I met Eliot I was a little unhinged myself – suffering from a disharmony of my personal spheres. There was the Laura episode, and beyond it a number of difficult questions about home and identity that I had no idea how to answer. Eliot’s instinct about Mala and me was one answer that I was grateful for. Home, like Hell, turned out to be other people. For me, it turned out to be her.
Not Martian, but Mauritian. She was a ninth-generation child of indentured labourers brought from India after the black exodus that had followed the end of slavery. At home – home was a small village to the north of Port Louis, and its largest edifice was a small white Vishnu temple – she and her family had spoken aversion of the Indian Bhojpuri dialect, so creolised over the years as to be virtually incomprehensible to non-Mauritian Indians. She had never been to India, and my birth and childhood and continued connections there made me, in her eyes, ridiculously glamorous, like a visitor from Xanadu. For be on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.
Even though she was, as she put it, ‘from science side’, she was interested in writing, and liked the fact that I was trying to be a writer. She took pride in ‘Romeo and Juliet of Mauritius’, as she called Bernardin de St Pierre’s Paul et Virginie ; and insisted that I read it. ‘Maybe it will influence,’ she said, hopefully.
She had a doctor’s unsqueamishness and practicality, and like all people ‘from arts side’ I envied her knowledge of what human beings were like on the inside. What I had to imagine about human nature, she gave every appearance of knowing. She wasn’t a big talker, but I felt that in her I had found my rock. And the warm dark tides of the Indian Ocean rose nightly in her veins.
What angered her, it seemed, was Eliot, and my closeness to him. Once she was installed as my wife – we honeymooned in Venice – her unease prompted what was, for her, a major speech. ‘All that mumboing and jumboing,’ she snorted, full of science-side contempt for the Irrational. ‘So phoney, God! Listen: hecomes round too much, it’s bad for you. What is he? Some English mess-head, only. Get my drift, writer sahib? I mean, thanks for the intro etcetera, but now you should drop him, like a brick.’
‘Welsh,’ I said, very surprised. ‘He’s Welsh.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ snapped Doctor (Mrs) Khan. ‘Diagnosis still applies.’
But in Eliot’s enormous, generously shared mental storehouse of the varieties of ‘forbidden knowledge’ I thought I’d found another way of making a bridge between here-and-there, between my two othernesses, my double unbelonging. In that world of magic and power there seemed to exist the kind of fusion of world-views, European Amerindian Oriental Levantine, in which I desperately wanted to believe.
With his help, I hoped, I might make a ‘forbidden self’. The apparent world, all cynicism and napalm, seemed wholly without kindness or wisdom. The hidden realm, in which Sufis walked with Adepts and great secrets could be glimpsed, would show me how to be wise. It would grant me – Eliot’s favourite word, this – harmony.
Mala was right. He couldn’t help anyone, the poor sap; couldn’t even save himself. In the end his demons camefor him, his Gurdjieff and Ouspensky and his Crowley and Blavatsky, his Dunsany and his Lovecraft long ago. They crowded out the sheep on his Welsh hillside, and closed in on his mind.
Harmony? You never heard such a din as the ruckus in Eliot’s head. The songs of Swedenborg’s angels, the hymns, the mantras, the Tibetan overtone chants. What human mind could have defended itself against
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