Hundreds and Thousands (17 page)

WENT LAST NIGHT TO
“New Thought.” Dr. Ryley from the States expounded on the spiritual mystery of Christmas or birth of Christ in the soul. Oh goodness gracious! What is one to
believe?
Everyone thinks he is right and runs down the other fellow’s religion and extols his own. God, God, God. That’s what we all want, to get a nearer and better understanding of God. Today I wrote Lawren and told him I couldn’t swallow some of the
theosophy ideas. I had to be honest. Couldn’t let him think I was wholeheartedly in tune with it, when I am not. I do see the big grandness of much of it. It’s their attitude towards the Bible I can’t endorse. It’s awful to have your holy of holiest dusted with a floor rag and a stable broom.

Been out to the asylum to see Harold. The place was in an upheaval for their Christmas concert. Harold and I sat on two straight wooden chairs just inside one of the ward doors — eleven plain little iron beds, flat and immaculate, with little square pillows. No other thing in the room but those eleven beds a foot apart with a two-foot aisle down the centre, between each row, bare, clean floors.

You go through three padlocked iron grated doors. The windows are barred. The stairs are all iron cage work. A helper paces the corridor or sits in the room always. They like me and always seem glad when I come and there is a happy feel in knowing you have brought a wee glim of sunniness into that grim place. I jolly Harold and he is quite merry. We talk of all the Indian villages we both know and of animals which we both love and I take an interest in his work, polishing the brass spittoons. And he is fearfully interested in my painting. He hoards up every notice that ever appears in the paper about it. His pockets are stuffed with my letters and press notices. The worst bore is when he reads my
own
letters aloud to me. How I wish then I had not made them so long-winded!

Now all the jobs are about done up. Parcels for the nieces are bought or made and packed and posted. The candy-making orgy is over for the year. Cards are posted, cemetery holly wreaths
made. Maybe tomorrow or next day I can paint a little. There was a piece in the paper about my picture that the women’s clubs sent to Amsterdam. The critics had dubbed it the only one in the collection showing spirituality. Oh, if it really
were
a “spiritual interpretation.” Will my work ever really be that? For it to be that I must myself live in the spirit. Unless we
know
the things of the spirit we cannot express them.

That’s over. We’ve turkeyed and mince-pied and exchanged gifts and feasted each other and kissed all round and written and received mail sacks of letters. They have charity-ed and Sunday-School-treated and heard services radioed from Bethlehem and admired church decorations while I cleaned and stuffed turkey, made ginger-beer and candy and pie and cemetery wreaths and done the menial family jobs, and now it
can’t
happen again for twelve whole months and I’m mighty glad. I painted a little this afternoon. I walked along the cliff yesterday with the dogs. The heavy rains have washed down whole banks. They’ve slithered and sat low and left bare clay scars, slimy, unbeautiful. I must get out there and study and absorb; realize space and eternity out there.

Oh you half-thoughts that come tantalizing and eluding! Why do you tease so? Why not come and
stay?)
This Hide-and-seek business tires one. Do you say, “If we showed ourselves too plainly the game would be over; you would cease to seek”? Perhaps. It’s the same always — people, places, pictures, reading. The same thing. I suppose Lawren would call it “Law.” When you are dimmest
and not really looking you see clearest. You can’t put the “dimmer” on yourself. It is just there at times. When it’s there your memory works in a different way. For instance in reading you won’t remember a single
word
but inside you remember the meaning or a glimpse of it. You couldn’t put it into words or explain it to someone else. In painting you don’t see the woods or whatever you are looking at but something else bigger and more vital. In people, you do not see nor can you afterwards recall their features; their faces do not exist. What you know and love is way in back, in their souls. I know that Bess is beautiful and serene. I know Fred’s smile. I know nothing about Lawren’s face, can’t remember one feature — yet I know him best and love him best. I do not remember Harry Adaskin’s face.

THE SPIRIT AND
its vehicle, or manifested body, must work together, through each other, for perfect realization. What would be the good of a carriage with no
goff)
What would be the good of the
go
with no carriage to sit in? The body must not be ignored and the soul must not be ignored — a third thing must be born of the two. I cannot name the thing and all the books can’t and I do not think it needs a name. A name would spoil it, would be too crude for such an elusive — spirit? being? thing? Even a thought is too hard and material to press upon it, though sometimes it travels in thought. When you go to pick it out of the thought, separate it, clothe it in definitions, it has gone — lifting up beyond, just out of your reach — and left you empty.

DO YOU KNOW
the exquisite, self-respecting, firm feel of a mended garter and taut stockings that have slopped down your calves
from a broken one? Well, that’s the same feel you get from a good
honest
day’s painting after a period of impossibility.

Express, express, express, lead up and on through the picture. God is trying to get through, trying to speak. Swing the thought through the whole, no abrupt disharmonies, transitions. A bird flies straight with ever-flapping wings till it has reached its goal. Then it is finished and rests till the next idea of action comes to it and away again to a fresh goal, forgetting its last flight. Only its wings are kept strong and ready by every flight.

A few minutes more and the New Year will come. The present moment, that’s all we have. This looking forward and looking back is unprofitable. I have done? I will do? No. I am doing.

I have been to my two sisters’. Oh, how little our real lives touch! We love each other dearly. I can’t imagine life without them; it would be one awful blank. They are so good and so unselfish. Yes, we are jig-saw puzzles with the pieces mixed. We don’t make one picture. Was it accident we all came in one family? Nothing is accident; we needed each other. Will we be together in the next incarnation? We are each so utterly different — lives, aims, outlook. Bless them, bless them! God bless us all and make us all more understanding in 1934.

I worked well today, painting with vitality and intention. In consequence, am tired and glad.

Here I am, little book, having neglected you for some time. I have written to Lawren twice, so that does you out of your little spiel for I work it off on him instead of on you. It’s all the same as long as you can get it off your chest, only it’s easier when there is flesh and blood at the other end and, more than that, an answering spirit.

I heard from Gerhardt Ziegler yesterday and was so happy, for the last time he wrote he was very near death, but he is better now after much suffering. Poor boy, he has a beautiful mind. If all Germans were like him — he has altered my whole attitude towards Germans. Oh, we are all bad and all good. If we could only all meet on our
good
planes! Gerhardt says there’s a little bit of me over there in South Germany in his garden, the little bit he took back in his heart of me. I’m glad; I like a little bit of me to be over there in that land of strangers. I too have that little sprig of German niceness in my heart’s garden here in B.C. which he brought and left with me. We were both looking perplexed, and poor Klaus too, that day up the Malahat, where we drove in their travelling van, and picnicked and talked of all these things and read Walt Whitman aloud. Little Koko was there too. Now Klaus and Koko have gone on to other places to grow but we have more here to learn first.

My six pictures came home from Ottawa yesterday, returned without thanks, no praise, no blame. Wish Brown had said something even if it had been bad that would have put my back up. Nothing hurts like nothingness. A flat, blunt weapon gives the deepest, most incurable wound. I look at the pictures and wonder are they better than my present-day ones — this year’s?) I don’t know but I do not
think
they are. I think they have better colour
and perhaps more strength but any shapely or fine-coloured object can be pleasing. (Not that Mr. Brown did find my pictures pleasing; apparently the reverse.) But as I look at my big forest I find a lack of life — the essence. If manufactured materials were heaped together in a good light and pleasing folds wouldn’t they do just as well? That is not what I want — the thing I search for. They lack that vital understanding thing, which must grow and develop and unfold in you yourself before it can come out. That something must be realized and experienced in your own soul before it can possibly be expressed by you. So I heap the pictures back in their room, not ashamed, regarding them as the under-crop that is to prepare the soil for a finer one — dig them in for manure. Don’t sit weeping over your poor little manure pile, but spread it and sow a new crop on top and the next one will surely be richer for it.

I went to hear Raja Singh’s lecture on Gandhi. Singh is a Christian Hindu, educated and vital, big, broad and spiritual. Gandhi is
not
a professing Christian but he lives it. There was no mean, petty narrowness so often visible in Christian missionaries and preachers. The man was big. When he got through you loved him and Gandhi both.

JACK SHADBOLT AND
John MacDonald wrote from New York. They want me to have some pictures of my pictures taken and send them over there in the hopes they can persuade one of the galleries over there to stage an Emily Carr exhibition. I refused. It is not practical and I do not want that thing, publicity. I want work. I do not think for an instant they would want my stuff anyhow and oh, the worry and trouble! No thanks.

I asked Raja Singh to supper and Willie Newcombe and Flora Burns to meet him. Somehow I wanted to ask him into a Canadian home that wasn’t a parson’s. He is a most charming man, vital, intense. He phoned at 5:30 to say he was just in from a meeting and would be along shortly after six. I gave him minute directions and got my dinner all cooked. The others came and I sent Willie out to hunt the Raja. A perfect deluge of rain came suddenly. Willie found the Raja wallowing through it in the black, completely lost. When he accosted him he thought Willie was a holdup man. Well, you never saw such drowned rats! The Raja was hatless and had no umbrella. His black hair hung down in dripping ringlets like a wet spaniel’s. We got his coat off and shook it. His pants were soaking from the knees down, and his shoes. I suggested he take off his shoes, but his pants! I offered to go below and borrow a pair but he wouldn’t hear of it, so I got him a towel and he dried his hair and we had supper and were very merry over it all. He brought some interesting photos. He will come and visit me some afternoon he says and I hope so, for I like him — so in earnest and no prig, but splendid, big and doing something. He works with Eurasians, not-wanted children of low caste Indians and white men, often Oxford and Cambridge men. They have to fight to get the children; the women want them to sell for prostitutes. They move them right away to a colony by themselves. When they are grown, they are given free choice, not coerced religiously or any other way, but left to be individuals, with the ideal before them of making a fine contribution to India and of being looked up to, not down on. He says their brains are splendid. They will make a fine, new race. That is real missionary work.

I have heard two more lectures by Raja Singh, and today he has been in my studio from 10:30 to 1:45. He is fearless, earnest and grand. We talked of many things. Everything in him centres on Christ — being consecrated to Christ, opening oneself to become a channel to be used by Christ. He has a child-like, simple faith — no sect, no creed, no bonds but just God and Christ.

I have said goodbye to the Raja. He’s splendid. I heard him eight times and I am so glad he came here — I can’t tell you how glad. My whole outlook has all changed. Things seem silly that used to seem smart. I have decided to take my stand on Christ’s side, to let go of philosophers and substitute Christ. I wrote to “Uncle Raja” (that’s what his Eurasian children call him) and he gave me a beautiful “May God bless you” as I took his hand and said goodbye tonight after the lecture on Mahatma Gandhi. Oh, I do want the kind of religion that he offers — it is verily of Christ. As he lectures you lose him; it is God speaking. His great clear voice, rich and carrying well, rolls out uttering fearless truths, sincerity, conviction. The man is surely inspired; the vitality he puts into it is not human. From his fingernails to his toe tips and right up through his Indian black hair, it is life exultant. He is radiant. When it is over, great beads of sweat are on his forehead. He wipes his face and his human body sinks into his seat and he covers his face with his hand and I know he prays then. His invitation to pray is so simple, just “Shall we bow our heads in silent prayer?” And after a few full, live moments he begins, deep and quiet, “Our loving, holy, Heavenly Father” and the few simple sentences take you right in front of God.
Oh, this is live, vital religion. The theosophy God and philosophy are beautiful but cold and remote and mysterious. You circle round and round and rise up a little way so that your feet are loose but there is beyond and beyond and beyond that you never could reach. God is absolute law and justice. But here a live Christ leads you to God, and the majestic awfulness is less awful. Tonight he interpreted the life of Mahatma Gandhi, brought out all his nobility and greatness, and spoke so lovingly and understandingly of his weakness as if he was speaking of his own father that he loved.