We live in a very mysterious world, in which thoughts are realities that communicate in ways other than print. Of course any dream contains many elements but I have no doubt that there was indeed some meeting between us in yours. I enclose the book review in last week's TLS which as you see is extremely hostile and malicious (besides being a typical example of the decline in values in this country over the last years) and I was very distressed about it - more than I at my age should have been, but I had hoped that a review in the TLS might have made our work in Temenos better known to more people who might share our concern to restore true values in this decline of standards. I also enclose a friendly review from the Times of Pakistan - by way of contrast, which should reassure you if you are in any doubt about the better values prevailing on the subcontinent. And part of a letter from Laurens van der Post. So you see your information in the subtle body was so far correct. The comb? That too is a strange if trivial detail. I had broken my ivory comb many years ago and had seen one exactly like it, which I had asked my daughter to enquire about for me (it proved too expensive!). But as a trivial but accurate detail it is nevertheless remarkable.

As to books, you and I would both be likely to be carrying them! Dalliance with Eternity is a good theme. So is Dalliance with Transience. Is that your judgment on me? Which do I do? As a poet with both I suppose. If there is any difference. Incidentally I have been deep in reading Pupul .Jayakar's Life of Krishnamurti. Profound, but austere, his teaching. I find in it deep thoughts on Being; and on Consciousness; but where is the Bliss (ananda)? How do you find him? I have to review the book for Resurgence. I am very surprised that I took the liberty of using your hairbrush but glad if you did not mind!

I intend to reply to your most recent letter when I have got certain urgent things out of the way. I've been writing of my impressions of India in the course of my three visits, not to say correspondence with you and a few others and how 'the India of the Imagination' and the India of the temporal here and now compare and contrast. One might say that the England of the Imagination is very far from the degenerate England of the temporal present. I have of course only

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dipped my feet in the ocean - or river - of India - but even that is transforming. India must save the whole world's soul, or we are all lost. It is already happening, of course. I represent but a drop in that tide. But Temenos at least is on a significant intellectual level; it is easy to dismiss the children of the various New Age movements. But these changes must come at all levels.

It is at present uncertain whether Temenos will continue after our tenth issue; but I would be happy to publish something of yours on the theme of The Future Poetry, the idea of the various levels on which poetry operates. Something entirely forgotten here, where poetry operates only on the lowest level, or lower still were that possible. There are of course some exceptions but all too few.

I am very moved by your letter. Although you are often in my thoughts I

(February 1988)

From K. D. Sethna

I was very happy with your response to my dream-experience. Yes, those two little points - the TLS and the comb -touch physical realities connected with you and seem to imply an actual meeting in our subtle bodies. There appears to be a symbolic matching between your comb and my hairbrush. The matching would have been perfect if, just as you used my hairbrush, I had used your comb. As it is, I wonder what a Jungian psychologist would read in what you did. Both the comb and the brush bring the theme of hair into prominence.

Mallarme, as my book may have reminded you, was much preoccupied with this theme. It gets treated at some length in the sonnet La chevelure vol d'une flamme... There the hair stands for the one life-energy in two forms of beauty: the uncoiling of it is the symbol of the profane, the erotic

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mode whereas the binding up of the tresses indicates the sacred, the aesthetico-mystic way. But in my dream we are in the dimension of literature with a sort of spiritual light falling upon it and the head of hair seems to represent the mental being with its manifold self-expression of whatever ideative enlightenment it may have. Your gesture may have more than one meaning. Apparently it is a movement of friendliness with a shade of deepening into a spontaneous intimacy. No wonder I was filled with gladness at the same time as surprise.

All that happened in the dream-experience suggests at least that our long controversy has ended or should end. Both of us have had our flings about Sri Aurobindo's poetry. We may leave it and our debate to the future's judgment. About one whale of a letter of mine you said that it was worth publishing. I replied that I would never publish it without letting you have your say as well. If somebody finances the venture, do I have your permission to bring out another collection like The English Language and the Indian Spirit? It would start with the very first letter you wrote to me on receiving a copy of that book - at the beginning of last year. We went on to discuss Yeats and the subject became livelier with the arrival here of your remarkable Yeats the Initiate and brought in many other topics, including Tagore in Radice's translation, and in and out of the to-and-fro of our opinions and arguments the subject of Sri Aurobindo as a poet kept moving before it took the centre of the stage and along with its pros and cons brought up a host of general questions on poetry which are sure to interest many readers - at least in India. With the hope of interesting readers in England and the USA I sent copies of our first book both to the TLS and the New York Times Book Review. I believed that your fame would induce them to take notice. But there has been a dead silence. The same holds for The Obscure and the Mysterious and the earlier publication "Three Loves" and "A Worthier Pen": The Enigmas of Shake speare's Sonnets. Would you like me to send you the last-

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named study? If you have time to spare 1 would be glad to get your reactions to my utterly novel identification of the Dark Lady and the Rival Poet. Anyway, I'll post you a copy and if ever you have a bit of leisure you can dip into it.

The TLS review of Temenos 8 by a rather pretentious Scotsman criticising what he dubs "Elitism" in a style which is a specimen of falsely elitist writing should not have bothered you so much. Sometimes a markedly prejudiced comment is as good an encouragement to adventurous readers as a strikingly perceptive eulogy. What exactly do you mean when you say that you were more distressed than you should have been at your age? Perhaps you mean that you have had a fighting life and should have been inured to slings and arrows - having become a toughie by now. But, of course, when things we hold precious in our hearts, the causes we consider sacred are treated with subtle disdain, there is a deep pain in the sense that the depths in us are hurt. Possibly by 80 you should have known what to expect from a decadent age and not set your hopes so high: is this what you had in mind? As you know already, the Indian subcontinent and especially the Hindu part of it are still far from being cynical about matters of the Spirit and we have a spontaneous feel of high endeavour, an instinctive sympathy with the arduous attempt to catch in life or, if not in life, at least in art a concentrated outbreak of the Divine Presence ethereally pervading the universe. Every truly typical Indian is a Wordsworth in some degree or other, sensing a Cosmic Revelation in various forms, more distinct in some aspects of Nature than in others as the seer of the Lake District knew when he spoke of the secret universal Being

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.

Do you know that Tennyson regarded this line as the grandest in English poetry? He may well be nearly right, for to my mind both the art and the heart of it are superb. Take the vowellation to start with. A softly penetrating sound

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meets us the first thing as if leading us into some far depth, a delicately stretched-out heavenly home in the distance figured to our ear and eye by the word "dwelling" with its finely yet firmly expansive first syllabic based on the widening quality the w gives to the short e and with its in-drawing second syllable which is short but at the same time given weight by the conjunct consonants following it. The same initial e-sound though without any expansive touch and . the same terminal i-sound recur in the adjective "setting" balancing in the midst of different consonants and six monosyllables the two-syllabled "dwelling" and thereby imparting to us the justness of the imaginative insight which puts together the universal Being's abode and the day's departing glow. This glow itself serves the balancing by being caught in sound-value by the markedly long-vowelled "light". The phrase "setting suns" picks up the sibilancc with which the line commences and with a triple occurrence masses it into a soothing and silencing effect on the ear while the eye receives the impression of a glory-burst before a final fading away. One may ask: "Why setting suns and not rising ones?" It must be a profound instinct in the poet that made the choice, for here the passage is from splendour into mystery, the bright visible is the guide to the fathomless invisible which is to Wordsworth the trance-goal of all conscious seeking for the divinity interfused with the world.

Mention of Wordsworth of the "Tintern-Abbey" period brings me to your question whether I would ascribe to you dalliance with eternity or dalliance with transience or, taking you as a poet, both. At first blush one might doubt if one can speak of dalliance apropos of so serious-minded a singer as Wordsworth. But surely serious-mindedness doesn't preclude the light-hearted romantic temper. It only precludes romancing with life's superficialities. Even in common things the Wordsworthian mood searches for a deep chord of living. And this chord, a music of time coming from a silence of eternity, makes for a persistent happiness. Didn't Wordsworth say, "Even Coleridge didn't understand me,

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for he was not happy enough"? As you are steeped in Wordsworth's poetry it is no mis-step to move from him to you. But there seems to be a difference of shade between his dalliance and yours. He loves the eternal in the transient, you the transient in the eternal. To him eternity is always there in front, to you it is ever there in the background. It is constantly present for both of you, but for him it is a felt reality whereas for you it is a visioned one, he was a born mystic, the mystic in you is waiting for her birth. Meanwhile the shadow of the sacred floats upon your poetry: the sacred is not yet a swimmer in it. This does not necessarily make for a defect in the verse. Poetry as such does not need to be mystical in order to be first-rate and the visioning of eternity as contrasted to the feeling of it can also create an exquisite happiness in the poet, but this happiness will come and go and the dallying spirit will not find its whole life answering to that perception or experience of Vaughan:

A quickness which my God hath kisst.

You have asked me how I find Krishnamurti. His early life has always fascinated me - the way he broke out of the mould created for him by Mrs. Besant and Leadbeater and, as if inwardly drawn to the future by some projection from the past which had held the timeless Buddha, he launched on the adventure of what he has called "pathless reality" to which, according to him, there can be no guide except the deepening of one's own self into a quiet detached inner presence which is ever "mindful". A vague figuration seems to have been touched by him of what the seer-creator of Savitri has set before us as one ultimate aspect of the manifold Eternal:

The superconscient realms of motionless peace

Where judgment ceases and the word is mute

And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone.

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I say "a vague figuration" because I am afraid the word "mindful" does not indicate merely a mode of approach but also the level on which the realisation is reached. If this realisation is permanent, it is no small achievement and yet how far from the all-transcending Nirvana in which the mental consciousness is overpassed, the infinite self-luminous abyss of the Silent Brahman beyond the time and space of the entire "sevenfold chord" of manifested existence! I have no quarrel with this limited status as such but I don't feel happy with the clever word-play that goes on with topics like "change", "time", "thought" and "question". The verbal game is meant to divert the mind from its usual track and, blocking its ordinary thinking, veer it inward, but it often sounds like a bit of superficial trickiness and covers genuine ignorance on the part of the teacher. In the hands of the teacher's followers it generally becomes an irritating irrelevance and once when I had the occasion to meet some of them in Bombay years ago I found it a mockery of the deep soul's movement. There I was, all aflame with longing for the Beauty of ancient days yet ever new, and they were twitting me with little cries of "Oh you are now speaking from the time-consciousness" and similar sophistries. I could see they were quite surprised that a man could be in love with the immense Unknown as if that Unknown had a hidden face and a secret smile and words of sweetness and light and strength waiting to be heard in the depths of the seeker's heart. You have well said about Krishnamurti: "Profound, but austere, his teaching. I find in it deep thoughts on Being and Consciousness; but where is the Bliss (ananda)?" The Upanishad has said in effect: "There is an ether of Bliss in which all is hung. If it were not there, who could take a single breath?" I remember also the other Upanishadic utterance: "From Bliss is everything born, in Bliss everything lives, to Bliss everything goes back." The searching eyes of the lover, the straining lips of the poet are doomed to remain unfulfilled by Krishnamurti. They want the Divine who will stoop down from the Beyond and give

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them the enchantments of Form, the intoxications of Name. From all that 1 have read I gather that Krishnamurti was a warm helpful person, but his teaching strikes at the very root of the soul's movement towards the Personal Divine or His representative the enlightened Guru. Throughout India's history the Master is the fount of the spiritual life. Krishnamurti, in a paradoxical gesture, says: "Refuse to have any teacher, learn at no one's feet. Never forget this teaching of mine when I am not there for you to learn it from." Behind the guru in India stands the Supreme Lord or the World-Mother. Under Krishnamurti's persuasion we have to forget the call of Krishna Himself through the Gita: "You that have come into this transient and unhappy world, love and worship Me" - or: "Abandon all dharmas and take refuge in Me alone. I will deliver you from all harm and evil. Have no fear" - or else: "Dear are you to me and I shall reveal to you my most secret word."

Please excuse the length at which I have written. Here is only my individual response to your inquiry. It need not colour your review.

(21.2.1988)

From Kathleen Raine

Your letter is very comforting. When contact is made on the subtle planes one must be serious. I, of course, was unaware of this contact - being more deeply 'sunk in stony sleep' of the natural body than you who have travelled far on the spiritual path which I see only far off and am aware of intellectually. But the evidence of the TLS and the odd confirmatory detail of the comb 1 mildly coveted on that very day is incontrovertible. I did not get it (the comb), it was too expensive, and have not given it a thought since, but it is proof of an actual, not a merely symbolic contact don't you think? As to symbolic interpretation, since the dream was yours that aspect of the dream relates solely to you - the symbolism of hair, etc. I presumably represent for you some

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aspect of the Poetic Muse and also your interest in English (and French?) poetry, not surely to forget William Blake who was our first and remains an enduring link. So I would read your dream as suggesting that the Muse is well disposed to your work and that I had the honour, in one dream, of being the mask under which Saraswati appeared to you! Not that names and masks matter, but the feminine muse has ever been important to poets.

As to why I was so upset by the TLS I think there are several strands. First, I ought not at my age to mind blows -the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and so on - and should meet adversity and its opposite with 'equal mind'. I thought my equanimity would have been equal to the situation. Second, I was outraged on behalf of our distinguished contributors who have supported Temenos without being paid a penny for contributions. Third, I was ashamed for my country. There was a time - as you know -when the TLS represented the best, the most authoritative critical judgments of current publications. Now it is a cheap ignorant nasty little clique of journalists inspired mainly by envy, and by no means wishing to be confronted with a journal that affirms quite other standards, albeit these standards are closer to the universal norm of all human civilizations. And finally, I felt 1 had failed in our venture, a vain one in a country whose culture has declined to a nadir of decadence and has no future. In part this is a decline in standard of education - the schools (state schools) impart the barest literacy, and the English public is really educated - 'conditioned' rather - by the television-set whose purpose is to impart news of a violent and ignorant world and to sell sell sell everything from cars and after-shave lotions to convenience foods and contraceptives. The England of Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Shelley is barely remembered. Yet it seemed to me that Temenos, reaffirming a standard which at other times - or even now in France -might have seemed but a norm - might have drawn to our standard those who still are concerned with these things. But

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civilizations do after all come to an end, why should our own (Not yours, I speak of the secular materialist West) fare better? Would I not do better to live in a cottage with roses round the door etc. and write verse? Or leave this world where my task is all but finished? However, Temenos 10 shall be published.

You do not say whether you are willing to contribute a paper on poetry from the standpoint of Sri Aurobindo and yourself, who rightly understand that there are different levels from which poetry speaks. This is a most important thing to understand, and I would like to publish such a paper if you are willing to write one. Albeit here there seems to have been a continual lowering, not raising, of the level of consciousness. Materialism prevails and the language itself has been impoverished and debased. As you say, India is by no means cynical about things of the spirit, endangered though you inevitably are by multinational commercial imperialism. If India is lost all is lost but I can't believe that will happen. On the contrary it is surely time for India to play an active part in saving the soul of the world. Which of course you are already doing in many ways. So what about such an article for probably our last issue of Temenos?

You are right about Wordsworth and 'happiness', and 'ananda' being absent from the thought of Krishnamurti. I too am all too far from happiness, I see it afar off but never deny it, I never forget lost Paradise and regard it as one task of the poet never to forget, never to break faith with that country poets see afar and only saints inhabit. I realize more and more that unless poetry can give joy we should be silent. Yet sorrow itself is a far-off way of keeping faith with ananda, for if like the purveyors of Mercedes-Benz cars and shampoos and cigarettes we consented to their world of material satisfactions-all would be lost. As in the Psalm of the Jews in exile, 'If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand lose its cunning' etc. 'By the waters of Babylon I sat down and wept.'

I like your young friend's piece on Kubla Khan, and it

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may well be that she has indeed settled the date of the poem. I can't see Coleridge as likely to be accurate about dates. He may well have read Wordsworth's letter. The thing about poetic images and metaphors and symbols is not that it is either from this source or from that, but and, as in the imaginative world a crystallization takes place of this waterfall seen by Wordsworth, another described in Purchase, the first wondrous waterfall we saw as a child, and perhaps some archetype in the soul itself, a sort of map of Paradise each carries within, together with the Mountain, the Four Rivers, the Gates of the Temple, and the inner light that comes from no sun or moon but from the Source itself. Plotinus sees 'Nature' as a projection of the soul itself made in order to contemplate itself. This in the West seems a very far-fetched notion but not 1 think in India. But if the Eternal India, the India of the Imagination is lost, then the world might just as well destroy itself without further delay for the attempt to live without soul or spirit disseminated by Western materialist civilization is the end of our humanity.

As to "dalliance' I think of myself rather as on the field of the Great Battle in a beleaguered outpost, with little opportunity for dalliance! Rather like seeing Tagore's 'jasmin-spray' as the missiles and bullets whizz past. All the dearer its beauty indeed, but one wants rather to tell the grass and the leaves and the waters and the very soil of the earth that we are sorry and ashamed for what we have done to earth and its creatures; and the holocaust within is even worse.

By all means publish whatever you like of our exchanges. This letter also if you so wish. I don't mind my thoughts on my own country being known; or on India. I think India is perilously exposed to the cancer of consumerism but yet there arc many here in the West who are ready to learn from India. Material power is finally so ineffectual and self-defeating. But how long will it take the world to discover that unless we build on the foundation of eternal Spirit our cities will crumble. Or it may be that we should not resist the Destroyer when the time has come to destroy.

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My dear friend, let us remain in correspondence even if we may have exhausted the theme of Savitri. I am reading a very bad American translation of the whole text of the Mahabharata, but translated without a gleam or glimmer of poetry and what a waste of industry. However, Peter Brook's dramatized version, which is said to be wonderful, is coming to Glasgow - not London, England couldn't care less - in May. I'm not sure when it goes to India.

As to ananda my own life is a write-off (not perhaps my work) but those like myself must be content to know that Paradise is there, and that there are happy souls like William Blake who are 'inhabitants of that happy country'. The lost also bear witness to the sorrow of that loss.

(2.3.1988)

From K. D. Sethna

Your letter of March 2nd is perhaps the most beautiful you have written and it is all the more so because it is a-glow with your passion for the "sacred" which has kept the torch of Temenos "burning bright" for the last so many years. I share your concern over "the forests of the night" springing up everywhere. Even India feels their shadow falling here and there, but the "distant deeps or skies" from which the saviour "fire" has to be caught are more clearly seen than elsewhere and the "wings" on which the soul has to "aspire" towards them have never been quite folded in the land where even in our materialistic times a Ramakrishna could arise, tripping like a haloed child with a spontaneous intensity of heart into all the known courts of heaven, a Vivekananda could come like "a lion of the Vedanta" spreading with his own illuminated mind his master's message in the West as-well as the East, a Raman a Maharshi could embody the eternal Peace which would enable the commonest man to reach out to that rare Wordsworthian ideal -

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Our destiny, our being's heart and home

Is with infinitude and only there -

and a Sri Aurobindo could stand like a Colossus with all-visioning, all-revealing eyes, his head exemplifying the realisation which one of his disciples has illustrated with the lines —

The core of a deathless sun is now the brain

And each grey cell bursts to omniscient gold -

and his feet planted firmly yet most lovingly on the earth, the patient compassionate mother of our lives, to whom he sought ever to transmit through his upward-yearning limbs the freedom, the glory, the beatitude of high heaven where he had discovered the secret of secrets, the archetypal Truth-Consciousness, the ultimate Gnosis. That secret, by which in "the long results of time" the very body has the chance to be divinised by the light of the perfect model of it pre-existing in the "Supermind", has been vaguely dreamt of in various guises - the elixir vitae, le corps glorieux, the final alchemy achieved by the philosopher's stone, the esoteric sense behind the legend of Jesus' resurrection (quite different from mere physical resuscitation) - ever since the Rigveda spoke of liberating the sun buried in the earth and the Upanishads called Matter itself Brahman.

You may wonder why in my list of recent spiritual luminaries I have not mentioned Krishnamurti. From my last letter you must have gathered how during my search for God I was disappointed by his followers and was convinced that some occult power was using him with the gift of a certain semi-Buddhist experience on the mental plane to fix down to an ambiguous imitation of the Witness self (sakshi purusha) the many-sighted far-venturing soul of the world, particularly plastic and versatile in its Indian mood. Through him this power attempts to confuse and limit that soul, even to cut the ground from under its devotion to the One whom

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through the ages it has hailed as Lord and Lover and Guide and whose representative it has always recognised in the enlightened Guru. On deeper thought 1 am inclined to withdraw whatever little admiration I gave Krishnamurti in regard to his break-away from his own Gurus, Mrs. Annie Besant and Leadbeater.

I now see that this break-away was not really a plunge into freedom beyond the narrowing hold of these two mentors of his but an escape into an independence conducive to the aggrandisement of his own self. He sought to make himself the path to the "pathless Reality" about which he talks at so much length: a vast ambition possessed him and it was an ambition to destroy all past spirituality of Guru-worship and God-adoration. Rather I should say that the occult Force at work through him made his ambition a tool for its own purpose. You must be aware that Mrs. Besant and Leadbeater had trained him to be the vehicle of "the World-Teacher" and indeed those who heard him at a certain grand gathering were struck by the mediumistic way he addressed them. I believe that "the World-Teacher" and he became fused, as it were, when he severed his connection with those two theosophist leaders. Across Krishnamurti's attractive personality the preter-natural mission went on very effectively to counteract all movements of the soul's sweetness and light, all gestures of humility before the Superhuman, all ego-surpassing by means of submission to the "One who has shaped the world" and "is still its Lord", surrender to the Incarnate Divine, the Ishwara-Shakti manifested in the flesh. Apparently what Krishnamurti did was to set aside the Theosophical Society: actually it was an individualistic drive towards the demolition of India's aeonic tradition of master-disciple relationship and particularly her beauty-haunted love-enchanted Yoga of Devotion, her cult of the rapturous inner dance with the flute-player of Brindavan, her profound pull towards the many-sided word of wisdom and dynamism and compassion enshrined in the Gila with the towering figure behind it of the Divine Driver of Arjuna's

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war-chariot and life-chariot as the Personal Godhead to whom all one's being has to flow.

It is an ironical situation that the contemporary figure who is subtly most subversive of the Truth-revelatory Ananda, the variously illuminating Bliss with its expressive corollaries of Beauty and Love which Sri Krishna channelled to the earth should be addressed by his disciples as "Krishnaji." The irony comes home to me rather acutely because of some words of Sri Aurobindo's to a seeker who had been a Vaishnava but had somehow felt drawn to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Sri Aurobindo wrote to him that there should be no conflict or contradiction, for what was being done in the Ashram was Sri Krishna's own work. Of course, by this he did not mean that the Ashram was an ultra-Vaishnavite centre and was repeating the teachings of the Bhagawata Purana or even the Bhagavad Gita in an intense form. What he meant was that the Ashram was carrying further the lines along which Sri Krishna had proceeded -the lines of a synthesis of Yoga, the coalescence of the Paths of Knowledge, Work and Devotion, crowned by an utter self-giving beyond all Paths, beyond all Dharmas, to the Supreme Divinity who is both within and without, both here and above, and with whom a multitude of relationships, mind-heightening, heart-deepening, life-widening, can be established. Those lines would terminate in an "Integral Yoga" by which there would be the descent into us of the Supreme Divinity's hitherto hidden highest status - Super-mind - and there would be the action of an all-transforming power so that a new earth-existence would flower, fulfilling all that is finest here and bringing a magic and a music which are as yet a faintly intuited mystery to us. If Sri Krishna's work is being furthered by Sri Aurobindo and endowed with a consummation greater than any possible in the past, I cannot help regarding Krishnamurti as essentially anti-Aurobindonian in motive and influence no less than anti-Indian in general by his single-tracked drift towards a heart-drying thought-impoverishing "void" in the inner

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consciousness of the mental self.

I am sorry if you find me too negative - and sorry too that I have taken up so much space about a matter which may not be of much interest to you. Let me turn to my dream of us. The occurrence of the comb and the reference to the TLS were indeed proofs of the reality of our contact, but to me the sense of the meeting was so concrete that I needed no proofs. I have some experience with dreams of various kinds as well as some familiarity with other planes and their objects and denizens. The feel of reality in these subtle things is quite different from the experience of mingled fantasies and memories which we get in our ordinary sleep. The reality is of two sorts: an entry into supraphysical worlds and a meeting with human beings on an inner level of consciousness. There is no intrusion of fantasy when one enters other ranges of existence than the physical; one sees what is actually there. Fantasy and symbolism come into a bit of play when one gets into touch with fellow humans on an inner conscious level; the subjective dream-element is not quite excluded, but symbolism has a greater role here than fantasy and neither of them takes away the actuality of two subtle bodies meeting and, through that meeting, passing somewhat into each other's mind. It was impossible for me to doubt that I had walked and talked with the real Kathleen Raine, or that I had become aware of what you are in the inner recesses of your being. Not only the subtle bodies but also the subtle consciousnesses were communicating and the thoughts were going over from one to the other both directly and through symbolic acts. Your attempt at reading my dream splits it into two parts - the hair-element as relating solely to me and the you-me element as representing something more general. You write: "I presumably represent for you some aspect of the Poetic Muse and also your interest in English (and French?) poetry, not surely to forget William Blake who was our first and remains an enduring link. So I would read your dream as suggesting that the Muse is well-disposed to your work and that I had

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the honour, in one dream, of being the mask under which Saraswati appeared to you! Not that names and masks matter, but the feminine muse has ever been important to poets." In this reading, what stands out for you is the Muse being favourable to me under the mask of KR: what may stand out for someone else may be KR figuring with favour in the image of the Muse. In either case, but especially in the latter, there seems to come into your association with me a more sympathetic, more encouraging, more accepting attitude to my work. Saraswati masking as KR or KR in the Saraswati-part of her being is, as you put it, "well disposed" to my activity as a poet, either myself creating verse or the verse-creator in me responding to the inspiration of fellow poets. Something in the secret places of your heart appears to come close to the work that is near my own heart

in the realms of gold...

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

But how can that be? The outer KR has been often at loggerheads with me. Could the inner KR be less headstrong? And here arises as if with a natural affinity the picture which took me quite by surprise in my dream: KR brushing her head of hair with my hair-brush in a spontaneous gesture which filled me with great pleasure. The two parts into which you split the symbolism of the dream may not be so divided as at first sight you think.

Anyway, there is no doubt that the dream bears testimony not only to an actual inner-plane contact but also to a warm intimate relationship in a common love of literature - poetic literature in particular - to which our happy talk of "dalliance with eternity" bears evidence.

The turning of our talk to the TLS shows the deep interest with which one naturally approaches a periodical with a great name in the past. As you told me afterwards the reference to the TLS pointed to your own actual concern at that time over the semi-cynical manner in which it had dealt

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with the high cause to which you had dedicated yourself for years. Surely the TLS has fallen in my estimate no less than in yours by the sly philistinism of its review of Temenos. But perhaps all is not so dark and hopeless as you see and feel at present. Competent and enlightening reviews still meet us from its columns. 1 remember two long ones treating of Dorothy Wordsworth and Sarah Coleridge. Certainly such things don't excuse cleverly nasty sneers at a noble venture like yours. In the old days they would have been impossible. All the same they have served a purpose they could have never thought of. After the first pain they brought you they have put your back up most unexpectedly. I cannot admire sufficiently the spirit in which you confront the decay of standards and the general prospect of your country's civilisation coming to an end. You say: "Would I not do better to live in a cottage with roses round the door etc. and write verse? Or leave this world where my task is alt but finished? However, Temenos 10 shall be published." That's real courage and a superb creative deployment of the emotion of the ideal.

The brief suggestion you make of your ideal is very penetrating: the refusal to forget lost paradise, the poet's one task being never to break faith with that country, no matter if only saints can inhabit it and poets can but see it afar. Not to be satisfied with material comfort and profit and pleasure, ever to ache for the eternal Loveliness, the perfect Presence that glimmers out to us from beyond the all-too-human and to strive to catch a sense of it from the strangely glinting transiences in both outer and inner experience: this seems to me the life of the true poet. And here is at the same time joy and sorrow. The vision of Eden, however distant, and the discovery of its wandering reflections, its passing echoes, in what impinges on our eyes and ears in the movements of our days and nights are surely sources of happiness, and through every genuine poem we receive the flow from these secret fountains. But no poet can rest content with fragments of beauty; the ecstatic whole, the

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undying fullness are always his dream, his desire. Their lack leaves him perpetually yearning, their fragmentariness breaks his own heart. But this sorrow is most precious to him, for without it his imagination would be deprived of its wings and he would lose the urge to concentrate in flawless abiding word-form the fleeting and dispersed wonders that keep calling to him from the world of mortality. Unless he lived smitten by the unreachableness of the perfection, the archetype, the paradisal plenitude haunting his reverie, he would never be able to achieve that inevitable form which alone is the consummation of his art: the sorrow of what cannot be seized in life spurs him to mirror in faultless artistry the remote Platonic realm. This does not mean that unimpeachable poetry can be written only by the pang of alienation the poet feels from the Utopia of his dreams. If it is this Utopia from which inspiration streams, those who inwardly inhabit its ''happy climes" (to use a Blakean phrase) cannot be debarred from being its singers. Provided they have the poetic gift, their song should be the most glorious, whether common humanity can manage to cope with its extraordinary revelations or not. But for the poets who have not begun to live directly in those climes, the searing sense of separation from them is the goad to their endeavour to transmit through symbol and rhythm a rapturous hint of "forms that divinise the sight" and "music that can immortalise the mind" (as Savitri somewhere puts it).

Your mention of the Mahabharata prompts me to compliment you on your power of persistence and endurance face to face with the whole text of it translated by some totally unpoetic American. Even otherwise the total Mahabharata is not what its traditional author Vyasa actually composed. Of course it is all interesting and instructive as a picture of the Indian consciousness in its numerous aspects down the ages. But the original epic attributable to whoever is named Vyasa can be deduced from two passages in the Prolegomena (Adiparva, 118 and 102-107) to have been a poem of

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24 to 26 thousand slokas and not the mammoth it now is of 100,000 slokas, I should like to share with you some of the conclusions at which Sri Aurobindo arrived when he made a study of the poem in the period most probably in Baroda -long before he came to Pondicherry:

"All that we know of the Mahabharata at present is that it is the work of several hands and of different periods... Yet to extricate the original epic from the mass of accretions is not, I believe, so difficult a task as it may at first appear. One is struck in perusing the Mahabharata by the presence of a mass of poetry which bears the style and impress of a single, strong and original, even unusual mind, differing in his manner of expression, tone of thought & stamp of personality not only from every other Sanscrit poet we know but from every other great poet known to literature. When we look more closely into the distribution of this peculiar style of writing, we come to perceive certain very suggestive & helpful facts. We realise that this impress is only found in those parts of the poem which are necessary to the due conduct of the story; seldom to be detected in the more miraculous, Puranistic or trivial episodes, but usually broken up by passages and sometimes shot through with lines of a discernibly different inspiration. Equally noteworthy is it that nowhere does this poet admit any trait, incident or speech which deviates from the strict propriety of dramatic characterisation & psychological probability. Finally, in this body, Krishna's divinity is recognised but more often hinted at than aggressively stated. The tendency is to keep it in the background as a fact to which, while himself crediting it, the writer does not hope for a universal consent, still less is able to speak of it as of a general tenet & matter of dogmatic belief; he prefers to show Krishna rather in his human character, acting always by wise, discerning and inspired methods, but still not transgressing the limit of human possibility. All this leads one to the conclusion that in the body of poetry I have described, we have the real Bharata, an epic which tells plainly and straightforwardly of

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the events which led to the great war and the empire of the Bharata princes....

"...Tradition attributes it to Krishna of the Island called Vyasa who certainly lived about this time and was an editor of the Vedas; and since there is nothing in this part of the poem which makes the tradition impossible and much which favours it, we may, as a matter both of convenience and of probability accept it at least provisionally....

"...Vyasa is the most masculine of writers. When Coleridge spoke of the feminity of genius he had in mind certain features of temperament which whether justly or not, are usually thought to count for more in the feminine mould than in the masculine.... Yet Goethe, Dante and Sophocles show that the very highest genius can exist without them. But none of the great poets I have named is so singularly masculine, so deficient in feminity as Vyasa, none dominates so much by intellect and personality, yet satisfies so little the romantic imagination. Indeed no poet at all near the first rank has the same granite mind in which impressions are received with difficulty but once received are ineffaceable. In his austere self-restraint and economy of power he is indifferent to ornament for its own sake, to the pleasures of poetry as distinguished from its ardours, to little graces and self-indulgences of style; the substance counts for everything & the form has to limit itself to the proper work of expressing with precision & power the substance. Even his most romantic pieces have a virgin coldness & loftiness in their beauty. To intellects fed on the elaborate pomp and imagery of Kalidasa's numbers... Vyasa may seem bald and unattractive. To be fed on the verse of Spenser, Shelley, Keats, Byron and Tennyson is no good preparation for the severest classics. It is indeed I believe, the general impression of many 'educated' young Indians that the Mahabharata is a mass of old wives' stories without a spark of poetry or imagination. But to those who have bathed even a little in the fountain-heads of poetry, and can bear the keenness and purity of those mountain sources, the naked and unadorned

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poetry of Vyasa is a perpetual refreshment. To read him is to bathe in a chill fountain in the heats of summer....

"The style of this powerful writer is perhaps the one example in literature of strength in its purity; a strength undefaced by violence and excess yet not weakened by flagging and negligence. It is even less propped or helped out by artifices and aids than any other poetic style. Vyasa takes little trouble with similes, metaphors, rhetorical turns, the usual paraphernalia of poetry; nor when he uses them, is he at pains to select such as shall be new and curiously beautiful; they are there to define more clearly what he has in mind, and he makes just enough of them for that purpose, never striving to convert them into a separate grace or a decorative element. They have force and beauty in their context but cannot be turned into elegant excerpts; in themselves they are in fact little or nothing. When Bhima is spoken of as breathing hard like a weakling borne down by a load too heavy for him, there is nothing in the simile itself. It derives its force from its aptness to the heavy burden of unaccomplished revenge which the fierce spirit of the strong man was condemned to bear. We may say the same of his epithets, that great preoccupation of romantic artists; they are such as are most natural, crisp and firm, best suited to the plain idea and only unusual when the business in hand requires an unusual thought, but never recherche or existing for their own beauty. Thus when he is describing the greatness of Krishna and hinting his claims to be considered as identical with the Godhead, he gives him the one epithet aprameya, immeasurable, which is strong and unusual enough to rise to the thought, but not to be a piece of literary decoration or a violence of expression. In brief, he religiously avoids overstress, his audacities of phrase are few, and they have agrace of restraint in their boldness. There is indeed a rushing vast Valmekeian style which intervenes often in the Mahabharata; but it is evidently the work of a different hand, for it belongs to a less powerful intellect, duller poetical insight and coarser taste, which has yet

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caught something of the surge and cry of Valmekie's Oceanic poetry. Vyasa in fact stands at the opposite pole from Valmekie....

"Strength and a fine austerity are Then the two tests which give us safe guidance through the morass of the Mahabharata; where these two exist together, we may reasonably presume some touch of Vyasa; where they do not exist or do not conjoin, we feel at once the redactor or the interpolator.... The love of the wonderful touched with the grotesque, the taste for the amorphous, a marked element in Valmekie's complex temperament, is with his follower something like a malady. He grows impatient with the apparent tameness of Vyasa's inexorable self-restraint, and restlessly throws in here couplets, there whole paragraphs of a more flamboyant vigour. Occasionally this is done with real ability and success, but as a rule they are true purple patches, daubs of paint on the stainless dignity of marble. For his rage for the wonderful is not always accompanied by the prodigious sweep of imagination which in Valmekie successfully grasps and compels the most reluctant materials. The result is that puerilities and gross breaches of taste fall easily and hardily from his pen. Not one of these could we possibly imagine as consistent with the severe, self-possessed intellect of Vyasa. Fineness, justness, discrimination and propriety of taste are the very soul of the man."

I hope I haven't tired you with these excerpts. Before 1 close let me thank you for permission to publish whatever I like of our exchanges. I may touch on three other topics. My friend V. Seturaman, late of Annamalai University, has written to me: "Dr. Indira (one of my students) has gone to U.K. on a short assignment and she would like to have an appointment with Kathleen Raine. She may discuss one or two problems connected with Coleridge and Miss Raine's own poetry and its relationship to the Coleridgian tradition of romantic poetry. Indira is likely to be in London between 1st May & 8th May. Just now she is working in Cambridge. She is expected back here on the 12th May." I have asked

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my friend to tell Dr. Indira to phone to you and take an appointment. I trust this will not inconvenience you much.

Eira Dyne was very pleased to hear from me that you liked her piece on "Kubla Khan" and that it may well be that she has indeed settled the date of the poem.

Now the last point. You have asked me whether 1 am willing to contribute to Temenos a paper on poetry from the standpoint of Sri Aurobindo and myself, "who rightly understand that there are different levels from which poetry speaks". But if I get round to writing such a paper and expound what Sri Aurobindo calls "the Future Poetry", of which the inspiration and illumination from what he has termed "the Overhead planes" would be the major element, I shall inevitably have to give illustrations from his own work, notably Savitri. You have forbidden me to do so or else if you let me go ahead you are likely to put in a note expressing your disagreement with my choice. Under such conditions I would have to stand afar from Temenos with my riches undelivered, struck as if with

The silence that is in the starry sky.

(18.4.1988)

From Kathleen Raine

Thank you for your eloquent letter about many things that concern us both. I write by return of post but will re-read at leisure. However, I want to repeat my invitation to contribute a paper on Sri Aurobindo's and your own view of poetry as coming from different levels. You must of course be free to illustrate such a paper at your own wish, and if by Aurobindo so be it; but I would ask you to use also other examples, especially from English or European poets who are known to our readers. That you would in any case do, of course. If your paper were to come within the next six or eight weeks it could go into the tenth issue, to be published

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this year, which would be appropriate as this year is the centenary of Sri Aurobindo. There is no more important theme in the present depressed state of poetry in this country than the question of the levels from which it comes and to which it speaks.

To go back to your dream, I am interested and must agree with what you say about a symbol working both ways - you would not dream of Saraswati under the symbol of a cook or a female athlete! I hope some of my poems are such as She would accept as an offering. I had with me today, as it happens, a Professor Dalai (Suresh) from Gujarat, who has translated poems of mine into Gujarati - he has chosen well, too, which gives me great pleasure. One has even been made into a song, so perhaps Saraswati is well-disposed to me also. Have you received 'The Presence', the recently published book I am almost certain I sent you? If not please let me know and I will send another copy.

To proceed to Krishnamurti. I am deeply interested in what you write, for in reviewing Pupul Jayakar's book, I found myself turning page after page wondering when I would come to the point of vision which I somewhere expected to find. It never came. No ananda as 1 think I wrote. I was surprised - I had expected to find that vision of beatitude in some form. Blake too said we can only worship God as a Man - the Self, the figure of 'Jesus, the Imagination', for that is the only form in which we as human beings can receive or conceive the living Self. Krishnamurti is much admired here, and my friend and co-founder of Temenos has built a chapel at Brantwood. Perhaps he brought with him the associations of the Indian 'Master' without possessing the attributes; and of course his having renounced the role of 'world-teacher' was admired in the West for possibly the wrong reasons - the West would not have thought of the possibility that he simply fell short of that attainment of 'perfect Master' which others in India have, even in this century, attained. Remember that for Christians there is but one Perfect Master, and for huma-

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nists, no possibility that there is any perfect Master at all. Comparisons with the Buddha are often made, I notice, yet surely the Lord Buddha did receive enlightenment? Certainly the world has received it through him, in India and beyond? I am not myself drawn so strongly to Buddhism as to the completeness of the Indian vision, which is at once life-affirming and also sees life as maya and is apt to produce also asceticism and renunciation - it includes Buddhism, and is not in any case a historical religion, as I think you have pointed out.

Or maybe that point is one made by Raja Rao in 'The Serpent and the Rope', which I have just re-read in order to write a piece on it for an American journal on the occasion of his award of the Neustadt Prize for his new novel 'The Chessmaster and his Moves', which I have not yet read. I am glad the prize went to a writer who upholds the India of the mind and soul, and not to one of those reductionist secularized Indian novelists so much admired here precisely because they have renounced what is most centrally and sacredly Indian. Certainly I felt that these extraordinarily anguishing encounters with transhuman forces could not surely be with the life-giving bliss-bestowing Lord known to so many who bear witness to Him. His visions seem to have been more in the nature of torture than of enlightenment. Or maybe he simply lacked love. Yet many people loved and revered him.

As to the Mahabharata, I am most interested in Sri Aurobindo's description of Vyasa as a supremely masculine writer. Certainly Valmiki has more flowers of beauty, yet dramatically and psychologically Vyasa is extraordinary. I am going with friends to the dramatized version of the Mahabharata by Peter Brook, now playing in Glasgow (Brook failed to receive support to play it in London but it has, even in this indifferent country, deeply impressed all who have seen it). My American version is dreadful, but includes many fine things and one realizes that the whole work is about dharma and adharma, and works these out in

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a thousand ways. And India's great gift is the knowledge of dharma, here lost for this time. Peter Brook gave a radio interview in which he said that the Mahabharata was like a work of Shakespeare; but a work in an earlier incarnation, not a later one. The persons of the epic and the things they do are certainly Shakespearean. And the Kauravas too are marvellously Shakespearean - the hypocritical old father, Duryodhana himself, and Radheya, Kunti's abandoned son who- is so noble but thrown onto the side of adharma because of his mother's sin against dharma. And so with all. But Shakespeare never created a Lord Krishna nor could any Western poet have done so or included the divine within a human world. True, it is in the Gospels, and the story of the death of the Christ, but differently. That story too is one of the great creations of the human spirit.

I must now go and post my letters, including this most inadequate reply to your own. I do hope you will write something for us.

(26.4 1988)

From K. D. Sethna

This morning, at about a quarter to six, I woke up from another dream of you. It must have been a little past midnight in London and you must have been asleep - and perhaps dreaming. I wonder whether you have ever tried your hand at painting. I saw you showing me several paintings of yours. One of them struck me especially. It had two trees, one in the foreground and the other at a distance at the back. Both had somewhat thick trunks. I admired in particular the tree in the background - noting the fine significant strokes of the brush building up the trunk. As there were several pictures, you had to look for this when I expressed my admiration. I joined in the search but we failed to find it. Instead I saw another picture which had a tree whose thick trunk had a big hole running right through it. At this point I woke up. What I remembered to have seen

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in the dream was a sequel to something which had slipped from my memory except that we were in a room where there was another lady present, a friend of yours with whom you were perhaps living or who had come to visit you. My contact with you was to me as concrete as in the earlier dream-experience.

Yes, I received your gift of The Presence and dipped into it immediately but it got left to one side because of some urgent work. I have looked at it again this morning, again dipping. Turning the pages I came across some phrases which shot out at me - the stars saying "The woods are always" - "Immemorial woods" - "Vistas of winter woods where we will go no more". My dream of your painted trees must have served as a magnet to these expressions.

The mood pervading the book appears to be a strange one - a sad joy. You are looking at the past, reviving in your mind the loved things that are gone or about to go - and this induces sadness. But there is a pleasure in realising that you once had moments of deep happiness. The general idea in such matters is the one voiced by Francesca of Rimini to Dante:

...the greatest of all woes

Is to remember days of happiness

In misery - as well your sage guide knows.

The guide, of course, is Virgil with his "sense of tears in earthly things" as Matthew Arnold puts it, Tennyson, in a lovely poem of nine-foot lines attempting to echo the Latin hexameter, hails him:

Thou majestic in thy sadness at the doubtful doom of

humankind!

Tennyson has also tried to echo Dante directly, though in a different style in the second line of that couplet from "Locksley Hail":

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Comfort? comfort scorned of devils! This is truth the

poet sings,

That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering

happier things.

But in your case there is a quiet exultation, a proud smile on your lips while the eyes are tearful. When brightness falls from the air. you have a different mood from Nashe's: the dusk deepening towards night gets studded with little glimmering memories of the brightness you have known. You are sure that nothing can take them away and the varied beauty witnessed and felt along the pulse will remain in your being, no matter if it has vanished or even was an "illusion":

Reality or dream

What difference? I have seen.

This is a triumph-cry of joy although the mouth may be wrung. It is possible only if there has been an inner life which can capture some touch of the Eternal from things that live a day. A poet who is dedicated to the Sacred, however far he or she may be from the full mystical life cannot help having the grace of this ananda in some measure. Naturally the actual mystic will have the plenitude of it and if the mysticism is of the Aurobindonian kind which believes not only in the reality of the manifestation but also in the ultimate value of it, the very transience of things will be lit up and leave in the soul an intense revelatory aspect of the Eternal's own infinite variety.

I am glad you are drawn to the Indian vision rather than to Buddhism or any other partial experience. The core of Buddhism is already there in certain utterances of the Upanishads just as the mayavada of Shankara is anticipated in some deliverances of the same scripture. Buddha and Shankara turned into mighty monoliths what were complementary columns in a many-chambered edifice of spiritual realisation. But each of these teachers was exceptionally

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great and in the circumstances of his time his single-track message had a valuable work to do. Shankara had even a bhakta-side to him: he composed splendid hymns to the Divine Mother and his call towards a featureless transcendent Atman-Brahman was deemed a final necessary step from a world which for all its teeming labour seemed to him incapable of lasting reformation. Knowing that in its central drive Buddhism itself in spite of its exaggerations was not alien to the Indian ethos, India has absorbed its twin movements - a grand liberation from phenomenal selfhood and a boundless compassion for creatures caught in it - and looked upon Gautama Siddhartha himself as an emanation of the supreme Godhead, while rejecting the lopsidedness that was due to the peculiar conditions of a past age. The India of spiritual history is best summed up in the figure of Krishna, at once the ravishing flute-player of the Brindavan legends and the master-charioteer of men's lives emerging from the Bhagavad Gita and, in general, the Mahabharata story. I am glad you feel him to be a unique all-synthesising culmination of the world-soul's turn upward, inward, outward, onward so far. From this feeling the next natural step would be to understand what Sri Aurobindo meant when, as I wrote to you last time, he said that in his Ashram Krishna's work was being done - in the sense that it was being carried further. Here Krishna's unified triple path of spiritual Knowledge, Love and Action issues into the total life-consecration which Sri Aurobindo has designated "the Integral Yoga" and which, evoking the inmost soul whose spontaneous turn at all times is towards the Highest, aims ultimately at drawing through what he has called "Overmind" or "Krishna-Consciousness" the sovereign Truth and Bliss, Peace and Power of what he distinguishes as "Super-mind", a divine dynamism of the All-Beautiful not only world-creative but also world-transformative.

Peter Brook is right in saying that the Mahabharata is like a work of Shakespeare and you correctly point out the vividness and individuality of the various characters, the

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true-to-reality depictions of their tendencies and acts. We are face to face with human beings and their diverse motives. A strong dramatic element is almost everywhere. But we have to note a difference in two respects. First, in the overall vision. The intense issue of dharma versus adharma stands out in both the Ramayana and the Mahabharata far more recognisably than in the more complex and colourful world of the Elizabethan master. Shakespeare's style also differs. Multi-imaged, swiftly intuitive with the surge of the Life Force, his thought rising not in its own right but as thrown up by passion and emotion, Shakespeare may have some affinity with the wide-glancing prolific Valmiki. His manner, marvellous though it be, is too rich and romantic to compare with the intellectual masculinity of Vyasa's. Sri Aurobindo writes: "Be its limits what one will, this is certain that there was never a style and verse of such bare, direct and resistless strength as this of Vyasa's or one that went so straight to the heart of all that is heroic in a man. Listen to the cry of insulted Draupadi to her husband: 'Arise, arise, O Bhimsena, wherefore liest thou like one that is dead? For nought but dead is he whose wife a sinful hand has touched and lives...'It is a supreme utterance of insulled feeling, and yet note how it expresses itself in the language of intellect, in a thought. The whole personality of Draupadi breaks out in that cry, her chastity, her pride, her passionate and unforgiving temper, but it flashes out not in an expression of pure feeling, but in a fiery and pregnant apophthegm."

I must stop now. I thank you profoundly for the free hand you have given me with the article you wish me to write for Temenos within eight weeks. Let's hope I can do something adequate in the stipulated period.

(3.5.1988)

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From Kathleen Raine

The regions of the mind are truly mysterious. No, I have never painted, but you describe a painting in my bedroom of which I am very fond, of a group of trees, one in advance of the group, so to speak, and another tree behind it, before the whole composition merges into a little grove. I don't have a tree with a hole through the trunk, but I do have a group of Japanese rather gnarled alders by a stream, and yet another tree picture entitled 'The Gate of the Forest' with a sort of tunnel under the canopy of leaves. I also have a fine engraving of a beech tree with a bold beautiful trunk (but no hole through it) and a fir and a rowan, growing together. You mention a second friend staying with me - I have had Santosh Pal, a Yeats scholar from Delhi, with her son, for several weeks - she went back this morning by the Air India morning flight. So although not so precise as your first sighting of me in your room, I consider that there has again been a real contact. You may be interested to hear that although many people did write to the TLS in protest, no notice was taken, except when Laurens van der Post wrote personally to the editor, telling him that he considered the review insulting and disgraceful, and received an embarrassed reply, asking him if he himself would like to write something about us in a forthcoming issue. L. van der Post is of course a famous man, a friend of the Prince of Wales and so they took notice of him. I was unduly hurt, but also ashamed of my country, and angry and sad that we have come to this.

I am leaving this afternoon for Devon, where a group of us are meeting with the object of discussing a possibility to start a University of the Spirit - a small university - a sort of Santiniketan - where the teaching will be grounded in the view of man as a spiritual being and not in the materialist humanism that has brought so low our present universities and schools and media and journalism, and indeed the arts themselves which for the most part only reflect the disease

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that the arts should exist in order to cure. I am delighted therefore that you will write us something about the Indian (and especially Sri Aurobindo's) view of the hierarchic nature of the worlds from whence the poets receive their inspiration. I was always aware of that in India - that an audience listens, in the first place, to catch the vibration of the level on which a poet is speaking. It is something that has to be said, and rediscovered in the secular modern world, for reality remains what it always is, and there is no food for the soul in work that has no resonance of the higher worlds.

I will leave this letter open, for we are proceeding to Glasgow from our Devon conference, and I will write more when I have seen the Mahabharata, I am reading a dreadful American translation in a mixture of slang and archaisms, but it is the complete text. The only full text I have been able to get. Yes, the theme of dharma and adharma is very evident in every episode. But it all becomes so very complex - indeed Shakespearean - in such a character as Kama, thrown by the adharma of Kunti his mother into the camp and service of the enemy. And one feels that modern civilization has become so entangled in the complexities of adharma that where can we begin to disentangle the web? Always at every point, I suppose, each in ourselves. But the web weaves on and on and on. What Christians call 'the Fall' of course. We need some sort of counter-measure to be taken - Redemption - it might seem. It is not enough to be the perfect 'dharmaraja' and just never become involved in the web at all. Not that I can accept Christian cancellations and divine interventions either.

Well, I continue this letter after my expedition to discuss the Dartington small university project - I believe it may come about, for the need is as desperate as when Hanuman brought to the dying army the mountain with the healing herbs - and then some of us went on to Glasgow; where a

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derelict transport-museum, itself doubtless made from a derelict warehouse or factory, had been converted into INDIA, by the magic of Peter Brook's brilliant theatrical imagination. London had not responded to the proposal to bring here the most marvellous theatrical experience this generation is likely to see, ever - nine hours was a timeless moment. The cast was international, and when one had become accustomed to Kunti as a Korean, Yudhisthira as an Englishman, Bhima a Negro, Arjuna an Italian, and two handsome middle-eastern twins, and much besides, one saw that Peter Brook's vision of the Mahabharata as the story of mankind was justified. The dedication of the actors was total and the beauty and imagination of the lighting and magic by which illusion was created would have pleased the architect Maya who built Indraprastha himself. But it is indescribable. No-one who saw it can be the same again. I wonder if that would be so in India. The bare ruined Industrial building in a derelict city became a region of the imagination truly boundless. A wonderful Krishna; and the narrative was told by Vyasa to a child - a young boy - about his ancestors. A stroke of genius, for all the time one saw innocence commenting and questioning the great battlefield of life. I hope you will manage to see it when it goes on to India. I see that Russia has given Peter Brook an honour - he is of Russian descent - and only England seems determined to allow nothing to disturb the complacence of prevailing mediocrity. My mother came from Scotland, so I am glad that proud poor country that has never lost its poetry had the opportunity to enter that world, through Peter Brook.

I am now setting to work on getting Temenos 10 to the printer. If we have your paper within the next six weeks it will go into this issue, which will I think be one of our best. I'm also waiting for a Copy Raja Rao has promised to send me of his new novel 'The Chessmaster and his Moves', which I am glad to learn has just been awarded an international prize, in preference to those reductionist Indian novels on Western lines like 'Midnight's Children', and 'A

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House for Mr. Biswas', which the English like so much. But Raja Rao writes of the India of the Imagination which, he says, is not a nation like England or France or Germany but a state of mind. India must change the" world. Am I mistaken in seeing signs that the world wants to change, is ripe for change? At least Temenos has done its best. I am glad that you will be numbered among our illustrious contributors.

You are very perceptive as well as kind about my poems. I do indeed see the maya of appearances as a theophany - the lila of God, as you do. Only the vision is clouded by human sorrow and ignorance. I don't believe India has any equivalent of the Christian doctrine of 'the Fall' but it is hard for any Westerner not to see human nature as 'fallen', inexplicably imperfect, therefore unable fully to perceive and rejoice in what we nevertheless know is there. The poet sees from afar what the yogi sees and experiences totally. But all poets of the imagination know that world as the soul's native country and that it is here and now for whoever is able to reach it.

I wonder what more of my secrets you will penetrate in the 'interworld' of the astral in which the soul strays in sleep? We are indeed surrounded by unseen realities and powers that we should never forget, be it for good or ill they touch our lives. One can only hope to commit no crimes of the soul in those regions.

I look forward to receiving your paper on that most important theme.

(13.5.1988)

From K. D. Sethna

I was very happy to receive your latest letter with its many interesting and apt reflections. Yes, there was definitely a contact again between us on the dream-plane though, as you remark, not so precise as on the earlier occasion. One little item I forgot to mention in my last letter. You were wearing a white or near-white dress. I wonder whether this is your

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usual preference or it happened to be such on the day whose night held our contact or else it was symbolic of your general state of mind these days, echoing the mood of that line of AE's -

White to Thy Whiteness all desires burn.

Perhaps a sense of whiteness together with a sense of trees is woven into your life because of a Proustian search for times past. I remember those touching lines of yours:

And I already in early morning sometimes wake

Upon the threshold of some long past day;

A tree stands on the brink of light White with blossoms as once beside a house long

desolate,

Maybe 1 am letting my imagination run too freely along albescent themes. And in your lines it is the tree with the dawn-glimmer upon it that is centrally significant. At least from the numerous pictures among which you live one can guess you must be extremely fond of treescapes. I also have loved them - trees are my passion next to horses, and both of them Phave enjoyed intensely, most in my young years when the Sethna family used to go three times a year for long stays to their cottage in the "hill-station" named "Matheran" (meaning "that which has a forest on its head"). In India the forest has a spiritual association and not only a poetic one. It is the penultimate stage of life: after all the human work is done a man is expected to retire from the world and practise God's presence in a forest. Once he has fulfilled his threefold destiny he is free of everything and the last stage sees him wandering without any fixed home, no one place holds him for more than a day or two except of course in the rainy season. This is the traditional scheme and, though it is no longer followed, spirituality as the true goal of life is still an idea haunting the Indian consciousness

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and the old potentiality of going deeper and higher than the mere mind has never been lost. In India of the past, trees have always invited inwardness. There is that lovely little snatch from Buddha:

Here are trees.

Here let us sit down.

Here we shall meditate.

In India Temenos would at once be recognised for what it is. Perhaps Laurens van der Post's letter to the editor of the TLS will have a general effect. I see in one of the latest issues a big advertisement of Temenos. It made my heart glad to read it. But why wasn't van der Post's letter publicised? No letter protesting against the semi-cynical tone of the review has appeared.

Your observation of how an Indian audience would naturally respond first of all to the vibration of the level on which a poet speaks is very acute. It shows your own sensitive inner perception of things. My article, if it manages to get written within the dead-line you have given, will try to show the various typical vibrations of the different planes from which poetry hails. All the planes are capable of transmitting genuine poetry, but while there is a certain equality of inspired art in the midst of the diversity of expressive plane - subtle-physical, vital, mental, "overhead"' - there is a widening of the possibility of revealing the hidden Soul or Spirit in its authentic accent. Perhaps one may best suggest this in a few words with the point Sri Aurobindo made long ago when he wrote that while poetry in the broad sense is well hit off by Meredith's definition - "our inmost in the sweetest way" - the fulfilment of this art, psychologically speaking, would come when poetry becomes "our inmost in the inmost way".

Your idea of "a University of the Spirit" is quite thrilling. It is not only beyond the present-day notion of a great unfoldment of knowledge but also beyond the finest New-

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manian 'idea of a University". If teaching is to be grounded in the view of man as a spiritual being, then what could be more apt than a course of certain writings of Sri Aurobindo which hold this view and apply it to several fields of man's activity with a vast and penetrating knowledge and with a mind fully modern at the same time that it is charged with an ever progressive spirituality: The Foundations of Indian Culture (your friend Raja Rao considers Sri Aurobindo the best expositor of Indian culture) - The Human Cycle, originally titled The Psychology of Social Development (about which the famous Dr. Schweitzer wrote to the Ashram that he found it extremely important) - The Ideal of Human Unity - The Synthesis of Yoga (which expounds all the past Yogas and goes on to the Yoga of Self-Perfection) -Commentaries on the Isha Upanishad and the Kena Upanishad - The Future Poetry & Letters on Poetry, Art, Literature. These books have the rare quality of literary charm on top of profound thought.

Coming to the wonderful Mahabharata show, I may draw your attention to quite a perceptive review of it in the TLS of May 13-19, p. 531 under "Commentary", entitled "Destinies and deities". One John D. Smith is the reviewer. I learnt from it that Jean-Claude Carriere is associated with Peter Brook in the adaptation made for the Western stage: Smith writes: "It is magnificent - but is it the Mahabharata! The answer is a resounding Yes. The work of Carriere and Brook is remarkably faithful to the events, sometimes even to the wording, of the Sanskrit original, but, more important, it stays true to its spirit." From the enthusiasm it has engendered in you, I feel it is something never to be missed if it comes one's way. Smith's commentary is all the more valuable because of a few bits of criticism in it. Discussing the paradoxical figure of Krishna, Smith contradicts Carriere saying in his programme notes that "in the Mahabharata, at least in those parts of the poem generally thought to be the earliest, nothing clearly indicates that he is an avatar, one of the earthly incarnations of Vishnu". Smith

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declares: "Mahabharata 5.22 is a chapter that can be shown on internal (metrical) evidence to be uniformly early: at Stanza 10 Krsna is referred to as 'Visnu the unassailable, the great overlord of the three worlds'. 'Unlike the Ramayana, the other great Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata acknowledges its central god's identity with Visnu from the start." Smith is full of praise for the way the necessary condensation has been done by Carriere and Brook, but he notes "a single omission": it is "Bhima's vow to break Duryodhana's thigh, made after Duryodhana insults the heroes' joint wife Draupadi by baring his thigh at her and paralleled by Bhima's vow to drink Duhsasana's blood to avenge another similar insult. Both insults arc included in the play, as are both of Bhima's terrible deeds, so it seems a pity to have lost the thread of motivation in one case."

The court scene where the two vows were made is a favourite of mine, but not because of them. Here I have a query for you. I don't have a complete rendering of the epic. I have at the moment in my hands what is regarded by competent scholars as the best condensation running to 741 pages: Kamala Subramanian's Mahabharata, third edition, 1977 (Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Bombay). My query pertains to Draupadi's invocation of Krishna when the heinous disrobing of her in front of the gathering starts. Subramanian's account does not contain the details I remember to have come across somewhere, details which marvellously combine a deep spiritual truth with a touch of humour most dramatically blended with the terrible seriousness of the event. Let me tell you what has stuck in my memory. While the sari is being pulled, Draupadi appeals to Krishna: "O Lord of the highest heaven, come to my help!" There is no response. The poor girl becomes more desperate. She sends out again a cry: "O Master of the three worlds, help me!" No reply still - and more and more folds of the sari come out. Once again Draupadi raises her heart's plea: "O Ruler of the four quarters of the earth, rush to my rescue!" All in vain - nothing results. Draupadi is really at a loss. Then she

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cries out in a final intensity: "O You who dwell in my own heart, come!" At once Krishna appears before her secretly, with his hand gesturing abhaya - "Have no fear." The sari goes on unwinding endlessly. In a later scene Draupadi chides Krishna: "Why did you take so long to come?" Sweetly and coolly he replies: "If I had to come from the highest heaven or from the three worlds or even from the four quarters of the earth, wouldn't it take some time? But when you summoned me from your own heart, there was no distance to be crossed. Naturally 1 came out once."

Do you have this story in the complete American text before you? If Brook had staged it, it might have been quite a hit. Perhaps it does not belong to Vyasa's version but to Tulsidas's Hindi retelling or else it figures in some popular Vaishnava evocation of the scene?

You have indicated the nationality of some of the cast in Brook's masterpiece - a Korean as Kunti, an Englishman as Yudhisthira, a Negro as Bhima, an Italian as Arjuna, etc. But was there no Indian in any role? What country played Krishna? I wonder how India will receive Brook. The first impression may be as of something rather fantastic - not quite because of the different accents of the players' English but because a certain homogeneity of emotional gesture stemming from a traditional background may be missed. I should think the depth with which the varied cast renders the drama would lead to India overlooking whatever surface incongruity she may find. The film Gandhi was very well received, but it wasn't so bold an experiment as Brook's.' Let us hope the sincerity and force of the acting, the magic of the setting and the psychological widening of the story's range will carry all before it.

I hear that the Mahabharata in 52 episodes will soon be on the Indian TV just as the Ramayana has been. The latter was beautifully done and was popular on an international scale: it seems it was shown in England to school children and greatly appreciated. Archaeologists are trying to make out "Lanka" to have been a small patch of ground loopedc

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round by a stream in Madhya Pradesh, and Ravana a Gond aboriginal who took away the wife of an Aryan princeling. The traditional Lanka - Ceylon - is said to be a late fiction. A crude folk-tale is made out to be the nucleus of the epic. Although I have a lot of interest in archaeology I am not convinced here. What the Ramayana embodies is a great crisis in the evolution of human consciousness. On one side is the animal mind, on the other the titan aberration and in between is the natural man, his line of development threatened - most by the well-equipped titanism represented by the ingenious powerful Ravana, king of a sort of Indian Atlantis in the form of an insular land-mass where now Sri Lanka is situated. Rama Dasarathi is the Avatar of the Dharmic Mind fighting to establish this psychological level in the race. Valmiki, according to Sri Aurobindo, has truly caught the nature of the Avatar who acts not from the individual standpoint but from a universal plane, the plane of supreme mental ideals. Of course a lot of myth is mixed up with the historical crisis or perhaps facts of a non-physical occult dimension get fused with occurrences of the earth and we meet with part romance, part allegory, part reality, part spiritual vision, a kind of super-Faery-Queene by a poet far greater than Spenser in imaginative thought, rhythmic expression, character-creativity and quantity of quality.

The Christian parable of a Fall is seen differently by the old Kabbalists. They conceive a Rise from the self-sufficient state of man the mental animal, a peer of non-mental animals that live instinctively without any vexing questions of right and wrong, true and false, good and bad, to a state of self-conscious inquiring aspiring mentality which is transitional between the animal's instinctive absolute and the absolute of the intuitive godhead which is the goal of striving and struggling human idealism. This Rise is a Fall from a vital harmony until a harmony beyond the mental grope is found. The esoterics picture the Serpent as an iridescent being, a gracious power of secret evolution.

(5.6.1988)

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From Kathleen Raine

Your letter of June 5th is, as always, a great pleasure. Alas, I seldom wear white, black more often. I have a white Irish knitted jacket, I might have been wearing it, but this time I think it is at best symbolic. But I love white flowers, white blossoming trees. Yes, I had understood that forest-dwellers in India are something more than wood-cutters, it is woven throughout Indian literature, those blissful forest-dwellers in their hermitages in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata too, and when I looked up into the hills above Rishikesh I knew there were still holy-men who come down to worship at Hardwar, where indeed I bought a string of one hundred and eight beads made from some kind of wrinkled nut whose name you no doubt know. Having myself reached my eightieth year only this week I know I should become a forest-dweller myself but I seem to be still occupied by karmic - or maybe dharmic - tasks. The immediate one is getting the material for T.10 to the printer, so I hope to receive your paper before too long. It would be good to have it within Sri Aurobindo's centenary year.

But I did not picture my learned correspondent as a horseman! That radically changes my picture of you. Though from Indian art and folk-art, and the famous 'horse-sacrifice' I realize that the Horse too plays a central part in Indian life, though a very different one from the Forest. As to the last stage of life few surely can face that solitude, Indian spirituality is so absolute in its affirmation that finally all this earth and all that it inherit must fade. I love it all so much, and see may a not as illusion so much as epiphany - the continual self-revelation of the living spirit. But I am now toiling through the 700 pages of Raja Rao's new novel, 'The Chessmaster and his Moves', and that too I find as chilling as the icy peaks of the mountains. He contrasts civilizations based on 'infinity' - the 'reign of quantity' I suppose, i.e. the West - and those based on 'zero' - nirvana - yours. Blake of course understood the myste-

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rious 'punctume' through which everything emerges into manifestation so perhaps he understood the Indian Zero Raja Rao is talking about. I am here considered an elitist, etc., but I confess myself no match for the supersubtlety of a brahmin who knows the West also. I can read with ease his French and relative ease Provencal, his Latin and Greek, just, his mathematics, Sanskrit and Pali and Hindi not at all. I find his novel so impressive that I wonder who his readers will be, even in India. He's rather like the 'Boston Brahmins' where the Vanderbilts speak only to the Cabots and the Cabots speak only to God. However I promised to review the book for Temenos and must persist. The 700 pages are closely printed in smallish type and many need to be re-read in order to be understood.

The 700-page condensation of the Mahabharata by Kamala Subramanian I found excellent. The American so-called translation by van Buitenen is bad, inaccurate, and I found in it no trace of the calling upon the Lord Krishna as you describe it in that very profound and profoundly Indian passage. In fact Krishna is not even mentioned in the passage of the unwinding of the sari and although it is certainly immensely long I wonder what 'editing' means to the translator and whether he has not just cut out certain things. Only two volumes have hitherto appeared - I am at present reading the section about the exile in the forest -and I shall not order any more. As to Peter Brook, I agree with the TLS reviewer, that he seems to have got it all in, in essence, I will post you the text of the dramatized version. Knowing as I already did Bhima's vow to break the thigh of Duryodhana, I did not even notice that the vow was not made. In the performance, the point was I think sufficiently made when in the gaming-hall Duryodhana says to Draupadi 'Look at my thigh', and deliberately parts his robe and raises his thigh. It is a dramatic moment and not one an audience would have forgotten. Such things can be done in the production. Even so I find the savagery of Bhima as a character pretty hard to take. And even Krishna, when he

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tells Arjuna to slay Kama while he is trying to free his chariot wheel, and indeed again when he tells the terrible Bhima to strike Duryodhana on the thigh, is hard to reconcile with the words of the Bhagavad Geeta. Or perhaps not, since there is no death, and it is all maya.

The only Indian actor was Mallika Sarabhai, Draupadi, who was extremely beautiful, and she at least had to be Indian. Krishna - Bruce Myers - is English and acted very finely. A middle-aged Krishna, not at all the lover of Radha, but severe, as befits the part of the charioteer of the great Battle. 1 don't know how an Indian audience will take Peter Brook's conception of that battle as universal but he makes his point that the whole world is involved in it. All the same, Kunti's children are as multicoloured as a litter of kittens.

As to Temenos, the TLS rightly recognizes us as the enemy of the trivial reductionism it now has come for the most part to represent. Laurens van der Post's scathing letter brought a response only because of his repute. Other letters of protest sent went into the waste-paper basket, no doubt. He has told me not to send a copy to the TLS next time, but to him, so that he can send it with a personal letter to the editor, which is nice of him, but it will be about as much use as the Lord Krishna's peace overtures to the Kauravas. They are the Kauravas. (You see we are all digesting the lessons and symbols of the Mahabharata in this island this summer.)

Arabinda Basu has sent me a book by Vilas Patel whom I hope to see this week; she is bringing with her the mother of the young scholar who wrote that piece on Coleridge which you sent me. I was disgusted but not surprised to hear that Oxford was scornful. That is but another instance of the falsification of values that has inspired the idea of a University of the spirit at Dartington Hall. I hope it will come about. Arabinda writes that it must be based on spirituality not 'idealism' which was of course the trouble with the original Dartington Hall venture, which was purely secular; much good was done, especially in music, but it all

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ends in decline. The school, founded in the great days of 'free' schools and Bertrand and Dora Russell has now been closed because of scandals and drugs getting into the school and so on. The need is such that I believe it will come about. Please God it may. It is a great mistake to suppose that in these days Oxford and Cambridge are 'better' than the newer Universities. Even they lead the field in secularization and destructuring. And Indian universities go on copying them, they retain it seems in the Indian memory the prestige they once (and perhaps deservedly) had.

I will post the Claude Carriere (English Translation) separately.

(18.6.1988)

From K. D. Sethna

1 was waiting for the text of the dramatised version to arrive before replying to your fine letter of June 18. But it has not reached me yet. So I have decided not to delay further. After you wrote to me that you had just reached your eightieth year a friend told me that your birthday fell on June 14. As I shall be eighty-four next November 25,I am 3 years, 6 months and 19 days older than you - if my mathematics is not far out. I was never good at numbers, except, I hope, those which Milton had in mind when he wrote of dwelling "on thoughts that voluntary move / Harmonious numbers". In regard to arithmetic what seemed the truth of the matter dawned on me when on failing miserably in the exam to qualify for the 4th standard at St. Xavier's High School at Bombay I was favoured with a special test by the Principal Father Hetting in consideration of the important historical fact that my papa had been a Xavierite. To buck me up papa accompanied me to the test. I was given four sums to do. Twenty minutes later I submitted my results. They proved to be all wrong. Father Hetting looked grave and passed the papers to papa. Papa glanced at them and said with a smile: "See, his method is

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perfect everywhere. He knows exactly how to approach a problem. Doesn't that show an acute intelligence? The only thing he doesn't know is addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Surely they can be learned in time. Just for failure in them, will you hold back a boy so bright in finding his way in the subject?" The Principal was so stunned by the originality and acuity of this argument, which any Schoolman of the Middle Ages might have envied, that he broke a minute's silence with the sporting words: "Oh well, let him go up with his master mind and tackle the trivialities later."

Your reference, apropos of your surprise that I was a "horseman", to the horse as an important part of Indian life gives me a cue to some observations on Indian spirituality. As you know, this spirituality has its fountainhead in the Rigveda, the earliest religious document of the Indo-European linguistic family to which both of us belong. In the Rigveda the cow and the horse are the two central animal symbols. The word go or gau for the former meant both the female bovine and "ray". The cow stood esoterically for Light, the spiritual illumination. The horse, on the other hand, stood for the Life-force and the highest symbolic figure of the equine is the white horse Dadhikravan which is said to march ever towards the Dawn: here is the purified and enlightened Life-force. Both cow and horse are integral portions of the spiritual realisation. Both the animals which lent themselves to spiritual symbolisation were woven closely into the old Aryan existence and when this existence took on a spiritual dimension it remained still something earthly. There was no talk of flying away from earth. One rose into the subtle planes, reaching up to the world of the Sun, the Truth-world where all the multiplicity is harmonised and unified and has its divine original or source, but one still kept one's hold on the"terrestrial scene. Mother Earth and Father Heaven were never disjoined. The Rishis who were the mystics of that remote age were also the guides and teachers of the community. They did not think of the terrestrial scene as something to be escaped from: it was

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something to be led to its own truest significance here and now. The very word "maya" in the Rigveda has no inevitable association of an undivine unreality. It connotes the power of the Supreme Reality to outline, measure out, mould forms in the formless, psychologise and make know-able the Unknowable, geometrise and seem to make measurable the limitless. By this power static truth of essential being becomes ordered truth of active being. In a less exalted sense maya meant knowledge, skill, intelligence. Only later it acquired the pejorative sense of cunning, fraud or illusion in ordinary parlance and philosophically an inexplicable phenomenon in which an unreal cosmos appears with its unredeemable multiplicity from a Oneness which is timeless, spaceless, featureless and which counterpoises a Nirvanic beyond of beatitude to the many-motioned teeming Here and Now of mixed shadow and shine. But even later the Shankarite world-negation was never the sole spirituality in the Indian field. Various world-affirming outlooks and disciplines flourished, especially the Bhakti movements and the Tantrik experiments and, above all, the synthesising message of the Gita which swept together the Yogas of Knowledge, Devotion and Work. To them the earth "and all that it inherit" are an epiphany in the same way as to you - "the continual self-revelation of the living spirit". (Raja Rao's vision is Shankarite: it is hardly representative of all of India's Godward turn.)

But I must say that though the epiphanic nature of the world is undeniable the soul's passion for "one entire and perfect chrysolite" is not wholly satisfied. There is something missing in world-affirmation just as in world-negation. Neither in concept nor in experience has an answer been found for that demand of the soul until the advent of Sri Aurobindo. He alone has gone from his initial Nirvanic experience to a vision of the Divine at a revelatory play in the world and then to the Supermind which bears in itself not only the original creative power but also the final transformative power, for it is at the same time the home of

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the perfect originals of mind, vitality and matter and the evolver of these very originals within their imperfect forms in earth-history because they are already "involved" in the evolving phenomenon. The Supermind is hidden below in the primeval darkness no less than it is secret above in the ultimate light. By its pressure and pull from on high and by its pressure and push from the nether pole all evolution takes place - the free forces descending and the bound ones ascending. First, the multi-linked material universe emerges from what the Rigveda calls the chaotic ocean, then life makes its appearance, then mind shows itself and the next step will be the manifestation of Supermind, bringing about a super-epiphany. Mind will fulfil its urge for all-knowledge. Life-force its nisus towards all-capacity, matter its straining for durability, immunity, flawlessness of form. The path to this fulfilment cannot be totally smooth. How can anything be quite easy when the Supreme has undertaken the tremendous adventure of beginning its own self-expression from what it has posited as its own opposite, a dense Inconscient, the Rigveda's chaotic ocean in which, as that scripture says, "darkness is enwrapped within darkness"? Yes, there are hurdles to be crossed, yet, as Sri Aurobindo says, "the advent of the Supermind is inevitable by the very logic of things". But man as a being conscious of himself has to give his willing co-operation if this advent is to be soon. Hence the need for the Aurobindonian Integral Yoga to embody the Supramental Divine both individually and collectively. A mantra of this Yoga's aim is the great invocation which I once quoted to you and which ends with the profoundly moving mysticism of the words:

Rose of God, like a blush of rapture on Eternity's face,

Rose of Love, ruby depth of all being, fire-passion of Grace!

Arise from the heart of the yearning that sobs in Nature's

abyss:

Make earth the home of the Wonderful and life beatitude's

kiss.

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Perhaps I have been flying too high and tiring you. Let me come down to a theme nearer our general discourse - the Mahabharata. At almost the conclusion of your excellent comment on Peter Brook's show you allude to the savagery of Bhima and say that you find it hard to take. Then you add: "And even Krishna, when he tells Arjuna to slay Karna while he is trying to free his chariot wheel, and indeed again when he tells the terrible Bhima to strike Duryodhana on the .thigh, is hard to reconcile with the words of the Bhagavad Geeta." Nor are these the only incidents in which Krishna seems to act out of accord with that scripture's commands. Duryodhana, after he has been beaten by means not agreeing with the Kshatriya code, lists some more deeds of Krishna that stand out as "unfair". But we must remember those declarations of Krishna to Arjuna in the Gita: "...whenever there is the fading of the Dharma and the uprising of unrighteousness, then 1 loose myself forth into birth. For the deliverance of the good, for the destruction of the evil-doers, for the enthroning of the Right I am born from age to age" (IV.7-8). The victory of the Kauravas would have spelled the death of Dharma. Unrighteousness would have ruled. But they were so strong that they could not have been destroyed by the ordinary modes of warfare. To follow strict Kshatriya standards would have frustrated the very purpose of the Avatar Krishna's birth in that age. He tried his best to avoid the war. Several times when he is accused of employing stratagems for the Pandavas to come out victorious, he asks: "Have I not strained my utmost to prevent hostilities? Did not the sons of Dhritarashtra turn a deaf ear to my pleas? Was Duryodhana willing in the least to put aside his unjust ambition, his gigantic lust for power?" He declares that his sole purpose was to save good men from harm, from death at the hands of incarnate demons. Even so, we may mark that he let the Pandavas fight fairly and do their best to overcome their enemies. Only when he realised that they would ultimately go under did he resort to unconventional methods. If Dharma could be established by

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generally approved means, they were certainly welcome. The fullest chance should be given to them. But if they seem bound to fail, one who was born for the destruction of evildoers could hardly stand by. What was clearly visioned by the Avatar to be wicked the Avatar had the right to dethrone by whatever means his wisdom and superhuman insight deemed valid. His exceptional right to overpass common standards was implicitly recognised, for none of those who obeyed his command to act unkshatriya-like would have acted that way on his own. His friends who became his instruments knew that he was more than human and that he could act from a motive inherently right and that in his case the end would justify any means. Unless we enter into the sense of his Avatarhood and understand intuitively his mission we shall fail to perceive the utter intrinsic inevitability of his deeds.

You have mentioned Vilas Patel. She will be carrying to you some news of me just as Dr. Indra carried to me interesting news of you. She was very happy to have met you and spoke highly of your cordiality and hospitality. I was delighted to see the picture she had taken of you. Yes, it is on the whole like my dream-impression of you. Perhaps by now Vilas has already been to see you and my friend Ms Sonia Dyne must have met you. When during her recent visit to the Ashram I showed her the TLS review of Temenos she was very indignant and even thought of writing a letter of protest to the editor. I hope she brought her daughter Eira along with her to your place. Ms Dyne is one of the finest, most cultured, most generous and deeply poetic persons I have come across. If Vilas shows you the Video she filmed here you will both see and hear me and, in the course of reminiscences of various kinds, get into the secret of the one infallible system of winning at Races! A horse-lover and especially a horse-rider (at one time) could scarcely be expected not to revel in the glorious pageant of godlike gallopers that the racing season in Bombay used to make available to him.

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The article you have asked from me is dragging its feet. I have covered 12 double-spaced typed sheets so far but the theme and the treatment don't seem to get their self-identity quite clearly and confidently yet. This may be because I have a lot of work on my hands which keeps interrupting the article and prevents it from shaping naturally towards the full deliverance of its many-levelled vision. Please don't delay Temenos 10 because of it. Perhaps it is not meant for it but for Temenos II. By the way, what made you think the current year marks Sri Aurobindo's centenary year? Sri Aurobindo was born on August 15. 1872. His 75th birthday got declared most significantly - thanks to Lord Mount-batten's blind intuition spurred by his memory of Japan's surrender in World War II - as India's Day of Independence. A seal appeared to be set on the political work, during his early career, of one who was the first to formulate total independence as the ideal of his country's fight against British rule. A deeper seal may be seen in the fact that Sri Aurobindo wanted free India to be the centre of a new era of spirituality with

A Mind unvisited by illusion's gleams.

A Will expressive of soul's deity,

A Strength not forced to stumble by its speed,

A Joy that drags not sorrow as its shade.

(10.7.1988)

From Kathleen Raine

Now that I know you are so much my senior I must treat you with added respect! My oldest friend is Marco Pallis, the Buddhist and musician, who is 92 and makes me feel positively young! I intend to make my great age a pretext for not doing what I don't want to do, and shall otherwise continue as before. I hope to see twelve issues of Temenos, then I shall discontinue, even if I'm still here. Twelve is a

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sacred number, I'm told by Keith Critchlow and other mathematical friends, more so than ten. So if your paper does not arrive in time for T. 10 it shall go into the eleventh issue. But there is still time, should inspiration flow. It is a most important theme. I don't know what gave me the idea that this was an Aurobindo special year of some kind. Like you, I have no head for numbers, but I can't have invented such a concrete piece of information, something must have put it into my head. I too could never do addition and subtraction and multiplication and division, but I remember vividly that once I came top of the form at the end of term examination in geometry, at which the rest of the class laughed and cheered! But I feel I could understand geometry were 1 to start again - it has great beauty. Too late now.

I much enjoyed the visits of Dr. Indra, and then Vilas Patel, who unfortunately was not able to bring Mrs. Dyne, with whom I had a longish telephone conversation. Apropos her daughter's piece on Coleridge, we agreed that a new University is needed - evidently you at Pondicherry are giving true education, and something of the kind is needed here, and there is a project brewing for a small private University, possibly in the school building of Dartington Hall - the school has been closed - which was as you know a companion foundation with Santiniketan. It is urgently needed here to send out a few prepared educators to combat the miseducation of both schools and universities - Oxford and Cambridge not least - as these are now totally (or almost) in the hands of the secular materialist world. Many people would like to see a change, and it has to begin somewhere. Weekends and occasional lectures are not enough, it should be a two-year course. We could probably supply an excellent staff from contributors to Temenos, some of whom are themselves discontented academics. The idea was fortified from our recent visit to India, of which you know. Keith Critchlow and Satish Kumar and John Lane were there, and are all implicated. The proposal came from

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Satish, who having as a youth spent eight years as a Jain monk is a good hand with a begging-bowl and thinks funds could be forthcoming.

To come to the foul play of the heroes of the Mahabharata, it's a question that comes up towards the end of every war, surely, and if the Dharmaraja is allowed to tell a lie (about the death of Drona's son Aswatthama) at what point does he forfeit the right to be called King Dharma? I think of the last world-war when Churchill ordered the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima. Of course the Jesuits said (or were said to have said) that 'the end justifies the means' but once war is engaged foul play is certain, and vengeful atrocities. Prof. P. Lal gave me his translation of the Bhagavad Geeta, and he thinks Arjuna was quite right not to want to slay the heroes of both sides, to see all his family wiped out in a war. I was interested to read that point of view from an Indian scholar; but Mahatma Gandhi might arguably be seen as an avatar of a new age? His nonviolence won the respect of the whole world and even though wars go on no one now glories in them (as in 1914-18 I remember it was). But of course it is true that the Lord Krishna did his best to prevent a conflict, A belief in reincarnation also makes the classical position more acceptable - after all even Duryodhana reached the heavenly world on account of his bravery in battle. (I hope by the way that the text of Peter Brook's version has now reached you?) But right action is in this world like walking blindfold for (that too is in the Geeta) in this world we know neither the beginning nor the end of things. Meanwhile 1 am still working my way through my bad American translation, and not without reward. In the wonderful section about the Pandavas in the Himalayas I have just read the marvellous meeting of Bhima with Hanuman. And Hanuman's account of the Four Yugas, in each of which one-quarter of the whole of reality is lost. It certainly feels as if we are living only in a quarter of reality. Blake had the same view of course, 'single vision and Newton's sleep' but the successive

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loss of a quarter I had not previously seen set forth. Plato, Cabbala, Swedenborg, all know of the four 'worlds'. Perhaps we are beginning the reascent - Sri Aurobindo would presumably have taken this view. As these things (coincidences) happen, I am reading a book by a psychical researcher and doctor, Mary Scott, who points out how little of ourselves we know, or of our world - that is 'we' as a materialist society - and she cites Sri Aurobindo as an exponent of Tantra rather than Vedanta, She goes at great length into the Tantric account of the 'sheaths' and the chakras - she has also written a book on these. I don't think it is any longer questioned, least of all among physicists, that naive materialism is an untenable view. And next on my list is another long book, sent me by Aravinda, on Sri Aurobindo's social and political thought. I have just realised where I got the wrong idea that this was a centenary year -the book is a centenary volume, but that was, as you say, 1972. Such is old age (you see I am using that good excuse!).

I never thought of maya in a negative sense; as I suppose the Buddhists do. Rather I see this world as a perpetual epiphany - theophany. Not to see it so is perhaps maya? To see the world, as Traherne says, 'aright' is to see its divine radiance. The via negativa could never hold me, loving the natural world as I do. I hope you are right about a 'supermind epiphany'.

Of course the horse is to be seen everywhere in Indian art and folk-art, and the 'horse-sacrifice' is in the ancient stories. The horse (or mare) is also to be found in Celtic mythology - do you know Vernon Watkins' fine 'Ballad of the Mari Lwyd'? And in the West highlands of Scotland 'water-horses' are believed in to this day - like the steeds of Poseidon they emerge from the water, and sometimes befriend farmers by pulling their plows. But on the whole the "white horse" is associated with death, I suppose from the Book of Revelation, but water-horses certainly don't come from the Bible. Nor the Mari whose skull is carried round the Welsh village (or until recently was) asking

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riddles. 1 just had not associated you with riding before an army, riding to hounds, or the like. Nor of course do 1 suppose you did, nor polo I imagine! My father too loved horses dearly, though he never placed a bet in his long life.

To return to the loss of three quarters, one does, I find, in old age, become more aware of surrounding presences beyond the visible and audible spectrum. Often a friend - or my daughter - will telephone just as I was about to do so, or a letter come - nothing so concrete as your experience of the TLS and the comb when I appeared in your room, but more than coincidence, and 1 know that there are many more psychically gifted than I - mediums and healers, not to mention advanced spiritual people. When I was in Southern Arizona where friends took me to visit the Hopi Indians, the village head-man (whose mother had been a seer) told us that there will be seven ages of the world, and that this is the fourth and lowest. Here and there, he said, the fifth world is beginning to appear, and that is the turn upwards again to repossess what we have lost on the descending gyre. Strange how these things are known to civilizations so far apart, who could never have had contact in the natural way.

Or perhaps you were a horseman sixty years ago? Did you yourself take part in those god-like races?

I've just been reviewing David Gascoyne's collected poems; with the title 'England's last great poet?'. His poetry certainly has prophetic moments.

I look forward to your paper, in due course.

(16.7.1988)

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