I have been a little slack in replying to you, but the procrastination has brought me to a very important day on which to launch my letter. August 15 has for India two far-reaching significances to commemorate. There is the birth of Sri Aurobindo whose fight for freedom was seminal in many respects, not least the first clear-cut demand for total independence, and to whom India's political freedom meant a chance for her to develop without any impediment or distraction a spiritual light for the world. According to him, this light has to gather together all the various past shades and generate the vision of an ultra-violet reaching out to the all-transformative "Supermind" and of an infra-red plunging down to the same archetypal Power waiting secret in Matter to break forth a divine life on earth. Sri Aurobindo's birth on August 15 in 1872 is celebrated today on its 116th anniversary. This is the prime significance of the date in view of India's basic genius of many-lustred spirituality.

Harmoniously along with it comes the 41st anniversary of her rising free of British rule and announcing her freedom, through Nehru's mouth, to the world in the very language of her erstwhile rulers, the language which in fact had served her best in her struggle for liberty and which had communicated to her many a modern ideal, one of the chief having been the ideal of national independence and unshackled individuality so dear, according to Wordsworth, to the English-speaking heart:

We must be free or die who speak the tongue

That Shakespeare spake...

And it is most meaningful that the choice of August 15, 1947, a birthday of Sri Aurobindo's, was made for India's Independence not by any Indian but by an Englishman, the last British Viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten.

What gives further suggestiveness to the choice is that Mountbatten picked out August 15 because two years earlier that date had seen the end of World War II with the surrender of Japan to him, the war which Sri Aurobindo had singled out as a crucial confrontation between forces controlled from behind the scene by preternatural anti-divine beings and those which, for all their defects, were on the side of the Gods helping the evolving soul of the world

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towards a future of non-regimented diversified depth-expressive unity.

Openly Sri Aurobindo supported the Allied Cause despite the British component in it which had been responsible for the foreign imperialist yoke in India. There was a lot of criticism in our country: "Why is a spiritual figure participating in what is apparently a clash of titan Egos bent on their own interests and aggrandisements? Should he not keep apart as an impartially disapproving Witness instead of favouring by both downright word and financial contribution a contesting party which includes India's own alien masters?" For Sri Aurobindo to keep apart would have meant in a super-Keatsian sense

Standing aloof in giant ignorance.

It was precisely because he possessed a mighty spiritual knowledge of unseen things instead of being totally in the dark about what was below the surface that Sri Aurobindo, along with the Mother, declared that fundamentally this war was theirs and not merely a conflict of the Western democracies with Nazi Germany and fascist Italy and, towards the concluding period, militarist Japan. For the work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother was for a new spiritualised earth building dynamically a greater beauty of the visible and the concrete, a tangible progressive embodiment of the Divine and not just a flight of the Inner to the Higher, leaving the Outer to the poor devices of a groping and stumbling mind. A victory of the totalitarian powers would have spelled a tremendous setback to the Vita Nuova that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were striving to realise for the earth.

Thus from various points of view today, to which my delay has led my reply to you, is the recurrence of an occasion of multiple momentousness. You should be proud and happy that I have kept you waiting!

My mention of Japan's surrender, signalling the end of World War II, brings me to your reference to Churchill in

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connection with the order to drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima. There's a slip here on your part. The atom bomb was made by America and it was dropped by the order of Truman, not Churchill, though it had the approval of Churchill - and not only Churchill but also Stalin who had been told at Potsdam about its getting ready to be dropped. You have also implied that its use was an example of the "foul play and vengeful atrocities" unavoidable once war is engaged. I think you have not been fully informed of the circumstances of its creation and its use. It has been hotly discussed time and again, mostly with a condemnatory attitude, and its use has even been compared to what was done in the Nazi concentration camps, Hitler's holocaust of six million Jews. In the East one has also heard that it was tried out against Japan because Japan is an oriental country: the suggestion is that it would never have been dropped on Western people. May I briefly set right the main misconceptions?

Einstein's famous letter to Roosevelt to develop the bomb stated explicitly that strong rumour had come of Nazi Germany being busy with experiments to make an atom bomb. The dreadful weapon was made by the U.S.A. specifically to forestall Hitler. After the war it was discovered that Hitler had been pushing every bit of government money towards the manufacture of long-range guns, anti-aircraft and small cannon. So the scientists researching in nuclear energy and wishing to utilise the uranium-supplies from Czechoslovakia received little help. There is no doubt that if Germany had not surrendered on May 7, 1945, the threat of atomic destruction would have been levelled at her as soon as the first experimental bomb was exploded in the New Mexican Desert on July 16. The threat was diverted to Japan when it was reported in the summer of 1945 that in spite of reverses she was in no mind to make peace and had more than two million soldiers and thirty million citizens prepared to die rather than be dishonoured by surrendering. A grandly suicidal mentality was here, but it involved also

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the possibility of great losses on the American side if the war was allowed to continue in the teeth of America coming into possession of a super-weapon which might terminate the war. Even so, in late July a warning was issued to Japan from Potsdam where Truman, Churchill and Stalin had conferred. Radio Tokyo broadcast that the Japanese government would treat with "silent contempt" any call for "unconditional surrender", It was then resolved to bring the atom bomb into action in order to avoid the huge toll of American lives which the plan of invading the Japanese homeland would involve. One may add that even Japanese casualties might have been more than the results of the attack on Hiroshima. It had been calculated that in the event of an invasion of the Japanese islands the probable casualties would be half a million Americans out of an invasion force of five million, and ten million Japanese from the combined effects of battle, bombing and starvation. The cumulative effect of the bombing of both Hiroshima and, three days later, Nagasaki was over 100,000 people killed outright, a further 100,000 horribly maimed and over 200,000 left homeless. By 1950, the additional count of those who, without knowing it, were mortally sick with radiation disease, brought the total number of casualties directly attributable to the double bombing to 300,000, about half the population of the two cities combined. Even so, the loss of life was much less than the certain deaths in the wake of a non-atomic invasion. As for American deaths, whatever the possible smaller number than the half million calculated, once the bomb was available its employment was imperative for the American government. Shirking the use of the atom bomb, how could Truman have explained his choice to the families of the soldiers who in whatever numbers would subsequently have died? How could he have excused the continuation of the war at their expense when he had a weapon to bring about a swift end? I don't believe we can stigmatise the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as "foul play and vengeful atrocities".

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Only two questions may be raised: "Why was Nagasaki bombed in the same way when it had been thought that the bombing of Hiroshima would suffice? How can a weapon with such a catastrophic radiation effect be humanly justified?" Both the questions admit of easy answers. In relation to Nagasaki, there was the enemy's mentality to be reckoned with. The doggedness with which the Japanese defended Okinawa was a lesson to the Americans: they inflicted 50,000 casualties and themselves lost 110,000 dead. Every Japanese was a potential Kamikaze pilot, sworn to be suicidal in the defence of the Japanese cause. The idea of surrender under known conditions of warfare was impossible. An analogy from Okinawa is not just the American view. Kawamoto and most other Japanese today feel that nothing short of a total disaster would have made Japan's military government surrender. Even the terrible casualties of the Hiroshima bombing did not lead her to surrender at once. It took her three days to do so. At last the Japanese Prime Minister told his cabinet: "The only alternative [to being destroyed] is to accept the Potsdam Declaration and terminate the war." But this decision was taken one minute before the Nagasaki bomb was dropped - and therefore too late to prevent this drastic measure to force the hand of an unrelenting enemy. The bombing of Nagasaki was unavoidable. And here I may put down the fact that both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were military targets. Hiroshima, for instance, was serving as a rail-terminus and port, regional army headquarters and a major producer of synthetic oil and industrial war-materials.

As to the difference between accepted means of destruction and the atomic bomb with its catastrophic radiation effect, the simple truth is that nobody knew beforehand how much damage would be inflicted on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There was no conception of its unusually dire consequences. The scientists responsible for its development never stressed that their product might unleash radioactive fall-out that would make it the most sinister weapon imagi-

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nable. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the master-mind of the project, who in the later "witch-hunting" McCarthy era was suspected of Communist sympathies, gave short shrift to those scientists working under him who proposed that this super-destroyer should not be employed. What Truman and his advisers were told was simply that the explosion would be phenomenally large. Naturally they believed that it would be no more morally repellent than the tremendous firebombing of Tokyo. The "conventional" raid on Tokyo on March 9 of the same year had killed 84,000 people and left a million homeless. And this was merely the curtain-raiser to a future offensive which killed or wounded 750,000 Japanese and destroyed the homes of nine million. Such devastation, including the mutilation of civilians, was in keeping with the horrific principle of "total war" which had been accepted by all the parties concerned in World War II. In the minds of Truman and company the question was of degree and not of kind: the atom bomb seemed as legitimate as any other deadly weapon of modern war. When Einstein wrote his letter to Roosevelt and even after the test at Alamogordo this new weapon was considered to be no more than an ultra-efficient explosive. Hence the question of the morality of the American action never arose and could not arise.

When the full awareness of the horror dawned on America with the piecing together of all the reports, she learnt the lesson from them as an unforgettable one. This is shown by her non-use of the bomb and its more dreadful successors ever since. She never even held the overawing weapon as a threat against any nation although she had the monopoly of it until 1949: that is, until the formulas stolen from her by Russia-inspired spies enabled the Soviet Union to make its own bomb. Clearly the later nuclear programme of the U.S. did not stem from an aggressive motive. It stemmed from a distrust of Russia based on the latter's moves in Eastern Europe soon after World War II. At present, thanks to the profound inspiration of Gorbachev,

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the distrust is fading as also the long-standing Russian suspicion of capitalist scheming by the U.S.A. I see here the first turn in world-affairs towards the future which Sri Aurobindo has foreseen. I remember referring to it thirty-seven years ago when you had written to me of "the destroyers" who are our masters today, and you had asked: "How much longer will this world itself last?" I had reminded you that the nuclear age is also the age of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. I wrote: "I, small and insignificant in myself but blessed with the rare good fortune of having known Sri Aurobindo and the Mother intimately for years, make bold to assure you that all shall be well with the world these two have made their home and that in spite of the menacing destroyers you may gaze tranquilly into the future, for the future will never be theirs." Harking back to a line of yours which I had quoted at the start of my letter -

This world you with the flower and the tiger share -

1 continued: "I do not prophesy that everything will be smooth and safe in a short while. The time of a turning-point in evolution is never a comfortable one, to say the least; but - also to put it mildly - a turning-point that leads the Supermind in cannot result in the 'tiger' preventing the 'flower' from sharing 'this world' in which you find yourself."

I am digressing from our theme of Hiroshima. Let me wind up my long discussion by asking you not to regard the dropping of the first atom bomb as merely a matter of the end justifying the means, as you opine. The means was as legitimate as the end. The use of it cannot be equated to Hitler's atrocities at Belsen, Dachau, Auschwitz and other centres of systematic genocide. There was no pursuit of atomic bombing as there was of "the final solution" - the persistent multiple murder of non-combatant Jews as a matter of policy. The latter stands in a category of its own, with neither the means nor the end justifiable.

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In passing, you have alluded to the Jesuits as having "said (or were said to have said) that 'the end justifies the means'." Poor Jesuits! all kinds of iniquities are charged to them. Maybe some Jesuits in the pastdid employ foul means to secure religious ends which they considered most worthy, but what is generally attributed to them is a sheer travesty of the motto 1 used to find on the labels stuck by the European Fathers of St. Xavier's School in Bombay to the prize books I would earn year after year in English Composition or History or Latin. The motto ran: "In omnibus respice finem" The translation simply is: "In everything look at the end." I take it to signify: "Don't judge anything in mid-career. See how it finally turns out. A man may approach great things with small steps. One may falter on the way and yet arrive at a glorious goal. Little deeds may sum up to a memorable achievement," For the motto to mean that one could commit any crime in the name of an ideal would be the height of bare-faced cynicism. The Society of Jesus, founded by Ignatius Loyola, would have been condemned at its very inception if it had set out in the name of a saint with so shameless a guide-line. Not that their historical record is all white; far from it. Not only has Voltaire scathed them with his irony: Pascal before him scalded them in his famous Provincial Letters and even the Popes have repeatedly condemned them (1710, 1715, 1742, 1745). Their Order was dissolved several times, but they somehow came up fighting and rendered signal services to the Church and proved most proficient educationists. In any case, for all the skill and ingenuity and even cunning with which they managed their own revivals, nobody can show that they ever advocated evil means as a defensible path to reach an end which may be deemed good.

Touching on the Mahabharata, you have asked: "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?" It is true that Yudhisthira let Drona believe his son was dead, but the Mahabharata

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depicts this circumstance with greater subtlety than your words suggest. Take the whole complex of events in proper significant sequence. First is the fact of Drona harassing the Pandavas with a divine "astra", a weapon not permissible in a conflict among Kshatriyas. Krishna emphasises the unfairness of the fighting and declares that an unfair counter can be made to it. He tells his comrades that if somehow Drona can be led to believe that his son has died he will drop his illegitimate weapon and get killed or else the Pandavas, the upholders of Dharma at whose head is the greatest of Dharmic men, Yudhisthira, would be wiped out. Now there happens to be an elephant who bears the same name as Drona's son. Bhima slays this elephant so that one may truthfully announce that Aswatthama is dead. The announcement as composed of words will be true but its sense will be false. Knowing its double nature Bhima, "with shame suffusing his face" exclaims to Drona: "Aswatthama is dead." Drona is upset and feels faint, yet he fights on. He will cease only if he hears the news from the lips of Yudhisthira who has never told a lie. Drona turns to Dharmaraja. Krishna has already anticipated this emergency and has put before Yudhisthira the fact that if the false suggestion does not come from his ever-truthful lips the Pandava army will be decimated. He has also assured him that the suggestion will not cling to him like a sin. So Yudhisthira has been made ready. Now mark what exactly is exchanged between Drona and him. Drona asks: "My child, I want you to tell me if it is true that my son has died." Yudhisthira answers: "Aswatthama is dead," and softly adds, "The elephant called Aswatthama." Yudhisthira has not only uttered a verbal truth: he has expressed the true sense as well, though in a whisper which Drona is too distraught to hear. The Mahabharata has brought out a subtle shade in the falsehood which converts what would otherwise be a direct lie into that delicate hoverer between straight truth and straight falsehood: equivocation - and a special one too with a slight tilt towards the former. The

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poet Vyasa has too clear a mind to deny that something wrong is done by his paragon. So he says: "The chariot of Yudhisthira which was always four inches above the ground because of his dharma, touches the" earth as soon as those words are spoken. He is now like any other mortal." But with his psychological fineness of perception Vyasa has depicted the paradox of dharma's essence surviving dharma's loss of existence. We have to remember also Krishna's persuasion of Yudhisthira: "You have to deceive Drona for the sake of saving your army, a vast multitude of men."

1 am amazed at Prof. P. Lai thinking "Arjuna was quite right not to want to slay the heroes of both sides, to see all his family wiped out in a war." First of all, Arjuna was asked to fight the Kauravas, the heroes ranged against the side of the Pandavas. Only a part of his family was to be wiped out by him. And Krishna explains to him at great length and from various angles the necessity of the drastic action. And, over and above the socio-political need, the Divine Charioteer seeks to instil the high spiritual mood in which the mighty work has to be done. The Gita is not just a call to war, however righteous: it is a call to a many-aspected Yoga which is not after a static realisation alone but combines an unalterable inner poise of peace and a dynamic identity with the Divine Will at work in the world, work which at times may involve actual conflicts demanding difficult decisions. How could Lal have translated the Gita without entering into its spirit? He is a good translator as a rule but to do justice to spiritual writings one has to catch their inner afflatus and empathise with their supra-intellectual vision. You have referred to Mahatma Gandhi in the Lai-context. His doctrine of Non-violence is a commendable one, but in certain circumstances it has no validity. Thus Gandhi, during the Battle for Britain when the Luftwaffe was pounding the country and preparing the way for an all-out invasion by Hitler's armies, advised England to practise non-violence, submit to Hitler, welcome him and thereby

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melt his heart. He had no insight into the Rakshasik Force that was making Hitler its instrument. As all occultists know, the Rakshasa, the Asura, the Pisacha, by their "typal", non-evolutionary nature, cannot be mended: they have to be ended. The British in India, for all their superior airs and occasional brutality, were manifesting human traits gone awry: they could be touched by non-violence, though even they at times required to be tackled differently, and basically it was a change in world-conditions and in Britain's own fortunes that created the ground for India's independence. And unlike the Nazis quite a number of Englishmen had a mind of their own: they were themselves in favour of India's freedom. There is a time for non-violence and there is a time for active resistance. All efforts should be made, as by Krishna, for a peaceful solution, but, when they fail, a call to arms is inevitable if mankind is to progress. Extreme adherence to the Gandhian line would be a backward step. Of course, the ideal would be to fight after one has fought with one's own common nature and got in touch with one's deepest self which is in contact with the Infinite, the Eternal who is the world's Lord and Lover. In short, to follow the light which is shed by Avatars like Krishna and in scriptures like the Gita.

Reference to Krishna and the Gita is an appropriate approach to the theme of the Kaliyuga on which you have made interesting comments. According to tradition, the Kaliyuga came the moment Krishna's "lotus-feet" left the earth. The message of the Gita is, therefore, the last spiritual summons to us from the pre-Kali epoch. I am not speaking of the historical date of this scripture. Whatever that may be, spiritual tradition has to look on it in this manner. And I should think that no other scripture has hailed from the past with so comprehensive and synthetising a revelation of the secrets of Reality. The vision of the successive loss of a quarter of Reality with the series of the four yugas is an old Indian insight. One version speaks of a cow originally standing on her four legs but with the passing

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of each yuga losing one of them until in the Kali she is precariously poised on a single leg. We may consider the Gita's threefold message - Karma, Jnana, Bhakti - as supplying the spiritual support in"an epoch in which the Time-cow has lost three of its upholding limbs. How shall we understand the occult import of the last of these limbs? A fancy of mine has it that the Gita itself provides the answer. What is its culminating word? The triple path of Work, Knowledge and Devotion has been elucidated and a varied disclosure of Divinity has been given to Arjuna by Krishna, including the apocalypse of the World-Form and the Time-Spirit where we have those phrases which occurred to Oppenheimer during the experimental explosion at Alamo-gordo, "Such is the light of this body of God as if a thousand suns had risen at once in heaven". Now in the last chapter the Divine Charioteer prepares the final revelation by telling the disciple: "Further hear the most secret, the supreme word that I shall speak to thee..." Then the great secret is voiced: "Abandon all dharmas and take refuge in Me alone, I will deliver thee from all sin and evil, do not grieve" (XVIII.66). This seems at first sight a somersault of a statement. Hasn't Krishna declared the Avatar's role to be the restoration of dharma in a time of its decline? What then does he mean now? He has also insisted on a man following his own nature's dharma instead of trying to foist a foreign one on himself. What does he intend now? I believe we have to attend to the plural number used: "all dharmas". There is, as every student of Hinduism knows, a dharma that is sanatana, "eternal". Surely there should be no abandonment of that. What is to be abandoned is the multitude of norms that spring up from time to time according to occasions. These norms are called "dharmas of the heart", the promptings of the surface being, the common natural reactions or responses to particular situations, and they depend also on the psychological state of an individual, like the state of Arjuna when he saw the unpleasant work he was asked to do as a protagonist of the Pandavas against the

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Kauravas - the state in which his heart prompted him to refuse to fight. An additional nuance of temporary or occasional dharmas relates to certain conventions of an age: these conventions may be passing social conveniences or legal technicalities. A further shade would refer to the outer trappings of religion - its observances, rituals, customary practices. To be told to transcend such dharmas would not contradict the clinging to what the Avatar periodically comes for in order to maintain terrestrial harmony. But I would go a step beyond, I would say that along with asking Arjuna to relinquish such non-eternal dharmas, Krishna has a still deeper command. It is as though he were laying bare to Arjuna an inner spiritual movement which, if resorted to with absolute intensity, would bring in a single blaze the luminous results of the triple path already set forth. Work, Knowledge, Devotion would yield their superhuman sense spontaneously, without involving their special disciplines, by means of an all-compassing self-surrender to the Divine -the will fused with Him, the thoughts plunged into Him, the emotions rapt by Him through one sustained sweeping soul-gesture. This is how in the Kaliyuga the God-seeker can make the Cow of existence afford to lose all its legs except one, the last remaining limb concentrating in itself the strength of the other three and giving them a new energy of simplified significance going straight to the spiritual mark.

My somewhat complex attempt to read in the apparent negatives of the Kaliyuga a hidden positiveness seems to find support in an insight of Sri Aurobindo's apropos of the idea that from aeon to aeon God "manifests himself in an ever-evolving humanity which grows in experience by a series of expansions and contractions towards its destined self-realisation in God". Sri Aurobindo comments: "That evolution is not denied by the Hindu theory of Yugas. Each age in the Hindu system has its own line of moral and spiritual evolution, and the decline of the dharma or established law of conduct from the Satya to the Kaliyuga is not in reality a deterioration but a detrition of the outward

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forms and props of spirituality in order to prepare a deeper spiritual intensity within the heart. In each Kaliyuga mankind gains something in essential spirituality. Whether we take the modern scientific or the ancient Hindu standpoint the progress of humanity is a fact. The wheel of Brahma rotates for ever but it does not turn in the same place; its rotations carry it forward."

The psychical researcher and doctor Mary Scott is both right and wrong. I remember a statement of Sri Aurobindo to the effect that his Yoga does Tantra through Vedanta - a paradox at first sight. In Tantra the subtle centres - the chakras - are sought to be activated by the rising up of the coiled "Serpent Power", the Kundalini, at the base of the subtle-physical body's spine, to which the tail-end of our gross material body's spinal cord corresponds. The Shakti. the Mother-Force, in its course towards the top of the head, activates the chakras. The body, both subtle and gross, is the field of experiment. Sri Aurobindo's Yoga is Tantric in the general sense that it takes the body into its scope and in the particular sense that it calls upon the Mother-Force, the Shakti, to work on the body. But it is Vedantic because all the experiences compassed by the Vedanta are included so that the whole system undergoes purification and the consciousness undergoes a profound peace and there is an invocation of the Divine who is above the mental level together with the Divine who is deep within and the Divine who is universally around - but in as much as this Divine is figured as the Supreme Mother one with the Supreme Lord we get again a strong Tantric stress except that the Divine Mother works from above downward and not from below upward to open the Yogi's consciousness to the hidden potentialities of his embodied being. The push upward from below is not ruled out: indeed no occult or spiritual discovery of the past is neglected, all is drawn into a wide unifying scheme to bring about in diverse ways the development of the inner self and the permeation of the outer self by the light from within and above.

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I am glad Celtic mythology lets loose wonderful horses into the English imagination. I have read a bit of Vernon Watkins but not come across his "Ballad of the Mari Lwyd". I have enjoyed Chesterton's "Ballad of the White Horse" but no actual white horse takes part in the story: only the location of the tale is indicated by that name. It's sad that so fine a symbol spells only "death" for the Christian mind. Down from the Rigvedic Dadhikravan through the Puranic animal on which the last Avatar Kalki is figured as riding onto earth to establish the Golden Age - down from hoary antiquity to the time of KDS the equus has played a spiritually suggestive part. As you know, KDS has several poems on his favourite quadruped. As your father loved horses dearly, perhaps you will enjoy reading one of my pieces which might have gripped your father's fancy though I am afraid his more esoterically-minded daughter would have had to run a commentary to him at certain places.

White Stallion

White stallion champing the barley

Of silent bliss -Gathering into thy heart's

Vermillion abyss

A power outrunning time,

As if to a witching west Out of a wizard east

Racing were one with rest,

A calm that suddenly views

Here grown to There, A wide-awake sleep devouring

Aeons with a single stare!

Fastest of all the flames

Born of the Cave beyond sight,

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Bringing on starlike nostrils

Neigh after neigh for night -

Carrier of immortality" Between blue wings,

Yet hooved with a hurry to spurn Imperishable things -

On all the tracks of truth

Speed without peer, Yet unappeased by winning

God's Derby every year!

O never-ageing stallion,

Down to lean-breasted earth

Thou comest like a lover

Through the low gate of birth,

Renouncing the vast triumphs, Graciously gone to stud

For mixing nameless nectar

With sobbing mortal blood!

Alone among the godheads Thy soul was never drunk

With self-infinitudes,

But saw the Den far-sunk

Where weak yet restive fetlocks Were secrets without keys.

Unknowing why for all the weakness The running would not cease -

Why the dim quiver of fatigue Was a tremble of blind joy

As if behind the fallen ears

There rose a heavenly "Hoy!"

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Thou on thy thunderous hill

Couldst hear the strange despair

In those four tottering mysteries Of the black-bodied mare.

Many a groping steed

Sought her for dam Of darkling colts and fillies,

But like an oriflamme

The mane on her neck of night Fluttered to a wind of dream,

And never from her heart ran forth The future's shadowy stream.

But now the lives to come

Take singing start In the crimson distances

Of the deep heart.

The laugh of the mountain Cave,

The sigh of the Den below Have married their mystic sounds:

Their children shall grow

A wonder-dappled pack,

Love's rich surprise Even to the gaze of grandeur

That is paradise!

Let me not tire you with further poetry or prose. But my impression of you is that you are an indefatigable reader. Recently you wrote to me that you were going through Raja Rao's Chessmaster and His Moves, which, I believe, is quite a mass (or mess?) of fiction-shot philosophy and a display of multi-lingual would-be wisdom, Greek and Latin and French rubbing shoulders with English, the latter being for

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all I know deliberately Indianised. The fifty-fifth anniversary of your twenty-fifth birthday - if I may discreetly refer to your latest birthday, since a woman never admits growing beyond 25 - has not affected the infinite variety of your interest in reading matter. Nor has it dammed in any manner the energy with which you have indulged the cacoethes scribendi with which you were born. I hear that you are busy with a new volume of your autobiography. Or has it already come out? I have read with great admiration and fascination the three earlier volumes. Some other members of the Ashram have also shared your ecstasies and agonies. I am glad that the increase of years has sensitised you more to subtle presences and who knows you may come to feel them in themselves in addition to feeling them as transfigured tree and house and star as hinted in the two lines of your verse I quoted some months back to you.

Alas! the Brook which left its "haunts of coot and hern" has not yet been able "to join the brimming river" of my daily post.

(15.8.1988)

From Kathleen Raine

Some time ago I made this copy for you of one of Vernon Watkins's poems about horses - his best-known poem as I think 1 wrote you is The Ballad of the Mari Lwyd - the ballad of the living and the dead, the dead led by a mare's skull adorned with ribbons etc. The mimers came to every door in the village seeking admittance, with a rhyming contest (in Welsh) and his Ballad is a wonderful poem in the form of this contest. I believe it is now extinct in Wales, but was still a living tradition when Vernon was writing. The Ballad is too long to make a photocopy. 1 send the poem on the opposite page as well because I know you will recognise that this is true poetry of a very high order. Brian Keeble of the Golgonooza Press recently published Vernon's Collected Poems, disregarded, need I say, by our Sunday Paper

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culture. You will at least appreciate his use of language and verse-forms. He was of my generation but died twenty years ago. A better - more profound - poet than Dylan Thomas, his friend, I would maintain. There is a section and a review of his work in Temenos 8, if you have it.

Proofs of T. 10 are coming through now - or would be but for the present postal strike. I hope they come soon since I'll be leaving for New York and Massachusetts - the pretext is an invitation to lecture and read poems but the real reason is because I want to see my dear American friends once more. I owe much to that country whose politics are so endangering to world-peace, but where there are so many marvellous people. England is still (or again) 'sunk in deadly sleep' as it was in Blake's day. No wonder our national archetype is King Arthur, who is said to sleep in a number of different places, awaiting his call to return, America is more alive.

I do hope to have a paper from you to go into our eleventh issue, for the theme of the different levels from which poetry derives and which resonate within it is not only important in itself, but the least understood aspect of poetry in this materialist country at this time. Not that we will change the attitude of 'the literary world' but here and there one finds a reaction, a stirring in the grass-roots of another understanding. Or at least a search, a dissatisfaction with the dull, dreary positivism currently in fashion, in a number of groups and communities, Sufi or Buddhist or many inspired of course by India.

Your interesting letter about the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima, on Yudhisthira's prevarication about 'Aswatthama', and the ethics of war raises questions I cannot answer. I only know that my own instincts are all against war of whatever kind, yet I see that the Lord Krishna answered Arjuna, and the Great Battle is eternal, it seems to be a part of the destiny of this earth. I suppose I would see it as Blake does, that Governments seek to promote natural and depress 'spiritual wars'. In the Spiritual War we are all engaged, and I am myself much in the front line here in

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England - Blake's war, and all our war of the eternal against the temporal truths. As for Yudhisthira, Blake wrote,

A truth that's told with bad intent

Beats all the lies you can invent.

You would say, the intent of Yudhisthira's lie was not 'bad' since he stood for Dharma against Adharma, but all the same, once a war is engaged, both sides believing they represent dharma, all standards are apt to break down, as with Hiroshima. I do believe that we had to wage the last war against Hitler and the genocide of the Jews in the cause of dharma, but Hiroshima seems to have (as I feel it) gone beyond what any dharmaraja would be justified in allowing. Your knowledge of the sequence of events is more accurate than mine. I speak, in a feminine manner, simply on instinct: When that bomb was dropped, an irrevocable step towards the nihil was taken. You in India take long views and I hope your faith in 'evolution' may be justified; but having reached that section in my bad American translation of the Mahabharata where the last phase of the kali-yuga is described, I wonder if that is not where we are. Would that Kalki, the Second Coming of the Lord Jesus, etc., be at hand. But 'what rough beast/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?'. Yet how wonderful this world is, how rich, 'O brave new world that has such people in it'. I have known so many wonderful people, many faces of the one Face whom I have loved. Of course if - or must I say since - Spirit is indestructible, all must pass, yet nothing can be destroyed finally in our mock-battles here in 'the world of generation'. So Blake would have seen it, yet how grieved and indignant he was at the wars of his day and the slaughter of armies of young men, the crimes of power against the 'meek' who will 'inherit the earth'. But these things you know as well as I. I don't exactly despair but I don't see how we can go on as we are without destroying this earth. First the seals began to die in our waters, and now the beautiful dolphins are dying. It is

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all too close to our Christian Book of Revelation, apocalypse is in our daily news-bulletins and no one stops the destructive course. But there are, as I've said, little groups here and there, grass-roots seekers for a different reality.

I've now at last finished a fourth volume of my life. No volume about any life could be conclusive but mine ends with my 'passage to India'. The India, that is, of the Imagination. Here I must stop, there is much to be done before I leave for U.S.A. Then our Temenos conference in October. There will be twelve issues. I still wish Arabinda would send me something on Indian music but I don't suppose he will. However, I've just had a letter from him, which is very nice, I used to see him much more often than of late since he began to jet round the world at such a speed. Please give him my love and tell him I'm just ready to attack the book he sent me.

I hope you like the Vernon Watkins poems.

(4.9.1988)

From K. D. Sethna

Please forgive me for being a little slack in replying. I received at last the Mahabharata play and find it fascinating. Thank you very much. I have been an admirer of Vernon Watkins, but what I like more in him is the Yeatsian side and not the side that has an affinity to Dylan Thomas. Thomas has a spontaneous picturesque strangely suggestive verbiage which is not easy to echo. Even he himself often falls short of his best moments of a medley of colour and sound. In those moments unforgettable thoughts are caught from the images and rhythms that are running away: there is no attempt to think or work out a theme - in fact the thoughts that arise are vague and, though they linger in our minds, we cannot define them apart from the singing stream upon which they have arrived to us. Watkins is more mental than Thomas and tries consciously to call forth the Dylan-effect. Sometimes he strikes out a mysterious beauty to

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which something in our depths resonates:

Darkness is not dark, nor sunlight the light of the sun

But a double journey of insistent silver hooves

And he slips from that mother to the boundless

horizons of air

Looking for that other, the foal no longer there.

But often the poet seems to be contriving the Dylan-effect. His Yeatsian contrivances seem to me more successful:

Blake, on the world alighting, holds the skies,

And all the stars shine down through human eyes -

Beggar of those Minute Particulars,

Yeats lights again the turmoil of the stars.

But he is at his best when he catches a spark of the Yeatsian grey matter into which an intuitive flash has fallen and the result is verse that is simple and direct and yet profoundly cunning with "the artifice of eternity". I remember your writing to me that he is the finest heir of Yeats. I don't have Temenos 8 where a review of his poetic work appears. In fact I have had access to only two numbers of Temenos - one of them was sent by you, containing your article on Kabir and Yeats and Radice's splendid translations of Tagore.

I am interested to learn of your coming visit to America. You speak enthusiastically about the people there, but when I mentioned Thomas R. Whitaker's Swan and Shadow as having been hailed as "the greatest book yet written on Yeats's poetry" you were openly sarcastic, holding that no American could ever write anything worthwhile on poetry

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like Yeats's. When you are in the States, try to take a look at this book and let me know your considered opinion.

Apropos of Hiroshima you have developed a heroic pessimism. But surely you have seen the recent moves of Gorbachev in conjunction with Reagan. A definite turn has taken place towards the future envisaged by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. They knew very well - and much better than anyone else, since they had spiritual insight - how dangerous the times have been and still they held out glowing hopes for the future. By the very logic of evolution the Supermind is inevitable. When the Kali Age is ending or has ended - as I believe - there is a terrible period in which all the hidden evil comes out or is drawn out in order to be dealt with by the divine forces. We have been passing through this period and now the first signs of God's dawn are faintly visible. We may have a fairly long wait but the result is sure:

Streak on gold streak wounding the illusive night.

When Sri Aurobindo has appeared in our world, there can never be what you deem "an irrevocable step towards the nihil". Behind the dark look of things there is preparing, however gradually, the irreversible step towards the Plenum. The Shakespearian phrase you have used "O brave new world that has such people in it" - has a deeper and wider significance than you imagine. Of course our earth is full of wonderful people - as you say, "many faces of the one Face whom I have loved" - but what you are referring to is the brave old and not new world. The really new world towards which the finger of Sri Aurobindo is pointing will show the Divine directly shining through the human, a straight revelation of the One Face of many faces. Be sure that a Shakespeare of the future will vision not time's "dark backward and abysm" but its bright forward and empyrean. And a hint or glint of what is to be may be glimpsed in the dreams and desires of those whom even your Jeremiah

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mood cannot help noticing: "little groups here and there, grass-roots seekers for a different reality", in whose midst there is undoubtedly that part of you which is "much in the front line" of "the Spiritual War... of the eternal against the temporal truths".

It's indeed good news that you have at last finished a fourth volume of your life-story. When you say that it ends with your "passage to India" - the India of the Imagination a la Blake - do you not mean that it contains an account of all that your mind has mirrored and your heart echoed of the Mantra-vibrant Light which still persists in our ancient country? Do write to me about the Temenos Conference and your latest impressions of the U.S.A. I'll convey your message to Arabinda Basu.

(24.10.1988)

From Kathleen Raine

It was a pleasure to get your letter, it is a long time since 1 had heard from you, I'm glad the Mahabharata stage version reached you and that you think well of it. Peter Brook did seem to capture the essence of the whole, although of course wonderful incidental things - Savitri and Sakuntala, and the meeting of Bhima with Hanuman and much besides - don't appear. I wonder if it will be performed in India and if so how India will take this internationalization of India's most Indian of epics. My friend Prince Kumar, a descendant of the Udaipur family, told me, quite casually, that his relations had tried to poison him when he was a child and I said 'just like the Mahabharata' and he replied 'They haven't changed!' Something to do with the succession and inheritance of course.

Would you like me to send you Vernon Watkins's Collected Poems, or do you have most of them - your letter suggests you have at least some of the Faber collections. As always your perceptiveness goes straight to the significant detail, and you are very perceptive about Dylan Thomas's

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poems being wonderful but at the same time vague in thought and a blend of delusive verbiage and that singing stream. I don't really think Vernon imitated Dylan, Wales and its language is a common inheritance. I would not say Vernon was more derivative from Dylan than Dylan from him. I would say Vernon was the more complete poet, envisioning as he does the full human range of life and death and rebirth. But will never be popular, he's less dazzling. I'm posting separately a copy of Temenos 8 with Vernon Watkins material and Philip Sherrard's review of him. It also contains material about Peter Brook and the Mahabharata production. Will you let me know if there are other issues of Temenos you would like to have and I'll send them to you. (See leaflet for contents.) And I hope you will let us have your thoughts on Sri Aurobindo's views of The Future Poetry for our eleventh issue - T.10 just going to press now.

1 heard sad news today from my friend Santosh Pal, in Delhi - that Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay has died. She was most generously friendly to me in India, and what a privilege to have known this great uncrowned queen of the new Indian nation. A woman of the theatre, and the arts, a friend of Gandhiji, she is part of history. It will be deeply sad to revisit India without her presence.

America - I have many dear American friends and I find New York intoxicating but frightful, and the woods of New England in the Fall one of the beauties of the world. But it is a totally chaotic society, relationships don't hold, whether of marriage or of family, everything is relative and unstable, and everyone as a matter of course seems to be 'under analysis' with some psychiatrist instead of living their lives properly or even joining the local church choir or reading seriously or otherwise cultivating their gifts. Gandhiji's remark when asked 'what do you think of Western Civilization' seems particularly applicable to U.S.A. at present, 'It would be a good idea'. On the other hand they are open, idealistic, generous, much more so than here - less apathetic, less 'sunk in deadly sleep'. I had a lovely time but it's a

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terrifying thing to think of the power of that great nation being in the hands of such uncouth ignoramuses, and a nation in which 96% of the population lives in these great towering cities and only 4% on the land is another terrifying thought. And yet they are all 'in search of a soul' and those who are not 'under analysis' have some sort of guru, Zen or Indian, or something less reputable, and really want to discover some spiritual path, just so long as it does not involve any control of their 'way of life' especially in sexual matters, where total democratic freedom prevails. It's a mad society but at the same time so many sincere young people trying much harder than not more than a few try here. Though even here there are stirrings in the grass-roots, and much interest in 'Green' economics. I'm off at the end of this week to give a paper at the annual meeting of the Schumacher Society - a big event that takes place in Bristol. I'm going to point out that 'nature' is the environment of the soul as well as of the body and that caring for our earth is not merely a matter of expediency.

You ask about the Temenos Conference at Dartington Hall. I enclose the programme. It was a wonderful and profound experience, and every place was taken and the open air concerts of the Dagar Brothers, the Noh troupe from Japan, and the English choir, overflowing and many could not get seats. Great beauty was there - our poet this year was David Gascoyne - and Kapila Vatsyayan was given a standing ovation, for her paper left us all far behind. A young film director who has just completed a film on Edwin Muir is going to make a film about Kapila - he's planning one on me at present - and India carried the day, for we all left, uplifted on the sound-current of the Dhrupad music of the Dagar Brothers. Arabinda knows their music and I expect so do you. They brought a son and daughter who will, please God, continue that great tradition for another generation. What pleased me above all was that after their concert they said 'we came because we love you'. Their presence was a great delight throughout the conference, and

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our own very gifted musician, John Tavener, and also Joscelyn Godwin the musicologist, were delighted to talk with them about music. So I hope it was worth it to them also to have come. Dartington as you probably know is a companion foundation (by the Elmhirsts) to Santiniketan.

The Conference papers, including my own on the theme of 'Poetry as Prophecy', will all be published in Temenos 11-T. 10 just going to press. It contains Raja Rao and Professor Gokak. I try to include India in each number, and next time we will have Kapila and I hope your own paper also.

Tell Arabinda, if you see him, that, having now completed all these outstanding tasks, I shall set to work in earnest to read the book he sent me. Your friend Mrs. Dyne came to the Conference, and can tell you more about it if you see her -I think she is now on her way to Singapore. I think she must have enjoyed it for she generously contributed to our expenses, in response to a request at the end of the Conference. We do it all on a shoestring, even though we have but to request Japan's greatest actors and India's great singers and they come! Now I'm wondering what to sell next in order to pay the printer once more for Temenos 10.

As you may imagine I have had little time to read, still less to write, but now see a little leisure opening in the coming weeks. 1 must try to find time for poetry - with my India Seen Afar book finished. I shall try to concentrate on poetry in such time as remains to me.

As to the future, be that as it may, our task lies always in the present. I hope it is true that the future will bring the divine nearer, to shine 'directly through the human* but as you know I don't feel much enthusiasm for the idea of Utopia, under whatever form. I think I share Edwin Muir's liking for 'wheat and tares together sown' of this present world of Good and Evil. As to India, yes, India is a state of being, seen afar, and indeed it echoes in that 'mantra-vibrant light' which still persists in your ancient country, 1 was struck, hearing the Dagar Brothers again, that, supreme

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musicians as they are, it is the same music that sounds in every village festival, every home, everywhere, some more some less skilled, but India is that 'sound-current'. 1 hope the destructive music of the modern West never supersedes that great OM that is the sound of India. We need India to civilize the world. I agree with you about Mr. Gorbachev -perhaps in Russia also - from Russia also - the Spirit will be re-born. For the rest we can but pray, in the words of the American poet-novelist Wendell Berry, 'God preserve us from the consequences of our own acts'.

(31.10.1988)

From K. D. Sethna

As always with your letters the latest one of October 31 was very welcome - and it is full of stimulating thoughts showing the wide range of your interests and the varied activity of your eye which is both observant and visionary.

Your little chat with Prince Kumar - rather frightening in its implications - reminds me of the differing views I have come across on the subject of sati - wife burnt along with her dead husband. The immediate link is the rumour the Greek historians of Alexander's invasion of north-west India has left to us. There are two items. One is about the reported origin of the Sati-institution. Here the origin is traced to men trying to protect themselves. Poisoning of husbands by wives who had extra-marital lovers was said to be so common that the male legislators had to make it the wife's duty to burn herself on the dead husband's funeral pyre, so that the lascivious lady would be deterred from envisaging her lord-and-master's early demise. Another Greek peep at sati in about the same B.C.-period discloses the rivalry among the several wives of a high-ranking military man who had fallen in battle. Each of the widows claimed the privilege of immolating herself with his burning corpse. This verbal and perhaps even physical fighting bespeaks either genuine devotion or a keen desire for posthumous honour. The

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ancient Indian idea that the bond between husband and wife was not only sacred but a lasting relationship beyond the earthly life and might even mean a relationship continuing through the complex of rebirths may have been at the back of the sati-phenomenon. The widow would long to go with her deceased mate in order to carry on her devoted duty. Here the question would arise with us: what about the husband's attachment to his wife in the light of the sacred? There was no call on him to commit the male equivalent of sati for the sake of the relationship. I believe the inequality was due to two reasons: (1) the patriarchal character of the Vedic society and (2) the male polygamy prevalent down the ages. The husband, being nominally the head of the household and not being tied down to one spouse, was under no obligation to accompany any wife through the gates of death. A third reason could be the misreading of a certain hymn of the Rigveda. There, when a man is put on the funeral pyre, the wife is told to go and lie down beside him before the fire is lit. The phrase in which it is added that she, after this gesture of reverence and devotion, should get up and join the group of the living had one syllable wrongly articulated by the tradition-keepers which precluded the going away from the pyre. There is no corresponding hymn pointing to the husband's attitude in case of the wife's death.

So far I have touched only on the masculine angle. There is a feminine aspect of the sari-problem. The life of a surviving widow was one long series of miseries. She would be looked upon as an inauspicious presence and openly shunned, even ill-treated and subjected to various disadvantages which would make her life a protracted painful process of dying. It would be much better to get burned at one shot with the departed husband and be saved from the ignominy of a widowed existence, as well as winning posthumous fame for courageous self-sacrifice. This view makes sati a consummation devoutly wished for by the woman: in other words, sati was a wife-prompted institution.

In any case, the institution has a side of horror along with

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that of glamour and glory. The latter side has been vividly presented in those two lines by Butler, the poet of Hudibras, about

Indian widows gone to bed

In flaming curtains with the dead.

All forward-looking minds in India today are against the institution. Even now there are scattered instances of sati -often suspected to have been engineered by the husband's family to get for themselves whatever financial rights the wife might inherit. Our legislators and public opinion in general are up in arms against the aura some parties are trying to wrap the sati practice in.

I am afraid I have been drawn into quite a digression apropos of Prince Kumar's reference to the attempt to poison him when he was a child. Perhaps the subject hasn't proved an absolute bore to you?

I shall be glad to have Temenos 8 with the Vernon Watkins material. The review of Rilke will also interest me. And there are many other things worth knowing in this number. I see the name of Jean Mambrino. As recommended by you, he sent me four books of his some months back and I wanted to thank him, but, search as 1 might, I could not find either his address or the address of his publisher. Will you please let me know where to find him? Temenos 9 also holds a lot of meat. T 7 attracts me by the piece on David Gascoyne. But how much shall I count on your generosity? I suggest that you send me these issues not by air mail but by surface post. I can afford to wait. What I am most looking forward to is the new volume of your autobiography.

You are certainly right in considering Vernon Watkins a more complete poet. As between Dylan Thomas and him, I should say that the true poetic spirit touched Thomas now and then with brilliant effect but it never quite moulded his mind to make it a home for its profound values and for a

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permanent sense of its presence in a steady harmonised mind capable of inspired thought no less than inspired sensation and, linking both, a fine feeling for what I may call the divine shadow in the human substance. I am not sufficiently versed in Watkins's work to make a definitive detailed pronouncement. Perhaps some matter coming from you will confirm or modify my general impression left by lines like

For death has burst upon you, yet your light-flooded eyes

do not tremble...

I am not surprised at your sadness on hearing of Kamala-devi Chattopadhyaya's death. She was an unusual woman and she contributed much to India's varied cultural consciousness. Did you know that she was the wife - long separated - of one of India's most gifted poets writing in English: Harindranath Chattopadhyaya. He wrote remarkable things until he turned Communist. Since then 1 haven't come across anything of his which would stick in my mind like that brief phrase which gives us at once a subtle unforgettable picture and the elusive atmosphere of a mystic mood, where the time-consciousness "forgets to roam" -

grown sudden unaware,

Offering up its noontide and its gloam,

Withdrawn in a lost attitude of prayer.

You have evoked for me an image of America with a penetrating as well as comprehensive accuracy - a huge fumbling giant semi-chaotically managing its individual and social life and yet "in search of a soul". I know that the soul sought for is still not put above sexual excitement, but the spiritual hunger, however vague and incompletely purified, is genuine. It has led several young men and women to the true path, as I can see from their presence in our Ashram.

Will you send me a copy of the paper you were to read at

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Bristol? India too needs to learn the truth of your thesis -that "nature" is the environment of the soul as well as of the body and that caring for our earth is not merely a matter of expediency. I read the other day about the great Himalayas being in danger because of the unlimited deforestation going on.

Your account of the Temenos Conference at Dartington is quite thrilling. I must come to know more about the Dagar Brothers and Kapila Vatsyayan. I recollect that once you referred to her in a letter of yours, but I forget the context. I think it was when we were discussing Yeats. By the way, if you can lay your hands on an offprint I had sent you of my article "Yeats: Poet of Two Phases" I shall be thankful to have it posted back at your convenience. I am not sure you have read it. As it presents a somewhat unorthodox vision of Yeats's work I would like to have the opinion of so insightful a scholar of Yeats as you are.

My friend Mrs Dyne hasn't written to me yet. She had said she would be somewhat of a nomad in England and she didn't tell me when she would be back in Singapore ("Lion City"). She has a very generous nature but it is also governed by a discriminating mind so that her generosity does not run away with her and go helter-skelter. It is she who financed the publication of our old series of letters: The English Language and the Indian Spirit. Her most wonderful, though some might call it most blunderful, act is her being after me to bring out that far-from-marketable commodity, my Collected Poems!

(14.11.1988)

From Kathleen Raine

It's a pleasure to find a letter from you in my morning's post. You have been in my mind of late because I met Mrs. Sonia Dyne, who came to our Temenos Conference at Dartington Hall, which I hope she enjoyed -I think she must have done so since she afterwards sent me a generous contribution to

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our expenses - we have no 'funding' and do it all 'on a shoestring'. That only goes to show that it is not in fact 'funding' that enables things to be done, but the wish to do whatever it may be, 1 have edited Temenos now for nearly a decade, and we have had several substantia] gifts but no regular funding of any kind. I don't know how I shall pay the next printer's bill, but in need I can sell another painting. When my friends were young and unknown I sometimes bought paintings which now have become extremely valuable -Cecil Collins, Winifred Nicholson. David Jones I shall keep till my last resource is exhausted!

Not deterred by this we now contemplate setting up a small College to be called the Temenos Academy of Integral Studies. Perhaps I do not need to tell you that the Universities, in the arts and subjects which involve values rather than information, no longer fulfil their task. Indeed I realized that this is also the case in India, whose Universities tend to be geared to the English or, even worse, the American models. Cultural imperialism is perhaps more insidiously effective than the other kind. Many Indians still seem bewitched by Western values instead of (which would be very valuable to the West also, or in particular) bringing more enduring values to bear on Western culture. One young woman in Delhi was working on (heaven help us!) Sylvia Plath, and I heard from my friend Santosh Pal of another whose marriage had broken up after her return from Cambridge (England) where she had been working on a thesis on Dr. Johnson! So, if our Academy comes to pass-only perhaps 50 full time students each year - we would want always to have an Indian philosopher on our staff. But so far this is not a certainty but a scheme we're working on. I feel that perhaps here the time is ripe, many grass-roots movements in search of better values than those that prevail are to be found, not of course hitherto discoverable in the University Establishment. We can but try.

Well, the West has always made a great deal of Suttee (sati) in boasting of the better values the West brought to

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India. I do think it is a sad criticism of Indian society that widows, had they lived, would have had no place in a household they had entered. What about their children, deprived of two parents at once? But every nation has its dark underside and widow and (worse) bride-burning seems to be India's. However, your point about husband-poisoning goes to show that not all men are wicked and not all women are beyond reproach. Here marriages don't seem to hold any,more, one in three ends in divorce and on the whole young people tend not to marry in the first place at all and the illegitimacy rate is high, with so-called 'single parent families', where mothers never married and men come and go, very common. It's the children of course who suffer. I don't know what the figures are in America. However, many young people here are 'in search of a soul' and Buddhism, Sufi communities and other groups attempting to replace the old stable family and village communities are springing up, some of them very serious and dedicated people.

As to my friend Prince Kumar's family I suppose the Kshatriyas don't like too many heirs around - exactly as in the story of the Pandavas and the Kauravas. He told me about Kamaladevi's husband the poet, whom he knew in U.S.A.; in fact he used to put him up in his apartment. She must have been very different as a young woman, passionately interested in theatre and indeed all the arts. She still was. of course. I remember seeing her at a rather imperfect performance of Shakuntala, half empty theatre, and only about three of the cast proficient in the traditional acting and speaking, with a flower in her gray hair, a true woman of the theatre. I shall miss her very much if I return to India, where she held court at the India International Centre. She was very friendly to me and enabled me to see and do many things I would never have seen otherwise.

I can't remember whether I sent Temenos 8 airmail or surface, but I shall today post you 7 and 9 surface mail, for posting to India costs a fortune.

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At our Temenos Conference we had Kapila Vatsyayan, who for once had written her paper, and she was given a standing ovation. So often she is too busy to write anything down and speaks extempore with an armful of books in which she searches for quotations, but when she has prepared her material she is splendid. Another of India's wonderful women. Her husband too is a poet - I've asked her to let me have some of his work. I just met him the first time 1 went to India but barely took him in. I hope that we will not end our series (the twelfth issue will be our last) without your presence in our Temenos. I asked Sonia Dyne to say a word on our behalf. To me Indian participation is most essential since India is (as Raja Rao said to me) not a nationality but a 'state of consciousness' and that state the goal not of one race only but of all. Alas, how far we have to travel on that way! And meanwhile Westernization, for all its practical benefits, represents the easy, effortless way, insidiously attractive wherever it may be in the world. However, you say Sri Aurobindo believed in a progression, not a regression, and one can but hope he was right. Meanwhile we all do our best.

1 am interested to hear that there is a project to publish your Collected Poems. I hope you will not fail to send me a copy. No, poems are not marketable, in this country they are something multitudes of people write but nobody reads. You and I belong to the late literate generation. Unless India is very different. I have written in T.10 a review of David Gascoyne's Collected Poems entitled 'England's Last Great Poet?'. The reason I think there can be no more great poets in the tradition of our culture is because of the impoverishment of the language itself. Words no longer resonate with a whole tradition, no one knows the myths any more, or even the bible, words are flat and factual, a kind of instant language as used on the television and the daily press. But the question demands another letter and meanwhile I must post this one, and the two copies of Temenos. I'd be glad to send you any others, we may well have copies

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left at the end of the series. Our sales have slowly risen but even so. Therefore do not hesitate to ask for any of the back issues still in print.

P.S. Jean Mambrino's address is,

Etudes, 15 rue Monsitur 75007.

Paris.

(21.11.1988)

From K.D. Sethna

Your letter is full of hope for the future in spite of there being a great deal to despair about the present. In this you are an Aurobindonian without quite knowing it. I say "quite" because there is a touch of knowing since you write sympathetically after recounting the bad-to-worse process all around you: "However, you say Sri Aurobindo believed in a progression, not a regression, and one can but hope he was right. Meanwhile we all do our best." Sri Aurobindo, speaking from inner experience as well as from insight into the world-movement across the ages, declares that the Supermind is a thing decreed for the earth and that its advent in the course of evolutionary history is inevitable. According to him, an evolution of divinity cannot but take place since there has been an involution of divinity at the very start of earthly time. If biology has any intuitive light in its eyes it should see the seemingly impossible occurring at every step: sentient life breaking out of apparently brute matter, conscious mind emerging from instinctive and sense-chained vitality, an aspiration towards what the Rigveda called the True, the Right, the Vast {Satyam, Ritam, Brihat) gleaming forth in the midst of mental man's preoccupation with making his mortal existence tolerable by the help of his analytic wits, his synthesising skills, his speculative ingenuities, his clair-obscur creations. This aspiration which has been vocal from far antiquity is inherent in man and a sure sign of superhuman things to come. Not that they can arrive

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cheaply. An evolution beginning from as complete an involution as can be conceived could hardly be an easy climb, but the involutionary fact itself, implying (in Aurobindonian words) that

The Eternal is broken into fleeting lives

And Godhead pent in the mire and the stone,

yields the promise of a divine efflorescence one day. The day will dawn sooner if we keep the fire of idealism burning and not let adverse circumstances make us down-hearted or complacent, leading to a situation in which one would have to lament (again in Aurobindonian phrases):

Lost was the storm-stress and the warrior urge,

Lost the titan winging of the thought.

Kathleen Raine, carrying on with Temenos through year on year and planning new institutions where values will acquire meaning and being ready to sell her cherished possessions for their sake, helps the luminous future to come nearer. Since the vision of Sri Aurobindo is never sectarian and sees the involved Godhead everywhere seeking liberation and the free Godhead from beyond the mind seeking incarnation wherever it can and the evolving Godhead seeking to fuse the two by a hundred means, there is nothing incongruous in my regarding you as an Aurobindonian according to your own lights. I am such in a direct conscious manner, having accepted the all-covering yet flexible discipline of the Integral Yoga which looks forward to a transformed collectivity no less than to a divinised individual. But that does not lead any avowed follower of Sri Aurobindo to look down his nose at any idealistic endeavour on earth just because it is not openly allied to the aims of the Pondicherry Ashram. Did not the Mother once send you a spray of the Tulsi plant as a token of her blessing and her protecting power? May the coming New Year bring us closer to the realisation of our

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deepest dreams! With my best wishes and a lot of warmth from the inmost heart and thanks for the back numbers you have posted of Temenos I end.

(23.12.1988)

From Kathleen Raine

When yesterday I found your letter written on Dec. 23rd in my post it seemed to me very auspicious, and it is a pleasure to be replying to you on the first day of this as yet undisclosed year. Not that one year is in any sense different from another, but in ourselves there is surely some kind of symbolic change through writing 1989 instead of 88 or 69 or 29 or 1919 - I can remember heading my letters 1919! Think of it! And that really was in a different world, though whether a better or a worse one I would not like to say. Sri Aurobindo saw an evolving universe, and so did Teilhard de Chardin, but other prophetic books see the end of the kali yuga in terms of desolation and destruction. Perhaps both are true, for you in India are always aware of many levels which exist simultaneously. That is a profound difference between Indian and Western ideas of evolution, here it is a purely natural material process. I may well have quite misunderstood Sri Aurobindo's evolutionary ideas. Jewish Kabbalah also presents four 'worlds' with a descent to the lowest world and a reascent of the divine to the Source. You say that Sri Aurobindo was made aware of these things by a higher consciousness, and that is something one must accept. Blake knew it, but in the West 'knowledge' is always a process of acquiring and relating more facts, more information, not, as with you (and as it should be) opening the eyes of the mind by spiritual work, meditation and the rest. I do hope you will write me that piece about Sri Aurobindo's view of poetry as operating on different levels of consciousness. There too - and never so much as at this time - poetry (so-called: there is not much poetry in it) is all greater refinements of an exploration of smaller and smaller sectors

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of consciousness, not a discovery of the heights and depths; as was still the case with the Romantics, up to and including Yeats, with poets like Edwin Muir and Vernon Watkins and perhaps still David Gascoyne and myself remembering at least in what we attempt a greater view of poetry. You will find some new poems of mine in T.10, delayed once again because the printer hasn't got the right paper. However, that gives me a breathing space in which to raise the next printing-bill. We never cover costs. Yet we do reach many people who do care. Today were posted the prospectuses for our proposed Temenos Academy of Integral Studies; and it includes a clause saying that while we would like to have visiting lecturers from many countries, we would wish to have a teacher of Indian philosophy and culture always. India must assume the task of teaching the West or all is lost. But of course this is already happening and I believe the time is ripe and we are at last - some of us, and as Arabinda knows many in America - are prepared to listen. We at last begin to learn our ignorance. The very desperation of the situation creates its own reaction perhaps.

Thank you for allowing me to be an honorary follower of the Integral Yoga. I stumble as best I can where the Golden String seems to lead - maybe 'next time' - or after many 'times' - I may be born in India. Where no doubt I would find a different set of difficulties. I see India as a deeply wounded culture - wounded first by the British, now by American multinational capitalism, but all those distinctions of culture are melting away for better or for worse. Better insofar as knowledge is shared, worse insofar as much is lost. But we are at best instrumental in a purpose we cannot know, but in which we must trust. When I was a student there was a phrase much in vogue as a means of demolishing any positive standpoint, such as religious faith, 'wishful thinking'. I don't remember who invented it - Freud perhaps - but it inculcated a habit of mind that denigrated faith and hope, making them not, as for the Church, 'theological virtues' but moral weaknesses. Perhaps I never

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fully recovered, for I still find it difficult to believe that the desirable might be true. Yet of late it has become clear to me that we could not in our nature desire unless that desire has an object. Otherwise we would" simply be unaware that there is anything to desire. Our wishes therefore are perhaps in their way a measure of reality - since we wish for these things, they must, somewhere, be. Just as in the shell a bird's wmgs have no function, but only in relation to a future of which the unhatched bird is unaware. I use this rather clumsy metaphor but perhaps you see what I am trying to find words for - yet the desirable paradisal state seems to exceed hope - or there I go again with the ghost of Bertrand Russell or someone of that kind muttering 'wishful thinking'. Or maybe it is for us to create that which we desire. Thereby making a reality of a wish? Who knows. To 'Build a heaven in hell's despite'. But what terrible dreams mankind has, star-wars and weapons of destruction and all kinds of material power and tyranny. All the same there are signs of hope as this year begins, many of them. Despite all. I hope Sri Aurobindo is right. Though what he calls 'superman' I think I would prefer to call 'man', since in our nature we are already what we should become. A matter, perhaps, of words.

May this year bring you the fulfilment of your wishes, and the collection of poems of which you spoke in your last letter. Please remember me to Mrs. Dyne. And to Arabinda Basu and Sisir Kumar Ghose if you see either of them. Sisir has fallen silent of late.

I hope my christmas-poem reached you. I sent it a long time ago, knowing the uncertainty of Indian posts. Indeed our posts here are getting worse and worse - here in Chelsea the letter-boxes have been sealed up for the last fortnight because the post-office had an overtime dispute with the postmen and the mail has simply not been cleared.

So I send you my thoughts, and if I should stray into your dreams I hope my presence may be auspicious and that I shall not be carrying a copy of the TLS. I might have been

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carrying a very good paper by Tagore, on 'Personality' based on his interpretation of the Isha Upanishad. No doubt you know it.

(1.1.1989)

From K. D. Sethna

Your letter of Jan.l was a pleasure with its varied looking before and after and its basic optimistic note in spite of ambiguous appearances. The current month marks the beginning of the third year of our renewed correspondence after a long silence. We have covered a wide range of topics spanning thousands of years if we count Sri Aurobindo on the one hand and Sri Krishna on the other. This pair of names standing at the two time-extremes of our subject-matter seems significant. Hasn't Sri Aurobindo said, "It is Sri Krishna's work that is being done in our Ashram", meaning not just a continuation of old traditional Vaish-navism but a new extension of an all-round spirituality as in the Gita with the Yogi's eye rolling super-Shakespeareanly with the finest frenzy possible both from earth to heaven and from heaven to earth? There is the prophecy put in the mouth of Savitri:

Life's tops shall flame with the Immortal's thoughts,

Light shall invade the darkness of its base.

Then in the process of evolving Time

All shall be drawn into a single plan,

A divine harmony shall be earth's law,

Beauty and Joy remould her way to live:

Even the body shall remember God...

Of course, this does hot imply that everything in the evolutionary process will look bright enough to draw from us Bertie Wooster's "Oh it's bung-ho!" Difficult times may have to be gone through before the path to the supramental future is openly struck. India is in a pretty bad mess because

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of the Punjab problem. Terrorism on an unprecedented scale is going on there with a view to frightening the Government into granting Khalistan, a seperate Sikh state. After the colossal folly of letting Pakistan take shape India has learnt her lesson and, come what may, there will never be a Khalistan. Economic conditions too are not very cheering. Public life too can hardly be thought clean. But India with all these scoriae is still the horizon at which the sun of Sri Aurobindo's vision of Supermind is to be discerned:

A long lone line of hesitating hue...

A slow miraculous gesture's dim appeal....

An experiment is proceeding with ups and downs and zigzags but with a gradual movement forward on the whole to develop a new consciousness resulting in a new life. The word "Superman" connected with Sri Aurobindo's work has to be properly understood - in the very sense in which you speak of "man" "since in our nature we are already what we should become". Yes, in Sri Aurobindo's spiritual experience not only man in his inner being but also apparently brute matter holds the supramental light and love and bliss secret within. That is why evolution follows as a natural consequence of involution of divinity. There is, no doubt, a pull by the free uninvolved Supermind from beyond earth combining with the push of the same power from below -and because matter is itself inwardly divine the outcome of evolution upward will be something of matter's own dharma, own inmost nature, own intrinsic law of existence and therefore something permanent and not something imposed on it by means of a siddhi, a special Yogic capacity. To be supramentalised will not be a forced perfection: it will be the realisation of a native possibility. "Even the body shall remember God" in the sense that God was always there in it and was simply forgotten: He has to be brought up from within and not to be learnt from without, even though the remembering may need a luminous touch from its never-

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forgetting counterpart in the empyrean Reality.

Exactly like you I as a student felt the impact of the cult of "wishful thinking". I don't know whether Freud introduced the phrase: he talked of dreams as wish-fulfilments, but the practice of calling all our highest beliefs - all the dreams of our souls - nothing save wishful thinking dates back to the late nineteenth century, the heyday of atheism and materialism drawing sustenance from mechanistic science. The early part of the present century when you and I had our school-days and college-days lived still under the shadow of the preceding century's doubts and denials. Science was undergoing a new influence - relativity theory and quantum theory had brought some strangeness into the Newtonian and Laplacean universe, but the hold of post-Darwinian biology was very strong and the stress on our animal origin made religion and mysticism and poetic idealism look like fantasies. Yet now and again the great aspirations refused to be brushed off as being "wishful thinking". A poem of Laurence Binyon asked very pertinently the question:

Eternity! how learnt I that strange word?

In the Middle Ages there was the famous Ontological Argument that the very idea of God the Perfect Being entailed His existence since one could not be perfect if one did not exist. Kant is said to have refuted Anselm's logic but I don't think he could touch the question: "What makes us conceive of anything like God at all?" Imagination can conjure up

Gorgons and hydras and chimeras dire

because they are made of elements known separately and can be put together in our minds but God is not a composite construction in our thought: He transcends all that we can think of and is an unimaginable completeness, unimaginable because we know only finite and flawed entities except in

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the realm of abstractions where by extending in thought our limited experience of time and space we can conceive them as endless and boundless. Even there the notion of perfection is absent. Works of art give a feeling of faultless form, but form is itself a coming short. God alone can contain everything as well as exceed it and fill us with a sense of the Primal, the Ultimate, the Absolute, the Unsurpassable. Binyon's "Eternity", we may say, sums up the essence of the God-idea, the God-word, which go clean out of all possible learning by us. A reality corresponding to them seems an inevitable conclusion from our failure to account for them on the basis of all that we know, all that we can mentally construct.

Shadows of the deific in terms of our time-space world of facts are the ideals we cherish and work for beyond the facts - what you call in general "the desirable" and feel to be necessarily true and somehow realisable, even if it appears to our common state as "beyond hope", a fanciful figure of "wishful thinking". We have to cleave to these ideals as though without them we could not live, just as Wordsworth felt that

We must be free or die who speak the tongue

That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold

Which Milton held.

It makes me happy to know that you, my friend, have been carrying on Temenos for years against heavy odds and are at present launching the Temenos Academy of Integral Studies where you would like to have a teacher of Indian philosophy and culture always.

You write of having sent me your Christmas-poem. I never received it. Everything ever sent by you has come here, but this has somehow vanished. My projected book of collected poems, which is really a dream of Sonia Dyne, is getting prepared. I have kept also the Temenos article in mind, half a dozen or more pages need to be written to

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round it off. You have not strayed into any dream of mine of late but you arc often in my thoughts and my best wishes go to you for this year that has just begun, a hopeful year indeed for the world in the wake of Gorbachev's break with the divisive past and its narrow formulas which have stood so long in the way of a multi-productive peace and an internally rich and varied world-oneness.

(22.1.1989)

From Kathleen Raine

You will no doubt be surprised to receive a letter from me in Delhi! I came for a small celebration put on by the Yeats Society of India of the half-centenary of the death of W.B. Y., and I am staying on for a week or two. Anne Yeats came (his daughter) and his daughter-in-law Crania, a singer and harper of the traditional music of Ireland. It was a small but pleasant celebration. Prof. Bushoni of Lebanon (now Kahlil Gibran distinguished professor in Maryland University) gave the Yeats Memorial Lecture which we all enjoyed very much. Unfortunately I brought with me a virus infection that has been afflicting England this winter, and although I can now see and speak I still cannot hear, and this deafness (it must mean something) alas prevents me from listening or conversing with anyone at all. I'm told it will go in a day or two, but it shows no sign of doing so. What a waste of being here in India!

After many delays the printer of Temenos managed to bring me a box of the first twenty copies the day before I left, so I am able to send you one. Not a great deal from India in this number, Islamic rather, but I hope you will find some things to enjoy. As you know, I'm still hoping you will write on Sri Aurobindo's perceptions of the different levels from which poetry comes. Only two more issues of Temenos still to come! I hope I shall not now remain deaf for the rest of my life, or even the remaining weeks of my visit to India. I am sure if 1 could only discover the Karmic cause 1 could

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overcome it - or perhaps not so.

This is the wheel of sharp weapons returning

Full circle to punish the wrongs you have done!

England seems diminished to a small spot on the world's surface, infested by salmonella in eggs, listeria in cheese, water infected by artificial fertilizers & insecticides, and by leaded petrol, acid rain, etc., the seas polluted so that our beautiful seals and dolphins are dying and I feel infected myself! And the physical poison is as nothing to the mental and spiritual poison that kills less by violence than by the trivialization of all that is highest in human kind. And here in India how will you prevail over the American television channels raining down their pollution from the skies themselves? It saddens me to see that it has already arrived.

I brought with me the first vol. of the letters of T.S. Eliot, recently published, which I am reviewing for Temenos. I knew him, though slightly and only in his later years. His childhood, youth, and ill-advised marriage make sad reading, yet doesn't a poet choose just that sorrow his work requires to temper it in the fires of life? What seems chance is choice, what seems a mistake is necessity. At least it is well to know how happy his last years were, married to Valerie, who loved him (and who has so admirably edited these letters). And T.S.E. did not evade his suffering, but endured and transmuted it. He was, surely, the last great poet of Christendom and the old civilization? Yeats spoke for a more universal, timeless reality, and the future. He too fell short of wisdom, and perhaps did not die happy? He was insatiable - his daughter Anne agrees about that. How can any of us be satisfied by a small share of the All (and at eighty my long life seems only a moment) unless we be saints?

(10.3.1989)

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From K. D. Sethna

The handwriting on the envelope was so familiar, indeed so unmistakable but that row of Indian stamps stood in such a stark contradictory posture of suggestion that if 1 were to poetise the situation I would speak of my state of mind in William Watson's words on a certain phase of the evening as

Pendulous 'twixt the gold hour and the grey.

The moment I opened the envelope it was all "the gold hour" - the sight of the latest beautifully designed Temenos and the enclosed most welcome letter. Thank you for both the gifts.

I never dreamt there was a "Yeats Society of India". The next thing I'll hear of will be a Blake Society! And that would bring you to India just as imperatively. Perhaps the two poets will be juxtaposed for you if in the "week or two" that you will be in India my long-waiting book - Blake's Tyger: A Christotogical Interpretation - which is at the stage of its cover getting stuck to the bound pages leaves the Ashram Press soon enough for a copy to catch you in Delhi. If I happen to be remembered in the literary world by posterity, perhaps next to being connected among my more famous contemporaries with Sri Aurobindo for his gift to me not only of the Integral Yoga but also of "overhead poetry" my name will get linked with yours on the one hand because of the already published correspondence between us as well as the still-to-be-published greater recent bulk of it and on the other hand because of our detailed dealings with Blake's enigmatic beast of prey. I think our different readings of that symbol will remain the only ones in the field and future critics will have to choose either your hermetical-alchemical-cabbalistic insight or my Christological-Miltonic vision -unless perchance, as a hint of mine in the long Introduction to my study has it, Blake may be considered to have made in two alternative ways his meaning not "explicit to the idiot".

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Is it possible to let me have the text of Prof. Bushoni's Yeats Memorial lecture? You say you all "enjoyed it very much", but you must have been in the same position as I shall be if 1 get the text; that is, you must have enjoyed it by reading it rather than by hearing it, since that blasted bug which has been afflicting England this winter has somehow disastrously affected your ears - for the time being, as we all hope. Having gone through a partial impairment of hearing after a bout of flu some months back - a defect luckily gone now - I can well understand your greater predicament. Although one may pride oneself on being in the august company of Milton in his fifties no less than of

Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides

And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old,

or on receiving the same stroke of adverse fate as that superman of music, the aged Beethoven, it is surely preferable to be less distinguished but fully able to appreciate "Summer's rose" and the "human face divine" as well as thrill to the presence of "the wakeful bird" which

Sings darkling, and in shadiest covert hid

Tunes her nocturnal note,

or revive through your friend Crania's plucking the strings the sense of

The harp that once through Tara's halls

The soul of music shed.

Please excuse my bubbling over with poetry, but it all comes of the joy of hearing from you and feeling that you are almost next door. Coming from so nearby, your reminder to me of the article you have asked me to write for one of the last Temenoses has had the effect of making me dig up the already written sheets from my archives of oblivion and try to get in tune with them. Your reference to Eliot and Yeats has prompted several thoughts but I must stop now and express them later lest I should miss reaching you in Delhi with this letter.

(18.3.1989)

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