The Thinking Corner

Uttering the Unutterable

Speaking of a "metaphysical" poet, Dr. Johnson laid down the law to goggling and gaping Boswell: "If Mr. X has experienced the Unutterable, Mr. X will be well advised not to try and utter it." The advice, I am afraid, is not the Doctor's wit or sanity at its best. It is a superficially brilliant play on words, taking little stock of the uses and potentialities of the art of words.

Just consider the term "Unutterable". It is not mumbo-jumbo: it has a meaning. Strictly and frontally, it signifies a divine infinitude which is so marvellous and mysterious that it cannot at all be described in language. An additional background significance is caught in the anecdote of the Indian sage and his disciples who kept asking him what the Eternal was. Every time the sage kept silent. At last the disciples said to themselves: "We have the answer. The Eternal is the opposite of speech. The Eternal is Silence." Silence here stands for a supreme calm - a state of self-withdrawn imperturbable inexpressiveness behind the ever-mobile expression that is the cosmos.

To utter the Unutterable, when that term is literally interpreted, is to do no more than suggest by various verbal ways a Reality fraught with a blend of the two significances. The various verbal ways fall into four categories: words can define the Unutterable, point to the Unutterable, picture the Unutterable, induce the Unutterable. The defining is done by a direct statement, either with plain words or splendid, of our intellectual understanding of the term; the pointing by an indirect statement of the same comprehension; the picturing by the use of images or descriptive phrases that directly or indirectly stir our inner eye in the direction of that understanding; the inducing by the heart being stirred in this direction owing to the emotional associations of words and the suggestive rhythms they make by combining themselves in response to the thrilled state of mind in which the speaker

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or writer is. Words thus can intensely convey the sense of what is entirely beyond the capacity of words or else is opposed to their nature! That is the paradox forgotten by Dr. Johnson.

Perhaps the finest brief example of language employing all its resources to impart the Unutterable in a literal interpretation is a three-line snatch from a passage Sri Aurobindo once sent me out of an unpublished poem of his:

The superconscious realms of motionless peace

Where judgement ceases and the word is mute

And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone.

Here defining, pointing, picturing, inducing are creatively held together to suggest a supreme transcendence and a supreme calm - "the Unconceived" and His "peace". A defining of the transcendence and the calm is accomplished by the epithets "superconscious" and "motionless" fixing clearly the condition stated, while the phrases about judgment ceasing and the word falling mute bring out still more positively its implications of unutterableness. The pointing occurs in the last line where "alone", without directly connoting the Unutterable, renders the transcendence and the calm complete and absolute, permitting no penetration or disturbance by any agent. The imagery pictures the condition, gives it an objectivity, so that much more than an idea of transcendence and calm is carried home to us and we seem to behold and touch them. The noun "realms", taken in conjunction with the adjective "motionless" soon after, confers on the condition stated the sense of a substantial extended Spirit-stuff that is entirely free from any feature or vibration. The adjective "pathless" reinforces this sense by negating the least cutting up of the stuff into this or that particularity or purpose or tendency and reveals cogently that our mind can never explore it, but at the same time there is also hinted that what can be spoken of in such terms must be concrete, must be relevant to the absence of a concrete

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thing like a path, and the relevance is stressed by the verb "lies" which has an association of the visible, if not even the tangible. A transcendence-ward and calm-ward direction of the heart is induced by means of the feeling the atmosphere of several words in these lines evokes and by means of the subtle pull of the rhythm. Rhythm has an inner aspect and an outer. About the inner in Sri Aurobindo's verses we can only say that it is a thrill of realisation on a plane of consciousness that appears to be divine, a plane of vast superhuman Yogic experience: this thrill embodying itself in the outer rhythm fills the sound with a potency to rouse in us some presence of that plane. The outer rhythm admits of more specific analysis. The first line has seven sibilants within a short compass, playing around four labials in the form of two "p"s and two "m"s - labials that involve the joining and parting of the lips: the total effect is that the mouth tends to be closed into silence but opens only for sibilating as when we put a finger to our lips and sibilate in order to quiet people and spread silence. The second line echoes and confirms the effect by continuing the "m"-sound and making in the first syllable of the markedly sibilant word "ceases" a suggestive rhyme to the word "peace" of the previous line. The last line does not lack a certain sibilance but its chief contribution is, first, through the term "alone" with its sound that goes ringing in us with a full roundedness because of its long "o"

Dr. Johnson, of course, has no inkling of the Aurobindo-nian art with its rare characteristics: immense supra-intellectual clarity and penetrating fathomless reverberation. But

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it would be unjust to hold that the school of Donne, Crashaw and Vaughan which he dubbed "metaphysical" could have no success in uttering the Unutterable and that his wisecrack puts it out of court. No metaphysical had Sri Aurobindo's large and close grip on the Unknown nor his plucking of the poetic word, at even the simplest, as though from the very depths that seem to be beyond speech. Still, the metaphysi-cals had flashes of mystic intuition and experience visiting their undeniable if intermittent poetic genius: they could not, therefore, be abject failures in what they set out to do. Nor did they set out every time to do literally what Dr. Johnson charges them with. In fact, no mystic poet takes the term "Unutterable" as always connoting something which tends to seal his mouth for good. Mostly, the Unutterable is to him not that about which nothing can ever be said; rather, it is that about which everything cannot be fully spoken since it is inexhaustible and, no matter how much we speak, something vast and wonderful will always be left over. Seen in a positive instead of negative form, it is that about which one can go on endlessly talking without exhausting its secret splendours, because, to quote Meredith,

Its touch is infinite and lends

A yonder to all ends.

That is, gleam after gleam, shade upon shade of the Deific can be captured in language and yet the sense will remain of the miraculous that no language can wholly compass and make satisfyingly understood or completely natural. As a rule no incompatibility exists in the mystic poet's mind between his declaring that he has intuited or experienced the Unutterable and his attempting to transmit in words not only that ecstatic fact but also some notion of the supernatural strangenesses within the Object of his intuition or experience - strangenesses like Vaughan's "deep yet dazzling darkness". The phrase of Vaughan may have been double Dutch to Dr. Johnson, obscurum per obscurius: it need not be that to

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someone who is receptive to mystical subtleties and brings, instead of the pragmatist's superficial intellect or the merely religious man's blind emotion, an intuitively wide and visioning turn of consciousness. Is there any reason why words should be for ever at loggerheads with the mystic's perception? Is not the deciding factor the psychological level at which they start functioning? The psychological level, for instance, of Dr. Johnson's own poetry would be quite impotent for the mystic's purpose. What about levels less brain-dense, more inward and "dreamy"? Cannot words arising there respond to the Eternal? The Divine would altogether preclude words only if He remained altogether unmanifest. Since the universe is continually His manifestation, no matter how hard to read aright, and since He lays Himself bare in diverse degrees in the rapt soul of the saint and the yogi, He cannot be quite averse to being disclosed - and what are words except a form of disclosure? Doubtless, the Divine, precisely because of His divinity, His transcendence of everything, will always in some manner exceed words; we must, nevertheless, remember that He is also an immanence, an omnipresence, an unfoldment, a power that inhabits all things and is everywhere and breaks out through veils, with the result that words can always be pregnant with His greatness, aura'd with His infinitude, revelatory of His supernature.

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