Memoirs of a Dervish by Robert Irwin

Author:Robert Irwin [Irwin, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books UK
Published: 2011-04-14T06:00:00+00:00

17. University Challenge, 1965. Though there were complaints about our long hair, mine was to grow longer yet

According to Proust’s Contre Sainte-Beuve, ‘La Rochefoucauld said that only our first loves are involuntary.’ But are they not all involuntary? Late in the November of that year I met a nurse on a blind date. Here I shall call her Juliet. After Juliet and I met in London and had dinner, she came up to see me in Oxford the following day. For both of us it was unplanned and unexpected. We listened to Ravi Shankar and the Beatles in my room and later we walked hand in hand round Christ Church Meadow. Afterwards, I took her round to see John Aiken. That afternoon he confidently lectured us on the crystal memory banks that were concealed in Peru, Persia, Tibet and elsewhere; the impossibility of building pyramids today; mystic union conceived of as existence at the sub-atomic level; the end of the Brahmin Kalpa; prophecies by Jehovah’s Witnesses regarding the End of the World; the Kundalini yoga system and erotic heresy in Oxford; what higher mathematics could tell us about the End of the World; the architectural codes of pre-Inca civilisation; the hypnotic basis of Indian mysticism; Sufism as black magic; black magic to be considered as white magic at the highest level; evidence for the lost continent of Lemuria; how civilisations flourished on top of electromagnetic fissures; marriage as a way of making dialectical progress on a spiritual path. John always smiled as he poured this stuff out. He was a walking encyclopedia of dodgy knowledge. What was I thinking of, exposing Juliet to all this?

She was very pretty and had been offered work as a model. Though she was not a classical beauty, I thought that she looked like Jean Shrimpton. She had long brown hair and a pleasantly curvy body. I thought then that she was the most marvellous person I had ever encountered in my life. I thought that, if it meant risking eternal damnation for her sake, so be it, but of course I kept that sort of thought to myself and, for the time being, I kept quiet about Islam and the Zawiya. While I tried to conceal the raging neurotic beast within me, she was soft and kind. She wanted to live in a cottage in the countryside with roses climbing up the walls. She enjoyed teasing me. She used ‘Super!’ a lot. Trouser suits alternated with miniskirts. She liked skiing, riding, cooking, sailing, amateur dramatics and expensive meals. She shopped for pleasure and I enjoyed watching her array herself. Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse had made a great impression on her. She wanted to be like Mrs Ramsay. She kept saying, ‘You don’t know me. You just don’t know what I am like’, and eventually she was to prove to me that she was right about that. But, come to think of it, she did not know me either. For a while, I was successful in impersonating a normal, healthy person.

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