12
I was delighted to get your poem' for my birthday, all the more because it brought a breath of England with its conjuration of flowers from Sussex hills and woods on the music of a language which is part of my inmost being. There is a slight touch of early Milton and a half-hint of Shakespeare in the verbal turn here and there, but both are taken up most felicitously into the quintessential You, and this taking up is all the richer because of that faint waft of the past, which I love, mingling with the air of the England your dear self carries into my heart. I have particularly in mind the phrases - remarkable in both image and rhythm - in lines 5-10:
A Birthday Bouquet
Dear Muse, companion of my dreaming hours.
Gather me violets huddled under hoods:
On Amal's birthday let us send him flowers,
Bluebells and daisy-chains from English woods.
Send to him snowdrops that the sun's cool kiss
Fathered in mossy glades before the spring;
A riot of poppies scarlet in the grass;
And every fragrance that the warm winds bring
From roses after rain - with clarion daffodils,
First in the van of summer, celebrate this day,
And golden buttercups from Sussex hills!
All these dispatch to Amal, that he may
Look down upon a Pondicherry street -
Yet see an English garden at his feet.
Sonia Dyne
The day was very well celebrated with Indian flowers blending in my sight with the memory of your lines.
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Now my eighty-sixth year has been completed. I expect I shall see at least my ninety-fourth year to find out the full drift of a letter Sri Aurobindo dated in such a style that 1928 read quite distinctly as 1998. If in these eight more years I can bring out the eighteen books still lying unpublished in my cupboard I shall have covered my literary life-work - provided I beware of writing any further books during that period and creating the necessity of living yet longer to see them through the press. But can I remain unproductive all that time - and how much further lease of life can I hope for beyond 1998? Actually I have no sense of how short or how long could be the period of my continuation on earth. Some people feel at a certain age that their life's work is done. I am referring, of course, not to people who feel fulfilled when their grandchildren are grown up or when they have amassed a good fortune for the future family to thrive upon or when their ambitious careers have been crowned with success, I am referring to those who are not of the common run, people who carry in their bones the drive of some great mission. Milton, for instance, who knew he had been born for a worthwhile poetic creation. 1 believe Dante too had to wait for the Divine Comedy to emerge. After this poem's music had come to rest with
I'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle
(The love that moves the sun and the other stars)
its author must have been quite resigned to end his life of unhappy exile far from his beloved Florence, just as after waking up one of his daughters at some odd hour of the night to take down the dictation of the lines -
They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow
Through Eden took their solitary way -
the blind revolutionary Puritan, fallen on evil days and evil tongues in Restoration England, could not have cared much
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whether his own "solitary way" went further on or not. I have no intuition of having to wind up some Paradiso or Paradise Lost. But you are right in believing that on the literary side the Amal of Sri Aurobindo has reached his goal essentially in the considerable mass of his poetic expression. I can't be sufficiently grateful to you for making possible the publication of this mass in the near future. However, for two reasons I wouldn't feel my days quite rounded and ready to close when my volume sits proudly on the shelves of my Lady Bountiful.
One reason is that the literary life-force in me breaks out in many directions and finds satisfaction even in such a fantastic-seeming project as The Beginning of History for Israel. The other is that Sri Aurobindo, while giving a tremendous push to the writer in me, has yet so moulded my being that the main urge of my life is to be the disciple of his Integral Yoga and to go on and on in realising his immensity of light and his profundity of bliss in both inner and outer living -and these too not in one single mode but in a multitude of manners. Channelling the Aurobindonian inspiration in various lines of literary activity is surely my nature's bent, but still more is it its bent to let the Aurobindonian revelation stream forth through all the thousand and three movements of my being in thought and word and deed from hour to hour. My first preoccupation is always to answer in pulsing reality the questions: "Does the Supreme Master's presence suffuse every attitude of mine? Does the presence of the Divine Mother manifest itself in all my relationships with fellow-creatures?" Since the goals of the old spiritual paths are regarded as no more than stepping-stones in the Integral Yoga, the drive of a perpetual seeking in which God
is no fixed paradise
But truth beyond great truth
leaves the future grandly indeterminate for one and raises up in one the strange idea that one has to live for ever. It is not a
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question of clinging to life - something deeper, wiser, quieter than one's own heart seems to lead one onward and sees no discernible end. Should one speak of a sense of immortality on earth? That may hardly sound reasonable. Perhaps one can speak of what the Rigveda calls "the Immortal in the mortal" standing awake in one all the time? Possibly the feeling is present that one has lived innumerable past lives and is going to have life after future life on earth securely in the transforming hands of our Gurus. I can't tell. All I know at this instant is that an all-pervading peace appears, in a faraway manner, to hold me at its core and that I am caught, however faintly, in some eternal Now.
Enough of what Yeats, unable to look further than his nose and yet hurting it up, dubbed "Asiatic vague immensities". Let me attend to the fine letter you wrote to me just before flying to England.1 Your answers to the question how
1. My dear Amal,
We tried once to find a mutually satisfying form of words to describe what poetry is: do you remember? Now your last letter seems to challenge me to say how it is produced - sudden inspiration flowing effortlessly into song? The infinite capacity for taking pains? A little bit of both?
In a letter to a young man who had sent examples of his work, Walter Scott described poetry as a 'knack'. He didn't seem to set much store by it, either, and advised the aspiring poet to apply himself to a worthwhile profession! Perhaps it was a tactful way of telling the young man that he had no talent. On the other hand, to a writer like Waiter Scott, poetry may well have seemed to be no more than a 'knack' with words. I cart imagine Rudyard Kipling, for example, saying the same. Sri Aurobindo dismissed Kipling as a clever versifier, not a poet, and he may have dismissed Scott in the same way. Yet, few critics have attempted to make the distinction that Sri Aurobindo makes, and for the reading public in general there is no distinction to be made (between poetry and mere verse) that does not depend upon subject matter and style.
You and I both agree that poetry is "received by the thinking mind". It follows that whatever is simply a product of the thinking mind, however elegantly phrased and irrespective of its outward form, is not "real" poetry. Stated bluntly like that, the truth I am trying to express is greatly reduced. 1 know, I would not like to have to define what I mean by "thinking mind", or to state how poetry which after all is language, the very vehicle of thought - can be "received", as if it existed, unexpressed, apart from the language in which it is expressed. Yet I do believe this ..
I do not want to be prescriptive, and if I had never tried to write poetry myself i would not dare even to express an opinion. I am guided by my own
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poetry is produced are excellent. They are a "Yes" to several possibilities, as poetry comes in many ways: the central truth
experience and intuition. Once I asked a friend, a sculptor, how he was able to carve a head (a perfect likeness of the subject) out of a block of stone. He told me that he 'saw' the head, as if already existing within the block, waiting to be uncovered. He did not "create" it - it was there already in its final form - the process was one of gradual and patient discovery. This is how 1 see a poem - as pre-existent, waiting for the poet who will discover it. I do admit that the discovery may require a long labour... or it may not. The point at issue is that the process is one of discovery (although we call it creation because it seems to us that when we discover what is, we build). If we were not so tangled up in time, if our yearning for the future equalled our nostalgia for the past, surely we would see the process of artistic creation with different eyes.
I will admit that I do not believe in the necessity of hard labour. Something in me has always rejected the ancient biblical prophecy (or curse): "in the sweat of thy brow shall thou eal bread". For this was not said until Adam had been driven out of paradise, and therefore we infer a prior blessed state, natural to man as he was first made, in which he does not labour... Now in that blessed state - in that supramental state, one might say (looking forwards instead of backwards) - would there be a limbo-state between perception and perception perfectly expressed in language (the future poetry)... a limbo-state filled with hard labour?
I am not trying to say that labouring at a poem makes it less a product of Hopkins' "sweet fire". Often we have to wait and strain for the felicity that surprises us (we know it is not ours by right) and enchants us with "the rhythmic sense of hidden things".
For what, after all, is the object of all our "doing and undoing", as you, quoting Yeats, have put it in your letter? Isn't it to keep clear the channel by which inspiration entered? The inevitable word, when we find it, is transparent - the light behind shines through. When we reject a word, isn't it because it somehow blocks that channel? When Meredith wrote
"1 low slowly does the skein of time unwind"
he found an image that cannot be replaced by any other - one feels this, but it can't be explained. Do you think he laboured to find "skein of time" or did the image impose itself, so many years before physicists began to speak of space-time as a curve, before the discovery of the shape of the DNA molecule - (a skein seems to be one of nature's basic shapes) - did the image impose itself because it embodied a truth, and the channel was clear? If Meredith had pondered over his image, he may have "undone" it and substituted something more conventional. Often the thinking mind rejects inspiration, not recognising it for what it is.
Keeping the channel clear - that is labour enough: and slowing down the dance of "inspiration's lightning feet" because we cannot write fast enough! If we succeed, and "the great wordless thoughts" leave their impress, their au revoir on an image, on the rhythm of a phrase - I call that poetry! But who knows this better than you?
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is that it "comes" and is not made by the surface intelligence - "the thinking mind", as we call it. And, of course, this implies that a poem "pre-exists" and there are, as you say, "the great wordless thoughts", but these movements of the higher conceptions and perceptions represent, as another phrase of Sri Aurobindo's cited by you has it, "the rhythmic sense of hidden things". Not words as such but a meaningful rhythm which can be communicated in the form of words in any language has to be part of the original inspiration. To turn a phrase of Swinburne's to my use, I should speak of "very sound of very light". And this sound is both of particular significances and of overall suggestions. When caught in language, the inspiration is not only in individual words but also in their general order and in special combinations. Let me pick out the line you have quoted from Meredith:
How slowly does the skein of time unwind.
No doubt, what immediately strikes us is the word "skein" -though I am not sure whether your "curved" space-time of relativity physics and your "double helix" of the DNA molecule are quite relevant or invest "skein" with extra insight. Can we even say that these phenomena of macro-physics and microbiology have any "unwinding" shade in them? The basic insight of Meredith's metaphor simply is: "Hardly do events and circumstances yield their true meanings at once, and often the meanings are manifold: their tangle rarely grows clear all round in a brief while." "Skein" is indeed the mot juste for this truth, by its touch of concrete imagery no less than by its figurative connotation. But it acquires its full force only by being part of a rhythmic whole of sound to convey the sense. The opening foot - a spondee with long stressed vowels - reinforces its sense by its sound: the delay in the skein's unwinding is driven subtly home through the ear at the very first step of the poet's perception. Similarly, the final word "unwind", both by its utter proxi-
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mity to ''time'' and by its containing the same long accented i as that word, as well as by its standing where it does, becomes specially effective in a conclusive manner to suggest that the function indicated gets carried out. The total interconnected impression the line makes would be lost if the ensemble were reshuffled to something like:
The skein of time - how slowly it unwinds.
or
The skein of time - how slow is its unwinding.
The initial suspense, the delicate atmosphere of discovery, the rhythmic and verbal reflection of the meaning unfolded -all these are missing. Merely the metaphor of "skein", however apt an inspiration, will not create authentic poetry unless it is an organic element in an inspired order of significant words.
1 don't know whether Meredith got bis Une straight away or after trying out some such versions as I have offered for comparison. As for the "skein"-image, I don't think he laboured to find it. It must have imposed itself.
Your idea that a true poem "pre-exists" is quite correct in the sense that what flows through the poet's pen is something that has hailed from beyond his scribal consciousness. He has found it, not put it together. But all poems cannot be said to pre-exist in the very form they take through that consciousness. There are works which are of one consistent shining tissue: e.g., Shelley's "Skylark". But some poems seem to vary in the texture of their parts. All the parts may be of equal artistic excellence and yet they may derive from different "planes" and cohere only in what I may term a subtle aura just beyond the poet's receptive mind. He may have got stuck at some point and when he resumed writing, though the theme was not changed, the style of expression was from another "plane" than the one he had started with. Then the resultant whole cannot be considered to pre-exist in its entirety from the start. It is a fusion of disparate pre-
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existences - elements drawn from more than one source of creation to serve a single thematic purpose. Here is no question of varying intensities of expression: everything is equally intense, but the intensities are not all of the same mode of revelation. Let me give you an example
Evanescence
Where lie the past noon-lilies
And vesper-violets gone?
Into what strange invisible deep
Fall out of time the roses of each dawn?
They draw for us a dream-way
To ecstasies unhoured,
Where all earth's form-hues flicker and drop,
By some great wind of mystery overpowered.
In this example what Sri Aurobindo has designated as the "overhead" plane of Intuition is active with its sudden disclosures which are subtle yet go straight into our minds and prove completely convincing. Yes, there is only one plane at work but it operates in two distinct dimensions. If it had continued in one dimension throughout, the poem would have been of a piece and the whole said to have a pre-existence. Evidently the last two lines bring a different turn of sight - a vision less vivid and direct, a more spread-out thought-touched though still light-swept eye is at play. It is as if the poet could not sustain the "occult" or "magic" vein, so enchantingly profound, and opened himself to a region more familiar to him: the Illumined Mind of Sri Aurobindo's overhead series. The inspiration from the Intuition got latched on to this more •familiar, even if intrinsically rare, region and brought forth a pure intuitivised snatch from it, no less fine as sheer spiritual poetry than the charmed outbreak from the in-world he had tapped earlier, but constituting a poetic pre-existence different from the one
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which that in-world had yielded in the six opening lines.
I am sure your sensitive aesthetic ear will understand why, while granting poetic pre-existence, I am led to a less simple notion of it than would occur to one at first blush.
My own style of composition is a mixture of swift and slow - precipitation and pause - except in the poems of The Adventure of the Apocalypse where for three exultant months there was almost a constant leaping out of phrase after flashing phrase. There was also a start-to-finish movement, whereas ordinarily I may begin anywhere, occasionally in the middle of a poem and sometimes even at the end of it, and work my way to revelatory significances before or after! A seed of light, as it were, falls into my mind with the thrill of a basic suggestion calling to be unravelled in many shades which yet are a unity like a swirl of various planets with a single sun at its centre. The perfectionist critic in me is never at rest until he can have the sense of a radiant whole.
(27.11.1990)
By now you must have received my letter of the 27th November, As it was long overdue in reply to yours of September 28th, written on the eve of your flight to England for over a month, I was in a hurry to post it. So, after my reflections apropos of my completing 86 years on 25 November, I went on to discuss the questions you had raised about poetry. In doing this I omitted a very important occurrence connected with my statement: "All I know at this instant is that an all-pervading peace appears, in a far-away manner, to hold me at its core and that I am caught, however faintly, in some eternal Now."
As soon as I had written these words the peace which I had spoken of came forward from the back of my consciousness, made the centre which it had in my little self a spreading glow, at once intense and soothing, what I can only call an omnipotent softness. It permeated my whole being, my entire body and I was immediately a new person.
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The newness had a particular relevance as well as a general one. I have dwelt on both in a couple of letters to friends. I wish to repeat my account to you who most deserve to have it since you were the direct occasion of my experience.
My birthday had passed as usual with several fellow-Ashramites dropping in with their warm smiling faces. There was an atmosphere of happiness. But in one respect this birthday was a little different from my past ones. It had fallen in the midst of a period of indisposition - a fortnight during which I had a persistent low fever accompanied by a constant unease in the stomach. For more than two days the stomach refused to let any food in. I was reminded of the time - 17 years earlier - when I had gone to Bombay for my first cataract-removal. Some time after the operation I contracted a fever and a great malaise in the stomach as if an ogre had been sitting there and refusing all nourishment. My nephew who was a doctor in that hospital swept me out of the place and took me home. The illness went on for more than a week. Medicines made it worse. During that period a passive prayer to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother went on - passive because there was just a turn towards them with no explicit call for intervention. When conditions looked as though there were a hidden form of typhoid at work, suddenly one evening, around 8 p.m., 1 saw with my closed eyes a fist come down with great force behind me on the right side of my body and at once the ogre was pushed out of my stomach and the fever vanished. The same night I had a dream of trie Mother walking on her roof-terrace and 1 myself standing in the street below. A tremendous wave of emotion went up to her from me - such as I have never known at any time in my waking hours. During my latest illness I had made a definite appeal to our Gurus to rid me of the fever and the stomach-upset. But nothing took place until the day I wrote to you. Then with that momentous sentence the fever and the general discomfort in the body were just washed away. I suspended my typing for a minute or two, lost in that
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glowing softness of utter tranquillity in which I was plunged literally from head to foot. Then I returned to my typewriter.
The sense of "some eternal Now" stayed outward for a few hours, delicate and yet most Concretely invasive - then gradually receded into the background without disappearing. The work it did directly in the body is a settled thing: I am cured and healthy.
Today is the fortieth anniversary of one of the most significant days in the Ashram's history: December 5, 1950, when Sri Aurobindo left his body. The message distributed this morning is a prayer by the Mother:
"Grant that we may identify ourselves with Your Eternal Consciousness so that we may know truly what Immortality
is."
I feel that in a remote and passing way what the Mother wants us to have was borne into me by a sudden breath of her grace on the fateful November 27.
(5.12.1990)
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