I reprint it here for old times’ sake, and also as evidence of my constant attachment to the principle of non-attachment as outlined in the poem! It was not a bad way to greet a world war. I note also the use of the adjective ‘heraldic’ for which I have often had to answer the critics. It means simply the ‘mandala’ of the poet or of the poem. It is the alchemical sigil or signature of the individual; what’s left with the ego extracted. It is the pure nonentity of the entity for which the poem stands like an ideogram! It sounds rather enigmatic put like that, though in fact it boils down simply to the crucial smile which I exchanged with Chang over the kitchen sink, and which needs no gloze. Language confronts this sort of reality with despair which rapidly turns to humour and, in the face of earnest or too earnest questioners, to slapstick. Another way of going about it would be to look up the Saxon word ‘ullage’ in the dictionary; the definition of it – ‘what a cask wants of being full’ – will exercise your reason to the snapping point – especially if your cask contains wine! It is another sort of koan – or can be used as one! The war was a time of hesitant stock-taking for all of us, and my little article with all its solemnity and youthful lack of experience – not to mention its inexactitudes – was a humble attempt to greet it with an act of affirmation. It may be a bit boring to read now, but for the young man in question it was a capital document.
TAO AND ITS GLOZES
(Lawrence Durrell in the following article suggests a method whereby the real Tao can be differentiated from that which is not the Tao. He rightly perceives that Tao is a philosophy, but also much more. Indeed it is ‘the uncreate unborn and eternal energy of nature, manifesting periodically. Nature as well as man when it reaches purity will reach rest, and then all become one with Tao, which is the source of all bliss and felicity. As in the Hindu and Buddhistic philosophies, such purity and bliss and immortality can only be reached through the exercise of virtue and perfect quietude of our worldly spirit; the human mind has to control and finally subdue and even crush the turbulent action of man’s physical nature; and the sooner he reaches the required degree of moral purification, the happier he will feel.’ – EDS)
It has become a commonplace in. literary criticism today to refer to the disparities which exist between certain portions of Lao Tsu’s Book of the Simple Way: to accept, with the limpid resignation of the scholar, the apparent confusions (the word is repeatedly used) of which the text seems so full. So far, it seems, no one has tried to disentangle the conflicting fibres of doctrine and statement. Indeed, the task is not one to attract the boldest of textual scholars, for properly speaking no text exists which would offer the reader any canon on which to build an analytical or critical scheme. Yet it seems to me that a method may be found – perhaps not stable or exhaustive enough to satisfy the pedant, but sufficiently exciting to interest the student of Tao – a method by which one may catch glimpses of the original work among the glozes and shifting emendations of later scribes. The clue lies embedded like a diamond in the body of the text itself; a clue sufficiently cardinal to allow one a firm working foundation.
Now Tao has been defined as a philosophy which remains always in sharp contradistinction to the Confucian (more generally the ‘Socratic’) dialect of the ethic; but it is more than that. (The word ‘Philosophy’ still carries with it the taint of method given it by the Greeks, from which it has been impossible to free it.) It is an attempt to localize an experience, which itself is too comprehensive to be included in the mere confines of language. Throughout the book one can feel the language probing, like a pair of giant callipers, attempting to circumscribe a realm, for the expression of which we have nothing between the madman’s idiom and the A minor Quartet. The searchlight of the ratiocinative principle is too weak to light up this territory: words themselves are used as a kind of sculpture, to symbolize what cannot be directly expressed: the heraldry of language is called into play to accentuate, to attest to, to pierce through the rind of the merely cognative impulse and delineate once and for all the mystery, the resting place of the Tao.
‘The true Tao is not the subject of discussion.’ In your opening statement you are faced with an attitude which, more exactly expressed as the text proceeds, ends in a complete and final denial of principle; a denial, in fact, of polarity, of schism. The affirmation here is that of a total personality, speaking from its totality. In the symbol of the Simple Way, expressed once and for all, you will find no trace of that abruption of the personality from its cosmos which has hallucinated European thought ever since pre-Socratic times. There is, to write nicely, no human entity; it is merged in the All. Here there is no trace of the rupture between the individual and his scenery. Fused, there remains only the gigantic landscape of the spirit, in which our Aryan problem (‘To be, or not to be’) is swallowed up, exhausted, sucked dry by the eternal factor – the Tao. The house admits its resident: the tenant is absorbed, like a piece of tissue, into the very walls of his spiritual house. The world of the definition is exploded. All this is so exhaustively written out in the book that it seems a little difficult at first to locate those areas in which the conflicting ideas enter. But with this profound clue (the denial, the absolution of principle) it would seem possible to retrace one’s steps; and against this rule, measure the various phases of the text.
One thing becomes clear: if the denial of the dogmatic principle is the key-note of the document, then what confusions there are operate always in the realm of the ethic. It is only here that the voice becomes muffled, that the statement, otherwise so pure in its lingual evasions of the rule, become muddy, ambiguous.
The struggle is directed always against the Confucian scheme, the precocious assumption of man over men, over God, over the spiritual landscape; and luckily for us the Confucian contribution serves admirably to light up for us those precise departments of the idea which might as yet remain obscure.
When a man with a taste for reforming the
world takes the business in hand, it
is easily seen that there is no end to it.
For spiritual vessels are not fashioned in
the world. Whoever makes, destroys;
whoever grasps, loses.
And again:
A sage is one who is full of rectitude,
but he does not, on that account, hack and
carve at others … He is upright and yet
does not undertake to straighten others.
In these two extracts from Lao Tsu his stance seems clearly enough defined. He refuses the dogma with its sharp black and white tones. Within the experience of which he talks there is room for infinite adjustment, infinite movement. The imposition of the iron scheme is a violence from which he utterly dissociates himself; his method is a wingless flying – an act which operates along a line where the mere mechanics of the act is lost; is irrelevant. His refusal to transform the flora and fauna of his world is a direct challenge to the world of dogmatic relations, where good is balanced against evil, black against white, being against non-being; the world of opposites, from which alone flowers the ethic, the canon, the principle. In his refusal to accept the limited concepts of language, he shows his wariness against the destroying, limiting effect of definition.
It is when we come to speak of Beauty as a thing
apart that we at once define Ugliness. So
when goodness is seen to be good, then we
become aware of what is evil … For this
reason the Sage only concerns himself with
that which does not give rise to prejudice.
He will not place himself at the mercy of the dogmatic principle, which, he realizes, can carry embedded in it the poisons of the divided personality, against which the volatile principle of being is at war. Consequently he sees that the ratiocinative principle itself must go; and as the document closes, this is the note which is sounded in a last exhaustion; the last attempt to speak coherently from the very heart of Tao.
If we accept this as the u
ltimate statement from which the Tao lives, then it at once becomes obvious that we have in our hands a clue which relates to the actual text. For it is precisely where there occur abrupt expressions of dogma that the same ‘confusions’ also arise of which our scholars have talked for so long.
But let us pause for a moment to consider those to whom we owe the impurities in the test. What concerned them was never the Tao itself (the inexpressible IT): but merely a means of realizing it, tapping reservoirs for Peace; transforming it into an ideal easily attainable by religious practice. The history of this book: the subsequent erection of a huge and corrupt dogmatic theology around it – these prove our point beyond all doubt. What concerned the men who came after was a practice of Tao – a thing which could never exist in something whose theme was merely the localization of The Experience, with which language could deal, at the best, imprecisely. Their concern was credo; a credo that carried with it the iron imperative.
If we go back, then, keeping this fact in mind, we at once fall upon passages which carry the strange theological imperatives bedded in them.
The pride of wealth and glory is companied
with care, so that one should come to a full
stop when a good work is completed, and when
honour is advancing.
The imperative here is barbed with implication; the theological overtone slightly too obvious.
By expelling impure things from the mind
it is possible to remain untainted and to
continue in obscurity …
Quotation in bulk would be tiresome. The object of this note, impertinent enough in itself, is not to provide a hunting ground for the contentious scholar; rather I have suggested an exciting game which would interest those for whom the Book of the Simple Way is still confused, still a little obscure. By striking at the ethic wherever it appears in the text, one is suddenly faced with a genuine clearance of all the ‘confusions’. The book is empty of dead wood, the tree itself stands out, free and glowing, as it must have been originally.
Empty the document of these bewildering volte-faces and the circle finds itself harmoniously closed once more; we enter the centrum again. The ‘confusions’ have gone.
* * *
Have the ‘confusions’ really gone? What a preposterous last sentence, for while I continue to write, their continued existence must be supposed. A long way from the enigmatic smile of Kasyapa I am still at work taking bearings and keeping my humble Ship’s Log up to date. Poetry creates these clear imperatives – not thinking so loud, letting the heartbeats break the codes embedded in the vowels. And then, in daily life, others created out of the tensions of events; to be the equal of reality you must learn how to ignore it without danger!
So the search must go on, poem by poem, until one strikes the obvious disengagement strategy so as to enter the stream of the Heraclitean time at last. Great truths, one discovers, are not necessarily Facts – Facts are dreams.
NOTES
1 Chang, Jolan, The Tao of Love and Sex, Wildwood House, London, 1977.
2 Needham, Joseph, Science and Civilization in China, Cambridge University Press, 6 vols.
3 Yes, absurd, for had I strayed into a Tantric temple and seen wall-decorations involving jovial acts of cannibalism, ghosts drinking blood from skulls, and tearing human bodies limb from limb to eat them, I might easily have had a shock in the opposite sense.
4 The full address of the Chateau De Plaige is: Kagu-Ling, College Monastique, Chateau de Plaige, France 71320.
A Biography of Lawrence Durrell
Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) was a novelist, poet, and travel writer best known for the Alexandria Quartet, his acclaimed series of four novels set before and during World War II in Alexandria, Egypt. Durrell’s work was widely praised, with his Quartet winning the greatest accolades for its rich style and bold use of multiple perspectives. Upon the Quartet’s completion, Life called it “the most discussed and widely admired serious fiction of our time.”
Born in Jalandhar, British India, in 1912 to Indian-born British colonials, Durrell was an avid and dedicated writer from an early age. He studied in Darjeeling before his parents sent him to England at the age of eleven for his formal education. When he failed to pass his entrance examinations at Cambridge University, Durrell committed himself to becoming an established writer. He published his first book of poetry in 1931 when he was just nineteen years old, and later worked as a jazz pianist to help fund his passion for writing.
Determined to escape England, which he found dreary, Durrell convinced his widowed mother, siblings, and first wife, Nancy Isobel Myers, to move to the Greek island of Corfu in 1935. The island lifestyle reminded him of the India of his childhood. That same year, Durrell published his first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers. He also read Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and, impressed by the notorious novel, he wrote an admiring letter to Miller. Miller responded in kind, and their correspondence and friendship would continue for forty-five years. Miller’s advice and work heavily influenced Durrell’s provocative third novel, The Black Book (1938), which was published in Paris. Though it was Durrell’s first book of note, The Black Book was considered mildly pornographic and thus didn’t appear in print in Britain until 1973.
In 1940, Durrell and his wife had a daughter, Penelope Berengaria. The following year, as World War II escalated and Greece fell to the Nazis, Durrell and his family left Corfu for work in Athens, Kalamata (also in Greece), then Alexandria, Egypt. His relationship with Nancy was strained by the time they reached Egypt, and they separated in 1942. During the war, Durrell served as a press attaché to the British Embassy. He also wrote Prospero’s Cell, a guide to Corfu, while living in Egypt in 1945.
Durrell met Yvette Cohen in Alexandria, and the couple married in 1947. They had a daughter, Sappho Jane, in 1951, and separated in 1955. Durrell published White Eagles Over Serbia in 1957, alongside the celebrated memoir Bitter Lemons of Cyprus (1957), which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and Justine (1957), the first novel of the Alexandria Quartet Capitalizing on the overwhelming success of Justine, Durrell went on to publish the next three novels in the series—Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958), and Clea (1960)—in quick succession. Upon the series’ completion, poet Kenneth Rexroth hailed it as “a tour de force of multiple-aspect narrative.”
Durrell married again in 1961 to Claude-Marie Vincendon, who died of cancer in 1967. His fourth and final marriage was in 1973 to Ghislaine de Boysson, which ended in divorce in 1979.
After a life spent in varied locales, Durrell settled in Sommières, France, where he wrote the Revolt of Aphrodite series as well as the Avignon Quintet. The first book in the Quintet, Monsieur (1974), won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize while Constance (1982), the third novel, was nominated for the Booker Prize.
Durrell died in 1990 at his home in Sommières.
This photograph of Lawrence Durrell aboard his boat, the Van Norden, is taken from a negative discovered among his papers. The vessel is named after a character in Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. (Photograph held in the British Library’s modern manuscripts collection.)
One of Nancy Durrell’s photographs from the 1930s. Pictured here is the Caique, which they used to travel around the waters of Corfu. (Photo courtesy of Joanna Hodgkin, property of the Gerald Durrell Estate.)
This photograph of Nancy and Lawrence Durrell was likely taken in Delphi, Greece, in late 1939. (Photo courtesy of Joanna Hodgkin and the Gerald Durrell Estate.)
A 1942 photograph of Lawrence Durrell with his wife, Nancy, and their daughter, Penelope, taken in Cairo. (Photo courtesy of Joanna Hodgkin.)
This manuscript notebook contains one of two drafts of Justine acquired by the British Library as part of Lawrence Durrell’s large archive in 1995. (Notebook held in the British Library’s modern manuscripts collection.)
A page from Durrell’s notebooks, or, as he called them, the “quarry.” This page introduced his notes on the “colour and narrative”
of scenes in Justine. (Photo courtesy of the Lawrence Durrell Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Southern Illinois University Carbondale.)
“As well as serving delicious food in an idyllic setting, the Taverna Nikolas at Agni has strong links with the Durrell story in Corfu,” says Joanna Hodgkin of this 2012 photo. Durrell lived in the neighboring town of Kalami, where his famous White House sits right above the shoreline. (Photo courtesy of Joanna Hodgkin.)
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copyright © 1980 by Lawrence Durrell
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