Mother or The Divine Materialism - I

1: Roots

This great virgin forest of Mother took root very early. It is full of unexpected turnings and cascades and deep thickets. One does not quite know whether to go right or left, and one maybe has to go everywhere, in all direc­tions—perhaps there is no path in Mother's great forest, or everything is the path. It begins everywhere; it ends every­where, for each blade of grass perhaps contains everything. One just walks; it is very amusing, She used to say.

I was wandering through all the human constructions, She told me just after a vision She had had—because She saw so many things, this Mother, everywhere, in everything. To be with Her was to see the world through unexpected eyes, as if we had never seen it before, and as no Picasso or super-Picasso could have ever imagined it—who, by the way, was three years her junior. I was wandering through all the human constructions, but not the ordinary construc­tions: the philosophical, religious, spiritual constructions... And they were symbolized by huge buildings—huge—that were so high ...as if men were as tall as the edge of this stool, quite tiny, in comparison with those huge things. I was going about, and each person came saying, “Mine is the true path. ” So I would go with him to an open door through which an immense landscape could be seen, and just when we came to the door, it would close!... I was quite amused, I said to myself, “It's quite amusing!” You know, when they spoke you could see, through a door, vast expanses before you, in full light, it was superb; then I would go with that person towards the door and... the door was closed. It was really interesting.

There was no end to them.... And there were people, always new people: now men, now women, now young people, now old people, and from every possible country. It lasted a very long time.

*I remember that I said to one of them, “Yes, all this is very fine, but it isn't true food, it leaves you famished.” Then there was one who was ...I don’t know which country he was from: he wore a dark robe, he had black hair, a somewhat round face (he may have been Chinese, I can’t say, I don't remember). He said to me, “Oh, not with me! Taste this and see.” And he gave me something to eat—it was absolutely first-rate, oh, it was excellent! So I looked at him, and I said, “Oh, you are clever... show me, show me your path. " He told me, “I have no path.”¹

So we are going to try to be as wise as this Chinaman and refrain from boxing Mother in cubbyholes: We always feel the need to put one box inside another, one box inside another!² And She laughed, because She always laughed— except, perhaps during those last years, and even then who knows—and She would always find me dreadfully serious. From a very young age, something in me has always laughed. It sees all the catastrophes, sees all the suffering—sees it all and can't help laughing, the way one laughs at something that pretends to be but isn’t.³ Yes, already, She was hunting down a certain illusion that must be destroyed so we may live a true life—and perhaps the most tenacious and cherished of all illusions is our love of suffering and drama. We may protest, but it is true all the same.

So we will step into Mother’s great forest "at random,” without neglecting any direction or turn, for the direction may be everywhere, and we are not so sure what is part of or not part of the pathless path, nor if the end is not at the beginning, as in a children's tale.

Once we have wandered through the great forest, then perhaps we will see lakes and mountains and contours take shape, although, truly speaking, what is interesting is simply to walk.

An Amazing Grandmother

But, for the time being, that little Parisian who was to live forty years of her life in Paris (thirty-eight, to be exact), is not yet called "Mother." She is simply called Mirra (with two r's) and is surrounded by a strange and cosmopolitan tribe.

We might as well start with the grandmother, for there is something sparkling there, very impish, and indeed reminiscent of a certain aspect of Mother. She was called Mira (with one r) Ismalun and was born in Cairo in 1830. It may not be mere chance that Mother had her roots in this ancient land of Egypt—but Mother has many roots, very old roots, perhaps everywhere. I am millions of years old and I am waiting,⁴ She said during those last years with a gaze that seemed to carry the world and with it all the resistance of her terrestrial children. And we recall those moving words of Walter Pater on Mona Lisa, with whom Mother shared strange affinities and a certain smile: "She is older than the rocks among which she sits ... she has been dead many times and learned the secret of the grave"¹⁰⁰. But the Ismaluns also came from the old Ural-Altaic region of Hungary, and Mira Ismaluns father, Said Pinto, while Egyptian, had his roots far back in Spain. Shifting winds blew over that cradle, those of the Urals mingling with the mysteries of the Valley of the Kings and an Iberian fire. In fact, it was not really men who watched over Mother's cradle, but women—a line of strong women.

So we are in the time of Mehemet Ali. The Suez Canal has not yet been dug. The armies of the Pasha are rebelling against the yoke of the Ottoman Empire. Feudalistic Egypt confronts the modem world while still remembering Bona­parte. But Bonaparte's tempestuous wind had possibly left something in the air, for Mira Ismalun, too, lost no time in throwing off the yoke. In well-bred fashion, she married a banker at the age of thirteen, as was customary in those days, after having met her fiance on a Nile River cruise. “He offered me a diadem of great value and a little basket of strawberries,” she recounts in her Memoirs. For she left an autobiography—as charming and funny as it is brief— dictated in French to her grandson, Governor Alfassa, when she was seventy-six. At the age of twenty, she embarked for Italy—quite a daring act if we recall the abject condition of women in the Middle East more than a century ago. “I spoke only Arabic. I wore an Egyptian dress and traveled alone with my two children and a governess, while my husband remained in Egypt (her husband was always par­enthetical). I was the first Egyptian woman to venture out­side of Egypt in this way.” All the same, she remarks: “I was considered positively ravishing in my sky-blue Egyptian dress embroidered with gold and natural pearls." She also sported a "small tarbush worn very low, with a large gold tassel ... but I did not know the language, so I vowed to learn it quickly"—which she did, as well as French, for Mira Ismalun was decidedly an uncommon character. Then she met the Grand Duke, "who sent me flowers every day, as did Rossini, the composer." And, with a blend of coquetry and wit, she adds candidly, "although well-behaved and even stern, I was not insensitive to all those attentions."

This was around 1850.

We do not know if she was really stern, but she under­stood life well, frankly loved it, and was already gifted with a very universal spirit for which little patriotic borders seemed but vain and cumbersome contrivances. Commut­ing between Cairo and Europe, she left her eldest son off in a boarding school in Vienna and dropped off a second, then a third son at the College Chaptai in Paris. "I was crazy about Paris and, being of unconventional temperament and character, it seemed to me quite permissible to go about everywhere with Elvire (her eldest daughter, who had a good Egyptian name, as we can see), but, since my attire was quite elegant and rather conspicuous, I attracted a great deal of attention wherever I went.” Yet, for all that, Mira Ismalun was no featherbrain. She read Renan, Taine, Nietzsche, Darwin, and, like Mother, was endowed with a remarkable poise and knew how to reconcile opposites. "One of my most invariable policies has been to maintain the head and the heart in a constant state of balance, thus avoiding being led into the excesses of either ... As for my finances, I have always taken great care to balance my income with my expenditures.” Thus, she brilliantly combined usefulness with pleasure and when she realized that the poor Egyptian princesses in their harems were dying to know of Parisian life, she brought them the latest creations from Worth, jewelry from rue de la Paix, perfumes and magazines, all of which defrayed the expenses of her own extravagances. “Everywhere I went I was received and catered to like a queen. My dignified air, my strict behavior, my stunning wardrobe and my lavish expenditures placed me on a veritable pedestal." She also brought back paintings to the little princesses, who were very anxious to have faithful oil reproductions of themselves in their finest jew­elry, taken from photographs by the finest Parisian artists. It was how Mira Ismalun came to know the Tout-Paris of artists and the atelier of Vienot and Edouard Morisset, who was to be the father of young Mirra’s future husband.

Mira Ismalun's broad-mindedness did not stop at bor­ders. She did not let herself get bogged down by religions either, which she probably found as confining as countries, but she left everyone free to do as they pleased. Having come to know that her eldest daughter, Elvire, had been converted to Catholicism by a very devout chambermaid, not only did she not reproach her, but she immediately set about to find her a husband with similar beliefs, as this would make her happy. “I was the first person in Egypt,” she notes, “to allow her daughter to marry a Catholic (and an Italian at that, we might add). This was very much frowned upon in our circle and I was criticized; certain members of the family even resented me for a while.” And, as the convivial side was never absent in her, she adds, "It was a civil marriage conducted at the Italian Consulate; the ceremony was quite lovely and intimate, and I wore a mag­nificent pearl-gray gown of faille. After the ceremony, Elvire, her husband and their witnesses went to the church and I pretended not to notice anything. Very liberal in my ideas, I have always felt the better for it."

She stayed long enough in Egypt, however, to attend the inauguration of the Suez Canal. “Mr, Lesseps came to fetch me with a cavalry escort" (we can only wonder whom she did not know, this amazing grandmother). Then she let her second daughter, Mathilde, who would become Mother’s mother, get married in Alexandria according to her taste. This was in 1874. “The marriage was celebrated in grand style in the government palace; the Viceroy and the Ministers were present. I wore a superb dress and they found me more beautiful than my daughter." Finally, this little Arabian who took Paris by storm with her sky-blue pourpoint and her tarbush tipped low, who read The Origin of Species and created havoc in the Grand Hotel, retired to Nice and spent the last years of her life commuting between the Mediterranean and the “calm shores of Lake Geneva.” "After having frequented galas and theaters, run about great capitals and spas, lived on familiar terms with celeb­rities .., after having lived this grand existence in which I had no other worry than to look after my affairs and to satisfy, if not my caprices, at least the legitimate desires of an easy life, I had the wisdom to resign myself to a more modest and tranquil existence." Her husband "generally” accompanied her, she notes laconically. “He worshipped me"—which does not surprise us.

But what is most unexpected in this impetuous and irre­sistible existence, so impatient with all frontiers, though rooted in the Valley of the Nile, is that a sudden cry escaped her at the end of this eventful journey, as if all limits seemed unacceptable to her, including those of death: "Truly speaking, at seventy-six, I scarcely like old age; I still find life beautiful... and, with Goethe, I exclaim, 'Beyond the tombs, forward!’”

There was a seed there.

Mirra among the Materialists

With Mother, it is another rhythm, profound, vast, silent —but intrepid. For intrepidity was required to venture where She went:

A statue of passion and indomitable force

An absolutism of sweet imperious will

A tranquility and a violence of the gods

Indomitable and immutable.⁵

She was born in Paris on February 21, 1878. It was the time of the exploding light of the Impressionists. Monet, Degas, Renoir—She would come to know them all: I was the youngest. Cesar Franck was composing The Beatitudes; Rodin had just finished The Bronze Age. She would also come to know Anatole France—he of gentle irony. Jules Verne had already completed his Around the World in Eighty Days. Over there, six thousand miles away, Sri Aurobindo was six. A year later, in 1879, He would disembark in England, where he would spend the next fourteen years.

She lived at 62 boulevard Haussmann, in a building that has since disappeared, next to the former Le Printemps department store. She would live there until the age of eight. This was hardly Mother’s type of decor, and in fact it would be quite a while before She found her decor, if She ever had one. Mathilde, her mother, was born in Alexandria, where four years earlier, at seventeen, she had married in grand style (as we have seen) a young and not- so-wealthy Turkish banker, Maurice Alfassa, who was born in Adrianople in 1843. Although of a style distinctly different from the savory grandmother, it was Mathilde who was the strong person in the family: an iron bar, Mother said simply.

Appearances are misleading. We could imagine one as tumultuous and the other as rigid and authoritarian, like two opposite poles, but it is the same current that passes through both, expending itself in various colorations—what counts is that the current flows. And flow it did! This is what is called Shakti, or creative force, in India. Mathilde, like Mira Ismalun, was a first-rate shakti, although every­thing in her was concentrated on human progress and a will for perfection. "My children will be the best in the world." It wasn’t an ambition; I don’t know what it was, Mother relates. And what a will she had! My mother had a formidable will, like an iron bar! Once she had made up her mind, it was made up; even if someone were dying before her eyes, she would not have budged. And she decided, "My chil­dren will be the best in the world..." And that was enough.⁶ In the kind of half-light in which human beings usually move, that will for perfection was like a brilliant little diamond spark, which was enough to attract Mother’s presence—for beings move in accordance with other laws than it appears, and while we act on the outside like pup­pets, other eyes see from behind and move with assurance, as a firefly drawn by its similar light. But Mathilde had nothing to do with a firefly, nor did Mother.

To begin with, Mathilde had found the pomp of the Egyptian court as insufferable as the social yoke imposed on the women of those days, but rather than smiling and rising above it like a queen as did Mira Ismalun, and taking advantage of it, she smashed everything. One day, to the utter scandal of all the proper-minded people, young Mathilde refused to bow to the khedive, probably finding it incompatible with human dignity. She had to pack her bags. She was twenty and had a young baby, Matteo (an Italian name in Alexandria?—one wonders why), who would be Mother's elder brother and intimate friend. Eigh­teen months separated them; he was born on July 13, 1876 in Alexandria. This is how Mathilde came to Paris in 1877, probably because it was meant that Mother should be born on French soil.

Mathilde would also become a Communist at a time when well-bred young ladies were busy knitting their trousseaux. And she remained a Communist until she left this world at the age of eighty-eight, just because she had set her mind to. There is, however, a paradoxical story: Mathilde had a henhouse and used to sell her hens’ eggs to supplement her budget; one day a bold tax collector put it into his mind to make her pay taxes, not only on her current eggs, but on all the eggs she had already sold—she never understood. "But these are my chickens!" We do not know what Karl Marx would have said or whether Mathilde's Communism had anything to do with the orthodox version —she who loathed orthodoxies, except for the first syllable of the word: straight, walk straight and no nonsense.

Things were pretty rough at boulevard Haussmann. Not that Mathilde lacked culture; on the contrary, that young Alexandrian lady was very cultured, at least as much as the grandmother who admired Goethe, and she was consider­ably more intellectual, but she viewed life as a mathematical theorem to be constantly and rigorously proven. Life had to be exact and tend imperturbably toward some ideal asymptote, which was not God—for, it goes without saying, she was a perfect atheist—but rather the triumph of the perfection of Homo sapiens. Mirra was to inherit that seed—and take it farther. Yet, the mathematician of the house was not Mathilde, but the father, Maurice Alfassa. My father was a first-rate mathematician, Mother said—but he was presumably less gifted as a banker (the poor man must not have found it very amusing), and the household finances were not always brilliant. But the Alfassas were not poor, far from it, and they could have resorted to tap­ping the rich grandmother (no longer so rich, in fact, since she was cursed with four sons, “each more extravagant than the other”) but for Mathilde's spartan dignity. So, no one stepped out of line at boulevard Haussmann; the son, Matteo, was even to graduate from Ecole Poly technique *Mother would have a solid and rigorous foundation from which fancies were banished as a waste of time, religions forbidden as "weakness and superstition," and the mani­festations of the invisible worlds violently rejected: "It's all brain disease,” Mathilde would say. And that was that. Full stop. But it turned out to be a blessing in disguise, for, without this uncompromising materialistic armor, little Mirra might not have withstood the avalanche of strange experiences that befell her right from her early years. She would simply open her eyes wide, look delicately at it all, as one catches an insect under a magnifying glass—and not breathe a word to anyone, especially to her mother, who would have whisked her off to the nearest doctor.

An obscure milieu, Mother said. An ascetic and stoic

One of the very top French scientific schools.

mother. One sometimes wonders at the absolute relativity of human conceptions and philosophies; for this same Energy or Shakti that drove Mathilde may, in other places and beneath other skies, have just as well made of her a yogi in a cave, a Danton-like revolutionary, a diligent physicist in her laboratory or even, like Mira Ismalun, a great cosmopolite on an ideological conquest of the Euro­pean capitals, with another tarbush. But she had chosen these limits (unless they had been chosen for her), which shows that we may think or profess anything we like, whether of the right or of the left, but it is no more than convenient and temporary little dams within a great Cur­rent that flows and laughs at all the words we use for it.

However, there was a wisp of imagination in this austere household, which surprisingly was lurking in the poor banker. Somehow, we even feel that this big Turk, neglected among Mathildes baggage, must have been secretly delight­ful. He had in fact quite an array of hidden talents and was called “Barine” because of something Russian or Cauca­sian in him. He was as strong as the Turk he was and could bring a horse to the ground simply by pressing his knees, for he was a very good rider (a luxury soon banned by Mathilde); he had had all his schooling in Austria, where he attended the best riding schools, and spoke German, English, Italian and Turkish fluently (he would soon be naturalized French).¹⁰¹ They definitely were a solid bunch at boulevard Haussmann: An extraordinary physical poise, Mother said. She was to inherit a seed of that, too. Not only did this man know all those languages, but I never saw such a brain for arithmetic ... And on top of it, he loved birds! He had a room to himself in our apartment (because my mother could never tolerate him much), he had his separate room, and in it he kept a big cage—full of canaries! During the day he would close the windows and let all the canaries loose ...⁷

It was probably the only bit of poetry in the place.

He also loved the circus.

Such were little Mirra's solid roots. But it would be a mistake to seek the "explanation” for Mother there. She is rather inexplicable, this Mother. But the end of our expla­nations is where poetry begins, perhaps the real world as well.

We recall Sri Aurobindo:

The universe is an endless masquerade:

For nothing here is utterly what it seems, It is a dream-fact vision of a truth

Which but for the dream would not be wholly true.⁸

Unless we admit that Mirra had other roots—many roots—that are not limited to Europe alone, but extend to the Urals and the Spanish Peninsula, via the Valley of the Kings, nor to the genetic laws of Mr. Mendel, who, inciden­tally, had just completed his work in Brunn; and even if we persist in trying to confine her, and all the rest of us as well, in some obscure crypto-genetic code, which appears to be our last crypt, She was born precisely to break that code, to shake off that ultimate yoke, just as Mira Ismalun shook up the barriers of convention and Mathilde the court of the khedive, and to pull us out of this atavistic quagmire, into the open air, into some new state of man or new nature: We do not want to obey Nature's commands, even if they have billions of years of habit behind them!⁹