The Thinking Corner

The Muse and the Mystic

A bright young man, himself a budding poet, wrote to me about my own poetry, appreciating certain pieces of a bold and pungent type, but deploring my general mystical trend as unmodern, divorced from hard facts like slums and brothels, flying away from the delights of sense, out of tune with the revelations of science, unhelpful towards "breasting" life's miseries, a stumbling-block to a true fulfilment of the poetic urge as well as a bar to a true rapport between author and reader.

I am glad my "modern" and "realistic" friend made his position so clear to me. But I am afraid that what he has made me see most clearly is that his position is rather muddled. His point about rapport, for instance, ignores the question of how poetry is to be approached. Why should mystical emotion and vision stand in the way of a reader's appreciation of my poetry as poetry? What does it matter if he does not agree with that emotion or vision? He is not asked to sit in judgment on their ultimate truth. They are to be approached through the poetic body they wear and are to be valued according to the beauty of that body. If people had the genuine aesthetic sense, all authentic poetry would come alive to them, whether the theme be mystical or no. Even the sheer occult would not strike them as quite a stranger. Of course a mystical bent in the reader helps to take him to the last depth of a poem that is "God-intoxicated", but a keen aesthetic sympathy on his part is enough to catch a luminous suggestive thrill, a moving manifold meaning. The blank and befuddled face with which he generally looks up from the pages of mystical poetry can very well be his own fault -unless it be a fact that mysticism and poetry are born enemies, the latter refusing ever to embody the former. They would indeed be irreconcilable if mysticism could never inspire a man to feel strongly and to see vividly - or else if the feeling were so strong and the seeing so vivid that his faculty

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of expression got quite upset. I do not think anybody who has studied mystical experience, much less anybody who has undergone it, will mark in it a lack of feeling or seeing. Expression, however, depends on the presence of the artist in a man's nature: a non-mystic will come a cropper just as hopelessly as a mystic if the artist in him is ill-developed and proves inadequate to hold in significant form the stuff of experience. No doubt, the mystical experience is more difficult to capture, but difficulty is one thing and impossibility is another. To read the ancient Upanishads or, in our own day, Sri Aurobindo is to render all talk of impossibility ridiculous.

The aesthetic approach puts in the right perspective most of the demands laid on the poet by my friend. I agree that no art should be entirely divorced from life, but the use of it should not be merely to help one to "breast" any one particular kind of misery. If poetry helps a person rotting away in a slum or working his way towards a scientific vision of the universe or else hungering for "the clean sweetness of lust", there is nothing to be said against it. Still, if it does not give nourishment to a man sitting in a palace of pleasure or stirred by inexplicable longings for the Eternal and the Infinite or groping through labyrinths of dream towards the ecstasy of Krishna's flute-call - if poetry is meant for only this, that or the other kind of man but has no value for all the moods of the human heart, then its essence remains un-grasped and unutilised. The correct way of making use of poetry is to get from it an influence of perfect beauty that gives one's consciousness an intensity, a subtlety, a sublimity, no matter what the contents and the style. All sorts of contents, all varieties of style can be poetically used and made fruitful for that growth of consciousness. To demand from poetry anything except that keen growth through the enjoyment of flawless and absolute expression is to miss its essence and impoverish its flowering.

My young critic's letter pleaded also that "poetry must be in the forefront of the modern struggle for an understanding

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of our most difficult age". This is not wrong if he does not narrow down the meaning of the word "modern". By that word he means "scientific". Poetry, however, cannot be the handmaid of science and nothing else. I welcome scientific poets with open arms, so long as they embody the scientific attitude in a poetic form and expression. If there is no intense sight, speech and rhythm there is no poetry at all. Can any amount of scientific attitude by itself give it the breath of living beauty without which it is no longer art? Let us face slums and brothels by all means, but let us get poetry out of them and not mere poverty and prostitution. Let us feel them like a whip of flame across our minds and not turn them into grist for the mill of an economic theory. Let us also not fix our eyes on slums and brothels only. Life has many other manifestations. Let us face too the "dark night of the soul" in search of the Divine and the excesses of the "star-struck debauchee of light". There are men who live in our own difficult age and are at the same time mystically inclined. Those who are not thus inclined embrace often an idealistic philosophy and do not believe in Dialectical Materialism or an atheistic brand of evolutionism. "The terrific achievement of modern English and American poets" which my correspondent speaks of in support of his scientific modernity is, I fear, pretty poor when compared to the work of Bridges, Masefield, Gordon Bottomley, Lascelles Abercrombie, AE and Yeats - none of them pledged whole-heartedly to science.

Yeats is acknowledged universally as the greatest English poet of our age. What does his poetry consist of? In his youth, a good amount of the most exquisite love-lyricism woven into patterns of Irish myth and mystic symbol; in his old age, a vigorous utterance on the one hand of a zest-ful, inquisitive, flesh-accepting, death-confronting realism touched by what seems a scientific attitude, and on the other hand of an occult and esoteric vision that regards all things here as a faint representation of some secret Spirit within us, of archetypes and archimages that are beyond the physical

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universe. Yeats was a many-sided genius and in his poems he focussed all those sides, with an underlying mystical sense which was somewhat ivory-towerish in his young days but altogether life-gripping in the days of his maturity. If the greatest English poet of our age can help us decide what poetry is and should be, then certainly it is not a handmaid of science or of "men among men" with a social-reformist and Marxist penchant. I bear no grudge against such men among men, provided they give us genuine poetry and do not shut their eyes to the possibility of genuine poetry being produced by other kinds of men who too grip life though from a different angle.

We must not make a fetish of the scientific and social-reformist angle nor deem mysticism a flight from the concrete world of the senses. Technological development cannot argue a higher stage of essential consciousness. Is a modern scientist more evolved in consciousness than Aristotle or Leonardo da Vinci? Is Stalin on a higher plane of being than Draco or Lycurgus or our own Buddhist Asoka whom H. G. Wells, himself a scientific mind, calls the most enlightened ruler the world has seen? Not the outer mould but the inner reality determines progress. Monarchy, oligarchy, aristocracy, plutocracy, democracy, scientific socialism are merely the outer moulds: they leave man basically the same half-beast and half-angel that he was when the Rig-Veda was composed. And it seems to me undeniable that only what the Rig-Veda aimed at can give us true evolution. There must be progress not horizontally alone: a vertical line must be struck, a movement leading from our present level of humanity to a superhumanhood, a change from the mental grade to a supramental. A defect, a limitation resides in the very quality and stuff of our present consciousness: it assumes a large number of guises, it is clothed in dress after startling dress of outer life - but its burning imperfection eats through all these wrappings, reduces them to dust and ashes and glares forth its own unchanging futility. Mysticism steps in here - either as a grand escape to a luminous Beyond or as

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a dynamic surcharging of the human with the Divine.

We who live in the age of Sri Aurobindo cannot be escapists. There is really nothing in mysticism to compel us to renounce earth and not attempt a radical reshaping of it. For, between Spirit and Matter no gulf yawns as between abstract and concrete. The Spirit is described by all who have realised it as more dense, more powerful, more actual to all our faculties than the table at which I am sitting and the typewriter at which I am banging away. It has a concreteness and substantiality which makes our flesh-contacts pallid and passionless in comparison. What we call the world of sense is not foreign to the Spirit. Doubtless, the senses are given a new mode of action, a hidden Godhead becomes real to them in every cosmic phenomenon even as to our ideative and emotional nature. This recasts our habitual desires and activities - we have no longer the narrow selfish grab, the small jealous clutch: our greediness and our grossness are lost, but we are not "sicklied o'er" with an impoverishment of the essence of sensuous rapture. Where in the whole literature of love is there a description more electric with concrete personal sensation than those of the mystical ecstasies of St. Teresa and Mirabai? Where in Nature-poetry is a stronger sense of substantial being invading all our powers of perception and meeting us everywhere and infinitely and in a million forms than in the spiritual intensities of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita? Neither life nor art grows anaemic through the mystical experience. And my bright young friend's apprehension that the mystic cuts himself off from sense-delight is founded on a very superficial idea which obscures the natural affinity of the mystic to the poet. Poetry's keenly passionate sensuousness is not vitiated but illumined and fulfilled by the keener passion and sensuousness of mysticism.

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