Inspiration and Effort

THE ADVENTURE OF THE APOCALYPSE*

The poet who is not merely idealistic or religious but has a direct mystical sensitivity and of whom it may be said that his adventure is the Apocalypse — what species of poetry would he particularly aspire to write? In general answer to this query we may begin with some remarks on production from the dream-consciousness, the phenomenon now loosely known as Surrealism.

The ordinary notion about the dream-consciousness is very restricted and, though Freud and Jung have interestingly and ingeniously explored certain layers below the mind's threshold, they have not driven home the fact familiar to all practitioners of Yoga that behind the normal waking mind there is an immense range of being, with several strata or planes, each a universe in itself with objects and creatures as real as any we meet from day to day. These objects and creatures interact with our universe, pressing upon it their forms and potencies and moods. We are usually touched by them in our dreams in the midst of a welter of memories and wish-fulfilments, but even at other times there is constant communication between them and our life. Psycho-analysis skims only the surface, so to speak, of this communication; nor has it any concrete sense of the cosmic actuality, the world-substance, of what works behind. So it achieves nothing more than a fragmentary probing of the subconscious — mostly the individual subconscious and sometimes the general and collective, but even the collective is felt to be just a play of the similarities lying at the base of the variations of individual psychology. Everything is "found" psychological — even God is a psychological pattern — and the basic similarities are seen in terms of primitive impulses and the more developed and subtle velleities are interpreted as

* This title echoes that of a book of poems by the author, to which there is "A Personal Preface" and for which the present article may serve as "An Impersonal Postscript".

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refinements of those impulses. Surrealism in the West, guided by the findings of Freud and Jung, does not escape the psychological taint and, with it, the limitations of a shallow and sporadic awareness of the dream-regions. One of the worst limitations is the fitful, confused, inconsequential imagery.

Yoga serves to join the outwardly wakeful to the inwardly wakeful, the physical world to the supra-physical principalities and powers, the visible formulations to the occult structures of the one substance of Spirit that has emanated everything. The symbols of the Yogic surrealist are transcriptions of interrelated occult realities: either they are adapted, though never quite subdued, to the normal mind's manner of perception and conception, or presented "neat" with the normal mind acting the interpreter as little as can be helped. The latter course is the rarer creativity. When it is followed, the reader is called upon all the more intensely than in the ordinary type of poetry to see and feel instead of understanding. Understanding, of course, does come ultimately, but as a fiery intuition that breaks out through seeing and feeling and reveals the coherences and significances in a total comprehensive sweep which cannot everywhere be analysed into a system of progressive parts. The particularity and precision without which no poetry can live is not ignored: the particular and precise steps are vividly realised: they, however, cannot be throughout marked as orderly phases of imaginative thought developing into a definable mental scheme. Rather, the steps seem often to be self-sufficient and there is for the normal mind some lack of connectivity: the parts, though inter-related, do not always piece together, they are harmonised mainly by an intuitive "whole view" flooding the interspaces between the parts with a subtle cementing light which does not need the labour of thought in order to know.

The Yogic surrealist's explorations of the dream-consciousness are revelatory as well as profound, and they are both profound and revelatory by being made with the occult

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sight directly. But there is one other characteristic: they use the occult sight not for its own sake. It is the Supreme Divine who is sought, and the occult worlds are penetrated in order that they may yield strange thrilling tangibilities of God's sweetness and grandeur by which the earth-consciousness may grow more alive to its own evolutionary purpose. The Yogic surrealist is activated by the deepest of all the occult planes, the plane of the World-Soul where the Supreme Divine has His most luminous delegate power in the subliminal. And it is in rapport with this plane that there functions from behind the emotional heart the true soul-centre within us, God's nucleus in the evolutionary process of the individual, round which the mental and vital and physical personality is built and organised. Nor is the secret soul by itself the plenary inspiration of God-discovery. It has to open the subliminal upwards to the supraliminal. The planes of God's free and full being are "overhead" — answering to the innate sense we have of His living high up in the sky. The inspiration which descends from there is no longer surreal in the strict connotation of the term, unless we take the term broadly as signifying all that is beyond the reality of which our normal waking mind is aware. The ancient Upanishads distinguish two divisions in what is beyond: the dream-consciousness and the sleep-consciousness. We enter into the former through subtle centres or chakras which have some sort of corresponding plexuses in the physical body. We enter into the latter by going beyond the system of the inner and the outer through a chakra that has no corresponding physical plexus, the traditional "thousand-petalled lotus" above the brain. When first we break loose from both the subtle and the gross we have the experience of an infinite void, a featureless self-liberation without end, a sublime superconscious sleep. Really there is no vacuity here, cosmos on glowing and vibrant cosmos is disclosed, but there is an underlying indefeasible unity through all the divine multiplicity — a single boundless Selfhood that is perfect peace, within which and upon which

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perfect power is at play. From this peace and power the Yogic poet has to catch his inspiration if he is to be the apocalypt par excellence.

Poetic visitations from the "overhead" planes come with a vast powerful ease of illumination and harmony, for now there is no translation of the Divine into terms near the human formula: there is the original and authentic self-expression of the Spirit, the Divine uttered in the Divine's own way. A fine hierarchy climbs from intensity to greater intensity of divine substance and divine form, Spirit's matter and Spirit's manner — until the top is reached where abides what the Rishis named the Mantra, the divinest of all poetic words — a sovereignly luminous and miraculously rhythmed expression like that stanza of Sri Aurobindo's, summing up his own Integral Yoga:

Arms taking to a voiceless supreme delight,

Life that meets the Eternal with close breast,

An unwalled mind dissolved in the Infinite,

 Force one with unimaginable rest.

In lines like these there is at the same time a sheer exceeding of the normal waking intelligence and an absolute fulfilment of it. For, while realities before which human logic stands dumbfounded are disclosed, a tremendous clarity rules everything, the Truth is seen face to face and the omniscient consciousness pervading all plunges right through to the very essence of our being and wakes a power of identifying ourselves with whatever is spoken of or shown. Of course, reader and reader will differ in response and some may kindle up more than others. But amidst the extremest oddity and alienness of the revelation a grip will be felt even on our whole waking consciousness and the intelligence will stir with an immense philosophical joy of ineffably understanding what yet "passeth understanding". Not only symbol at its most living and most intimate but also philosophy at its most far-reaching and most synthetising is the apocalypse of

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"overhead" poetry, especially when the vision and language and rhythm are of the Mantra.

We have described the supraliminal and the subliminal as two divisions of the Beyond. They are, however, not cut off from each other. They can combine and get mutually coloured in various degrees and sometimes fuse inextricably. Both are at play in all poetry that is inspired. But poetry is not always written with its eyes directly turned on them. It is written mostly with a look on the physical universe — and through the forms and scenes of this universe the subliminal and the supraliminal are glimpsed. Mystical poetry reverses the progress. It does not reach the greater through the smaller but the smaller through the greater. It goes from a sense of the within to the without, from a sense of the above to the below — it catches up what are called nature and life into the light from which they are narrow projections, it is not limited by them, nor bound to their fixed terms: it does not use them to make vivid what is vague to the consciousness but, rather, finds them vague in comparison to what is vivid to it and suffuses them with that vividness in order to bring out what has been vague in them. It does not compare God's infinite Self to the blue sky: it compares the blue sky to God's infinite Self. I am talking of the essential movement of mystical poetry: actually it may phrase its comparisons in the ordinary way, but the way will only serve to express a direct feel of the superhuman and the divine and a feel of the human and the natural as obscurities to be lit up by the former instead of as lights by which the mysteries of the latter are brought nearer to our understanding.

"The direct feel of the superhuman and the divine": the phrase must be taken in its proper meaning. The feel is not merely of a secret existence greater than the human and the natural: this existence is felt in terms of sensation as concretely as the objects usually sensed by us. Thus God's infinite Self to which the blue sky is compared can be felt in its own rights as an expanse of luminous azure. There is the blue sky of our common experience because the mystical

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origin of it is a divine existence that can be experienced as a never-ending blue of absolute bliss and because between that ultimate being and our ordinary firmament there are amplitudes of sapphire expressing grades of happiness intenser than our world can hold. It is precisely the sense of such actual concrete stretches that marks the difference between ordinary verse talking of God's infinity and mystical poetry doing the same. Ordinary verse employs similes and metaphors about that infinity as if they served to concretise what can "never be sense-experienced. Mystical poetry knows that the superhuman and the divine can be seen, heard, touched: out of some seeing, hearing and touching of them in the recesses beyond normal waking life its words are caught, and that is why by the significances which they bear and the suggestions which they breathe we are given the impression that no similes and metaphors are here but the emergence of strange realities through the striking imagery. The imagery is not the face and figure put on the Unknown in order to awaken us to what is hidden and remote: it is the face and figure shown us by the Unknown of itself, awakening us to its own living closeness and to the pale derivativeness of earthly things from mighty miraculous terms of occult and spiritual sensation.

Here a word of warning is necessary lest every mystical poet should be credited with achievements of mysticism because of his achievements of poetry. The dream-conscious or the overhead poems he writes are certainly a transcript of occult and spiritual actualities, but they do not imply that in each instance he has had the experience his poetry embodies. Poetic mysticism is not identical with personal mysticism: the poet is indeed a mouthpiece of the Gods and is in touch with them through some part of his being, yet he may not in his personal consciousness have risen to the heights or delved into the depths. Thus, for instance, when he says, "I have seen the inmost truth behind man's form", he must not at once be taken to mean that in sheer fact he has beheld this inmost truth as he beholds man's form. Personal mysticism

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can do this marvellous beholding with a direct sense-faculty of a non-physical kind: poetic mysticism need not have exercised this faculty — all that it need have exercised is a sympathetic imagination by which the inmost truth directly visible to personal mysticism is projected for him as on a cinema screen. The cinema screen can bring very vivid impressions and call forth responses as though to concrete things: still, we cannot deal with its figures and scenes as we do with men and women and natural objects in the world which the film represents. There is, on the screen, realism without reality. The sole difference between the screen's realism and the realism of mystical poetry is that at any time the latter may merge in reality and become mystical experience. Although the difference endows mystical poetry with a strange trembling on the verge of the real, we must not forget that often the verge remains uncrossed and that always to attribute to the man the adventure of the apocalypse belonging to the poet is a naivete fruitful of many confusions. In a Sri Aurobindo the man and the poet are one. Every mystical poet, however, is not a Sri Aurobindo, not even a full-fledged Yogi. No doubt, if mystical poetry in glorious abundance is to take birth, the man must be in some sort of powerful rapport with the superhuman and the divine: true mystical experience must be his, but our notion of this experience should not be packed with every amazing detail recorded in the poems: the experience may serve merely as a centre of attraction by which words are drawn from the wonder-crowded vastnesses of the Unknown — words charged with the realities of those vastnesses but probably bringing to the man nothing more than an exalted and intense imaginative sympathy spontaneously generated, effortlessly sustained. The poet is primarily an apocalypt of revelatory words: whether he is also an apocalypt of the realities whose life-throb comes in the shape of these words cannot be decided straight away and the decision is not required for assessing the authenticity of the poetic inspiration.

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