Inspiration and Effort

"GOD'S DOORWAY "

A shining door, immense and unmoving, stands between our worship and the Beyond. That is all the light vouchsafed to us, a hard light blocking our passage to the ultimate Secrecy. We knock and knock, but no grace slides through the fast fitting, no glimpse of the other side is given us by any relenting of the giant hinges. Still, we find that every knock gathers — with its harsh and hurtful rebound from the surface of gold confronting us — a ringing sweetness, a most melodious and heart-ravishing "Nay" to all the importunate prayers of our flesh and blood. Here is a refusal that is a rapture more rich than our grandest triumphs in the world. Out of its mysterious reverberation our deepest poetry takes birth and, though we fail, the failure of our effort to pass beyond our finitude is an affliction which is the most wonderful creativity known to mortals.

But is this superb affliction everlasting? Yes, so long as our attempt to draw an answer from the Beyond remains entangled with outward things. We look at the tremendous beauty that shines upon us from the universe in spite of all the shadows that fall across its face and we throw our minds upon the huge and baffling spectacle to understand its appearances. But to know what is inside those appearances we must go inside the consciousness in us that catches their challenge. The mind must turn inward its sense of the cosmic beauty. The usual subjective tensions of poetry do not go far enough. Their "soul-searchings" no more than hover on the verge of the true abyss that must be plumbed. Not on the peripheries or the mid-ways but in the centre of our cosmos-thrilled being is to be found the magic perfection which inspires each effort of ours to outgrow finitude. What is behind the universe is also behind ourselves who are a part of the universe. But while we cannot break open the universe's heart, we have pathways leading towards our own depths, knowing which we shall know the Beyond that is at

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once hinted and hidden everywhere. The shining door by which we are blocked is the outward gaze of our eyes; our eyes open and the Mystery gets shut. By shutting them completely and looking inward to the sheer centre we shall see what lies on the other side of the "great door — the Divine Loveliness — and having done so we may open them outward to find the Light and the Beauty no longer hard but yielding and responsive to our touch, letting us in through their splendour to the same supreme Delight. From our turning towards this vision and experience there is born the poetry that is called mystical.

People believe mysticism to be an exalted dumbness and incompatible with any mode of speech, even the exalted speech of poetry. The mystical plane, they argue, is above distinctions — an infinite featureless unity. How can such a world be expressed in the language of a world of countless objects that are separate and clearly defined? This question is rooted in an error. The mystical world is not a featureless unity. It has indeed a vast unity which can be felt as featureless by an exclusive concentration on it; but, on the basis of the experience of an inalienable oneness, there is an experience of infinite diversity — distinctions innumerable are visioned and felt though with no sense of rigid limitation or mutual exclusiveness. Line, colour, mass, design are not lost: they cease to be a hard shutting in and shutting out, they become pervaded by a single reality, a single consciousness, a single bliss. That is the nature of the balanced mystical experience, whether cosmic or transcendental.

The cosmic experience, enfolding a universe whose parts have jagged edges looking imperfect and ugly, bears a vision in which the jagged edges of the different parts fit into one another and make a perfect and beautiful whole. The transcendental experience has the vision of a universe whose perfect whole carries the fitting together of parts that have themselves flawlessly beautiful contours: this is the universe of archetypes, of ideal forms which our jagged universe is meant progressively to manifest. Both in the cosmic vision

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and the transcendental, there is no compulsive loss of distinctions and so no inability to use language with its lights and shadows of a world where distinctions have play. Doubtless, the language of mysticism does not move always in step with the language of logic; but neither does poetry obey the logician's dictate. Not systematic thinking so much as harmonious perception is the power of the poetic consciousness — and this power mysticism seizes upon as akin to its own and charges with its hidden intensities. To charge it thus is to make poetry's habitual "in-feeling", its moment after moment of sudden felicitous penetration of things, function in a new province of its own nature: the mystic does not distort it to a use utterly alien and unpoetic. Hence he need be no outcast from the golden-voiced circle of the Muse.

The end of mysticism is not silence. But the source of mystical poetry must ever be a deep and large ego-exceeding silence, a hushed receptivity of the mind and heart in which they are swept beyond their merely human experiences. When that silence is found in the being, even for an instant, the poet becomes capable of hearing voices which come from above the normal level of consciousness, above even the subliminal recesses to which he is usually open. Only when we attempt, without any self-exceeding or illumination, to utter mystical truths we are borne down by the conviction that we are trying to utter the Unutterable, define the Indefinable: an awed impotence seems all our art in the face of that Mystery. We lapse, not unnaturally, to the conclusion that the Spirit escapes utterance and negates distinctions, whereas the sole legitimate conclusion is that the speech of the mere mind is not competent and that our normal imagination is incapable of getting spiritual reality into focus. To discard speech and lay aside vision as non-mystical is a grave blunder.

Every plane of consciousness in us has its own speech and vision, characterised by its own peculiar rhythm of being. Shakespeare's

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After life's fitful fever he sleeps well

is a triumph of exquisite pathos that goes home to our vital nerves, as it were, making us feel and see poignantly through the sensitive life-force in Us: our guts seem to respond — like flames that are wind-shaken and go out. Shelley's

He has outsoared the shadow of our night

has an exaltation, a threnodic thrill, of the intellect — its words are plucked out of a passion of the mind-energy and not the life-force: our brain-cells grow warm and appear to stretch upward a kindled thought-power. Suppose we came across an account of death in some such terms as Sri Aurobindo's

Rapt, thoughtless, wordless into the Eternal's breast.

The whole movement here is different from Shakespeare's and Shelley's. It does not take place in the impassioned life-force or the impassioned mind-energy, though it has affinities with both of them — a word-design and rhythm-urge that have a concrete touch upon our nerves as in Shakespeare and at the same time an atmosphere of ideative height as in Shelley — but added to these is a draw inward, a pull deep within that seeks to liberate us into some unknown yet intense and intimate immensity reaching out around and above without end. This sense is created by the words being caught from a plane beyond the human: the rhythmic vibration no less than the stuff of significance is derived from an ampler consciousness and carries the actual thrill of it. If that plane were contacted and drawn upon all the time, poetry would lay bare the Spirit's own speech wherein the nature of the mystical world is not something that fits ill, or by half, the shape and sound of language but makes one organically moving body with it. Simile and metaphor

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become then no dubious effort to suggest what seems to the mere mind a state of formless being that is outside the range of imagery: language with its various devices grows a natural mode of expressing the one yet manifold cosmic Divine as well as the archetypal Transcendent.

The mental energy and the life-force can both poetically catch fire when the Spirit presses upon them, a fine outburst of revealing figures is possible on these planes of consciousness if somehow a channel has been cleared between them and the Unknown till

From cloud-zoned pinnacles of the secret Spirit

Song falls precipitant in dizzying streams.

But in a Thompsonian sonority like that, the Spirit's accent is attuned to a force belonging to the human rather than the Superhuman: the sight and the movement are of the inspired imagination, they have not the profound ease and colossal freedom of a direct spiritual experience. More inward, more authentically swept with the true spiritual suggestion and resonance is the poetic soul of those two lines about mystical inspiration, by the Indian poet Harindranath Chattopa-dhyaya during his stay in Sri Aurobindo's Ashram:

See me go from silence to deeper silence

Song by song bird-marking a cloudless azure.

In rendering the process and the meaning of his music alive to us, the poet here does not take his sense of the Divine and proceed to make it concrete to himself by equating it with figures from Nature — "cloud-zoned pinnacles", "dizzying streams"; he appears rather to intuit the Divine in a concrete way from the first and then proceed to envelop and permeate natural figures with that intuition. The secret Spirit is not felt through Nature so much as Nature is felt through the secret Spirit: that is why the vision-impact and the rhythm-movement bear some kind of largeness and directness that is more

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revelatory than an imaginative magnificence helping out mysticism.

An even more puissant largeness and directness should be the mystic's goal. In the just-quoted lines, haunted though they are by the mood of the In-world and the Over-world, there is yet something missing from the highest spiritual point of view. Aesthetically, they are faultless — so too are Thompson's lines; mystically, their revelatory rapture is not altogether the sheer substance of the Spirit thrown out in luminous speech. To get that substance and its direct disclosure, the poet must practise a deeper concentration, realise a keener concreteness of the Eternal and its thronged infinities. Above everything else, he must still all the vibrations of his ordinary being, no matter how grand or exquisite they may be, and fix himself on letting loose without any reshaping by those vibrations the pure rhythms of the wide and massive Divine such as the ancient Indian scriptures carry and in our own day Sri Aurobindo's recent work in which 

Swiftly, swiftly crossing the golden spaces

Knowledge leaps, a torrent of rapid lightnings;

Thoughts that left the Ineffable's flaming mansions

Blaze in my spirit.

Slow my heart-beats' rhythm like a giant hammer's;

Missioned voices drive to me from God's doorway

Words that live not save upon Nature's summits,

Ecstasy's chariots.

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