Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 2)

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Your long letter was a great relief. You have been on my mind ever since we last got a ghostlike sense of your presence somewhere. Your total disappearance puzzled and worried all your friends. In the meantime we heard nasty news about the activities of your ill-wishers. You must have come to know of them too. But you are a soul as tough on one side as it is tender on the other - a sort of Belisarius though not battered by Fate so horribly. Belisarius was the greatest general during the reign of Justinian in Rome. Both he and his emperor married dancing girls. The empress conspired his ruin and had him degraded. His wife ran away with a monk. In the end the once-famous soldier used to stand under the Arch of his own triumph in Byzantium - a blind beggar yet unbroken in spirit. Longfellow in a poem on him concluded by weaving a versified version of the hero's own words:

The unconquerable will

This, too, can bear; - I still .

Am Belisarius!

As long as you are you and, what is more, feel intensely that you are a child of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, nothing can down you. You are a born fighter, but we are very glad that in being courageous you did not forget that, when occasion demanded, even Krishna, as Sri Aurobindo has told us, could be discreet and did not consider it un-Avataric to run away.

Your attitude to the super-Shakespearean "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" is profoundly illumined. You have turned all the wounds into openings to the Divine. The cuts and thrusts have not stopped at the outer ego: they have been received by you in the inner soul where the Divine is seated and where that secret Presence can use them to fuel

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the sacred fire burning towards an ever greater Consciousness. And how have you done this alchemic reception of the hurtful dross? The answer is simple: whatever happens to you, you have offered to the Divine with ah intense faith and devotion. Accepting your offering, the Divine has made the "Purusha no bigger than the thumb of a man", which is the Upanishad's vision of the evolving soul in us, grow in bliss and beauty within you and come closer to the splendour and strength of the Supreme Himself.

The vivid picture you have drawn of the emergence of the new You from the old is rather over-critical of the latter. The adjectival torrent in which you have sunk the old fellow - "What a smug, self-satisfied, arrogant, puffed-up, complacent, pretentious and hopelessly gullible intellectual booby I was" - out Hamlets Hamlet in his passionate polysyllabic pessimistic mood, as when he cries out -

How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable

Are to me now the uses of this world -

or in a grander gloomy style he rages in poetic prose: "This goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical dome fretted with golden fire, - why, it appears to me no other than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours."

It is always salutary to see one's shortcomings clearly and you have done well to pass beyond the stage where you were before the multiple blows fell on you, but to us the person we knew deserved none of the derogatory hammering you have given him, except perhaps the epithet "gullible" in your relationship to the friend who has betrayed you. We see your life's passage to be from "fine" to "finer" and we don't at all think we poured our love upon an undeserving uppish chap. It is your foe, masked as friend, whom the adjective-fluent Shakespeare would have called a "lecherous, treacherous, smiling villain" and who by digging your grave

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in secret is accurately hit off in that magnificent impeachment in Measure for Measure:

man, proud man, Drest in a little brief authority,

Most ignorant of what he's most assured,

His glassy essence, like an angry ape,

Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven '

As make the angels weep.

To turn to a much more pleasant dispute, let me touch on a discussion I have been having with our mutual, widely cultured English friend, a sincere devotee of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, one who means a great deal to me and whose fine aesthetic judgment has been a powerful spur to my career as a poet. Lately she has reacted rather over-emphatically against a certain tendency of expression in English which seems to come more easily to non-English speakers than to native ones. My impression is that she has a point but that in a language like English, so multi-rooted, plastic, vari-mooded and open to "liberties", all tendencies can become naturalised. One's sense of any strangeness should not solidify into a barrier - unless a writer is found patently ignorant of the idiom. Our friend has said: "My English soul rebels at abstract nouns preceded by the definite article. It's o.k. in French of course!" Thus, when she was here last year she remarked that the title of my book on Mallarme's symbolist poetry - The Obscure and the Mysterious - was not quite English. In my recent correspondence with her I cited several uses of the kind from English and she wrote her comment on them:

"For my own interest I will try to analyse my 'intuitive' reaction to the examples you quote, and add some of my own:

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I was most intrigued by her looking askance at "the Divine", I have four times employed this locution in the first part of this very letter and we come across it every now and then in not only the Mother but also Sri Aurobindo. According to our friend, an English-speaking person would expect to see "God" in contexts where the Mother says "the Divine". She adds: "Admittedly it is grammatically correct and functionally effective - we know what is meant. We also know that the Mother had special reasons of her own for avoiding the word 'God'. Nevertheless we feel that the Mother, being French, could not have been aware of the horrid effect of 'the Divine' in English - it sounds like an euphemism and therefore to the English ear, accustomed as it is to hearing a spade called a bloody shovel (if you will pardon the coarseness of the expression - I merely wish to stress a tendency to directness in the language which makes it difficult to avoid a commonly accepted word without sounding phoney or hypocritical or simply 'foreign') - to the English ear if s odd." Our friend also insists that the correct translation of "le Divin", when used in French where it would be natural, is not "the Divine" but "the deity" or the "the Godhead". She supposes that Sri Aurobindo used the expression "the Divine"- out of deference to the Mother's wishes, "because he wrote "The Hour of God' and 'God shall grow up while wise men talk and sleep' and 'A step and all is sky and God.' He did not write 'The Hour of the Divine' -thanks be to God!"

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I wrote back:

"I am afraid you are overdoing your English soul. No doubt you have on your side the fact that no English dictionary, not even the OED, cites an example on 'the Divine' down the centuries. But the American Random House Dictionary of the English Language (College Edition, 1969) gives on p. 388, col. 2 seventeen uses of 'divine' and the eleventh use notes: 'the Divine', a. God, b. (sometimes I.e.) the spiritual aspect of a man; the group of attributes and qualities of mankind regarded as godly or godlike.' No quotations are given as examples, but 1 suspect writers like Emerson and Whitman can be drawn upon. At least in the American philosopher Josiah Royce's book, The World and the Individual, published in 1901,1 have chanced upon the phrase: "...in the world as a whole, the divine accomplishes its purpose, attains its goal...."¹ The Divine' may not be British but it has historically proved to be English, even if transatlantically English. And now that such a master of languages as Sri Aurobindo has set his seal upon this use, with so insistent a significance, all ears should get attuned to it."

In my latest letter I wrote:

"1 have been keeping my eyes skinned for the use of 'the Divine' in English. Casually turning the pages of Bernard Shaw's Three Plays for Puritans in the Penguin Edition, what do I chance upon on pp. 133-34? In the 'Prologue' to his play 'Caesar and Cleopatra' included here Shaw imagines an Egyptian god addressing the modern audience. Towards the end of the 'Prologue' the god says: '...I had not spoken so much but that it is in the nature of a god to struggle for ever with the dust and the darkness, and to drag from them, by the force of his longing for the divine, more life and more light.' Now here is the use we are looking for in English literature itself and by one of the most modern minds. What is equally striking is that - but for the small d - the utterance might have come from a book of Sri Aurobindo's!

1. P. 292 of the edition by Dover Publications inc.. New York.

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"After this discovery I came across a few more examples. My friend Ravindra Khanna drew my attention to an incident connected with Tennyson's 'Crossing the Bar' For years and years in both England and America critics have exercised themselves over the question of why Tennyson's 'pilot' remained on board after the vessel had crossed the harbour bar. Tennyson's explanation was that the pilot had been on board all the time, but in the dark he had not seen him. The pilot, he said, was 'that Divine and Unseen who is always guiding us'.

"Again, there are those lines in AE's 'Star Teachers':

These myriad eyes that look on me are mine.

Wandering beneath them I have found again

The ancient ample moment, the divine.

The God-root within men.

"Further, Paul Theroux, after visiting writer Jan Morris's house near Cruccieth, Wales, related in the course of commenting on it and on her that she wrote, 'Animists believe that the divine is to be found in every living thing...'

"Finally, in addition to my early citation from the Random House Dictionary, let me quote Webster's New International Dictionary of the English Language: 'Divine - often cap: something having the qualities and attributes of an ultimate reality that is regarded as sacred.' The example given is: 'man's relation to the Divine.' "

My latest discovery is the title "Depicting the divine in Nature" of a review of Early Poussain Exhibition in the weekly from London, The Times Literary Supplement, October 28-November 2, 1988, p. 1204.

If you run into any helpful phrase - preferably in English literature - bearing on the bone of contention, do pass it on to me. I am waiting for our friend's reply.²

(9.12.1988)

2. The friend was gracious enough to close the discussion by saying that she too had recently come across occurrences of "the Divine" in current English writing. - Amal Kiran

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Postscript

The suggestion that Sri Aurobindo started using the term "the Divine" "in deference to the Mother's wishes" may be too broad in its sweep, but a brief check by a friend indicates that his use occurs only after he met the Mother - that is, after March 29, 1914. A light perusal of some of his pre-1914 writings, including The Yoga and Its Objects, Thoughts and Aphorisms, early commentaries on the Isha and Kena Upanishads and early essays in Vedanta, Hinduism, Yoga, etc. (commentaries and essays published in Archives and Research) shows not a single instance of the term "the Divine" and hundreds of instances of "God".

The earliest use of the term occurs in the September 1914 issue of Arya: it occurs on p. 9 in the second chapter of The Life Divine and p. 48 in the second chapter of The Synthesis of Yoga, as published in that journal.

However, it may be noted that in the 1913 essay "The Evolutionary Aim in Yoga" the seventh paragraph (see reprint in Bulletin, November 1982, p. 10, lines 22-23) has the sentence: "The human first touches the divine and then becomes the divine." The use here is not quite the same as the term "the Divine" for God, but it does evince a verbal turn in which the later expression may find a plausible basis for its development. So the seed for the actual term may be traced in pre-1914 days: the term itself takes shape after Sri Aurobindo's association with the Mother and with the growth of that association it becomes markedly common. The letters to the disciples teem with it, but nowhere does Sri Aurobindo give any sign that he was doing something somewhat unnatural in the English language.

*

Your ideal and aspiration are admirable when you say: "My one regret so far is that I am still to nurture a flower of purity, perfection and harmony in me to offer at the feet of the

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Divine..." But as the state you aim at cannot be achieved in a short time, the important question is: "What do you do meanwhile?" The real job of the idealist and the aspirant is to offer at the Divine's feet all the impurities, all the imperfections, all the discords in him. What is crucial and central is the act of offering and, as a result, the receiving of the Divine's guidance from within, which would help one to be a little less impure, less imperfect, less discordant the next time. I don't mean that one should not on one's own try to outgrow one's all-too-human state, but the secret of sadhana is to put oneself in the hands of the Higher Power and get its guidance from the deep heart instead of planning all the time by the light of one's own tiny candle of intelligence.

To be dejected because the wonderful flower you mention is far off is hardly the right frame of mind for a sadhak. The fact that you have become aware of the need to reach the Supreme is a tremendous grace. To respond to the touch of this grace you have to put at its disposal whatever happens from day to day and get free of the wholly personal element with which we usually meet the calls and challenges of the relationships and circumstances in whose midst our hours are spent. Nothing is too trivial for the Divine's attention. When the Mother and Sri Aurobindo were with us bodily, they welcomed our wish to be led by their wisdom and power in everything. No doubt, they may have wanted to be free from inquiries like "When I get out of my bed in the morning, which foot should I first put on the floor?" -though I know that even such banalities they patiently dealt with. But I have seen how most naturally and interestedly the Mother attended to two pleas for help which I dared to convey to her in spite of the evident disapproval of her attendants. They were from a friend of mine. One was: "I suffer from constipation" - and the other: "I can't sleep properly in the afternoon." I could see from her face that she appreciated the naivete with which these messages had been sent as if to an actual physical mummy raised to the nth degree. I could see also that an answer from her conscious-

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ness was spontaneously going forth. Of course, my friend knew that he had himself to get in contact with her inwardly in these as in other matters, but to bring them outwardly to her notice when her divinity was-with us in an embodied condition was understood to help one all the more. And the Mother accepted in a wide sense the responsibility she had incurred by getting embodied.

No doubt, we had to avoid the mistake of thinking it just a,matter of course to consult her: a genuine prayer, a true self-dedication had to accompany the gesture of informing her. Similarly, you have to sincerely appeal to her for guidance after setting before her all the movements of your daily life without making up your mind in advance as to what you should do on one occasion or another. If you follow this practice in as much detail as you can manage, you'll see the slow yet sure progression towards the spotless, flawless, perfume-pervaded lotus you dream of as the life you want to offer to those Feet that are the ecstatic end of all journeys.

Now to your attraction towards poetry apropos of my reference, in a compilation by me of mostly my letters to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and their replies, to that stanza of Sri Aurobindo's which I consider to sum up with mantric power the goal of the Integral Yoga:

Arms taking to a voiceless supreme delight.

Life that meets the Eternal with close breast,

An unwalled mind dissolved in the Infinite,

Force one with unimaginable rest.

The variations you suggest are poetic enough - "silent" or "wordless" instead of "voiceless" - "meeting" in place of "that meets" - and for the third line either

A mind unwalled and merged in the Infinite

or

A mind unhorizoned in the Infinite.

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But when poetry comes from the sheer overmind to constitute the mantra the order no less than the choice of the words and the wide as well as the weighty rhythm they create are of basic importance and significance. In your versions the sense of remote distances of divinity getting caught with an intense yet quiet immediacy is lost in what Sri Aurobindo would have called bright combinations and permutations playing about in the plane which he has termed "the poetic intelligence". Your "silent" has no surprise in it. One would mentally expect it. "Wordless" is rather feeble and lacks sufficient concreteness. Nothing except "voiceless" will convey an absolute and ultimate quality at the same time that it gives an almost physical substance to the "delight" which refrains from declaring itself with a voice. The silence becomes substantial, the wordlessness becomes seizable -and they have to be such if "arms", the instruments of the body's aspiration, are to get, by self-dedication, into touch, however subtly, with a "supreme delight". This delight, in order to be capable of giving contact to our physical self, has to exist as a Being of Bliss and not as an impersonal ananda. You cannot replace "voiceless" without attenuating the spiritual suggestion appropriate to the matter-part of man the aspirant. In the second line to substitute "meeting" for "that meets" is to bring about a monotony of rhythm in relation to the first line's "taking". Besides, the vividness of "Life"'s performance of an action is lost. "Arms" has an inbuilt vividness: "Life" hasn't and needs to be made "living", as it were, by making it directly do something. Such doing would prepare and be in tune with the "close breast" Sri Aurobindo ascribes to it at the line's end. Your third line is too fluid in both the versions. The first version has again no surprise: "Merged" is commonplace. The second is more picturesque with a typical Aurobindonian word - "urihori-zoned" - but it is wanting in strength. The original's massiveness and power of movement, partly due to the unusual past participle "dissolved" and partly to the flanking of "mind" with two qualifiers each on either side, produces

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the impression of something specially done to the mind by a sort of two-pronged attack for infinitising it. The attack is all the more vigorous because both "unwalled" and "dissolved" are two-syllabled and have a mutually reinforcing effect by the d-sound along with the d-sound common to them.

Your experiment with the last line -

Lull one with an ineffable rest -

is not only the weakest of your proposals and metrically unsatisfying but also a complete misunderstanding equally of Sri Aurobindo's spiritual revelation and of his syntactical structure. His line represents the fourth limb of the plenary or integral realisation: it does not just round off the combination of body, life-energy and mind. The word "Force" is a noun and not a verb as your "Lull" is, and "one" is not a pronoun standing as the object to "Force". Sri Aurobindo wants to say: "Force that is one with what seems its utter opposite - namely, rest - but what is, in a way beyond imagination, not really so." The comma after the third line's "infinite" should have alerted you to Sri Aurobindo's continuation of his series of the superb realities to be experienced.

I may remark that the six-syllable adjective "unimaginable" cannot ever be replaced. Its length is essential to suggest not only the extreme wonderfulness, which keeps defying even conception, of the state spoken of but also the sustained sovereignty packed into a "rest" which can be equated with "force". In comparison, "ineffable" is piffling.

(18.10.1990)

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