reality, it wasn’t a time for starched cuffs and cufflinks, but a very ordinary London morning, when I indulged myself in passing judgement on spring and the human soul, as if this judgement was not to be disputed – and just as a truly impartial blast of storms and snow beat down from the English north for the next few weeks to expose my all-too-human error. Only in May did spring bless the islands – and even then somewhat reluctantly.
Yet though of course I soon discovered my error, I would not admit it straightaway. I simply amused myself with this illusion. And no wonder, after such an endlessly long and dark winter.
So, coming down that morning after the Muslim prayer that had become mandatory for working with a calm heart, I entered the kitchen and boiled filtered water for my coffee – two lumps of brown sugar and two teaspoons of instant – and as usual, ambled through those mundane solitary ten minutes preparing to go to work. I opened the door to our haphazard garden, sat down on the step with my red delft mug, sipped the still scalding coffee and, striking a match, lit my rough cherrywood pipe from Karlovy Vary. And after this simple personal ritual developed over the years, I finally opened my sleepy eyes and, through my ancient spectacles, looked and saw: it has happened.
Yet, the bold simplicity of my assessment again turned out to be an error; in reality, it was only just starting to happen, and the conception was far from certain. In my haste, I had once more shot far ahead, rashly outpacing the proper time. Meanwhile, the sky turned pellucid blue before I truly woke; and the aromatic, incense smoke of Mac Baren tobacco (an offering to the idol of defective pleasures) hung in the moist, clear and slightly dim air and diffused gradually. The morning was fresh, but not too chilly, and I was warm enough in that green, quilted and rather stiff dressing gown given to me in wintry Tashkent – so comfortable and convenient for the morning, yet also very traditional in its lack of pockets and buttons, which means you can quickly wrap it around you and belt it with a twisted scarf – now where is that scarf? So again, I was sitting on the kitchen step and doing what had become usual for me – seeing what I wanted to see.
Collecting my thoughts and dragging myself back to reality, of course I sought authentic perceptions, but each day of life for just a single soul has already proved that although the authenticity of prayer is an absolutely necessary condition, it’s not always enough. Action is needed – not just any action, but one formed and matured from lessons of previous existence and which slowly flows from the soul with the clear light of labour and compassion to the world – an action that begins without my frail, capricious will, and once begun has no mortal end but joins the Unity of immortalities.
This soul action, which was meant to happen and, maybe, has long been imprinted with a moving script, must foster all other efforts in life and ensure they are not futile; so everything must happen constantly, rather than stagnate, and it is starting even now, and secretly, in the inner life of the first primroses, birds and trees …
And so the puffs of vanilla incense that hovered and floated in the morning air, conjoining and dispersing, were like awakening imagination that without your conscious will conjures seeming facts in your passage through the world – that imagination which the moment it arises brings ideas to the soul, Sufi-like in its moving script, the same Fancy that Laurence Sterne admonishes: ‘Thou art a seduced, and a seducing slut; and albeit thou cheatest us seven times a day with thy pictures and images, yet with so many charms dost thou do it, and thou deckest out thy pictures in the shapes of so many angels of light, ’t is a shame to break with thee.’
That is how spring entered my imagination, as on the verdant lawn amidst the plain grass a tiny wild crocus shone its soft lilac light, while above on the strong boughs of the spreading maple tree two stock-doves perched saucily, along with a fickle magpie that occasionally picked a fight with the squirrel family that long ago took a liking to this mysteriously hollow and exotic tree in the corner of the garden.
Then the birds took flight, but the maple remained, as it probably will long after me and my philosophizing are gone. Climbing into the sky like some giant branched fountain, the tree was still completely bare, yet so dense and ample with branches that even the unadorned candour of its naked form still hid its pure, natural essence – and isn’t this like the legendary Lady Godiva who covered her marvellous nakedness beneath the golden veil of her down-fallen dale of hair? So she rode past the greedy gaze of the people on her black, or was it white, horse? In the same way, the ambient reality of life slipped undiscovered through my morning, overfilled as it was with the fancies common to all mankind, while reality in its complete authenticity was lived out within the bushes and crocuses. There awoke in my heart a wrenching and insatiable jealousy of how completely they fulfilled their purpose in their brief existence.
Everything I saw through the small circle of my glasses made me ache with its unreachable authenticity, its absolute compliance with intention. Everything was explicit, and without any sly concealment. If there is one all-embracing word to describe this super-real sense of the garden, it would be ‘honesty’. Isn’t it true, though, that frankness in men is not always honest?
Frankness may be disingenuous when it breeds narcissism, and derives from that deliberate invention of conventions from chance human meetings, in which a clever script conjures hidden meanings and associations, establishes links with petitions and entreaties and the explanatory notes with which it is sometimes possible to justify oneself – but it is impossible to reckon and exhaust the guilt of life, the guilt which years not only fail to diminish but ceaselessly multiply.
Honesty, on the other hand, draws on silence – not because of any dark secrecy, but because it is impossible with even the best writing and speaking to be completely honest in a way that is understandable – yet still I keep trying. Can words ever be as honest as true music, which is ever replete with unspoken nobility, love and loyalty to one’s spiritual and earthly home; honest as music that directly and unequivocally connects soul to soul and expresses for solitary humans conjugations of authentically present realities, rather than just the visible, the manifest, the apparent?
I cannot compose or even record music, yet I cannot be honestly quiet, and just like a beloved woman, I am always demanding words.
In the meanwhile, in the world of plants and birds, and the world of cats, foxes and squirrels, two different aspects of reality – the visible and the true – were merging into one, their corporeal union free of human disorder; a conjoined existence which feels all the unseen, unheard sadness and pain of living things, yet does not sow the bitter seeds of distemper and doubt that flourish in human hearts and souls.
By now, dawn had fully broken. Yet the sun still hid behind low, trailing clouds, and you could only wonder at the innate colour of the sky. This saddened me greatly and it seemed that if day’s dawn begins only with the sun, then the soul’s dawn can come only when its light marries the visible and the true.
Oh Allah, if I did not know, and could not imagine, what heights exist! And how steep the vertex of human destiny! If the truth of the Unity didn’t at times shine into the soul with such unbearable brilliance and burn into it forever an unquenchable thirst for everything to be accomplished as intended! If I was not so profoundly aware of that summit – sublime, poised, fitting – which might be achieved once and forever … then if only I might know how and what to sacrifice for it.
That human and artistic imperfection, unspoken but felt from afar like the music of the spheres, was troubling me again this morning, and again I could neither express nor capture the truth of the moment, mundanely realizing that all things captured in haste stagnate in the mire of monosemantic meaning. The visible made me forlorn, and the true was so far, so infinitely far, away, and ever receding – leaving me in my dull bondage to a world which, like an idle woman, is drawn to light chatter and superficial folly – a world loosed from the mutual obligations which, in her opinion, no-one follows anyway.
And so there I was, wearing the Tashkent robe and smoking my
