On Poetry
THEME/S
"SWAN OF THE SUPREME AND SPACELESS ETHER...
AN APPROACH THROUGH SPIRITUAL PHILOSOPHY TO A POETIC VISION
Have we here a contradiction in terms or a suprarational truth? What point is made by the words "spaceless ether"? Nineteenth-century physics accustomed us to the ether as a medium permeating space and transmitting electromagnetic waves. In the twentieth century, the Michelson-Morley experiment and Einstein's relativity theory discredited the ether as a spacefilling medium and left us with empty space. But this space, according to Einstein, is capable of structure and in that sense cannot be an insubstantial void and may be called "ether". The poetic imagination down the ages has also identified ether and space and given the latter name to the clear sky, the upper regions beyond the clouds, spatial extension in its essential purity. In short, ether and space seem inseparable, whether we function as poets or physicists. Can we separate them simply by terming the ether "supreme"? Again, how is a "Swan" with its three-dimensional shape to be fitted into something that is "spaceless" or unextended ? Can the non-extension accommodate it merely by being designated supreme ether"? Poetry may have—as Coleridge phrases it—"a happy valiancy", but is not this whole poetic expression of Sri Aurobindo's an impossible violence?
we have a language that is not only profound but also life-packed, as language should be when it attempts the revelation of spiritual reality. It can be simple but with a direct stroke and not with an easy-going fluency, or it can be rich but with a density of semi-occult semi-physical vision and not with a loose decorativeness of intellectual or emotional stuff" coupled with pleasing images. The spiritual style simple is in "outbreak of the Godhead in man". Just one word is enough to bring a beautiful energy from within, going straight to its goal without. It is also in "Beatitude's kiss". Here too one word gathers up all the piercing intimacy of Beatitude: a word like "touch" or even "clasp" would not give that intimacy. And, further, "kiss" is very appropriate because sobbing has been mentioned before it: the mouth is involved in both sobbing and kissing: life which is a sob of Nature becomes a technically, in "free
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quantitative verse with a predominant dactylic movement" and, inspirationally, in "Overhead poetry". We shall leave the technical aspect aside. The poetry is of a type in which both the clear and the mysterious come on the breath of an incantation from a masterful height of realised spiritual consciousness. When the clear is achieved, then, unlike as in "the heritage of Symbolism," the work of the post-Mallarmé poets like Valéry, Rilke and the later Yeats, the shades and shimmers of the Beyond are not caught into an intellectual chiaraoscuro but what looks such is rather the art-pattern of some lucid-languaged revelatory power other than the sharp-phrased interpretative intellect. A philosophical atmosphere is there, yet shot with a luminosity and wideness of significance exceeding thought. In Ascent
Sri Aurobindo begins with asking the "Spirit immortal" to soar
Away from the turning Wheel, breaking the magical Circle,
out of "the grey and the litde", "the cry and the struggle", the known universe of ignorance and continual rebirth, as well as out of all supra-terrestrial domains where the soul may sojourn. The command is to press upward into "the Silence", "the Alone and the Absolute"—and the adjuration runs:
Vast and immobile, formless and marvellous,
Higher than Heaven, wider than the universe,
In a pure glory of being, In a bright stillness of self-seeing,
Communing with a boundlessness voiceless and intimate,
Make thy knowledge too high for thought, thy joy too deep for emotion;
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At rest in the unchanging Light, mute with the wordless self-vision,
Spirit, pass out of thyself: Soul, escape from the clutch of Nature.
But Sri Aurobindo does not stop here. He next calls on the "Spirit immortal" to outgrow even the Alone and the Absolute. He summons it:
Out from the Silence, out from the Silence,
Carrying with thee the ineffable Substance,
Carrying with thee the splendour and wideness,
Ascend, O Spirit immortal,
Assigning to Time its endless meaning,
Blissful enter into the clasp of the Timeless.
Awake in the living Eternal, taken to the bosom of love of the Infinite...
Thy heart close to the heart of the Godhead for ever.
Thus there is a Supreme that embraces both time and time-lessness, and in order to reach this Reality where the divine secret of all temporal vicissitudes lies hidden—the secret of their fulfilment rather than their annulment—the human aspirant is told not only—
Soul, exceed life's boundaries; Spirit, surpass the universe— but also:
Outclimbing the summits of Nature,
Transcending and uplifting the soul of the finite,
Rise with the world in thy bosom,
O Word gathered into the heart of the Ineffable.
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Nature is not abandoned: all her parts are retained in their essence within what Sri Aurobindo's spiritual metaphysics terms "the psychic being", the true inner individual, the deep dweller in man's "bosom", who has descended from the Transcendent, the Supreme, as a portion of that Eternity's and Infinity's Supernaure, "the heart of the Ineffable", into the cosmic phenomenon and evolves there to consummate all the yearnings of the cosmos—the mind's search for total knowledge of subjective and objective events, the life-force's quest for endless happiness and irresistible power and unlimited conquest in Nature's realm, the physical form's seeking for stability and health and perpetual organic persistence within an ever-growing harmonious society. The true psyche represents the whole drive of earthly evolution. When it rises to the Supreme, there goes with it the entire universe's agelong ache for fulfilment in terms of mentality, vitality, corporeality, modes of an all-round spatio-temporal existence. Establishing a relationship of love between itself and the Supreme Godhead, it lays the basis for a return upon the Nature left behind, with the riches of a plenary Supernature, a divine mentality, a divine vitality, a divine corporeality. Alluding to that basis, Sri Aurobindo gives the injunction:
One with the Transcendent, calm, universal,
Single and free, yet innumerably living,
All in thyself and thyself in all dwelling,
Act in the world with thy being beyond it.
Here we have an anticipation of the grand finale of the poem, where the Soul-Word of manifestation that has gone back to its source in the Ineffable to recover the all-transforming truth is told:
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One with the Eternal, live in his infinity,
Drowned in the Absolute, found in the Godhead,
Swan of the Supreme and spaceless ether wandering winged through the universe,
Spirit immortal.
We may note that before we come to this vivid conclusion the poem's spiritually philosophical atmosphere combines already with its clarity a mystery projected in either challenging concepts—like "Single and free, yet innumerably living"—or adventurous images—like "O Word gathered into the heart of the Ineffable". At the very close the roles are reversed. We have mystery confronting us and breaking across the philosophical atmosphere with a sheer epiphany, as it were, of the Invisible made visible in its own direct right. But the challenging concepts and adventurous images of the preceding poetry are not effaced: they play their subsidiary roles and waft to us, like background music, the atmosphere of spiritual philosophy. And the burst of pure sight is mediated, so to speak, by the lines:
Drowned in the Absolute, found in the Godhead...
Here the Single and the Multiple seem reflected in the two sections of either line. But surely we cannot just equate the Single with the Transcendent and the Multiple with the cosmic? No doubt, we may say that the ultimate Plenitude is at once the Eternal that is timeless and spaceless and the Infinite that is all time and space—at once the Absolute that is an undifferentiated whole and the Godhead that is a whole where every part is fulfilled in its individuality. But in the Godhead a part finds its fulfilment without really being separated from any other,
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without being subjected to separation even in appearance as in this world of ours. Similarly, in the Eternal's infinity space and time are not agents of division as in our cosmos: they constitute an archetypal cosmicity. That is to say, the two lines we are considering do not yet figure the spatio-temporal phenomenal universe we know. We are still in the Beyond, but the Beyond as foundational to the Here. It is only in the Swan-line that we get a precise indication of this world of ours: "wandering winged through the universe." But that indication is not the entirety of the line: it is what follows by poetic logic and spiritual emergence from the first half of it. The first half embodies in a startling symbol the thought struck out in the concept of the archetypal cosmicity in the latter sections of the two preceding lines. With such a vision of its significance we are in a position to come to grips with the details of its apparently impossible violence.
For, what exactly do we mean by an archetypal cosmicity? Primarily, there are in it the perfect divine originals, models, counterparts, supporting truths of our world of matter, life, mind, soul. Nor are these truths mere static marvels locked up high above, allowing no more than transient reflections of themselves in the flux of phenomena, reflections that are fragmentary and inaccurate. What is high above is being slowly worked out here below: the phenomenal flux is evolutionary and through the aeons it evolves the archetypes. And the evolution takes place because on the one hand the archetypes press down from their lofty position where they are for ever manifest and on the other hand push up from their own involution in our world where they lie concealed. If they lacked this double presence and action, there would be a cleavage and shortcoming in existence: the Divine would not be everywhere in one shape or another and everything would not have a divine aim.
Secondly, the archetypes are what Sri Aurobindo calls Real-Ideas,
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the creative movements not of Mind but of Supermind, the Truth-Consciousness. In our mental consciousness, "we regard thought as a thing separate from existence, abstract, unsubstantial, different from reality, something which appears one knows not whence and detaches itself from objective reality in order to observe, understand and judge it; for so it seems and therefore is to our all-dividing, all-analysing mentality. The first business of Mind is to render discrete, to make fissures much more than to discern, and so it has made this paralysing fissure between thought and reality. But in Supermind all being is consciousness, all consciousness is of being, and the idea, a pregnant vibration of consciousness, is equally a vibration of being pregnant of itself; it is an initial coming out, in creative self-knowledge, of that which lay concentrated in uncreative self-awareness. It comes out as the Idea that is a reality, and it is that reality of the Idea which evolves itself, always by its own power and consciousness of itself...."1
Thirdly, the whole Supermind is within each Real-Idea, for all the Real-Ideas are the whole Supermind determining itself in various modes. Each Real-Idea is thus packed with all the infinite potentialities or possibilities of the Supermind yet having one particular potentiality or possibility brought forward for realised play. "Therefore all is in each as well as each in all. Therefore every seed of things implies in itself all the infinity of various possibilities, but is kept to one law of process and result by the Will, that is to say, by the Knowledge-Force of the Conscious-Being who is manifesting himself...."2
Fourthly, one Real-Idea does not clash with other Real-Ideas, for there is a single vast Consciousness which contains and relates all Real-Ideas in itself as its own movements.
1 The Life Divine (Sri Aurobindo Library, New York, 1949), P. 121.
2 lbid., p. 120.
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"Therefore, always, in all mutations and combinations, a self-existent and inalienable harmony."1
In the light of this fourfold character of the archetypal cos-micity we may probe further the question of space and time. All cosmicity argues relation of event to event, object to object: in other words; time and space. But, when all is in each and each in all and everything is held within one Consciousness variously disposed, time and space are only that Consciousness viewing itself in extension; and in this extension our past, present and future would be regarded in one view, all points and regions would be contained in a single survey. There would be an eternal present infinitely stretched out, an infinite expanse eternally indivisible—and both would be a fact of Spiritual Being. Again, inasmuch as the Consciousness of Supermind is a cosmic vision which is all-comprehensive, all-pervading, all-inhabiting and upholds by its immutable unity the variation of its self-deployment it exceeds the successions of time and the divisions of space: it is in that respect timeless and spaceless. Yet this is not a pure unitarian Consciousness, in which Spiritual Being does not cast itself out into any kind of self-extension and, if it contains cosmos at all, contains it in potentiality, not in actuality—in an implicit rather than an explicit form. The sheer timelessness and spacelessness of such a Consciousness are different from the Supermind's transcendence of time's successions and space's divisions. The latter is what we may call unsucces-sive time and undivided space. The former's high concentration of unity in unextended Being is translated here into extended Being in which there is an equality of oneness: Supermind pervades its extension as One, inhabits as One the multiplicities of its cosmos, it is everywhere at once and single and equal. Space-time here reflects and represents the spaceless and timeless. By the very nature of Supermind's intimate relation with
1 Ibid., p. 122
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the absolute Unity where all lies latent it is just such a paradox as we encounter in that Swan-line of Sri Aurobindo's. And just by this paradoxicality Supermind stands as the parent of our space-time universe and secretly governs it.
2
We now begin to see the appropriateness of the several components of Sri Aurobindo's phrase. Taking space and ether to be inseparable we asked whether we could separate them and render the latter "spaceless" with the help of the additional adjective "supreme". The answer is Yes. Unless the space or ether concerned is of the kind we have considered, unless it is supramental and therefore "supreme", it cannot reflect and represent spacelessness to make the equable extension of the One, in which multiplicity is not divided. The very noun "ether" occurs in the ancient spiritual tradition of India in companionship with the adjective "supreme" to denote such an extension. In the Rigveda, I, 164, 39, Rishi Dirghatama speaks of the Vedic hymns as "existing in a supreme ether, imperishable and immutable, in which all the gods are seated". The Rigveda, V, 15, 2, further says: "By the Truth they hold the Truth that holds all, in the power of the Sacrifice, in the supreme ether." The reference to the sitting of all the gods joins up with our question whether a three-dimensional shape like the "Swan" could be accommodated in spacelessness by the latter being designated "supreme ether". The answer, again, is Yes, for the same reason: we can understand the bird's three-dimensionality as being precisely of that equable extension which is space at once stretched-out and undivided. The Katha Upa-nishad, V, 2, having this space-ether in mind, makes room there for even our Swan by name: "The Swan that settles in the purity...born of the Truth—itself the Truth, the Vast." The
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ever-free Spiritual Being, the unsullied Soul, the inmost Perfection which is the source and the goal of all phenomenal existence is, of course, what Sri Aurobindo, following ancient Indian symbolism, calls "Swan"—and it is a most appropriate description not only because of the beauty and purity it conjures up but also because the white wonder is an organism, a living unity in which the numerous parts are no aggregate but diversifications of the unity: a single life-power pervasive of all its parts by multiplying itself and becoming them is here. In organic unity as distinguished from mechanical collectivity we have a suggestive approximation to the oneness-in-manyness of the Divine—and in the dazzling loveliness of the Swan-image we have this Divine's perfection approximately suggested.
On the collocation "spaceless ether", which is the core of the Aurobindonian phrase's paradoxicality, we can obtain a direct verbal gloss by culling some passages from Sri Aurobindo's own books.
Harking back to Upanishadic utterances he writes: " 'Brahman is in all things, all things are in Brahman, all things are Brahman', is the triple formula of the comprehensive Supermind, a single truth of self-manifestation in three aspects which it holds together and inseparably in its self-view as the fundamental knowledge from which it proceeds to the play of the cosmos."1 The triple formula is stated in our poem itself, with the third limb put first:
Single and free, yet innumerably living, All in thyself and thyself in all dwelling...
And the same formula is dealt with at some length when Sri Aurobindo explains: "For integral self-possession we must be not only one with the Self, with God, but with all existences. We must take back in the right relation and in the poise of an
1 Ibid., pp. 129-30
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eternal Truth the world of our manifested existence peopled by our fellow-beings from which we had drawn back because we were bound to them in a wrong relation and in the poise of a falsehood created in Time by the principle of divided consciousness with all its oppositions, discords and dualities... In other words, besides the consciousness of the transcendent Self... we have to accept and become the cosmic consciousness... "This realisation of all things as God or Brahman has, as we have seen, three aspects.... First, there is the Self in whom all beings exist. The Spirit, the Divine has manifested itself as infinite self-extended being, self-existent, pure, not subject to Time and Space, but supporting Time and Space as figures of its consciousness. It is more than all things and contains them all within that self-extended being and consciousness, not bound by anything it creates, holds or becomes, but free and infinite and all-blissful. It holds them, in the old image, as the infinite ether contains in itself all objects. This image of the ethereal (Akasha) Brahman may indeed be of great practical help to the sadhak who finds a difficulty in meditating on what seems to him at first an abstract and unseizable idea. In the image of the ether, not physical but an encompassing ether of vast being, consciousness and bliss, he may seem to see with the mind and to feel in his mental being this supreme existence and to identify it in oneness with the self within him. By such meditation the mind may be brought to a favourable state of predisposition in which, by the rending or withdrawing of the veil, the supramental vision may flood the mentality and change entirely all our seeing. And upon that change of seeing, as it becomes more and more potent and insistent and occupies all our consciousness, there will supervene a change of becoming so that what we see we become. We shall be in our self-consciousness not so much cosmic as ultra-cosmic, infinite. Mind
1 On Yoga, I: The Synthesis of Yoga, pp. 421-22
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and life and body will then be only movements in that infinity which we have become, and we shall see that what exists is not world at all but simply this infinity of spirit in which move the mighty cosmic harmonies of its own images of self-conscious becoming."1
Sri Aurobindo carries the ether-metaphor on to the second aspect also of the triple Vedantic formula. Asking whether the existences that make up the cosmic harmonies are only images, empty of any informing reality, within the all-containing Self, he answers: "Not so____ As the ether both contains and is
as it were contained in the jar, so this Self both contains and inhabits all existences, not in a physical but in a spiritual sense, and is their reality. This indwelling state of the Self we have to realise; we have to see and ourselves to become in our consciousness the Self in all existences."2
To complete his exposition, Sri Aurobindo continues: "This Self that we are has finally to become to our self-consciousness entirely one with all existences in spite of its exceeding them. We have to see it not only as that which contains and inhabits all but that which is all, not only as indwelling spirit but also as the name and form, the movement and the master of the movement, the mind and life and body.... The individual mind, life and body which we recoiled from as not our true being, we shall recover as a true becoming of the Self, but no longer in a purely individual narrowness — We shall come to feel all the consciousness of the physical world as one with our physical consciousness, feel all the energies of the cosmic life around us as our own energies, feel all the heart-beats of the great cosmic impulse and seeking in our heart-beats set to the rhythm of the divine Ananda, feel all the action of the universal mind flowing into our mentality and our thought-action flowing out upon it as a wave into that wide sea. This unity embracing
1 Ibid., pp. 423-24 2 Ibid., pp. 424-25.
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all mind, life and matter in the light of a supramental Truth and the pulse of a spiritual Bliss will be to us our internal fulfilment of the Divine in a complete cosmic consciousness."1
Our approach through spiritual philosophy to Sri Aurobindo's poetic vision is now complete. As "Overhead poetry" is at work here, the canons of the ordinary poetic imagination, no less than those of theoretical physics, are surpassed. There is really no contradiction in terms.
3
We may end by a few comments on the sheer poetry of our line. The dominant sound-effect is of s and w, with an undercurrent of n. A sweep of sibilance asserts some poise of high-breathing power that is sovereign. The w-alliteration has an active widening influence, as if setting this power free in open expanses. And we may mark how the very initial word "Swan" includes the w-influence potentially, as it were, and how the very last word "universe" echoes the initial note of sibilance. There is a significant rounded harmony. And both these words carry the n-ring which becomes emphatic in "wandering winged". The present participle "wandering" is irreplaceable by anything synonymous, just as another form of the same vocable is the inevitable touch in Milton's
Those thoughts that wander through Eternity.
Not only a plunging puissance but also a sense of freedom in all directions is conveyed by this vocable. Further, its opening syllable—"wan"—chimes most suggestively with the same sound in "Swan", so that the act of wandering proceeds, so to speak, from the very nature of the bird. Neither "travelling"
1 Ibid., pp. 425-26.
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nor "voyaging" nor "journeying" would have this aptness. They would fail also to alliterate with "winged". The alliteration is of capital importance to clinch the connection between the ideas behind the two words. Besides, the n-résonance with its haunting thrill would fail to go home so definitively from those substitutes. Again, "winged" cannot give way to another word in order to suit such synonyms. For it is absolutely essential if the poet is to indicate the loosening forth of the Swan's transcendent power into a cosmos-covering mastery.
All in all, a perfect verbalising and rhythming out of the meaning in a varied manner is present, and the great length of the line as compared with the rest of the poem drives deep into us the ultimate magnitude of the spiritual achievement the whole piece pictures.
If any poetic phrase in world-literature comes up to the blend of literary surprise and satisfaction we have here, it is the fourth line of the first stanza in Mallarmé's sonnet Le Cygne (The Swan) :
Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui
Va-t-il nous déchirer avec un coup d'aile ivre
Ce lac dur oublié que hante sous le givre
Le transparent glacier des vols qui n'ont pas fui!
We may English the stanza:
Virginal, vivid, beautiful Today—
Will it tear with a stroke of drunken wing this lone
Hard lake where haunts mid hoar-frost's overlay
The transparent glacier of flights unflown?
Sri Aurobindo himself has picked out the fourth line for special praise and called it "magnificent", and he has commented:
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"This idea of the denied flights (imprisoned powers) of the soul that have frozen into a glacier seems to me as powerful as it is violent."1 On being told of the usual interpretation of the poem in terms of Mallarmé's poetic situation, Sri Aurobindo has said: "The swan is to my understanding not merely the poet who has not sung in the higher spaces of the consciousness, which is already a fine idea, but the soul that has not risen there and found its higher expression, the poet, if Mallarmé thought of that specially, being only a signal instance of this spiritual frustration. There can be no more powerful, moving and formidable expression of this spiritual frustration, this chilled and sterile greatness, than the image of the frozen lake and the imprisoned swan as developed by Mallarmé."2
In view of this gloss, Mallarmé's phrase makes a very pertinent juxtaposition with Sri Aurobindo's. Poetically it matches it: philosophically it polarises it with an equally expressive audacity. For, the Aurobindonian bird comes forth as a symbol antithetical to the Mallarméan. It is the Soul completely triumphant instead of being splendidly defeated. In the world-wandering yet world-exceeding Swan we get the all-consummating counterpart to the French poet's ice-bound Cygne flights unflown.
1 Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo by Nirodbaran, Second Series ( Pondicherry, 1959), P. 194.
2 Ibid., p.195.
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