Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 1)

3

FROM LETTERS TO FLORENCE RUSSELL

Your gift for June [1976] cheered up both the 27-year old Mother India and its 72-year young editor "Amal Kiran" (according to Sri Aurobindo's renaming of K.D. Sethna), "the Clear Ray", who, while appreciating Anatole France's advice to writers, "Clarity first, clarity again and clarity always", has in his role as poet preferred in consonance with Sri Aurobindo's own insight the injunction of Havelock Ellis: "Be clear, be clear, be not too clear." For, in poetry there must be around a core of distinct brightness a halo of radiant mystery extending far into the depths of the ineffable. To play a variation on the metaphor: one must be like a clear-cut star but all a-twinkle, all aquiver as if charged with a unknown message, as if

Tingling with rumours of the infinite.

Forgive this little sidetrack. Let me come to your letter. One point in it makes my "sidetrack" not quite irrelevant. It is your reference to Sanskrit words. These words, especially when plucked from the Veda, the Upanishads or the Gita, carry the double aspect which I have spoken of, for they have what Sri Aurobindo calls "undertones" of the inner being and "overtones" of the higher, or, as a line from Savitri about the Mantra puts it in a Mantric way:

Sight's sound-waves breaking from the soul's

great deeps.

The unfathomable suggestions, the "rumours of the infinite", are so strong that even if one does not know the meaning of the words they invade one's consciousness and reverberate there with a sense of revelation. As you have

Page 13

yourself said, one can "grasp some meaning without any vocal interpretation".

I must one day get together all my poems and send them to you. The immediate packet due to you is, of course, the coming July issue of Mother India: "Spiritual India and Bicentennial America" - which will be out in a few days and wing its way to you so as to reach you by the fourth of the month, the date of the great occasion.

I had a mind to include in it some tidbits about the War of Independence and Washington. Perhaps the most interesting is the following. When King George realized the ghastly mistake he was making, he instructed Lord Howe to take a letter to George Washington, granting pardon for the revolt and desiring complete reconciliation. But the British did not recognise Washington as the American General, the rebel Commander-in-Chief. So Lord Howe addressed the letter to Mr. Washington. The American army sent it back, saying, "There is no such person here." Later, Lord Howe tried again, this time addressing George Washington Esq. Again, the letter was returned with the same comment. Then Lord Howe gave up, because British prestige would be injured if he changed the tune of the address. Thus the war was allowed to continue for many more miserable months, proving the truth of Einstein's remark at a later date: "There are only two things that are limitless - the universe and human stupidity."

*

Your mention of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony brings back to me the feeling I have always had about all art. 1 find art to divide roughly into two kinds - the one that humanly ascends in a way that makes us sing paeans of praise and the one that divinely descends to leave us absolutely dumbfounded. The first kind admirably embodies the life-force heroically striving towards the heights, the dreamer mind winging luminously to the empyrean, the soul of idealistic

Page 14

love rising in fire and frankincense in answer to some eternal noonday. Here is an inspired effort to seize what St. Augustine calls the Beauty of Ancient Days that is forever new. The other kind is not an act of seizing but an act of being seized. No inspired effort meets us now: we are face to face with the condition which Sri Aurobindo once put before me as the prerequisite of the Mantra: "the hushed intense receptivity of the seer." There is a waiting and watching in the wideness of the life-force or on the pinnacles of the mind or amid "the soul's great deeps". Responding to this visionary vigil a glory comes down from the Unknown, an utterance of the Supreme in the tongue proper to it and not in a translation in terms of the human. No doubt, mingling with the human consciousness at the other end, it has a touch not quite alien to us; but the quiet with open arms, that receives it, allows the divine tone to keep ringing over every other note. Both types of art are precious, yet this is indeed a ram avis - Sri Aurobindo's

Swan of the supreme and spaceless ether wandering

winged through the universe, .

Spirit immortal!

Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is an example of the second type of art and what you have described as "the final outburst of inexplicable joy" is one of the world's master-movements of it. Among European achievements 1 would incline to couple with it the whole last canto of "Paradiso" in Dante's Divina Commedia, closing on that unforgettable note which one may venture to English, a little freely, thus:

Then vigour failed the towering fantasy;

Yet, like a wheel whose speed no tremble mars.

Desire rushed on, its spur unceasingly

The love that moves the sun and all the stars.

Page 15

Reading your latest letter I remembered Sri Aurobindo's line to Ahana, the Dawn Goddess -

Trailing behind thee the purple of thy soul and the

dawn-moment's glamour....

What a magical world, at once inner and outer, you have conjured up with that violet script on special paper! This line of Sri Aurobindo's is indeed a vision of the real Florence - I mean you, not the city, though I am sure the city anticipating your name had in times past all the wonder our imagination wraps it in.

When I look at the soul your letter unveils, I see in a single unifying flash the three goddesses I have always worshipped: Beauty, Generosity, Courage. To me Beauty is a Platonic presence, the fugitive yet unforgettable reflection of eternal Forms in the flux of time - thrilled super-realities which I have tried to echo in a couplet much appreciated by Sri Aurobindo:

Bodies of fire and ecstasies of line

Where passion's mortal music grows divine.

And Beauty is not only an outward marvel: it is also the mind's exalted attitude, the heart's exquisite gesture. With this inwardness of enchantment, Beauty merges in those two other goddesses. For, Generosity and Courage are a high and wide, intense and powerful as well as sweet and radiant self-giving of a mind that seeks to lose its being in the Infinite, a heart that yearns to contain the whole world and warm it with its deepest life, two movements that are fearless barrier-breakers, two laughing enemies of all that twists the large lines of existence into ugly imprisoning fences of the small and the self-centred. It is this Beauty, outward-inward and never separated from Generosity and Courage, which evokes immortal music from the true poet. It is this Beauty which is the fount of all great art. It is this Beauty which stirred within

Page 16

Florence to make that city memorable - and it is this Beauty which I see in you when you kindle up in response to my letter about Florence.

"The dawn-moment's glamour" - that also is to be remembered together with the soul's purple which is the innermost being's royalty of grace and graciousness. What is that glamour? Every day there is a moment between darkness and brightness when some mysterious perfect world seems to peep out and our world appears to tremble delicately on the verge of a miraculous new-birth, a psychic "renaissance", as if some everlasting glory of colour and shape were about to be revealed as the truth of the on-going time- process. The opening Canto of Sri Aurobindo's Savitri is an enchanting hint or glint of this phenomenon. The ineffable moment passes and we have again common daylight. But that moment is a promise and a presage: its transitory touch is the seed repeatedly sown in earth-life, serving as the secret source of all its evolutionary aspiration and endeavour. I have a clear sense of this seed stirring within your words.

*

I am a little late in replying. Quite a heap of work suddenly descended upon me, submerging the letter-writer out of sight. The work sometimes becomes a heap just because, like you, I am a variety of beings - and that too not in succession as with most people but simultaneously. So a great number of things lure me at the same time and it's a job dealing with all of them almost together. One of the results in the past of this multitude of me's is that I have 23 unpublished books on subjects fairly wide apart: poetry, literary criticism, philosophical thought, scientific perspectives, history, archaeology, scriptural exegesis, translation from the French. On top of all the author-characters jostling one another, there is the sheer human diversity such as you speak of, a collection of contradictory pieces: "some say yes - some say no - do this or do that." The consolation that manifold people like us can

Page 17

take from our present perplexity is that the greater the crowd to be organised the greater the ultimate richness of unified being! To get to this richness we have to practise assiduously the Aurobindonian command:

"All life is Yoga."

The command does not, of course, mean that everything constituting what passes for life, in the world as it is, can be accepted straight away as Yoga. What is meant is: nothing in life should be considered as lacking a spiritual possibility, a spiritual truth hiding behind or within it. The old ascetic habit of cutting out whole chunks of common existence and confining oneself to a few bare necessities - preferably in a forest or a cave - has now to be itself cut out on the whole, though now and then a bit of withdrawing in order to leap forward better will not be quite out of place. But, by and large, we must live in the midst of the teeming vicissitudes of the world and, rejecting the spurious shape of things, try to evoke the authentic one.

This does not always imply a mere refining of habitual movements: it occasionally implies a complete substitution of them by the Divine Originals - the Archetypal Truth, Force, Bliss that may have got distorted and not simply diminished here. A re-creation may be needed through the pure light and strength and sweetness that reside in our inmost soul.

You have raised the question: "What is life?" Arthur Symons, with a dignified Stoic pessimism, says:

Life is a long preparedness for death.

Shakespeare, in the role of a disgruntled Macbeth, cries out, as everybody knows;

Life's but a poor player

Who struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more...

Page 18

Shelley, idealistic visionary that he was, declares as also most people are aware:

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

Stains the white radiance of eternity,

Until death tramples it to fragments....

A French poet, with a resigned attitude of humble yet happy faith sings:

La vie est telle-

Quelle Dieu la fit,

Et, telle-quelle, E

lle suffit.

The lines may be freely rendered in English:

Life is such

As God devises,

And, little or much,

Life suffices.

A deeper sense of the Divine in the vibrant beauty of time's passage comes home to us in Vaughan's intuition of life:

A quickness that my God hath kissed.

This is one of my two favourite definitions. It suggests at the same time the fleeting, fast-vanishing character of human existence and the blessedness which it can still carry because it is a gift from God, because it can feel constantly the warm presence of the Divine's care and because the Supreme Himself, out of His deep affection and compassion for man, became incarnate, took on the brevity of the human condition and filled it forever with His undying love.

The co-favourite definition is my friend Nirodbaran's phrase, a fusion of the simple with the subtle in word as well as rhythm:

Page 19

Life that is deep and wonder-vast.

Here we are not only given the glimpse of a rich meaning behind the surface, a meaning opening up happy surprises. We also get the sense of a more-than-earthly truth silently at work within the many-motioned vital force to reveal through the play of this force a secret splendour whose power of transfiguring earth overpasses our largest dreams.

*

Your reference to horse-racing has stirred me a great deal. Did I ever tell you that I am a horse-worshipper? I rode horses for 20 years before I joined the Ashram, but I had to do it with certain limitations because of a bad left leg, legacy of infantile paralysis. The Mother once told me that one day she hoped to cure it. Do you know the first thought that flashed across my mind? It was: "I'll get hold of a grand big horse and start riding it all over Pondicherry!"

Yes, I have looked adoringly at the great Secretariat's picture. He was indeed an extraordinary racer - well suited to the traditional Persian hero Rustum, under whose weight the legs of every horse buckled except those of the one named Ruksh. "Ruksh" is the later Persian form of the ancient Aryan word "Rakshasa", meaning "Giant" and denoting a type of what Sri Aurobindo would call a Vital Being. The Rakshasa is the violent devourer as distinguished from the Asura who is the cold-blooded scheming destroyer and dictator, as well as from the Pishacha, who is the foul-minded perverted filth-fiend and torturer. Ruksh in the Rustum-legend would represent the gigantic power of self-assertive vitality coming under the control of the mind in its heroic ventures.

I have always regarded Sri Aurobindo as Kalki, the last Avatar of Hindu tradition, who has been figured as coming to the world riding a white horse. Perhaps the same symbolic horse arrives at the end of India's spiritual history as that

Page 20

which at its beginning the Vedic Rishis visioned as galloping ever towards the Dawn - Dadhikravan, image of the purified and mastered Life-Force moving with the Immortal Light of Truth in his heart and eyes.

In connection with Sri Aurobindo, there is an interesting fact to note in his Savitri. The achievement of the heroine's father - the long manifold Yoga and detailed exploration of the various ascending planes right up to the highest, from which the Divine Mother emerges to meet him - represents the long spiritual labour of Sri Aurobindo himself. The name of this Aurobindonian "thinker and toiler in the Ideal's air" is Aswapati, "Lord of the Horse".

Page 21