inside a crystal

Durrell rises early. Well before first light,
lights the garden and listens to the dark.
By the time I awake, coffee has brewed
and he is in the kitchen, covering the table
with an array of tiny dishes, all filled
with edible treats. Honey, fresh figs, a
variety of cheeses, freshly sliced bread.
And more. I like that he has not concentrated
breakfast on any single plate, but spreads it
across so many.

He asks if I am hungry and we sit in silence.
While unclouding the mind of sleep, his presence
is easy to accept. The thick contour of his forearm
reaching through the air. The way his fingers grasp
items one-at-a-time and slowly raise them to his
lips. As if he is memorizing their tonal gradations.
Cherishing rather than ravishing; sampling various
flavours with full attention. Meanwhile, I simply
savour the heat of my coffee cup. Cup pressed
between each palm and held against the cheek.
All truth being relative, he informs me that Tao
is that state of total availability.

"...a comprehensive and wholehearted awareness
of that instant where certainty breaks surface
like a hooked fish."

"Is that a definition?", I ask. He pauses and then adds,

"As soon as it hardens into dogma, it becomes
absolute rather than provisional and is no longer
Tao".

"Reality is then prime. Just like this fig.", I reply.

With a piece of asiago perched between his teeth, he nods.

"It is the flashpoint where the mind joins itself to
the nature of all created things."

"Figs included." I say.
"Great motor of the universe. Why Tao?".

And this launches him into a delightful tale about
Jolan Chang's visit to his Provençal home a while
back. A Chinese scholar with good English on a
momentary escape from Stockholm.
Chang-with-his-panoramic-vision.
Chang with that certain look in his eye.
Of irony and laughter compressed into a
Graucho Marx-like twinkle. Like the eye of
some great paradox that, once expressed,
is somehow damaged. Chang's description of
Tao is an aesthetic view of the universe.
All of eternity potentially "compromised by a single
careless word or by some mere inattention".

"And perhaps also saved by resilient humour?", I plead.

But trained within the cannons of a language based upon
dichotomy, Durrell appreciates what Chang has taught
him and takes great pleasure in recounting it to me,

"A Taoist was the joker in the pack, the poet on
the hearth. His angle of inclination depended upon
a simple proposition, namely that the world was a
paradise, and one was under an obligation to realize
it as fully as possible before being forced to quit
it. The big imperative in the matter was that there
should be no waste, not a drop in the course of this
great feast of innocent breath."

Durrell watches as I get up to refill my coffee cup
one more time and then does the same.

"But you don't drink that much coffee. Do you?, I ask.

He tells me that it is called "sitting" (in Chinese).
If one has a friend who is harming himself by some
particular habit, just by sitting close and
concentrating on the questionable behaviour (and
even mimicing it) one can meditate a person into
another grove. An act of friendly passivity that
may inspire self-modification. A re-orientation.
Just by sitting, meditating and not saying anything,
something new may resonate in another person,
like a post hypnotic suggestion.

"Did Chang try that on you?" I ask.

But Durrell's reply is a sideways smile. And with all
the tiny plates now emptied, I can't let breakfast end
without asking one last thing: What about Greece,
what about Claude and what about that writing-life,
while there. A distant look crosses his eyes as he
peels back the rind from one last orange slice, adding,

"Chang used to eat it all, the seeds, the rind, everything."

He sighs with that sense of time steadily dripping away.
The kind of sigh that saturates entire days whenever
they fall "like pebbles from the walls of a deep well".
He warns me that his lens of memory will not do justice.
Nonetheless, knowing his enchantment with words,
I listen intently.

"Somewhere between Calabria and Corfu the blue
really begins. You feel the horizon beginning to stain
at the rim, the sky seems to come a little nearer and
into deeper focus; the sea darkens as it uncurls in
troughs around the boat. You are aware not so much
of a landscape coming to meet you invisibly over those
blue miles of water, as of a climate. Entering Greece
is like entering a dark crystal; the form of things
becomes irregular, refracted. Mirages suddenly
swallow islands and if you watch you see the trembling
curtain of the atmosphere. Once in the shadow of the
Albanian hills you are aware of this profound change.
It haunts you while you live there, this creeping
refraction of light altering with the time of day,
so that you fall asleep in a valley and awake
in Tibet, with all the landmarks gone."
(Lawrence Durrell, (1912-1990)

Then he mumbles, "...the ghost of an echo of a mood".

And so I drop my gaze.
Full coffee cup untouched.
Knowing no one communicates
a sense of place
quite like Durrell.