journal d'une transition

653

special day, there are celebrations everywhere, there are collective prayers being held, and meditations; we enter a kind of large church, very richly set, and a service is going on; I go straight to a chamber, where I am on familiar ground, and then, as the priest is uttering the words, suddenly from behind a screen, prototypal animals come out and jump down among the people, each with a special function and intent and then, at one point, a black powerful dog comes straight at me and sniffs me, moves around, and for some reason I cannot figure, comes back at me barking loudly, and catches hold of me, with a firm and controlled grip, and pulls me out of the place… *30-6-1986, Auroville: I was busy gluing some of the paintings I am working on, late morning, when Kenneth came in; he talked and talked, but there was a genuine sense of friendship between us, and I felt glad he had made the move to come over. We also talked a while about painting, and he made me a surprise, later, by bringing to me a bunch of beautiful art books on several famous painters… *1-7-1986, Auroville: After dinner Ar. and I went over to Bharat Nivas to watch a video (this is a graceless means of communication, which I have so far avoided) that promised to be interesting: “the Deer Hunter”, with Meryl Streep, Robert de Niro and other very good actors, about the terrible trauma thousands of young people underwent in the Vietnam war: this is quite a moving work, which may have helped at least some of those “veterans” to integrate and move beyond the experience… And now, quite late into the night, Ar. came to call me: her house had been broken in while she’d been out, and her loud speakers had been stolen… *2-7-1986, Auroville: In the night a she-dog came to deliver 6 puppies right by the house; I had to decide what to do about them this morning… The first “instinct” is to respect all life, to let things be, not to interfere. But when I returned from “Ravena” later in the morning, something else came to me that felt more real, given our context, but also demanded more from me: I chose then to drown them all. I put them in a bag. I would rather have left one alive for the mother, but I asked around and no one knew where she belonged, and we cannot afford more dogs here. So I carried them over to the pond; their eyes hadn’t opened yet; I plunged the bag into the water, slowly, and concentrated quietly; this was a strangely calm and sweet experience: for just a few seconds they seem to panic a little, then they shifted over and back into the rhythm which they had just left at their “birth”, the rhythm they had known within the womb; I looked at my watch; I saw that for nearly twenty full minutes, they went on moving very quietly and naturally – twenty minutes…! Then I asked Rad to bury the bag in a freshly dug pit. While I was drowning these pups, I was turned to the Lord, and to that reality that supports the laws of manifestation; I was turning to that with the awareness of the world as it is, with its disharmony. It was calm and poised. … Today I finished reading “The City of Joy” (a recent book on the work of Christian missionaries in Calcutta); I can appreciate what this stands for, but those motivations could not move nor guide me, not out of insensitiveness or indifference, but… You stand so far beyond that…!