A Man of Letters
K.D. SETHNA (the "Dear Amal" of a correspondence spanning more than twenty years) is a prodigious letter-writer. The 'clear ray' of his sparkling intelligence muminates any subject to which his attention is drawn, and ( no matter how profound the observation or how complex the question under consideration, his quick wit and gentle humour plays over it like sunlight on an ocean's depth. I am among the fortunate recipients of some of these wonderful letters - a few of the longer ones have already appeared in print as part of the series published in Mother India.
My first letter from Amal is dated May 18th, 1979. It acknowledges receipt of a short poem I had sent. I remember still the shyness I felt when sending those lines to so eminent a writer, and furthermore to one who had corresponded on literary matters with Sri Aurobindo himself. I did not then know about Amal's unfailing kindness to aspiring poets, and his ability to find exactly the right words to inspire confidence and hope. He always managed to combine uncompromising truthfulness with an empathy that perceived behind the inadequate form of words an inspiration that struggled to express itself. "Your poem," he wrote, "on it's own diminutive scale has both feeling and imagination and is well-turned... it reminded me vividly of a famous prayer in the Illiad by the Greek warriors who did not wish to be killed under the night's bewildering pall." Suddenly it did not matter if my small attempt had any merit of its own -enough that it had kindled in the mind of a lover of great literature the moment of pure joy that a memory of Homer's lines calls forth! That letter was the start of a correspon-dence that began in the nineteen-seventies and a friend-ship that endures to this day.
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I first met Amal during a visit to Pondicherry in December 1979. The meeting took place at the house where he was staying in Rue Suffren. I had called on an impulse, without making an appointment. To my amazement I, a complete stranger, was greeted with a beaming smile, and the words "Oh, you've come!" My first thought was that he had mistaken me for someone else. I had been thoughtless and in-sensitive to turn up unannounced, and expected at any minute that our conversation would be interrupted by the arrival of the person who should have been there instead. But nobody else arrived and in the meantime we discovered a whole range of mutual interests: Sri Aurobindo of course, but also Teilhard de Chardin, William Blake, Mallarme and the French symbolist poets, the sonnets of Alfred Douglas, the strange historical/visionary perspectives of Immanuel Velikovsky - the list seemed endless, while Amal's enthusiasm and his extensive knowledge appeared to have no limits. I was impressed by the humility and honesty of his approach to every subject - rare enough qualities in men or women of outstanding intellect - but perhaps even more by his apparent ability to quote accurately from memory the works of any poet whom he had read. Only once I was able to tell him something he did not already know, and it was that Sri Aurobindo, Teilhard de Chardin and Mallarme had something else in common besides their genius, for they had all spent time in Hastings, a small town on the South coast of England. All must have climbed to the top of Castle Hill to look out over the English Channel (Sri Aurobindo had even written a letter from there on his sixteenth birthday), and all must have walked on the stony beach beside the cold grey sea. Amal was charmed by this thought, and even more pleased when I offered to read one of his own poems aloud on that shore as a mark of his admiration for these revered figures. It was an offer he did not forget. A letter arrived soon after my return to England:
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Now that I realise Hastings played a part in the lives of such three beings as Sri Aurobindo, Teilhard and Mallarme, I am quite thrilled at the thought of your plan to recite one of my poems to the English Channel when you next visit the place. I wonder what poem you will choose. There are five which have something to do with the sea: "Sky-Rims", "Glamour Tide", "Prefigure", "Symbol Mood", "Deluge". But it is not one of these which should necessarily be read. Pick out your own favourite. Whichever moves forth most naturally on a surge of Sonia-appreciation will be the most appropriate. If you can let me know the date on which you will do me this lovely favour I shall concentrate on you at the right time. I wish I could accompany you in person.
(10.01.1980)
So it happened that a poem composed in Pondicherry and submitted to Sri Aurobindo with the question "Will you tell me the worth of these fourteen verses both as poetry and as sonnet? I want perfection - so be unrelentingly critical if there is any drop...." was read aloud to the sea at Hastings. There could be no hesitation about the choice. "Sky-Rims" is not only a fine sonnet, it is the purest expression of Amal's questing and questioning spirit responding to the endless adventure of life, daring to explore 'the wideness ever new', seeking to capture and express each new insight with the greatest possible perfection. There was also a personal reason for the choice of "Sky-Rims". I had myself struggled with this verse form. It is a Petrarchan sonnet, named for the great Italian poet who invented it, and because of its demanding rhyme scheme it is not easily adapted to the English language. Sri Aurobindo had mastered it easily -and Amal too succeeded brilliantly:
As each gigantic vision of sky-rim
Preludes yet stranger spaces of the sea,
For those who dare the rapturous wave-whim
Of soul's uncharted trance-profundity
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There is no end to God-horizonry:
A wideness ever new awaits behind
Each ample sweep of plumbless harmony
Circling with vistaed gloriole the mind.
For the Divine is no fixed paradise,
But truth beyond great truth - a spirit-heave
From unimaginable sun-surprise
Of beauty to immense love-lunar eve,
Dreaming through lone sidereal silence on
To yet another alchemy of dawn!
That magnificent final line did not come easily, as we know from Amal's correspondence with Sri Aurobindo. He waited a long time for 'the inevitable word' which would complete the poem. Mallarme, a fellow-seeker after perfection (whom Amal once referred to as 'ME') would have understood the search and appreciated the result.
At the end of that memorable first meeting with Amal I made a second promise - to myself - that I would attempt to find a publisher for the forty-five unpublished manuscripts he had at that time. Some of our subsequent correspondence dealt with my unsuccessful attempts to do so. I took away with me his study of Mallarme, and - a gift that I will always treasure - his last remaining copy of The Adventure of the Apocalypse. Already I could see on the book's cover the ravages wrought by the humid climate of Pondicherry and its thriving insect population. I feared greatly for the fate of the works still in manuscript! Eventually the Mallarme translations found their way to Oxford University and into the hands of an acknowledged expert, Dr. Annie Barnes, who praised it highly and offered to have the manuscript catalogued and placed in the Bodeleian Library where it would be available to other scholars. Amal, however, preferred to wait until a publisher could be found. He wrote: "I personally think Mallarme is one of my best things in the literary field."
I had never been a gifted letter writer, but from time to time I would send books that Amal had been unable to get
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in Pondicherry, or my own attempts at poetry. I often had cause to wonder how a few lines or a small gift could inspire the wonderful replies I received. I once sent him a volume of early English poetry, and was rewarded by a paragraph ex-ploring the nature of poetry itself from a most original angle:
Alexander's Introduction brings up the question of what a poet does. The old Anglo-Saxon word "scop" comes from a root suggesting "shaper, former, creator" and it is allied to the Greek term which is related to "polein" - to make - and to the old Scots expression "maker". All these are unlike the Provencal "trobator", North French "Trouvere" and Italian "tobatore", which come from a "find" root. Alexander considers all these vocables to in-dicate "more modest aspiration". But I am not sure. One might well read in the other terms an emphasis on the mere art aspect, working from outside on a pre-existent material rather than a practice of creativeness. Actually, to my mind both the descriptions are to the point.
The Anglo-Saxon, Greek and Scots terms combine the God-like creative function with the function of formative labour - the rolling of the "eye in a fine frenzy" from earth to heaven and heaven to earth, as Shakespeare says, together with a skilful excitement of the hand giving the correct curve and line to the various visions so as to catch them with a measured precision, a moulded memorableness. As for the Gallic and Italian designations, they can be plumbed to mean not just a polishing up of what is "found" but rather a "voyaging on strange seas of thought alone" towards the magical shores of a hidden Reality greater than our day-to-day world's - an adventure of discovering or un-covering the idealities behind or beyond phenomena...
Analogously, to be Godlike as a maker would signify for me "the thinking of God's thoughts after Him" as some scientist has tried to depict his own job. The imaging and echoing of the Supreme Secrets is the way one plays the deific role. The ancient Vedic formula hits
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the mark: the Rishi of each hymn is "the seer and hearer of the Truth". The full Vedic account tells of the revelatory Word arising simultaneously from the heart of the Rishi and from the lofty ether of Surya-Savitri and get-ting shaped like a chariot in the calmly dynamic mind for the gods to ride from their mysterious stations into the world of men.
(30.3.80)
In April that year Amal's wife of thirty-six years died, and he moved into a smaller flat at 21, Rue Francois Martin. He told me: "This is the street on which I began my life in the Ashram when I set foot in Pondicherry on December 16th, 1927. The wheel has come full circle." From this new address letters continued to arrive, sometimes in response to material I had sent but often simply reflecting his own literary interests, which he knew I shared, or the spiritual and historical research engaging his attention at the time.
The occasional glimpses of Amal's early life appearing here and there were of special interest to me:
Your mention of England brought back impressions en-graved on my mind from my sixth year. I had an attack of polio when I was two and a half years years old. For over three years I used to walk with a hand pressing my left knee downward because the heel of the left foot had been pulled up. As this was in almost prehistoric time my father who was a doctor took me, along with my mother, to London. We stayed at Earls Court where two operations were done by Dr. Tubby. Later we stayed at Shepherd's Bush. Every scene is clear in my memory. Before returning to India we visited Dublin where my father took the degree of MRCP. Once during a visit to Phoenix Park it suddenly poured super-cats and super-dogs. A tall policeman gave me shelter under his cloak. It was the most thrilling incident in my young life. I had the privilege to touch his thick belt! I wrote of it to my younger brother and how he envied me! On a higher plane an unforgettable experi-
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ence was a visit to the art galleries of Paris where artists on tall ladders were touching up old paintings. I changed my ambition from being a fire-brigade man to being an artist. After my B.A. I wanted to go to Oxford. If my father had been alive I could have done so. My orthodox grandfather put his foot down. His fear was that I might bring back an English wife - and such a thing was intolerable. But when I started turning to yoga he tried to persuade me to go to Oxford. Evidently, an English wife was preferable to the Divine Beloved. At that time I was in a hurry to find my guru - and soon enough I found him and, on reaching Pondicherry, gave up preparing a thesis for the M.A. The new atmosphere would not allow the old academic grind. But life under Sri Aurobindo opened up fresh founts of literary creativity in a short while.
(24.6.82)
The picture of the little boy sheltering from Irish weather under a policeman's cloak was certainly unforgettable to me and I must have asked for more, because a long autobiographical note written for a friend appears in the file of letters around this time. Another letter, written on Sri Aurobindo's birthday, brought precious memories of a darshan in 1928:
The next best thing that has happened is that I am writing on August 15th in Pondicherry. As I was meditating, my mind went back to my first August 15th in Pondi. Between February 21,1928, which was my first darshan of Sri Aurobindo, and his birthday celebration which at the time was the next since there was no April 24th in the interval, a great deal had happened. At the first darshan I had watched Sri Aurobindo's outer appearance closely and approved his being my impressive Guru. When a day later I met the Mother and asked her whether Sri Aurobindo had said anything, she re-ported: "Yes, he said about you 'He has a good face'."
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Quite a tit for tat! Before the next darshan, my whole being had opened up, there had been moments of un-bearable psychic ecstasy and a general effluence of the deep heart had become a part of my life. I had grown a beard and my hair had been worn a little long. As the Mother once noted, I had the face of an early Christian of the Thebaid. When I knelt at Sri Aurobindo's feet, he blessed me with both his hands. When, before kneel-ing, I had looked at his face he had kept gently nod-ding. Later I had the experience of a tremendous bar as of luminous steel entering the head from above and making me dizzy. The same afternoon I met the Mother. She took me into the darshan room, sat in a chair and I knelt a second time at her feet. She blessed me and said "Sri Aurobindo was very pleased with you. He said that there had been a great change." I was extremely moved.
I think that it was after this darshan I started writing poetry in the new vein - from the in-world or the over-world. Of course, all genuine poetic stuff hails from these domains but it is not always couched in the very tongue of them - the fire-tongue that has tasted paradise: it is translated into the imaginative language of the reflective mind or the passionate life-force. There is a whole bunch of poems by me of the pre-Pondi time -intense in thought and sensuousness passing often into an artistic sensuality edged with a topsy-turvy ideal-ism. Much of it was published under the soubriquet of "Maddalo", the name given by Shelley as "Julian" to Byron. (My identity had to be concealed to save my grandfather from jumping out of his orthodox seventy-year-old skin.) Before I came to the Ashram I destroyed all the copies I could lay hands on.
(15.08.1986)
Quite a number of letters from Amal concerned the art of writing and I always hoped that he would speak directly about his own work, but he seldom did. However there was
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a good deal to be learned about his approach to poetry in general from his comments on poems I sent for his appraisal. During my stay in England I had retrieved some very early work of mine - below is an extract from one of his letters in reply. It is typical of the meticulous care he took, not to mention the generous use of his time:
My reply has got delayed by a little over a fortnight after the receipt of your letter, so I don't know if it will catch you still in England. What you write about your poetry brings up to me the image of Athene full formed and perfectly panoplied from the head of Zeus. Where then is any room left for "improvement"? Your early work is essentially as good as any "grown-up" might compose. Once you realise this, you won't break your heart because you don't write better now. Just let your pen run - in my direction -I mean just send your new things to me without thinking whether they are worth sending. Too much self-criticism stands in one's way. I am quite confident that you will turn out fine stuff with a line here and there which you can "thrust like a lean knife between the ribs of Time".
Your desire to break metrical regularity is nothing freakish: some of the most memorable effects are produced by it, like:
Cover her face, her eyes dazzle, she died young
or:
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain...
Even in verses that seem regular, the best ones offer have a little kink somewhere, a modulation or an unexpected sound-play, as in:
Time like a snake coiling among the stars
In cradle of the rude imperious surge
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But whatever irregularity one commits must be allowed to pass from the outer ear to the inner hearing and not be merely a surface stroke made for its own unusual sake because of a deliberate rather than an instinctive sense.
Your "Cathedral Windows" appeals to me very much: the art is perfect, every line a cut gem, but, as you say, the whole is extremely condensed. By the way, the little bit of explanation with which you have prefaced it in your letter is a gem in itself and deserves to go as a small note by the author below the poem, shining on its own at the same time as it illuminates the superscription....
"Road Accident" is all that poetry, if it wants to be modern without sacrificing the ancient office of song, should be. Even the modern fashion of baffling the reader is carried off in a mysterious manner that carries the overtone of some universal presence - "seen nowhere though felt everywhere". I am reminded of the last stanza of a poem by Sarojini Naidu:
I, leaning from my sevenfold height,
Shall teach thee of my sevenfold grace:
Life is a prism of my light
And death the shadow of my face.
Your whole piece is poetry without a break. Both the solar plexus and the thousand-petalled lotus respond to it. They receive the impact of the secret it vibrantly communicates past the mere mind's logpoeia. No wonder ordinary readers can't understand the lines - they are not meant for understanding but for "overstanding". Some-thing of what Housman calls "pure poetry" is here. He would have thought at once of Blake's "hear the voice of the bard..." Rather irrelevantly perhaps and yet with a happy thrill I remember the closing line of Hecker's "Song of the Arab Horsemen": Pale Kings of the sunset, beware!
(4.12.82)
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There were also occasions when Amal allowed me to see a poem of his that had just been composed. In October 1989 he sent some lines written two days earlier, with the comment:
One bit of news in which you will perhaps be especially interested. On the 14th I found myself waking up in the morning with a poem taking shape on a subject which seems just a bolt from the blue -
I've visioned many barenesses - a beach
Of mile on tawny mile swept clean by sea -
A noon of cloudless blue serenity -
A hill, pure rock, out-soaring all bird-speech.
An unforgettable moment I have stood
Bereft of voice to act interpreter
To a timeless flash of unveiled Aphrodite.
But O the nakedness when one deep night
Caught suddenly my mind beyond thought's stir,
Shorn of a million stars to grope sheer God!
I am too close to the poem to arrive at a just estimate of it. Perhaps you can tell me whether it deserves even to come at the tail-end of the new Secret Splendour which is in the making....
In some years it was a fancy of mine to send Amal a poem for his birthday- and, as the 25th November was approaching my response was not simply an appreciation of the lines he had sent, but also a sonnet which began "Go words And dance your way across the paper" and included the line "So words, I send you to Amal in Pondicherry". This juxtaposition seemed to please him very much. He wrote back:
What an enchanting birthday gift! The very measure of the verse is exquisitely terpsichorean. And the personal note imaginatively woven into the word pattern meant to celebrate a particular occasion - "Amal's natal day" sets us two delightfully together as partners tripping
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out of the poem into some subtle actuality to the rhythm of more than metrical feet. I don't know whether your conscious mind intended this overtone of suggestion. But poetry, even if deliberate artistic workmanship has gone into it, is surely more than the poet's doing. Yeats has said somewhere that though a lot of conscious labour may be spent on a poem, the result is worth nothing if it does not read like "a moment's thought". This "thought" exists beyond the poet's conscious mind, and the latter toils to dig a channel for that secret wonder to flow through, destroying all appearance of the passage prepared for it. And what breaks out from within car-ries often much more than the toiling poet is aware of.... I am charmed by the quatrain:
The ant embraces the ant in a wordless greeting;
A pulse of delight moves the delicate steps
of the deer;
All nature dances for joy at fortuitous meeting'
And treads out a burden of bliss on the listening air.
I think it's the first time that "Pondicherry" has figured in a poem. The first time I heard of this town was in connection with a competition in an old TLS (Times Literary Supplement). Readers were asked to invent a name for a book such as would never interest one to read it. The first prize was won by "How to Ride a Tricycle"; the second by the title "The Roads of Pondicherry". In literature proper the town had a place in Conan Doyle's second Sherlock Holmes story "The Sign of the Four". The four conspirators fix on Pondicherry as their venue. When this novel was published, Sri Aurobindo had not made Pondicherry world-famous by his presence in it. Now the name is on everybody's lips but none before you has put it in poetry and even made it an end word evoking the rhyme "simple and merry". If not for anything else your piece should be published for the sake of its making
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music with this name. The poem will also be noted for the phrase "Amal in Pondicherry". So far Pondicherry was associated with Sri Aurobindo. Now it will be linked forever with a disciple of his, too.. ..
...I am glad you liked my little poem. This is the second time I have awakened in the morning with a poem taking shape. As you have approved it I shall add it to the collection which is slowly piling up for a final burst upon the world in at least your lifetime if not mine. Of course I know that you would like it to take place when the poet himself has not yet under-gone "the ecstasy of being over".
(18.12.1989)
Amal's health has been a constant concern to those of his friends who live at a distance and thus are not able to feel reassured by the sight of his smiling face and cheerful acceptance of the ongoing consequences of a tragic illness in childhood. All enquiries as to his well-being are turned aside with a typically humorous response:
It should be really cheering news that all the vital organs are functioning well, and in contrast to the fate envisaged in Swift's famous "Meditation on a Broomstick" there is no decay at the top but rather quite a topping state there. I think (and this is a sign of that state) a good deal on all kinds of subjects, and if you read my 130-page critique of Asko Parpola's impressive attempt to prove the Aryan-invasion theory, you will agree that my grey matter is in plentiful evidence even though its activity in this particular field - Indology - may bore you to a massive stupor. The main trouble I have is with my legs. They are getting weaker and weaker, but let's hope they won't have the strength left even to kick the bucket! There's something wrong with my arms near the shoulders. Perhaps I exert them too much with my Marathon plod with my "Canadian canes" daily from
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the Ashram gate to my chair under the clock opposite the Samadhi. If I turn to left or right in bed I am in pain and the arms go numb. A Sikh neurologist was brought by a local physician to examine me. He took out a pin from his turban and poked me here and there and asked me if I could tell him where he had poked. I said "Certainly - since my eyes are open." "Oh", he exclaimed, "I forgot to tell you to shut them." After a week of cogitation he sent the re-port that nothing could be done: there must be some-thing wrong in the spine. Maybe he is right, but it doesn't trouble me. No matter what happens, I am bathed in bliss all the time. That is Sri Aurobindo and the Mother at work in me....
(17.1.90)
Later that year Amal's physical health was once again threatened by a mystery illness that defied medical treatment -until the Mother herself came to the rescue. The whole story is told in a letter addressed to Singapore, after my return torn a short stay in England. As this letter is not long, it lay be reproduced in full:
Sonia, My Dear Friend,
By now you must have received my letter of 27th November. As it was long overdue in reply to yours, writ-ten on the eve of going to England for over a month, I was in a hurry to post it. so, after my reflections apropos of my completing 86 years on 25 November, I went on to discuss the questions you had raised about poetry. In doing this I omitted a very significant occurrence connected with my statement: "all I know at this instant is that an all-pervading peace appears, in a far-away manner, to hold me at its core and that I am caught, however faintly, in some eternal Now."
As soon as I had written these words the peace which I had spoken of came forward from the back of my consciousness, made the centre which it had in my
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little self a spreading glow, at once intense and soothing, what I can only call an omnipotent softness. It permeated my whole being, my entire body and I was immediately a new person.
The newness had a particular relevance as well as a general one. My birthday had passed as usual with friends dropping in with their warm smiling faces. Here was an atmosphere of happiness. But in one respect the occasion was a little different from my past birthdays. This time the birthday had fallen in the midst of a period of indisposition - a fortnight during which I had a persistent low fever accompanied by a constant unease in the stomach. For more than two days the stomach refused to let any food in. I was reminded of the time -seventeen years earlier - when I had gone to Bombay for my first cataract removal. Some time after the operation I contracted a fever and a great malaise in the stomach as if an ogre were sitting there and refusing all nourishment. My nephew who was a doctor in that hospital swept me out of the place and took me home. The illness went on more than a week. Medicines made it worse. During that period a passive prayer to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother went on - passive because there was just a turn towards them with no direct call for intervention. When conditions looked as though there were a hidden form of typhoid at work, suddenly one evening around 8 p.m. I saw with my closed eyes a fist come down with great force behind me on the right side and at once the ogre was pushed out of my stomach and the fever vanished. The same night I had a dream of the Mother walking on her roof-terrace and I was standing in the street below. A tremendous wave of emotion went up to her from me - such as I had never known before nor have I ever experienced since. In my latest illness I had made a definite appeal to our Gurus to rid me of the fever and the stomach upset. But noth-ing took place until the day I wrote to you. Then with that momentous sentence the fever and the general
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discomfort in the body were just washed out. I suspended my typing for a minute or two, lost in that glowing softness of utter tranquillity in which I was held from head to foot. Then I returned to the typewriter.
The exteriorised sense - delicate and yet most concretely invasive - of "some eternal Now" stayed for a few hours, then gradually receded into the background without disappearing. The work it did directly in the body is a settled thing.
Today is the fortieth anniversary of one of the most important days in the Ashram: December 5th, 1950, when Sri Aurobindo left his body. The message distributed this morning is a prayer by the Mother: "Grant that we may identify ourselves with Your Eternal Consciousness so that we may know truly what Immortality is."
With my love, Amal
(05.12.1990)
Amal's total reliance on the loving guidance of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and their ever-present help has always been a source of inspiration to me and, I am sure, to many others in the Ashram and the world outside. The 'clear ray' emanates not only from his mind but from his heart, illuminating for himself and others the difficult path of the Integral Yoga. Courage is a quality he possesses in abundance, and reading between the lines of his letters one senses the fortitude with which he has at times endured intense physical pain. A year after the previously quoted letter was written, after a silence of some months, a hand-written note replaced the familiar well-worn script of Amal's trusty type-writer. He was in the Ashram Nursing Home following serious injury to his leg resulting from a fall:
Prof. Nadkarni visited me and had a ringside look at the complicated apparatus in which my right leg was housed. The most impressive item was a slim steel rod driven through my shin-bone (tibia) close to my knee. Its function
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was to hold the traction poised! I was able to turn neither right nor left and had to sleep on my back for a month and a half. After the traction was removed on November 30th I thought I could sleep on the side, but no! The injured leg was not to be treated too freely. Perhaps a month more I will have to be like this. It seems a long time will have to pass before I am a little mobile. Quite a number of problems will have to be faced when I go home -presumably before the end of January '92.
My fracture has been in the same bone (femur) and the same leg (right) as Sri Aurobindo's in 1938. But I am said to outdo his achievement. His was in the middle of the thigh-bone, while mine is next to the knee. The two parts of his femur were in contact though one was thrust a little higher than the other. My fragments - three in fact -were all separate and in a kind of jumble. The healing will also have to be in a rough way and will take a long time. My nephew, a doctor, who happened to drop in from the States, was appalled on scrutinising the X-ray picture. He said that serious arterial damage could have occurred...
(18.12.1991)
Amal's modesty with regard to his own poetry ex-presses itself in a certain reluctance to talk about it un-less a direct question is asked. At the same time, his own finely tuned critical sense must leave him in no doubt about its exceptional quality, even if Sri Aurobindo had not praised his work so highly. Recently I asked him to name the poem that had come closest to satisfying his constant desire for perfection, and without hesitation he named "This Errant Life". Of this poem Sri Aurobindo wrote "it goes home to the soul". There is a quality in the best of Amal's work which is indefinable, a sheer inspiration that denies itself to any other channel than the precise language the poet has chosen for it. My own attempts to measure and explore his extraordinary achievement in poetry met with his constant encouragement and support, and it is my hope that one day his confidence will be justified, and I will be able to convey
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to a wider audience something of the power and audacity of his creative genius. In an article written for Amal-Kiran: Poet and Critic which appeared in 1994 to commemorate his 90th birthday, I had called him Musarum Sacerdos (Priest of the Muses) borrowing a phrase from Horace. This struck a chord with Amal and even provoked some speculation about a possible previous incarnation:
Your article with its epigraph from Horace has well touched the core of my poetic life with the words "musarum sacerdos" and taken them far beyond the priesthood of poetry practised in the Augustan Age. It is thought-provoking that Caesar Octavius, renamed Augustus, is an early manifestation of Sri Aurobindo of the vibhuti kind. No wonder the two greatest bards Augustus patronised were born again - Virgil as Nolini and Horace as Dilip - to be patronised by Sri Aurobindo. I, who as a poet was patronised by him even more than they, am still a question mark in connection with the time of the first Roman emperor. I feel a great affinity to Catullus with his commingling of the erotic and the wistful, and very interestingly Sri Aurobindo's early verse is most reminiscent of this lyricist....
... Ordinarily we would be tempted to see Catullus redivivus in the early Sri Aurobindo but knowing better the personality of his past we can only say that he carried over to our time a close kinship to that poet which would tend to draw to himself whoever happened to be a new manifestation of him. Catullus died before Octavius became emperor but it is a guess worth hazarding that Lydia's victim with his pathetic "odi et amo" was as much a literary influence on him as the master of the epic and the expert of the odes.
(03.12.1994)
The life of each one of us is woven of many strands and Amal's letters reflect the innumerable influences and interests of one who carries in himself the impetus of the past
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evolving towards its consummation in the future. In 1996 I must have pressed him unusually hard for more stories from his family history, because a letter written on the eve of his birthday brought memories of his grandfather and the Persian poets whose work had delighted him in his earliest years, and with them reflections on the immortality of art. He speaks of Ferdausi and Hafiz and Saadi "a few echoes of which are still intoxicating to my mind". And he quotes "a famous vaunt" in which Ferdausi forsees the verdict of the future on his work:
The homes that are the dwellings of today
Will sink 'neath shower and sunshine to decay,
But neither rain nor fire shall mar what I
Have built - the palace of my poetry.
We live in an age when the art and craft of poetry is appreciated by comparatively few. But then this eminent poet of Persian descent whom we have had the privilege of knowing seeks neither fame nor fortune. The "palace of my poetry" built by Amal will last as long as we need language to express the soul's deepest needs and aspirations, and to reflect, as in a mirror, the light of a Truth that lies just beyond mind's grasp.
When I look back and recall the pleasure and support the correspondence with Amal has given me over many years, it is with a feeling of immense gratitude. His generosity knew no bounds. When I once requested permission to use his photograph in an article he wrote back: "you have my permission to make use of anything connected with me." Omar Khayam famously wondered what the vintners buy, one half so precious as the goods they sell. And I too wonder what I could have written to Amal, one half so precious as what he wrote to me!
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