Mother's Chronicles (Book 2)

4

Mirra among the Artists

In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, European consciousness and sensibility were radically changed. Mirra grew up breathing that air of change.

The Impressionists had paved the way for the Post-Impressionists, the Expressionists, the Fauves, the Pointillists, all leading to modern art.

By the time Mirra came among the artists, some tenets of the Impressionists had become well established: Truth to sensation, Light governs all, etc. But Truth and Light were Mirra's natural elements. No truth, no reality escaped her. Mirra, we have seen, was someone who observed, who studied. As Mother puts it: "There was an intense vital¹ development during this period

1. Vital: Sri Aurobindo and Mother have made a classification of the being. Roughly, the vital comprises all our sensations, emotions and feelings. But to get a clear idea the Reader should turn to Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's works.

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of my life . . . and it all centred on studies: study of sensation, study of observation, study of technique, comparative studies, and so on; even the study of taste, of smell, of hearing, with an entire scale of observations. I mean, a kind of classification of experiences."

Nothing was beyond the pale of Mirra's study. If she had to go out for one reason or another, in the street she would watch how this one walked, how the other moved, how the light reacted upon that object, how that little tree there suddenly made the landscape beautiful, how . . . the thousand and one things we meet with in our daily lives and ignore. A mere nothing would open up a whole field of knowledge. "I remember I once had" Mother told us, "when I was simply walking in the street —a kind of revelation, because a woman was walking in front of me, and she really knew how to walk. How lovely it was! She had a magnificent gait! I saw this and all of a sudden I saw the origin of the entire Greek culture: how those forms came down towards the world to express beauty —just because a woman knew how to walk!"

Never a dull moment for Mirra!

And how keenly she observed those famous

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artists: "I lived for ten years among artists and I found them to be mostly a fallow ground. I mingled with all the great artists of the time, and I was like their kid sister —it was the end of the last century, the beginning of this one, with the Universal Exhibition of 1900; and they were the leading artists of the epoch. So I was by far the youngest, much younger than any of them —they were all over thirty, thirty-five, forty years old, whereas I was nineteen or twenty. Well, I was far, far ahead of them in their own domain —not in what I was producing (I was a perfectly ordinary artist), but from the standpoint of consciousness: observation, experience, study."

Mother always said that she was a mediocre artist. We wonder. Using a simple combination of lines, an unpretentious harmony of colours, she could raise this medium to suggest profound truths with perfection. In the Ashram she did not have much time to sit and paint, but she did a lot of rapid sketches of people. Anyway, I have seen how with a stroke or two of the brush Mother would help a painter to see what they had done wrong.

When I was around eleven, for several months I

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'

'My smile,' Mother called her

stayed in my father's room in the Ashram's main compound. A lady then wanted to do my portrait in oils. So every day I went up to Pavitra's bedroom to give sittings. Mother came daily to see how it was progressing; then taking a brush she would put strokes on the canvas with a sure and deft hand. Then she would take me towards her own quarters, open her frigidaire and ply me with fruits!

Mother's granary was full of every conceivable grain. Out she would come with one grain of story or another to illustrate with a concrete example the subject under discussion. For example, once Mother was explaining the vital's craving to be lauded; she said that unfortunately the vital is famished, of even a badly spoilt food, and it is such a glutton that it is ready to accept laudation from even those who are incompetence personified. "This reminds me," said Mother, "of the annual opening of the Salon of Painting at Paris, when the President of the Republic inspects the pictures, discovering with acumen that this is a landscape and that is a portrait, making insipid remarks with an air of knowing the very soul of painting. The painters are perfectly aware of the

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stupidity of these remarks; they however never lose an opportunity to bring up the testimonial to their genius given by the President." Mother's conclusion was: "For such indeed is the vital in human beings — ravenously hungry for fame."

Nothing escaped those eyes. Her sharp humour would scrape off people's veneer and lay bare what was underneath. "Which reminds me of a story that occurred in Paris," said Mother, "when I was seventeen or eighteen years old. A charity bazaar was held. In this charity bazaar worldly people bought and sold all sorts of things, and the sales proceeds went to charity works (it was more to have fun than to do good, but anyway, charities benefitted). The fashionable set, the cream of high society had gathered there. Now, the bazaar was very well laid out, but the structure was of a temporary nature, because it was to last three or four days only. The roof was made of a painted tarpaulin hung overhead. Everything was illumined by electricity; the work was more or less properly done, but of course they thought it was just meant for a few days. A short-circuit occurred, everything started to go up in flames; the roof caught fire and in an

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instant crashed down, burying people underneath. As I said, the elite of the society was there; for them, from the human standpoint, this was a frightful catastrophe. People near the exit were trying to flee; others, set on fire, were also trying to flee by reaching the door. It was a real free-for-all! All those elegant, refined people, who normally had such good manners, started to scuffle around like street urchins. There was even a Count of something or other, very well-known, a poet, perfectly elegant, who had a cane mounted with a silver knob, and he was caught in the act of striking women on their heads with his cane so that he could pass before them! Anyway, it was a fine spectacle, something very elegant!" Mother said in a sarcastic tone. "Afterwards, lamentations in the society, great funerals, and lots of fuss. Now, a Dominican friar, a well-known orator, was asked to deliver a sermon over the tomb of the unfortunate ones who had perished in the fire. He said something like this: 'Serves you right. You do not live according to the law of God, so He has punished you by burning you.'

As though that infinite Lover of man would stoop to such crudeness! Really!

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Mirra watched the artists —at work, at home — and saw that very few lived art in their lives. Some were strict moralists: "I lived for ten years among artists, and I met many who were bourgeois to the core; they were married and established, good fathers, good husbands, and lived in conformity with the strictest moral views as to what should or should not be done."

Others were vulgar or even cruel: "For example, I was pondering on all the artists I have known — I have known all the greatest artists of the last century and the beginning of this century, and they truly had a sense of beauty —but morally some were very cruel. When you saw the man at home, he had a pretty limited contact with the artist he was; and generally he turned into quite a vulgar man, quite ordinary." Mother paused and added, "Many, I am sure. But those who were unified —in the sense that they lived their art —not they: they were good and generous."

This 'good and generous' reminded Mother of Auguste Rodin (1840-1917)."I remember a very funny story told me by Rodin. Do you know Rodin (not him, but his work)?" Some of us did! "One day, Rodin put a question to me," Mother pursued her tale, "he asked

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me, 'How do you prevent two women from being jealous of one another?' " We all roared with laughter; after we subsided, Mother continued: "I said to him, 'That's a real problem! But do you mind telling me why?' So he told me: 'You see, I do the bulk of my work in clay at least a great many —before hewing them in stone or casting them in bronze. Well, what befalls me is as follows. Sometimes I go on a trip for one day or two days or three days. I leave my clays covered with wet rags, otherwise if the clay dries it cracks and then all the work is lost, another one has to be made.' " Mother added: "All sculptors know this. And here's what happened to the poor man. He had a wife and he had his favourite model who was perfectly . . . very much at home in the house, she went in as she pleased. She was the model he used for making his sculptures. Well, the wife wanted to be the wife. So when Rodin was away, she would enter the studio early every morning and sprinkle all the rags, all the faces and bodies, everything —it was all covered, enveloped in damp clothes: you spray water on them as you would spray plants. So she would come and spray water. Next, some time later —two or three hours later —the

Auguste Rodin

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model would come; she had a key to the studio. She would open the studio and spray. She saw quite well that it was all damp, but she was entitled to the upkeep of the sculptor's sculptures —and she sprayed. 'So then,' Rodin said to me, 'the result is that when I return from my trip, all my sculptures run and nothing at all of what I had made remains.' Poor Rodin, what a life!

"He was an old man," Mother continued, "at that time he was already old, but he was magnificent. He had a faun's head, like a Greek Faun's. He was short, very broad, robust; with mischievous eyes. He was remarkably ironic and a bit.... He got fun out of it, but, after all, he would have preferred to find his sculptures intact!" When asked what her reply was, Mother said: "I don't remember any more. . . . Perhaps I replied with a pleasantry. No, I remember one thing, I asked him, 'But why don't you say, it is this one who will spray?' Upon which he tore the little hair remaining on his head and told me, 'But that would mean war to the knife!' "^l

1. Of interest: Auguste Rodin met Swami Vivekananda in August 1900,

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Yes, those who were artists to the core felt drawn to Mirra. They saw her beauty, for beautiful she was: those luminous great eyes, the piled-up hair on her head, the straight, fine nose, the red lips that curved in a wide smile, the satin smooth skin that glowed as if rose petals and honeysuckle had gone into the making of it. But they felt more her inner beauty, and they were drawn to her.

Mother herself never failed to notice the inner beauty in others. I remember, I was then twelve or thirteen, when a lady told me of a remark of Mother's. It seems Mother had said to her about me, elle est jolie. As at the time I knew but a bare smattering of French, the lady thought an explanation was needed; she said, "Mother doesn't mean you are jolly! She means your inside is beautiful." I nodded. And that made me love Mother the more. For, I told myself, anyone can see your physical beauty, but how many care to see your inner beauty?!

But generally speaking, people's sense of beauty — what is termed as such —is ... ah, well. . . . Let us hear what Mother says. "If you speak to Europeans, for instance, they tell you there's nothing more beautiful

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than Europe. I knew Frenchmen — not one, but hundreds—who used to say: in the world you'll not find women more beautiful than French women! I also knew a Negro who did all his studies in France, and when asked who the most beautiful woman is, he would say, 'No woman is more beautiful than a Negress.' It was quite spontaneous, you see."

That is how it goes when we are wrapped up in a local consciousness, a national consciousness — the consciousness of a country. What is beautiful in one country is not necessarily considered beautiful in another.

"The sense of beauty differs." Mother then alluded to the African student just mentioned. "For example (I can make you laugh with a story), in Paris I knew the son of the King of Dahomey." Dahomey is a tiny country in West Africa, on the Gulf of Guinea. It is hemmed in by Nigeria to its east and Togo to its west. "He was a Negro, his father was a Negro. The son had come to Paris to study Law. He spoke French like a Frenchman. But he had remained Negro, you see. He was asked —he used to tell a lot of stories about his student life — someone asked him in front of me:

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'Well, when you marry, with whom will you get married?' 'Ah! With a girl of my country, naturally; only they are beautiful. . . .' " We —most of those listening were Indians —laughed. "Now," Mother said pointedly, "for people who are not Negroes, it's difficult to see Negro beauty! And yet it was absolutely spontaneous. He was fully convinced that there were no two ways of thinking about it, impossible. . . ! 'The only beautiful women are from my country.' " She then said thoughtfully: "Everywhere it's the same. Only those who have developed some artistic taste and travelled a lot, seen a lot of things, have enlarged their consciousness and are no longer so sectarian. . . . Therefore, to know true beauty, independent of all form, you have to rise above all form. And once you have known beauty beyond all form, you can recognize it in any form, regardless. Then it becomes very interesting."

And what is our lot when we remain boxed in in the mentality of the average human being? Because, isn't the average man even now as crude and undeveloped in his inward existence as was the bygone primitive man in his outward life? "We circle in an unending round," Mother warned us. "Sometimes it is an iron

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ring, sometimes a golden ring —but we circle and we circle and we circle in a round, as our children will circle in a round and our grandchildren will circle in a round —and it will go on endlessly."

Thank god for the exceptions! For the rare thinker, poet or artist who can achieve a harmony of the inner and the outer life and make them one in fullness. Thank god for a Rodin.

Rodin must have instinctively felt an affinity with this young lady. Although there was almost a difference of forty years between them, Rodin was at ease with Mirra ; he could open his heart to her. Under that serious look did not the twinkling eyes reveal an ever-present humour! Yes, Mirra understood.

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