By The Body Of The Earth or The Sannyasin

The Temple

Björn had returned in the middle of the night; he seemed on edge, his voice was hollow. I could hardly see him in the semi-darkness around the well, the dawn was still only a green transparence in which the first crows were cawing hoarsely, but I felt his distress, it was a kind of hardness in the air: I could not get through. Only men are impermeable! They are the most opaque mineral in the creation. And when man forgets himself, he radiates everywhere like a diamond. It is a strange thing. Just a veil: one thinks of it and it is dark, one no longer thinks of it and it is clear.

—Are you worried?

—I don't understand anything.

He flung a bucket of water over his head in a sort of rage.

—And then, it takes all this time, it is like Erik with his shafts: I shaft, 2 shafts, 3 shafts... Three years have gone by—three years, do you hear, not three months—since he promised me the initiation, the supreme mantra,⁸ and then... he calls me (I don't ask him anything, mind you), he tells me: “Today, you will receive the initiation.” I jump for joy. I am brim-full, I sweep his house, I empty buckets of water as if it were the resurrection. He speaks, he says all sorts of things, the hours go by; and then finally, he asks me what the deuce I am doing there! As if he had forgotten everything. He has played the same trick on me ten times. Yesterday... Or suddenly, when I am not thinking of anything or when I am completely desperate, he calls me, makes me sit down, gives me a mantra: “The final mantra,” he says. And oh! it is really like an intiation, just one syllable and the body seems to open. As if one is lifted from the ground and one spreads out in a powdering of particles. It is tremendous. A dark blue powder. And the following day, by chance, simply, in the conversation, he says: “Hey! Gorom (that's what he calls me), you will repeat this one a hundred thousand times. Afterwards, we'll see if you are ready for the final mantra”... Do you see?

I did not see, but I felt Björn's revolt, and it was dark and painful.

—Drop it, Björn, let's go and have a look at the sea.

The air was almost cool. The street was deserted, the sand-storm had not yet started. A siren filled the dawn with a journey-call.

—Is there a port here?

—On the other side, on the mainland. Here, there are only coral-divers.

He clenched his teeth and added:

—I should not complain when I think of the others, of Erik... We, at least, know we are going somewhere, even if that somewhere is at the end of a hundred thousand shafts of mantras, we know there is something to find... It doesn't matter, I will go through to the end.

And there was despair in that “through to the end”. The siren rent the air again.

—I remember, Erik used to say: “The siren is the journey; afterwards, it is as before.” And it is true, there is no journey! No journey at all—one simply wants to justify the shriek of a siren.

He kicked an empty gourd and sent it flying. I thought I saw my own portrait in another existence. Oh! those we encounter are always like the ghosts of a previous life, or the heralds of a life to come—a past, a future,—and they come and cling to us (or we to them) by a strange attraction, as if they were bringing us the picture of what we must shed, or conquer. And it is always precisely those we meet. The others disappear as though they did not exist: they have no message.

—Do you regret?

—Nothing. I'll go through to the end, that's all. But, damn it, it's long! One must have power, Nil, we must change the world... For thirty million years we have been begetting children—thirty million, you understand—simply to end up with a B.A... Hell!

—But what do you want to change?—If you change nothing in yourself, you change nothing in the world!

—All right. But I don't care a damn about reason, I want to do something.

—Do you want to open hospitals, schools? Cure the sick, divide the wealth of the world, or what? And afterwards, when you have made your poor rich, they will rob the others, just the same, and then it dies and we die and everything dies, and it begins all over again. And as long as there is a single man to die, everything will be the same—it is not the outside that must be cured, it is the inside! Or else what? Do you want to perform miracles? To fly in the air, pass through walls, appear in a glory of light above the market in Oslo? They will take you for a god, they will worship you—they will hate you. And babies will flourish as before. That is the illusion, Björn, people want to have all the attributes of the gods without being like the gods, so it breaks down. But if they do not change within, their journey will not take place, that is all. Afterwards is as before.

—But if one could show them the power of the Spirit? Show them...

—You want to perform in a spiritual circus?

—Oh! How irritating you are! Well then, let us flee to the Himalayas and contemplate our navels. The misfortune is that I am not interested in my own salvation, my own liberation, I am interested only for others.

—Listen, Björn, you want power—very well. Let us suppose you have all the powers, you are all-powerful. What are you going to do with it, tell me? Do you know, at least, for what you want to use this power? Do you know what is good, what is bad? And what is really bad? That is still another question. You are going to abolish illness, death, misery?—And that misery is perhaps just the means of passing to another state? You want to make your B.A. babies live to be ten thousand years old? They will fill the libraries and the savings banks... Never once in my life have I seen a single evil which did not have its full meaning. So? You are going to cut out evil, and you will cut out the good with it. What do you know of the good of the world, what vision have you?... Björn, let me tell you, if we had the true vision, we would automatically have the power; we have no power, because we have no vision, For we would eliminate just those things which should not be eliminated.

—Then I'll clear off with bag and baggage and go to plant shafts with Erik. And the world can go to hell. Amen. Everything is for the best in the best of worlds.

—Oh! Björn, how violent you are... But really, there is nothing to eliminate, nothing “to change” as you say, it is something else... Sometimes, I feel that it is a complete error to look for something “tremendous”—the secret is not tremendous, it is simply something else. Perhaps, simply a look to be changed. A glance which changes all!

—As for you, you'll end up croaking in a crystal look. Well, as for me, I want to do, even if I do wrongly; I want to live, I want to mould matter, I want... In fact, I grumble, but I have found. I have found a lever, I know the secret—or at least one secret,—a rational secret, a rational miracle, something that men can grapple with and forge. It's only a question of time and tenacity. A hundred thousand mantras, that's nothing. One must go through to the end, that's all.

The siren rent the air a third time. We arrived at the temple.

An erne flew away into the blue. As for me, I could not understand a word of their stories. It swerved in flight, melted into the sky. Oh! each time, it is like a cry within, as though I were left behind. There is a bit of the bird in us, which remembers. Each time I suddenly discover that I am a man as one finds oneself dwarfed in a dream—no, it is not that that I seek! Not intelligence, not virtue, greatness, powers, not a superiority over all this mediocrity: but something else, something else, a complete elseness... autre chose, autre chose, une autreté complète. A new vision is what I want, it is my very own story, my own mantra, like a mule!

And the gigantic teak gateway... The crowd, the scramble, a torrent of colours. A turmoil of odours and beggars, smelling of rancid oil, jasmine, bats. A mixed bazaar of arborescent corals and shells, of red and green powders piled up on each side of the corridor and assaulting the pillars with painted glass-ware like icons, ribbons, straw baskets—everything swerved and whirled like the sculptured multitude above: the beggars with the merchants of mother-of-pearl, the monsters with the wise men, the pilgrims, the monkeys and the girls with their plaits, all swept along equally in a huge polychrome kermis where even ugliness becomes divine, even the junk seems suddenly caught up into an irresistible sacred rush. And I too wanted to merge into it, to disappear, to annul myself in a complete strangeness, oh ! I know now what is so familiar to me in these places: all my life I have sought a radical uprooting—or a re-rooting perhaps—as if, in the grip of I know not what upheaval, I would suddenly find my true face again and come out of that leaden forgetfulness. There is something like the memory of a fabulous transmutation in us; our fairy tales remember better than we do! And I have sought. I have sought through emptiness, negation, destruction; I have demolished like a vandal, hammered the idols like the invaders of Thebes, and now I was caught into this crowd of sculptured gods in a sort of devastation by fullness and flood—a breaking out into the great cosmic revelry. And something in me said no. A flame within, like a sword of light against this invasion: I did not belong to this temple! I belonged to no temple, no place, no country—I was from that light within, that is all. Or perhaps from a pure white minaret amongst the sands, with a cry up there. And it was Björn who had dragged me into the heart of that contradiction.

—We shall pass through the northern corridor.

He flung himself out of the crowd, I breathed again.

—They all pass through the southern corridor. There are four like that, immense, which go right round the sanctuary. One goes out through the eastern gate, by the sea.

We turned left into the northern corridor. Then I was thrown into another world without any transition. There was that stupendous, fabulous corridor with its sculptured pillars that plunged into the mists of time, almost as fantastic as those of Luxor, but a present, living Luxor, vibrating to the beat of gongs. Abruptly, I had the impression of disappearing. Somebody else emerged. Somebody who looked at all that, encompassed all that corridor and that tiny fragment of me there who walked... A great sudden look which opens out, and everything is different. The eyes are different, the perspectives are different; the rhythm is different, and yet extraordinarily intimate, as if one were entering into the heart of the thing. And all is enveloped by that look, or rather all is in that look: the world is no longer outside, it is no longer “looked at”, it is lived at once. It is within, one contains the whole scene. And it is no longer an isolated, flat scene; it is a deep inner scene, a series of scenes one inside the other, and as though seen one through the other; one enters into the archetype of the place, into its millenniums, its history, its living depth; and at the same time, one is that tiny character who walks in the old scene, or perhaps one should say a series of characters rolled into one, a multiplicity of stories in one, as if one were moving in several lives at the same time, several world strata—one single gesture contains thousands of gestures, a single step crosses many lives, one is like a living symbol; and behind, or around or above, one is that something which looks—which looks eternally,—the actor and the witness, the image and he who looks at the image; one has picked up the thread of an old legend again, a countless life, familiar and strange, as after a long journey elsewhere, and one goes on, one is that little image which walks under a great serene eye.

I was going there as if after centuries, and nothing had changed; I had lived elsewhere perhaps, it was a dream, and I found again the smooth coolness of the great flagstones under my feet. We were going together, Björn and I, clad in white and barefooted, in that gigantic corridor, three hundred metres long, which plunged on towards a breach of sunlight in the distance, amidst a hundred pillars like the timbers of a ship surmounted by motley leogriffes; we were walking on great flagstones smooth and cool like the centuries of the Nile, small and luminous hierophants under the acquiescent gaze of the dragons and the mystic circles painted in yellow ochre and brick-red as in the corridors of Thebes. I had left my shadow at the door with the noises of the world, I had left my names and my costumes, and I advanced with only that little flame of being in the hollow of my hands, with only that light coolness under my feet, my eyes almost closed, and as though borne along by the silence. I had lived in daylight, perhaps, and I had made so many gestures elsewhere, in other places, other countries, but everything had fused into that white flame, everything was concentrated into the rhythm of that single walk, and I held my breath as if I were going to hear the word once more and renew the gesture. I groped my way along in a great memory of gongs and of cinnamon towards a sunlit breach in the distance, a minute pilgrim on the backward march of time, I climbed the curve of the ages, of lost existences; vain and luminous lives under a great look, tale upon tale in the heart of that hull, and I clasped that little flame to my heart, that single drop of light at the end of a myriad centuries; and my light was almost singing. It was like a rhythm which rose with each step, which rose from the depths of time, from the depths of my vain efforts, from the depths of my million walks through forgotten plains, it was as smooth as those flagstones, it was endless and clear like the smile of the dead, and of all the dead that I had been, and everything had fused into that music: all the faces and the loves, all the prayers upon prayers, the temples, the thousands of temples where I had hoped, prayed, worshipped, and all the gods once loved, the mysteries upon mysteries; a single thread of music linked all my steps, a high white tension which sang, almost motionless by its lightning speeds of existence, a unique eternal vibration. I was going like a luminous blindman under sacred slabs, a very tiny image borne along by a smile, and everything was lived through in a flash, misery upon misery, the hopes and the despair, ah! what remained? A single love had ensnared all my eyes, veiling with light the unending race, the abysses after abysses, the deaths, the fruitless lives, and I was advancing as if to a sacring, I was walking towards a triumph over there which rose with every step, which rose from the depths of my soul in a great white rhythm, as if all the sorrows and sorrows of my lives were surging up together, purified, released, changed into their content of light. Oh! that pure song, that triumphant light at the end! A million tendernesses springing from a million sorrows, and which have known everything—darkness upon darkness, villainy and baseness and wisdom; which have committed every evil, every good, loved, hated and which are choked by too much understanding! A same look of love in the heart of shame, a nameless something which was always there and which recognizes everything: a fulgurating recognition like a million cries of, love returning from a million nights, a single cry of fusion at the end as if one were a living holocaust of all the sorrows of the world, an epitome of the earth, an infinitesimal image which carries a million men, ah! as if everything were going to burst at last and I were going to lay my forehead in the sun, open my hands and give back that flame for ever.

Björn pulled me.

We turned into an inner corridor.

Then we entered into a vast chant which resounded everywhere like bronze and swept into a maze of corridors and sculptured pillars surging back to strike again the high walls and fill everything with a full-toned flow, as powerful as the rumbling of the sea itself. We were at the doors of the sanctuary.

Björn went down the steps.

I was alone on the threshold and I followed that little white silhouette which was advancing into the forest of pillars. He stopped for one moment as if lost, his arms dangling, and very small under the high vault; he reascended the steps of the sanctum sanctorum like a granite island in the midst of the immense quadrilateral, and I was there, near him, looking on. Then everything became fixed, magnified; time widened, my eyes became immense, the minutest detail began to live intensely like an absolute—everything had a meaning, a total fullness, as though each thing contained a unique eternity—and nothing moved any more... I was there, looking on.

I had always been there and I knew all the gestures, was as old as the pillars and the flagstones, and I had so often looked at that little golden flame draw its circle round the sacred stones that I had perhaps become that stone myself, become that ancient immobile look which sees everything, understands everything, without passion and without a cry, which takes all these beings into its silence and dissolves the sorrows in its great sands of eternity—they cry out, they lament, they pass, while I am always there I Through my half-closed eyelids, my great peaceful look has already beheld the end of all these peoples, and this little flame which shines in my eyes is the reflection of their own eternity. I give what they give me, and I have all the eternity that they possess, my joy is at their feet, my peace smiles on their lips, and if they are hard, am I not made of their stone?

But will they see this light in their hearts, and the god who stirs here because he stirred there?

Then there was a slight drop in tension; that look fell back on Björn, on me, or rather it concentrated, narrowed down, it was like passing from one altitude, to another, from an expanse to a point of the expanse; and just at the moment of passing, I perceived a fugitive secret, as if one could pass freely from one to the other at will, come and go from the great look to the small one and live simultaneously in two worlds or two beings. And it was like the key of liberty. Just a small step back and everything widens, unifies, takes distances and depths of time—it is the great royalty outside everything; then a slight dip and everything condenses here or there, as a play, and if one lets oneself be caught up in the play, then there is nothing else but that little condensation, hard, separate, which sees nothing more, understands nothing more than a small crust of its existence, a small scene of its immense story. I came back to that small image, and there remained with me like a memory of all those depths—vague, fleeting, but familiar—as if every odour, every gesture, every person were ready to give me the thread of a multiple legend that had been lived. And then nothing, it had gone. I looked at Björn, my brother, who was repeating the rite, and I was alone under the high portal as though on the verge of a dream-landscape: was it he or I who moved under ancient pylons, and had I not lived the whole of that story also, here and there? If I had pushed a little, crossed that threshold it would have been enough: it was there at my finger-tips. Oh! I seem to remember an unforgettable life, I still know, I almost remember that rapture of sinking into a world of marvellous abandon where the little person is drowned in a haze of gold, and with a look from above one walks to a triumphal sacrifice—one passes elsewhere, everything has passed! And that cry of tremendous release as if one were changing one's species. I know, I have lived that; I almost remember a child who stood one day under other pillars: a golden disc had descended into my heart and everything had burst into flame—the pillars were aflame, the stone was aflame, everything was flaming as if the world were made of sun. I almost remember, it is there, if I went down those steps again it would be enough... And then, something said no: you will not pass. As if I had to forget. Oh! shall I never finish retracing the track and counting my pebbles of gold or blackness? And perhaps this too was a trap, perhaps one had to conquer one's luminous past as well as one's dark past, and go beyond both.

O Pilgrim
You are the old-comer
Of many a shadow
And of some victories
You come down to the task
Wilfully forgetful
Until the day when
In the great tranquil Memory
You can embrace
The snare of ancient victories
And the headiness of old shames

Then I sank into that chant. And it was there that I made my discovery...

It sprang from all sides at once, from a group of choristers squatting among the columns, then from another and still another, and each chanted his own recitative, each wave rolled over the other, swelled into the other, fused with the other, until the whole sanctuary was nothing but a great surge of song which vibrated, vibrated, struck the walls like a high tide of bronze, rolled into a maze of grottos and sculptured divinities, then returned to strike against the vault, while from the depths of the crypts, like an endless breaker, the same syllables rose: AUM namo namo namaha, AUM namo namo namaha... And that AUM was a marvel of full-toned power, a golden bronze which seemed to roll out from the depths of time, steeped in a million cries never lost, never extinct, and it was not even a prayer nor a call nor a chant, it was only a surge of being, only the voice of Man,—stark, grave, eternal,—like the voice of the sea, like the voice of the wind; a sound which told of man only, like the river tells of water, and perhaps it was the cry of the world through his lips, one day, under the migration of the stars when he stood up erect and alone to grasp his own mystery; and that first verb rose, making him man on the stony field of the world, seizing him of himself as the first stylet stroke had seized the aurochs on the walls of a cave. AUM namo namo namaha, AUM... I let that verb rise in me, let that mystery flow from the depth of my night until it filled my whole temple of flesh: I was that ancient man, alone and erect under the unnamed vault, I was that conjunction of obscure forces and there was something to articulate, something unique that I was, and it had no name, no language, but it was there like a child in the womb of my night; it was my secret of being, my own pure sound, my real name, “that” which had to be named in order to live, and if I did not find my name, I was like an inexistence, crushed under the stars, lost in the darkness with the cry of the jackals. And I leaned over that mystery, I listened to that something in the depths, that sound of my forest, that murmur of my waters, and deeper still, further inside, like the end of my breath, or perhaps the beginning of myself, a very tiny pulsation, a warmth which made a cry—it was like a swell of gold... and so tranquil: the tranquillity of what is. Just a tiny vibration, but solid! It was certitude itself, the rock, the warmth, the fullness of my being. It was like an adoration in the depths, for nothing, for everything, because that is and I am, that vibrates and I vibrate and everything vibrates—that and nothing but that, as simple as breathing, the warmth of the world, the rock, the full of tenderness, naked love; that only that I am, that cry which makes me be! And which makes everything be! A tiny breath in the depths which holds everything in its warmth, which coagulates the worlds, the stars, the beasts—which coagulates bodies and bodies in its song,—a unique cry of the eternity in things, a single syllable which makes be, AUM... Ah! what need had I of a temple! There, there is nothing to pray to: that itself prays, that itself vibrates, that sings ceaselessly; there, there is neither fear nor hope, nothing to expect, nothing to will: it is always there, it is always full; there, there is no more mystery, nothing to name, nothing to understand: it is all understood, everything is that and everything says that, everything is the obscure prison of that singing stream!

I opened my eyes, I looked at the temple. And for the third time something said no. It was obvious, as vibrant as that verb in my flesh, as clear as the blue of the sky overhead and over all the cages of men, whether gothic or exotic: oh l there is something which no temple, no Church can. seize, something that no being, no prophet, no god, no pope can hold whether he be from the East or the West; that no book, no mystery can imprison in its formula of stone or of blood, its letters of ink or of light; something greater than all the saviours of the world, all the interceptors and gaolers of the True; a Truth vaster than all the heavens, too simple for their greatness, too natural for their miracles—something which smiles everywhere, sings everywhere, which plays at priest, plays at pagan, which suffers with, the day, suffers with the night, and which still smiles beyond all the sorrows and all the days of the world, the sacred, or less sacred prisons: a very tiny golden vibration which tingles everywhere, breathes everywhere, which shines and shines in spite of all our light and darkness, all our Bastilles of the Spirit or of the flesh. And I say no and three times no!—I am not of this temple I am of no temple, no formula, no prison of the gods, or of men!

Then I opened my eyes, very wide this time. I took hold of that chant under my stone archway, that music of man under the stone, here and there, five thousand years ago or yesterday, in all languages, all hearts, all miseries black or white, under the gods and the devils—under, always under and a prisoner. And that chant in my heart did not pray, did not implore, was fearless and lawless; that cry of my heart struck, struck against that great wall like a bird in its cage... And suddenly, I saw—my eyes wide open I saw that surprising mystery; I would call it THE MECHANISM OF IMPRISONMENT IN LIGHT: they were chanting, like others in other places, under other vaults, and I saw the surf of their chant break against the walls, rebound from them and then fall back upon the choristers like a stream of electrum streaked with powerful, dark blue vibrant pulsations, which enveloped them, illumined them, encircled them with gold and filled the whole place with a mass of power like the very reverberation of their chant, the coloured translation of their own force of invocation—and it, was again their own sumptuous reflection which lit up walls as it lit up the eyes of their gods. And I, standing erect in there, alone under my stone archway, struck and struck against that vault, that prison of light, and the more I struck, the more I saw that dark blue pulsation swell with intensity, with force, and almost with hardness, as if I too were caught like those men, in the luminous snare of my own incantation, imprisoned in a sapphire ringed with gold like an insect in an amber bubble. Then I understood, I saw, I touched the secret of the Churches, that boxed illumination, that summit of light in a cage, that salvation in a bubble. And suddenly I let go of everything. I opened my hands, left my chant, left my force, my lights, my poor light in a cage and all my pompous reflections; I fell into a precipice of nothingness—the sudden sweetness of a lost child, torn away, carried off in I know not what triumphant cataclysm like a great thrust of the shoulders against the walls, as one passes into death; and I went through in an infinity of white light, white, white, free, free!... blanche, blanche, libre, libre!

The drums, the conches, the silver trumpets burst forth under the vault. Björn prostrated himself. The whole place was nothing but a sacred, dark blue, powerful precipitation—yes, divine, one could plunge into it and lose oneself in a triumph of light. It was the perfect magic spell, the irrefutable illumination, it was the powerful magic of the Churches. A luminous concentration of millenniums of prostration. The trumpets sounded a second time, then the high-pitched shenais. Then a third blast as I went out of the sanctuary. Their echo vibrated in my heart like a great signal of departure, like a sailing off into the open sea, as if I had walked and walked, worn out lives, millenniums, gestures, thousands of gestures and sorrows in all ages, all places, gone through infernos, illuminations, pyres upon pyres within, without, unending revelations and salvations—which all collapsed against the same wall. I had lived and suffered all that time in order to reach this one point, this white moment, and all was exorcised: the victories and the snares, the illuminations and the devils—I was going naked and free for what must be, like God's pagan,

The great dunes rippled in the sun in front of the portals of the sanctuary and flowed, so white, towards the sea, naked like my heart. And it was there that I felt like prostrating myself, without a vault overhead and without walls in front of me.

Then she passed in front of me, the little peacock-girl. She looked me straight in the eyes without blinking. Then she disappeared towards the dunes with her tray of offerings in her hands.

And that look flowed into me like the first smile of a new world... Et ce regard a coulé en moi comme le premier sourire d'un nouveau monde.