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Your long-distance call was a unique event in the history of Mother India. Never before has any voice from beyond Pondicherry come precisely in reponse to my work in our Monthly Review of Culture with such an irrepressible joy. In more than the sense of sheer surprise the call seemed to arrive "out of the blue". It was as if Sri Aurobindo, from another world which is yet mindful of earth's aspiration and effort, had found on earth a receptive soul to transmit his still continuing appreciation of what a child of his had been trying to do ever since February 1949 for a periodical about which he had once said when a carping critic had doubted the authenticity of the views expressed in its pages: "Doesn't he know that Mother India is my paper?"
I have mentioned "Sri Aurobindo", but I should add "The Mother". For, the sense of both of them glowed in my being as soon as I reatised the wonder of the far-away, along with the happy thrill in the admiring voice. There was not only the communication as of a light of understanding from some height: there was also the communication as of a delight from some depth. And by a coincidence which yet seemed most natural, the voice identified itself as "Aditi"! The grandest conception in the Rigveda - greater than that of Mitra-Varuna or Indra-Agni or Surya-Soma - is the one in which the Rishis bring close to our souls from a rapturous all-ruling remoteness the Mother of the Gods: Aditi, the personification of the Illimitable, the Ultimate. Appropriate here would be those lines from Sri Aurobindo's poem, "Bride of the Fire":
Voice of Infinity, sound in my heart,
Call of the One!
Thank you, sweet human namesake of that Mightiness -twice "thank you", for in the wake of the congratulation on
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the phone came the letter in symbolic colours: white envelope, pink notepaper, reminding me of that phrase of Sri Aurobindo's in his poem "Flame-Wind": "the white and rose of the heart." Indeed expressive were they of the heart's inmost qualities - "light and sweetness", purity of perception and intensity of affection. I am not using these words idly. They correspond to the reality and hit off exactly your letter's contents. You have not only liked the general sweep of my writings but savoured specific individual parts of them and quoted the turns of phrase that struck you as most true to the various movements of the inner life. Here to be "true" is to be "beautiful", for the inner life has an enchantment which cannot be caught in language unless the language has a felicitous form. That is why poetry whose concentration is on beauty is best able to convey the richness and harmony distinguishing spiritual truths. In addition to the acuity of discernment in your letter, there is the wide warmth of it, typical of the soul's gesture which is always in tune with the universal Krishna, the omnipresent Vasudeva who is at once at play with myriads while being felt as each one's special beloved.
It was good to meet your father. Years of distance did not prevent us from getting close immediately. We are running neck and neck in the race to nonagenarianism. I was amazed at the long list of books you had ordered. And it is typical of the bibliophile such as Southey celebrates in the poem from which you have quoted two lines, that you should be happy I increased your list. Three books of mine are still missing because these are out of print: Sri Aurobindo - the Poet, The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo and Sri Aurobindo on Shakespeare. The last one has gone in for a second edition, with an added appendix giving two references I had somehow missed.* This book has been rather popular. I remember that on a visit to Bombay many years ago I called at a bookshop to inquire how the sale of my productions stood. The owner
"Editor's Note: The new edition was out in the middle of last April.
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told me: "One of your books is creating a lot of interest." I asked: "Which one?" He answered: "Shakespeare on Sri Aurobindo." I exclaimed: "No wonder! It must surely be the most original book I could ever have written." He nodded with an innocent smile.
I was glad to know of your love of flowers. Lately I have opened in a very concrete way to the influence of leaves and blooms on our mind and heart. The leafy greenery conveys great ease to my heart when trudging with my poor legs from the Ashram gate to the Samadhi puts a strain on me. And the many-coloured many-shaped flowers shoot into me little bursts of joy, bringing a smile to my tense face as it looks forward to my seat in the Ashram courtyard.
I am grateful to Dr. Roerich for the warm regards he has sent through you. I reach out to you with the deepest affection.
(10.5.1990)
You have been in my heart all these days even though I haven't been able to put my heartbeats in rhythm with the eager play of the typewriter keys.
The lovely feeling of joy rising in you in response to my letter and making you wonder how it comes "wave after wave, never-ending, ever-growing, from no dramatic outward event, only an inner exultation, an inner celebration" -there cannot be a truer description than this of the authentic soul-movement. That movement is non-effusive yet most intense and does not depend on anything outward, it springs from an eternal source in the infinite self-existence of the Divine in our depths and goes forth to the same limitless reality in the manifested world. A special mark of it is that what is a universal light is known by it also as an individual form of enchanting beauty and ineffable love, a pulsing personal centre whose happy aureole is a light fanning out in all directions. From the very beginning of my stay in the Ashram I have sought to quicken to the presence of Sri
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Aurobindo and the Mother from the core of my heart. Although I came to them with a mind keenly interested in spiritual philosophy what had brought me was an inner urge I hardly understood and only knew as something strange within my chest which yearned for an Unknown surpassing every object of my sense and my thought and making nothing worthwhile unless that Unknown were first found. Again and again I asked the Mother to put her hand on my chest and open up what dimly and dumbly quivered, deep inside, to meet in full the mystery of the endless warmth I felt within her eyes and the vast wisdom I glimpsed within Sri Aurobindo's.
A peculiar sign of "the imprisoned splendour" (Browning's phrase) was that every time I closed my eyes to meditate I got a vague pain in my chest as if something wanted to come out and was baulked by a barrier. I spoke to the Mother about the pain. She said: "Don't worry. I know what it is. It will go." A few months later, suddenly I had the sense of a wall breaking down in my chest - and there was instead a shining space, as it were, within which indescribable flames and fragrances sprang up and a wide happiness without a cause pervaded my whole being. I was resting in bed in the afternoon when this opening took place. I lay breathless for a while. The ecstasy was more than I could bear. And when I could cope with the explosion I wished it would go on and on. Of course it could not continue at that pitch. But from that time onward the soul, which had acted from the background and influenced me indirectly, became a part of my conscious life. It used to play temporary hide-and-seek but never more was there a wall between me and this delegate of the Divine. Not that I never went astray. Various parts of my complex being demanded their satisfaction and my will could waver and my steps leave the "sunlit path". This is a strange phenomenon - the unregenerate parts clamouring on one side and on the other the little steady glow exposing their falsity -
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A flame that is All,
Yet the touch of a flower -
A sun grown soft and small.
The last line here reminds me of Newman's hymn which you like so much. The soul could be from day to day the "kindly light" showing us the one step forward needed on our path to perfection. My own favourite hymn is "Abide with me". I remember showing the Mother a combined miniature photograph of her and Sri Aurobindo which I used to carry in my wallet and on the back of which I had written: "Help of the helpless." The Mother was quite interested at this unexpected inscription. But the words expressed my attitude precisely and I told the Mother that my lame leg made them all the more appropriate. Perhaps I should have quoted those lines of Savitri:
...Mind, a glorious traveller in the sky,
Walks lamely on the earth with footsteps slow;
Hardly he can mould the life's rebellious stuff,
Hardly can he hold the galloping hooves of sense.
Anyway, do you know the hymn from which I wrote those words behind my pocket-photo? Three couplets have impressed themselves on my memory:
Abide with me, fast falls the eventide -
The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide....
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me....
Change and decay in- all around I see;
O Thou who changes! not, abide with me.
Perhaps you know this hymn already? If you don't, get hold of the recording - as far as I recollect - of Dame Melba's or
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Clara Butt's recitation. It is a very haunting and moving tune.
The temper and tone of the hymn breathe intense aspiration. If the result of such aspiration is to be sought in any words inscribed by a God-worshipper I would pick out those which Longfellow has given us, called "Saint Teresa's Bookmark", evidently a translation of that Saint's own writing:
Let nothing disturb thee.
Nothing affright thee;
All things are passing;
God never changeth;
Patient endurance
Attaineth to all things;
Who God possesseth
In nothing is wanting;
Alone God sufficeth.
When I am with expressions of profound moods - either an exquisite religious urge or a settled mystical state with outflowing benedictions to those who need it yet have not reached its shelter - my mind keeps racing towards analogous utterances. One which Saint Teresa's sense of the all-satisfying plenitude of God's eternity suggests to me at the moment is a stanza I recall from Emily Bronte. Here we have in a concentrated form a philosophical dictum swept into poetic vision with a passionate severity of what I may term intuitive thought:
Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou wert left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.
Perhaps I may round off these literary-spiritual recoveries from my memory with two more. First, a harking backward to the Chandogya Upanishad's summing up of the human
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heart's ultimate experience: "There is no happiness in the small. Immensity alone is felicity." Then as the grand finale that Mantric line from Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, a quintessential pointer to the end of all travail:
Our life's repose is in the Infinite.
Not irrelevant in this context is your question about "longing" and "attachment". It is a crucial question and cuts down to the very first principles of Yoga. Short of doing Yoga, all you say is nothing to be contradicted - and actually you have, a natural affinity to the psychic being's turn towards the Divine - one of the prominent signs of its working is a longing for the Beautiful everywhere. You are also on the right track when you say: "Why is attachment to be given up? Isn't the important thing what we are attached to and not attachment itself?" But it is necessary to define "attachment" as well as "the Beautiful". Referring to a line of Sri Aurobindo's poem, "Bride of the Fire", you ask: "Why should 'longing' be sacrificed?" But the whole stanza reads: .
Beauty of the Light, surround my life, -
Beauty of the Light!
I have sacrificed longing and parted from grief,
I can bear Thy delight.
The Beauty invoked is that which is a blissful harmonious manifestation of a Supreme Consciousness free from all the shadows and shortcomings of the common objects of human love. Not that these objects are to be disdained and rejected, but the usual way they are approached and valued has to change. They are approached with a "longing" which is bound up with "grief" because they are loved by the divisive ego in us for the limited ego in them and not by the leap of the soul to the sheer soul. There is expectation on our side and, if it is not fulfilled, grief will follow for us - and, if our demand cannot be met by the person whom we love, this
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person too will grieve, feeling as he must that he has fallen below our expectation. Wherever any grief is bound up with longing, the joy obtained is limited and non-lasting. There is a greater joy to which Sri Aurobindo points, a joy whose ideal intensity and immensity are not easy to come by and cannot be reached unless we set aside the lesser joys by giving up the all-too-human longing which is intertwined with the ego's suffering grief or inflicting it. More intense and immense, this joy involves not only a higher attuning in us but also a capacity to stand the loss of ordinary joys. Hence the phrase: "I can bear thy delight."
No doubt, Sri Aurobindo does not order us to abandon God's multiple manifestation. There is a value in it and we have to cherish that value, but we have to learn - as the famous exquisite lines of Yeats's have it - to see
In all poor foolish things that live a day
Eternal Beauty wandering on her way.
We may even go further and affirm with two lines of Amal Kiran in a super-Yeatsian mood:
The Eternal Beauty is a wanderer
Hungry for lips of clay.
But now an important qualification comes in, which is hinted at by your query: "Isn't the important thing what we are attached to and not attachment itself?" Here the thing to be attached to is not "all poor foolish things" in their transience or 'Tips of clay" in their earthiness but the Eternal Beauty itself in its own direct substance, its own intrinsic form recognised as being at the same time those short-lived moulds and beyond them. If the sense of the "beyond" does not suffuse the sense of the "within", we have not felt wholly and truly the "longing for the Beautiful". And here the point about "attachment" gets rightly answered .To be attached to the eternal beauty must imply a deep degree of
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non-attachment to its temporary or restricted manifestation. That is why in Sri Aurobindo's Yoga, much stress is laid on what he terms "equality", which we may ordinarily designate as "equanimity". By equanimity we have an equal attitude towards all events - a facing of everything with an unaltered peace. No reaction of a personal nature to any impact from outside - no excited rejoicing, no upsetting distress, no impulsive anger. By this constant composure we acquire a distance from the entire play of time and, while discerning the Divine everywhere, remain uncaught by the nama-rupa under which the Supreme manifests. The grip of "name and form" loosens and we are free to meet the Reality transcending them. Equanimity in the Aurobindonian Yoga does not dry up the heart. Against a background of vast illumined tranquillity the heart keeps functioning but now serving like a centre of pure light and a core of clear warmth to that background. Only thus can we be human with all the tenderness possible, all the attention needed by the call of earth and yet know the inner liberty without which we are ill-equipped to experience the touch of the Eternal Beauty and be its instruments in a fallible and mutable world.
As for your inquiry about "the breath of a sevenfold noon" in Sri Aurobindo's "Flame-Wind", I suppose the adjective "sevenfold" which puzzles you is an intensive word, signifying "multiple" and suggesting "plenary" in a concrete fashion. In the ancient world-vision, "seven" was an important number: there were seven planes comprising the whole creation and there were seven rishis covering the whole gamut of possible acquisition of wisdom. A noon of power raised to the nth degree is brought by the breath. Passion, dynamism, eclat, the mind and the vital force in extreme action are conjured up, overwhelming whatever the heart may have to say, the heart with its quiet yet profound "rose and white" of love.
I am glad that Dr. Roerich is interested in my comments. Did I write to you that I was a great admirer of his father and have seen his own work with deep pleasure? Both father and
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son possess considerable insight into the hidden soul of things. I had a passing acquaintance with Dr. Roerich's wife Devika Rani when she used to act in the early Indian films. I remember her as a rare beauty.
(7.6.1990)
It's been a longish time since I last wrote to you. I have been busy with a lot of matters. The main preoccupation was to read and revise the typescript of a certain book of mine which at last I have decided to send off to a publisher in Holland who has lately been bringing out researches in Jewish subjects. My book - don't gasp at the title - is called The Beginning of History for Israel. The subtitle is: "How long did the Israelites stay in Egypt? - When was their Exodus? -What was the Period of their Conquest of Palestine?" and a general pointer to the work done by me is called "A Reassessment of Historical, Literary and Archaeological Evidence." One may wonder why I wrote this book, which has entailed an abundance of meticulous research and cannot be of much interest to the Indian public. There were two reasons. The Mother is known to have remarked that it was Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt (one of the Mother's own past incarnations) who was the princess said in the Old Testament to have asked her maids to pick up the basket in which baby Moses had been left on a river's bank. This gave me the approximate date of the birth of Moses. From it I could work out all the other necessary dates according to the numbers given by the Bible. This series of dates differed by nearly a century and a half from the chronology currently accepted by scholars and even by the State of Israel - with small variations here and there. That chronology stems from the greatest authority on the subject: William Foxwell Albright. So I was faced with the job of demolishing him in favour of the scheme inspired by the Mother. Just the fact that he was the great Panjandrum in this sphere made me feel like the war-horse in the Bible neighing "Ha-ha" at the smell of the
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battlefield. "The fascination of what's difficult", as Yeats puts it in a poem, drove me on through months and months of close study to complete a book of 231 double-spaced typed pages. It has been lying among my 18 still-unpublished works for several years. Now I have pulled it out to cross the t's and dot the i's before packing it off to Mr. Brille of Leiden. All publishers have their Readers who estimate the typescript received. I hope the Reader who deals with my thesis has an open mind and William Foxwell Albright has not already imposed his erudite Will on him and Foxed him well into believing that the current theory is All Bright!
Now let me turn from me and my antiquity to the living moment and you. I have before me the photographs you have sent. Each has a disclosure to make to me of my newly found friend's many-shaded being. The one with "little Sheetal" on her birthday in your office-room brings home to me several "truths" of your l ife. The way you hold her in your arms and the expression you wear on your face tell me that though you have to do with a lot of children as pupils you do not lose the individual child in the midst of the group. Each child is a special revelation to you and you deal with it with a "dream" of the future proper to it alone - a future in response to its soul's present with the unique possibilities you have intuited in its budding beauty. Your slightly smiling face shows by its blend of joy and calm an affectionate ardour playing around a poise of patience - a poise charged with understanding of the child's depths along with pleasure in its changing momentary moods. Further, your patience prevents you from getting easily irritated - or, if by any chance, there is any irritation it passes quickly and does not flare up into anger. Your office is quite tidy and tastefully decorated. It speaks of a gift for artistic order. The epithet "artistic" is important. For there can be an order which is mechanical or conventional. Also, the epithet implies that one is not a slave to a fetish. If one is orderly, it is only with an artistic turn - that is, by following an inner sense of accordances which expresses an originality of vision. But the
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capacity of artistic order does not compel one to follow that sense always. It leaves room for a spontaneous care-free condition at times which does not mind a degree of disorder. To act from within outward is not to be bound down to anything. Whatever is non-mechanical, non-conventional is admissible. And under that category one may list even "wild Nature" which can differ from all man-made creation, however artistic, and yet have a ravishing loveliness. When one goes from within outward, one's eye for beauty can be multi-sensitive, alert to all forces at work in the human domain or the natural world.
One of the pictures catches you, as you say, "between verdant earth and azure sky, a happy state of being". It is not exactly a scene of "wild Nature" but there is enough of Nature's presence, not only varied but ample, to make you look a glad escapee from so-called civilised schemes and regulations. What strikes me in addition to this is that you are alone - almost a speck in the expansive panorama, yet in entire tune with it as if the spirit of the expanses were itself concentrated in that little human body so that in spite of its apparent tinyness it holds an intoxication with distances and rejoices in being alone, cut off from the crowd which would be a largeness of excited egos. Such a crowd would be quite contrary to the spacious impersonality of the green and the azure that is Nature's - a milieu in which one sees no end, one seeks no halting-place, one feels secret after secret delivered from some infinity to unplumbed depths in oneself. In this environment a poet could say about a poet as in a Line of my own:
Far-visioned with the homeless heart he sings.
Mention of poet along with mention of Nature reminds me of sending you a short piece I wrote many years ago. Glimpsing the flower-vase and the flower-painting in the photo of your office-room I am led to lay before you the picture of Amal the Gardener, now deep-sighted rather than "far-visioned":
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EDEN EVER-PRESENT
O the dew-dipped delicious drudgery
For red and blue and white and yellow pomps
Reigning with perfect petals over the dust!
Back bent, I serve them and on grateful knees
Touch with a mighty worship the frail kings.
One careless finger is their empire's doom -
Yet on my thoughts their pollen strews a blessing
And every breath of scent is a command;
For, each round tuft of quiet colour pricks
A flawless hole in some enormous veil -
A light shoots up and lays bare all my flowers
Small and precarious by brief difficult
Thrustings of paradise through clods of clay!
(If you find the construction of the last three lines a little obscure, put "as" or "to be" before "small". This kind of compressed expression, though dubious by common grammatical rules, is a poetic licence for the sake of direct felicitous effect.)
Now back to your series of photos. The one in which you are, as you write, "at Mahabalipuram, a splendid legacy of the past", appeals to me particularly for two reasons. First, you are again all by yourself. A number of people would have spoilt the impression of quiet happy communion with the spirit of the antique monument. Superficial tourism would have been suggested. Secondly, though at first glance your bright orange dress is a bit of a shock against the grey massive ruined artistry of the immobile stones, you have stood at some artistic instinct in front of a dark aperture which seems a background of mystery from which your vivid colour and living personality emerge in the most natural way. At the same time the loud-looking present is subdued and the silent-seeming past springs to life and finds the secret of its creative urge bodied forth from old times in a living "Now", disclosing, as it were, the joyful soul which
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worked out its dream of grandiose response to the infinite Spirit whose mighty Ananda has structured the multiform unity of the cosmos.
Finally, the snap of you and the well-known artist Dr. Svetoslav Roerich, on the back of which you have written: "With a friend whom I revere with all my heart." Your fine feeling comes out well in the picture. There is a warm nearn ess combined with what I may call a sweet submissive-ness as to someone who holds great depths in himself. From the far-away contemplation of an unreachable Beauty the eyes of Dr. Roerich look at once most gently and most penetratingly into the human condition and strive to seize in terms of art the pleasure and pain, the shine and shadow of its varied aspiration. His work comes nearer to common humanity than that of his father Nicholas, though I must add that the latter's work was not really "cold" in spite of its preoccupation with the Himalaya any more than one can consider as really cold the presence of that mighty mountain that is like a vast guardian of the land that lies at its foot. If 1 have to talk in ultimate language, I may aver that the father's art conveys, knowingly or unknowingly, a sense of the benevolent transcendent Godhead, the Supreme who is above and yet not aloof, while the son's art inspires, consciously or unconsciously, a sense of the compassionate immanent Godhead, the Supreme who is always with us because he is within us.
This letter has become very long. I'll stop now with love to you and all the others of your wonderful family.
(26.7.1990)
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