Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 1)

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You write: "On page 19, line 8 of the new edition of The Future Poetry I stumbled over translating the following passage: 'Nevertheless, mere force of language tacked on to the trick of the metrical beat does not answer the higher description of poetry...' The word 'trick' in the sense of 'device' does make sense, but could it not be that the original has the word 'tick' which seems to fit in more perfectly here?"

Your perplexity over "trick" and "tick" has a point, but I am afraid "tick" won't do: "the metrical beat" is itself a "tick", so there will be an unnecessary repetition hardly conducive to either substance or style. In this context, "trick" means not only "device" but "feat of skill or dexterity, knack, best way of doing something". It is suggestive, in addition, of "peculiar or characteristic practice or habit, mannerism". The metrical beat is a thing which one can learn and be an expert at and employ to striking effect, like the trick of a conjuror. All these shades would be lost if "tick" is used, signifying no more than mechanical recurrence, which, as I have said, is already implied in "beat". The background sense of Sri Aurobindo's phrase is not that the metrical beat is always a "trick" - in fact, metre is a great truth of inspired utterance - but that it can become just a skilful device by which uninspired utterance may try to pass off as genuine with the help of the repetitive and therefore impressive swing of the language. True poetry is measured speech with a moving precision in it: there metre or at least marked rhythm serves as a winging power which makes the moving precision go home to the depths in us and become a memorable part of them. However, metre can also be a contrivance because of the general regularity in it of short-long or slack-stress and one can be a good hand at it without achieving what the poet Hopkins calls

The rise, the roll, the carol, the creation,

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and, at the intensest, the mantric pitch, what Sri Aurobindo terms with the mantric pitch itself

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

great deeps.

(26.6.1987)

Some words of yours have put me on the track of what is happening to you. Generally speaking, you are in the transitional passage between one yuga (age) and another, when the past is a disembodied spectre and the future an unembodied ghost. It is important to realise that there are two things. If one feels that everything is just the past grown empty, one becomes the current "you" and speaks of

my thoughts,

my desires and impulses

pale, dull images

of once-bright sculptures.

What is necessary in the transitional passage is to discern shadows cast by events still to occur. Sculptures, that are bright but beyond, throw into the mist of this passage their images. Naturally these images are pale and dull. They are so not because their reality has vanished and lies in an irrecoverable past but because it is waiting to appear in its true solid shape. You have to look forward and try to discern what is ahead from what has fallen - as Shakespeare would visionarily tell you -

In the dark backward and abysm of time.

The difficulty is that the "once-bright" is fused with the "not-yet-bright". Only the soul in you who, as the Katha Upani-shad implies, is today from yesterday and will be tomorrow from today can do on the individual scale what Shakespeare with another powerful vision, refers to as being done by

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the prophetic

Soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.

You are "disinterested", as you put it meaning "uninterested", because the "gone" is lost for ever and there's no sense in catching at phantoms. Perhaps you'll protest that even the future does not attract you and you don't care about what may materialise from the fog in front. Your double-aspected indifference, which is like being suspended in a void, is due to your not understanding the Mother's cryptic declaration that the Supramental Transformation has already been achieved but hasn't yet taken physical expression. The glory promised by her and Sri Aurobindo is nothing uncertain any more than India's Independence previsioned by the Mother in 1920 was such. Sri Aurobindo too said to Purani that the fiat for the country's freedom had gone forth and he need not be agitated about it but plunge gladly into the non-political life calling him to Pondicherry. Both our Gurus have done in the subtle dimension what they came into the gross to announce and prepare and, if possible, establish. That is why the Mother once told me that Sri Aurobindo had so arranged his work that nothing could stop its fulfilment on earth - even if the present civilisation broke down, the work would come to pass in due course. You may also remember his saying that what he had willed had always happened and would happen no matter what hostile attacks might delay it and even create the semblance of its failure. If you hold the light of this certainty in your heart and mind, your present neutral grey will slowly feel upon its cloudiness a faint rainbow and the "disinterested" condition will be like a suppressed smile rather than like an unexpressed sigh.

You have asked for "illumination" from me. Here is at least a candle to help you grope your way to your own hidden glory.

(11.11.87)

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I thank you for remembering me and sending me such a nice present for my eighty-second birthday.

The day passed very harmoniously. People asked me what special wish I had made for it, I replied, "None. There is one single wish running through all the years - and that is to be open more and more to the transforming grace of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. On each birthday it gets an extra spurt."

The prayed-for opening is not a boon only for me. By it I would be rendered more helpful to my friends - a deeper sense of my oneness with them will grow, an intenser feeling of gratitude to them will develop and the Mother and Sri Aurobindo will be more present with them.

Somebody put me the question: "Where in your being is the centre of your sadhana?" As I write on various subjects and read also a lot and have been a frequent expositor of Sri Aurobindo's spiritual philosophy, the expectation seemed to be that I would point to my head. It appeared to be a surprise when I put my hand on the middle of my chest. But ever since I came to the Ashram it has been my aspiration to be open there. Again and again at the beginning of my stay I used to plead with the Mother to break open the heart-centre to the Divine. I did not realise at that time that the Divine Himself has His central presence in us deep in our heart and that the true soul of us is secretiy poised there, an evolutionary emanation of the Divine and His developing companion through the ages. Of course one can be aware of the Divine from any centre, but He is approached most directly through the heart.

It is interesting to note that when one is speaking of oneself and affirming the "I" in some way or other, one never puts one's hand on one's head or one's belly but always instinctively on the middle of one's chest.

Apropos of the subject in hand I may recount a little episode from the Indian epic Mahabharata. Once when Draupadi, the heroine, was about to be disgraced in public by her enemies, she appealed inwardly to Sri Krishna for

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help. "O Sovereign of the Highest Heaven, come!" No response. "O Master of the Seven Worlds, come!" Nothing. "O Ruler of the Four Quarters, come!" Still no answer. Then desperately Draupadi called out, "O Dweller in my own heart, come!" Immediately Sri Krishna appeared to her subtle vision and signed to her not to be afraid. The enemies were foiled in their attempt to undrape her. The sari went on unfolding endlessly. Later Draupadi chided Sri Krishna and asked why he took so long in coming. He explained: "You see, the Highest Heaven, the Seven Worlds, even the Four Quarters are far away and it takes time to come from them. But when you called me from your own heart where I dwell, I could come at once."

(27.11.1986)

I am sorry to learn that your mother passed away a few days back. You must be feeling rather lonely, but if that is our Divine Mother's Will you have to accept it as the best thing for you, no matter what the appearance. Whitehead once said, "Religion is what one does with one's loneliness." Plotinus much earlier framed the famous formula: "The flight of the alone to the Alone." So surely there is an inward-pulling and upward-pushing power in the state of loneliness. But in Aurobindonian terms a deeper truth lies in a spirituali-sation of that remark of Emerson's that the most developed man is he who preserves a state of solitude in the midst of a crowd. Or else the converse may be visualised as a complementary truth to the full Aurobindonian: against a background of the realisation of the one immutable Brahman there has to be a foreground realisation of the multitudinous many-splendoured Divine - a combination of what is called in Savitri

White chambers of dalliance with eternity

And the stupendous gates of the Alone.

I hope you will excuse me for this semi-poetic semi-

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philosophic sidetrack from the subject of your dear mother's death. But perhaps this digression - in tune with my typical digression-full lectures on poetry which you were always interested to attend - may help to take you out of whatever sadness you were plunged into by the departure of a longstanding or at least long-sitting if not long-reposing affectionate companion who had been ailing of late.

(27.11.1986)

I was indeed glad to hear from you - a voice from the past so sweetly wafted and reminding me of a happy occasion when I had the pleasure of speaking to fresh young souls and I was myself just across the border of being sixty years old and felt much less loaded with years, for, as Wordsworth put it when face to face with a bank of daffodils,

A poet cannot but be gay

In such a jocund company.

The "secret of secrets" which I passed on to this company from the Mother's whispering lips has been my master-key right up to now and has opened many locks which otherwise would have remained deadlocks in my life. I must, however, add something which is also equally important. I wonder if I referred to it twenty-three years ago. While the gesture of "Remembering and Offering" is to be made all the time from the heart confronting the world, there has to be in the background an attitude as of an eternity supporting that gesture - an attitude pictured in those three unforgettable lines from Savitri:

A poised serenity of tranquil strength,

A wide unshaken look, on time's unrest

Faced all experience with unaltered peace.

Your letter has asked me to go back not only by twenty-three years but also more than sixty, requesting me as you

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have done to recount the incident of the "shoes". I had already felt the call of the Infinite and started my search for a teacher. I had come across a number of Yogis but none touched me to the core. A theosophist friend who had met Sri Aurobindo had said to me that nobody except Sri Aurobindo would satisfy a complex fellow like me. I had read somewhere that Sri Aurobindo was a great philosopher and linguist and poet on top of having Yogic attainments. But somehow he had not come alive to my soul. Then, one day, I went to the Crawford Market of Bombay to buy a pair of shoes. The shopkeeper put my purchase in a cardboard box and wrapped the box in a big newspaper sheet and tied it up with a string. When, on reaching home, I untied the box and unwrapped it, the newspaper sheet fell open right in front of me and disclosed a big headline: "A Visit to the Ashram of Aurobindo Ghose." I at once started reading the article. At the end of it I said to myself: "This is the place for me." The destined Guru's Grace had come to meet the searching soul. I wrote to the Ashram seeking permission to stay in it. In those days nobody was allowed except after his photograph had been studied by the Master and the Mother. In the reply to me through Purani who used to manage the correspondence of Gujarat no photo was asked for: I was simply told that I could come. A few months after, I went to the Ashram with my wife who was later given the name "Lalita" by Sri Aurobindo - I went wearing those very shoes: they proved to be the shoes of a pilgrim on his march to the Goal. Most seekers are drawn to the Divine through their hearts or through their heads: He drew me through my feet. Quite a feat, I should think, even for an omnipotent God!

I may say that once a seeker's feet are caught he can never go astray from the path, no matter what the mobile heart and the mutable head may suggest in the course of the trying journey that is Yoga. In spite of all my vagaries of emotion and thought Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have kept me treading "the razor's edge".

(14.1.1988)

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You have put me a question which is not easy to answer, but I shall make an attempt to meet it.

Face to face with the Divine - either the Divine incarnate or the Lord in the heart - we have to be absolutely, unreservedly, transparently truthful - there sincerity, straightforwardness, openness cannot be crossed by the slightest shadowness. With regard to human beings, one surely should not indulge in lying, but there is no obligation to be utterly transparent on all occasions. Frankness and the avoidance of falsehood are ideals here too - and yet we have at times to be discreet, judicious, diplomatic. For we are in the midst of a huge ignorance which may misuse our virtues. This does not mean we can freely deceive people; in that case we ourselves add to the huge ignorance. What we have occasionally to do is to be careful about our words: the substance of our speech has to be the truth but the form can be so shaped that without creating a lie it may not give out information that may be misused.

A famous instance of this "equivocation" is St. Athana-sius's reply in a moment of crisis. He was being pursued by his enemies who had heard of his being in a place but had not seen him. They did not know what he looked like. He took a boat and went down a river which had many bends clustered with groves and thick-growing trees. His enemies were behind him. He turned round a bend and then instead of going straight ahead he veered in the opposite direction and went sailing towards his pursuers. They naturally could not take him to be the man they were after. And they asked him: "Did you see somebody go down the river?" St. Athana-sius answered: "Just a while back a man went round this bend." This was the exact truth, but no lie could have served better to put the enemies off his track. He saved his life by an equivocation In certain circumstances we can equivocate. It may be that in a complicated world like ours even a lie may be justifiable in a rare situation if the cause to be served is particularly great - like saving one's own life or somebody | else's. But as far as we can help it we must be strictly truthful.

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It is difficult to sit in an armchair and dictate what is perfectly right and perfectly wrong in the savage hurlyburly of life. Still, some broad principles can be enunciated - and that is what you must take me to have done.

(1.5.1956)

Your remark about wintertime reminds me of two poets in whom the cold season somehow set free the inner founts of creativity. First, Milton whose inspiration used to flow most in the six months after the autumnal equinox. Somehow the chill of the grey months without used to stir the blind poet and evoke the heat within to generate Paradise Lost. Then there was the arch-symbolist Mallarme who wrote of

L'hiver, saison de l'art serein, l'hiver lucide

(Winter, serene art's season, lucid winter)

with the sheet of snow mutely suggesting the beyond of some ineffable White towards which his reverie yearned.

The onset of winter, which, as you say, makes your gaze turn more inward, should ultimately lead you to your final decision - the word from the depths, telling you whether for the nonce you should stay in the West or soon pack up your present concerns and make for the Samadhi-centred silence waiting for a new world to be bom. Of course, even where you are, you can hold that silence within you - the advantage of the Ashram is that one does not only hold the Divine but also feels the Divine enveloping One from all the quarters. However, do not be in a hurry to make up your mind. Go on doing the work that comes most sweetly to your hand.

What you have chosen to do sets me thinking of myself. I cannot but identify myself with "the elderly and handicapped" to whose needs you are helping to minister, except that I have a fire in my heart which age cannot quench and 1 do not look backward to muse on past irrecoverable joys but gaze forward to a future of more and more bliss of self-giving

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to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. AH the same I can be called "elderly" because of my semi-bald head and a bit of difficult hearing. If the latter is due more to some extra wax in the ears than to any defect in the tympanum I should be able to say, "My deafness waxes and wanes." As to being handicapped, I have to plead guilty, though the appropriate term would be the coinage "legicapped" rather than "handicapped". As long as my fingers can tap the keys of my typewriter I don't feel debarred from the world's work - but finding my legs deteriorated during the last ten years I feel I can't quite be considered "alive and kicking". Perhaps this shortcoming which enforces a peaceful existence may save me for more time than otherwise from kicking the bucket.

(12.11.1987)

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