Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 2)

22

I am surprised that in Spanish the equivalents of the English "portent" and "portentous" - namely, "portento" and "por-tentoso -can only mean "wonder" and "wonderful" and their synonyms but never anything to do with the suggestion of a significant sign, whether favourable or unfavourable. In that case, Calderon could have chosen for his well-known play "Il Magico Prodigioso" the adjective "Portentoso" to go with the noun. It seems that both in Spanish and in French there is nothing corresponding to the ambivalent epithet "foreboding" in the Savitri-line:

The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone...

where, so far as the meaning in general is concerned, "portending" could substitute "foreboding" though it does not have the same subtle appositeness of atmosphere and rhythm. A French friend of mine has "menacant" which would make the mind of Night altogether a menace whereas it is itself more "menaced" than "menacing". Actually, here is not a question of immediate danger so much as of a vague peril felt in advance without being quite known as a peril. The exact poetic shade is of a prevision touched with fear or with a faint feeling of menace. "Menacant" would be "forbidding" rather than "foreboding"!

It is news to me that Spanish, unlike English or German, does not easily remodel or coin words. You have implied that Italian also does not lend itself with ease to such practice. You have written:

"The word 'ancilar' (you may recognise in it the Latin 'ancila' = 'she-servant') is an adjective which conveys the meaning of 'dependent', 'subservient', 'something which helps or supports from a humble position'. I do not know if all these meanings can be expressed so precisely and beautifully in Spanish by any other word. Nevertheless, this word

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is not recognised by the dictionary of the Real Academia de la lengua Espanola, and I am sure many Spaniards would be spellbound if they read or heard it. It has been very much used, perhaps created, by Alejo Carpentier, the Cuban writer and I am certain that nobody would doubt that as a neologism it is a success.

"Take another example: Dante's 'insemprare' in the line 'se non cola dove gioir s'insempra' ( Paradiso X, 148) - 'there where joy can be forever' - where the preposition 'in' and the temporal adverb 'sempre' ('always') undergo a twofold process of coalescence and transformation in a verb to express in a single word what neither Italian nor Spanish could say with such poetic force and depth of meaning."

Excuse me, but are you sure you have spelt the Latin for "she-servant" correctly? The original is ancilla (double l ). In any case, it is a pity that authoritative lexicons of Spanish don't list it. The common English derivation from the latin is via the adjective ancillaris. That is, we have "ancillary" meaning "subservient", but I can easily imagine an English poet writing:

Anciilar to God's will is the world's work.

Very interesting indeed is what you say about Dante's verbal innovation. I wonder whether in an English rendering we can incorporate a suggestion of his feat. Laurence Binyon has a fine sensitive version:

Save where joy tastes its own eternity,

Barbara Reynolds translates, just as creditably though less grandly, thus:

Where ever-present joy knows naught of time.

But the direct daring neologism escapes both the authors. An English coinage should spring to the eye if the Italian innovation is to be caught. What about an attempt like:

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Save there where joy lives self-eternalised?

You are welcome to visit India and me at your convenience and hold discussions on poetry. Yes, both Savitri and Ilion which mould the English language with a technical as well as semantic mastery have to be carefully probed before they wear a non-English garb. Ilion is less chockful of audacities than Savitri, but some turns of phrase in it also need a bit of elucidation. There is one not far from the start:

Even as fleets on a chariot divine through the gold streets

of ether....

Here one should not link "on" with "a chariot" in the prepositional sense that somebody is on a chariot, fleeting: the rest of the passage will fail to show who is fleeting charioted. The drift is: "Even as a chariot divine fleets on..." Just the chariot moving fast onwards is meant. The next line's "Swiftly when Life fleets" shows that "Life" is compared to "a chariot divine".

Then there is the line a little later:

Half yet awake in light's turrets started the scouts of the

morning...

The verb "started" does not indicate the scouts beginning to move or making a start of anything. It simply connotes "making a sudden involuntary movement due to surprise". Please forgive me if I am sounding too schoolmasterish. Most probably I am telling you what you already know.

(10.8.1991)

Ups and downs of the sadhak in us are natural. Don't worry about them. The progress towards perfection is never uniform until the whole of our being has been unified. The unification takes long but it is certain if the central self, the innermost psyche, grows more and more aware in all our

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movements. It has the master-key to open every part of us to feel what Wordsworth calls

A greatness in the beatings of our heart.

To aim at this unification is our immediate concern - the pervasive sense of the Divine within us. And as we move towards such pervasion an automatic concord gets created with our surroundings. But we must be patient. It takes long for the grand finale to be struck. With as much equanimity as we can muster we have to meet whatever wrong notes ring inwardly or outwardly. If we do this, they turn into stepping-stones towards the ultimate harmony. Of course, our equanimity has to be, as a phrase in Savitri goes,

A heart of silence in the hands of joy.

For we are offering our unwounded poise to the Holy Feet that are leading our pilgrimage to the satyam-ritam-brihat - the True, the Right, the Vast - the ideal set before the world from the beginning of our history by the Vedic Rishis. And we are doing the offering with a rush of rapture born of love: "hands of joy." Our equanimity is not of an intellectual Stoic: it is that of a spiritual Epicurean. An Eternal Face whose eyes are depths of immutable bliss and whose mouth is a moulder of ever-new beauty is our goal.

Don't tax yourself with the problem whether bodily divinisation will take place in this very life. Let all your inner self be a constant remembrance of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and let that remembrance shape your outer life to a consecrated strength which is at the same time a dedicated sweetness. Thus will you lay the foundation of a future, whether in this life or another, of a divinised body.

(9.10.1991)

It is natural that those lines from a Christian hymn which

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meant such a lot to me should go home also to you. Indeed your condition is still worse than mine though mine has worsened since the time I quoted to the Mother, as fitting her relationship to me, that poignant phrase from the hymn: "help of the helpless." I really admire the courage and calmness and composure with which you carry on. Surely it is your constant feeling that you are a child of the Divine Mother and that she is making the utmost possible of your soul's embodiment - truly it is this conviction of yours which is the cause of the quiet smile taking you through all your difficulties from day to day.

Outwardly the hymn's phrase applied to me forty years ago because of the defective left leg I had to put up with. 1 could not lead a normal safe physical life, fully self-helped. But there was also an inward relevance of those words. I seemed to lack a will powerful enough to push me through the spiritual life successfully. A call had come - but even there, as you know, the Guru had to come in search of me: the newspaper sheet covering the box of the shoes I had bought fell open at home in front of me revealing the article headed: "A Visit to the Ashram of Aurobindo Ghose." Without this act of grace I wonder whether I would have entered Sri Aurobindo's Ashram at the age of 23 years. I might have wandered into it after almost a lifetime of drifting here and there in quest of my soul. You will remember too that when I first went out of the Ashram for a visit to my grandfather after six and a half years of stay with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother my one appeal to the Mother was, in effect: "Please never give me up even if I myself tend to give you up!" The Mother granted the favour I had so intensely solicited and that is why I have been enabled to remain under her wings all these years.

A clear sign of my sort of Yoga may be seen in the passage I chose when once the Mother asked the group of us, sitting with her in the evening in the "Prosperity Room" before the Soup Distribution downstairs, to mention what lines we cherished the most in her Prayers and Meditations. She had

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brought her manuscript with her and was cutting out of it whatever passage was our favourite and giving it to us after pasting it on a blank sheet of paper and putting her signature along with the date. My selection was from the prayer whose start runs in the English translation: "O Divine and adorable Mother, with Thy help what is there that is impossible?" The sense behind my selection must have been: "Even I who am an impossible candidate for the Integral Yoga can go on if the Divine Mother whom I can't help adoring for her sweetness and light and strength takes me up and bears me towards whatever realisation Sri Aurobindo has in sight for the earth."

It is noteworthy that the end of the prayer whose few opening lines I offered as an echo of my heart's throbbings, as it were, brings us a statement which prophesied in general the consummation of Sri Aurobindo's work and hers and which she turned into the present tense on March 29, 1956, making it run as a Message referring back to February 29 when the Supramental Manifestation had taken place:

Lord, Thou hast willed and I execute:

A new light breaks upon the earth,

A new world is born.

The things that were promised are fulfilled.

I speak of a consummation in general because on the evening of February 29 certain aspects of the Supermind became in the inner or subtle layer of the earth a permanent part of terrestrial history. Here was a definite turn in the process of evolution. A breakthrough was achieved. Further manifestation of the Supermind was to be expected, leading ultimately to an emergence of the new consciousness in the outer or gross-physical layer of our planet and to a gradual transformation of not only the human mind and life-force but also the very body in which they function. In this great change the main motive-power is to be what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have called "the psychic being", the true

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soul in us acting from the depths of what we may term the inmost heart behind the complex of emotional movements, the depth where what may be designated the emotion of the ideal - the intense urge towards the"True, the Good and the Beautiful - is experienced directly as a one-pointed love for a Supreme Master or Mother of the world who is stationed at once on some secret altitude and in some arcane profundity. I am reminded of that invocation put by Sri Aurobindo into the. mouth of his Aswapati:

0 radiant fountain of the world's delight,

World-free and unattainable above,

O Bliss who ever dwellst deep hid within

While men seek Thee outside and never find....

This invocation always sprang to my lips whenever in the early morning the Mother came to a first-floor balcony and gave darshan to the sadhaks and sadhikas gathered in the street below. Once she came with her hair unbound and partly falling about her face. The sight of her like that has inspired the beginning of a poem of mine entitled "Vita Nuova" ("New Life"):

Haloed by some vast blue withheld from us,

Her pure face smiles through her cascading hair -

Like a strange dawn of rainfall nectarous

It comes to amaranth each desert prayer.

What is sought to be conjured up is a picture of Divine Grace. The Grace is twofold - beauty and benediction. It hails from a height of spiritual consciousness far beyond our reach, but, wearing the transfigured form of a face like ours, it brings to us with its joy and compassion a radiance rising out of the Mystery beyond and approaching us with its loveliness framed in loose-hanging hair, as if an unearthly morning were breaking through thin refreshing rain. This image evokes the suggestion of a transfiguring response from

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regions of immortality to the appeal of our human state, barren of true bliss. In Classical mythology we often find "fields of amaranth" — ever-living blooms in the Home of the Blest, a visionary after-death island-paradise. I have used the noun "amaranth" as a transitive verb - a poetic licence - to render vivid and forceful the transfiguration envisaged of the state, as of a desert, which is behind every human heart's longing in a world of mutabili "this transient and unhappy world", as Sri Krishna puts it in the Gita.

The memory of her appearance on that balcony is unfading - an "amaranth" I may call it, a particularly impressive one because those appearances were at the start of the day, giving the many hours to come a beatific stamp received when the outer eyes were most sensitive with the touch of the inner eyes after the night's long withdrawal from the crowded siege of changing superficialities. Of course, the sense of that "morning glory" is not the only guide to me these days when we cannot have again and again as in the far past the physical delight of her body moving amidst us to trace for us a pathway to perfection, her countenance imparting to us a sweet strength which would enable us not to feel our pursuit of her onward and upward too tiring for our human frailty.

At present I seek her help repeatedly by fixing my gaze on her photographs. One especially has a great power over me. I first saw it looking out at me from above the body of Lalita after Lalita had died. I seemed to hear it summoning me to a greater effort at self-transcendence. It is a coloured enlargement presenting frontally her face and a little portion below it of the body. It hangs on the wall opposite the chair in which, when I am not typing, I spend most of my time reading, conversing or else in-going instead of letting the inner become out-going. Her expression here is very serious and the eyes are most penetrating but in a strangely quiet way. They look stem and yet there is a warmth in them, a basic tenderness. They are not the eyes of the censor, the judge, warning me against the falsehood in my nature as with a

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hidden threat. They have a firm compassion bent on never letting me prove unworthy of her love - never allowing any insincerity to veil the soul in me who is her child and who loves her. She is in dead earnest to protect me from my own weaknesses, my own tendencies to diverge from the straight path on which she has at last put me with so much care. This explains the deep seriousness in her expression. At one and the same time I am guarded and enfolded, kept strongly within bounds with the unrelenting softness of a firm protective embrace.

Enough about myself and my concerns! Now for your scruple about my use of the word "death" for Sri Aurobindo's leaving his body. You have rightly guessed that the adjective "mysterious" should modify - at least partly -the usual association of this word. But even if "mysterious" were not here, "death" would be the mot juste here in order to stress, as I have done, how really living in a most extraordinary sense was Sri Aurobindo when to all appearance life had fled. To drive home this sense a touch of stark "realism" was needed. In another earlier context the same touch was equally called for. You may remember my sonnet "Heaven's Light and Mortal Doom". There the last line of the octave and the first two of the sestet run:

Heaven's light vanishes - divine Aurobindo died.

But this one death where Heaven's own self gave room

For dire echpse of its eternity...

The Mother never liked the word "death" in relation to Sri Aurobindo. But when I showed her this sonnet, there was not the slightest demurring. She wholly accepted the usage as an inevitable part of the extraordinary thing I was visualising in the poem. Besides, from the standpoint of "form" -the rhyme-scheme and the metre - nothing else could replace it.

On palmistry I have nothing to say except to recount one incident of a long time back. I had gone to see a Maharash-

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trian Yogi - Devji by name - who had come to Bombay and about whose powers an article had come my way. This was before my visit to Sri Aurobindo's Ashram and before even the article on it which decided my spiritual future. The man in whose flat Devji was staying called me to himself instead of directing me to the inner room where his guest was receiving people. I was in full English dress - necktie and all - with a felt-hat in my hand. I must have looked rather strange as a seeker of Yoga. The host asked me to show him my right palm. On examining it he shook his head. "What's the matter?" I inquired. He said: "You are fated to have four children. Why are you bothering about Yoga?" I quickly countered: "But I don't have a single one yet. Please let me go in." With a disgusted face he waved his hand towards the door of the room concerned. I was tempted to steal a glance at his own palm thus fleebngly exposed. But, of course, I had no clue to where his reproductive power might be indicated. This whole curious incident took place about sixty-one years ago and I haven't had even one offspring. So much for palmistry - at least in my life!

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