Satprem and Malraux

Compiler’s Note

This compilation explores the brief but significant contact between Satprem and the prominent French writer, Andre Malraux. The communion between the two men consists not in always giving the same answers to the same questions, but in a certain way of posing them, a certain way of acutely feeling the grandeur and misery of the human species. 

Using quotes from the written works of both, a montage of their distinct but complementary ways of being and thinking is provided in the first chapter. It is followed by their brief epistolary contact spanning over two decades and relevant conversations in the Mother’s Agenda. The last chapter takes extracts from Satprem’s Letters to Yolande and Notebooks of an Apocalypse where we find an expression of his expectations of Malraux and his disappointments - though ending on a hopeful note.

NOTE:
In some cases, when the English translation of original text in French was not available in the form of published books, online tools like Google Translate etc. have been utilised, for the purpose of this compilation.

“For the last half century, psychology has done nothing but reinstate the demons in man; it is possible, as André Malraux believed, that the task of the next half century will be "to reinstate the gods in man," or, rather, as Sri Aurobindo put it, to reinstate the Spirit in man and in matter, and to create "the life divine on earth"

- Satprem > The Adventure of Consciousness

A Dialogue through Quotes

Humanity was thick and heavy, heavy with flesh, blood, suffering, eternally stuck to itself like everything that dies.

- Malraux 

A memory of an indelible pain is engraved in the tongue of the race, it was the first word of the world and the last one with a few songs in between in order to forget.

- Satprem

*

Under the sun of Asia, in the European night, in every corner of the world, men were dying, appalled by the frustration of their lives, and full of rancor for their fellows who would see another dawn  -  and nearly all of them were seeking consolation from their gods. Ah, if only they existed, those gods of theirs, and he might, even at the cost of never-ending torment, howl in their faces, like the baying dogs, the bitter truth  -  that no hope of heaven, no promise of reward, nothing can justify the end of any human life! Could he but circumvent the sheer futility of shouting his resentment at the bright indifference of the sun, the closed eyes of the dying man, those blood-stained teeth gnawing the tattered lips . . . and see no more that tortured face, the spectacle of that immense defeat!

- Malraux 

We do not believe in death; death is the falsehood of the world. We are going to shatter the myth of death. 

Suffering is a falsehood, death is a falsehood, pain and pettiness are falsehoods, and until the end, even if I perish, even if I fall, I shall repeat like a mad king: we are truth, we are light, we are greatness and beauty, the joy which sings, because we are divine.

- Satprem

*

Man becomes truly Man only when in quest of what is most exalted in him....

- Malraux

Man is yet to be, he is to be discovered and to become in these very cells, laid bare and stripped of all their genetic and atavistic and medical clutter.

"Become the human being," the Vedic Rishis had already said some ten thousand years ago.

- Satprem

*

To understand what the outside of an aquarium looks like, it's better not to be a fish. 

- Malraux

We are at the end of everything: just as the tadpole, one day, reaches the end of its fishbowl  -  and it does not know that it will become a frog, it does not even know what a frog is. Our terrestrial fishbowl is cracking. 

- Satprem

*

"Sometimes one is seized by the anguish of being nothing more than a man."

- Malraux

Suffocation is the first step to finding the door. Anguish is stupid in itself, but it is the false image or mental transcription of a physiological state necessary to reach the solution.

- Satprem

*

Suffering, I'd rather reduce it than account for it. I don't like humanity that is made up of contemplating suffering.

- Malraux

We are constantly in search of millions of remedies for one Disease we do not really want to cure: UNCONSCIOUSNESS.

- Satprem 

*

Death exists as the irrefutable proof of the absurdity of life.

- Malraux

In the end, there are graves. Always more graves. ..Revolutions as well as men are engulfed in the mortal tide. 

There is no MESSAGE, except to change our skin, our physiology and produce another being on earth that will reverse the conditions of evolution. 

- Satprem

*

Art is weak in the face of suffering; unfortunately, no painting can stand up against a pool of blood. 

- Malraux

Turn everything into fire and a more desperate determination to get out of this inconsolable system. 

We are ALL in a certain intimate rot that we must have the courage to get out from. 

- Satprem 

Some Letters between Malraux and Satprem

Extract from Mother's Agenda 1972-73 > March 29, 1972

(In an interview in a Swedish magazine, Malraux had said, "For the last fifty years, psychology has been reinstating the demons in man. Such is the real result of psychoanalysis. Faced as we are with the most frightening threat humanity has ever known, I believe that the task of the next century will be to reinstate the gods in man.")

August 2, 1955

Dear Mr. Malraux,

Your reply to the questions of a Swedish magazine regarding "whether religions have in fact promoted the conditions of tolerance and understanding among men" happened to fall into my hands just as I have started giving a series of lectures on your works at the "International University Center" of Sri Aurobindo Ashram. This coincidence, along with a long-standing familiarity with your books, prompt me to write you a few words about another testimony, that of Sri Aurobindo, which I am sure you are aware of, but whose work, still incompletely translated in French, remains poorly known in Europe.

I seem to find in Sri Aurobindo's work an answer that meets yours and develops it—for the question is indeed to "reinstate the gods IN man" after having reinstated the demons, as you rightly stated in the Swedish article—but I also find there an answer to the agonizing question constantly raised by your characters from The Royal Way to The Walnut Trees of Altenburg. Indeed, all of them seek a "deeper notion in man" that will deliver them from death and solitude—this is THE question of the West, to which Sri Aurobindo brings a solution at once dynamic and illuminating. Hence, I am taking the liberty of sending by surface mail one of Sri Aurobindo's books in the original English entitled The Human Cycle. I hope it will interest you.

I call on you rather than any other contemporary writer because I think your works embody the very anguish of the West, an anguish I have bitterly experienced all the way to the German concentration camps at the age of twenty, and then in a long and uneasy wandering around the world. Insofar as I have always turned to you, daring and searching with each of your characters what "surpasses" man, I am again turning to you because I have a feeling that, more than anyone else, you can understand Sri Aurobindo's message and perhaps draw a new impetus from it. I am also thinking of a whole generation of young people who expect much from you: more than an ideal of pure heroism, which only opens the doors (as does all self-offering) on another realm of man we have yet to explore, and more than a fascination with death, which also is only a means and not an end, although its brutal nakedness can sometimes open a luminous breach in the bodily prison—where we seem to have been immured alive—and we emerge into a new dimension of our being. For we tend too often to forget that it is "for living" that your heroes think so constantly of death; also I think that the young people I mentioned want the truth of Tchen and Katow, the truth of Hernandez, Perken and Moreno [characters in Malraux's novels] beyond their death.

It may seem strange to speak of you in an Indian Ashram that one would consider far removed from the world and the agonizing problems and struggles of the "Human Condition," but as a matter of fact Sri Aurobindo's Ashram is concerned with this earthly life; it wants to transform it instead of fleeing it as all traditional Indian and Western religions do, forever proclaiming that "His kingdom is not of this world." Knowing that there exists a fundamental reality beyond man, religions have focussed on that other realm to find the key to man just as your heroes focus on their death to discover the fundamental reality that will be able to "stand" in the face of death. But religion has not justified this life, except as a transition toward a Beyond which is supposedly the supreme goal; and your heroes—though so close to life's throbbing heart that at times it seems to explode and reveal its poignant secret—finally plunge into death, as if to free themselves from an Absolute they cannot live in the flesh.

The young Indian students with whom I discuss your books understand perhaps better than Westerners the reason for all those bloody and apparently useless sacrifices—the torments conflicts and revolts of your heroes condemned to death, the great Hunger that drives them beyond themselves—for they know that these are like the contractions of childbirth, and that the thick shell of egoism, routine, conformism, intellectual and sentimental habits must be broken for the inner Divine to transpierce the surface of this life—for the Divine is indeed WITHIN man, and life harbors its own hidden justification. Echoing the Upanishad, Sri Aurobindo tells us that "The earth is His foothold." He also wrote, "God is not only in the still small voice, but in the fire and the whirlwind."

I think I am correctly interpreting the feeling of my young Indian friends when I say that they see the heroes of your novels as "raw mystics," to use Claudel's description of Rimbaud. This may seem a surprising attribute, considering your heroes' atheism, but that is because we have too often confused mysticism or spirituality with religion, as Sri Aurobindo stresses. One need not believe in a personal, extracosmic God to be a mystic. (That is certainly why religion has from time to time taken upon itself to bum alive all the "non-regular" mystics.) Here we touch upon a huge confusion rooted in religions. Through their monks, sannyasins and ascetics, religions have shown us a purely contemplative, austere and lifeless side of mysticism—indeed those mystics, like the religions they practice, live in a negation of life; they go through this "vale of tears" with their eyes exclusively fixed on the Beyond. But true mysticism is not so limited as that, it seeks to transform life, to reveal the Absolute hidden in it; it seeks to establish "the kingdom of God in man," as Sri Aurobindo wrote, "and not the kingdom of a Pope, clergy or sacerdotal class." If the modem world lives in conflict and anguish, if it is torn between "being" and "doing," it is because religion has driven away God from this world, severed him from his creation and flung him back to some distant heaven or empty nirvana, thus denying any possibility of human perfection on this earth and digging an unbridgeable gulf between being and doing, between mystics sunk in their dreams and this world abandoned to the forces of evil, to Satan and all those who consent to "get their hands dirty."

That contradiction is powerfully expressed in your books, it is striking to my Indian students. And they are surprised, for the urge to "do" something at all costs—"to do anything at all, as long as we do something," as one often hears in Europe—without this action being based on a "being" which it expresses and of which it is but the material translation, appears to them a strange attitude. Neither the despair, the silence or the revolt, nor the absurd pointlessness that sometimes surrounds the death of many of your heroes escape them. They feel that your heroes flee from themselves rather than express themselves. This torment between "being" and "doing" can be found in each one of them. They have apparently renounced to "be" something in order to "do" something, as one character stresses in Hope, but are they not desperately seeking to "be" through their actions, a "being" that they will capture only as time is abolished, in death? The same obsession seems to run through each of them: from Perken, who wants to "leave his scar on the map," to "outlive himself through twenty tribes," who fights against time as one fights against cancer, to Tchen, who shuts himself in the world of terrorism: "an eternal world where time does not exist," and to Katow, who whispers to himself, "O prisons, where time stops." In that respect, these characters clearly symbolize the impotence of a religion that has not been able to give the earth its meaning and plenitude.

To the question raised by the Swedish magazine and to the one many characters in your books ask themselves, I believe that Sri Aurobindo and his vast synthesis bring the key to a reconciliation and long-sought answer, a reconciliation between being and doing, which religion is incapable of supplying. "Through our Yoga," Sri Aurobindo wrote, "we propose nothing less than to break totally the past and present formations which make up the ordinary mental and material man and create a new centre of vision, a new universe of activities in ourselves, which will form a divine humanity or a superhuman nature." This is not an "idea" but an experience to be lived, which Sri Aurobindo has minutely described in his extensive body of works. It is what some thousand men and women from all over the world are trying to do at the Pondicherry Ashram.

In your reply to the Swedish magazine, you emphasize, "The major obstacle to tolerance is not agnosticism but Manichaeism." That is also why religions will never be able to unite humanity, because they have remained Manichaean in their principle, because they are founded on morality, on a sense of good and evil, necessarily varying from one country to the next. Religions will not reconcile men with one another any more than they have reconciled men with themselves, or reconciled their aspiration to "be" with their need for action—and for the same reasons, for in both cases they have dug an abyss between an ideal good, a "being" they have relegated to heaven, and an evil, a "becoming," which reigns supreme in a world where "all is vanity." I would like to quote here a passage from Sri Aurobindo's Essays on the Gita which throws a clear light on the problem: "To put away the responsibility for all that seems to us evil or terrible on the shoulders of a semi-omnipotent Devil, or to put it aside as part of Nature, making an unbridgeable opposition between world-nature and God-Nature, as if Nature were independent of God, or to throw the responsibility on man and his sins, as if he had a preponderant voice in the making of this world or could create anything against the will of God, are clumsily comfortable devices in which the religious thought of India has never taken refuge. We have to look courageously in the face of the reality and see that it is God and none else who has made this world in his being and that so he has made it. We have to see that Nature devouring her children, Time eating up the lives of creatures, Death universal and ineluctable and the violence of the Rudra forces in man and Nature are also the supreme Godhead in one of his cosmic figures. We have to see that God the bountiful and prodigal creator, God the helpful, strong and benignant preserver is also God the devourer and destroyer. The torment of the couch of pain and evil on which we are racked is his touch as much as happiness and sweetness and pleasure. It is only when we see with the eye of the complete union and feel this truth in the depths of our being that we can entirely discover behind that mask too the calm and beautiful face of the all-blissful Godhead and in this touch that tests our imperfection the touch of the friend and builder of the spirit in man. The discords of the worlds are God's discords and it is only by accepting and proceeding through them that we can arrive at the greater concords of his supreme harmony."² I believe that the characters of your books would not be seeking sacrifice and death so intensely if they did not feel the side of light and joy behind the mask of darkness in which they so passionately lose themselves.

Sri Aurobindo has constantly stressed that, through progressive evolutionary cycles, humanity must go beyond the purely ethical and religious stage, just as it must go beyond the infrarational and rational stage, in order to reach a new "spiritual and suprarational age"—otherwise we will simply remain doomed to the upheavals, conflicts and bloody sacrifices that shake our times, "for living according to a code of morality is always a tragedy," as one of the characters in Hope notes.

The tragedies we are experiencing—communism, Nazism—are not rooted, as the Swedish magazine implies, in the weakening or disappearance of religion, it is religion itself which is the source of the disequilibrium insofar as it is fossilized in dogmas, as it clings to a power it possesses in a human cycle drawing to its close, and as it refuses to open itself to a "new deeper notion in man" which would at long last reconcile heaven and earth. As a result, men go elsewhere to seek what religion is unable to provide: in communism or any other "ism," so great and persistent is their thirst for the Absolute—for that? abides under one name or another and that very thirst is the surest sign of a fullness to come.

At this crucial juncture in human evolution, Sri Aurobindo brings a luminous message to which I hope to draw your attention through this letter and the book I am taking the liberty of sending you. I think the youth of Europe have a profound need to hear a great voice that would bring them face to face with their fundamental truths; none can, better than you, touch that youth and awaken the anguished Occident.

I deeply hope, Sir, that Sri Aurobindo's works will be a new source of inspiration for you.

With my best and most considerate regards,

Bernard E.

(André Malraux's reply)

August 10, 1955

Your letter keenly interested me. I am familiar—relatively of course—with the works of Sri Aurobindo (whom I met by chance a long time ago, without any exchange of words...), but I did not know the book you are kind enough to send me, and which I look forward to receiving.

I agree—as you have seen—with your main thesis. But the text in question (the reply to a specific inquiry) was limited in its very scope.

Thank you again, and with sincere regards.

André Malraux

*

In 1971, Satprem had sent his book (On the way to Supermanhood) to Malraux, signing it with this sentence: 

"Between two worlds, this cry, this heartbreak that needs you."

Malraux’s reply:

Many thanks for 'On the Way to Supermanhood,' about which one of our mutual friends had spoken to me - thank you also for thinking of sending it to me."

Satprem’s reply on 2 October, 1971:

Dear Mr. Malraux,

I was very touched by your note thanking me for "On the Way to Supermanhood." Some fifteen years ago, in this Ashram, I was teaching French classes to the young Indian disciples, and I tried to tell them who Malraux was, whose work I admired - today they remember and, like me, are moved by your intervention on behalf of Bangladesh.

The problem is deeper, of course, as you well know. What is at stake at the end of the present mental cycle is the creation of a new man - that is what we are trying to do here with the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. Great Forces are at work here, in a humble way. And I am happy that "Supermanhood" did not leave you insensitive. Indeed, its cry needs you and your capacity to grasp the profound Sense of our human crisis.

May the Force of Sri Aurobindo and Mother be with you.

Fraternally with you in the great Work to be accomplished.

Conversations with The Mother about Malraux

Malraux and Bangladesh

Extract from Mother's Agenda 1971 > September 22, 1971

What do you have to say?

Not much. There's some interesting news. You've heard of André Malraux, the French writer?

Yes.

I believe he even came here to Pondicherry to see you. He has made a statement on the radio, and you know, he's a man who carries a lot of weight internationally: when he says something, he is listened to all over the world. So on French radio, he made a statement (you know that he was a minister under de Gaulle for a long time), a statement in favor of Bangladesh. He says:

The Indian Express, September 20, 1971

At 69, Malraux offers to fight in the ranks of Bangladesh.
He says, "I receive many letters from young people who write: if you form a foreign legion, we are ready to fight for Bangladesh."
Malraux admits he is too old to serve in the infantry, but he claims he could serve in a tank.
"One cannot seriously help Bengal by merely talking in its favor," he says. "One should go there in person and fight for her."
Malraux acknowledged, of course, that India had been created by nonviolence, but in the present case, that kind of tactics is not possible. "You are facing a Vietnam. Either you fight and you will have the whole world on your side, or you don't fight and the cause is lost."
"While intellectuals are signing petitions in good faith, the Pakistanis are throwing tanks into the battle. Consequently, the only serious thing is the defense of Bengal. Do it intellectually if you like, but with the support of combat."

(Mother nods her head several times and goes within for a half hour. Then Satprem gets ready to leave and Sujata approaches Mother)

This can go on for hours....

(Sujata:) Mother, what does a white peacock with a golden tail mean?

Ooh! That must be the supramental victory. A white peacock is the integral victory; a golden tail is the supramental realization.... Did you see that?

Satprem saw it.

(Satprem:) I saw it last night.

Why, that's splendid! It's splendid. It announces the victory. What were you meditating on?

But I don't know, I just saw it in passing.

Oh!... That's very good. It's the supramental victory. (Mother seems delighted) It's good.¹

*

Extract from Mother's Agenda 1971 > October 2, 1971

(Last year, after the death of General de Gaulle, Satprem's friend Y.L. had met André Malraux at Verrières; he immediately asked her, "Is the Mother still alive?" As Y.L. was a little taken aback, he added, "I went there before you, 33 years ago.... So I assume you know what they have been looking for in India...." Again a few days ago, Y.L. met André Malraux after his cry "Volunteer for Bengal"; he said to her, "What is essential in the fight I'm going to wage for Bengal is to know the attitude and action of Pondicherry." Y.L. therefore came to put the question directly to Mother. Mother asked, "When is André Malraux meeting Indira Gandhi?" "In November, in Paris." Mother again asked, "When is André Malraux thinking of coming to India?" "I don't know." Then Mother remained absorbed a long time and said, "He will only get THE answer when he arrives in India, because the answer is in him." After meeting Indira Gandhi in Paris, André Malraux will renounce his plan of action. Let us note that when Y.L. met him, he leafed through the Auroville pressbook and said, "All this is familiar—I'm part of it—I know this." And closing the book, "It's as if the sun had risen. And it goes down.... And we begin again...." Y.L. simply replied: "And what if the sun has risen for good?")

[These notes are taken from Y.L.'s travel diary.]

Well, then?

Do you know that Y.L., whom you saw a few days ago, met Malraux in Paris and gave him my article on Bangladesh, and "On the Way to Supermanhood"? And this morning I received a note from Malraux.

Ah!

A card. It's nice. He simply says:

"Many thanks for 'On the Way to Supermanhood,' about which one of our mutual friends had spoken to me—thank you also for thinking of sending it to me."

Good....

He said you were "my son"!

Oh!... Well, that's not completely wrong.

I said it's true! (Mother laughs merrily)

It seems he has a lot of authority over there?

Oh, indeed a lot, and not just in France, but all over the world. If he says something, it's a world event!

Oh, then that's good.

So I thought I would send him a little note ...

Yes.

... in which I would tell him this:

Dear Mr. Malraux,

I was very touched by your note thanking me for "On the Way to Supermanhood." Some fifteen years ago, in this Ashram, I was teaching French classes to the young Indian disciples, and I tried to tell them who Malraux was, whose work I admired—today they remember and, like me, are moved by your intervention on behalf of Bangladesh.

The problem is deeper, of course, as you well know. What is at stake at the end of the present mental cycle is the creation of a new man—that is what we are trying to do here with the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. Great Forces are at work here, in a humble way. And I am happy that "Supermanhood" did not leave you insensitive. Indeed, its cry needs you and your capacity to grasp the profound Sense of our human crisis.

May the Force of Sri Aurobindo and Mother be with you.

Fraternally with you in the great Work to be accomplished.

That's good, that's very good!

If a man like that were directly touched by you, it would be a fantastic help. Two words from that man, and the whole world listens.

Oh!

(Mother goes within for a long time)

*

“Perhaps he had an Indian life?”

Extract from Mother's Agenda 1971 > October 9, 1971

Did you send your letter to... what's his name, in France?

My letter?... You mean to Malraux. Yes, yes, I sent it.

With whom?

Directly, to an address in Paris.

Registered?

No, Mother.

The mail works very poorly these days.... Did you keep a copy?

(Mother goes within for 25 minutes)

Do you have a question?

You know, I think I've seen Malraux's inner being.

Really!

Yes, just the day before I received his card, at night I saw a being dressed in golden clothes, all golden, and he was even wearing a golden turban. And he came to me and offered me something on a tray.... But the clothes were very important! And he was quite handsome.... With a turban!²

(Mother laughs much)

And he was quite handsome.... With a turban!

He intends to come to India.

Perhaps he had an Indian life?

(Mother goes back within)

*

Malraux on India

“Within the Indian mind there remains something fascinating and fascinated, which stems from the feeling it gives us of climbing a sacred mountain whose summit is always receding, of advancing in the darkness by the light of the torch it carries. I do wonder why, when I first came into contact with India, it was so profound: it was immediately an encounter with transcendence.The word "God" seems ambiguous to me: The transcendence we're talking about is something quite different, or at any rate independent: for me, transcendence is the element that combats what I call man's sense of servitude, i.e. old age, illness, death - in short, everything by which man is not master of himself.”

*

Extract from Mother's Agenda 1972-73 > March 29, 1972

I received a letter from Y.L. You remember, last year she came to ask you Malraux's question about Bangladesh—Malraux wanted to participate in the struggle for Bangladesh. You told her to tell him he would have the answer when he came to India ...

(Mother nods)

... He never came to India. He dropped his project after meeting Indira Gandhi [in Paris].

Oh?

Yes, since India was officially going to war in Bangladesh, he didn't think there was any more reason for him to get killed... on the official side. So instead of going to Bangladesh, he went to the United States to meet Nixon.

(Mother frowns)

Well, anyway, Y.L.'s idea is to get Malraux to participate in Sri Aurobindo's Centenary. You know that for years I've been trying to interest Malraux in Sri Aurobindo's thought, I wrote him the first time ten or fifteen years ago. And here's what Y.L. writes to me:

"...Malraux again and again! In your last letter, at the end of December, you wrote, 'He could be the herald of the new world.' Invited by Nixon, he obeyed the outward call. Now remains the return journey via India and Bangladesh. This morning I received a copy of your speech on the Delhi radio. I immediately sent it to Malraux...."

She means my article "Sri Aurobindo and the Earth's Future." Then, a few days later, I received a second letter from Y.L., in which she says:

"This morning I received the enclosed reply. Please read it to Mother. I leave it to you to decide what should be done. I have not informed A. ['Sri Aurobindo Study Center' in Paris]. Your article on 'Sri Aurobindo and the Earth's Future' is what has won his support...."

Malraux agrees to be a member of the Centenary Committee. His secretary sent the following reply to Y.L.:

Verrières-le-Buisson
March 13, 1972

...Monsieur André Malraux is traveling abroad and is not expected back before April 15, but he has asked me to request you to tell the Mother that he is at her entire disposal for anything concerning the Committee, and that he considers it an honor.

Signed: S.R.

Oh, that's good!

We will have to speak with A.

It's good. Very good.³

*

The Mother sends a Blessing Packet for Malraux

19 Oct, 1972.
Satprem’s letter to Yolande when Malraux contemplated suicide after being rushed to the hospital. 

Your telegram was read to Mother immediately. She remained focused for a long time and gave a "package of blessings" for you (the blue one) and another for Andre Malraux - “if he is still alive" when you receive this letter, Mother said.

For Andre Malraux, it is the golden packet with the photo of Sri Aurobindo.

Yes, of course, there was a step to take, and it is easier to cross over to the other side... But it is not on the other side that one takes the step, it is here, and we must come back and come back again until it is DONE. That is where true courage lies.

An unfinished tale

“You can also take Andre Malraux as a Western representative of a certain brilliant success. But Malraux was a failure  -  he ended up in failure. What was the practical result of all his marvelous mental juggling?

I didn't meet him, but Malraux is someone I really understood in my heart. His courage, his determination to put into action what he felt  -  it all had a meaning for me. But he was never able (it seems he struggled and fought a lot), but he was never able to go beyond his mental jugglings  -  marvelous as they may be, but... He was marvelous inside the fishbowl, but he was never able to get to the other side.

And I have the feeling this applies to every apparently successful life.”

- Satprem, My Burning Heart

*

“I had always felt that he should have understood..”

Satprem’s letter to Yolande, 29 December, 1971. 

It is clear, in the higher destiny of individuals, that Bangladesh was only a pretext for Malraux to meet his moment of truth at the feet of Mother - if he seized the opportunity. And I understand that his external hopes for dramatic and spectacular action had to collapse in order for him to face the true Motive. Under these circumstances, it is quite possible that your letter will have a useful effect. Moreover, by a kind of "chance" that always reveals the guiding Hand, it so happens that my own letter to Malraux (sent to the wrong address, Boulevard Victor Hugo) was returned to me a few days ago. I sent it back to the correct address, I hope. But I realize that if this letter had arrived while he was still in the throes of his combative dream, it would have had no effect - whereas now, our two letters combined may be of some use.

We shall see. Things and beings are guided - and all is always well. Malraux had dreamed of dying, like his heroes, in beauty, according to his own tradition, on the battlefields of Bangladesh. But this kind of theatrical escape was not reserved for him - perhaps because there are better things to do than be a beautiful hero….

18 Nov, 1974

Malraux... As I believe I have already told you, we must remain silent, not intervene, as this only serves to provoke adverse reactions. And as far as I understand, for two or three years now, he has turned his back on the future, performing mental acrobatics with outdated ideas. He is very useful where he is - let us leave him there.

27 October, 1976

Jane's idea seems very good to me. However, I have some doubts that Malraux would accept it - I tried several times to get his attention, even 20 years ago I was speaking of "The Human Condition" (title of Malraux’s book) to my Indian students at the Ashram school! I had always felt that he should have understood, but... Perhaps the time wasn't right, I don't know. In these three volumes, he would find many answers to his questions and perhaps see a large section of the wall open up

- but how would he read all this? Anyway, let Jane follow her inspiration. It would be good if, for once, a great French voice had a few words for Mother, who has done so much...

8 December, 1976

Yes, I sensed that the Brincourts would not react. They are wooden. They only understand mental trapeze exercises, which Malraux adored, and if you try to give them the solution, the real remedy, the one that will cure death and all their cancers, they cry out in medical protest, or else it is not aesthetic or literary enough. Too bad, let them fester in their dusty literature - they won't even leave behind a pretty ruin like in Thebes. Malraux is as outdated as André Gide was twenty years ago. But after Karl Marx and Mao Zedong, there is Mother.

*

“How I regret that Malraux did not live a little longer to hear Mother's Answer - not an answer in the head, just one among others, but a process, a cellular path that is the goal of all these millions of years of pain.” - Satprem, 1977

Letter to Thérèse de Saint Phalle: Satprem thanks her for her article on his book, Le Matérialisme Divin (The Divine Materialism) in her women's magazine, Votre Beauté.

2 May, 1977

Our friend Yolande, the transparent one, sent me your message about Mother in "the goal of a civilization." I am so touched in my heart that you spoke of Mother - you are the very first. And you do so with such simplicity, you saw so clearly how Malraux's questions led to Her - because ultimately, the question that Death poses to us can be viewed through the stained glass windows of the sacred - Van Gogh's black birds, the physicist's microscope, but ultimately we are led to the place of the Answer in our own bodies. All our songs and works were not intended to poeticize Death or to deny it in a so-called Eternity that mocked our little lives - nor to create beautiful civilizations that all crumbled before this single Gaze, - but to reach this suffocating point where we MUST find the Answer, that is, the material answer, for our bodies, for our cells that had once been poetic, these cells that had traveled so far over millions of years to arrive at their answer: the end of death - Victory over Death. We are at that moment in the great journey where bodies must have their Answer - not just kind spirits. It is an evolution of matter, not just of Art and momentary pirouettes. If this matter has set out on its journey, it is because it too must have its Fullness - its Truth. Mother, this is the secret of matter. It is the Path of immortality in reverse - not in the pale heavens of the Spirit but in the first stirrings of a cell in our clarified matter, unencumbered by its atomic memories. There has been no adventure more powerful, more courageous, more revolutionary, really, since we began to emerge from the age of Ptolemy. It is the last revolution. For truly, life is not life until it has dissolved death. How I regret that Malraux did not live a little longer to hear Mother's Answer - not an answer in the head, just one among others, but a process, a cellular path that is the goal of all these millions of years of pain.

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for speaking of Her in such simple terms, side by side with Malraux. And I note that it was a women's magazine that first spoke of Her, because women, Mother said, will be the first to build the bridge to the next Species - "the New Species," the species without death - their bodies understand - it is the body that must understand.

*

The end of an era

"It should be otherwise."
Malraux’s last written note. 

-

November 23, 1976

Death of Malraux. The end of the mental man.

Satprem > Notebooks of an Apocalypse 1973-1978, Vol. 1

-

Conversation between Satprem and Sujata, 25th October, 1986:

Sujata: But I don't know why, when Malraux left… 

Satprem: Yes.

Sujata: ... I have had the impression that, there, it is the end of a human era.

Satprem: Yes. He was also a humanist.

Sujata: He was almost the last of….

Satprem: The thinkers.

Satprem > Notebooks of an Apocalypse 1986

-

20 December, 1986

If Malraux were alive, he would understand me…

Satprem > Notebooks of an Apocalypse 1986

-

6 January, 1988. 

12 years after the passing away of Andre Malraux - Satprem notes the following ‘dream’ in his Notebooks of an Apocalypse 1988, Vol. 8:

I also met Malraux. I talked to him about Mantras. He was very interested and wanted to "record" what I was saying.

(This was just before I woke up - curious.)

The ones who seem most alive, it would seem, are the "dead"!

*

Brothers and passers-by
But who goes, who stays?
Only the clothing changes
Or the colour of a sky over a little, 
white beach 
Only the sorrow goes 
And a child
On a pure, little beach 
Looks with wonder
At those who come and go
And no longer recognise each other….

- Satprem > By The Body Of The Earth or The Sannyasin