Mother or The Divine Materialism - I

4: Of Music and Colors

More often than not the blade of the Mind comes down on these spontaneous experiences—certainly we all have threads, signs, scraps of memory, but we do not know that they are experiences, or that there is an experience, so we speak of "dreams," of "impressions”; it is vague, hazy, and soon covered over by the logic of the Cartesian world, which comes and seals us up like a glass jar. We are soon taught life, in other words, how to politely suffocate. After­wards, we will speak of mystics, cranks, or charlatans, while we ourselves embrace all kinds of not so philosophi­cal religions, because we have failed to embrace the only thing, the simple thing that could unravel all our threads. But it may be just as well; people need a strong logical and rational foundation to be able to meet the great, simple Truth on equal terms without capsizing into an air too vast, or mistaking a small exotic lagoon for the whole Pacific Ocean. It would almost seem, in Nature’s marvelous economy, that every falsehood or aberration of an age serves as a protective envelope for a truth still too danger­ous for our rudimentary skiffs, and that perhaps there is no falsehood anywhere and no error, but simply a truth growing in accordance with our own possibilities. If we could always remember the greater wideness behind and beyond us, we would quickly put an end to the childish quarrels between materialists and so-called spiritualists, who are only the "ists” of something yet to be born, which is perhaps neither their pure Matter nor their pure Spirit, but... something else—without any "ism," perhaps the real earth we still cannot see behind our materialist or spiritu­alist Homo sapiens lenses.

The Great Waves

Mirra was not encumbered with these antinomies, and She took up the jugglings of this world, as those of the other worlds, within her quiet look, no more, no less, just as phenomena “to be studied,” a particular behavior of the same thing, which perhaps is on the other side, or on this one, only for us. When there is no more prison, there are obviously no more sides. She painted; She studied music; She played a lot of tennis. She “fell in love" with tennis at the age of eight and continued playing imperturbably till She was eighty. Painting, however, seemed to be more important to her (She especially liked portraits; human faces were a far greater enigma to her than pharaohs or mathematics), and this is how She came to meet Henri Morisset, her future husband, a young student of Gustave Moreau and Rouault’s classmate, to whom She had been introduced by her amazing grandmother, who continued to dash about the capital under Mathilde’s uneasy eye. As might have been suspected, Mira Ismalun had a weakness for young Mirra: She considered me the only sensible person in the family (!) and she shared her secrets with me.¹ Yet painting, which She started at the age of twelve, was less important to her than it might seem—or not any more important—and my guess is that She plunged into it partly to annoy Mathilde and shake off the well-polished yoke of square du Roule, as one of the characters in the play She would later write avows: Born in a very respectable bour­geois family that considered art as a pastime rather than a career, and artists as somewhat irresponsible people, easily inclined to debauchery and harboring a very dangerous con­tempt for money, I felt, perhaps out of a spirit of contrariety, a compelling need to paint.² Yes, like Mathilde in her own way with the Khedive, or Mira Ismalun with the customs of a feudalistic Egypt. Had I been born in India, I would have smashed everything!³ Mother confided to me one day. We can well believe that.

Not far from there, in London, Sri Aurobindo was pre­paring to throw off a certain British yoke.

We do not know whether She could have been a great painter, but She certainly could have been a great musi­cian—assuming She cared for greatness—for there is Mother the musician, whose extraordinary “improvisa­tions" are an endless source of surprises. It would take ten books to just start speaking of Mother, and still more would remain for generations of exegetes to come, whom She used to gently poke fun at. I hear sounds up above. Oh, what I hear is so lovely! But I have no idea of what I play. I play without hearing what I play; I hear the other thing ... This is really amusing: it’s somebody having fun—having fun, and, so to say, forcing me to play. I am about to sit down, he says to me, “Start off that way,” so I start off that way and then he embellishes, elaborates on it. Then, sud­denly he says, “Ah, enough!" and off he goes! I don’t know who it is.⁴ And Mother laughed.

Another time She told me, / constantly hear something like great waves of music, I just have to withdraw a little and there it is; I hear it. It is always there. It is music, but with­out sounds—great waves of music!⁵ And most curiously, these “great waves” are also linked to that "motion of wings" we spoke of earlier, which set her down so gently on the flint road in Fontainebleau—our world may be more rhyth­mical than we think and its music more marvelous. But we must first find our own music within, otherwise how could we possibly hear the music from above, which is perhaps also within, and which is perhaps one and the same Music everywhere. Years ago, as I was writing a particular book, Mother suddenly said to me, I don't know how I can help you, but I am going to send you some music. And indeed the words came like a very vast rhythm, which was perhaps music and which garbed itself in words as it came down— it chose its words automatically, as if each sound created a word or attracted its own like word, but if the least think­ing occurred, the sound was scrambled and all the words came out wrong. Thought took shape underneath automati­cally, almost without my knowing, as if it were produced by the music, a secondary and inferior effect of the music; if one lost the rhythm, one also lost the thoughts. For thought—like everything else, like our architecture and painting, our gestures and revolutions—may simply be a translation of that great flow of Shakti which gives rhythm to everything—how wonderful if we always knew how to find the pure Flow! To create is to find the great Music again, to tune in to the pure Rhythm and let it flow. But most of the time we only tune in to “our" ideas; we translate through our opaque mental Sargasso—and naturally the rhythm is false, thought is false, and all life is false. It is no longer the motion of great wings; it is the motion of any­thing at all which fidgets and bumps into evety bar of its cage. If I only had an orchestra with two hundred performers at my disposal! She exclaimed. It would be quite interesting! Unfortunately, She had only a poor foot-driven harmonium, later replaced by a scarcely better electric organ. It’s like having to gather it all into an eyedropper and letting it out drop by drop—so of course it comes out very diminished!⁶ But even these little drops have yet to be discovered, and perhaps one day She will find the person who, to our delight, will know how to orchestrate those great waves of no human music. A sort of meditation with sound.⁷

The Explosion Above

Yet She did not meditate. Until She was twenty, She had no idea that one could meditate or make a big to-do about it: it was very simple, closely intertwined with life itself, and she would have found it very strange to sit apart from others, in order to do something that took place as natu­rally as breathing. She simply took this kind of fervor everywhere She went, this keen intensity that pierces through appearances, that gaze which insists on seeing the real thing, the real world, the truth in everything, that need for perfection which is only the prescience of a secret Perfection in things—though outwardly, to our eyes, it is disfigured, distorted, diminished—and which creates that kind of keen intensity, as if we were forever on a quest for the world's real face, for an enigmatic memory in every­thing: beings, encounters, objects, a piano one plays on for hours to make it yield its Note (She did work for hours everyday on her piano), a canvas one grasps to make it burst forth with an impossible color, or perhaps tear with a cry that unbearable blank, a mathematical problem one contemplates as if to pierce through the lines and volumes, and transpierce the problem of a world confined in a geometry that may not be Euclidian: My brother was study­ing advanced mathematics to enter Polytechnique and he found it difficult. I used to look on (Oh, She was always “looking," looking a lot) and everything would become clear: the why, the how; it was all clear. So the teacher was working hard, my brother was working hard, when I exclaimed, "But its like this!" Then I saw the teacher's face! It seems he went and told my mother, “It's your daughter who should be studying! ⁸

One day, however, by dint of sustaining that intense gaze everywhere, something burst out. It was at a concert, a recital by the great Belgian violinist Ysaye, a colleague of Rubinstein: The first time I heard Beethoven's concerto in D—in D major, for violin and orchestra ... suddenly the violin starts up (it's not right at the beginning—first there's an orchestral passage and then the violin takes it up), and with the first notes of the violin (Ysaye was playing, what a musician!), with the very first notes my head suddenly seemed to burst open, and I was cast into such splendor.... Oh, it was absolutely wonderful! For more than an hour I was in a state of bliss ... And mind you, I knew nothing of all those worlds, Mother explained, I hadn’t the slightest knowledge; but all my experiences came that way—unexpect­edly, without my seeking anything.⁹ Much ink has been spilled about this explosion above in Indian literature; it is the opening of the center above the head, sahasradala, or “thousand-petalled lotus,” the direct communication with the great Shakti's flow and her worlds of light and beauty, which we gropingly attempt to translate through a cranial shell. From then on, young Mirra would see the world otherwise—not only in the transparency of a history book, the secret murmurings of flowers and stones, or even the intimate vibrations of beings, but in its other origin above, its primal source—until the time She would see it still differently again (perhaps many times differently): more from within, more within the depths of things, within the very heart of Matter, where the secret Origin may be concealed in the atom or the cells of a body, as it is con­cealed in the infinitudes of the Shakti. For Mirra never ceased "looking"; even the immensities seemed to her yet another veil over “something else,” which was perhaps not only immense. She was too much of a “materialist" not to love Matter more than the scientists and not to wish it more beautiful than all quantum equations.

Everything now sprang up before Mirra's eyes; nothing was confined to a photographic flatness anymore: When I looked at a painting, same thing: something would suddenly open up inside my head and I would see the origin of the painting—and such colors!¹⁰ Even humans opened up, like the paintings, and behind their words or actions was revealed the true movement that gives them life, the vibra­tion that impels their gestures, the rhythm or color of their soul, or lack of soul, and everything was like a moving, colored and innumerable kaleidoscope endlessly turning the thousand faces of the Shakti, and often the thousand ways of disguising and distorting a single little color that would have liked to make such a lovely painting: I see the physical thing (words or action) and then this colored, lumi­nous transcription at the same time. The two things are superimposed. For example, when someone speaks to me, it gets translated into some kind of picture, a play of light or color (which is not always so luminous!). And that’s how it works—it is translated by patches and moving forms, which is how it gets registered in the earth's memory. So when things from this realm enter into people’s active conscious­ness, they get translated into each one’s language and the words and thoughts that each one is accustomed to—because that doesn’t belong to any language or to any idea: it is the exact imprint of what is happening.¹¹ The imprint that sticks to places, houses and objects, as it does to our cells— a tremendous living and exact History, which is like the world's truth in color. Our tape recordings may not be such a recent invention after all; we always "invent" a caricature of what is already there. Later Mother suddenly realized: So that’s what these modern artists see! And with a mischie­vous little smile that puckered her lips and puffed up her cheeks like a little girl suppressing a giggle, She added, Only, as they themselves aren't very coherent, what they see is not very coherent either!¹²

The world opened up and everything opened up. The far became near, the distant unknown vibrated as if it were right here, and the known here seemed to sink through the centuries; each thing was a world containing perhaps the whole world. Music mingled with colors, which mingled with one and the same great Rhythm that could also make poetry, or geometry, depending on whether it flowed this way or that, and even create a new gravity, or other gravities, depending on ... depending perhaps on the truth of our gaze. A gaze becoming truer and truer—which twinkled in the caterpillar along one single little line of the world, twinkled in the animal along tortuous trails and drew unchanging grooves, drew little meridians on its globes and confined galaxies into a bubble until the day it bursts its own bubble, and everything begins again according to another geometry. And perhaps all these little mental barriers were necessary to prevent us from tumbling— psychedelically or otherwise—into a world too vast for our consciousness. But the journey is not over; the true gaze has yet to be—the world has yet to be! The world is becoming more and more what it is. The world is a gaze becoming true. We must grow in consciousness; we must open eyes that do not stop at the grid of the little globe. And once we open our true eyes, once we are totally true, the world will be totally what it is, and all our laws will crumble like little children's blocks in the garden of the gods.

For the great world Kaleidoscope can also turn by an unexpected movement of the hand.