journal d'une transition

599

… Janaka and I chose a spot for a temporary house for D.M, Auralice and him, which we may start building very soon, as D.M is becoming more and more uneasy and unwell in this airless house in town… … Tonight I had to go and see Ar., who had left me a dramatic message, and try to cheer her up, and take away the gloom and the shadow from this attachment she nurtures for me… I spent nearly two hours at her house, and I don’t know that it served a purpose: she is not even trying to surrender, in herself, this attachment! She says, and I understand, that she can only feel whole, quiet, centred and open when she is with me, and that without a living contact with me she feels lost, or else she would have to be in an entirely different set of circumstances, living another life on her own… *29-11-1985, Auroville: I had to leave Samuel a little earlier today, and he cried; I regretted my lack of finesse: I could have done it differently! Anurakta’s room in Pondy has changed and evolved; the atmosphere in it is densely packed with that high crystal power I know well, that can fill objects offered to it; I liked it a lot more this time than the last time I went. I fetched from him his findings for the Institute’ well… *1-12-1985, Auroville: While I was cleaning the house this morning, N came to see me, under the pretext of ordering fencing materials so we could start planting tomorrow, when the soil is still damp…. I gave him breakfast. He talked at length about the fears or frights “Tamil people” have of the dead ones, and how he has himself several times been attacked, since he was a child; that they – the dead people – always tried to enter like air, or else by pushing through his legs, and bring about a sort of possession, or chronic fright, which only the temple swamis know how to exorcise, through dances or ritual beatings… And how frequent and part of the ordinary life these things are… Then he expressed the view, commonly shared, that we – the foreigners – lived here because here we didn’t have to work as hard as in the West and could live the way we wanted… This gave me the measure of a sort of unbridgeable gap between us, a fact which seems totally impossible to change – and how stupid it would be to even try to change it… And yet, all the time, there IS a communication, of which both are aware one way or another, and it runs deep… … E.B came and called me down, in a terrible state of affective need… And what am I to do, when I myself, at times, feel just about the same way…!? It is all so ridiculous, and yet so very much the stuff of life… I had to send her away after a while though, with as much gentleness as I could muster… … Tency came to let me know that the compressor test in the well of “Ravena” was done and showed an exceptionally high yield – about 16,000 litres an hour: a magnificent well!

*4-12-1985, Auroville: Today I had only time to go and watch, with Samuel, the end of the concreting at Matrimandir; and it was so beautiful to see so many of us up on the structure, in the evening light, working… But when I went up, I at once got a heavy wave from