Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 1)

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Your letter has saddened me a great deal. But I don't feel that, you have reached the rock-bottom of hopelessness. To lose your health - getting spells of dizziness and weakness, not feeling like eating, etc. - is not what the Mother expects of you. Our central joy is that we are deeply and inalienably related to her. Whether we always experience the relation or not is a secondary matter: the primary truth of our lives is that the Mother has accepted us and that, sooner or later, we shall know her living presence in us at all times. We have to learn to seek our raison d'etre in this glorious act of grace. It is an irrevocable act and nothing should make us despair or enter a physico-psychological decline. Circumstances can occasionally be very drastic - but I remember the Mother saying that when all material props appear lost we have a clear sign that we are meant for self-dedication to the Lord. How much are we nearer to the Lord at every step? - this is our principal concern. We may do our best to better our circumstances: the Mother never discouraged efforts in this direction. But failures and buffets are intended to push us more and more into the Lord's arms. They must have such a result while they last. And what you have to do to counteract your depression is to make an offering of the problems to the Mother and obtain an inner freedom from distressing preoccupation with them. Ask for guidance with intense faith and wait quietly for the answer. I am sure that you will not only gain inner peace - and, in consequence, better health -but also come into touch with the right parties. Keep an eye open for them and do whatever you can with those you already know — the people immediately involved in paving the way towards your pension and gratuity.

This is all I can say at present. In one word, my advice is: take yourself in hand like a true child of the Divine and let the deepmost things come first and, from that starting-point, go all out in the external field to meet the challenges.

(1980)

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You have sent me a quotation from Sri Aurobindo which most of us have forgotten:

For a sincere sadhaka it is necessary to be exceedingly careful about his company and environments. You can lose in a few minutes what has taken you months to gain. Contact with hostile and undesirable persons and even people of spiritual influence foreign to the integral yoga, holy places, temples and churches have an influence adverse to the working of this yoga and are a hindrance to progress.

The words were more apt when the Ashram had not expanded and variegated itself, so to speak, and started dealing more and more with the common world. But in essence they are still worth attending to and convey an important truth in all circumstances, especially for situations where we have an amount of choice.

You want me to tell you how best we can live up to this truth and what criteria we have to follow in deciding about persons and places. I shall touch on the problem as briefly and pointedly as I can.

People with ideas very different from ours and eager to change our outlook and mode of life - people who are immersed in the ordinary life of the senses and carry an atmosphere full of worldly desires — places that have marked old-world religious associations or are charged with the presence of a spiritual figure whose sadhana diverges very forcefully from the Aurobindonian Yoga - all these are to be avoided. Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish such people and places. Then we have to use our own inner feeling. If you are left in peace after contact with people or places, you may be sure that your protective zone has not been pierced. If you become aware of subtle uncertainties about your usual attitudes and movements, it may be better to cut down the contact or strengthen your own powers of resistance.

A time may come when you have so strong a protective

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zone around you that nothing will affect you. You will be conscious of undesirable influences hovering at the periphery of your being, but you will remain untouched and serene. However, it is not advisable to go on testing your own strength and safety. Keep away from whatever you clearly perceive to be out of tune with the Aurobindonian harmony of spirit and life, no matter how distantly.

When you can't avoid a certain environment, stay calm, invoke the Mother's Force and be confident of its action. 1 may add that at no time should there enter into your attitude any sense of egoistic superiority or any excited urge of hostility. These things are not Aurobindonian. In peace we avoid what is incongenial and in peace we face it if we must.

(1980)

Your information that "incarnadine" can be an adjective as well as a verb is welcome. It extends the possibilities of this splendorous vocable. I have learnt something.

But your assertion that Sri Aurobindo has used "incarnadine" as an adjective is unacceptable. If he had done so, would I not have known and therefore refrained from criticising the phrase in your poem where the word occurs? Surely you may credit me with acquaintance with his usage. The lines of Sri Aurobindo you have alluded to, without quoting them, run:

The soul could feel into infinity cast

Timeless God-bliss the heart incarnadine.

Merely the fact that "incarnadine" comes immediately associated with a noun does not render it adjectival. I have marked only two earlier employments of the word in English poetry and, according to me, Sri Aurobindo's is in accord with them.

The first occasion is in Shakespeare's Macbeth:

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood

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Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather

The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

Making the green one red.

(II.2, lines 61-64)

Here also the word follows immediately a noun. But it actually goes with "will rather" and the object of "incarnadine" precedes the verb - a grammatical construction which is common to older poetry, where inversions are frequent, and which even now is legitimate for a special effect. The last half-line gives the certainty of the verb-form, proving the sense of the word to be "make red".

The next instance is in Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyam. Quartrain VI ends:

'Red Wine!' - the Nightingale cries to the Rose

That yellow Cheek of hers t'incarnadine.

Here "to" with its "o" elided leaves us in no doubt of the verb-character of the word.

Now for Sri Aurobindo's sonnet "Evolution",¹ the two closing lines of which, as already quoted, are our bone of contention. The construction is difficult. The phrase "into infinity cast" is a passive past participial one, going with "soul". The sentence can only be construed as follows if it is to have grammatical shape: "The soul, cast into infinity, could feel timeless God-bliss incarnadine the heart." In English, after "feel", as after words like "see" and "hear", one can use a present participle or simply the present-tense verb-form which is really the infinitive with "to" understood: that is, either "incarnadining" or "incarnadine" in the sentence concerned.

The line just preceding our two illustrates the present-participle use after "see":

I saw Matter illumining its parent Night.

1. Collected Poems (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Fondicherry 1972), p. 157.

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The present-tense verb-form may be noted with "hear" in Wordsworth's "Immortality" Ode:

I hear the Echoes thro' the mountains throng...

(1980)

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