5
Please forgive my inordinate delay in replying to your earnest letter asking for my interpretation of two verbal problems in Sri Aurobindo's early poetry.
In the lines (p. 7 of Collected Poems) -
Perfect thy motion ever within me,
Master of mind -
it is possible to take "Perfect" as either a semi-exclamatory frontally projected adjective or as a verb in the imperative mood. The choice has to be guided by the suggestion, if any, in the succeeding lines. What follows is:
Grey of the brain, flash of the lightning.
Brilliant and blind,
These thou linkest, the world to mould,
Writing the thought in a scroll of gold,
Violet-lined.
A sense of wonder is felt here. The second stanza too breathes a similar sense:
Tablet of brain thou hast made for thy writing,
Master divine.
Calmly thou writest or full of thy grandeur
Flushed as with wine,
Then with a laugh thou erasest the scroll,
Bringing another, like waves that roll
And sink supine.
The astonishing skill of the "master divine" is delineated in telling strokes. Can we take the poet to be marvelling at the highest effects of inspiration brought about by the "Master of mind"? Surely it is not possible to think of the poet as
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considering everything he writes to be perfect? But the general tone does allow this possibility. If we fight shy of such an interpretation we are led to look on "Perfect" as your friend does, so that the poem becomes "Primarily a prayer of the poet".
The adverb "ever" in the opening line is dually significant. The Master may have been admiringly told that his "motion" is always "perfect" - or else the poet appeals to him to keep on perfecting "within me" this "motion". But if the "motion" is at all times what it is portrayed in the poem, there seems hardly any room left for further inspired proficiency: it appears to be already "perfect". So, unwilling to understand the poet to be telling us that he is always a marvellous writer under the ruling hand of the "Master", I am inclined to make the poem refer to his inspiration only at its highest pitch. I must confess, though, that such a reference is not explicit. Perhaps we may aver the poem to mean that when the "Master divine" takes charge, all is flawless at every moment. Then the unexpressed implication would be that there are occasions when the "Master of mind" is not directly present and active with the result that the work is not impeccable.
The poem is indeed complex and a final meaning cannot be completely disentangled.
Your other query is more easily answered. To get that answer into focus it is advisable to look at the whole last stanza of "To a Hero-Worshipper" (pp. 8-9):
No herald of the Sun am I,
But in a moon-lit veil
A russet nightingale
Who pours sweet song, he knows not why,
Who pours like a wine a gurgling note
Paining with sound his swarthy throat.
Who pours sweet song, he recks not why,
Nor hushes ever lest he die.
Your comment on the last line is: "If the word Test' is taken
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as per the ordinary meaning 'for fear that' it does not sound appropriate, I feel the meaning should be taken as 'for reason less than' as per the old English usage, from which the word 'lest' has been derived. In that case the meaning of the phrase would be - 'the nightingale does not ever hush for reason less than that of his death'. Another meaning suggested is that the nightingale does not ever hush because it would indicate his death. Which of these two is appropriate?"
I am afraid you are being unnecessarily puzzled. Both of your two meanings are far-fetched, the first especially so. The significance you reject is the only one possible in a straightforward reading. In modern English the last line can only mean that to the nightingale the act of singing is very life so that to stop singing would be to risk death. All the preceding lines picture this bird as song embodied - there is no for-mulable reason for his singing - it is just his mode of being alive. If he "hushes ever", he would run the danger of being dead.
The only question possible to raise apropos of the stanza is in regard to the word "veil" in line 2. Could it be a misreading for "vale"? Or is "veil" used to suggest that the nightingale sings from a hidden place, shielded from eyes by thick foliage made bright by moonlight? We may remember Milton:
the wakeful bird
Sings darkling, and in shadiest covert hid
Tunes her nocturnal note.1
By the way, it is interesting from the literary point of view that Keats, writing his "Ode to a Nightingale" two hundred years after Milton's day, brings in the same somewhat unusual usage: "darkling". While Milton applied the adjective meaning "in the dark" to the bird, Keats refers to himself: "Darkling I listen."
(14.6.1992)
1. Paradise Lost, Book III lines 38-40.
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As always, I was very glad to hear from you. But the news you give of yourself is hardly comforting. What is of comfort is that you are holding on with undiminished courage and even turning your troubles into occasions for going closer to our Divine Mother. About one trouble in the future I can assure you that you can take it quite lightly. I mean the cataract operation. I have had both my eyes operated on for cataracts -of course, not at the same time - and from the very next day 1 was reading the press-proofs of Mother India with the other non-bandaged eye. People keep frightening one about movement. I was told: "Once somebody shook his head and everything got spoiled. So do take care." Very solemnly I said "Yes" again and again and kept nodding in support of that strong affirmative! Nothing untoward happened, though my adviser was shocked and feared the worst. At the end of the six days you can go home. And when the treated eye first opens again on the world, there is a wonderful revelation. The whole world appears bathed in a most clear white light, such as you haven't seen ever in your life. And when the glasses come, the contours of earth's manifold existence and mobility are so keenly etched that you feel you are on the verge of being told some secret beyond them - those sharp lines seem to tear some veil and give a glimpse of the Ineffable.
The use you are making of your body's sufferings renders those sufferings worthwhile. Not that you have invoked them - they have come of themselves but you have not let them go waste. They have served as spurs to the inmost being - they have called it forth not only to surmount them but also to let their poignancy become a call to the Divine Grace, the Saviour Love which draws the eternal child in you close to the radiance of the Infinite Mother. The sharper the pain, the intenser the cry for the supreme all-soothing Presence. The pain turns into a short cut - a sharply swift passage to a sacred Sweetness which helps the hidden soul to overflow, as it were, and permeate more and more the outer consciousness, even the bodily consciousness. Thus you have had both the inspired wit and the intuitive wisdom to create out of your
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hardships stepping-stones for a two-way traffic between you and your Masters.
(1.7.1992)
Almost daily I have been receiving your SOSs and I would like very much to serve - in whatever small way possible - as our Gurus' channel to help you. Let me make certain points clear.
One who has been touched by the light of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother cannot ever close his eyes to it. So it is no use thinking of making such a person give up sadhana. But this light carries with it a great peace and if it does not establish that peace, there is something wrong in the recipient. Perhaps he is pulling at it too much. Perhaps he is too frantic and wishes to achieve the highest at one leap. I have advised equanimity as the basis of sadhana, but it is necessary to acquire a poise even with regard to the spiritual force. Do not be over-enthusiastic, over-zealous. Proceed calmly, slowly. You seem sometimes to be in a sort of fever for Yoga. This is not advisable - especially for a disposition which is liable to be unstable. The notion that spiritual practice is in itself an upsetter is a mistake, but if proper conditions for it are not observed, there can be temporary upheavals. A beginner should not forget that he is a beginner and must learn to accept small gains with gratitude. Earnest prayer for progress is good, but if progress is slow don't force yourself to big efforts. Be as normal as you can, have normal relations with your family and friends. Don't consider yourself as someone special who needs to stand aloof.
The "fear-complex" that has again gripped you is partly due to your not feeling at home with your surroundings, not feeling yourself to be a natural part of the people you are with. If you have a spiritual ideal, keep it steady yet without drawing a line dividing you from general humanity. A change of attitude will be to some extent a help towards getting rid of the "fear-complex". And as an aid to acquiring
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normalcy continue with the psychiatrist's prescriptions. Try also to realise that you are in the saving gracious hands of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. No ultimate harm can come to you. There is no reason for any fear. Can you put your finger on any particular occasion or incident that sparked off this resurgence of an old complaint which, according to all signs, had substantially disappeared? I say "substantially" with a purpose. For, even when the substance of a thing vanishes, a shadow of it can linger in the subconscious and rise up under some unusual circumstances. Offer it to your divine Gurus without any agitation and be sure that it will vanish. Do not give it unnecessary strength by imagining that the very substance has come back. At this moment of writing to you I feel a great peace enveloping me and emanating from me and wafting towards you. It is the peace that comes from feeling constantly the presence of our two Masters, the one as if descending from a freedom above the mind and settling sweetly in the deep heart, the other as if emerging from the deep heart's sweetness and enveloping us with the vast serenities of the "overhead".
(17.7.1992)
There has been quite a flood of letters from you. Let me respond with at least a respectable trickle. The one which interested me most was that which gives an account of your daily programme of sadhana and work. It is good that in the midst of your work you snatch moments of inwardness during which you re-establish equanimity and strengthen the attitude of "remember and offer". But there should not be too big a division between these moments and the work in hand. During the work itself there should be a growing background-consciousness of calm and self-giving. Or, if such a background is not easy to develop at present, let there be small pauses during which you do the dedication. Thus work itself will be a part of sadhana in a more direct manner than now. Then, if you have the enthusiasm to practise Yoga, work will
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be a mode of moving towards the Mother and therefore a most welcome thing. I believe that the best procedure for you is to conceive your studies as well as your daily medical activity as your central sadhana. You have not yet properly woven them into your role as the Mother's child. Once you see and accept them as your main path of Yoga, you will develop your true relationship with the Divine. You have made too sharp a distinction between two dimensions of your life.
When I read of your morning programme before going to work, I had a strong impression of the cleavage you seem to make between the sadhak in you and the evolving medico. An hour and a half of walking with a book of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in your hand and doing Yoga in a supposedly concentrated manner is to my mind a somewhat artificial strain on your nerves. Half an hour of absorption in Yoga with or without a book in the morning is sufficient for you at present. And when you come out of your absorption, there should be a kind of soft halo of equanimity and self-consecration going with you which will serve as a protective presence of the Mother and suffuse whatever you do - study or work - with her sweetly intense nearness which is yet "distance-haunted" by all the depth beyond depth of Soul and Spirit which she keeps waiting for you. At the end of the day you may again have a half-hour of inner absorption. In the meantime you should be more relaxed in your being, with an easy poise affably in touch with the outer world. The outer world begins with your own family with whom you should cultivate cordial relationship as a part of your Yoga.
The "fear-complex" will not recur if you have a greater relaxation in your inner-outer consciousness. You have a keen sense of insecurity - especially with regard to your future. There is also an uncertainty about your spiritual status. You have to proceed in your sadhana without too much self-concern, too much asking, "Am I progressing adequately? Will I be a first-rate follower of Sri Aurobindo, a full-fledged child of the Mother?" Perhaps there is a streak of
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unacknowledged ambition - a jealousy of Nolini and Champaklal and Pavitra and Dyuman, possibly even of stumbling, fumbling and still onward-rumbling Amal Kiran! On the other hand, you underrate your own powers of intelligence and application and industry, your own possibilities of being a proficient M.D. All sorts of contradictory movements have got entwined in your subconscious. Stop worrying and brooding - make a clear peaceful space within you for your true soul with its outward as well as inward radiance, its happy humility and its confidence in God's grace. If any vague "fear" hovers around you, think of it as absolutely a force external to you and instead of fighting with it head-on, turn away and distract or divert your mind to reading or talking or going out for a stroll, and at the same time calmly live in the Mother's presence and invoke its grace.
(7.7.1992)
About the readings made by the Shuka Nadi Foundation of Bangalore, my information is that the so-called "Bhrigu Leaves" are not always right. Experience has shown them to be a mixed bag, quite frequently off the mark. Of course, the most important question for you is whether they are right in saying that you will have God-realisation. You have put me the question about this most anxiously. If I give some sort of answer, please don't think I am a seer or saint. I can answer from my own inner experiments.
It is not possible to say prophetically that you will have God-realisation but you certainly can have it in one particular sense. God-realisation is of various kinds. Briefly, three kinds have been indicated by Sri Aurobindo: the psychic, the spiritual, the supramental. The supramental is all-transformative, divinising every part of us, including the very body. The spiritual comprises the universal Self of selves as well as light, peace, power, knowledge and Ananda descending from "overhead". The psychic is the discovery of our true soul which is hidden in the depths of the heart-centre and which is
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perpetually in the presence of the Individual Personal Divine because it is itself put forth by the Divine as a centre of individual, personal yet non-egoistic manifestation in the evolutionary process on earth. As the psychic being is within ourselves it can surely be realised and with its realisation you will live constantly in the presence of divinity, an object of worship, a source of bliss, a shaft of illumined feeling guiding you at all times in all circumstances.
The way to this realisation is, according to me, twofold: "Equanimity, immune to hurt and mishap, which tends to carry one towards a reflection within us of the vast silent Self which is ever free - and the persistent undisturbed remembrance of the Personal Divine (who, for me, is Sri Aurobindo and the Mother) and the sincere offering of all our movements and all happenings to this'God-figure, a gesture which will eventually bring you a deep delightful dynamism full of the concrete experience of God within and without."
(7.6.1991)
I am jotting down for you - as you want - the names of a few works of fiction just as they come to my mind. The first is the one I looked for in my cupboard after telling you about Agatha Christie's pen-name before she invented Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple as arch-detectives and became a celebrity. For sheer literary creativeness and penetrating psychological finesse, I believe the future will remember her for that early book, Absent in the Spring (a phrase from a line in Shakespeare's sonnets) published under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. The book is a Dell paperback. I find that on the title-page I have written on 8 August 1967: "I think it is the deepest and subtlest book Agatha Christie has written. Definitely worth reading - it has the making of a great book or rather it is a great book caught in a miniature glimpse, as it were."
My opinion on somewhat similar lines is about the work of that most popular writer, Edgar Wallace. Unlike Christie's
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"whodunits", none of his potboilers will survive, but future critics may chance upon one novel of his unlike anything else he wrote. It is called Masters of Souls, an original and powerful work. As I don't have a copy I can't tell you the publisher's name.
Galsworthy is a writer of a higher calibre on the whole and his Forsythe Saga has become world-famous. Surely it is worth reading, especially the very first in the series: A Man of Property. But, according to me, the two best things he has done are the novel Fraternity and the drama Strife. The former creates a character, an old man, who might have walked out of the Upanishads in a modern dress and suggested the play of the Atman, the infinite Self of selves, in disguise among a present-day set of circumstances. Strife has two levels of interaction - one is the outer on which employer is pitted against employees with an obstinate will, the other is the inner where the employer's heart is at work in a secret league with the poor employees' wives and children who must suffer because of the conflict. They receive anonymous food-packets all during their trying days.
Two novels I remember having enjoyed in the far past for their sensitive perceptions are The City of Beautiful Nonsense by E. Temple Thurston, and Richard Aldington's All Men are Enemies. Aldington is known most for his war-books, but this is a most charmingly yet most unostentatiously written document of the inmost heart of young love. It is indeed an exquisite piece of insight. Another book of rare insight matched with style is A Well Full of Leaves by Elizabeth Myers and so too is Gone to Earth by Mary Webb (both in the Penguin Paperbacks).
A couple on a still finer and deeper level are The Fountain by Charles Morgan and A Many-splendoured Thing by Han Suyin (the latter in the Penguin Series). Both are indubitable masterpieces by their psychological penetration and literary art.
If you care for a high-class detective thriller, a book well written with a well organised plot, I offer The Hound of the
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Baskervilles by Conan Doyle. His next best story-telling in matter of grip and surprise is the second part of his later book, The Valley of Fear. The title of The Hound... reminds me of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Ubervilles. Hardy is a great short-story writer too and in the same genre I would recommend Somerset Maugham's collection under the title, The Casuarina Tree. Here I would put in a word for Daphne du Maurier's collection. Kiss me Again, Stranger. The story which gives the book its title didn't appeal to me, but among the rest there are four or five which are perfect. Conan Doyle's short tales in The Adventures of Brigadier Gerard are extremely enjoyable and the Gallic touch in them adds to the relish.
Turning directly to France I I must speak up for one of the mightiest no less than finest creations in world literature, Les Miserables of Victor Hugo. A contemporary of Hugo's, equally famous as he, was Balzac who is the most prolific creator of living characters after Shakespeare. So intense is the life-force in his characters that someone has said that even his scullions have genius. To my mind his masterpiece is not the popular Old Goriot or Eugenie Grandet but Cousin Betty, an extremely subtle study in jealousy. Here, in passing, I must not forget Anatole France's The Gods are Athirst.
Among recent English fiction on a grand scale I am enthusiastic about Anthony Adverse. I forget the author's name. It is a work of prodigious talent verging on genius, a more vivid and deeper novel than the spectacularly popular Gone with the Wind. As with the latter, a film has been made of it, but in black-and-white and with many cuts in the story. Anthony Adverse amply deserves a full-length technicolour production. Talking of films I must never forget Billy Budd based on Melville's tale. The chief character in the film is the truest representation I have witnessed of a youth ruled by what we Aurobindonians have come to call the Psychic Being. Innocence, sincerity, purest love and natural bravery have hardly ever been acted out as in that short film. The plot is tragic but the tears will not be only for the tragedy but also for the piercing expression of the true soul in one at every step. I
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must get hold of the written original of Melville and see whether the psychic is disclosed in action there too. An emergence of the psychic, though in a conventional mode, is part also of Wassermann's huge many-layered picture of the human condition in his novel The World's Illusion. So much for fiction for now.
(1990)
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