Talks on Poetry

TALK THIRTY-NINE

We have finished our discussion of pure poetry. We gave the subject the broadest definition possible and made pure poetry depend not on the kind but on the quality. All kinds can be "pure" and the purity is determined by the distance from prose— distance in terms of intensity of vision, intensity of word, intensity of rhythm and not in terms of what is popularly thought of as poetic — namely, a special vocabulary and an unfamiliar theme. Pure poetry thus becomes co-extensive with life itself, but life in its inner nature: as Nirodbaran has put it in a line which is poetry at its purest —

Life that is deep and wonder-vast.

"Inner nature": that is a phrase which we can make our point of departure into a talk on what Sri Aurobindo calls Planes of Poetry. And the talk would not be irrelevant to pure poetry, for poetry can be pure not only with any vocabulary and with any theme but also from any plane. According to Sri Aurobindo, man lives on several planes, and Existence is a manifold chord of powers, each power constituting a plane on which there is a universal play and within this universal Nature a large number of individual natures. People do not always realise that there are other worlds than the physical: they consider all the powers of our being as merely different aspects of bodily activity or else, if distinct from that activity, effective only through centres in the body — the brain, the heart, the solar plexus and the less solar and more lunar or lunatic centres below. The play of different centres in us is felt in a general manner by most people; and a hint, through such a feeling, at Sri Aurobindo's "planes" is very well given in a semi-doggerel a poet once composed in connection with his lady-love:

I put my hand upon my heart

And swore that we should never part.

I wonder what I would have said

If I had put it on my head.

The question, of course, is whether when one puts one's hand

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upon the heart, one is at all conscious of a head to which the hand may be transferred: as commonly expressed, one loses one's head. But we cannot perhaps totally deny the co-presence and interaction of head and heart. Do you remember the lines I once quoted to you from Housman?

If men were drunk for ever

With liquor, love or fights,

Lief would I rise of mornings

And lief lie down at nights.

But men at times are sober

And think by fits and starts,

And while they think, they fasten

Their hands upon their hearts.

Thinking and feeling take place simultaneously in the Housmanian situation. But one may argue that thinking itself takes place in various centres and not always in the head. Did I never tell you what Aristotle took to be the seat of thought? If ever there was a sheer intellectual, an intellectual whose work is abstract and even at times dry-as-dust, it was Aristotle. Quite a contrast to Plato whose mind was not only a light but also a fire, one in which intellect was married to imagination and made the philosopher a poet even if he did not fulfil the poetic element in him through any substantial body of verse proper. Chesterton has wittily hit off the difference between Plato and Aristotle and summed up the qualities of their thinking:

Said Aristotle unto Plato:

"Have another hot potato.

" Said Plato unto Aristotle:

"No, thank you, I prefer the bottle."

I suppose Aristotle had finished talking to Plato and was offering to continue. He must have asked Plato's permission because Plato was his teacher. But one hot potato of sober and earth-heavy intellectualism from the pupil was enough for the teacher who loved a soar, with all the being a lightness in the high heavens drenched with the luminous wine of the sun-god. The bottle sym-

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bolises the holding, by man's mind, of the fire and ether of inspired supra-intellectual vision. We may say the bottle stands for individual expression and the wine in it for the stuff of poetry shaped according to the form of the individual's being. But just as bottles vary in shape as well as volume, so also the wine itself varies. The variety we can describe in several ways. At present we shall describe it in terms of planes.

However, before we come to planes, let us finish with Aristotle. I said that Aristotle was brains incarnate. And yet when he wrote of the functions of the human system he said that the brain had the function merely of regulating the temperature of the body: some sort of balancing of our hot and cold sensations was the work of the grey matter of our cerebrum! Imaginatively, we might state that when things got very white or very black the brain mixed a compensating hue and endeavoured constantly to make everything grey like its own matter! Aristotle never thought that his own thought was working through his brain. When he got very cold-blooded with abstractions the brain added a bit of warmth and saved him from freezing to death by his own intellectualism: it could not change his potato to anything else but could make it hot. Or, looking at Plato, he must have believed that when Plato got too fiery with his famous allegories and myths and metaphors illustrating philosophical doctrines the brain manufactured an amount of ice and spread it in Plato's body in order to save him from internal combustion: his bottle might contain "fire-water" but it could come iced to the thinker's palate. Aristotle, locating the movement of thought itself, fixed upon the heart as its seat.

Perhaps Plato would have done the same and with more reason. Aristotle's attribution of thinking to the heart provides us with an insight into the Greek nature. The Greeks are often regarded as intellectuals out and out, but when we closely examine the character of their intellectuality we see a certain instinctive trend in it, a fine feeling for truth. It is not without significance that the Greeks identified the highest Truth with the highest Beauty and defined Virtue itself as the courage to live and die for the highest Beauty. But what is this Beauty? It is not appearance, it is essence — not beauty of body but beauty of being. We have ordinarily set up the figure of Apollo or of Aphrodite as representing the Greek ideal of Beauty. But actually this ideal was caught in the pug-nosed, stumpy, pot-bellied satyr of a man that was Socrates! He

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was Beauty incarnate because his very being was saturated with a sense of the supreme Beauty that was Truth. The mere physical looks did not matter in the ultimate judgment, the ultimate grading. Here we discern a premium put on Character, on Goodness. But one thing we must remember: a puritan virtue, a self-torturing ethicism, a bigoted and persecuting morality was never what the Greeks meant by Goodness. Greek Goodness had a grace about it, a wideness about it, a balance and harmony about it. The Greek ethical sense was fused with the Greek aesthetic sense just as the Greek sense of truth was always charged with a sense of proportion and symmetry and a lucid shapeliness as if truth could never be true unless it came living either in visible loveliness or in loveliness of moral nature and action.

All this complexity-in-unity of the Greek mind expressed itself in Greek poetry which, according to Sri Aurobindo, dealt with life from one large viewpoint, that of the inspired reason and the enlightened and chastened aesthetic sense. Mark the epithet "inspired" affixed to "reason". Not reason in its own right but with an influx of something that is both more luminous and more sweet than itself — something that yet keeps the swabhava of reason unspoiled and allows a bright order, an exquisite inter-relation and wholeness. Mark also the epithets "enlightened" and "chastened" for "aesthetic sense". Beauty is indeed the guiding deity for the Greeks but upon it falls a light and on it works a refining power, the beauty is not blind, the beauty is not uncontrolled and licentious. Even in Aristotle, despite his apparent dryness, one feels a certain height and depth: his style is abstract but his substance is concrete and is not of a flat and level world of thought. Now and then the inner height and depth break through the style, as when he speaks of the Immortal within the mortal or when he seeks to characterise the nature of the original Divinity who is the Prime Mover. Apropos of motion, Aristotle says that it cannot be explained in terms of causality by saying that one thing moves another. What moves another is itself in motion and, like that, we have an infinite regress with nothing static to start from. Only that which is unmoved, eternally at rest, immutable, can be the cause of motion: it must stand outside the time-process which is motion endless and everywhere. However, how shall we conceive of the unmoved Mover's effect of endless and ubiquitous motion? How is this motion caused without any movement on the

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part of God? Aristotle struck out the wonderful explanatory phrase: "He moves all things by being their beloved." This is thought working through the heart, and the inner heart besides, not the merely emotion-flushed heart but the heart in which, as Sophocles puts it, are engraved those eternal laws whose home is the high ether.

By the way, the famous last line of Dante's Divina Commedia, which we once translated with a slight freedom at the end—

The love that moves the sun and all the stars—

is Aristotelian and not Romantico-mystic. It is not the doctrine that God is the Love by which things in the world are set moving to their proper goal. Dante does not deny that God is Love, though his equation could permit certain things that would shock us out of our skins, as when he makes everlasting Hell declare:

I too was created by Eternal Love.

But what Dante in that terminal line of his masterpiece meant was the love inspired in all created things by God's Beauty and guiding each to its fulfilment which is ultimately that Beauty itself.

Yes, the Greeks made the heart the seat of thought, though it was rather the aesthetic than the emotional heart: they were not drowned in emotion, they were quickened into artistic harmony. Aristotle would have been surprised at being called "brainy". But if he had met an African Hottentot in the act of thinking, the Hottentot would have been surprised at Aristotle's calling him "hearty". When the psychologist Jung had a talk with the African aborigines and advised some of them to think more and use their brains, they looked at him as if he had himself been what we should term "brainless". They would have used another expression with a reference to a part of the body far below the cranium. They told Jung politely that the seat of thought was not up there in the skull but right down here inside the belly. Don't think the Hottentot is quite off the mark. The Mother has told us that thinking can be done through even one's little finger: in fact, wherever one's consciousness chooses to poise itself. I suppose that, though the person himself may not be conscious of it, the fingers of the writer, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, even

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the cricketer, always think — and often think more quickly, more efficiently than their owner does with his brain where he is com-monly poised.

We have talked of thinking on various levels and parts — we seem to have digressed in doing so; but the apparent digression is really relevant to our theme. And it is relevant not only because several levels and parts are involved. It is relevant also because what is involved is thinking. Man, full-fledged man, man of the historical times as distinguished from the prehistoric Homo Nean-derthalensis and the like, is labelled zoologically as Homo Sapiens, "Wise Man", "Man the Thinker". Of course each of us considers himself wise and considers every other person otherwise, but all distinctions here too are made in terms of more wisdom, less wisdom, no wisdom. Thought is our main characteristic, and when we speak of poetic planes we may broadly speak of poetic thinking from this plane or that, from the brain-level or the heart-level or the belly-level, etc. But we should specify one thing: the multi-levelled poetic thinking occurs from inside the levels and not from their surface.

This specification takes us back to the phrase with which we commenced our lecture: inner nature. Poetry, like all art, like all worthwhile expression, comes from the inner nature of man. Speaking of planes, we should declare that the outer physical plane is never the source of poetry. To look at the world without any insight is not poetry: our physical eyes image things without looking into them. A photographic expression will not be poetry or any literature: it will be expression in which aspiration and dream and desire and understanding have no part: a bare description will be all we get. To the outer eye of man things are as they were to Wordsworth's Peter Bell:

A primrose by a river's brim

A yellow primrose was to him

And it was nothing more.

We may say: "A yellow primrose is a thing interesting enough. Why can't it be made poetry?" Well, it can't if in speaking of it we stop with the words "yellow primrose" and don't associate the object with any gleam in our gaze, any stir of our pulse, any thrill in our brain, any figurative view of it as in the Porter's

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expression in Shakespeare's Macbeth: . . . go the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire" or else as in Ophelia's speech to her - : brother Laertes in Hamlet:

Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,

Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven,

Whiles, like a puff'd and reckless libertine,

Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,

And recks not his own rede. (I.iii.50)

Even the word "primrose" has something of attitude and judgment mixed with it, for it derives from the Mediaeval English "primrose" which itself is from the Mediaeval Latin "prima rosa", literally, "first rose". We do not know why this rose was called "first"., but some sort of grading in quality or time seems involved and that means attitude and judgment. Perhaps we have a clue in Milton's line:

Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies...

("Rathe" means coming or blooming early in the day or the year.) Even to feel the yellow primrose to be beautiful is to bring in more than a mere perception. Emotion, imagination, understanding — all these things make of the primrose something beyond just a perceived object. Surely poetry exceeds the bare act of perceiving. It is sight plus insight, and to have insight an eye other than the outer comes into operation. Our inner nature begins to act.

That is why, when Sri Aurobindo speaks of the poetic phenomenon, he refers always to the "subtle" planes and not the gross external physical. Thus he says in general: "Poetry, if it deserves the name at all, comes always from some subtle plane through the creative vital and uses the outer mind and other external instruments for transmission only." In all poetry, the creative vital is necessary, for else there can be no manifestation on earth. The creative vital is required even for the manifestation of the Super-mind in the world. And to let the work of the creative vital come into the physical plane, the outer mind and other instruments enter the field. The best poetry is produced when the vital force of creative beauty allows itself to respond faithfully to the inspiration and the outer consciousness remains entirely passive and transmits

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what the inspiration has formed with the vital substance and impetus without being mixed or altered. The inspiration itself can hail from any one of the following planes:

1)The Subtle Physical.

2)The Vital.

3)The Creative or Poetic Intelligence.

4)The Inner Mind, with its four domains:

a)The inner Mind Intelligence.

b)The Intuitive Intelligence.

c)The Mystic Mind.

d)The Mind of Dynamic Vision.

5)The Psychic.

6)The Higher Mind.

7)The Illumined Mind.

8)The Intuition or the Intuitive Mind.

9)The Overmind, with its four domains:

a)The Mental Overmind.

b)The Intuitive Overmind or the Overmind Intuition.

c)The Overmind Proper.

d)The Gnostic or Supramentalised Overmind.

The Inner Mind Intelligence is the Inner Mind acting not in a special field of its own but in the same field as the Creative or Poetic Intelligence, though with a different power. The Intuitive Intelligence is the Inner Mind receiving from the plane of the Intuition a light not its own and adapting itself to it: the pure intuitive play is here mixed with the functioning of the mind and diminished or coated with something less luminous. The Mystic Mind works amidst occult formations belonging to another field than the one in which the Creative Intelligence operates. The Mind of Dynamic Vision is a power that has tremendous force, usually of a packed kind in which occult symbols and visions weave a pattern baffling to the reason and the logical faculty yet impressively ordered in its own way. The planes starting with the Higher Mind are all "overhead": they have no organised centre in the human system. The Psychic is also not exactly a part of the gradation below the head: it is our inmost, our deepmost being and stands behind the planes of the subtle physical, the vital and the mental, even the inner mental: its station is at the back of the centre, represented by the heart, where the vital and the mental interplay as emotion. It can open more easily than any other to the

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Overhead, but its own function is not directly to open to it: it has a divine sweetness and light without the powerful amplitude that belongs to the overhead levels. The Overmind's four domains are the highest levels of poetry. When the Overmind lifts into itself the Creative Intelligence, the Higher Mind and the Illumined Mind and in the process modifies itself to suit the new working it forms the Mental Overmind. When it takes up the Intuition together with these powers into itself and again gets suitably modified, we have the Intuitive Overmind or the Overmind Intuition. Perhaps the Overmind Proper and the Gnostic Overmind may be regarded as one whole, but it may be useful to distinguish them in the sense that the former may be conceived as employing whatever* gnostic light it has in its own nature due to the Overmind being a delegate of the Supermind, whereas the latter may be conceived as admitting a new influx from the Supermind in the process of its own transformation into the Supreme Truth.

At a later stage we shall exemplify the poetic creations of the hierarchy of planes and distinguish each plane's way of creating. Now we are presenting only the broad prospect.

You may ask: "Why is not the Supermind listed among the planes of poetry?" Sri Aurobindo has said that the Supermind has never directly worked in the world in the past. The Overmind has been the top power so far. Possibly some influence from the Supermind has made itself felt: just as the idea-substance of the Overmind can come into mental poetry and yet the word and the rhythm may be of the mind, so also the idea-substance of the Supermind may drop into the Overmind and still the resultant poetry may have the typical Overmind word and rhythm. The best passages of the Gita, many passages in the Upanishads and a good deal of the Rigveda are Overmind poetry: the Rigveda is also likely to have some idea-substance from the Supermind. Where the Supermind is sure to have worked most abundantly, infusing even more than its idea-substance, is of course Sri Aurobindo's own Savitri. Savitri is wholly charged with the Supermind vision and experience: the general expression in it has been said by Sri Aurobindo in private letters to be of the Overmind either sheer or lifting into itself the planes below it.

I am not competent to pronounce on what the sheer Supermind poetry would be like. It might even alter the structure and texture of human language, just as the structure and texture of the human

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body would be altered by the transformation effected in Yoga by the Supermind. Something of the present formation will remain, but the change will be pretty radical and much more than what the Overmind can do. The Overmind is indeed a delegate of the Supermind, yet a crucial change takes place when it is projected from the sovereign Gnosis. It is the perfect Mind, the global Mind: it is not the Beyond-Mind. The Supermind is the Divine in His own immediate being: the Overmind is the Divine as He would be in the Mind tuned into utmost closeness to that immediate being. In relation to ourselves, the Overmind converts to its extreme spiritual form the humanity of the human body, it makes our body divinely human. The Supermind reverses the relation and makes our body humanly divine. Not the human but the divine is the supramental basis: in terms of the divine the human will stand, unlike with the Overmind where the divine will stand in terms of the human. Another way of putting it is that the archetype of the human is the Overmind while the archetype of the Overmind is the Supermind. The difference between supramental poetry and over-mind poetry is the same, roughly, as between the poetry of the Overmind and that of the Mind. That is at least how I understand things — from what the Mother once told us. She said in effect: "The gulf between the Overmind and the Supermind is just like the gulf between the Overmind and man's mental consciousness." I recollect lines in Savitri where the Supermind is said to be seen like a faint star in a remote distance of night from the top ridge of the Overmind. So you can imagine the difference. A sort of divine darkness divides the one from the other or, if you like, we may say that the Supermind is to the Overmind — in Miltonic phrase — "dark with excessive light": Sri Aurobindo would perhaps describe it as veiled by a Ray no eye of the Gods can bear.

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