Initiation and initiative : an exploration of the life and ideas of Dimitrije Mitrinović

164 LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIC

a greater sense of discrimination and conscious control ever what they divulged to whom in different circumstances.

It is possible to attribute a similar serious intent to other aspects of the group life which appeared, on the surface, to have a certain game-like quality. For example there was the institution of “Thomson’s Ticket’ which was explained by one of the ‘gate-keepers’ charged with issuing or withholding the ‘tickets.’

There were three of us—Watson Thomson, myself and another woman. At one time or other we were charged with interviewing singly everybody in a certain group. It was interesting because we had to work in accord and we had to discover whether there was any artificiality—we didn’t speak about this as our aim—but talking to that person we could see whether they were really speaking from the very centres of themselves or just mentalising or just trying to be clever. If they tried to be clever and artificial, they weren’t given the ticket. If they threw all that out and really spoke genuinely, they had what we called the ‘Thomson Ticket.’ DM used this device to try and get to the centre, the core, of peoplebecause there was a lot of jockeying for position and being clever and all that sort of thing .. .

And when you got your ticket? That really meant nothing. All it meant was that for that occasion, at that moment, you had your ticket. But you could lose it the next day—nothing was ever permanent. One had to be got out of the thing that most people tried to do, which was to do the things that they thought would please DM and other people rather than what was really them.”

It was not too surprising that people tried to please Mitrinoyic rather than themselves, given the impression he made upon those with whom he came into contact. Apart from anything else there was the sheer scale of his visionary imagination coupled with the depth and range of his knowledge and learning. Charles Purdom, writing after the war, described it thus:

His mind is encyclopaedic. There is nothing in which he is not interested; his reading is comprehensive in half a dozen languages, and includes art, philosophy, philology, theology, history, anthropology, archaeology, physics, biology, psychology, politics, science and economics. A student of Sanskrit, in recent years he has been learning Chinese. He is passionately devoted to music. He knows as much about modern as about ancient pictures and sculptures . . .7°

As one young associate explained, “You really felt you were in the presence of someone who was so immeasurably above anything that you knew.”

Watson Thomson remarked that “the important differences between oneself and DM was one of scale and dimension.”?” This applied not only to his vision, his learning and his imagination, but also to his temper. On more