Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 1)

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I wonder what disturbed you so much. Earthquakes should be out of place in your life now unless they can bring up a Himalaya out of nowhere. Perhaps the meeting with a sadhak who can leave everything to the Mother was a Himalayan discovery. But can one really call this chap's condition Mount Everest? "Total reliance" on the Divine can be assessed only if an Ever-rest is felt towering within one while a veritable Kanchenjunga of calamity looms in front of one's nose. In the common run of events a naturally optimistic temperament, when turned to Yoga, can become optimystic with no great difficulty. The true test arrives when everything goes crashing about one's ears. Can one in such deafening circumstances still say -

Ever we hear in the heart of the peril a flute go before us?

This line from Sri Aurobindo's Ahana has been a great favourite of mine both as a guide in the spiritual life and as an example of poetry fulfilling one of its basic functions. As you must know, poetry is hard to define with one single formula. We have to approach it from several viewpoints. Its intrinsic nature may be considered at least fivefold. It is:

1.Not only sight but also insight.

2.At the same time light and delight.

3.Passion building up peace.

4.Intensity held within harmony.

5.Magic leading into mystery.

The last definition is perhaps most applicable to the work of Sri Aurobindo and the line I have quoted is a striking instance of it. That "flute" is surely a mysterious entity. To us Indians it is suggestive of Sri Krishna, the soul's magnet, the love-lord of a divine hide-and-seek. To the Westerner it will

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be the touch of a baffling beauty - the elusive hint of some enchanting power of protection and direction in the midst of life's constant uncertainties. Essentially it should bring home to us the sense that ahead of us, as if knowing the path which is vague and fraught with danger and as if guiding us through it to a distant goal, an unseen friend and lover asks us to follow him with happy faith.

Technically, there is a special point in the words "heart" and "peril". Particularly through perils the flute is intended to sound clearest and sweetest. The very phonetics of "peril" are flutelike. While the r and / have a trill and roll at once rousing and lulling, the p with its demand on our lips closing and opening to articulate it conjures up the act of managing a wind-instrument with the mouth. The noun "heart" bestirs us to feel that there is a secret depth in each danger, a centre where a concealed life has its steady rhythm which can take all seeming disorder and disruption to an harmonious end.

To end my own comments harmoniously I should draw your attention to the hexametrical mould of Sri Aurobindo's line. The hexameter, with its 17 possible syllables at its fullest (5 dactyls and 1 spondee or trochee), has not only given the poet his best chance to complete his complex play of idea, emotion and image at one stretch but also helped him convey to us the sense of a long sustained continued movement through time and space, a life's journey of repeated risks with yet the Divine's presence subtly assured as going with it. And both the companionship and the risks are hinted at as being constant by the r-note running from start to finish - 5 times audible ~ across the line.

(6.5.1987)

What light is shed on the nature of poetic inspiration in general by Sri Aurobindo's line: "Sight's sound-waves breaking from the soul's great deeps"?

This line from Savitri is meant primarily to sum up the

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Mantra, the poetry of the highest spiritual truth flowing out "in metres that reflect the moving worlds" - and it is itself an exemplification of mantric utterance. But it also sheds light on the nature of poetic inspiration in general. For, if the Mantra is the ideal poetry, all poetry that is genuine must represent or shadow forth in its own way the mantric essence.

We gather from the line, first of all, that the ultimate source from which poetry comes is what we may term the soul, the true being of us, which is not our body or our life-force or even our mind. Our self of sensations, our self of emotions, our self of ideas are not the fountain of poetic speech. All of them have a part to play, all of them can be instruments, indeed must be instruments if the poetic speech is to be full. But that speech is basically from the true being of us which is not only deep within but also itself a great depth, holding as it were a vast secret ocean of experience-movements in which the Divine Consciousness is hidden and in which there is a concealed oneness of our individuality with the whole world. Sensation, emotion, idea are here involved or contained in a thrilled intuitive awareness focussed for poetic purposes into a subtle vision which is at the same rime a subtle vibration taking the form of rhythmic words.

Sight is the characteristic function of the poet: he catches the shine, the colour, the shape, the gesture of things, his is a concrete seizure of significances - vivid pictures, imaginative figurations, symbolic suggestions, these are the poet's fundamental powers and means by which he enjoys the world within and the world without and by which he traces the beauty and truth of things and attains to a comprehension of details, interrelations, totalities.

But mere seeing, however intense, is not all that there is to poetry. Whatever the poet intensely sees carries with it an expressive harmony as if every picture, every image, every symbol spoke out its own heart: the poet's act of seeing is simultaneously an act of hearing. They are not two processes really - the sight-substance comes fused with the sound-

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form, the vision is its own word, the right manifesting word which is not just "transmissive" but "incarnative", embodying with a living intimacy and .concrete directness the gleaming stuff and stir of the soul's revelatory contact with reality.

Furthermore, this sound is like a march of waves, it has its pattern of rise and fall, its rhythm variously modulating on a basic recurrent tone and breaking upon the receptive heart and mind and sensation with the powerful spontaneities, the profound felicities of soul-experience.

We may sum up in the words of Sri Aurobindo: "Sight is the essential poetic gift. The archetypal poet in a world of original ideas is, we may say, a Soul that sees in itself intimately this world and all the others and God and Nature and the life of beings and sets flowing from its centre a surge of creative rhythm and word-images which become the expressive body of the vision, and the great poets are those who repeat in some measure this ideal creation, kavayah satyairutah, seers and hearers of the poetic truth and poetic word."

*

One of the basic calls of the Yogic life on us is to understand that while being omniscient and omnipotent can wait we have to lose no time in being, in a certain preparatory sense, omnipresent. The drift of this rather cryptic pronouncement will be caught if you take as your purchase-point the word "time" in the preceding sentence. "Omnipresent" theologically means existing everywhere at the same moment. It is impossible for us to have such an existence - as Sir Robert Boyle, a scientist of the 17th century, realised when he protested in a particular situation: "Sir, how can I be in two places at once? I am not a bird!" Not as referring to God but as referring to man, "omnipresent" has to do with "time", not "place". We must learn to live always and altogether in the present. As Jalal-u-din Rumi put it long ago:

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Past and future veil Him from thy sight -

Burn them in fire.

Omar Khayyam, whose Sufi light was transcreated by Fitzgerald into Epicurean delight, gets through to us a similar message though with a smiling sadness in English rather than with the original Persian inward laughter:

Come, my beloved, fill the cup that clears

Today of past regrets and future fears -

Tomorrow? Why, tomorrow we may be

Ourselves with yesterday's seven thousand years.

Khayyam's cup and Rumi's fire indicate the same wonderful secret of true Iife:^he soul, the psychic being, hidden within, like a golden key to liberate us from the leaden room locking us up with obsession by what has been and what is to be. The inner cup waits to be filled with our ever-flowing outer consciousness and give us happy security in an immortal remembrance of the Eternal Now. The concealed fire, lifting ever upward and tasting at all times with its thrilled tongue a perpetual paradise, is ready to shrivel up the veil of miserable memories and anxious anticipations which keep us away from the sun of Supreme Truth that neither rises nor sets but is always poised over our fluctuant universe. Not looking backward, not looking forward - forgetting the flicker of the days that have gone, getting rid of the quivering hopes for the nights that are ahead, we must gather all our thoughts and feelings and dreams in the living moment, make it an outward-inward offering to the Divine Mother.

An offering to her, made with full absorption in the sense of her luminous beauty, will wipe off the script of karma and render us new-bom and,, if we let the offering keep out the worry over the uncertainty of the future with faith in her care for us, all such forebodings as you have will take flight. When you think how tied down you are by past happenings and how choked up you are by the mist and fog of whatever

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threatens to happen, hold on to the Mother's revelation that the long dragging chain of events which appear to make our present a vanishing link between an unchangeable past and an ineluctable future is just a superficial impression. According to her, the universe is re-created every second, so that we are essentially free. There is an appearance of sameness and continuity, for a line of sequence has been established, antecedents and consequents run on as if bound together in a succession of instants, but within this scheme of what seems law and logic the Divine's perpetual freedom keeps smiling, ready to act with those secret "incalculables" that are the despair of the historian or else on rare occasions with inexplicable turns that flash in our faces the impression of miracles which, try as we may, we cannot absorb into our scientific minds.

A clue for us at all times to the Mother's revelation of what a phrase in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri calls the Divine Magician's freedom pacing in the same step with law and thus leaving for us also a breathing-space, as it were, of liberty - this clue is our intuition of "freewill". Without knowing the reason - namely, that the world emerges fresh and new all the while from the Divine's depth — we have continually the awareness that we are somehow never completely constrained by any hangover from the past nor wholly affected by concern for the future but can choose our line of action as we want, in however limited and momentary a measure. This intuition has always been a puzzle in a cosmos of causality in the scientific view, a cosmos of foreknowledge and fate in the spiritual vision. But, if at each instant there is no determination from either the past or the future and the cosmos is born straight out of eternity, an utter freewill, an absolute liberty to choose would be just the thing expected. We humans are small consciousnesses: so the utterness and absoluteness are in a miniscule form, nothing more than the pigmy power of the inner Watcher, the back-standing Purusha, to say "Yes" or "No" to what seems to be the flux of inward and outward Nature, Prakriti.

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But this power is a mysterious pointer to the truth the Mother has surprised us with. And I may venture to suggest that the strange disclosures modem physics goes on making - Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy about the simultaneous measurement of position and velocity, the replacement of the old calculus of certainty by the "wave"-mathematics of probability about the place of an atom or a photon in a multitude of either entity - are also a vague index to the same truth.

If you hold fast to this truth and make your mind and heart detach themselves from preoccupation with what old Khayyam in another quatrain terms

Unborn tomorrow and dead yesterday

and steeping your being in the rapt felicity of the Soul that is both child and sage, live in its attunement to that truth, you can repeat to your own tingling ears the line following the one on "tomorrow" and "yesterday",

Why fret about them if today be sweet?

Here is the "new value-system" you have to recognise and establish in the strange philosophising mixture of laughing Democritus and weeping Heraclitus which names itself You. Let this letter be the "blessing" you desire from your less mixed-up friend.

(13.6.87)

Apropos of the small sample you have put before me of your way of translating Mallarme, may I say a few personal words on the "how" of translating this super-symbolist poet, as if I were penning a postscript to my book on him?

In the work of modern translators of old writers, there is a tendency to adopt a style with vivid appeal to current cleverness and with a phraseology answering in present-day

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terms to expressions thought apt in a past period. Here the question is not only of what Mallarme might have written if English had been his native medium: the question is also of the kind of English which would have echoed his particular sensibility, his peculiar mentality. Thus the line in Brise Marin

Sur le vide papier que la blancheur defend —

which I have translated

On the empty paper guarded by its own white

has been rendered by you:

On the blank veto of an empty page.

This is a fine example of transposing Mallarme's suggestive utterance into a speech combining forceful explicitness as in "veto" with imaginative wit as in "blank", which hints at the old French "blanc" (- "white") as well as means "unrelieved, sheer". Though there is the danger that the ordinary reader may find "empty" tautologous after "blank" a keen scanner will get something of the Mallarmean feel of the purity which would be violated by the act of writing. But the sense of the profanation likely to be caused by inscribing anything in ink on what seems to represent a sacred Ineffable which is void of all world-stain and which inwardly inhibits the attempt to penetrate it - does such a sense waft to us with the breath of a sacred presence haunting the blank sheet of paper? The boldness of your rendering, though more in keeping with contemporary idiom, misses the delicacy always going with Mallarme's audacity.

Carried over into another age no less than into another language, Mallarme should still preserve his characteristic temper and tone - provided he is saved from the unconsciously awkward or the deliberately archaic in our effort to be faithful to his unique past. A certain amount of liberty is

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unavoidable and even desirable in transferring his individuality from French into English, but we should avoid the temptation to rewrite him and preserve only what we may consider his substance. We should keep in mind, in a slightly adapted sense, his little dig at Degas when that painter complained that although he had plenty of ideas he couldn't write poetry; "My dear friend, poetry is not written with ideas - it is written with words." The kind of words Mallarme used, the kind of connection he made between them, the kind of expressive whole he aimed at have to be conveyed from one language to another with, of course, whatever little alterations are syntactically demanded. The Platonic archimages glimmering out of a Buddhist "neant" which is a white voicelessness - this double-aspected essence has to be mirrored in a special turn of phrase in order to achieve, in the Mallarmean mode,

Pour la Rose et le Lys le mystere d'un nom.

(For Rose and Lily the mystery of a name.)

Tiny linguistic shades, small image-nuances have a crucial say in this matter. A sensitive faithfulness, both to the way Mallarme makes the solid world disappear towards subtle secrecies by means of words and to the manner in which the symbol-charged words relate to those secrecies so that le mystere du nom becomes musicienne du silence, is of capital importance. And I may add, wherever Mallarme has cast his symbolist creations in a rhymed poetic form, the English version should have, however flexibly, rhyme as well as metre. Else the typical effect of the ensemble -

Une agitation solennelle par l'air

De paroles -

(A solemn agitation in the air

Of words -)

will be missed.

(21.6.87)

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I would have enjoyed overhearing the talks you and your daughter had about the young poets who went to war in 1914-1918 and got killed. I personally think Rupert Brooke had the greatest promise, though none of his once-famous sonnets had the grim heart-break of Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth", which some critics rank as one of the finest in the English language. Brooke was more inclined to be romantically sentimental. But he had a gift of crystallised phrase, as we may see from "The Great Lover", and once he achieved a wonderful piece of half-symbolist half-mystic suggestion that is unforgettable. It is the sestet of his sonnet "The Dead". To appreciate it sharply you have to read the octave first:

These hearts are woven of human joys and cares.

Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth,

The years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs,

And sunset, and the colours of the earth.

These had seen movement, and heard music; known

Slumber and waking; loved, gone proudly friended;

Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone;

Touched flowers and furs and cheeks. All this

is ended.

Here Brooke is at his level of normal felicity of phrase, semi-romantic semi-sentimental, with two or three outstanding expressions: "washed marvellously with sorrow", "gone proudly friended", "sat alone". Then comes a sudden burst of sheer vision in the next six lines:

There are waters blown by changing winds to laughter

And lit by the rich skies, all day. And after.

Frost, with a gesture, stays the waves that dance

And wandering loveliness. He leaves a white

Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance,

A width, a shining peace, under the night.

The passage from life to death by the young soldiers could

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not have been poetically immortalised with keener sight and subtler insight. If it stood by itself, it might even conjure up a Yogi's trance, a Nirvanic world-transcendence and would be a Mallarmean poem in a more fluid, more open pattern than the interplay of the obscure and the mysterious, the complex and the cryptic which was Mallarme's typical Symbolist art.

(22.6.87)

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