In Memoriam - Roger Harris

On 30th March, Roger Harris left his body after a struggle with lung cancer. He was 64. Roger was one of the close-knit band of early Matrimandir workers, as well as a superb raconteur, a celebrant of fine literature, and an amused and amusing wanderer of the streets of life, with a particular sympathy for the marginalised and the rebel. His was the unique voice of a ‘vagrant heart’, at times celebratory, at others wounded, always seeking that final, fierce transformation.

For many years he worked for Auroville Today, enlivening our editorial meetings with his left-field observations, spiced with references to Dylan, 13th century troubadours and crop circles. He was a fine writer, equally at home with colloquial and high-toned utterances, voicing our idiosyncrasies as well as our deepest hopes and dreams. There’s also a plangent lyricism to some of his most moving poetry. 

We thought there could be no better way to celebrate him than by a selection of his writings.   

Matrimandir - The Soul of Auroville

The Matrimandir, lit up at night, looks like some strange ship in the desert, an ark under construction, symbol of a new and dawning age.  The Mother called the Matrimandir “the cohesive force of Auroville”; “a symbol of the Divine’s answer to man’s aspiration for perfection,” and “the soul of Auroville.”

This binding force that guides and upholds Auroville in a powerful if indefinable way was tangible and evident at a 19-hour concreting of a dome platform for the roof of the structure, held at Matrimandir on 2-3 June 1988.  Over sixty Aurovilians, adults, children, Westerners and Indians alike, worked through the night as a concrete mixer ground out its load of sand, cement and stones, which was lifted, one wheelbarrow at a time, by a crane to the top of the structure, to then be poured and vibrated into the mould of reinforced steel and plywood shuttering, completed after months of work a few days before.  From within the inner chamber, where scaffolding rises in an Escher-like configuration to the sloping roof, the hum of vibrators on the roof above resounded, echoing like the low chanting of Buddhist monks.  

(1988)

‘Common Dignity’: Ireland after 9-11

On 13 September, two days after the day, it felt that time, like those clocks that stopped forever, had come to an end, and I flew from Paris to Shannon. Charles de Gaulle airport had a surreal pre-apocalyptic feel to it. Plain-clothes security outnumbered stranded or flying passengers, and the computer screens and arrival departure panels listing all the flights to or from the U.S. as cancelled made the ramifications of the unimaginable act of horror that had just occurred even more immediate. That evening in a crowded pub in a small village in County Clare I observed a white-haired man trying to explain to a young girl the meaning of the terrible footage being rerun on every news channel. His task could not have been an easy one. The next day was a day of mourning throughout Ireland and all shops and businesses closed down. I spent three minutes of silence at 11 a.m. gazing from across the street at the Irish flag at half-mast in the middle of a small park that contained a memorial to the local Republican dead from 1916 on. The feelings of a shared sense of shock, grief, and sympathy for those affected by the attacks in New York and elsewhere cut across all boundaries and perhaps even united the island for a brief while in a common surge of humanity...  

Ideology of whatever sort, even an idealistic revolutionary one, can divorce us from the mainsprings of our common, shared humanity. When ideology hardens into fanaticism, it leads to the aberrations and horror that prevailed on such a wide scale throughout the twentieth century – aberrations that are still with us. And perhaps this is the challenge of the twenty-first century: to refuse the perversion of terror while at the same time taking on the tremendous task of globally combating its roots, which most often lie in injustice of one form or the other – much of it institutionalized – whether economic, social, cultural or political. The spirit as well as the methods used to achieve this will be of foremost importance.

(February 2002)

Heading South like Ambrose Bierce: Remembering Kenneth

Dropping in on Kenneth, which I did every six weeks or so down the twenty years I knew him, would most often lead to an invitation to step inside, and a two to three-hour session in his small, cluttered kitchen. Once we’d settled in and become relaxed with each other’s company – ‘How are you doing, don’t give me the macho bullshit, the last few weeks it’s just getting worse and worse’ – our conversation, fuelled with brandy and cold coffee from his rusting fridge, would ricochet. Once he described a play he had started writing, called “Roll On, Shelley.” Its characters included Rooftop Julie (a woman leaving on the bus for Iowa), a man with balloons, a prisoner and a guard coming out of a manhole who end up exchanging roles, a couple of wino derelicts and two lovers carrying a park bench around. I’d say this was fairly typical of his surreal and often ribald sense of humour. Our conversation would then range from Tennessee Williams and Marlon Brando’s performance in a “Streetcar Named Desire” and “On the Waterfront”, to the Sumerians, Niburu (the rumoured twelfth planet of our solar system) and extra-terrestrials. It would be punctuated with relevant asides such as how Al Capone was a great fan of Louis Armstrong and used to go to his gigs in speakeasies in Chicago. 

(October 2002)

Banished now the Bastille Blues

Banished now the Bastille blues,

That once led me astray,

This exile in a land of half-forgotten truths;

The battle for brotherhood leads through speckled labyrinths

Of betrayal and disguise;

A moonlit clearing, radiant and dark, 

Reflects these scattered dreams

Silvered sparks of slivered light wound the fallen flesh

As sudden movements, fresh as morning dew, 

Stun my dreaming mind,

Surprise my restless soul.

Awakenings banish slumber;

 And embodiments of light reveal

Another world:

Light torn and slivered wounds the stubborn flesh

Heavy falls the mood of an ancient joy

Sister of the moon.

Footsteps and grey corridors, a glance in the metro;

Beauty now breaks through disclosed:

In each and every face,

In every heart: a rose.

In the Ruined Cities of the Mind

Drama, suffering, it’s all a great good-bye, a world which cannot stand itself anymore with all its lacquered histories and all its frescoed pasts, and the cries rise out from the ruins of the north, the rubble of a greater age that once had reason to believe in something, anything, and all our armadas break upon the rocks and all our children watch the sunsets and the dawns break through the crevices of dream and we are here to watch the last age out with all its sculptured hopes and all its noble thoughts and its beauty dancing naked with eyes of lust and flame and the cries that rise again as the beast unconquered walks but knows that its end is near. 

The ruined cities of the mind surround on every side as a skinny wildcat sleeps in the chair beside me and India Today on the cement table by my typewriter announces a breakthrough in the Punjab, and I remember last night the Matrimandir stood out eerily beautiful, illuminated by a powerful projector, as I bicycled around it before heading back to the canyons beneath the stars, on this our earth, an invisible ship sailing through the galaxies of space towards what splendid shore?

(September 1985)

The Dalai Lama’s Shoes or “The Buddha can’t do much!” 

I am struck by the powerful simplicity of his (the Dalai Lama’s) similes, feeling in some way his presence behind them and realizing how unused we are to such a state of being – we, who are in love with outer complexities and contradictions, children of an age that is dancing out its last dreams in a ballroom of destruction. He does not have the mystic, piercing gaze I might have imagined the Dalai Lama to have. Rather he has a wide, benevolent one, and a strongly anchored physical presence, not an otherworldly, spiritual one. He is sitting in his armchair next to me, red and yellow robes draped over a pockmarked arm and, although I’m concentrating on his questions and following his answers – periodically checking that the tape has not run out – the contact is there. We are talking from our different viewpoints, but behind that there is something else.

“A human being – if you show him something – you will feel sometimes that, at a superficial level, the other side will not accept it. But deep down something happened there.” And something did.

We are one whether we like it or not, I suggest, and he goes on to use the image of the human body to bring this fact out. “It’s like one’s body, between one’s head and one’s shoe, I mean one’s foot, there is quite a long distance and big differences, but still it’s part of your body and you must concern yourself with every part of your physical. In the same way, the world is one. You simply cannot neglect or ignore another part of the world. You cannot solve one problem, localize it, and solve that alone. And under these circumstances, the key point is human universal responsibility, a genuine sense of brotherhood, sisterhood, with warm heart and clear realization, clear deep realization as one human family….”

As I listen to him, my gaze travels down his body to his feet and, shining out – immaculately polished – beneath his robes, are a pair of walking shoes identical to my own, and I have the distinct feeling that my own pair of revamped shoes are having a spiritual experience. 

(1986)

My Mutation 

For the last six years, I’ve been experiencing my own mutation. I was translating the book Mother or the Mutation of Death by Satprem six years ago, when I had a motorcycle accident. I lost my right arm and was in a deep coma for six weeks. The doctors didn’t give me long to live when I arrived at the hospital. When I came out of the coma, I began to speak Italian with a German friend who did not know Italian and I told another friend that I had been a wine smuggler during the Middle Ages. At least I wasn’t unemployed in those days! I asked someone else what kind of hotel I was in, because I couldn’t smoke cigarettes and drink beer there, and he said: “It’s the emergency section in the hospital. You’re not in a hotel, Roger.” When they wheeled me to another building in the hospital for a scan, the friend who was there told me that my body, on contact with the outside air, began to react and to tremble. She asked the doctor to stop moving me for a moment so she could talk to me and explain what was going on.

Since 29 February 2012, the “Golden Day” anniversary marking the supramental manifestation on the physical plane on the planet Earth and many universes, my mutation has become miraculous, beautiful, and strange. Before, I used to suffer from depression, but now I wake up every morning just happy to be alive and I thank sweet Mother for that. 

(2012)

City of Peace

City of peace and God's unguarded light,

City of silence, and the rich unfolding word;

City of love and the laughter of the gods,

City of man, his labour born of dream.

City of harvest, born of canyon soil,

City of rich acres, sown with strong-eyed toil;

City whose song the soul enraptured sings

City of lost boundaries,

Province once of kings

City whose deep calm at sunset does recall

Ages when the earth stood golden,

Heaven-tall; 

City on night's borderline,

Outpost of dawn's light,

City born of promise

And a conqueror's delight.

(Matrimandir meeting, 1983)

A selection of Roger’s writings, ‘Mutation, Alchemy and Grace’, 

was published in 2017 by Auroville Press Publishers. 

For further information contact [email protected]