Between One and One Another. Michael Jackson

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СКАЧАТЬ I have recourse to metaphors of water and darkness to describe myself at twenty-one, it is partly because I spent that turbulent year in a harbor city buffeted by high winds and ransacked by winter storms. In this emotional maelstrom, I knew only one person who seemed to have the knack of staying afloat. And so I clung to him as to a life raft, buoyed by his concern for my welfare, guided by his advice, secure in his example. In retrospect, I am amazed that Brijen Gupta was only ten years older than I was.¹ Yet the difference between twenty-one and thirty-one is the difference between youth and manhood, and it was magnified, in this instance, by Brijen's political savvy, breadth of experience, and formidable self-confidence.

      Though he lectured in the Asian studies program at Victoria University of Wellington, he enjoyed the company of students as much as academic colleagues and presided over our small circle of leftists and would-be writers with the autocratic assuredness of a guru and the bemused detachment of a Cheshire cat. Whether in the student cafe or at a Ghuznee Street coffee shop, Brijen would play the avuncular roles of provocateur and sage. I remember riding in his car through rain-swept, pitch-dark Wellington streets as he, by turns, chanted Hindi lyrics or chided me for my romantic illusions about tribal societies.

      Talking in the cities, longing for the earth,

      Those ignorant of life will tell their neighbors

      That in the country there is natural bliss

      For men and women, who are nearer angels

      Because they feel the wind upon their faces,

      Or eat their supper sore from tramping furrows

      And see the lightning scorch the prairie night.

      These have not woken in the smothering dark

      To listen to the clock draining away,

      Second by second, the inner spring of joy;

      Nor caught the smell of death that floats around

      The farmhouse in the early afternoon.²

      That I was not crushed by Brijen's criticisms may have been because I had such a dim view of myself and envied Brijen's urbanity, erudition, and forthright way of engaging with everyone he met, from gas station attendants to professors. But it irked me that he was always in the right, always calling the shots, always knowing what was best, politically, aesthetically, and intellectually, and brooked no opinion that ran counter to his own. Perhaps this was his failing, or the price of his precocious and encompassing knowledge of so many fields—that he was inclined to associate with those who would assent to his opinions and look up to him as a god. In any case, it was the absolute asymmetry of our relationship—his assumption of authority, and my willing acquiescence to it—that made me deaf or indifferent to the snippets of information he shared about his background. And it wasn't until I came to Harvard in 2005 that I rectified this and asked Brijen—who was now retired from university teaching and living in Rochester, New York—if he would agree to a conversation about his early years in India and the United States. So began a series of meetings and e-mail exchanges that gradually filled in the gaps in my knowledge of this man who had figured so importantly in my development, a man to whom, in many ways, I owed my life.

      Not long before our conversations began, I had read Albert Raboteau's essay on Thomas Merton and Martin Luther King Jr., both of whom died in 1968.³ Raboteau chronicles the events that brought these men to understand that the monastic and prophetic traditions of which they were a part were not incompatible with critical thought and social activism. Sixteen years after publishing The Seven Storey Mountain, in which he embraced a philosophy of world renunciation, Merton decided that this goal was illusory, and he experienced “the immense joy of being a man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate.” His epiphany occurred in the most pedestrian setting: a shopping district at the corner of Fourth and Walnut in Louisville, Kentucky.

      I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream. Not that I question the reality of my vocation, or of my monastic life: but the conception of “separation from the world” that we have in the monastery too easily presents itself as a complete illusion: the illusion that by making vows we become a different species of being, pseudo-angels, “spiritual men,” men of interior life, what have you.⁴

      Martin Luther King's transformation from church pastor to civil rights leader was triggered by the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. Like Merton, he came to the realization that love for his fellow human beings was the way to God, and that fighting for human rights—even if it cost him his own life—was the path to righteousness.

      Raboteau's insights also helped me understand that, for me, the dialectic between the outward and inward poles of being had not found expression in a rhythm of political activism and periodic retreat but in an oscillation between intellectual or literary work (which is, of necessity, solitary and silent) and a passionate engagement, as an ethnographer, in the lives of others on the margins of the Western world. This was my personal variation on the theme of being at home and being away.

      Fortuitously, Brijen was not only sympathetic to Merton's paradoxical synthesis of contemplation and social commitment; he identified with the disillusionment that preceded Merton's decision to retreat from the chaos of the world in the early 1940s. Brijen drew my attention to Arthur Koestler's famous essay, “The Yogi and the Commissar,” in which Koestler uses the image of the spectrum to account for “all possible human attitudes to life.” At the infrared end, the figure of the commissar exemplifies a commitment to change from without. He is the revolutionary for whom all means, fair and foul, are justified in realizing his vision of a brave new world. At the opposite, ultraviolet, end of the spectrum, where the waves are short and of such high frequency that they cannot be seen, crouches the yogi who believes that little can be accomplished by willful striving and exterior organization. In seeking change from within he distances himself from the social sphere in order to make possible a mergence with the universal and cosmic all-one. “It is easy to say,” writes Koestler, “that all that is wanted is a synthesis —the synthesis between saint and revolutionary—but so far this has never been achieved. What has been achieved are various motley forms of compromise…but not synthesis. Apparently, the two elements do not mix, and this may be one of the reasons why we have made such a mess of our History.”⁵

      There is, perhaps, a third way. I glimpsed it in a letter Brijen wrote me in 1965, at a time when his energies were being drained by his involvement in the American civil rights movement and protests against the war in Vietnam.⁶ “I wish I could be nearer to you,” he wrote. “I know that we [friends from Wellington days], could start a circle of friendship, in which sharing and creativity may bind us together. But I know now it will remain a vain dream: I dreamt of it in India when I was in college, and it was shattered; then I had a vision of success in the sixties; it has now turned into frustrtion.” It was a utopian theme to which Brijen would return several times in his conversations with me—that a close-knit family or an intentional community offered the possibility of closing the gap between retreat and engagement, and that an intimate group of friends or kin could provide a refuge from the wider, impersonal worlds of national, academic, or corporate life yet prevent narcissistic withdrawal into oneself. Only in such contexts could one forge the bonds of mutual care, shared interest, and affection that make life worthwhile.

      At first, Brijan was coy, resistant to my proposal that we retrace the course of his life. Memory was fallible, he said, and memories often painful. Even if accurate recollection were possible, and pleasurable, what was the СКАЧАТЬ