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  back - I TELL YOU - 01/08/07

Mozart and the watchmaker

The discovery of beauty is the joy of life. So long as we keep on discovering beauty, we’ll keep on living. I’ve just now discovered a fugue by Mozart. And it has rejoiced my soul. We’ve always said that fugues have to be left to Bach. They flowed from his fingertips just as he sat at the keyboard. The mastery of “The Well-tempered Clavier”, which I studied as a young man, marked me for life with the flood of its preludes, the variety of its fugues, the innocence of its motives, the expectancy for its echo, the surprise of its reappearing, the wanderings of its excursus, the sonority of its harmony, the fullness of its ending. Nobody could imitate that. In music class we were officially told that Beethoven, for all his genius, never wrote a noteworthy fugue. He manfully tried in his Hammer-Klavier piano sonata, but in the score itself he calls it “Fuga a tre voci con alcune licenze” (Fugue at three voices with some licences), confessing that he himself was not very sure what he had written. Only three voices and with some licences. Fugues are not his cup of tea. And even less for Mozart. His playful and melodic nature does not seem to fit in with the seriousness, the rigidity, the formality, the inflexibility of a classical fugue. You have to leave that to John Sebastian. (One of the happiest memories of my life is having played in my youth John Sebastian Bach’s “Prelude and Fugue for Organ in A Minor” on a Cavaillé-Coll organ – which are to organs what Stradivarius is to violins – in the church of Our Lady of the Antigua in Orduña, Spain. Foretaste of heaven.)

And here comes the surprise. Listening carelessly one day to a CD with little known pieces by Mozart while I was working at my computer, suddenly my ears were pricked, my hair stood on edge, my thought stood still, every other object of my attention disappeared, and a revelation broke through my mind: But that is a fugue! A fugue by Mozart! And a beautiful fugue at that. Typical, canonical, original, magnificent, with its initial theme, its well-behaved development, its playing hide-and-seek between the voices, its laughter, its mischief, its humour, its wit, its coming back to the beginning as it approached its end, its sense of satisfaction when it has said all that it had to say and it ends when it just had to end. Bach’s depths in a Mozart’s score. Incredible beauty.

I looked up references to delve into the mystery. There is question of a strange work written by Mozart for a mechanical organ, that is a toy clock that was to repeat mechanically the piece at the stroke of each hour without any organist at the keyboard. Quite an order for a genius. Mozart was short of money, as it often happened with him, and to earn some money he accepted musical errands like this “Fantasy in F Minor” with K. 608 catalogue number. There is a letter from Mozart to his wife Constanze dated 3 October 1790 in Frankfurt in which he unburdens himself about this atypical piece: “I have made up my mind to write the Adagio for the clock-maker immediately, then to slip a few ducats into my dear little wife’s hand. And I did too, but it is such loathsome work I was most unhappy not to be able to finish it. Every day I work on it but always have to leave off, because it bores me. And I would quite certainly abandon it, if I did not have such an important reason for going on with it. But I hope to make myself finish it all the same, little by little.” A reluctant masterpiece. If that was Mozart when he was out of sorts, we can imagine what he was when he was inspired.

A historical curiosity. Beethoven was so fond of this little piece that he copied it out in his own hand. That much for a mechanical organ!


The hidden star

This meeting with Mozart has brought to my mind a story I myself wrote time ago, which follows. There is always something new to discover.

The stars were celebrating their own assembly, and each one was bringing to light, as only stars can bring things to light, its own merits in the life of humans, kings of creation. The pole star showed how it helped men and women on earth to fix the North in their maps and in their ways; the sun – which after all is also a star – described the warmth, the light, the life that it had engendered for all men and women on earth; a little known star revealed that it was the one that had confirmed Einstein’s theory when it passed in the nick of time behind the sun during an eclipse, which went to show how light bended under gravity, and with that it had rendered a signal service to science; and others mentioned the names they had made famous and the discoveries they had given rise to. Each one had something to say, and they all rivalled in fame and splendour. 

Only a little star, hidden and remote, remained quiet in the celestial assembly. It had nothing to say. When its turn came and it had to say something, it confessed that it had done nothing for the cosmos or for the human race, and that men and women on earth did not even know of its existence, as they had not yet discovered it. The other stars laughed at it and reviled it as useless, lazy, and unworthy to occupy a place in the sky. The stars are there to brighten the heavens, and what is the use of a star of which not even its existence is known?

The little star was listening in silence to all the reproaches its companions were hurling at it, and then something occurred to it while the others spoke, and it said it at the end. “Who knows?”, it said twinkling softly, “maybe I too am contributing in my own way to the progress and welfare of men and women in that far-off earth. It is true that they do not know me, but they are no fools, and their calculations tell them that in order to explain the paths of other stars and heavenly bodies they know, there must still be some other star that with its own gravitational attraction may explain the observed deviations in their orbits. This keeps them studying and observing and searching, and that is the way their science advances and their interest is kept awake.”

The other stars had gradually fallen into silence as the little star spoke, and so it gathered courage and at the end said something that set all the other stars thinking: “Not that I want to push myself forward in any way or underestimate anybody else’s work, and indeed I am the first to recognise and proclaim all the many good things you have done for men and women on earth; but I also think that I am rendering them an important service: I am making them realise that there is still something left for them to discover.”

I am deeply indebted to the many stars that have appeared through the years in the skies of my life. But perhaps the one I owe most to is that little star, remote and hidden, joyful and mischievous, anonymous and beloved, which keeps on playing hide-and-seek with the lens of my telescope. And I keep searching.

(Tales of The City of God, p. 4)

Memories of a seeker

 [Lucy Edge is a sharp British girl who, alter working ten years in a publicity firm in London, decided to go by herself to India in search of a guru, an experience, a doctrine, an association, a community, a scripture, a tradition that would lead her to find the meaning of life, her own identity, the perfection of her body, the liberation of the spirit, the illumination of the mind, and the ultimate cosmic bliss. She travelled north and south, east and west by train and by bus, she approached masters, joined courses, studied Yoga, meditated, contemplated, stretched out, squeezed in, twisted, coiled, opened up chakras, woke up kundalinis, performed asanas, practiced pranayam, breathed in, breathed out, closed her eyes, opened her eyes, sat in lotus posture, stood on her head, lied down, joined her hands, greeted the rising sun, dressed in orange…, and after all that drew the conclusion I’ll tell at the end, not without first relating some of her amusing and instructive experiences.]

“There was a bewildering array of yogic paths. Which way to go? It was very confusing. The royal and scientific path of Raja Yoga with Desikachar in Chennai? The path of self-knowledge – Jnana Yoga – at Tiruvanammalai? Bhakti Yoga – the path of love and devotion – with a Hugging Mother on the Keralan backwaters? Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga at Auroville? Tantra – worshipping the body as a temple of the Divine – with Osho in Pune? The precision of Iyengar Yoga, also in Pune? Ashtanga Yoga in Mysore or Sivananda Yoga in Kerala? These places occupied the four corners of India – should I go north, south, east or west? (Yoga School Dropout, p. 22)

[She eventually tries them all, beginning with Mysore:]

There before me were twenty or more beautiful people, draped over floor cushions, daybeds and each other. A harassed waiter, the only person showing any signs of movement, shuttled backwards and forwards through shuttered kitchen doors from which the smell of garlic and fresh coriander periodically escaped.

Smiling weakly, I surveyed the scene, nervously clutching my brand new copy of The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali to my chest. I suddenly felt overwhelmed. I had imagined this moment for a long time – my first encounter with the yoga students of Mysore – but where to sit? Everyone seemed so entwined. Unable to work out an immediate way to add myself to this human spaghetti, I hovered at the edge of a small splinter group sitting straight-backed at a low-slung table decorated with empty plates, bits of Naan bread and mint tea.

‘Would you like to join us?’ asked a husky voiced girl with golden skin and long, white-blonde hair.
‘Thank you, I’d love to’, I said gratefully.
I attempted to copy their ‘lotus’ position – ankles perched effortlessly on their thighs – but my hips and knees resisted at the crucial 45-degree point. I was forced to abandon the attempt and sit cross-legged – feet and ankles nailed firmly to the ground. I slid my shawl over the offending posture.

 ‘I’m Lisa, from Sweden’, said a blonde girl, with a perfect English accent and a warm smile.
‘I’m Lucy. I just arrived today, from London.’
‘Namaste, Lucy. Welcome to Mysore.’ Lisa raised her hands into prayer position and bowed her head.
I was eager to establish contact with these fellow spirits.
‘I love your shawl, where did you get it?’
‘Oh, thank you so much, Lucy. You know what, before I came here I was in Dharamshala and a holy man there read my aura – the shawl was a perfect match. The violet vibrations blow my crown chakra wide open, but it also keeps my energy field protected. And what brought you to India, Lucy?’
‘I think it was a Boeing seven-four-seven. It was a long journey – into Bombay and then on to Bangalore. What about you, Shanti?’
‘I am here to study Ashtanga Yoga with Guruji. My mom was here in seventy-five when she was pregnant with me, though she didn’t know it, doing all these inversions on her head and on one hand and on two and the peacock stand on one hand with her body horizontal. Pretty dangerous really – she could have lost me – but I must have loved it. It feels like Yoga is in my blood.’

Shanti smiled and, with a dancer’s poise, slowly unfurled her legs into an easy 180 degree stretch, keeping her back perfectly straight. She flexed her ankles and toes and came to rest with a small tinkle of the hand-carved bells on her antique ankle chains. (p. 2)

I could hardly wait. In less than a month I would have a pretzel like body, and all of its incumbent powers. Needless to say, things didn’t work out exactly as planned. The only time I did manage any degree of synchronicity was poolside. In the daily sunbathing line-up I found co-ordinating the laying down of my beach towel alongside those of others almost effortless.

Meanwhile, back on the yoga mat, my troubles continued. Try as I might, I couldn’t create enough yogic fire to raise the kundalini serpent of energy from the bottom of my spine, every single one of my chakras remained resolutely closed for business, and I couldn’t count more than three breaths without thinking about what was for dinner. I could not succeed in my Ha-Tha Yoga exercises to entwine and ultimately to merge the ha of the sun with the tha of the moon into the spinal energy of my sushnuma channel for instant enlightenment. I was reminded that in the Bhagavad Gita the Lord says that people only come to practice yoga in this life if they have already practised it in a previous life; but if that was the case, my body had forgotten all about it. And then, how could they have practised it in a previous life since that always presupposed to have practised it in another previous life? Where was a genuine beginner to start? (p. 15)

[This is now, among all her schools and all her teachers, the highest experience of all her yoga trip, and it coincides with my appreciation of Sri Raman Maharsi of Tiruvanammalai as a true saint and of his single-minded quest of the philosophical question ‘Who am I?’ as a true path:]

So in the presence of a Saint who had been dead for more than fifty years, I sat down to ask myself, ‘Who am I?’ I established I was not the tickle in my throat that I had noticed as soon as I was required to be silent. I was not the first grey hair I had noticed in the mirror that morning. I was not the age I am now, because in a second I would be older, and a second ago I was younger. I couldn’t be my body because, according to medical research, it had been completely renewed in the last seven years, and, if all went according to plan, it would be renewed again in the next seven. So, if I was not any of these things then who was I? Perhaps I was my thoughts? My hopes? But my hopes changed all the time, too. Perhaps I was my fears?

No, these had changed, too. It dawned on me that if my hopes and fears and body were constantly changing then so was the world around me. Nothing was the same, not even for a minute except – and this was the essence of Ramana Maharshi’s teaching, and in fact of all yoga – the Eternal Self which remains eternally still. And then I began to drop, leaving all behind, living my own self behind, into a stillness, a contentment, an awareness of a bigger reality, just pure existence, consciousness, and yes, bliss. It was funny that I hadn’t been sitting on a mountaintop, as I had always imagined I would be if I ever reached this state. Funny that, weird, and probably a bit mad.

As I surfaced, so too did my doubts. Was that really Gnana Yoga? I had been conscious of my breathing and that wasn’t supposed to happen. I had experienced a sense of timelessness but when I looked at my watch, no more than a few minutes had gone by. Oh well. Who cared? Whatever it was called, and however long it had lasted, I had felt something deep in a place where they didn’t charge a single rupee in registration fees and in the memory of a man who had been dead a very long time. (p. 265)

[And, after making the rounds of all the main yoga centres, she comes to her conclusion:]

It was time to call it a day. The quest was over. The turnaround I was looking for wasn’t going to be wrought by enrolling at another yoga school, the acquisition of more OM T-shirts, yoga books or laminated yellow certificates. I needed to change my perspective. Perhaps if I could just accept myself as I was and stop trying to be extraordinary, stop trying to be a Yoga Goddess, I would actually make some progress. It also struck me that the most inspirational people I had met in India were so-called ‘ordinary’ people, waiters, railway workers, government employees, tailors, masseurs, teachers.

In fact, it would seem that the closer people got to Self-Realisation the more ordinary they became. When I thought about these ‘ordinary’ people, the reason I found them so inspiring was because their yoga practice stretched way beyond their mat. They saw Yoga as a state of mind, an attitude to life, and the world as their school. Yoga was, for all of them, ‘a harmonious way of living’, not a one-off physical goal – they knew that all they had to do was look within. Enlightenment was not a trophy to be lifted high in one triumphant moment, it was about trying to increase the moments of seeing clearly and choosing wisely in daily life. None of them seemed to want a yoga calendar body. None of them seemed interested in balancing on a rock in handstand. For them yoga was not a huge topic of conversation, unless a Westerner asked about it. It was an unremarkable thing – breathing, meditation, and perhaps a few simple sun salutations. It was practised informally, not in a big class on the instructions of a big name teacher, but at home – quietly, without fuss. The thing that really distinguished these ‘ordinary’ people was their ability to celebrate the ordinary, to take pleasure in everyday life, to wonder at small things. Their happiness was right here, right now, in this place, wherever ‘this place’ happened to be.
If being this ‘ordinary’ could make you this happy, this content, I wanted in. It was time to ditch the big goals – they weren’t really getting me anywhere – and start with some small stuff. I would give up on trying to make headlines – the big merger with cosmic bliss, the quest for bodily perfection, the recruiting of a retinue of followers – and I would definitely stop trying to stand on my head, which hurt too much. Instead I would concentrate on the small print – trying to increase the moments of seeing clearly and choosing wisely in everyday life, just like my ‘ordinary’ gurus.

To all intents ad purposes I’d failed on my quest – but I didn’t feel like a failure. I actually felt happy and optimistic. Failure had set me free. I’d given up on perfection and I didn’t feel beholden to the demands of my ego any more. So I crossed the remaining yoga schools off my list – I had what I needed now, no need for any more shopping – and headed back to London. I was finally getting in touch with my inner guru. The one that says be content with what you have. The one that says happiness is always available to us, we just have to look inside ourselves. That one that says there is perfection in imperfection. The one that stays with you. (p. 309)