The Adventure of the Apocalypse

A personal preface

Between the heart-strain known as myocardial defect and the heart-strain, the cri du cwur, that is poetry no connection has been noted by either doctor or critic. But the story of the poems here collected has its beginning in a collapse due to over-tension of the poet's heart-muscle.

I was rushing about a good deal in order to manage certain financial ventures undertaken to meet demands with which pure literature is proverbially incapable of coping. On top of this were months of intensive research in the philosophical implications of modern physics. Making a close and wide study of relativity theory and quantum theory and trying to find what lay at the back of so many and often so conflicting interpretations was quite a tax on the mind, especially as even mathematical technicalities had to be attacked. The result of the physical exertion and this scientific exploration was a general tired feeling. Another result was the receding of whatever poetic faculty I had into the background.

Then came the sudden collapse—on the 8th of May, 1948. I was coming home after a rather strenuous morning. There was some fatigue, but nothing more unusual than was the order every day. However, when I reached home at nearly 3 p.m. ,and was climbing the hillock on which our house is perched, I found myself breathing very hard and suffering from a drained-out sensation in the middle of the chest. I had to make two or three halts. With difficulty I reached the gate and slowly, step after determined step, I got up to the first floor.

I was in no state either to cat or undress. With my habitual rashness I tried to do both. But I seemed to drip ice from my face and be forcibly bent and broken. So there was nothing else I could do except creep to bed and lie flat. The feeling of a hollow in my chest was growing deeper and deeper. So sucked in and dragged down I felt that I thought I would soon die. Various medicines were given me to keep me up. Yet the terrible sinking increased. It struck me that the only decisive help could be drawn by inwardly appealing to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, in whose Ashram at Pondicherry I had spent eight years and whose disciple I still was. With all my power of faith and aspiration I kept outstretching invisible hands to them, calling and calling. I pulled at the saving and healing light that is their Yogic consciousness and when I thought a blue sheen and a gold glow enveloped my heart I sensed a subtle supporting strength gradually taking outward effect.

A doctor had been summoned. By the time he came I had emerged to a considerable extent from the vacuity in the heart-region. He gave me an injection and advised complete rest, saying my heart had been strained. I lay for a couple of hours, safe now but still weary with the terrible passage. As the evening wore on I found my mind getting extraordinarily quiet and clear, until I seemed to look into a new dimension of things. Suddenly the whole universe appeared to be a great living being, a wonderful substance of Spirit, and every piece of matter tingled with a divine presence drawing my worship. I had an intense impulse to read that canto of Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, which is named The World-Soul. It is a thrilled cry of mystical insight bringing up image on strange yet apt image of some hidden Heart of Hearts which in its many-toned unity carries all experience transfigured into bliss. For the first time the entire canto came to me glowing with an absolute perfection. Not even a word anywhere was to my mind human and flawed. This impression extended then to the whole of Savitri and I could not help worshipping the Yogic power that was embodied in it.

Night came, but I was wide awake. I closed my eyes and in a short while could see right through their lids. I saw the whole room in a thin dark haze. I marked my wife's posture in the next bed and opened my eyes to verify the impression. The verification was complete. After a time a flood of poetry raced through my mind. Line after line, charged with spontaneous vision and symbol, ran before my shut eyes. I had the sense that I was composing and yet it would be equally true to say I was reading off the lines as they themselves appeared. The two processes were aspects of the same phenomenon. Composition was being rapidly done by a "me" which was more than myself; and the lines, as far as the habitual "I" was concerned, were like living creatures acting on their own. Whenever there was a slight pause in their appearance I applied a little pressure of attention, as it were, and the vivid phrases glimmered out. This went on and on. It may sound presumptuous but I felt as if a new canto of Savitri were being written. I have never in my life had such a flow of inspiration sustained through such a length of time. As the doctor had advised as much sleep as possible, I begged the sweet immortal presences that were seeming to be shaped into words, to withdraw for a while, though never to be lost. There was not the slightest heed taken of my appeal.

More and more lines streamed past as I lay in that state of in-drawn-ness. But it was difficult to remember them. I had to focus my mind on them to be able to retain a few and set them down. Every one or two minutes I would emerge out of the semi-trance and scribble verses on the back and cover and other blank pages of the copy of Savitri which, together with

a pencil to mark passages in it, I had near me in bed. I was writing in total darkness and with extreme rapidity. There was no time to halt and make sure about anything; I had to hurry because the moment I opened my eyes the lines started slipping away and because to get new lines I must return to my semi-trance which might not come if I waited awake too long. This continued up to four o' clock in the morning. Then I dozed off.

I got up again quite early without any sense of fatigue. Throughout the day there was no sleepy feeling. Two nights back I had kept awake similarly; but there had been no poetic inspiration. I had, however, been making inward contact again and again with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and hearing what I hear in my best and calmest moods, a low universal croon, a far-away rhythm with a deep monotone overlaid with small variations: even the variations repeat one and the same softly trembling theme: some ultimate Mother Spirit seems to be gently singing to her child the cosmos.... The next morning I had felt absolutely fresh, just as I was now.

Almost the first thing I did on waking now was to go through the night's scrawl. It was in a jumble: several lines had been written over one another. Even those that stood legible were a series of snatches caught out of the night's flowing song. I willed them to cohere, and waited. Out of the many different strains one short ensemble was the first to result; whatever gaps had been there were filled by means of a conscious entering into the mood of the existing lines and creating a continuation. This conscious effort must have pulled at the inner being which had come into contact with the afflatus at night. For, soon two new poems quite apart from what had been scribbled took shape. They were in a different tempo, so to speak—more lyrical— but still with what appeared to me a living touch on the occult. The next day, some of the remaining lines from the semi-trance pieced together. And the rest became connected soon after. All of them (as also many written later) have a vein of surrealism though without, I hope, the capricious and the chaotic which usually mark surrealism in Europe and which strike one as rather the froth of the dream-consciousness than its true supra-physical profundity, its genuine plumbing of mysterious universes behind the one we know in ordinary waking moments.

I was now in a hypersensitive condition. Moliere's Monsieur Jourdain was surprised to find he had talked prose all his life: I was discovering that, when I talked prose, there came suddenly in the midst of commonplace language bright poetic phrases that led me away from the conversation along strange trails of image and rhythm. Or, out of the talk of others, some casual word would bring me vivid suggestions and set me off to write a poem. And at the oddest moments poetry would rush in: while being spongedj for

instance, I would be all lit up with ideas that ran into rhythmic expression. Poems would start also from words or phrases in the books I read. My reading was mainly of Savitri and it tended to keep my faculties at concert-pitch. A dip now and then into the first canto of The Ring and the Book by Browning struck, too, on some creative hints, but I could not abide Browning for long: he had a vigorously found felicity, yet not much lift. That extremely poetic and mystically pregnant novel by Elizabeth Myers, A Well Full of Leaves, was the only other reading-matter at my bedside. I tried on occasion to look at less congenial stuff, but so strong a "No" swept out from within my chest that I got most uncomfortable and had soon to drop it.

Day after day brought more and more poetry. I was writing with a kind of automatic energy. It was as if I were a mere gate through which poems strode out. Occasionally I had to pull them forth and also correct on afterthought, but there was little now of the piecemeal writing and the long and careful chiselling to which I had been accustomed in the old days of poetic composition. I seemed to be plastic in the hands of the inner being. As the heart-specialist called by my doctor had found my electro-cardiogram clearly indicative of muscular strain, I had been ordered to be in bed for at least eight weeks—until the "muffled first sound" (as medical jargon has it) should become normal. I had been asked to avoid even lifting my head up. I did not take this regime seriously and spent hours resting in a slanted position. I felt that if I could open myself to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother they would effect a cure much sooner than the doctor expected. I kept concentrating more and more intensely on them, feeling that a grip had broken loose in my chest, with no longer a dreadful hollow as in the experience on May 8, but a sweet warm restful wideness that held deeper and deeper their presence. The poetic inspiration and their presence were really one and the same thing—and after each poem had been written I could not help inwardly divesting myself of its authorship and offering it into their hands. This was like putting away from me the poetic power, but actually with each gesture of offering I found myself richer—a larger room grew in me for both spiritual and poetic experience.

I knew a happiness such as I had never known. The weeks I spent in bed, regularly taking injections and medicines, floated in a sea of bliss and light. I would not for anything have missed the heart-strain which brought so much inward nourishment and strength and so much poetic flowering. The doctor told me I would have to go easy for a long time and avoid doing a lot of things I used to. Nothing dampened my spirits. I was getting the best nursing imaginable from my wife;, so even the physical routine of being in bed was not irksome. I drank my bed-riddenness like pure nectar, though

never, of course, encouraging the suggestion of illness. I was eager to get well soon; but, while I lay unwell, there was no fretting—on the contrary, a happy realisation of how through the worst the best could come and how the Divine could utilise everything for a purpose beyond our calculation.

The poetic impulse kept me in an excitement which no doctor would have sanctioned—if he had seen what was happening. So vivid were the symbols that made their impact on my consciousness that my whole body appeared to live with them; almost automatically I would move my hands to feel the visions that dawned on me; my limbs would tend to act out a response to what they signified; it was as if the scenes and figures had been physically in my room and as they grew and found expression they kindled my eyes with wonder and drew exclamations from my lips. Often the words in which they got uttered would be found by me with forceful physical gestures. And several of the rhythms came plunging from some remote wideness and thundering out with a bursting sensation in my chest: the opening passage of the poem entitled The Two Crosses is a typical example. The heart would beat faster and I would be thrilled through and through and left somewhat exhausted. But behind all the excitement there was a great peace and every act of exertion brought in its wake an intense depth of contact with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. What I did and experienced might not have been according to medical rules, yet it helped me immensely and kept me so cheerful that the doctor said he simply loved to visit me and have a chat with me and listen to my comments and jokes. The heart was improving —and every phase of its history I communicated by letter to the Mother. In fact I was writing to her every day and sending poem after poem. I was sure I was on the right lines in doing what I did and in believing that she would look after me and anyhow put me again on my feet. Her reply to one of my letters set the seal on my own conviction. She wrote: "My dear child, I quite agree with you that there is a power other and much more powerful than that of the doctors and the medicines and I am glad to see that you put your trust in it. Surely it will lead you throughout all difficulties and in spite of all catastrophic warnings. Keep your faith intact and all will be all right."

After eight weeks I was allowed to toddle about a little. The poetry did not cease when I left bed. It grew, however, a bit less abundant and towards the close of the third month there was marked diminution and I was afraid that soon the flow might stop. Stop it did—almost exactly at the termination of the third month. But it left me with a certain confidence I had always lacked even when during my stay in the Ashram I was writing poetry pretty often. I had wondered whether I should ever be able to write a long

poem. The present collection does not contain any really long poem, but a number of pieces have a distinct tendency to length, several took birth on one and the same day and I was conscious of an irresistible drive in nearly everything I wrote: all this has made me feel as though a whole sea of un-uttered song were waiting somewhere in the deep background of the being and might some day flow out if I opened myself sufficiently to the influence of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Till then, the present collection must stand as my most fluent and prolific art-experience of what a poem of mine calls the adventure of the apocalypse. I hope the three months' mass it forms, with its many moods simple or complex and its various turns of sight and speech, gives at least some promise that,' should the prayed-for outburst come, its quality would not lag too far behind its quantity.

K. D. SETHNA