Mother or The Divine Materialism - I

6: From Art to Matter

She was to enter the “artists life” at nineteen by marrying Henri Morisset, a pupil of Gustave Moreau and a student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. It seems odd to speak of an “artist’s life” for Her who had so many various lives present in her memory or living before her eyes—now glittering, now brutal, illumined or obscure, and initiated into so many mysteries—not to mention all the lives we do not know. Her view of the world was obviously not the same as ours, nor was she hurried and feverish like we who think we fall over at the end of the road, after a few years of struggle and pain mixed with meager joys, whose source and destiny we do not even know, nor whether they will fecundate anything except a doubtful progeny alien to us. We must admit that we live a complete absurdity and our ways would have seemed very barbaric to supposedly less intelligent ancestors. For Her, everything was different. She had a different way of touching Matter and a different way of growing up on a highroad that became ever clearer, vaster, and more precise: It is quite amusing, you learn.... Even if I lived a thousand years or more on earth, I would go on learning unceasingly, and I am sure I would always learn something new, for what was true yesterday is no longer so true today and what is true today will no longer be so tomorrow.¹ One day, when a child asked her what had become of Beethoven’s soul—probably thinking that that wonderful genius had to be reborn as a super-genius writing super-quartets—Mother, with that ever present touch of humor, replied to the deeply shocked child, 1 don't know— maybe a cobbler! For our concept of the grand road is as absurd as the absurd little bit of truncated path we hurry along in order to become the super-something of today’s fashion or todays taste or today’s knowledge—but fortu­nately tastes change, and fashions, and sciences. But what does not change in all this? What is the constant? And She added in order to reassure the child, disconcerted by the prospect of a cobbler Beethoven: It isn't a downfall; it is just meeting the problem from another angle.²

What then is this problem of all times and of each time?

The Artist’s Life

From Luxor or the Palazzo Ducale to rue Lemercier (the location of Morisset’s atelier) there was apparently quite a step, but this whole world is a tremendous appearance of "something" which goes on imperturbably beneath, and through all appearances.

We are in 1897, one year before Gustave Moreau’s death, six years after the death of Rimbaud. The Impressionists’ explosion of light had set off a whole train of waves across Europe and gathered together a remarkable palette on the banks of the Seine, which was already bursting into a thou­sand new colors. Monet was painting his Peupliers au bord de I'Epte, while the little atomized dots of the Pointillists were leaving in their wake a new thirst for kneading Matter and wresting goodness knows what emphasis or light from it. The Neo-impressionists, Expressionists, Fauvists were already drawing their provocative lines and catching the sky or trees to tinge them with canary yellow or brick red— the colors of their souls—or with “something" that had no longer anything to do with appearances. Rouault outlined his faces like bas-reliefs letting centuries pierce through or some surprised Assyria open its eyes amongst us. Like Mirra herself, painting was bursting the bark of the world to rediscover some ungrasped mystery. Vlaminck left his violin for that strange vertigo. Braque and Picasso were already progressing like young, ravenous wolves to disar­ticulate once and for all that old and dubious articulation. In the background, Rodin was chiseling and rechiseling his Porte de VEnfer, as if some new heaven might spring forth out of that chaos of the soul.

And Mirra was there.

She had her eyes wide open; She gazed at all this with her Mona Lisa smile or her laugh that delighted in every­thing, understood everything, played with everything— which understood so well what the others were seizing, clawing, kneading or tearing apart on their canvas or in stone. Like Morisset, like Rouault, Matisse was a student of Gustave Moreau, and She would know them all, as well as the old Impressionists—Renoir, Degas, the last days of Sisley, Signac, and the one who never painted his plates round (Cezanne). But he was right!³ And her gaze never paused; her thirst was as great as theirs, perhaps even greater. Even after they had stopped exploring, She was still digging and digging into Matter to wrest its secret. Even in front of the most extravagant explosions of colors and lines of our modernists, She, who had such a refined culture, would still exclaim, at seventy-seven, What’s terrible is that it gives you a complete distaste for all the other types of painting! Yes, they’ve managed to dispel all my taste for classical painting. There was a time when I looked at the paintings of Rembrandt, Titian or Tintoretto, Renoir or Monet, and I felt a great aesthetic joy. I no longer feel this aesthetic joy; they all seem empty of aesthetic joy. Naturally, I feel none of it when I look at the things they do today, but neverthe­less it’s SOMETHING BEHIND THIS that has caused the other to disappear. So with a little effort toward the future, we may find the formula for the new beauty.⁴

She was there—was it by chance? In fact, we had not had such a profound revolution since 1789, and Einstein was eighteen when Mirra turned nineteen. Like the poin­tillists, Max Planck was about to discover that light did not move sensibly at all, but in “little parcels." Newton’s apple was beginning to be seriously threatened, like a certain other apple that caused us to fall from paradise. And it is not over yet.

Of course She was everyone’s favorite. They were all thirty, thirty-five, forty years old, while I was nineteen or twenty ... I was by far the youngest.⁵ She had a little something that opened every heart and every door, like Mira Ismalun, but it had nothing to do with her eccentricity or her wardrobe (I had lacquered boots that were cracked and I painted them so it wouldn't show!)⁶ and her words were rarer than her laughter, but She had a silent way of going right to the heart of things, of casting off the mask of appearances and touching what vibrated there—that something the painter strove to capture, which he could hardly explain to himself —She also had that sweetness mingled with humor which knew how to be quietly violent, that sharp intelligence and that immediate comprehension which put each thing very simply in its place, so simply that no one had thought of it and everyone would break into unexpected laughter. Even Rodin confided in her. So many secret intrigues thus came to her unbidden, involving this one torn between his wife and his model, that one torn between his art and the diffi­cult truth he strove to wrench without flourish from a canvas or a block of granite. Had Mirra cared to collect her reminiscences, we would have had some remarkable mem­oirs, but for her it was all a fleeting breeze, and She had already moved ahead, far ahead into the forge of the future. Those who forge ahead, everywhere and in every form, were the only ones who interested her. She was just passing through. And everyone knew She was just passing through. We can picture her in her long sheath gown, as was the fashion in those days, the bodice tightly fitted like an hour­glass, her amber hair swept into a coil, high on top of her head like Shiva's jatta¹⁰² her round cheeks with the slightly golden complexion of the Middle East, that very impassive face which would suddenly open into laughter and so curiously model itself on what She was looking at, and those eyes which took on the colors of the worlds. She seemed to have stepped out of a painting by Renoir, but no Renoir would have known how to paint those eyes, and She stepped out of more than one painting, depending on the day or the hour, with a quite extraordinary mobility that could make her resemble a Clouet as well, an Egyptian mask or a Moghul miniature (one day I saw her look like a cat). This "adaptability” of Mother's features—and of Mirra’s, I suppose—is one of the strangest phenomena I have ever seen—probably not "strange” for her who became what She saw, who plunged so deep within that it all became one, without any barrier, as with the python in the Jardin des Plantes, the geraniums at the Tuileries (calm and smiling, nothing disturbs them), that opalescent reflection on Monet’s soft rivers, or the distress of this or that person —and ultimately the great distress everywhere. She went into everything—paintings, beings, cats, stones sculptured or not—and She left something in the heart of each one that no Mira Ismalun could ever have left.

The Division

Strange Mirra.

Yet, all this did not quench her thirst. She was in quest of a more profound revolution than that of lines and colors, and Einstein or Planck would have finally interested her more than the Impressionist explosion, although every­thing is linked. A secret ferment had crept into Matter to shatter the old facade.

In Bengal, Sri Aurobindo had started his revolutionary activities.

She was searching left and right; She kept her eyes wide open, making all sorts of "studies,” as She called them, and the experiences kept pouring in—unexpected, chaotic, but involving human matter this time. What could all of this mean? We make pretty paintings, talk madly in the night, dare this line or that color, chisel marble or mold clay, but life, that primary matter without frame or flourish, what is it? All that is like a lovely opaline or lemon yellow foam, or whatever color we sprinkle over something that remains so gray and drab underneath, so petty at heart (Culture? A sort of foam that has been whipped up and floats on the surface,⁷ She said), or else life was just a paintbrush or a chisel, or any kind of instrument, and the rest was a mere nothing strolling about between two brushstrokes. Where was life? Real life? And that color so warm and vibrant which bursts forth on the canvas was but rarely found on the face of the painter, quite the contrary. She had only to open her eyes and a different story emerged, sometimes even a curious story, as if the features of the face became transparent and formed other lines with moving colors, not always pretty—sometimes dark, or even an absence of a face within a gloomy haze—and at times the various parts of the face would take on different hues according to the moods of the person in question, and it all formed a kind of composite picture with harsh contrasts or muddy colors, which in no way resembled the artist’s lovely painting. Had Mirra dared to paint what She saw, She might have made a more “realistic" Picasso than Picasso himself. But Picasso had yet to paint his "Harlequins.” The state of conscious­ness of the person I’m looking at, for instance, changes his physical appearance ... The eyes are not quite the same, and the rest o/ the face, too, even the color and the shape. Within one individual aggregate, you find the whole range, and not only the whole range, but it changes constantly; the propor­tion of vibrations changes; only the appearance remains what it was, but that’s very superficial. And their state shows itself as—if you only knew the things one can see! A myriad of forms, faces, expressions. You’d think it was an album by the sharpest humorist possible ... And it all turns round and round, constantly. It’s very amusing, really. But it’s not seen by someone severe or harsh—no, no!—It's seen by someone very sharp—very sharp—with a wonderful sense of humor and a charming irony. It swarms and swarms. And people who are quite shut up in their bag of skin give you the feeling of something totally artificial, hard—hard, dry and artificial, and exact.⁸ So why should this picture not be as lovely as the other? Why should life be inferior to the picture we paint of it, a chance brushstroke in the midst of a dark “mudhole”? In the end, molding that human matter seemed to her more interesting than coloring a canvas that so poorly resembled the model. What about changing today’s canvas? What about painting a more beautiful picture? In short, the first and foremost of Mirra's morals was a sort of extension of aesthetics—the Greeks had not discovered anything else. But we are not so sure that all their Apollos did not conceal the same misery.

And Mirra did not like cheating. Honesty began with the color of ones thoughts.

She was to live this artist’s life for exactly ten years, until 1908, when She would divorce Morisset, just as Picasso had begun painting his “Harlequins”—a coincidence? Those artists were very much a fallow land, Mother would remark. When you saw the artist at work, he was living in a magnificent beauty, but when you saw the man at home, he had hardly any contact with the artist he was, and he became generally quite vulgar and ordinary.⁹ We do not know whether this comment applied to Morisset, whom She never spoke about, though not just to him alone. She already was deeply shocked by this division in a person —all persons—between art and life, between what we are and what we do, between the ideal and practical daily life. The eternal division between Matter and Spirit. For the "spirit" does not begin at a certain altitude; if it is not actually there in the most ordinary and banal act, it will really be nowhere, or it will be constantly under threat of being shattered by the first neglected banality. The power of “banality" is one of the most surprising discoveries we have yet to make, in case we still have not noticed that all our civilizations one after the other, all our spiritual or scientific triumphs one after the other, and finally our own lives and bodies, collapse under the most banal pretext—a tiny "random” shock, a speck of dust, a forgotten nothing, one of the million futilities we neglected to instill with spirit, which assail life and finally devour it. Meanwhile, since it takes us fifty or sixty years to become aware of the little nothing that will ultimately destroy everything, it remains “like nothing," and we move about with scores of swarming, silent little deaths biding their time. I recall (please excuse the digres­sion) making a beautiful speech one day to someone who was complaining about her difficulties. Simply "drown the little beast" by putting it in its microscopic place, here, before the ocean that stretches all the way to Malaysia and the Pacific, and beneath the revolving galaxies, I said—a microbe amidst the eternity of time and space. To be sure, cosmic consciousness is an excellent way of drowning the little beast. But the little beast takes its revenge—it never drowns. And this person quite simply replied, "Yes, but microbes are what galaxies are made of.” And what un­makes them. In fact, until we have infused the spirit into every last microbe, we shall keep on dying again and again. And perhaps all our civilizations die one after another only to learn that lesson.

We are not here to create "civilizations” but to find a new way of touching Matter, no longer with thoughts, claws or a trunk, but with something else this time.

Mirra was too much of a "materialist,” a lover of Matter, to tolerate this division and not strive to instill spirit every­where, or rather to free the spirit everywhere, since She saw the same totality of consciousness flowing everywhere. “To join the two poles,” She would call it: The universe was not created for anything other than that—to join these two poles, the two extremes of consciousness. And when they are joined, one realizes that both extremes are exactly the same thing—at once a single and innumerable whole.¹⁰ Over there, in Calcutta, Sri Aurobindo was discovering the same truth, while fully engaged in his revolutionary movement, and experiencing the infinitudes of the Spirit in the very midst of the most violent or most commonplace everyday actions. Most of the religions have put their curse upon Matter, He would write, and have made the refusal or the resigned temporary’ endurance of the physical life the test of religious truth and of spirituality. The older creeds, more- patient, more broodingly profound, not touched with the torture and the feverish impatience of the soul under the burden of the Iron Age, did not make this formidable divi­sion; they acknowledged Earth the Mother and Heaven the Father and accorded to them an equal love and reverence; but their ancient mysteries are obscure and unfathomable to our gaze who, whether our view of things be materialistic or spiritual, are alike content to cut the Gordian knot of the problem of existence with one decisive blow and to accept an escape into an eternal bliss or an end in an eternal annihila­tion or an eternal quietude.¹¹

And we recall this sublime line from Sri Aurobindo:

lied up the spirit to golden posts of bliss¹²

And the others have tied up Matter to the black posts of death. For the dogma of the ones—“We all are heading for death"—is as false as the dogma of the others—“We all are heading for heaven.” We "are heading” neither for death nor for heaven; we are in something else, which is neither Matter as we see it with our eyes of mental caterpillars nor heaven as we see it with our mind—something that our next pair of eyes will have to discover. Death might be the ultimate dogma to shatter. But to do this, we must go down into a certain microscopic, cellular "banality," which we have so far neglected for more brilliant pictures. For death no more begins with rigor mortis than the spirit begins at a certain altitude.

Sri Aurobindo and Mother are the whole story of a new relationship between Spirit and Matter, the discovery of a third piece of data that modifies both Spirit and Matter and opens the door to a new species upon earth.

The Clarification of Matter

How was Mirra to proceed? What path was She going to follow? ... It is hard to say. She may not have been too sure herself: It must mean that my course must be uncharted, even to my own mind, She would soon note. It is very easy to say first, second, third ... First, She did this, then She did that, so many exercises, so many meditations—and it all makes a nice little path inside a box. But, as always, She was mischievous enough to hop to the left and to the right, one step forward and another goodness knows where— to confuse everybody. Or perhaps to confuse our heads, which think of yoga as a sort of exercise, like dumbbells, geometry or gliding. In fact, She did not know what yoga was; She had never heard of that specimen, and as for “exercises,” well, all life was her exercise and the path ran everywhere, in every direction, without division. We might try to catch Mother in a roundabout way, but She laughs at us and has already run away. Quite a task for her present or future scribes, if they do not want to fall into the silliness of "Mother said" or "Mother did"—She said everything, even the most contradictory things, and did everything, even the most unexpected things. My consciousness is con­stantly a consciousness of action. Always action—action, action, perpetual action. Ultimately, constant creation. I could have been a scholar, I could have been a writer, just as I could have been a painter—and I have never had the patience for any of it. There was always “something" moving on too swiftly, too high and too far.¹³

Undoubtedly loo fast for Morisset; they went separate ways peacefully, smoothly, as good friends, until he remar­ried, as chance would have it, one of... Mirra's friends. We know little of him except that he was an unbeliever, like all the rest of the saintly tribe, and a lover of the good life, perhaps a bit fickle and undoubtedly not inclined to put into his life what he strove to put into his paintings. She never attempted to "reform" or convince him. It was com­pletely against her nature to try to convince others; She had a spontaneous sense of absolute freedom. I have the feeling that the world cannot be true unless it’s absolutely free.¹⁴ And with her disarming simplicity, She would later reply to those who reproached her for not being strict enough with certain unruly sheep, The Divine realizes Him­self differently in everyone—otherwise there would be only one person I¹⁵ And when Morisset closed his eyes forever to go elsewhere, it was of her that he thought and from her that he begged forgiveness. So, everyone must follow his own path and others have no business interfering with it.¹⁶

It is that simple.

Simple, but difficult if one is honest.

Nevertheless, She would have a son, Andre, who also became a "Polytechnician” (a family disease). She was exactly twenty. This was not what She expected from life, nor was it what She had hoped for from Morisset: I always dreamed of a great, shared love free of all animal activity, She would have one of her literary characters say, something that could physically reproduce the great love that is at the origin of the worlds.¹⁷ But producing daughters and sons ... I have never felt physically very maternal. There are millions and millions who do that, so do it again? No, truly, that’s not what one is born for.¹⁸

What we are born for ... We are a mystery to ourselves, each of us shut up in his bag of skin, with a father, a mother, and very soon geography and laws and history, lots of stories—but where is our story?—friends, family, then a job—what job?—a wife and children who begin the same story over again ... which we never began—when did we begin one second, one single little second of our own which would not be the story of the grandfather, of the great­grandfather and of the friends of our friends, with only a difference of a pen or a stethoscope, of a wife in brown or white who then begin again the grandmother's or the friends’ story, with a difference of religion or a straw hat, and scores of little libraries to recount the story that had never begun? We are wrapped up and bound in twenty- three thousand mysteries before we even know it. But truly speaking, there is no mystery here in all of this; it has just been laid on us along with the father, the grandmother, geography and the laws. Then we think we have to "do” this, and “learn” that, and we run after books that tell us only what others have learned, who in turn had learned it from others, adding only a little more mystery and some equations to it all in order to box-in the great Mystery they themselves have woven; we run after one object, another object, millions of objects to fill up the great emptiness of the subject in question, who is obviously not there—and where could he be? He runs about here and there; he runs multiplied a million of times after what he is not. He invents docks and telephones, but he has not even for a second invented himself. Has he ever once purely been himself—ή just a trace—free from ah this wrapping that cloaks itself in religion and philosophy and colors, lots of colors? We're born with a mudhole to clean out,¹⁹ She said. To know, know, KNOW! I knew nothing, nothing but the things of ordinary life, external knowledge. I had learned everything I had been given to learn; I had learned what I was taught, but also what my brother was taught, higher mathematics and all that! I had learned and learned and it was nothing. None of it explained anything to me. I couldn’t understand a thing!²⁰

Mirra was cleaning out the great, mysterious mudhole. She wanted to see things clearly—and without mystery, above all no mystery! She looked within herself and saw all their stories, scores of stories—Mathilde and the Big Turk and the neighbor of the neighbor—"the horrible mix­ture.”²¹ It’s like when you take different colors—three, four or five different colors—put them in the same water and mix it all up; the result is something murky, indistinct and incomprehensible, isn't it? You don’t know what is red, blue, green, or yellow anymore. It’s something turbid, a mixture of many colors together. So the very first task is to separate out the red, blue, yellow and green, and to put each one like that, in its proper place.²² It is quite possible in fact that She who had gone through so many “Mysteries" in other lives was born into the materialistic banality of this life in order to escape the burden of outdated initiations and, freed from all wisdoms, rediscover the Spirit’s supreme mystery at the heart of Matter. This is perhaps what "meeting the problem from another angle" means. There are large angles, small angles, millions of angles; and then there is a particular point where all angles originate, as the Big Bang originated from an atomic speck.

But first of all, Matter must be clarified.

She did it everywhere, at every moment, in the street or on the stairs leading up to her room, in the smallest thing, the least encounter. No, life is not mysterious; we just do not know how to live it; we constantly stir up the mud in the pond, on the boulevard and in everything we encounter, then we are surprised we cannot see anything clearly. We stir up thoughts, emotions, reactions, and we do not really encounter anyone or anything except our own mixture, which we then mix with everything. So how could the exact vibration, the exact perception, possibly occur? We might as well ask a radio set to broadcast on its exact wavelength after dipping it in coal tar. We BATHE in all conceivable things—good, bad, neutral, luminous, obscure—all of it is there, and everyone's consciousness is supposed, in principle, to act as a filter.... Basically, this is the purpose of physical existence: everyone is an instrument to control a certain range of vibrations that represent his particular field of work.²³ And it’s a wonderful thing—people do not realize what an ineffable grace it is—the way this universe is organized is such that there is a whole gamut of substance, from the most material substance to the highest spirituality, and all is gathered together within what we call a small individuality, but under the control of a central will. All this is yours; it is your field of work. It’s as if a number of particular vibrations had been carefully selected, collected, and put at your disposal so you can work on them fully—night and day, when you are awake or asleep, all the time. No one can take this away from you—it's marvelous!²⁴ So there is everything that comes from below, the old congenital and familial habits, the reactions that go back to the first milk we sipped, so "natural”—the enormous product of our education—and then there is the world of horizontal vibrations which come in at their own sweet whim and make us jump here or there; it is an infernal fandango compared to which our rush-hour traffic seems a pastoral dream. And everyday, we add some new “knowledge,” new encounters, new and wonderful "points of view” to this strange mixture, but all along there is nothing new in all that, except a gigantic mental tangle caught up in luminously obscure convolu­tions. We make a grand tour around a small trapeze and think we have gone around the world. And that trapeze is not even of our own making—what is ours in all this? Perhaps an idle second we had not even noticed, a second which seemed to give a little smile to goodness knows what.

No, there are no exceptional talents or exceptional visions; there are clear or clouded instruments.

But once there is the slightest bit of clarity, then ... then the world starts to become extremely interesting. Then “somebody” inside begins opening one eye—a completely fresh and clear eye, as if it were looking at the world for the first time ever. And nothing is mysterious anymore. We have emerged from the mysterious kneading trough. One learns to read the great book of the world, like Mirra in her little chair or with the trees in Fontainebleau: No one had yet spoken to me of meditation or of how to meditate. I would sit underneath those big trees; I felt very quiet and concentrated inside, and I almost lost the sense of the outer world; I felt a very intimate contact with the trees, and I was very happy. There are trees whose friendship with people grows very intimate. They are capable of a great affection and their generosity in giving protection may be far greater than man’s. If they like you, you can clearly feel the vibrations of their vital force.²⁵ We learn about a new kind of life flow, which spreads everywhere, in everything, connects everything without partitions of time or space—it is there immediately. We can take a river as a good symbol of life, Mother remarked, and what is constant in a river is the “water” element: it’s not always the same drop of water, but it's always water—without water there would be no river. And what is enduring in a human being is the “consciousness” element.²⁶ Freed from its mental coating and the multicol­ored "horrid mixture” of "our" feelings, “our" reactions, the countless “ours” that have nothing to do with us, the consciousness element flows completely clear and discloses its innumerable message. And we realize that it is a force, as concrete as electric or magnetic currents, which can be manipulated just as tangibly. We can aim the beam, emit, or switch off the current; we can make it travel where we want and as we want. And we receive what we want; we see the vibrations coming—light or dark, sympathetic or heinous, vibrations of illness or accident. Sorting out the different qualities of vibrations is a whole field of study. But there are no longer "morals” in all this, those horrible tiger-stripes of virtue and sin,²⁷ as Sri Aurobindo put it, that same devil in black or white; there are only “constructive vibrations” and “destructive vibrations,” the direct vibration and the vibrations with those absurd and completely useless twists and turns.²⁸ And instead of getting entangled in the swarm of horizontal vibrations, we free ourselves from it all and learn to perceive and receive the whole gamut of vertical vibrations, to project the antenna outside the little braincase and discover, world after world, plane after plane, the vibrations that move the world, people and events: I even have all kinds of knowledge that I don’t have!²⁹ Mother exclaimed one day. Yes, everything is there. We just have to draw it from the flowing of the great Shakti. In short, teaching is an attempt to replace Consciousness with an inner library!³⁰ She would say with her humorous touch.

And, finally, where is the misery when all is vast? The only misery is to be small and confined within a body.

We have got out of the little mentalized bag of skin—oh, we might as well say the "mental circus,” and the circus is very nice with its powdered clowns, its dancers and acrobats swinging wonderfully on their flying trapezes; it is a spec­tacle we would never get tired of, stunningly skillful, with jumps through flaming hoops and astonishing juggling ... but when we leave the big tent—that formidable tent, so brilliantly illumined with .., acetylene lamps, we realize that it was nothing but a small tent in the midst of an immensity. We can play in it for fifty years of our life or for centuries. We think we are, well, a highwire acrobat, a clown or a horse-rider; we think we are anybody, you know —a boy or a girl, a man or a woman, a dog or a horse, any­thing, a stone, the sea, the sun—we think we are all that instead of thinking of ourselves as the one.³¹ And this is where the whole mystery begins.

The "unified field" without equations.

In 1905, Einstein was formulating his first laws on the equivalence of Matter and Energy.