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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…!