Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 1)

15

You write that you owe me "many a debt". I think the commerce has been two-sided as it was bound to be in a genuine friendship. But perhaps one of the gifts I in particular have tried to force home is the artistic conscience. And I hope that in the pleasure of being a devotee you haven't forgotten the duty of being an artist. Poetry is a precious medium, not to be chosen without a sanctification of the lips. And this sanctification does not come merely of a noble subject and its adequate treatment. For, even though you breathe of God with every syllable properly significant, you serve Him ill if your verse itself is not Godlike.

What do I mean by "Godlike"? As an extreme example towards whose quality all of us Aurobindonians should tend, let me quote those two stanzas from our master;

Swiftly, swiftly crossing the golden spaces

Knowledge leaps, a torrent of rapid lightnings.

Thoughts that left the Ineffable's flaming mansions

Blaze in my spirit.

Slow my heart-beats' rhythm like a giant hammer's;

Missioned voices drive to me from God's doorway

Words that live not save upon Nature's summits,

Ecstasy's chariots.

May I add that poetry can be Godlike even if the poet has no belief or faith in God? Of course if one consciously puts oneself in tune with a higher realm one is likely to be more receptive of the afflatus, provided one has the true poetic turn. But if that turn is present in a sceptic or an atheist he can still by means of the artistic conscience create great verse. Did not Elizabeth Browning refer to the Roman poet Lucretius as denying divinely the Divine? Sometimes Lucretius is indeed stupendous, as in those phrases where he describes

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the philosopher Epicurus, of whom he was a disciple, triumphing over the crude superstitions of popular religion that blocked the way of rational investigation:

Ergo vivida vis animi pervicit, et extra

Processit longe flammantia moenia mundi

Atque omne immensum peragravit mente animoque.

1 have attempted to English these grand hexametres somewhat freely:

Therefore his vivid vigour of mind stood

everywhere victor; Forward afar beyond the world's flaming walls

he ventured,

Crossing all the immensities, led by his thought and

his longing.

(23.9.1981)

What you write about your wish to omit my "Heloise" from the collection Altar and Flame could not have been more perfectly put: "I can admire this poem, but I cannot overcome a difficulty which I have with some of its images. I could say more about this, but then it would take on too much significance, especially in view of my general and almost complete enthusiasm and love for your poems." I know exactly your response as well as your reaction. I may; however, say a few words on some points in the poem. They are not meant to recommend it for the collection. The piece would be out of place there - especially as it would not be flanked with compositions in a similar mode to render it more at home and help its edges fit better into the design of the whole. Actually it did stand in the midst of poems bearing an affinity to it. My plucking it out of their company was like throwing Heloise stark naked among shapes that came with a somewhat different attitude - poetic forms

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achieved by another process of art. I did not quite realise her incongruity without her "sister-songs". But I may explain to you the use of certain expressions which struck your ear rather oddly. Let me first quote the poem to make my remarks more apposite:

Heloise

{After a passage in one of her letters)

Holier is the wife's name -

But, O my love, to the core

Of my heart would I truer be

As thy worthless whore,

Fallen at thy feet with no hands to lay

On the torch of thy fame!

I would live most low

To feel like a flame

The height which my heart-throbs know

Of thy beauty and brain.

What tribute could I pay

Deeper than harlotry

Smiling at sneers as vain

If Abelard be my stain?

The head and front of the poem's offence are the expressions "whore" and "harlotry". They are terms with a strong medieval atmosphere and they must be understood in their old associations. They do not mean what we take as prostitution, the selling of one's body for money. Their significance is anticipated by contrast with the word "wife" in the very first line. In the Middle Ages what is meant now by "mistress" was subsumed under "whore" and "harlot". At the same time the two latter words had no necessary connection with the sale of sexual pleasure. A woman having sex-relations with a man not her husband - a man who may not

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be anybody else's husband but is simply not married to this woman — would be looked down upon and labelled as "whore" or "harlot". The terms have got debased in our time. A still greater debasement has occurred with "mistress'. This word in older English connoted no more than one's beloved, aside from being a general counterpart to "master" (now turned into "mister"). Marvell's "coy mistress" was - to his great impatience and disappointment -just the opposite of a bed-fellow. I may add about the other terms that they did not even point to any promiscuity as an inevitable shade in them. A woman, however deeply in love with one man alone, would still be branded with those terms if she was not married to her man. It is only the opprobrium of not being the legal wife that attaches to them. And this opprobrium would not come out in my poem if any other names were employed.

The names I have adopted are "strong meat" but essential. They are needed also in order to stress the tremendous self-giving, the unconditional love-surrender, the utter abnegation of personal importance, the intense voluntary renunciation of all advantages accompanying a wife's status, the absolute lack of claim and the complete granting of freedom to the beloved. We have to put ourselves into the 12th century as well as into Heloise's heart of passionate adoration, face to face with Abelard's "height of beauty and brain", to receive in full the living substance and the vibrant art, which are intended to convey by a powerful paradoxical movement a most exalting sensation. Both content and form would suffer, if not even grow null, without the shock-tactics I have brought into play, the extremism into which I have cast both the idea-gesture and the word-posture.

(22.6.1974)

Your mention of loneliness and aloneness calls forth a few distinctions in my mind - from the Yogic standpoint. The former involves a strong sense of the physical absence of

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loved ones, the latter the feeling of freedom from bondage even to these and at the same time the glad recognition of their ever-presence of soul along with oneself in the depths of the Divine. Loneliness carries a bitter-sweet of memory, aloneness an entry - small or large - into an inner realm where one loses all loss not because one is oblivious but because there is no need to recall anything: one touches or penetrates a wideness of omni-possession within a more-than-human reality.

Another term for "aloneness" is what the Upanishad mentions as the rending asunder of the knot of the heartstrings, except that this experience relates to everything connected with one's feelings, and does not relate merely to the dear people to whom one is attached. It marks a passage from the finely and profoundly psychological to the sheer spiritual. A prominent aspect of it is shown in those lines of Sri Aurobindo:

A poised serenity of tranquil strength,

A wide unshaken look on time's unrest,

Faced all experience with unaltered peace.

A step beyond this aspect, carrying into the supracosmic the large freedom achieved against a cosmic background, comes in the stanza from Sri Aurobindo:

He who from time's dull motion escapes and thrills

Rapt thoughtless, wordless into the Eternal's breast

Unrolls the form and sign of being.

Seated above in the omniscient silence.

Your medical curiosity about the effect the rending of the heart's knot would have on the physical cardiac organ finds me somewhat at a loss. I may only surmise that in the long run one may echo the Aurobindonian state:

Slow my heart-beats' rhythm like a giant hammer's -

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or progress inwardly as Amal has always hoped to do

Till all the heart-beats of my life's increase

Count but the starlike moments of His peace.

(3.3.1986)

It's good news that you will be Pondying for three days. Yes, the time is rather short, but as the awful punster in me is tempted to say, going about in shorts near the Divine's Samadhi is better than indulging in long pants for the Divine's presence far away. Punning as execrably in prosodic terms, I may affirm that to execute a pyrrhic (two shorts) or a tribrach (three shorts) here is preferable to performing a spondee (two longs ) or a molossus (three longs) elsewhere. To play on words in a more sober spiritual way, let me state that to long sincerely for the Mother in however brief a span of time is not to fall short of her expectations of her little ones.

(4.4.1986)

Here are my answers to your questions.

(1) The experience of a Presence silently radiating love from the heart is surely of what Sri Aurobindo calls the "psychic being", the true soul. But the psychic being itself is something of the Divine come down from the Transcendent and flowing out to everything of the Divine beyond ourselves from the same everything within us. In order to be authentically psychic, the radiation you speak of has to be of a deep quiet intensity that gives and gives and never feels wasted if there is no response from the human recipient, for it really goes forth to the Divine who has worn the face and form of this or that person. Actually it streams out not only to persons but also to non-human creatures and even to objects since the Divine is hidden in them as well: that is, to all manifestation. I may add that it creates in one a happy

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constant sense of self-dedication and self-consecration to the Supreme.

(2) In the course of individual evolution it is the psychic being that "grows" through the various experiences from life to life. The apparent movement is towards the True, the Good, the Beautiful, but inwardly the movement is towards the Divine and when this inward fact is recognised the genuine spiritual life has begun and one is aware of one's soul directly and not only of the reflection or rather emanation of it in the mental-vital-physical complex. I may add that no matter how much the psychic being grows, it still remains a child - simple, straight, trusting, humble. But this child is at the same time an extremely wise one, with the experience of ages enriching it and a spontaneous truth-feeling derived from its transcendent origin. Nor is it a weakling: its inherent immortality gives it a natural strength - strength to endure, to help, to conquer circumstances — strength bom from the unfailing intuition of an omnipotent Loveliness accompanying it.

(11.4.1986)

Your mention of evening reminds me of a line in one of my poems:

The wideness with one star that is the dusk.

It seeks to catch in terms of a spiritual mood a phase of Nature or perhaps I should say it tries in words to reflect by empathy an inward-going moment of the Earth-soul. The dusk suggests the movement of withdrawal from outer wakefulness into a sense of dreamy mystery and the single star represents the emergence of a one-pointed depth-consciousness, a unifying intensity discovered within. The combination of vague shadow and gemlike shine is set in a perception of calm immensity - a perception which seems to make the wideness a natural accompaniment of the concentrated withdrawnness.

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Facing such a sight you would spontaneously turn your thoughts to Pondicherry. Perhaps Pondicherry would appear to you as a wideness with Amal as a tiny twinkler nestling in the tranquil omnipresence of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Perhaps "twinkler" is not quite an accurate term. The evening star is a planet and planets are steady and I think Amal also has a certain steadiness in his temperament; but whatever calm there may be is not anything cold, unresponsive. A heart can beat steadily, yet there is still a pulsing. However undisturbed in its rhythm, the pulsing shows the feeling it has for the Master and the Mother and for their children, near or far.

The far child that is you will soon be near. He will be all the more welcome because his farness is only an appearance. His friends always feel him near just as he feels ever close to the true home of his soul. Soon we shall have the joy of seeing again his warm, sincere, handsome face with the God-dreaming eyes.

(4.4.1988)

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