Divinity is not
devoid of humanity. Spirituality must make man more human. It is a positive
attitude of releasing all that is good, noble and beautiful in man. It also
contributes to all that is gracious and lovely in the environment.
– Meher Baba
We want selfless design in life.
– Princess Norina
Matchabelli
Throughout his dynamic and multi-phased
life, Meher Baba (1894-1969) used various kinds of dress, both eastern and
western, and exhibited distinctive manners, most conspicuously his signature pink
coat, unique sign language, and forty-four-year-long silence.[1] First impression? The singular
constellation of these three simple features spontaneously serves to accentuate
the mystery of style as a gestural power at the boundary of speech and silence,
a visible language grounded in the palpable presence of the invisible. As Max
Picard writes, “silence is not visible yet its existence is clearly apparent.
It extends to the farthest distances, yet is so close to us that we can feel it
as concretely as we feel our own bodies.”[2] Meher Baba’s silence, as
the primary medium of his supremely active life, presents a similar paradox—so
natural and close as to pass unseen, so deep and vast as to astonish. Silence
is the style of his style, the cloak of his fashion, so let us begin there, at
this limitless boundary, like the hem of an infinite garment. As C. B. Purdom,
Meher Baba’s first biographer, observes in The God-Man, “Is it not
terrifying that Baba should have maintained silence all these nearly forty
years? For silence is the abyss, or the very edge of the abyss. In the ordinary
way in silence we come dangerously near the gap of meaninglessness, in which
nothing has a name or a rightful place. To me it is astonishing that a man
should look into the darkness so long, and should live; it shrouds Baba with
the deepest mystery.”[3]
In the world of
high fashion, around the mannequin silence of the model, absence of speech
serves to foreground appearance, subsume individuality within the cosmopolitan power
of a look, and guard the overall spell of glamour, which archaically means
“the magic power of imposing on the eyesight of the spectators, so that the appearance
of an object shall be totally different from the reality.”[4] As we read in the mission
statement of Silent Models, a top New York agency, “Each and every one of our
models is carefully selected by our international team, who ensure that each contributes
in a significant and unique way to our aesthetic.”[5] Here silence is the sound
of “glamour labor,” the captivated and captivating work of allure—an arachnid
silence of enchantments spun in threads of relation, as Otto von Busch observes:
“The fashionista is no victim of fashion, no slave, but a subservient and
laboring worshipper of sensual esoterrorism with a beast stalking in pleasant
guise . . . The allure, moment pierced, the silent stream of dark webs.”[6]
As glamour
(cognate with grammar) and allure (from *lothran, ‘to call’),
like spell (from *spel-, ‘to say aloud, recite’), both concern
the threshold of speech, their concepts reflect the nature of fashion’s magic as
grounded in the silence through which images speak, precisely by being both
existent and non-existent, betweenly outside both subjects and objects, elsewhere.[7] Such is the “grand secret
of . . . mirrors,” that “every image—a sensate
form as such—is the existence of a form outside of its proper place.
Any form
and any thing that ends up existing outside of its own place becomes an image.”[8] The imaginal topology of
fashion, as desire for lovely forms forever out of place (cf. Narcissus), for the
ecstasy of being in fashion, is bound by the desire for beauty not accidentally
or simply because beauty is desirable, but more precisely because beauty fills
the space between silence and language: “Image are silent, but they speak in
silence. They are a silent language. They stand on the frontier where silence
and language face each other closer than anywhere else, but the tension between
them is resolved by beauty.”[9] As every image, speaking
in silence, both is and is not, so “Fashion’s question is not that of being,
but rather it is simultaneously being and nonbeing; it always stands on the
watershed of the past and the future and, as a result, conveys to us, at least
while it is at its height, a stronger sense of the present than do most other
phenomena.”[10]
The extra presentness of fashion, the newness of its place, is possible only
through a silent forgetting or tacit ignoring of the difference between the
elsewhereness of images and the otherworldliness of beauty, in other words, the
magical illusion—so easily broken—that this extra present moment, rapt in the
glow of glamour, is eternal.
As surely in some
fashion it is! For as Dante shows from Purgatory’s terrace of pride, inverting
the ancient concept of painting as silent poetry in the mirror of his text, our
enchantment with the novelty of images, inseparable from their power to speak,
is in reality a relation to something unspeakably ancient, beyond time: “He in
whose sight nothing is new produced this visible speech [visibile parlare],
novel to us because it is not found here.”[11] The divinity of fashion,
its putative ‘timelessness’, is a species of negative eternity bearing like a
shadow or trace the true presence of the eternal as actus purus, the
infinite actuality of reality itself. Thus Nietzsche, praising the profound
superficiality of the Greeks, calls us back in The Gay Science to the paradoxically
divine height of appearances: “They knew how to live: what is needed for
that is to stop bravely at the surface, the fold, the skin; to worship
appearance, to believe is shapes, tones, words—in the whole Olympus of
appearance!”[12]
And Meher Baba: “If you don’t want to be old before you really ought to become
old, be cheerful in deed, thought, word and in appearance—most of all in
appearance . . . It is a divine art to look always cheerful. It is a divine
quality. It helps others.”[13] Fashion is forever,
temporally eternal and eternally temporary, an irreplaceable medium whereby the
world never ceases renewing itself in ways we can never properly anticipate. So
in 1929, Meher Baba commented at length on the importance of his external style
for his spiritual work: “mark my mode and taste for dressing. I wore that black
[kamli] coat with a hundred patches for years. I also wore the chappals until
the last moment when their original material had been totally replaced. And now
you see that I have had a new coat sewn and wear it with new shoes and
stockings, keeping myself well-dressed, spruce, and tip-top — quite the reverse
of what I had been doing. And who knows, perhaps I may one day give up all
these clothes and remain only in a langoti, or even stark naked! No one can
tell. Sadgurus and Perfect Masters, even though Realized, have their own ways
of living and working . . . So each one maintains some definite mode for a long
time. My style is quite different. I often change my food and attire, and there
are reasons behind it. Even this external mode of living has connection with my
inner working for the world.”[14]
How then to
measure the style of an individual who says of himself, “He who knows
everything, displaces nothing. To each one, I appear to be what he thinks I am”?[15] Immediately one senses in the atmosphere of Meher Baba’s silence that withholding
of voice indexes a totally different order of identity, the mystery of absolute
individuality, of the One who is and tells all: “I tell you all with my Divine
authority, that you and I are not ‘We’, but ‘One’.”[16] This silence is also the
sound of a labor, not of absorption into an aesthetic, but of an all-inclusive
behind-the-scenes universal activity which connects inner and outer, apparent and
hidden: “I speak eternally. The voice that is heard deep within the soul is my
voice, the voice of inspiration, of intuition, of guidance. Through those who
are receptive to this voice, I speak. My outward silence is not a spiritual
exercise; it has been undertaken and maintained solely for the good of the
world. God has been everlastingly working in silence, unobserved,
unheard—except by those who experience his infinite silence.”[17] Indeed the energy,
attentiveness, and expressiveness of Meher Baba’s overall life-activity and
manner, all the ways he communicated without speaking, often gave the
impression that he did and there are many stories of people who “hardly noticed
he was silent,”[18]
just as Baba himself said, “How can I be silent? I don't speak with my tongue.
I speak continuously with my heart.”[19]
High fashion vs.
Highest of the High fashion. The silence of the former promises to elevate
identity via participation in a transhistorical cultural medium that elitely
speaks for it, as if selecting the subject from the noisy crowd of so many who
are not so destined: “Not only is the consumer going to be reborn into a higher
personal manifestation, but as the narcissist L’Oreal slogan goes, it is
‘because I’m worth it’ (and implicitly that means others are not). With each
new fashion I am reborn, reincarnated into a higher form; more pure, more
perfect. And only I am truly worth it.”[20] The silence of the
latter, working to liberate one from illusory phenomena of births and deaths,
reverberates with the imminent emergence of the divinity within every
subject: “When I break my silence, the impact of my love will be universal and
all life in creation will know, feel and receive of it. It will help every
individual to break himself free from his own bondage in his own way. I am the
Divine Beloved who loves you more than you can ever love yourself.”[21] The silence of the former is an invisibility whose presence tends towards
disappearance, neither extending ‘to the farthest distances’ nor felt
concretely ‘as we feel our own bodies’ but rather compressed and woven into the
luminosity of the glamourous image or event whose texture and effect the
breaking of silence threatens to unravel: “When models break their silence,
their testimonies ‘dispel’ glamour as a carefully crafted fiction.”[22] Moreover, insofar as silent
models and their images exist as aesthetic selections, their silence (as
emblematized in the photo chosen for its perfectly parted/pouting mouth) echoes
with the virtual noise of a sea of counter-actualities, just as every attempt
at sprezzatura or spontaneous naturalness is haunted by its own intentionality
and artifice. But the silence of the latter, of One beyond number, is
absolutely natural, being identical with the true and actual silence of all
images and identities, in unity with the essential unspeakability of the real self
in all, the one only the breaking of that silence will reveal: “I am the
Ancient One. When I break my silence, the world will know who I am. Let us play
now!”[23] This is also maybe why it
is impossible to find a bad photo of Meher Baba, because no camera ever caught
him talking. High fashion silence promises itself to remain unbroken, but never
does, always breaking its promise. Highest of the High fashion silence promises
to break itself, yet never does, paradoxically keeping its promise alive by not
keeping it, by letting the promise itself forever speak.
The difference is
felt. In contrast to the austere silence of the fashion exemplar, whose affect is
characteristically cold—“Style is a wave of frozen silence, the lamentation
caused by the mating of humanity and eternity”[24]—Meher Baba’s silence
flows with the sweetness of a being who stands freely at the center of all
activity, inside and outside of time, who holds the line of the true
boundary of all human talk. “If you were to ask me why I do not speak, I would
say I am not silent, and that I speak more eloquently through gestures and the
alphabet board. If you were to ask me why I do not talk, I would say, mostly
for three reasons. Firstly, I feel that through you all I am talking eternally.
Secondly, to relieve the boredom of talking incessantly through your forms, I
keep silence in my personal physical form. And thirdly, all talk in itself is
idle talk. Lectures, messages, statements, discourses of any kind, spiritual or
otherwise, imparted through utterances or writings, is just idle talk when not
acted upon or lived up to.”[25] In considering the
fashion/silence intersection, we must always keep in mind the kind and degree
of activity that moves through it, remembering that the nature of one’s
appearance or species is itself vital to existence, that “living beings
could almost be defined as the entities that constitute themselves in the
medium of [self-presentation].”[26] In turn, self-presentation
has everything to do with how one speaks and how one is silent, with the design
of the heart which appears, however worn, on your sleeve.
One of the most
salient aspects of Meher Baba’s style of action was the deep sensitivity and
sheer human warmth of his presence. An illustrative anecdote is provided by Don
Stevens in his introduction to God Speaks: “God has never spoken to me, but
I am sure that I have seen Him act in human form. That is the only manner in
which I can explain the incredible sensitivity of action and reaction which characterized
Meher Baba during those brief periods on a Saturday afternoon in New York when
I first saw him in action.”[27] He goes on to describe
how, in the midst of a busy and changing scene, Baba inexplicably mirrored a
hand gesture (the circular sign of perfection) which Don had made three times outside
of Baba’s line of sight, confirming in each instance his responding gesture with
a more direct gaze, expressing his awareness of Don also when his back was
turned. Far beyond the apparent magic, the moment indexes Meher Baba’s “complete
ability not only to understand but, in some manner, to be one’s own
self.”[28] So God Speaks, which
Meher Baba dictated letter by letter in silence “to appease the intellectual
convulsions of the mind of man” and dedicated “To the Universe—the Illusion
that sustains Reality,” begins: “All souls (atmas) were, are and will be
in the Over-Soul (Paramatma). Souls (atmas) are all One. All
souls are infinite and eternal. They are formless.”[29] In the formless light of
infinite individuality, all forms reflect each other. Or as Ibn Arabi says, “O
marvel! a garden amidst fires! / My heart has become capable of every form.”[30]
Here we find a
supreme form of “fanera . . . the secret capacity of every animal to
transform its nature into fashion, to overturn its own substance into
mannerism,”[31]
a manner so divinely and lovingly complete that it gives itself to the other as
the sensitivity of one’s own infinite self. Far beyond his charm, Meher Baba’s
style is one that awakens into unfathomable affective unity seer and seen, as
in an infinity mirror of recognition. “You and I remain divided by no other
veil than you yourself, that is, the ‘I’ in you.”[32] Seeing that “fashion acts
simultaneously as a prosthesis of the imagination and a physical extension of
the body,”[33]
a medium wherethrough seeing and being seen interface and play each other’s position
around the simultaneously extro- and intromissive energy of the look, one
glimpses here the potential of a gravitational order of attraction free from
the duality of acceptance/rejection, one where the winner and loser of the
fashion gamble both win because each is no less lost to the unitary play of
life: “Is it anybody’s fault if one finds oneself on the right side of things
or the wrong side of things? No! Every human being has come to serve and
achieve a definite purpose, and by playing his part to perfection he
automatically works out his own salvation.”[34]
Since fashion is a
gamble, a game in which “my sense of self changes as it is set to play, from
the deep body-schema of proprioception to the socialized ideal self,”[35] so the whole game itself is
forever open to be being played on par with life—“The whole life is like
playing the game of hide and seek, in which you must find your real self”[36]—and gambled upon its
ultimate horizon, the impossible and inevitable limit where becoming what you
are converges with being God: “When the soul comes out of the ego-shell and
enters into the infinite life of God, its limited individuality is replaced by
unlimited individuality. The soul knows that it is God-conscious and thus
preserves its individuality. The important point is that individuality is not
entirely extinguished, but it is retained in the spiritualised form.”[37] The unboundedness of
fashion, the impossibility of saying where fashion begins or ends, is of a
piece with the divine unity of life and the correlative interconnectedness of
all things: “there is no unbridgeable gulf separating the finer aspects of
nature from its gross aspect. They all interpenetrate one another and exist
together.”[38]
More specifically, there is no definitive separation in the sensible life of
beings between clothing and embodiment: “Clothing does not stand opposite the
body. It is merely a second or minor body, in the same way that the organic
body, according to ancient Platonic theology, is the first clothing of the soul
. . . The anatomical body and clothing . . . are two poles of the same reality.”[39] So there is no limit to
the life of fashion, which is interwoven with the evolution of individualized
consciousness or the soul as it undertakes the endless adventure of realizing
itself via identification and disidentification with innumerable forms. As
Krishna tells Arjuna on the battlefield, “Just as you throw out used clothes / and
put on other clothes, new ones, / the Self discards its used bodies / and puts
on others that are new.”[40] The universe is a fashion
show.
And the more fashion penetrates technically
into anatomical bodies (as it always already has at least since Adam and Eve
were pierced with navels), the more visible and actualized the ancient analogy
becomes, above all in the imaginal sphere wherein the “boundary, ostensibly
dividing body and clothing, is permanently dissolved.”[41] Indeed in this present
age where, as Baba says, “the mirror literally and figuratively has become such
a seemingly indispensable part of modern life” and “the best that most can do
is to try to look the part they play,”[42] fashion itself is
revealed as a phantasmagoric reflection of the authentic, avataric narcissism
of the divine: “There can be no doubt as to the narcissism of fashion’s
project: this is an image of fashion incarnate . . . the synthetic ideal in the
fashion photograph is the apotheosis of fashion, and from its deified position
it creates an avatar of itself . . . it turns to itself as the ideal and
creates something ‘nearer to its heart desire’. Something that is beyond
perfection.”[43]
Yet to see this, one need follow glamor’s glow beyond itself and step boldly
into the mirror, beyond fashion’s circumscribed—and into its uncircumscribable—me-ness:
“The fact that God being One, Indivisible and equally in us all, we can be
nought else but one, is too much for the duality-conscious mind to accept. Yet
each of us is what the other is. I know I am the Avatar in every sense of the
word, and that each one of you is an Avatar in one sense or the other . . . God
. . . is the Creator, the Producer, the Actor and the Audience in His own
Divine Play.”[44]
Given that “to
engage in fashion is to go for a quotidian adventure, challenge the world for a
small quake of the soul,”[45] we must affirm all the
more the spiritual infinity of fashion’s gamble, its being of a piece with the
universal nature of life as play of a divinely sovereign Self for whom quality
so rules over quantity such that everything is simultaneously totally
expendable and utterly precious: “Spiritual infinity includes in its scope all phases
of life. It comprises acts which are great as well as acts which are small.
Being greater than the greatest, spiritual infinity is also smaller than the
smallest, and it can equally express itself through happenings irrespective of
whether they are outwardly small or great. Thus a smile or a look stands on the
same level as offering one’s life for a cause.”[46] Above all, as entities divinely
embodied in fashion by the miracle of existence—“Never was there a time / when
I did not exist, or you, / or these kings; nor will there come / a time when we
cease to be”[47]—all
are called by the very fact of this embodiment to live fearlessly and honestly
in one’s best carefree style. As Meher Baba said with reference to a longtime
disciple who habitually preferred his old tattered and patched clothes: “People
die in all sorts of ways but it is nothing to be upset about; they are born
again and again in different gross bodies. But during one’s lifetime, one
should do whatever one honestly feels without getting attached to actions. Changing
bodies between lifetimes is similar to changing a coat. Some die young . . . some
live long lives. They do not change their coats often, like Gustadji. But when
Gustadji was with me on the recent trip to the West, he became well dressed and
maintained a neat and clean appearance.”[48] The nature of eternal
existence is simply such that it demands fashion, fresh styles, new manners of
appearing.
What is the step
of divine style that does not pump and build up the futile, limited ego but instead
lights the path of the self’s passage to its own unlimited individuality? Whose
is the glamour that glows with a power more your own than you, a beauty that
dazzles no less without than within, specularly reversing the process of
perception towards a vaster new viewpoint that need “not be overpowered by the
spectacle of the multi-form universe”?[49] Where is the true fashion
of absolute honesty, the pure scene where no one tries to pose as more or less
than what he really is, the spiritually natural sprezzatura, neither proud nor
modest, the simple manner of “true greatness . . . free from camouflage” and
“true humility [which] is not acquired by merely donning a garb of humility . .
. [but] spontaneously and continually emanates from the strength of the truly
great”?[50] As Don Stevens wrote, and
emphasized for the remainder of his life: “In the long run each one of us is
searching for a deep inner sense of satisfaction and peace, a feeling of being
contained in some presence which is trustworthy and loving, for a spontaneous understanding
and response to our innermost needs. Above all we need to be ourselves and to
be accepted completely for ourselves. The deep response which Meher Baba
elicits from so many people is due to that undreamed-of sensitivity to one’s
most profound self.”[51]
Following the impulse
of this anecdote, I will in the course of this essay attempt to draw out the
fashion lesson of Meher Baba’s style around the principles of simplicity, spontaneity,
service, and simplicity, in order to think and imagine fashion in the direction
of a divinely inverted selfishness wherein the fashion statement works less to
uphold than to invert separative identities, suspending us in a mirror within
the silent unity of reality—a no-one-can-tell fashion wherethrough the visible
speech of glamor is folded through itself into the intimate horizon of
limitless silence that silences no one and is never afraid to speak. At the
same time, I am acutely aware of the futility of trying to capture this style
in words, given the radical love and spiritual self-recognition which this
divine human being, and simply his photograph, has inspired in so many
individuals. What demands emphasis here is the sheer mystery which Meher Baba
embodied, a mystery which again and again reappears in stories and testimonies
as something simply inexplicable, a je ne sais quoi of divine style so
enchanting that people found themselves loving and devoting themselves to him
irrespective of any spiritual interest or lack thereof. As Chanji, Baba’s
secretary for twenty years, wrote in his diary in the last year of his life:
“Baba’s greatest hold on all is his love. Something indefinable and inexplicable
that attracts all to him. In spite of his mysterious ways of handling
things—which none can grasp; in spite of his various promises unfulfilled . . .
through other difficulties in life . . . disappointments and dejections that at
times render life meaningless and worthless. What is that subtle charm that
attracts all, equally to him? None can define nor explain, yet it is a fact of
facts!”[52] Norina
Matchabelli’s experience of meeting Meher Baba in New York in 1931 is exemplary:
I doubt whether
that experience can be expressed in words. I had heard about him, but I
remained skeptical . . . I entered the room in which Baba was sitting
surrounded by followers and disciples. That very moment, an experience began,
full of wonder and beauty. Suddenly I had to run across the room and I found
myself weeping on the floor at his feet. Weeping, weeping! Oh, how I was
weeping! But I also began to laugh, and the streams running down my cheeks and
the outbursts of laughter became one. I was resting my head on Baba’s hand, and
my whole body was shaking with terrific sobs of liberation. Eventually, I
quieted down. Baba then took my face between his hands and looked at me for a
long time into one of my eyes, and then into the other, and then back into the
first eye. Then he spoke to me via the alphabet board. His first words were: “I
am man and woman and child. I am sexless.” He then paused for a while, brought
his face nearer to mine and spelled out, “Have no fear.”[53]
Jean Adriel recalls Norina’s transformation:
“Something extraordinary had apparently happened to her since I had last seen
her . . . She then told me that ever since the moment Baba’s feet had touched
the shores of America she had done nothing but weep. She had been compelled to
cancel all of her social engagements. The old hauteur of sophistication was
replaced by child-like wonder.”[54]
The path of Norina’s
life is itself an incredible crisscross of glamour and spirituality, a miracle
on the threshold of divine silence well worth lingering over. A silent film
actress (a.k.a. Maria Carmi) renowned for performing the Virgin Mary as a
statue come to life in Max Reinhardt’s spectacular production of her first
husband Karl Vollmöller’s The Miracle (1911), her spiritual-aristocratic
beauty lent mystique to the perfume company whose iconic bottle she designed and
later, after the death of Prince Georges in 1935, “spontaneously gave her share
[of] to Baba.”[55]
The performance, which cured Norina of tuberculosis
and which she would repeat over a thousand times, was experienced by her as a
process of communicating or channeling divinity via imitation: “I became the
medium of the unfathomable will of the Mother principle, performing through me
in ways I was unconscious of . . . The compassionate Mother so often spoke
within me in verse while moving on the stage. The verse, prompting emotion,
increased the intense experience, and her word in love released in me a rhythm
that created the aloof step for which so many artists, teachers, interviewed me
and tried to understand and wanted to adopt . . . This performance arose
unexpected soul benefits—the Compassionate Mother through me healed. I have
seen with my own eyes the blue light’s vibrations pouring out of my inner core
and reaching some unknown subject in the audience and be consciously received.
I have been through her grace—throughout the performance of this long-lasting
play—her imitation.”[56] Revealing the spontaneous
turn of divine style in the mode of “spiritual pantomime,”[57] we see here an
artistic-contemplative process of mystical fashion marked by a series of steps:
posing silently as a sacred statue, hearing a divine voice within, being moved
by the verse it speaks, receiving a rhythm from those words, turning the rhythm
into a step, transmitting through this movement a healing light to others. The way
of these steps is the façon whereby Norina embodied in medieval fashion
the ancient luminescent ideal of sartorially divine beauty: “Thou art clothed
with honor and majesty, who coverest thyself with light as with a garment”
(Psalms 104:1-2).[58]
That is, the spiritual experience is not merely a private or subjective passion
within the playing of the role, but its very manner, precisely how she
played the part which called for “standing perfectly still, statue-like, for
extended periods of time, and then convincingly enacting the transformation
from hieratic statue to the warm, feeling figure of Mary, a metamorphosis
conveyed entirely through silent movement.”[59] And this inner-outer transformation
is also essentially about dress, for the Madonna comes to life by laying aside
the robes adorning her statue and putting on the habit of a nun in order to take
her place in the convent after she runs off with a knight.[60] As the Holy Mother
effectively incarnates as the wayward nun, playing her role in life by dressing
her divinity in the nun’s outward form, so was Norina’s performative experience
a kind of miraculous conception of her own spiritual self, a “tremendous shock
given to my creative urge of living,” a “shock-like event brought [which] about
the turning point in my life.”[61] Decades later, Meher Baba
would reveal to Norina that she had twice been his mother and once his father
(St. Joseph) in previous lives, nicknaming her Noorjehan (‘Light of the
World’) and addressing her in maternal terms, “Beloved Mother, Noorjehan
darling,” as well as assuring her, in 1934, “You have to share in my suffering,”
as later transpired, most intensely in the period of Meher Baba’s car accident
in 1952.[62]
The continuing steps
of Norina’s experience appear to reverberate with echoes of this shock, to glow
with the spiritual glamour of a performative instrumental power, a capacity for
communicatively embodying the light of the divine in a stylish form
paradoxically expressed through the loving laying aside of her statuesque,
sophisticated status. In 1926 she co-founded, with Frederick Kiesler and Bess Mensendieck, the Brooklyn
International Theater Arts Institute, contributing “theories on psychoanalysis
and autosuggestion to the institute’s acting program,” believing “acting to be
an art of ‘co-relation’ between the brain, soul, and body modeled through an
art of training where ‘inborn unconscious talent’ can be studied and enacted ‘consciously.’”[63] After travelling and
working with Meher Baba during the 1930s, Norina returned to America in 1941
with only one of the fifty dresses she had taken with her (a black one from Vionnet’s).
Her lifestyle had changed, as she explained to the press: “Once I couldn’t
sleep on a bed unless it cost a certain price. Now, I turn as a flower toward
the sun . . . When I look back on my former life with all of its complications
and worries I can see I was a crazy old fool. Through Meher Baba I have become
an entirely different world citizen. I’m a young and happy woman.”[64] Living now with two other
Baba-lovers in a Manhattan apartment, “Norina took the smallest room in the
house, wore very simple clothing, often in black, and dedicated herself to
Meher Baba’s work.”[65] Her changed
state—simplified, rejuvenated, happy, turning like a black flower to the
sun—conveys, in keeping with Baba’s statement above about the ‘divine art’ of
cheerful appearance, a sense of the spiritual paradox of divine style as a form
of authentic, absolutely honest artifice. During this period, in addition to scouting
locations for and co-founding the Meher Spiritual Center, Norina devoted
herself to writing and lecturing in New York City via “thought-transmission,” a
method or practice of receiving divine messages through what she termed “White
Light Short Wave.”[66] The public presentations,
given with Baba’s approval and blessing, were a kind of mediumistic communication
introduced by Norina on one occasion thus: “I am transmitting to you a direct
message which is just as simple as a radio message. It is from my beloved
Master, Meher Baba, in India through me here in New York . . . His voice comes
through the etheric ear which is above the physical ear . . . I might be said
in this moment to become Divine as he transmits his voice through me.
Unfortunately I am unable to change faces or temperament . . . he uses me as I
am. My nature and subtler intellectual intuition are definitely useful to him.
The only difference is that instead of me using me in my temperament, he uses
it. He wills my temperament and other spiritual characteristics.”[67] Again one sees here the stylistic
pattern of the divine as something invisible that spontaneously speaks all at
once in gross, subtle, and mental form, via image, gesture, affect, thought. During
her lectures, for which “she required the use of a high-backed Italian chair,
with large wooden arms, covered in a yellow-olive velvet”—and a taxi that could
fit it—Norina’s “facial features were suffused with a spiritual beauty, which
one observer likened to the head of Christ in Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting of
the Last Supper.”[68]
As Agamben observes, “One must consent to Genius and abandon oneself to him;
one must grant him everything he asks for . . .
Even is his—our!—requirements seem unreasonable and capricious, it is
best to accept them without argument . . . a certain special pen . . . that
blue linen shirt.”[69]
It is written in The
Cloud of Unknowing that the work of contemplation has the power to “suddenly
and graciously” transform the appearance of even “the ugliest man or woman
alive.”[70] The charm of Norina’s
story in this context concerns how such inner spiritual work interfaces with a
person of great natural beauty, grace, and sophisticated elegance, how inner
and outer glamour truly intercommunicate and harmonize, not seamlessly or
perfectly as in an ideal actualized, but more naturally and spontaneously across
the abyss of real longing, in the midst of living on the bridge of sighs,
through all the cosmic and social tensions of high and low. The painter Anita
de Caro recalls of her close friend, “Norina . . . had great beauty, she had
culture, she had a romantic theatrical attitude towards things. Everything for
her had to have style . . . But really, in her heart there was the longing and
desire for something that she herself didn’t know . . . because of always
wanting the high and not realizing it had to be low, you can see what she had
to go through . . . the God she was looking for was a God she saw only in the
high, and she couldn’t see it in the low, so how difficult it was for her, only
for Baba could she accept it.”[71] Similarly in the account
of Rom Landau, who met Norina in the early 30s, we see a subtle but
unmistakable tension between the heavenly and earthly, eternal and temporal—the
beauty of a fading beauty unfading: “She had been celebrated for her beauty, and
she still possessed one of the most striking appearances I had ever
encountered. She had an infectious zest for life, but she also revealed a
certain spiritual quality . . . When I met her in New York the passion of the
great actress had not left her . . . Even her eyes and her hands were vocal. A
disciplined rhythm controlled the movements of her body; her black silk dress
clung tight to her figure, and to relieve the sombreness of her dress there
were ropes of pearls round her neck.”[72] In sum, Norina’s style,
informed by the intensity of love, is that of someone who divinely plays the
game of life, the role of oneself, a part perforce performed in the blindness
of unknowing who one is, in the joy and suffering of not being who one really is,
of living in the separation of self from Self. One of her manuscripts, entitled
“I Am Blind of God,” begins and ends, “The life that we live is small and
unreal . . . LIFE is the ROMANCE of I with GOD.”[73] So her telegram with
Anita to Baba, received in Paris after his departure from New York in 1931, both
calls across and closes the gulf between finitude and infinity, as if desperate
for an impossible agency already underway: “LOVE SPEAKS
US LOVE ACTS US WE TRY TO USE IN ALL WAYS ITS USE STOP . . . MOTHERS SPIRIT ILLUMINATED TOWARDS BABA STOP
COMPLETELY IN YOU NORINA ANITA.”[74]
The divine style
we are stepping towards is less a style of self-adorning consumption and
display than a style of loving service and action. Yet in the
spirit of play, there is space for the opposition to disappear, precisely
because the glamour of the self’s divine game is all about the emergence, or
coming into external form, of something other than one’s action or its result, something
found in the depth of silence. Perhaps Meher Baba had in mind his “darling
mummy” when he spoke of this mysterious element in terms of a scent: “To penetrate
into the essence of all being and significance and to release the
fragrance of that inner attainment for the guidance and benefit of others,
by expressing, in the world of forms, truth, love, purity and beauty—this is
the sole game which has intrinsic and absolute worth. All other happenings,
incidents and attainments in themselves can have no lasting importance.”[75] In light of the ultimate
unimportance of all activities other than this penetration and release, the
competitive currency of fashion, high and low, is utterly and immediately free from
servility to itself, from being a cultish worshipper of its own reification, to
serve as an instrument of divine fragrance. It is always the energy, the expressive
activation of an inner power, that counts, as seen in the perfect polysemy of bomb
as applied to acts of fashion, denoting the detonation of either total failure
or total success. For the sphere of fashion, as in spiritual life which “is not
a matter of quantity but of inherent quality of living,”[76] is precisely where
success and failure, winning and losing, may spontaneously become each other. “Let
not your left hand know what your right hand is doing” (Matthew 6:3). Leaving twenty
hats in India, Norina returns to New York bareheaded, buys a cheap one on the
street, and bumps into an old acquaintance: “She was elegant in the latest hat,
the newest style dress. She asked me where I’d bought my hat. She said it
looked so chic.”[77]
Correlatively, Meher Baba spoke of the spiritual power of his words as working
independently of whether or not they are understood, in other words, as the
pure and total fashion of their own divine silence: “You must understand that
whenever Baba [referring to himself] gives out words for his lovers to use and
read, he attaches a spiritual energy to them—something like an atomic spiritual
bomb! Then, when one reads those words, even if he does not understand even one
word of what he reads, a part of the spiritual energy will be absorbed by that
person. And this energy will be very important for that person in his spiritual
progress.”[78]
It is similarly senseless to speak of spiritual fashion in the sense of the
development of a spiritual style in fashion. Fashion embraces all of life and there
lies its profound affinity with the life of the spirit, which “knows no
artificial limits” and like fashion is never bound to any particular style: “True
spirituality is not to be mistaken for an exclusive enthusiasm for some fad. It
is not concerned with any ‘ism.’ When people seek spirituality apart from life,
as if it had nothing to do with the material world, their search is futile. All
creeds and cults have a tendency to emphasise some fragmentary aspect of life,
but true spirituality is totalitarian in its outlook.”[79] Highest of the High
fashion is not the opposite of high fashion—it is the highest. “The wind blows
wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes
from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit” (John
3:8).
What is the
fragrance of fashion’s ‘frozen wave of silence’ melting in the light of Meher
Baba’s style, dissolving in tears of love like Princess Matchabelli into his Noorjehan?
“Walking through the streets, the Princess wonders if it can be she. ‘I am an
entirely different person,’ she declared. ‘I am liberated.’”[80] What are the forms of
real connection or vital flows between the sphere of fashion and Meher Baba’s
mysterious charm? Following Norina’s example, we are seeking here the spirit of
a divine style through which fashion channels itself 1) in spontaneity,
according to an inner, intuitive rhythm—“love released in me a rhythm,” 2) in
simplicity, according to a proper and pleasing measure—“I turn as a flower
toward the sun,” and 3) in service, according to the practical, living unity of
life—“Love speaks us, love acts us, we try to use in all ways its use.” A
glamour that comes alive, giving life, awake to the rhythm of own healing gift.
As Norina wrote in her Manifesto of 1936, “We want the world’s New
Awakening. / We want the world to be without dispute. / We want tolerance. / We
want selfless design in life. / We want union between mind and heart.”[81] Fashion itself is inherently
a manifestation of freedom, of life living as it pleases. It concerns essentially
how we play our corporeal existence, dressing the body that grounds us to this
world in forms which do not merely adorn but actually determine one’s nature: “Life
gives itself always and only as costume, dress, habit . . . Fashion is not an
accessory, not a luxury, but the most profound and intense nature of everything
that participates in the sensible.”[82] Likewise these three
principles, as states of being, correspond to dimensions of spiritual freedom. Spontaneity
is freedom from habit, from all that renders one mechanical and predictable. “The
Religion of Life is not fettered by mechanically repeated formulae of the
unenlightened, purblind and limited intellect. It is dynamically energized by
the assimilation of Truth, grasped through lucid and unerring intuition which
never falters and never fails, because it has emerged out of the fusion of head
and heart, intellect and love.”[83] Simplicity is freedom
from desire, from all that renders one attached and entangled. “People always
make a mistake when they talk of leading a simple life. To live such a life is
infinitely difficult. Outwardly, a person may wear plain garments and have a
simple diet, but this is not living a simple life! The spiritual life is lived
when a person is free of all desires, thus becoming completely open and
guileless.”[84]
Service is freedom from self-absorption, from all that renders one slothful and
futile. “Among the many things which the aspirant needs to cultivate there are
few which are as important as cheerfulness, enthusiasm and equipoise, and these
are rendered impossible unless he succeeds in cutting out worry from his life.
When the mind is gloomy, depressed or disturbed its action is chaotic and
binding.”[85]
Obviously, all three principles, as affective states, are also very familiarly
felt through our dress, as brought into relief by the discomfort of their opposites,
as when our clothing feels too rigid/formal/constricting, too fancy/complicated/fussy,
or too sloppy/disfunctional/unappealing.
How
does this loose sketch of divine style fit with Meher Baba’s personal manner of
dress? The first thing that comes to mind as a truth to shape all three terms
around is the sheer naturalness of his style. As Eruch Jessawala said,
after thirty years of living in his company and serving as his interpreter, “everything
Baba did, always seemed completely natural. That is the hallmark of the Avatar,
His naturalness.”[86]
Naturalness is also a principle that Meher Baba repeatedly emphasized, usually in
connection with honesty. “Be pure and simple, and love all because all are one.
Live a sincere life; be natural, and be honest with yourself.”[87] “Be natural. If you are
dishonest, do not try to hide yourself behind the curtain of honesty.”[88] “A spiritual life leads
one toward naturalness, whereas a virtuous life, in the guise of humility,
inflates the ego and perpetuates it!”[89] The spiritual paradox of
naturalness, like honesty, is how ‘unnatural’ it is to the identity trapped in
self-concern, the so-and-so entranced by the double glare of self-image and
appearance. There are countless anecdotes of Meher Baba suddenly asking someone
what they are thinking at the moment they were having embarrassing or inadmissible
thoughts: ‘What are you thinking?’ ‘Nothing, Baba.’[90] Fashion broadcasts on an
adjacent channel, concealing-revealing, haunting all of its own statements with
the fact that someone is making them as if they were not. Through dress,
we want to be noticed, appreciated, to fit in and/or stand out, but not to be
stared at or seen through. We want clothes that bespeak us yet guard our
silence, that form a place to be safe in the open, a zone of extimate
communication where we can have it both ways, being ourselves yet reserving our
secrets, taken for what we are not without having to hide. Clothing, in the
broadest sense, is like an inside out confessional, a con-fashional of open concealments
and closed announcements where something else, a detail outside of the shared
design always slips through. Hence fashion’s predilection for perfect
imperfection and imperfect perfections, which is analogous to the symmetrical
impossibility of perfect honesty and perfect deceit. However honest one is it
is never totally honest, never honest enough, and however deceitful one is, it
is never deceitful enough, never totally deceitful. As Augustine said, the word
that a liar has in mind is the truth “I am lying”—nothing, Baba.[91] Thus the prospect of a
natural fashion—spontaneous, simple, of service—is far from easy, being like
honesty never a question of either/or, and yet always exactly that: “It is very
difficult to be natural and to express what you feel within. The false ego is
the stumbling block.”[92] Yet the difficulty of it,
seemingly impossible, is exactly its necessity and means, just as there is a
kind of indispensable dependability to the negativity of the ego which
interferes with natural honesty by demanding a central position in all affairs,
above all the illusory privilege of being an honest person. Ask someone if they
want to be good or to appear good and they will say the
former—for the sake of the latter! The stumbling block, the scandal,
correlative to fashion’s risk of falling, rising only on the failure of having
always already fallen for fashion, is exactly where the spirit lives and works
and slips, learning to climb where it cannot walk. As Meher Baba said, echoing his
most famous dictum, “Trying not to worry is almost impossible—so try!”[93] Likewise a divinely
natural style is less something to be achieved than attempted, first and
foremost in the sphere of appearances where everyone—so much more than their
eyes can see—gives themselves away regardless.
The
possible impossibility of divine style is evident in the singular,
extraordinary order of Meher Baba’s naturalness, a humanity so human that it
appears divine. Delia De Leon said of her time with Baba in 1931, “During the
week of his stay in London I saw him every day . . . He alone seemed real—the Perfect
Human Being. Compared to him everyone seemed like a shadow.”[94] The natural power of
Meher Baba’s presence was such that he typically concealed himself during his
movements, which were frequent and extensive, not to avoid being recognized but
to prevent arousing wonder as to who he is.[95] As
Eruch Jessawala recalls, “he travelled all over India incognito. This was
especially so when he had to do his work. He would go to lengths to disguise
himself, to cover as it were, his personality. His personality or presence was
so arresting that people would single him out amidst the crowds and just stop and
gaze at him. So Baba would cover his face with scarves, wear goggles or wear a
turban or a felt hat; he would wear the headgear that suited the conditions and
fashion of that area. In this way he remained incognito.”[96] At
the same time, concealment may reveal all the more, intensifying the question
of identity by calling attention to its secrecy. Thus the fashion-play of Meher
Baba’s incognito presence is no less visible as a spiritual hide-and-seek game
perfectly suited to spin heads and capture hearts: “That night, Baba went to
Monte Carlo with the mandali, Norina, and Elizabeth to see the casinos. Dressed
incognito, he looked stunning; wearing a cape of Norina’s and a French beret of
Mercedes’ [de Acosta].”[97] The spiritual sense of the game is brought into relief by a brief encounter, aboard
the SS Conte Verde in 1933, with one of the chicest style icons of the
day, Sanyogita Devi, the Mahrani of Indore, famous
for her (and her husband’s) avant-garde tastes and beauty, as captured in
portraits Bernard Boutet de Monvel and Man Ray.[98] The Mahrani wanted to
meet Meher Baba for his darshan and caught up with him taking a walk on the deck
in Western clothes, despite Chanji’s efforts to communicate that an appointment
is preferred. Baba explained, “As I do not wish to meet anyone while outside on
deck, I dress like an ordinary man to avoid being recognized. No one knows me
as I really am. For those who want to know my Real Self, I have no need to put
on such a show. But I am afraid of those who have no longing to know me truly
and have to hide my identity from them. I therefore must go about incognito.”[99] This admission of fear is
fascinating in light of the conventional sense of celebrity glamor as precisely
about the projection of image and not a person as they really are, and thus the
correlative need for personal time free from the pressure of recognition and
the burden of one’s image. Meher Baba’s concern seems to have been precisely the
reverse, a desire to appear only as his natural, everyday self, and only to
those with a sincere interest in his divine reality. Baba later met with the
Mahrani in his cabin: “Baba was dressed in a sadra at the time and his long
hair was down. Baba informed the queen, ‘This is my customary dress. It is the
clothing I wear in front of those who come to know me. To those who take me for
a foreigner, I become a foreigner. I did not wish to meet you as a foreigner,
so it is good that you have come today. Do I not look like a fellow countryman
now?’ The maharani laughed.”[100] Here we see a kind of
hyper-naturalness that stands at once inside and outside the cultural nature of
convention, turning each on their heads. On the one hand, Baba follows cultural
norms, dressing like a foreigner in foreign contexts and appearing familiarly in
the traditional Zoroastrian dress which he wore routinely throughout his life.
On the other hand, he stands beyond cultural tradition, cloaking himself within
the outsideness of Western modernity (not in order to fit in but as if in order
not to) and accentuating symmetrically his own normal dress as a special
garb worn for those who truly want to see him—especially hilarious given the
Maharani’s elite cosmopolitan mastery foreign fashion codes. No wonder she laughed!
Whatever the ultimate reasons or non-reasons for the play of dress, the overall
effect, the humanly divine weather atop “the whole Olympus of appearance,” is
clear: the Maharani gets to see Meher Baba more than once, a heart is touched,
and we are telling the story in an essay on fashion and spirituality. Maybe Sanyogita
laughed in a moment of simply seeing herself in Meher Baba, not a countryman,
not a spiritual master whose auspicious sight she desired, not this or that,
just a sweet silent someone—only the (infinite) reflection of her own infinite
self playfully trapped in the dress-up game of divine illusion.
Meher
Baba explains that the universe emerges out of Reality’s spontaneous desire to
know itself, a universal “original whim [which] can also be called the first
‘WORD’ uttered by God—‘WHO AM I?’”[101] Following
suit, his style dramatizes the specular infinity of eternal self-recognition, appearing
“to each one . . . what he thinks I am,” forever appearing as the self’s own
appearing, impossible to pin down, the direct evidence of its own impossibility
and the mirror image of beauty itself, beautifully defined by Simone Weil as “experimental
proof that the incarnation is possible.”[102] With inexplicable
sprezzatura, his manner exhibited the divine, sublimely comic proportions of
human identity. When asked by Eruch, on behalf of a bewildered group of
Baba-lovers, how to explain to others who Baba is, Baba was amused and replied,
“tell them that when someone asked, ‘Who is Meher Baba?” they should reply, ‘He
is the one who provokes this question in you—the being of all beings.’”[103] Here the paradoxical specularity of spiritual naturalness comes into view, just
as a mirror always both never and only lies, pointing both beyond itself and
back at viewer. “The mirror is changeless, immovable and always steady.
I, too, am like a mirror. The change you observe is in you—not in me. I am
always so constant and still that it cannot be imagined.”[104] As mirror between
humanity and divinity, Meher Baba wore his own form as fashion, like an image
in the universal mirror of cosmic illusion: “All this is imagination and exists only
in imagination. What you see physically is not Baba; it is only my body—a mere
piece of clothing! Baba is infinite, and you cannot see him with these eyes.”[105] The mysteriously
captivating naturalness of Meher Baba’s manners and movements is thus no less perceivable
as a form of perfect ordinariness, a mere-ness reversely reflected in the
fashion-being of the model who comports herself as a simple wearer of clothes
and becomes a kind of living image of no one in particular. As top model
Clotilde once said, “I am an optical illusion.”[106] But whereas behind the supermodel
there lurks a normal human being presumably more or less like ourselves, behind
Baba’s form is something one cannot be oneself and see: “I am bliss
personified. This five-foot, six-inch physical form you see is not real. If you
could see my Real Form, you would not be yourself.”[107] On one occasion, Jeal
Adriel felt Meher Baba literally taking his body on and off like clothing: “I
had an opportunity of witnessing the facility with which Baba uses his body
‘like a garment.’ . . . Suddenly he threw over his head the blue cloak which
lay on his lap. The next moment his body became lifeless. Baba—that dynamic,
radiant embodiment of spirit—was no longer beside me . . . During this amazing
ten-hour trip to Boston Baba must have gone in and out of his body a dozen times.
He explained to us later that there are constant calls on his inner counsel
from all over the universe, often requiring of him urgent work of a nature
which necessitates his presence elsewhere.”[108]
Moving between
being the only one present and being totally elsewhere, the trace of Meher
Baba’s style silently spells out a space for fashion that might be conceived as
a kind of Avataric normcore, just as he set ‘no precepts’—“I have come not to
teach but to awaken. Understand therefore that I lay down no precepts”—and
emphasized above all the practice of love and honesty in the midst of ordinary
life: “The best way to cleanse your heart and to prepare for the stilling of
the mind is to lead a normal life in the world.”[109] In his conduct and
guidance of others, Meher Baba likewise eschewed forms of exclusiveness and
signs of distinction, encouraging all to practice spirituality in the midst of
ordinary existence as that is where the action is. Referring to the
idiosyncratic masts or God-intoxicated individuals with whom he worked
extensively, Baba said, “Have that intensity of love for me and be as normal as
you are now. Then see the fun—that is real life!”[110] Confirming the practice
of this wish, Ray Kerkhove has explained the “curious
obscurity-amidst-popularity” of the worldwide Baba-lover culture as rooted in
Meher Baba’s own ways: “In 1924, some of Meher’s early disciples moved that the
group devise their own religious symbol. Baba immediately vetoed the notion:
‘We are not a society. Any mark of distinction would rob us of our independence
and would prove a binding to restrict our minds.’ . . . Followers of Meher Baba
today are camouflaged by a similar ‘normalcy.’”[111] Comparable to the late
medieval mystical ideal of the common life, which as Ruusbroec says, takes
“Christ as our model, for he gave himself completely to all in common,”[112] the naturalness of
divine style as Avataric normcore is obviously not about conforming to
conventions nor some kind of deflated or ironic elitism. Rather it must be
thought on the side of the inherent unity of life, as a way of freedom and
independence that stands outside false and identitarian divisions, a manner of
being at once here and beyond: “I am whatever you take me to be. I am what I
am, and, in fact, I am beyond that too!”[113] Naturally there can no
limits set on divine style, no way to fashion it into a look, or not to, just
as the spiritual permutations of service, simplicity, and spontaneity are
infinite.
Meher Baba offered
himself to all, claiming to be none other than all are: “To me saint and
sinner, high and low, rich and poor, man and woman, young and old are all just
the same. Why? Because I am in everyone. No one should hesitate to embrace me
and to meet me with all love.”[114] At the same time, he
asserted the distinction of being the Avatar, God in human form, “the same
Ancient One who alone is eternally worshiped and ignored, ever remembered and
forgotten.”[115]
And naturally he claimed no special status for this distinction: “You are bothered
about the idea of Avatar. There is no need to be, for we are all Avatars.”[116] Indeed, as Meher Baba
explains in his Discourses, the Avatar is simply “the first individual
soul” to emerge through the process of evolution and involution, the one by
whom “God first completed the journey from unconscious divinity to conscious
divinity”—an idea that robs the distinction between the individual and God of
all reality.[117]
Befitting the mystery of who he is and reflecting the question of everyone’s
own individuation, Meher Baba’s unique style and mode of being both manifested
his radical individuality and participated seamlessly in the most various forms
of environment and activity. On the one hand, as medium of his enchanting
divine humanity—“I am the Universal Thief! I steal the hearts of all!”—this
style is ungraspably graspable, always slipping through our hands: “Remember, I
am the most divine and, at the same time, the most human, so much so that no
one . . . can fathom my depth, because I am infinitely slippery.”[118] On the other hand, as
medium of his suffering human divinity—“The Avatar is crucified every moment of
his life on earth”—this style is graspably ungraspable, always caught but never
possessed, as per Baba’s last words: “Remember this, I am not this body!”[119] Between these two hands of
Meher Baba's style is found, like fashion itself, that which one can hold and must
never let go of: “Beloved God, help us all to love you more and more, and more
and more, and still yet more until we become worthy of Union with you. And help
us all to hold fast to Baba’s daaman [hem] until the very end!”[120]
[1] On Meher Baba’s silence and his
methods of communication, see C. B. Purdom, The God-Man: The Life, Journeys,
and Work of Meher Baba, with and Interpretation of his Silence and Spiritual
Teaching (London: George Allen &
Unwin, 1964), 407-14; José Sanjinés, “Meher Baba’s Silent Semiotic Output,” Signs
and Society 2 (2014): 121-59 and Hillel Schwartz, Making Noise: From
Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond (New York: Zone, 2011), 620-5
[2] Max Picard, The World of
Silence, trans. Stanley Godman (Chicago: Regner, 1952), 2.
[3] Purdom, The God-Man, 413.
[4] Sir Walter Scott, quoted in
Benjamin Moser, “Glamour and Grammar,” in Clarice Lispector, The Complete
Stories, trans. Katrina Dodson (New York: New Directions, 2015), ix. “The
perception of models as ‘dumb’ or mute objects has been a common theme in
scholarly work on visual culture” (Joanne Entwistle and Elizabeth Wissinger,
“Introduction,” in Fashioning Models: Image, Text and Industry, eds.
Joanne Entwistle and Elizabeth Wissinger [London: Berg, 2012], 4).
[5] https://www.silentmodelsny.com/About
[6] Otto von Busch, Moda
Maleficarum, or, The Dark Allure of Fashion (New York: Self-Passage, 2016),
[7] Ibn Arabi uses the example of a
man looking into a mirror: “He is neither a truth-teller nor a liar in his
words, ‘I saw my form, I did not see my form’ . . . So the cosmos only became
manifest within imagination. It is imagined in itself. So it is, and it is not”
(cited in William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-Arabi’s
Metaphysics of the Imagination [Albany: State University of New York Press,
1989], 118).
[8] Emanuele Coccia, Sensible Life:
A Micro-ontology of the Image, trans. Scott Alan Stuart (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2016), 18.
[9] Picard, World of Silence,
80.
[10] Georg Simmel, “The Philosophy of
Fashion,” in Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, eds. David Frisby and
Mike Featherstone (London: Sage, 1997), 192.
[11] Dante Alighieri, The Divine
Comedy, Volume 2: Purgatorio, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003), 10.94-99. On painting as silent poetry and
poetry as voiced painting, see R. W. Lee, “Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic
Theory of Painting,” The Art Bulletin 22 (1940): 197-269.
[12] Friedrich Nietzsce, The Gay
Science, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001), 9.
[13] Meher Baba, quoted in Ivy O. Duce,
How a Master Works (Walnut Creek, CA : Sufism Reoriented, 1975), 625, my
italics.
[14] Meher Baba, quoted in Lord
Meher, 1050.
[15] Meher Baba, quoted in Lord
Meher, 3960.
[16] Meher Baba, “Final Declaration,”
in Purdom, The God-Man, 223.
[17] Meher Baba, quoted in Lord
Meher, 5288
[18] https://meherbaba.eu/his-silence/
[19] Meher Baba, quoted in “November 1:
Morning Session,” The Awakener 9 (1963), 21. For an explanation of
Baba’s gestural language and the inimitable style of its expressive flow, see
“Mandali Moments: Meher Baba’s Gestures,”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WphnDsCLpDI.
[20] Otto von Busch, Vital Vogue: A
Biosocial Perspective on Fashion (New York: Self Passage, 2018), 71.
[21] Meher Baba, “Universal Message,”
in Purdom, The God-Man, 344.
[22]
Patrícia Soley-Beltran, “Performing Dreams: A Counter-History of Models
as Glamour’s Embodiment,” in Fashioning Models, 115.
[23] Meher Baba, quoted in Lord
Meher, 4001.
[24] Sato Sato, Style and Steel:
Fashion and the Endurance of Supremacy (New York: Self Passage, 2016), 21.
Cf. Vanessa Brown, “Why fashion models don’t smile,”
http://theconversation.com/why-fashion-models-dont-smile-53658
[25] Meher Baba, quoted in Lord
Meher, 3555-6.
[26] Coccia, Sensible Life, 80.
Hence fashion’s internal war with being fashionable, the inevitable impossible
fight to fashionably free fashion from fashion as such, which only intensifies
the problem of fashionableness as the mode of self-presentation wherein the
fact of self-presentation supervenes over its substance, as if breaking the
silence of every fashion statement with I am fashionable.
[27] Meher Baba, God Speaks, 2nd
edition (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1973), xi.
[28] Meher Baba, God Speaks,
xii.
[29] Meher Baba, God Speaks, 1,
190.
[30] Ibn Arabi, Tarjuman al-Ashwaq,
trans. Reynold A. Nicholson (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1911), 67.
[31] Coccia, Sensible Life, 81.
[32] Meher Baba, Life Is A Jest,
ed. A. K. Hajra (Jabalpur, India: R. P. Pankhraj, 1969), 63.
[33] Otto von Busch & Daye Hwang, Feeling
Fashion: The Embodied Gamble of Our Social Skin (New York: Self Passage,
2018), 16,
[34] Meher Baba on War, ed K. K.
Ramakrishnan (Pune, India: Meher Era Publications, 1972), 33.
[35] Otto von Busch & Daye Hwang, Feeling
Fashion, 55.
[36] Meher Baba, Listen, Humanity,
ed. D. E. Stevens (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1957), 179.
[37] Meher Baba, Discourses, 6th
ed., 3 vols (San Francisco: Sufism Reoriented, 1973), II.174.
[38] Meher Baba, Discourses,
III.55.
[39] Coccia, Sensible Life, 92.
[40] Bhagavad Gita, trans.
Stephen Mitchell (New York: Harmony, 2000), 2.22.
[41] Karen de Perthuis, “Beyond Perfection: the Fashion Model in the Age of
Digital Manipulation,” in Fashion as
Photograph: Viewing and Reviewing Images of Fashion, ed. Eugénie Shinkle (London: I.
B. Taurus, 2008), 176.
[42] Meher Baba, quoted in Lord
Meher, 4350.
[43] Karen de Perthuis, “Beyond
Perfection,” 180.
[44] Meher Baba, quoted in Lord
Meher, 3555.
[45] Otto von Busch & Daye Hwang, Feeling
Fashion, 23
[46] Meher Baba, Discourses,
I.168.
[47] Bhagavad Gita, II.16.
[48] Meher Baba, quoted in Lord
Meher, 3163.
[49] Meher Baba, Discourses,
II.98.
[50] Meher Baba, Meher Baba’s Call,
Given on occasion of Mass Darshan Programme at Ahmednagar on 12th September
1954 (Ahmednagar, India: Meher Publications, 1961). Cf. “The greatest
greatness and the greatest humility go hand in hand naturally and without
effort” (Meher Baba, quoted in Purdom, The God-Man, 222).
[51] Meher Baba, God Speaks,
xii. See “Don Stevens Interview – In Meher Baba’s Presence,”
https://youtu.be/CDKDBjd2ZCE.
[52] Chanji (Framroz Dadachanji),
quoted in Lord Meher, 2389.
[53] Norina Matchabelli, quoted in Rom
Landau, God is My Adventure: A Book on Modern Mystics, Masters, and Teachers
(London: Faber and Faber, 1935), 112.
[54] Jean Adriel, Avatar: The Life
Story of the Perfect Master Meher Baba: A Narrative of Spiritual Experience,
2nd ed. (Santa Barbara: J. F. Rowny Press, 1947), 17-8.
[55] Filis
Frederick, “Heroines of the Path,” The Awakener 20 (1983): 16.
[56] Norina Matchabelli, quoted in Norina’s
Gift: Messages from Meher Baba, Received through Princess Norina Matchabelli,
intro. Christopher Wilson and Charles Haynes (Myrtle Beach, SC: EliNor
Publications, 1997), 6.
[57] Ibid., 4
[58] See Sarah-Grace Heller, “Light as
Glamour: The Luminescent Ideal of Beauty in the Roman de la Rose,” Speculum
76 (2001): 934-959.
[59] Norina’s Gift, 3.
[60] For a brief summary of the story,
see “John Julius Norwich – ‘The Miracle’ – a play by Max Reinhardt,”
https://youtu.be/xfdT234Dk6k.
[61] Norina’s Gift, 4.
[62] Norina’s Gift, 13, 16.
[63] Stephen, Philips, “Toward a
Research Practice: Frederick Kiesler’s Design-Correlation Laboratory,” Grey
Room 38 (2010): 93
[64] New York World Telegram,
September 10, 1941, quoted in Norina’s Gift, 23-4.
[65] Norina’s Gift, 24.
[66] Norina’s Gift, 25.
[67] Norina’s Gift, 26.
[68] Norina’s Gift, 25, 27.
[69] Giorgio Agamben, Profranations,
trans. Jeff Fort (Brooklyn, NY: Zone, 2007), 10.
[70] “Whoso had this werk, it schuld
governe him ful semely, as wele in body as in soule, and make hym ful favorable
unto iche man or womman that lokyd apon hym; insomoche that the worst favored
man or womman that leveth in this liif, and thei mighte come to by grace to
worche in this werk, theire favour schuld sodenly and gracyously be chaunged” (The
Cloud of Unknowing, ed. Patrick Gallacher [Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval
Institute, 1997], 81).
[71] Anita de Caro, quoted in Filis
Frederick, “Heroines of the Path,” 17.
[72] Landau, God is My Adventure,
112.
[73] Avatar Meher Baba Trust Digital
Archives – Meherabad,
http://archives.ambppct.org/CA_1_7/jaibaba/index.php/Detail/objects/8952
[74]
http://archives.ambppct.org/CA_1_7/jaibaba/index.php/Detail/objects/2976
[75] Meher Baba, Discourses,
II.110, my italics.
[76] Meher Baba, Discourses,
I.168.
[77] New York World Telegram,
September 10, 1941, quoted in Norina’s Gift, 23.
[78] Meher Baba, quoted in Lord
Meher, 5100.
[79] Meher Baba, Discourses,
I.123.
[80] New York
World Telegram, September 10, 1941, quoted in Norina’s Gift, 23.
[81] Norina’s Gift, 117.
[82] Coccia, Sensible Life, 93-4.
[83] Meher Baba, The Religion of
Life [pamphlet], (USA: Universal Spiritual League, 1948), 5.
[84] Meher Baba, quoted in Lord
Meher, 1305.
[85] Meher Baba, Discourses,
III.121.
[86] Eruch Jessawala, That’s How It
Was: Stories of Life with Meher Baba (Myrtle Beach, SC: Sheriar Foundation,
1995), 168. Cf. “Frequently mentioned by observers was Baba’s naturalness, his
way of putting everyone at ease, of being a friend and superb host. Even those
who accepted him as God incarnate felt extremely comfortable around him. He
wore no religious markings and mixed freely with everyone. Baba was physically
affectionate, preferring his followers to embrace him lovingly rather than bow
down to him. In films he is seen clapping backs, tweaking ears, gently grasping
hands, equally natural with men, women, and children . . . Baba’s naturalness
was reflected especially in his playfulness and humor” (Allan Cohen, The
Master of Consciousness [New York : Harper & Row, 1977], 16).
[87] Meher Baba, quoted in Lord
Meher, 3554.
[88] Meher Baba, quoted in Lord
Meher, 3840.
[89] Meher Baba, quoted in Lord
Meher, 3668.
[90] For example, see Lord Meher,
314 and “Mandali Moments Meher Baba's Gestures,”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WphnDsCLpDI, 17:30.
[91] “Quod cum facimus, utique volentes
et scientes falsum verbum habemus: ubi verum verbum est mentiri nos; hoc enim
scimus” (Augustine, De Trinitate, XV.15.25,
http://www.augustinus.it/latino/trinita/index2.htm).
[92] Meher Baba, quoted in Lord
Meher, 4685.
[93] Meher Baba, The Path of Love
(Myrtle Beach, SC: Sheriar Press, 2000), 98.
[94] Jean Adriel, Avatar, 135.
[95] On Meher Baba’s movements, see
David Fenster, “Chronology of Meher Baba’s Movements” (Meher Nazar Pulications,
2018), https://www.ambppct.org/Book_Files/CHRONOLOGY.pdf, which lists
approximately 2700 trips.
[96] It So Happened . . . : Stories
from Days with Meher Baba, ed. William Le Page (Bombay: Meher House
Publications, 1978), 17. For example, Baba’s interactions with the passengers
aboard the SS Conte Rosso in 1932 are described as follows: “As usual,
Baba preferred to remain unnoticed and in seclusion, and hence the very first
order he gave the mandali was: ‘No interviews with anyone on board.’ They were
instructed not to tell anyone about him unless asked and in general to keep his
identity undisclosed. In spite of all the observance of strict privacy, Baba’s
personality was so powerful that he immediately impressed those who happened to
cast a glance at him or casually pass by him. Almost all who saw him wanted to
know who he was and insisted upon being told, though the mandali could not
reveal much and had to be careful of what they said . . . The ship’s Italian
stewards, sailors, purser and other officers especially seemed to ‘scent’
Baba’s presence, and they were all deferential toward him. They vied with one
another to render assistance and tried to approach Baba on one pretense or
another whenever an opportunity arose. As the voyage continued, in spite of
trying to keep Baba's identity a secret, he became known to most of the passengers,
officers and crew, who looked at him with a sort of reverence which perhaps
they themselves hardly understood or could explain” (Bhau Kalchuri, Lord
Meher: Online Edition, 1549, http://www.lordmeher.org).
[97] Lord Meher, 1860-61.
[98] See Meera Ganapathi, “How the last
king of Indore left a mark on the world of style and the arts,”
https://scroll.in/magazine/899359/how-the-last-king-of-indore-left-a-mark-on-the-world-of-style-and-arts
and Angma Dey Jhala, Courtly Indian Women in Late Imperial India (London:
Pickering & Chatto, 2008), 147.
[99] Meher Baba, quoted in Lord
Meher, 1549.
[100] Lord Meher, 1552.
[101] Meher Baba, God Speaks: The
Theme of Creation and Its Purpose, 2nd ed. (San Francisco:
Sufism Reoriented, 1973), 78.
[102] Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace,
trans. Emma Crawford and Mario van der Ruhr (London: Routledge, 1999), 150.
[103] Eruch Jessawala, That’s How It
Was: Stories of Life with Meher Baba (Myrtle Beach, SC: Sheriar Foundation,
1995), 178, punctation modified to reflect the pause before “the being of all
beings” which Eruch emphasized when relating this incident.
[104] Meher Baba, quoted in Lord
Meher, 1062
[105] Meher Baba, quoted in Lord
Meher, 3971.
[106] Quoted in Soley-Beltran,
“Performing Dreams,” 106.
[107] Meher Baba, quoted in Lord
Meher, 1039.
[108] Jean Adriel, Avatar, 28.
[109] Meher Baba, quoted in Purdom, The
God-Man, 343, 286. The former statement is especially important, being the
first sentence of Baba’s “Universal Message,” given in 1958.
[110] On Baba’s work with masts,
see William Donkin, The Wayfarers: Meher Baba with the God-Intoxicated
(Ahmednagar, India: Meher Publications, 1948).
[111] Ray Kerkhove, “Multi-faith
Invisibility – The Case of Meher Baba (1894-1969),” Paper presented at the
Annual Conference of AASR (Australian Association for Study of Religions),
Griffith University (Brisbane), July 2003,
https://www.academia.edu/9911405/Multi-faith_Invisibility_-_The_Case_of_Meher_Baba_1894-1969_
[112] John Ruusbroec, The Spiritual
Espousals and Other Writings (New York: Paulist Press, 1985), 106.
[113] Meher Baba, quoted in Bal Natu, Glimpses
of the God-Man, vol. 5 (Myrtle Beach, SC: Sheriar Press, 1987), 179.
[114] Meher Baba, quoted in Lord
Meher, 4301.
[115] Meher Baba, quoted in Lord
Meher, 4581.
[116] Meher Baba, quoted in Purdom, The
God-Man, 391.
[117] Meher Baba, Discourses,
III.14.
[118] Meher Baba, quoted in Lord
Meher, 4035, 3554.
[119] Meher Baba, quoted in Lord
Meher, 2020, 5399.
[120] Meher Baba, quoted in Lord
Meher, 4580. Meher Baba used this expression of holding onto his damaan throughout his life and dictated this prayer
1959.
