Of Transience and Transformation: The Ebb and Flow of Creativity
AMAL KIRAN is a scholar of extraordinary depth and understanding. His intuitive analysis of Sri Aurobindo's insights offers a unique instance of the creative integration of scholarship and inner vision. I, for one, have been greatly benefited by his critiques of Aurobindian poetry and poetics. His is not a mere re-rendering of the master's voice but a creative interpretation. He never takes anything on trust, and his writings evidence his relentless intellectual curiosity and inquiring mind. Amal Kiran, I believe, is essentially a poet in whom the creative inner-view and the critical intellect coincide. In what follows, I have attempted an exploration of the interface of creativity and the human mind in the line of the intuitive methodology that informs Amal Kiran's readings. The idea of time, ageing and the creative tension had always been in some corner of my mind, and I was always intrigued by the manifestation of these in the poetry of Wordsworth and Yeats. So this felicitation volume proffered me the ideal context for problematising these issues in a new light.
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The creative is of course more important than the creator or the created, for it is often the most elusive, the most unpredictable and the most incomprehensible. Almost every creative artist and writer would vouch for this fact. Why and how does this activity take place? And when, actually? It might not be easy to pinpoint this factor. For despite the plethora of theories and counter-theories, the wealth of actual evidence and data collated from creative artists upon
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which many psychologists and psychoanalysts have built their own interpretations, the actual act and its manifestation remains for the most part mysterious. Insightful creative artists and writers have recorded minutely what happens during the process of creativity; however, they themselves sound a little unsure about that unleashing of the fount of the creative which spurs forth the act of creation. There might be many external agents that trigger off like the episode of the hunter and the wounded bird as in the case of Valmiki. There might also be many internal causes that could account for the act. However, the creative is so amorphous and protean that it takes many shapes - any shape - and remains the elusive and also the transient. The energy does not last for long - it wanes and ebbs, and so often traces a trajectory of pain and longing. It is ineffable. Perhaps it is the ineffable.
In the Hindu cremation rites among the many unique mantras that are chanted, there is one that remains for a slightly longer time in the hearts of the genuine listeners:
Vayur anilam amrtam athedam bhasmantam sariram
Aum krato smara krtam smara krato smara krtam smara
(May this life enter into immortal breath; then may this body end in ashes. O intelligence remember, remember what has been done. Remember, O intelligence, what has been done. Remember.)
Only the memory of what has been done remains; all else disappears into the ashes of the past. Perhaps it is this irrepressible desire to eternalise the present before it lapses into the past that surfaces as the creative? Or even the realisation of the evanescence of life as it ebbs away unpredictable and unpossessed? The Will would search around for anything to grasp on to and would that result in the creative? Is the creative finally a mere by-product of the human mind? Or is there a higher realisation that penetrates from some other higher regions of the human soul at least momentarily? In the Isa Upanishad we read:
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Hiranmayena patrena satyasyapihitam mukham
Tat tvam ptisan apavrnu satyadharmaya drstaye
(The face of truth is covered with a golden disc. Unveil it, O Pusan, so that I who love the truth may see it.)
The creative act is the unmasking of this everyday truth. It is the descent of the pratibha and the ascent of the human spirit that sees into the heart of things and even sees beyond light into Light itself. It is the ineffable frarisforrning itself into the seeing and the seen. The poet, the artist, come to be in the process of the birth of the poem, the work of art. As Heideggger puts it so cleverly: what is a work of art? That which is created by the artist. Who is the artist, then? He who creates a work of art. Thus they are mutually interlinked - the work of art and the creator. The entire process of creativity vaguely resembles the primal art of creation itself. The created universe brings Eswara into being. Thereby rests the mystery of the creative.
The idea that the creative act is bound with the concept of time as evanescent and passing might sound a bit too overstretched: but this is an unavoidable realisation that almost all creative minds are given to at some or other point in their life. In The Spiritual Exercises of Nikos Kazantzakis, entitled, The Saviors of God, the Greek poet writes: "I recall an endless desert of infinite and flaming matter. I am burning! I pass through immeasurable, unorganized time, completely alone, despairing, crying in the wilderness." (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960, p. 82)
This cry in the wilderness is the fate of the insightful poet who has tasted the profundity of vision that the creative moment afforded, which was but a fleeting glance! This but underscores the evanescence of time! Time is felt reality. It is the change, transformation that every living thing in the universe undergoes. There is absolutely nothing that we could define as time, per se. It is the totality of past, present and future as we envisage it from our dynamic state of living. The moment that passes by is now a thing of the past;
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none can freeze it. Neither can we realise the future unless we let go the present, by which time that future becomes the present and automatically a thing of the past as soon as we realise it. As psychologists would vouch for, we can only experience something that undergoes a transformation into the past. This would amount to saying that there is no present at all as everything has to pass through into the past before it is realised by the human senses. In other words, only the past exists as the future does not become a reality until it ceases to be so and the present is so negligible a period to be real at all. Simultaneously, we are given to understand that the past too is something that is virtually unrealisable as present. In short, there is no past, present or future at all - in existence - but a constant and relentless becoming. "All being is nothing but becoming." Socrates points out that the unexamined life is not worth living. This is the predicament of the thinking mind. The creative experience creates a present that is relishable, while it grapples with the experience of transience and temporality. Raso vai sah - "Bliss verily is the essence of existence", says the Taittiriya Upanishad (7.1). However, the creative artist/poet who experiences that bliss is most often than not left with the burning sense of an absence that desires more and more to be re-lived. "After such knowledge what forgiveness?", writes T.S. Eliot.
Time could be seen in different aspects - the conventional and the biological. As we measure conventional time by the swinging of the pendulum or the lengthening of the shadows, or the movements of the hands of a watch, we realise the internal time by the change of our inner perceptions. If we are eagerly awaiting an event or a person we might feel the drag of time, but on the other hand, when we are in the thick of some activity we are not even aware of the passage of time. Time has different effects in different emotional situations: pain tells severely on the victim while happiness is virtually felt after it is past. These experiences would go a long way in evidence of the inner experience of time, which
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is no constant. The outer conventional time is supposed to be maintained at a normally universally accepted regularity. Although there are stretchings and squeezings of temporal experience in different spatial locations, under normal circumstances, time is more or less uniform, in given situations, at least its effect is uniformly spaced. Time, decay, old age and death are real for all living beings, however varied be the response to them. Consider Corneille's famous observation: "Every moment of life is a step towards death."
The decay of the living body and the instability of the world, its pleasures and pains alike have time and again been the focus of attention of religion and philosophy. We read in the Bhagavad Gita: anityam, asukham lokam imamprapya bhajasva mam. (Thou who hast come into this insubstantial and painful world, turn to Me.) Let us not miss the Buddhist connotation in these lines: the Buddha recognised the essential tragic sense of worldly existence - the Dukkha. In order to overcome Dukkha he propounded the Dharma and the Sangha.
In one of the most moving poetic passages in Adi Sankara we come across these lines:
Ayur nasyati pasyatam pratidinam yati ksayam yauvanam
Pratyaydnti gatah punarna divasah kalo jagatbhaksakah
Laksmistoyatarangabhahgacapala vidyuncalam jwitam
Tasmattvam saranagatam saranda tvam raksa raksadhuna
(Sivaparadhdksamapana stotram)
(Life ebbs away each second each minute, Kala - time - is the eater of the world, and Lakshmi, the Goddess of Wealth, is as transient and fickle as the breaking of the wave of water; jivitam - life - is as evanescent as lightning - vidyunchalam -and each moment life ebbs away. Youth, like all these is equally transient and disappears in no time at all. Therefore I seek refuge in Thee, O Lord Siva, I am the saranagata.)
This is no negative view of the world but a truthful account of the vanishing nature of all and everything. Time is the jagat,
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time is the jagatbhakshaka. This is indeed a mature vision considering the age of the man who composed the verse. Such a vision of the fickleness of life most usually dawns on the ageing mind and is one of the signs of the setting in of old age. In another well-known hymn, Sankara writes:
Balastavatkridasakta
Tarunastavattarururakta
Vrdhastavaccintamagnah
Pare brahmani ko api na lagnah
(As a child, one is absorbed in play, as a young man, attached to women. As an old man, one is lost in one's thoughts; Alas! no one is attracted to the Supreme Brahman.)
This recognition is the beginning of wisdom.
In "Memories, Dreams, Reflections" Carl Jung notes:
From the psychological point of view life in the hereafter would seem to be a logical continuation of the psychic life of old age. With increasing age, contemplation and reflection, the inner images naturally play an even greater part in man's life. "Your old men shall dream dreams." That to be sure presupposes that the psyches of the old men have not become wooden or entirely petrified. In old age one begins to let memories unroll before the mind's eye, and musing, to recognise oneself in the inner and outer images of the past. This is like a preparation for an existence in the hereafter, just as in Plato's view, philosophy is a preparation for death.
(London: Fontana, 1983, pp. 351-52)
Old age is thus a preparation for the afterlife when the soul or that divine element in human beings continues its earthly being in a different form. But although such a continuous dwelling on the life after death appears to be the condition of the aging human psyche, the sensitive, creative mind recognises early enough the fact that authentic or real existence surfaces
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only when life is lived in a continuous present, devoid of regret, remorse and misgiving. These are obviously contrapuntal pulls. Human existence is thus a complex condition caught between the paradox of now-and-then. Tasmatjagrata, "therefore be aware", says Adi Sankara. And yet for the ordinary mortal there appears to be a contradiction. Chuang Tzu talks about this as "great deception":
The birth of a man is the birth of his sorrow. The longer he lives, the more stupid he becomes, because his anxiety to avoid unavoidable death becomes more and more acute. What bitterness! He lives for what is always out of reach! His thirst for survival in the future makes him incapable of living in the present.
(See Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book
of Living and Dying, San Francisco: Rider, 2002, p. 17)
How does the creative mind respond to this dialectic? The creative is always a dynamic force. It operates from multiple planes. In the Aurobindian scheme of things, it manifests itself in many levels, and depending on the plane of its source and the corresponding creative inspiration that organises its manifestation, it varies.
With the insight of a true mystic Sri Aurobindo has'observed that all problems of existence are problems of harmony. And the apparent paradox of spatio-temporal human existence could only be reconciled through the poetic. To live here and now with the knowledge of the passing of each moment and the impossibility of possessing the moment in its totality calls for a yogic transformation of human's being. Such a realisation could also be achieved through the creative act.
W.B. Yeats is a unique instance of the creative-vital that constantly confronted the tragic situation of human's being. "Out of quarrel with the world," wrote Yeats, "we make rheto-ric, out of quarrel with ourselves, we create poetry." Old age for Yeats was a "tin-can tied to a dog's tail". In a tiny unique poem, "Politics", he actualises the inner trauma and tension of old age:
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How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
Yet here's a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there's a politician
That has read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war's alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms!
Examples like this are too many in Yeats. His was a poetry of passion, of bodily and corporeal energies and their tensions. His poetry was an escape into personality, a sublimation of the vital, the ojas, as we would term it in Indian psychology. Yeats gave free access to the poetic mind and allowed the complete free play of the creative to surface at free will from whichever levels. In another short poem fancifully titled "A Drinking Song", he writes of the dying of sexual energies that cause physical morbidity:
Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.
The sexual energy is so closely bound up with the passion for the absolute - in fact for the illuminated, these two are the two faces of one single sheet; tear one you tear the other too. That the sexual leads us on to peak experience is a fact well recognised by many psychologists and philosophers. The resemblance to the spiritual kinesis is so obvious yet complex. The releasing of the sexual energy leaves the inordinate craving for more; it is as if with lightning speed the mystical
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spasm withdraws after providing momentary glimpses of a superior harmony. The sexual is bound by virtue of its ontology to the physical and the vital - it is but a showcase of the possible. And yet there is no denying the similarity in its transient passing with the creative. Yeats's confession of his sexual frustration is frank and unashamed - he allows the poem to shape itself and flow unconstrainedly as the raw yearning of the physical that recognises the ebb and flow of time - the tragic sense of being.
However it is in "The Wild Swans at Coole", that Yeats achieves that poetic magic that is so often associated with him. The poem opens with a graphic description of natural beauty:
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.
The scene is so composed, so serene. The swans symbolise the majesty of a long lost time that is frozen in the inner mind of the poet who looks upon them, and "now my heart is sore". Their hearts, on the other hand "have not grown old" and
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
The poet compares his tragic situation with their drifting lives, "mysterious, beautiful" and feels the drag of a profound sorrow:
Among what rushes will they build
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?
The poem is unique in that it embodies the deep tragedy inherent in human time that is so ephemeral and eva-
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nescent. It matters little that the swans are also biological creatures that are not free from the bonds of physical existence. In the text of the poem, they are transformed poetic symbols that represent the dynamic/static unity of an ideal that exists so remote from the world of physical decay and decrepitude. Nothing and no one can reach their majestic state, but their very sight infuses the poet with a heightened vision. "The bell-beat of their wings above" his head sounds like some angelic annunciation of sorts. And yet the poet is torn with remorse at the unstoppable passing of time. In the final analysis the poem refuses to yield anything more than this deep and profound regret. Even from the opening lines onwards this feeling is built up and later through image after image led towards a culmination of uncertainty. The poet is already in the autumn of his life, and the "woodland paths are dry"; even the "water" and sky are "still". The only movement is when the birds suddenly rise "upon their clamorous wings". The poet bemoans that earlier day when he first heard them, and the nostalgia for the lost days becomes hauntingly real, and adds to the agony of that final loss "when I awake someday/To find they have flown away?" The transience is what becomes so tauntingly real throughout the poem. And it maintains a dhvani of such deep magnitude that the poet fades away alongside the ebbing sound of the swan wings. The words, "Mysterious beautiful," resonate to create a magic of silence afterwards. W.B. Yeats does not attempt to resolve the tension of the transience of time of past and the present in any manner whatsoever in his poem, but leaves the finer sentiment of time displaced and irrecoverably lost, unresolved and open. Such is the human situation - irredeemable, passe. However one can discern a certain element of the egotistical sublime in the last stanza where the poet feels that the swans will be there to delight some other eyes somewhere hence, while he is left with the trace of their absence. The poet certainly knows that authentic life is when the mind is free from such self-doubts and regrets.
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In an earlier poem, "A Dialogue of Self and Soul", we read these beautiful lines that remind us of the painful yet wonderful feeling of reconciliation with the deformity of old age and its discrepancies:
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.
This feeling of being blessed and being able to bless all other life is a near-Yogic view that dawns upon the mind that is completely drained of any regret or misgiving - it is akin to the nascent innocence of the just-born. It is something more inspired than the amateurish jealousy that taunts the poet while he looks upon the swans moving about, "unwearied, lover-by lover..." Here the poet has transcended the corporeal and grazed the overmental levels. In Coleridge's "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner", when the mariner beholds the sea creatures playing about in the sea and in a total thoughtless state blesses them from deep within his heart, the albatross that hung like a cross round his neck falls off on its own - he is released of his sinful bondage. This is a vision that beatifies from within; the outside phenomenal world is but a mere occasional cause by simply being there. Life when it is lived from within and liberated from the then and later becomes fresh and uncontaminated. Then time appears to start afresh. The creative mind finds its consummation in itself. It is the sublimation of the vision from within. Such static-dynamism can be approached from the thinking vital also. According to Sri Aurobindo, all British Romantic poetry could be considered as Rajasic as occurring from the vital and emotional planes. (See "The Sources of Poetry", written in 1912; first published in Advent, 1953). Interestingly, William Wordsworth could be seen as the one single instance of a didactic poet who through a vital engagement with the
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dynamic aspects of creativity comes to discover the very soul of being - approaching it through not a silencing of the intellect, but on the other hand, through singular reflection. Let me take a closer look at what I hold to be Wordsworth's greatest achievement in this direction - "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood". The poem opens with the almost oft-repeated poetic feelings of nostalgia for the past:
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth and every common sight, To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore; -
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
A few lines later we read: "But yet I know, where'er I go,/ That there hath past away a glory from the earth." Now this poem has been read and reread by a number of poets and critics alike and its interpretations are innumerable, and my intention here is not to reread the entire poem. But what touches me is that Wordsworth is not merely crying over the things that are past and bygone, but the anguish that the poem enfolds is the angst of creativity. The glory that has passed away is the glory that the creative eye had proffered him. Of course the overall effect of the poem is the touch of profound sadness at the human situation - the tragic sense of being. However, the poet, after a longish philosophical argument, comes to comfort himself with certain convincing arguments and reasonings, and the reader is also incorporated into this. There is the art of growing up - that is growing apart, and seeking intellectual comfort and security in the knowledge of what is abiding as a residual gift of the visionary eye. Transience is a truth but once we internalise this we learn to see the
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world afresh, unbound from the wheel of change and causality.
The creative surfaces in the deeps of subjectivity, offering a momentary respite, endowing the humblest phenomenon with the appearance of sublimity. Even the meanest flower that blows could give rise to the experience of the mysterious. However, the transience of the world is again highlighted by the transience of the vision. What remains for the poet is to recast the original in poetry. As the poet recognises, the writing of poetry is a momentary stay against confusion. The creative nevertheless offers a human strategy designed to overcome both the sense of temporal discontinuity and ultimately the sense of despair that such discontinuity provokes. Transience is a fact. Transformation is the magic of the creative eye. It is also to cultivate the possibility for future poetry where hope and memory are one. The rest of course is silence.
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