Inspiration and Effort

Towards the Illimitable

A moment's warmth and the intimacies of a handful can never be my terminus. I must either possess like a God or feel the universe alien and strive to destroy its endless multitude by some mystical fiat of my consciousness. If I fail, I move among men like a dusky cloud, depressing them and myself losing all savour of life. Even the poet in me, whose natural being is to discover the veins of gold embedded in dull rock, keeps drifting with a listless countenance. I know that a Light dissolving every imperfection lives somewhere and that I have a home in it which on occasion I attain. But the sense of not having attained it for good is often the verge of lunacy for my wits and devours each poetic thrill as soon as it is born.

Oh I am obsessed with the illimitable! It is not only because the visitations of exalted feeling are rare that dumb blanks occur in the history of my mind. Great inspiration can never be too frequent a capture — we are not strong enough to bear and retain the glowing pressure of deep significances — we are soft and yielding to the downthrusts of divinity, the sublime lights plunge through us and out of us because we hold up no sustained response to their cry and cannot catch their brightness on a firm tablet of memory. If our emotions could stand the impact of high heaven and resound to it instead of answering to rhythms that are commonplace, there would be more poetry in this world. But sometimes a most peculiar numbness debars me from clasping inspiration. It is not that the receptive vessel is weak or the skies are empty. Reflecting that in a thousand million years the sun will be a shrivelled ember, the earth a frozen sleep and no least stir of even a grass-blade pierce the silence, the inanimation, the winter without end and all that passion and poetry have built grandly in the spaces of human consciousness leave not a mark on the vacuity of that distant doom, I stand paralysed. An utter hopelessness comes over me: no stroke of my pen, however delightful, seems worth the

Page 95

trouble of lasting for a mere thousand million years. Does not every phrase claim, by the superb imagination burning in it, an eternity of existence? Why then should I be baulked of the Spirit's immortal right, why suffer the indignity of being fobbed off with a few paltry millenniums when God's own termlessness is my dream in all that I manifest of His creative glory? Most foolish to the practical sense — this petulance of the dreamer in me; but many a page that might have quivered into beauty is left by it a white desert like the snow of that inhuman epoch prophesied by Science as the tomb of all the wonder of words poetry sets winging through the ages.

If my work must perish and I go down the dark road even before, I must seek after a more durable power than is granted to the poet or his poetry. Nothing appears to me satisfying save the breaking of whatever walls guard me from self-loss in the Infinite. To bear the indifference of the winds and the tides, the aloof greatness of wheeling worlds that outsoar man's living, the magnificent and icy touch of the Cosmos, we must ourselves become a greatness, an immensity, a transcendence of all human heat. But a tiny creature who has in him the power to feel the weight of infinitude must be in essence an infinitude that has forgotten its own grandeur. The tremendous gap we suffer is the oblivion of a tremendous fullness which is our deepest life. I cannot help the intuition that we are equal to the Cosmos. But we can know our own immeasurable truth only by dying to the smallness of our ego, the littleness of the whole human race, the finitude of all earth, the limitation of even the sun and the moon and the planets heaped together in a colossal bonfire. Stripped of the least attachment, we must endeavour to become nothing short of a pure Existence stretched without end through space and time, free and featureless and immutable. No form, no period should confine us. That alone is master within us, which can stand outside each object and beyond each circumstance. Once that sovereignty is acquired, then without harm each object and circumstance can

Page 96

be embraced and our life throb with burning details.

You must be considering my mystical megalomania the pursuit of a majestic mirage. What will you think if I fling at you the sublime perversenesses of a nympholept? You will deem me not just reverie-infested but also a Grand Inquisitor putting the human heart-beat on the rack. For, I have a most difficult confession to force out of love's delicate mouth. I want lovers everywhere to admit to themselves that all their consummations were tumultuous betrayals of what the wistful eyes and the hungry hands had promised. Not the brief flare-up of the nerves had lifted a beacon on the hilltop of the future to call forward love's limbs. Surely a mightier fulfilment had haunted us, mightier than flesh clinging to flesh — mightier also than two souls hurling against flesh-barriers to become each other's possession. Abelard, what you were looking for when Heloise came to you was not Heloise but your own priesthood, the command of some absolute Beauty smiling above change. That is why the barred door of your refusal to look beyond her had to be pushed open by Fate smiting away your genitals like an obstinate padlock! But all are not made God's eunuchs in so crude a fashion, and their paths to Truth are cut short instead. In the lives of those who stir with a vague superhuman trouble that wears no familiar face, the stroke of Fate in some form or other is always in waiting. They are beaten down from their proud kisses and the embracing ease of their marriage-beds — down to the dust where they may learn to kneel and worship. But if we are wise and if all would behold the true light behind the surface glitter, lover should speak to lover: "Various miseries will befall us, time will tear many a precious portion out of our lives, and death may divide — who knows how early? — the touch that is our entire happiness. If suffer we must, since none can escape being vulnerable clay, why should we not turn to the Everlasting in the midst of the ephemeral and, separated, clasp yet the Wonder where all separations cease — not the blind clod of death but the shadowless Spirit within, that is always and

Page 97

everywhere one? There the ecstatic pain is found in which, by being cloven apart here, we shall know the love which holds together the quintessence of all things."

Cruel, no doubt, is my admonition. I myself who give it shudder at times. Yet I cannot deny the Truth, for hours are there when I stand in the presence of a Beauty and a Beatitude whose very invisibleness has the power to blot out the gold of our broad day. How can I wrong Thy kingship, O Spirit Eternal, by forgetting those hours? I am called and called beyond each mundane prize. Whatever Thy form, Thou unknown menace to my human heart, I love Thee. O sweet devouring Wideness — from above and around and below Thou comest. Nowhere can I escape Thee then: and at the first touch of Thy seizure of joy there is no desire left in me to escape!

Page 98