Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 3)

27

Before I launch on the main issues raised in your letter, I should like to- say a word on what you have advised about guarding "against interference with the inspirational substance" of people's writings. 1 hold that we cannot have a proper sense of inspiration unless we are ready again and again to accept interference either by others or by oneself with what seems to be inspired. The common criterion of inspiration is: "It all came just like that in a rush!" There are numerous levels of being from which things can rush forth in one shape or another and there are also numerous connecting passages where various kinds of intrusions and interventions in what is rushing out can happen. It is only when the free flow is from a deep or high centre of being that we get what can be legitimately considered as inspired. The true spontaneity which should never be tampered with comes from there. But, just because something may arrive with a rush, it does not follow that whatever so arrives is truly spontaneous. Nor, I may add, does true spontaneity arrive always in a rush. "Poetic pains" are proverbial. The vagaries of the Muse are also well-known. A poem may be written all at once or it may come through by driblets. But, just because it is not bom fully formed and perfectly panoplied like Pallas Athena from the head of Zeus, we cannot say that the ultimate structure of it has nothing of Athena-shape or Zeus-substance. The process of a poem's birth may be slow, gradual, piecemeal. What we have to see at the end is whether the final product, which has come laboriously and over a period of time, looks as if it were born instantaneously with absolute ease. The real aim is to get by any means the authentic article from the depths or the heights. If a poet takes a long time and spends much sweat to write his piece he can still get the authentic article by taking care that whatever comes through has the touch of an eternal freshness on it. The labour he undergoes is really in connection not with what flows out but with the digging of a clear

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passage through his brain-mind so that the obstructions of the common prose-consciousness may be removed. It is because he has to dig this channel that he writes as if unspontaneously. However, the trouble he takes makes no odds to the nature and quality of "the Helicon-spring that leaps sparkling across the channel. Conversely, no amount of apparent spontaneity, no easy gushing forth as of a perennial stream, are a guarantee that true inspiration is present. The phantasmal subconscient, the frenzied vital, the amorphous emotional, the quick-witted but surfacy mental - all these can mimic inspiration, and woe betide the writer who is satisfied just because a power seemingly other than himself pours through him.

There is also the fact that quite often one is in contact with Castaly but between the point de depart and the point d'arrivee unexpected intrusions and unsuspected interventions take place. A spurious or at least not equally genuine impulsion may mix with the nectar-flow. One may not feel any change in the compulsiveness of the movement, and yet the poem will not be a pure product of Parnassus. There will be, superimposed on what we may call the archetype, a phenomenal form which, while seeming to reflect it, really refracts it in its agitated flux.

A sensitive self-criticism is always needed, unless you happen to be Shakespearean in your rapport with the sources of song, whether Apollonian or Dionysian. Often a very sharp slashing into shape is called for. By and large, one may maintain as a fecund truth the depiction of the creative process in the lines from one of my old poems:

Implacable, unmeltable,

On the sun-daze of the heart

Falls the chill mind like a crescent's edge -

And the smitten splendour is art.

Along with self-criticism, one needs, in order to progress on the artistic path, an alert openness to what honest qualified

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critics may have to say. Then alone, in the majority of cases, one can be a true mouthpiece of the Gods. You are certainly not shut to inspired founts, but I am afraid you have a too facile notion of mantric utterance and are over-touchy to corrective suggestions though your touchiness is not violent and egoistic but sweet and suffering and therefore with a promising turn towards a fairer future. It is because I know of this fine turn that I am bothering to write to you on the subject of inspiration at all this length.

Now to come to the theme proper of your letter. According to you, you feel at home in India because India is one palpitating mass of emotionalism and sendmentalism. India to me is various things, including emotionalism and senti-mentalism, but at its most exquisite and at its truest it is psychic and intuitive on the one hand and dhira on the other, calmly contemplative, seeing life with a steady eye and seeing it from all sides. This does not mean that all thought is abandoned: thought continues, yet not in its own right, it is charged with influences that deepen and heighten it. And if ever thought as such is not prominent and even seems absent, it is not sunk into the emotions and the sentiments but refined and rarefied into truth-feeling or truth-seeing, and the mind's brilliant convolutions are replaced by the state Sri Aurobindo describes of the liberated self:

He who from Time's dull motion escapes and thrills

Rapt thoughtless, wordless into the Eternal's breast,

Unrolls the form and sign of being,

Seated above in the omniscient silence.

Here you have both ecstasy and peace, thought-transcendence and knowledge-attainment. Here the emotional and the sentimental are not annulled but lifted out of their usual rhythm, in which they tend to be uncontrolled, into the spiritual truth of themselves, at once intense enough to fulfil their own distinctive nature and widened enough to be free from being narrowed by that nature, widened enough to

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harmonise and even fuse with other movements of the consciousness at their true pitch. Finally, the intense and the immense of all movements are caught up into a kind of supracosmic ineffable which is yet not a denial of them but a poise where one is their masterful source and not their helplessly drifting captive.

You have spoken of the bhakta and his mad illogical rapture of love for the Divine, amounting almost to mind-lessness. And you have asked: ''Shall we then disregard all the bhajans of India, the uttering of the Sufis of Persia, the rapturous love songs of Mira and countless others and cast them all aside into the wastepaper basket...?" Of course my answer is "No". But it is "No" because these creations are not exactly what you believe they are. Bhakti has two aspects - the psychic (or soul-charged) and the emotional-sentimental. Often the two sides interplay and then all is well. On occasion they fall apart. Then, if the sheer psychic is in action without any "truck" with the emotional-sentimental there is great beauty but a lack of life-power and life-sympathy - and, if the sheer emotional-sentimental is let loose, a colourful degradation takes place, either an excessive weeping and wailing in loneliness or else an all-too-human indulgence in a Radha-Krishna erotic gambit which has cast a blot on the history of Vaishnavism. The wonderful expressions of bhakti to which you refer embody a balance of the two aspects - and the embodiment is done in terms of perfect art. There is nothing of pure madness or illogic or mindlessness in the love-transport finding voice in them. We can feel and even discern a subtle method, a sensitive development, an exquisite rounding-off. There is what I may call a passionate control, a rich restraint: an essence of psychicised mentality suffuses the emotional-sentimental drive, and an instinctive-intuitive perception of the demand of art for "significant form" leads, in however delicate a functioning, to what John Chadwick (our Ashram's "Arjava") has powerfully dubbed "the chaos-ending chisel-smite". Endless effusiveness is the last thing we can find in these bhakti-impelled voices. If the sense of a shapely limit is

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not in operation along with the tender tumult of the soul, then, no matter how sincere the bhakta in his vision of the Beloved, there is bound to be an over-all impression of emotion and sentiment running riot to submerge thought in a negative "expense of spirit" rather than "God's plenty".

Your two "Open Letters" have nothing unreservedly wrong with them except that they prolong inordinately the matter and manner suitable for a short prose-poem. The impression of the first one, which I conveyed to you, was not, as you say, just a verdict: it was also a suggestion. For, I distinctly said that if condensed and concentrated the piece could be an acceptable poetic expression. Here I may add that the thought-element, which now is dispersed and thinned on account of the length of the emotional-sentimental outburst, would automatically surface into a recognisable component within a shortened span. I have to make the same remark in general about your other composition. Parts of it move me -even the final appeal "O Sri Aurobindo, come!", which has no particular art-impact, pierces to my heart's core because of my relationship with Sri Aurobindo and my perception of what he is. But, unless this appeal is woven into an art-structure and unless these other parts which have already a diffuse art-form are close-knit and some of the passages dropped or more crystallised, the piece cannot stand in a periodical like Mother India. Not that Mother India is always chockful of excellent things. It has several "planes" - high brow, middle brow, even low brow; but a certain minimum thought-building has to be there and the thrust of everything has to be towards something fine or cultured in the being, even if not something overtly spiritual at all times. Further, Mother India has a "heart" added to its "head", and I I accept many articles or poems which do not stir me to sheer admiration but which are good attempts by beginners or contain glimmers of greater inspiration to come. I like to encourage people and I am very strict only with those from whom I expect really striking stuff. I count you among these fortunate or unfortunate few - "unfortunate" if the hyper-

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critical attitude is resented. You have talents and gifts beyond the ordinary, but they have not found their full flowering for want of someone to take you in hand right seriously. I wish Sri Aurobindo were there to pass you through the wonderful creative discipline he so considerately yet so consistently imposed on his literary disciples. When he is not there, I try my best to go by his light - in regard both to myself and to my friends. Do you know how finicky he made us by his own high demands, so that Nirod could become depressed if a poem of his was adjudged "Very good" or "Very fine" but missed being labelled as "Exceedingly good" or "Extremely fine"? Do you know that scores of things written by me have either gone into the wastepaper basket or lie still hidden in my files in spite of Sri Aurobindo finding them acceptable? They have suffered this fate because they fell short of the best he considered me capable of.

I may add that Sri Aurobindo too had a large range of standards. He once wrote to me in answer to some questions of mine: "My judgment does differ with different writers and also with different kinds of writing. If I put 'very good' on a poem of Shailen's, it does not mean that it is on a par with Harin's or Arjava's or yours. It means that it is very good Shailen, but not that it is very good Harin or very good Arjava.... I may write 'good' or 'very good' on the work of a novice if I see that it has succeeded in being poetry and not mere verse however correct or well rhymed - but if Harin or Arjava or you were to produce work like that, I would not say 'very good' at all. There are poems of yours which I have slashed and pronounced unsatisfactory, but if certain others were to send me that, I would say, 'Well, you have been remarkably successful this time.' 1 am not giving comparative marks according to a fixed rule. I am using words flexibly according to the occasion and the individual. It would be the same with different kinds of writings. If 1 write 'very good' or 'excellent' on some verses of Dara about his chair, I am not giving it a certificate of equality with some poems of yours similarly appreciated - I am only saying that as humorous

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easy verse in the lightest vein it is very successful, an outstanding piece of work. Applied to your poems it would mean something different altogether." (14.11.1934)

With various people and with various types of composition Sri Aurobindo aimed at bringing out the best possible to those people and for those types. He did not aim at turning everything Aurobindonian - as if he had written it. I have learned this lesson from him too, And that is why Mother India has many levels of writing as well as many modes of expression. If I were doing what you paint me as doing - namely, wanting all poems and articles to be "Amalian" - there would hardly be such a diversity. Merely to want certain turns of speech to be corrected or just to deem certain sorts of writing to be defective or unsuitable for Mother India is not to insist on everybody being "Amalian". This is a non-sequitur whose equally mistaken converse would be that whatever finds room in Mother India is published because it seems as if it has come from Amal's pen!

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The issue you raise about the Western psyche and the Eastern psyche and about their different ways of beautifully saying things appears also rather irrelevant. I am a very Westernised Eastern psyche and I should be the last person to have any prejudices against either the full Western psyche or the Western psyche Easternised. I suppose you are referring to yourself when you speak of the Western psyche, but this does not quite tally with what you say at the beginning of your letter: "...of course I am emotional, sentimental - how else would I feel so at home, so perfectly fitted amongst those others who, very much like myself, are made of a similar stuff? In fact, how else could I have come to live in India?" According to these words, you consider yourself a very Easternised Western psyche, perhaps even a typical Eastern psyche that has accidentally got born in the West.

Please, my dear young friend, don't think that in penning this letter I have given vent to any irritation with you or any dislike of you. I like you very much - indeed I have done so from the very first moment you presented yourself and there

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was an immediate recognition between us of the poetic soul in each. I have written for the sake of clarifying a number of points that have directly or indirectly risen in the course of my reading your letter - points of some moment for the writer as well as the sadhak. If you feel that in certain places I have misseen problems or misunderstood you, you are free to criticise me and set me right.

I am sorry I have delayed for nearly a week before replying to you. I needed time to do justice to the themes I wished to touch. Even when I got some time, there had to be interruptions. But now at last the letter has got written. In view of all that is said in it and in accord with my sending back to you your first piece and in consonance with your own sense of its inseparableness from the second, I am returning the latter. Before doing so, I have read it again. And I have marked the three opening paragraphs: I think they have genuine inspiration and, if continued a little further in the same strain, they can make a fine prose-poem. The rest, despite some telling phrases, is, in my opinion, romanticised fancy emotionally spun out and the true feeling with which you started fails to break through - except for a scatter of authentic vision-stirred heartbeats. This is harsh judgment, but I could deliver it only to a brave girl capable of profiting by it.

(4.10.1974)

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