Island - Aldous Huxley [96]
“Not unless she were unusually jittery or anxious. Which she isn’t. I know her very well; she plays with my children.”
“Then what would you do in her case?”
“Among other things,” said Vijaya, “I’d take her, in another year or so, to the place we’re going to now.”
“What place?”
“The meditation room.”
Will followed him through an archway and along a short corridor. Heavy curtains were parted and they stepped into a large whitewashed room with a long window, to their left, that opened onto a little garden planted with banana and breadfruit trees. There was no furniture, only a scattering on the floor of small square cushions. On the wall opposite the window hung a large oil painting. Will gave it a glance, then approached to look into it more closely.
“My word!” he said at last. “Who is it by?”
“Gobind Singh.”
“And who’s Gobind Singh?”
“The best landscape painter Pala ever produced. He died in ’forty-eight.”
“Why haven’t we ever seen anything by him?”
“Because we like his work too well to export any of it.”
“Good for you,” said Will. “But bad for us.” He looked again at the picture. “Did this man ever go to China?”
“No; but he studied with a Cantonese painter who was living in Pala. And of course he’d seen plenty of reproductions of Sung landscapes.”
“A Sung master,” said Will, “who chose to paint in oils and was interested in chiaroscuro.”
“Only after he went to Paris. That was in 1910. He struck up a friendship with Vuillard.”
Will nodded. “One might have guessed as much from this extraordinary richness of texture.” He went on looking at the picture in silence. “Why do you hang it in the meditation room?” he asked at last.
“Why do you suppose?” Vijaya countered.
“Is it because this thing is what you call a diagram of the mind?”
“The temple was a diagram. This is something much better. It’s an actual manifestation. A manifestation of Mind with a large M in an individual mind in relation to a landscape, to canvas and to the experience of painting. It’s a picture, incidentally, of the next valley to the west. Painted from the place where the power lines disappear over the ridge.”
“What clouds!” said Will. “And the light!”
“The light,” Vijaya elaborated, “of the last hour before dusk. It’s just stopped raining and the sun has come out again, brighter than ever. Bright with the preternatural brightness of slanting light under a ceiling of cloud, the last, doomed, afternoon brightness that stipples every surface it touches and deepens every shadow.”
“Deepens every shadow,” Will repeated to himself, as he looked into the picture. The shadow of that huge, high continent of cloud, darkening whole mountain ranges almost to blackness; and in the middle distance the shadows of island clouds. And between dark and dark was the blaze of young rice, or the red heat of plowed earth, the incandescence of naked limestone, the sumptuous darks and diamond glitter of evergreen foliage. And here at the center of the valley stood a group of thatched houses, remote and tiny, but how clearly seen, how perfect and articulate, how profoundly significant! Yes, significant. But when you asked yourself, “Of what?” you found no answer. Will put the question into words.
“What do they mean?” Vijaya repeated. “They mean precisely what they are. And so do the mountains, so do the clouds, so do the lights and darks. And that’s why this is a genuinely religious image. Pseudoreligious pictures always refer to something else, something beyond the things they represent—some piece of metaphysical nonsense, some absurd dogma from the local theology. A genuinely religious image is always intrinsically meaningful. So that’s why we hang this kind of painting in our meditation room.”
“Always landscapes?”
“Almost always. Landscapes can really remind people of who they are.”
“Better than scenes from the life of a saint or savior?”
Vijaya nodded. “It’s the difference, to begin with, between objective and subjective. A picture of Christ or Buddha is