Opposite Contraries (7 page)

We will arrive in Seattle 8:30 A.M. tomorrow. I should be home by 1:30 if I connect. Beloved West, don’t crush me! Keep me high and strong for the struggle.

All night the demon monster has rushed us into the West in a series of rough jerks and bumps, as if we lagged and it bullied. It is all West now, no trace of East left — low sky, dense growth, bursting, cruel rivers, power and intensity everywhere. I think it is a little crushing and then I note the fine trees, how straight they grow, not one kink or swerve in a million of them, plumb straight.

The Opposites went last night. The car is almost empty. The sniffs and coughs have gone. Blackie is mopping his face so hard, if it wasn’t black through it would come off. I’m going home. Why aren’t I tip-toppy and gay? I love home and my folks and the creatures. I love the West. It is the unpierceable mystery that baffles and discourages me.

The fusses are all finished.
Now I am on the boat. Here’s a corner of the lounge where I can perhaps sleep away the time or part of it.
Funny thing, there was not a moment to be lost on the train. I looked intently always. But the boat is different, just water and more water, and sky galore, and snatches of land here and there, but vague and not intimate.
In the train you’ve got to look and think because you are all squeezed up. You’ve got to get out in some way, so you do — out the window with your thoughts and eyes. Otherwise you’d burst. But on board, people let their thoughts gape away over the sea, and gulls help. They take people out with them over the water unconsciously. There is so little life along the railway. When there is, it is mostly wild and scuttles too quickly to follow. The gull gives you time. Now we are bellowing and backing out and the gulls are folding up their legs preparatory and it’s quite different from Chicago’s Lake Michigan. Nor is it like Toronto. It’s the dear, grand West and me, and I’m frightfully hungry. How queenly this ship is after the snorting, bumpity train. But the sea is restless; it has not the calm, pushing growth of the earth.

[
…
]
Until one’s thoughts have come through, how
can
one’s pictures come through? And we are such shirkers. It is so easy to play vacant and slither around the corner and change the subject — but it’s so
hard
to stand still and face it and search and search and search the thing ’til its bulwarks evaporate. Brag
and Bully won’t do. You’ve got to plead and wheedle. You’ve got to beg and be let in humbly, not wormlike but humbly sincere.

[
…
] I have just come off a three days’ starve and feel fine. We eat too much. It is my cure for neuralgia and such-like pains. Orange and grapefruit juice only for three days. How clean and easy one feels after, gay as pyjamas on the line on windy wash days. Yet the weakness of me puts it off, making every excuse before starting in. When started, I generally stick.

When I woke this morning, someone was saying to me, “And now go forward; take your courage in your hands and let whatever will be, be.” Last night Susie the rat found her way upstairs to the bedroom. I felt something against my back and was startled awake. Susie was very pleased with herself.

A letter from Lawren. He’s a
real
person. How worth while friendship is when it is that unashamed kind that can talk straight of soul things and the deep things of one’s work that really matter. Not just the froth of life, the fillings and surface. We have a compact between us that each will not deny his own Divinity, I mean state of yourself and your work. I used to, horribly, instead of recognizing and calling for the Divine in oneself. Oh I must lay aside all those little details of life that occupy me so much — clear the decks for action, keep my ideas straight and high and think over the heads of digging and dogs and dishpans, good in their places, but make them sit under the higher things, not occupying too prominent a place in life. Whitman says — everything is good in its place, bad is only good out of its own place.

[…]
Is theosophy good or bad? I wish I knew. Some of it seems splendid to me and some wicked. Love and mercy left out; law and justice predominate.

One’s place of worship is that place where he draws nearest to the universal spirit — God — whatever leads him to that place is his religion. If it is music, or singing, or gardening, or painting, or any other thing that brings him into tune with God and with himself, that is the religion for him. No man can judge what is the religion for others, because the bodies themselves are aware of being in harmony. No one knows the best man’s tune; that is why we three women are so different and can only go so far into each other. We don’t know one another’s tune. Yet I love them better than anything.

Last night I went to a lecture on the Mahatma Ghandhi by a Hindu, Raja Singh. It was splendid. [He was] well-educated, good-looking, vital and witty and charming, and he made me love the Mahatma Gandhi for his unselfish bigness. These Eastern men have something behind them that we Westerners have not got. They make you feel so clumsy and material. Lee Nan does that too though he is quite an ordinary Chinese. Somehow they seem more in touch with the Eternal.

He [Henry] is getting very insolent. Poor little Edith. The selfish brothers go their own way, pleasuring. If there was only some
hybrid between a lucrative asylum and a nursing home. He fits in neither. They are going to board [him]. I don’t think that will last long; there is a nervous, fretful husband. I don’t feel of any use. I have tried to be nice to Henry, to help him, but he’s impossible. Perhaps I have not enough tact. Perhaps boarding with a family will be better. He will be with them more.

Oh Lor’! My other sister has been to see the sketches. I am in no wise puffed but pancake flat. She insisted that my forest was a waterfall. The only thing that impressed her was the amount of stuff.

I have said goodbye to the Raja. He’s splendid. I heard him eight times and I am so glad he came here — I can’t tell how glad. My whole outlook has all changed. Things seem silly that used to seem smart. I have decided to take my stand on Christ’s side, to let go of philosophers and substitute Christ. I wrote to “Uncle Raja” (that’s what his Eurasian children call him) and he gave me a beautiful “May God bless you” as I took his hand and said goodbye tonight after the lecture on Mahatma Gandhi. Oh, I do want the kind of religion that he offers — it is verily of Christ. [. . .]

How can I describe this man of God, Raja Singh? He is so simple; no arts, no affectation or self-consciousness. He looks like a simple boy when he enters the church with the attending parson. His hair is black, skin dark. I do not know if he is handsome or not. That is one thing about people I put in my garden down in my heart. I have noticed that I do not remember their outside appearance, but their inside looks only. I forget their features. I think that is my test whether they belong to the garden, because it is a garden for souls, not for outsides. I generally
remember their hands. Raja Singh’s hands are very long and slender Indian hands. He has a plain little black Testament and he holds it close so tenderly as if he loved it. When he prays, it is a swift thing as though he met God immediately. He prays aloud very little. When he does, the words come slowly and few, but every one counts. He speaks to a near God and a real one. Nobody coughs or sneezes. God is too close. They have not settled down for a dry ten minutes of supplication that must force its slow way through interminable space to dump its burden gasping somewhere near God. He closes his eyes and instantly God is there in the midst of us. The amen is swift as if the message he had through prayer would not wait but must pour forth; out it comes without hesitation, gaining volume and power as it proceeds. I cannot imagine anyone sleeping under Raja Singh.

Perhaps my wanderings among Eastern philosophies have given me a better understanding and quicker grasp of Easterners. Surely it has been a journey of many steps but each one has taught me. I can see it as I look back now. I have been led on. In a stray newspaper I found the name of Raja Singh and I knew I was to go. There was an art lecture the same night. I had been asked to go even by the lecturer himself (Mr. Vanderpant from Vancouver). Then by mistake, friends called for me and brought me to the art lecture instead of Raja Singh. It would have been easier to go in, but I had to go to the other. God led. Had I been disobedient, what I would have missed.

Raja Singh is neat and smart in outer appearance as though the clean orderliness of his inner life showed right through him to the very last layer of his clothing in a godly self-respect. He is vital and emphatic to a terrific degree, yet does not rant and screech and denounce. He mentions neither Heaven nor Hell.
His theme is Christ. I asked him about after death. “I am not sure,” he said. “God looks after that. I can trust him. I have to live in the present the best I can like a little child, leaving things safely with the father.” Or words to that effect.

Raja Singh is courteous, honest and sincere. He said nothing of my pictures when he stood before them. I felt them empty and I loved and honoured him more because he did not hypocrite, pretending that they meant anything to him when they did not. He thinks very much of his friend “E. Panters’s” work, is very proud of him. He graduated and won a scholarship from the Royal Academy schools and studied in Italy. He said that Panters’s work was greatly influenced by the Italian school. It is good to have the lustre ripped off your work. The flavour is bitter when you know nothing has registered — there is only a blank. Uncle Raja says, “You cannot take anything out of an empty pot.” And these silly people praise empty canvas and call them “spirituality.”

What does spirituality in painting mean? First, the seeing beyond the form to the spiritual reality underlying it — its meaning. Second, the determination, power and courage to stick to the ideal at all costs, but there is a danger of letting the ideal become diluted with vagueness, uncertainty, indecision; then the thing is lost and left unsaid. Uncle Raja is practical. He has tired of the visionary circles — like a child he has come to ask for bread and butter — honest plain things. He demands no fantasies and selfish shutters-up-of-themselves, but letting the light of Christ in the heart where it should radiate to others about you. No noisy snivelling surrenders, no holding hands up and going on your knees and shouting your emotions. He leads to Christ and leaves them there at Christ’s feet and Christ will take care of them.
That is how they do [it] with the Eurasians. They show them but they do not sit underneath them to hold them up. They teach them to use their own faculties and to take their perplexities to God for guidance. Did not Walt Whitman say, “No one can grow for another, no one / No one can acquire for another, not one.”? You’ve got to rely on God and on yourself, not on other people. Right through your life be strong, not flabby.

He has phoned to say goodbye and to give me his blessing. He has left a book at the
YMCA
for me to read. He has made me feel India is just across the street, almost within shouting distance and well within the praying radius. Tomorrow he goes to Seattle and then into [the] southern states and eastern Canada and New England, and possibly home via Victoria in 18 months’ time. Bless him and his work always, and now I look around to see what effect all this will have on my work. Will it make it more vital? Or will it — finish it. Or —I leave it to God and watch to be told. This has stirred me to the foundations. I am exhausted today for I have been wrenched this way and that, lifted, thrown down, rejoicing, despairing. Oh when this ferment wears off, will I find peace and surrender finally, or will I be rooted and stand firm and end this 50-year chase? Go back to my starting point, for I believed and loved God then, though I was a bit scared of him too.

Now, little book, because I write so much about Uncle Raja, do not think the wrong way that it is just the man, his personality. It is all that lies behind. It is the eternal search, it is the hope that my searching is about to arrive at a goal. Maybe it’s the joy in the sight of home after fifty years of looking for a new location, and if I go into detail about the Raja it is because I want to be sure in myself how I stand in regard to this thing that he preaches and he is. I want to get it clear so that if I should slacken up I
can review, as it were, this whole thing; that if I am nodding, it may prick me awake, to remember my first reaction clearly.

My sisters took the Raja each in her own way. Both were invited to meet him the first night he came to my house, but as he had to leave after supper, they did not see him. One sister wanted to see what manner of missionary could be interesting to me (the family black sheep). She went to hear him when he lectured in her own church, and when he spoke on British Israel, said she was not impressed. She likes missionary addresses well sprinkled with the salt of Heaven and profusely peppered with Hell, and for folks to snivel up front and confess pathetically and all the harrowing deathbed stories of repentance, so that people quiver and squeal over them; [without that] she feels nothing is doing. The other sister seldom bothers over lectures. Her quaint prosaic religion satisfies her. Why stir up trouble? But she also went the night it was in her church, was mildly enthusiastic but did not go again ’til I invited her. Sunday night we sneaked off in a cab when Sister No. 1 was safely housed. It was a splendid meeting and my sister was impressed enough to go again herself next night. How did one mother and father produce three such antipodes in daughters?