Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 1)

14

I feel very happy and proud that my photo is in front of your typewriter. To be close to you in any way adds value to myself. The place you have chosen is most appropriate, for I am so often near my own typewriter with the aspiration that from a worker with types I may rise to be a worker with archetypes and create Platonic perfections - images of

Words that live not save upon Nature's summits,

Ecstasy's chariots.

What you say of my appearance is quite encouraging. But impressions can differ. Twelve years ago a Sannyasin came to see me. After a while he asked me: "What is your age?" I said: "70". He looked a little surprised and said: "You don't look it." With a shy smile I inquired: "Really I don't?" His prompt reply was: "No. You look 75." A good prick to my ego! But I was soothed when I realised during the course of further talk that he meant I looked as wise as if I had been 75. I suppose a lot of wisdom can be gained within that 5-year period. Now having completed 82 last November I must have the face of a super-sage! But I would prefer to embody AE's vision:

Age is no more near than youth

To the sceptre and the crown.

Vain the wisdom, vain the truth -

Do not lay thy rapture down.

(17.1.1987)

I know that the day of Savitri hasn't come yet. The "Symbol Dawn" in which its truth and beauty will be seen by all hasn't broken in people's consciousness. But here and there

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we shall find inner wakers. They have to be people with a wide sense of poetry and not sticklers after one kind or another and they must be ready to feel and see and hear even when they can't quite grasp. By sensitive feeling, penetrative seeing and sympathetic hearing they will begin to make out the substance and realise the traffic of the gods both as they move in their own empyrean and as they cast their shining shadows on the earth. A profound aesthetic approach is demanded by all poetry, for here is an art and, although art should not be cut off from life nor should meaning be a matter of indifference, it is by a receptivity to form that poetry goes home to us. There must be a response to the gesture made to the sensuous heart by the suggestive way the words are linked, the images interplay, the sounds get woven together, to evoke by the vivid expression a sense of the inexpressible. The epithet I have prefixed to "aesthetic approach" is important: the approach, for all its aestheticism, has to avoid being superficial - else we shall have only a preoccupation with the technique. 1 have spoken of "the sensuous heart" and my epithet "profound" points to this inner enjoyer. What I am trying to say with regard to Savitri is that if one searches the art of it with no fixed ideas as to what a poem should convey and how it should do so, one is bound to be touched by it.

I was delighted to learn that you are a Sagittarian, for so am I. I was born on November 25. What's your date? The astrological sign - a Centaur shooting with a bow - suits me very well. To be at least half a horse is a great honour. Horses have been my passion ever since my childhood and because of the defect in one of my legs I have lived dangerously on them. Five poems of mine bring them in. Sagittarius also sums up the essentials of education in ancient Persia, the country in which the ancestors of modern Parsis lived. Herodotus records that the Persian youth was taught three things: to ride a horse, to shoot straight and to tell the truth. I suppose the straight shooting implies psychologically not only accuracy of mind but also straightforwardness of heart,

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leading to a characteristic like yours: being outspoken to a fault, telling the truth without mincing matters. Of course, truth-telling can have subtler forms: one's writings may be directed to reveal verities, get to the living centre of every topic and, at the finest point, lay bare the fundamental reality of things. Do the astrologers actually say that the Centaur-natures aim darts carelessly as you say you do? Some degree of horse-play is to be expected, a kind of jolly practice of hurling arrows suddenly on all sides and tearing through pretences and disturbing humdrum. I don't think you are irresponsible. People may be taking you to be such because you may not be discreet. But surely there's no indiscretion in telling me that you have doubts about the feasibility of convincing anyone at present of Savitri's unique status in world-literature.

(4.12.1987)

I have dipped into a book of poems inspired by the conviction that the "Sacred" is the goal of all genuine poetry, not necessarily by a direct reference to it but essentially by a feeling of its "Presence" as permeating whatever one refers to. From the few passages I have gone through I get a sense of "tears in the nature of things", as C. Day Lewis translates Virgil's "Sunt lacrimae rerum". These tears are inevitable as long as things yield only a glimmering evidence of the Great One. Merely to experience things as symbols is not enough. The reality symbolised has to be known in one manner or another: either the Light beyond the mind has to be caught or the Liberty of the universal Self has to be¹ entered or else the Laughter that is causeless and endless in the deeps of the heart where the Soul, at once child and sage, is seated has to be shared - any of these secrecies must be penetrated if not all of them possessed. Then alone can the sadness which persists in spite of what the symbol transmits fade away or at least weaken sufficiently to get shot through by the ultimate Mystery which a favourite poet of yours has hailed:

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Fount of all, fire of all, fate of all - Bliss!

Poets of "the Presence" need to set their feet on the mystical path if their faces are to be serene and smiling.

Perhaps these poets will say: "Such faces are bound to be cold, wrapt in their own happiness." Here is a big mistake. To live in the Spirit's presence in a direct way is not to be self-confined: it is to be free of the ego and capable of going out to meet the Divine who is the same hidden splendour in others as in one's own being. Warmth of an understanding sympathy will flow forth and seek to kindle the identical happiness everywhere and words will come into play which will guide others to find within their depths the very glow whereby the poet turned mystic carries that serenely smiling face. What this poet will not undergo is an answering quiver to the grief or the pain of others. He will surely know their grief or pain, for has he not felt it in the days when he was like them? Nor is it necessary for one's heart to be wrung and torn in order to console and heal. The balm will come automatically from the inexhaustible source of joy he has tapped. And indeed along with that tapping goes the winning of an insight which gets a precise sense of the sufferer's condition without having to receive a similar wound. Rather it is the woundless state that can best salve the stricken by communicating to them the power to rise above their hurt. Why is the figure of Buddha the supreme representative of compassion? It is so because he has passed beyond the Virgilian "mortalia" which Lewis in the second half of that wonderful line renders by "human transience". Buddha's compassion is so mighty because his Nirvana is so complete, so transcendent of all sorrow. One who has not himself become whole cannot truly heal.

What you say about Sri Aurobindo's poetry and mine is not necessarily "heresy". My work is possibly closer to "the literary intelligentsia" by being more sophisticated, more modemly diverse in subject-matter and imaginative mood. It is not so Himalayan as his, but perhaps more accessible to the contemporary mind. If it can get accepted, the way to

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Mount Everest may prove easier. But I doubt whether even I can get easy entrance. When long ago I sent a copy of a small collection of poems written in the Ashram to a well-known English poet and critic, I got the opinion that a number of pieces "spoke" to her but she picked out only one from nearly a hundred as being almost "English poetry". This was the short poem "Each Night". I dare say others may not be so doctrinaire as she. You should be a good judge of the English poetry-loving public, I have always in mind your plan of "Collected Poems of K. D. Sethna." Just yesterday I looked again at the various sets already made. By my side the latest one - of poems discovered in the nooks and corners of my rambling attic, as it were - I chanced upon a semi-pathetic lyric written ever so long ago, addressed to the Mother. The date is 24.3.1954, a little after my second home-coming. The first was on 16 December 1927, the second on 19 February 1954. Do you mind my typing it out for you? I hope you'll find it not too un-English in sentiment and expression.

AN APPRECIATION AND AN APPEAL

Thus far you've drawn my soul

Out to the doors of sense -But now you are pushing my sight

Deep to the hushed intense

Core of the secret heaven

Hung in the heart Where sits your beauty forever

Alone, apart

From the crowding hands of the world -

A love complete, Offering to one sole clasp

Its deathless feet.

If my life takes not their seal, Never shall I win

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Safety from gloom and greed: The abyss is all within.

Time must be conquered there

For the Eternal's play To flower into flesh

And never fade away.

I know that your sweet limbs

Withdraw from gaze and touch Because the outward light

I crave and prize too much.

1 know that the dim distance

You place between us two Is only the beckoning path

Of an inward rendezvous.

But O my earth-embodied

Darling divinity, Be not too swift in the grace

You are plunging now on me.

Keep yet a visible smile -

How in so short a span Do you hope to make a griefless

God of this fragile man?

(4.12.1987)

I have received your picture-card with its revelatory reminiscence of the Mother's words that to some she gives red roses and these are the people she wishes to make Knights of the Order of Truth (Chevaliers de la Verite'). Your allusion, with the parenthetical phrase "even en rive!", is evidently to the dream I had at night after the very evening on which the Mother left her body - 17 November 1973. In that dream she

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gave me a bunch of red roses and told me to put them on my head. Receiving red roses from the Mother in a dream seems rather appropriate if they point to the Order she has mentioned, for it is to the inner being that the honour and the duty of it are given. To be asked to put the roses on the head is directly symbolic of the role allotted, since the mental self is the chief warrior in the lists of Truth. They would serve to suggest also a spontaneous intuitive rising up of the correct conception in the mind, a natural emergence Of illumining secrets of existence. I should think the rose-emblem a pointer to the Keatsian formula: "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty" - and the redness is a sign that the Verity discovered is not a cold abstraction but a living vision, a glowing insight into the ultimate Mystery, a glimpse of the heart of the Unknown.

The word "heart" is significant here - a necessary term in the colourful rose-context. A mind which both sees subtly and feels sensitively is the Truth-finder whom the Mother would appoint: it brings, in a deeper connotation than the Spinozistic, the amor intellectualis Dei, "the intellectual love of God". A further shade of the Truth-finder's activity may be caught from the Mother's French phrase for "Knights of the Order of Truth". The Knights are Chevaliers, riders of horses, drawing strength from those swift embodiments of vitality: the Truths found are life-values as well as thought-values -they are spiritual idees-forces. And the Mother not only appoints Chevaliers but also empowers them. As I remarked during your last visit to me, when the Mother gives one a work to do she gives at the same time the capacity for it and the joy in it.

"Your last visit" - the phrase is almost like the word "forlorn" which brought Keats back from his nightingale to his "sole self". It was such a delight to be with you and talk endlessly. Now that the "immortal bird" that is in you - or should I mention Browning's equivalent apropos of his Elizabeth: "half angel and half bird"? - has flown, my forlornness is somehow not as bad as Keats's, for the commu-

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nication can still go on by means of letters. There is also the prospect of the Air-line making Madras a stop and letting you have the chance of partaking more frequently in the golden silence of the Samadhi and the perhaps-not-too un-silver speech at your friend's place.

(3.3.1988)

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