Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 3)

36

Did I misquote Hopkins when I recalled his line on Oxford as

Towery city and branchy between towers?

You have written "leafy between towers". I thought of "leafy" but somehow could not feel it to be as apt, visually no less than rhythmically, as "branchy". The largeness, the grandeur evoked by "towery" fails to get support enough from the former. Something soft and sweet and huddled together comes in, where the requirement is of something strong that springs out at the same time that it makes a crowd. I wish you or I could check the phrase.

Your picture of the new skyline of Oxford horrifies me. Not that I am wedded to the past in all its forms, but when our Mother sees the Lord as going always ahead she does not reject everything of the past. On the contrary, all that is fine in times gone is quintessenced by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and carried over into a new revelation. I might aver poetically that their work answers to that superb phrase of St. Augustine about God: "O Pulchritudo antiqua et semper nova!" - "O Beauty of ancient days yet ever new!"

(21.8.1982)

I have looked up Hopkins. The line we were concerned with occurs in the poem, "Duns Scotus's Oxford" and the first two lines don't bring in boughs, as you thought, but branches as I did. They run in typical Hopkinsian:

Towery city and branchy between towers;

Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmed, lark-charmed,

rook-racked, river-rounded...

You are right about the Shakespeare-reference, except that

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it doesn't have the word "branches" but its synonym which is not in the Hopkins-phrase:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold

Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

Perhaps these lines have strongly associated a "branchy" tree with' bareness, a late-autumnal near-leailessness, in your mind, but poetically there is no reason for the association in general. Take Keats in his Hyperion:

As when, upon a tranced summer-night

Those green-robed senators of mighty woods,

Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,

Dream, and so dream all night without a stir,

Save from one gradual solitary gust

Which comes upon the silence, and dies off,

As if the ebbing air had but one wave;

So came these words and went...

Here greenness, summer and branchiness are all figured together.

Your story of chancing upon The Synthesis of Yoga in a public library moves me very much. It has the unmistakable stamp of Sri Aurobindo finding his childf Whoever is born to collaborate with him in working towards a new humanity he reaches out to in one way or another.) I can very well understand how amazed you must have felt on discovering -as some phrase of Sri Aurobindo puts it - the ultimate Face that is our own. When a Voice Supreme comes to us as if out of a depth in ourselves, we may be sure that we have met our destiny.

(31.8.1982)

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My replying on March 8 this year (1984) to your letter of November 18,1983 carries on - with greater gusto than your answering on July 14, 1982 my letter of June 12 in the same year and your subsequent "inordinate delay" - the habit we have established of being "a little laggard" in correspondence.

I have read with great interest the xeroxed matter you have enclosed. Isaac Asimov has always gripped me. His account of how the year 0 got neglected in the current dating system is quite credible - in fact, it is the only one that offers an explanation of the widely accepted silliness of Dionysus Exiguous - Dionysus the Shorty - in the Dark Ages. The zero of Hindu mathematics had not come as yet to the West. Hence the Shorty's anomaly of 1 A.D. being preceded by 1 B.C. But why was the natural mistake accepted later on? The torch of the Hindu mathematical enlightenment with its inclusion of the zero, carried by the Arabs, should have made modern chronologists sit up and cry, "O what an O-versight!"

Yes, the attraction Asimov has for "coincidences" may prove for him an opening into the dimension of ultra-scientific reality, for they seem to be relatives to what Jung has dubbed a-causal synchronicity - two similar events occurring at the same time without any related antecedents. For example, I may mention so-and-so and at once the phone rings, with so-and-so on the line. Or I may be discussing a problem and, on opening a book, see the key-word of it leap to the eye.

I wonder whether in any valid sense your getting your copy of The Life Divine on November 25, 1950, one of my birthdays, is another of Asimovian coincidences. Of course, if I have been lucky enough to be your '"favourite" among those disciples of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother whom you "knew about", we have a psycho-spiritual basis already for it. But possibly a numerological association between the event and me may be traced, 25+11+1950=1986 which can be dealt with in two ways. 1+9=10=1 and, with 8 added, yields 9 which, along with 6, makes 15. The other way is just to sum up the

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digits of 1986 and reach 24 which reduces to 6. Now the number given me by the Mother among those present in the Store-room for a special purpose was 15 which also equals 6. (6, by the way, signifies, according to the Mother, "New Creation", something I must be particularly in need of!)

Apart from all this, The Life Divine happens to be my favourite among the books of Sri Aurobindo, side by side with Savitri which is a poetic analogue to it in sheer spiritual knowledge. I have even declared that on finishing The Life Divine one can't help thanking that the author of this book must be the author of the universe! And it is my conviction that the first chapter of The Life Divine, the shortest in the book, is the finest and profoundest and most comprehensive piece of condensed philosophical writing in the world.

The Rossetti literature you have sent me has made very good reading. The translation of Villon's Ballad of Dead Ladies has been one of my favourites too. The original French of that haunting line you have quoted is -

Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan? -

Where are the snows of yesteryear?

Knowing me to be a Parsi, you have inquired about the Zoroastrian religion. The original sense of it is still a matter of controversy. The ancient Greeks who were nearest to it among foreigners took it as a dualism, the God of Light and Goodness, Ormuzd, pitted against Ahriman, the Devil of Darkness and Evil. Actually the Avestan Anramanyu, the Bad Spirit, is set over against Spentamanyu, the Good Spirit, but it seems as if Ahura Mazda, the Avestan for Ormuzd, who is separately mentioned in the earliest scripture, the Gathas or Songs of Zarathustra, is also shown in them to be identical with Spentamanyu. But, of course, the exhortation is always to accept one single deity, Ahura Mazda; in that sense we have a monotheism like the original Judaic monotheism which, while taking Yahweh as one of the many tribal gods of

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the Near East insists on the worship of none save him. The Zoroastrians have been devoted solely to Ahura Mazda, but ontologically Ahura Mazda and Anramanyu appear to be coeval, though the former has an edge on the latter in that at the end of the world he will be victorious over the other and imprison him in an everlasting hell.

As to the origin of the duality, there arose the "heresy" of Zarvanism. Zarvan-akarna is the Avestan for "Endless Time". This mysterious entity is taken to be the progenitor of the ever-opposed twins, Ahura Mazda and Anramanyu (or Ahriman). The modern understanding, after the scholar Martin Haug, among the Zoroastrians is that Ahura Mazda, the one and only deity, an aspect of whom may be considered "Endless Time", gave birth to the Good Spirit and the Bad Spirit. But such a view creates the problem of God being the cause of both Good and Evil, as appears also to have been Yahweh in the time of Isaiah. How and why the Bad Spirit, the Devil, was engendered has not been made clear. In the Christian world-view the being who is Satan was originally a divine being, an archangel, who misused the "freewill" granted to all the creations of God and became the Prince of Darkness from having earlier been Lucifer, Son of the Morning. In Zoroastrianism, as in Christianity, human beings are endowed with freewill and always called upon to choose the good and reject the bad. By extension the superhumans may or must be visioned as enjoying freedom of will. Then Ahriman becomes a fallen angel. But his fallenness from angelhood is nowhere made explicit in Zoroastrian metaphysics.

(8.3.1984)

What a pleasure it will be if you can drop in at my new place as you did at my old one. I very clearly remember you appearing out of the blue. I think the last four words are most appropriate because in spite of your small sweet charming solidity you had something ethereal about you, and this

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something has kept wafting to me throughout the years across all your correspondence. The ancient physicists spoke of five elements - earth, water, air, fire and ether. Most people have two or three of the first four, very few have even a touch of the fifth. In my view you have ail the first four - a rare enough thing - but they are all wrapped in the transfiguring last, which makes for quite a rarity and a great delight.

However, I have been expecting something more from you than the ethereal wrapping the intensely imaginative, the light-heartedly floating, the many-motioned and the common-sensically balanced. This something more is the permeation of the four elements by the fifth. It is when one element or another - out of fire, air, water and earth - is permeated by ether that suddenly a person turns towards the spiritual life with a direct cry. The cry puts the person in contact with what Bergson's teacher called the "Within-Beyond" but since only one element has been etherealised there is either a shooting off into that intimate unknown to the neglect of this element's companions or a kind of see-saw and zigzag because of pulls in several directions. When the permeation follows what I have termed the wrapping of the fiery, the airy, the watery, the earthy by the ethereal the natural result would be

The golden smile of the one Self everywhere

and a happy harmonious holiness would run through the blood and light up the flesh - with no spectacular effect but with a constant simple suggestion of being blessed and able to bless.

I think a beginning of fruitful total permeation is taking place in your life. Your letter from Singapore leaves me in no doubt. And I am glad that the urge in you not only to read, not merely to know with the mind but to be what Sri Aurobindo revealed as Reality by his life no less than his writing, is a quiet spontaneity rather than a fretful uncontrollable force. 1 can see you growing like your own English garden - a greenery speckled yellow with daffodils, primroses

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and celandine, the fruit trees ready to be covered with blossom. Though your return to Singapore prevented you from viewing the fullness of the English spring, you will not miss what will come to flower and fruit in your new inner life, for this garden will be your own true self discovering naturally its own supernature. Whatever help I am capable of giving will surely be given most happily.

(10.5.1984)

It is interesting that when you remember me you always see me smiling. I have used the word "remember" as if you had met me and were carrying a memory of me. It is certain that your inner being has established a concrete contact with me -no wonder it has the impression of a smile playing perpetually on my mouth, for indeed there is a quiet happiness in me all the time - yes, all the time precisely because it comes from something that does not begin with one life or finish with it but runs like a golden thread on which life after life is hung - some lives bright, others dark and most of them grey. This thread is not a straight line - it is a curve that is lit to a smile, and one end of it is suspended from a point in eternity whose name is Sri Aurobindo and the other from a similar point namable as the Mother. Their light and their bliss flow through it, however faintly. By their grace alone I have been able to discover this inner thread. I cannot say that every moment of mine is identified with it. A few moments are, but at least a shining shadow of it is caught by many.

I am sure you also feel within yourself the smile of the Immortal in the mortal, which the seers call the Soul. All of us who have been touched by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have wakened to it but the whole travail of Yoga lies in keeping alive the sense of that touch of theirs by which the inner is brought close to" the outer.

The soul's smile is also the best weapon against difficulties which the hostile forces raise in our path. To smile at their doings instead of raging at them or feeling depressed is to

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make them realise how little importance we give them. Failing in their attempt to upset us, they themselves are disappointed and get exhausted. The smile is, in addition, a secret message from us to what stands behind the apparent hostile forces. For behind them and under the mask of the Devil is the Divine, paradoxically helping us through the trials and troubles which bring up our weaknesses and challenge us to be strong. Of course this does not mean that we should look for difficulties. But when they come we must feel Sri Aurobindo manipulating what the hostile forces believe to be their own working. The Lord takes advantage of every crisis to create for us some short-cut towards our own fulfilment. And when we have the vision of the Supreme hidden within His seeming opposite we at once lose the sense of infirmity and hopelessness at being hard hit. Nothing in Yoga happens without the Mother's mysterious hand somewhere in it. And our smile speaks of our recognition of it and immediately draws the Grace towards us across the darkness. The moment we feel its presence at the back of everything, our hearts begin to sing in answer to trumpets of victory sounding from afar. The assurance comes to us that there is no abyss so deep that the Grace cannot lift us out of it sky-high.

So, dear friend, keep a smile playing on your lips in all circumstances. It will also help you, among other things, not to be upset if you don't hear from me for long. I have a lot of work - reading, writing, editing - and I may not be able to answer your sweet letters very frequently. But please have the smiling certainty that I have not forgotten you.

(7.10.1987)

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