Old....New
OLD
POETRY
Lovely fictions of the luminous, delightful fantasies of the perfect - these alone I let loose in a winging adventure of harmonious speech.
PAINTING
All that the eye can seize of transient line and colour, all that the eye can trace of finite form, my brush sets playing and glowing in a dream that can never come true.
SCULPTURE
I shape out a body of beauty that life can hope to reach in an utmost of poise or passion which yet is no more than human.
MUSIC
Mine is the work of soothing or stirring man's heart with rhythms that weave for him a paradise of sounds - but sounds echoed only from this earth.
DANCE
A gesture, a turn, a leap - and I strike into graceful intensities the movements of manifold nature within the limits of space, the bounds of time.
THOUGHT
I seek to measure and relate the steps of Reality. But what I find goes no further than a fitting together of Reality's shadows and a changing of them from one system to another.
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NEW
Truth's sun-gold silence breaking into words that move in unison like laughing gods through depth on depth of self-discovery.
Lines that tear all veils, colours that awake all mysteries, forms that gather up all the ends of existence - earth's play touched by an all-revealing light.
I break off with every stroke of time the mass of sleep concealing the faultless figure that lives and shines eternally in the heart of Matter.
An everlasting rhythm runs through the universe, holding the earth together with the stars. This rhythm, an outburst of rapture from the Infinite, I pass in a thousand tones through the common air we breathe.
The body sways, the limbs undulate, the face and form flower and flame - all to the heart-beat of a timeless Love, all in a space full of immortal watchers.
Not seeking to measure Reality but letting Reality measure me, I have become soft silent ground on which She leaves for ever the footprints of her secret ways linking the worlds and leading them upward.
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The Poet of Integralism*
The term "integralism", in our treatment of Sri Aurobindo the poet, the wielder of an intense art-form, must go beyond the discovery of a special spiritual experience and vision which we may designate by it. It must connote primarily an integral style, an integral word-power to match that experience and vision. But this style and this word-power cannot be defined just by saying that the former is one which commands with consummate versatility divers modes and attitudes of speech and that the latter seizes articulately on all possible objects with a vivid intimacy as well as a large sense of their interrelations within a world-harmony.
We have also to speak in terms of "planes" of expression. For, no matter how high or wide or deep the state of consciousness, how supra-intellectual the mystic's realisation, the poetic expression may take the mould of the mere mind's manner of utterance, the moved imaginative speech proper to the plane distinguished by Sri Aurobindo as the creative intelligence which is no more than a particular intensified operation of the same mental consciousness we find in the bulk of human activities. Most poetry is written from the creative intelligence, though the founts of it are more inward, more secret than those of our habitual mental life. Rarely do these founts deliver not only the significance but also the very word and rhythm native to their greater inwardness and secrecy. Poetic integralism would lie in an expression springing straight from the highest, widest, deepest fount of spiritual experience and vision instead of getting shaped in the mere mind or even predominantly in the intermediate planes whose lights and shadows play in the usual universe of poetry.
How the style and word-power of the creative intelligence differs from the Aurobindonian expression which we may consider poetically integral can be concretely seen if we compare a few phrases collected from several sections of Milton's Paradise Lost with a few from the opening of Sri Aurobindo's epic, Savitri:
* First published in The Integral Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo. A Commemorative Symposium edited by Haridas Chaudhuri and Frederic Spiegelberg (Geórge Allen & Unwin Ltd., London, 1960).
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A Legend and a Symbol. Milton apostrophises the Divine Spirit:
Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dovelike sat'st brooding on the vast abyss
And mad'st it pregnant.¹
He also addresses the original spiritual Light:
Bright effluence of bright essence increate!....
Before the Heavens thou wert, and at the voice
Of God as with a mantle didst invest
The rising world of waters dark and deep,
Won from the void and formless infinite.²
About the advent of this illumination, we may quote him further in the verses:
But now at last the sacred influence
Of light appears, and from the walls of Heaven
Shoots far into the bosom of the Night
A glimmering dawn.³
He has depicted too an ethereal revelation, an entrance to God's grandeur, in the illumined distances:
The work as of a kingly palace-gate,
With frontispiece of diamond and gold
Embellished, thick with sparkling orient gems
The portal shone, inimitable on Earth
By model, or by shading pencil drawn.4
Now look at Savitri:
The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone
In her unlit temple of eternity,
¹. Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I, lines 19-22.
². Ibid., Book III, lines 6, 9-12.
³ . Ibid., Book II, lines 1034-7.
4. Ibid., Book III, lines 505-9.
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Lay stretched immobile upon Silence' marge.
Almost one felt, opaque, impenetrable,
In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse
The abysm of the unbodied Infinite;.. .5
A long lone line of hesitating hue
Like a vague smile tempting a desert heart
Troubled the far rim of life's obscure sleep.
Arrived from the other side of boundlessness
An eye of deity pierced through the dumb deeps;....
Intervening in a mindless universe,
Its message crept through the reluctant hush
Calling the adventure of consciousness and joy
And, conquering Nature's disillusioned breast,
Compelled renewed consent to see and feel.
A thought was sown in the unsounded Void,
A sense was born within the darkness's depths,
A memory quivered in the heart of Time
As if a soul long dead were moved to live:...6
Into a far-off nook of heaven there came
A slow miraculous gesture's dim appeal.
The persistent thrill of a transfiguring touch
Persuaded the inert black quietude
And beauty and wonder disturbed the fields of God.
A wandering hand of pale enchanted light
That glowed along a fading moment's brink,
Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge
A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge.7
The passages from Milton are blank verse in a philosophico-religious mood conveying strongly-cut imaged ideas in a tone of exalted emotion with the help of words that have a powerful stateliness and a rhythm that has a broad sweep. But Milton's substance, as Sri Aurobindo has pointed out in a letter, "is - except at certain heights - mental, mentally grand and noble"8 and his "architecture of thought and verse is high and powerful and massive, but there are usually no subtle echoes there, no
5. Savitri, SABCL Vol. 28, p. 1.
6. Ibid., pp. 2-3:
7. Ibid., p. 3.
8. Letters on Poetry, Literature and Art, SABCL Vol. 9, p. 347.
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deep chambers: the occult things in man's being are foreign to his intelligence".9 He may employ certain turns resembling Sri Aurobindo's and there is the largeness of breath which seems to make his suggestions break through the intellectual grip, yet on attending closely we miss the sheer spiritual vision going home to us with a vibrant vastness and stirring up in us an intuitive sense of mystical realities. Something in the rhythm remains unsupported by the sight and the word. God, Light, Infinity, Heaven do not reveal their own body, as it were, and do not utter themselves in their own tongue: they are reflected in the mental imagination and given forceful speech there. But because of the rhythm the critical ear is likely to be deceived about the mostly intellectual-imaginative quality of Milton and it is with this possibility in view that Sri Aurobindo, for all his admiration for the poetry of Paradise Lost, has warned a disciple-poet who wanted to write authentically of the supra-intellectual: "The interference of the mental Miltonic is one of the great stumbling-blocks when one tries to write from 'above'."10
What Sri Aurobindo here terms writing from "above" is generally spoken of by him as "overhead" poetry and described as an inspiration that is felt in yogic experience to be descending from some ether of self-existent consciousness extended boundlessly beyond the brain-clamped human mind. This overhead inspiration can come even when one is not a practising mystic, but then it manifests like a shining accident and is a rare note. Milton himself at times catches it suddenly and at least in one line he has it, according to Sri Aurobindo, at its highest pitch:
Those thoughts that wander through Eternity.11
Sri Aurobindo distinguishes a fourfold gradation of the overhead planes as having acted so far in the world's literature on a few occasions: higher mind, illumined mind, intuition, overmind. On all these planes the experience of the Infinite is automatic, and there is a light of direct knowledge of the universe's fundamental being and becoming. But the light varies in intensity. The higher mind is like a broad clear day revealing
9. Letters of Sri Aurobindo, SABCL Vol. 29, p. 807.
10. Letters on Poetry, Literature and Art, SABCL Vol. 9, p. 347.
11. Milton, op. cit., Book II, line 148.
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through a spiritual rather than intellectual thought the divine substance and its multiform activity: it is, as it were, the arche-type of the mental Miltonic, the plane active behind Milton's grand style but unable to send its own spiritual stuff of thought in an authentic shape and motion through his genius. The illumined mind is more a luminous seeing than a luminous thinking: it is a play of spiritual sight, the divine secrecies are disclosed through a crowd of colourful yet subtle images in a swift or slow design with thought as a subordinate element. One may say it is the plane active behind Shakespeare's leap and coruscation and felicitous ingenuity of the life-force but mostly translated into vivid passion and sensation and idea-impulse instead of being transmitted in its multi-toned seerhood of divine values. Intuition is not what usually passes by that name, a quick abbreviated movement of thought itself or a rapid seizing through the vital drive: it is a profound penetration into the essence of things by a spontaneous inner intimacy on a super-human level. It differs from the illumined mind in that it is a flash by which divine realities bare themselves rather than are bared by a flood of illumination thrown upon them. Heart-beat upon essential heart-beat of Truth is felt more than Truth's opulent limb-gesture and robe-undulation. Intuition is at work behind the revealing reticence that is the Dantesque utterance: only, the style of the decisive sparing stroke in the Divina Commedia mostly converts into a mental incisiveness the sheer piercing Truth-touch. Even in that touch, however, the direct knowledge is not complete; the whole sense of the divine being and becoming is not caught in pure identity.
The entire directness is really the privilege of the supermind, the sovereign Truth-consciousness that is the special dynamic of the Aurobindonian yoga, but a radiant representative of it is possessed by the overmind which is what the world has hitherto known as the extreme Godhead. Also, the overmind vision, word and rhythm are at once intense and immense to the utmost. The line of poetry charged with them carries vastly a movement as if from everlasting to everlasting - thought, image, expression, vibration bear a value and form in which all the qualities of the other planes fuse in something diversely ultimate and variously transfigured by an inmost oneness with the cosmic harmony and with the supracosmic mystery. The voice of the overmind is the
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mantra, the eternal word spoken of and sought for and often found by the Vedic Rishis. Perhaps it is the pressure of this voice that from far behind gives, in Homer, through his nearness to something elemental, a ring of greatness and an air of divinity to everything said by him and endows his power of straightforward yet splendid speech with a rush of oceanic sound. But Homer's eye is ever thrown outward. Physical gesture, movement, act - these always he seeks to interpret. A subtilisation and elevation of the sheer physical on its own level, rather than a sweeping condensation of the pure spiritual without any loss, is the genius animating the Iliad and the Odyssey.
The typical mark of the passages quoted from Sri Aurobindo is the general overhead atmosphere breathing one or another level beyond the mind, either distinctly or in combination, and everywhere a lift towards the mantra, culminating now and again in that sovereign speech itself. The higher mind inspiration passes distinctly through
and mixes with that of the illumined mind in
An eye of deity pierced through the dumb deeps
and is replaced completely by it with
The illumined mind works up to the intuition in the phrases about the "gold panel and opalescent hinge" fixed by the wandering hand of dawn-glamour, and blends exquisitely with the intuitive revelation in
A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge.
We may note also something of the ineffable amplitude that is the overmind's power in all the lines, a pervading influence which perhaps looms out most undeniably in another verse:
The abysm of the unbodied Infinite.
It is not always easy to distinguish the overhead style or to get perfectly the drift of its suggestion. There must be as much as possible a stilling of ourselves, an in-drawn hush ready to listen
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to the uncommon speech; and we must help the hush to absorb successfully that speech by repeatedly reading the poetry aloud, since it is primarily through the rhythm that the psychological state with which overhead verses are a-thrill echoes within us, quickening the eye to open wider and wider on spiritual secrecies and the brain to acquire a more and more true reflex of the transcendental that is the truth of things, waiting for manifestation.
The truth of things, however, need not always be concerned with the occult and spiritual and we should be ready to perceive the overhead utterance, even the mantra, in a delineation of earthly matters. Of course, Sri Aurobindo could not be loyal to his revelatory mission if Savitri did not give wide scope to the occult and spiritual themselves and, with vision and rhythm proper to the summits, seek to poetise them, either
The superconscient realms of motionless peace
Where judgment ceases and the word is mute
And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone¹² -
or the domains of divine dynamism, either the solitary Unmanifest or the "Wisdom-Splendour, Mother of the universe" -
O radiant fountain of the world's delight
World-free and unattainable above,
O Bliss who ever dwellst deep hid within
While men seek thee outside and never find¹³-
either the levels and beings of the mid-worlds or the mysteries and travails of cosmic evolution, like that dreadful commerce of Savitri with one to whom Sri Aurobindo gives no name:
One dealt with her who meets the burdened great.
Assignor of the ordeal and the path
Who uses in this holocaust of the soul
Death, fall and sorrow for the spirit's goads,
The dubious godhead with his torch of pain
Lit up the chasm of the unfinished world
And called her to fill with her vast self the abyss.14
¹². Ibid.. SABCL Vol. 28, pp. 33-34. ¹³. Ibid., p. 345. 14. Ibid., p. 17.
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Yes, Savitri would hardly be the unique poem that it is if it did not try in passages like these to bring home to us the Unknown as it is in itself. However, it is a poem of many layers and no mean part of its excellence lies in its deploying the imponderables of sight and sound and remaining intensely spiritual even when its innumerable ranges and changes are not ostensibly concerned with spirituality. It is legend as well as symbol, a story with many scenes and levels of development at the same time that it is instinct with a mystical light. That light itself plays over many regions and does not fail to cover most aspects of world-thought.
There is a variety not only of matter but also of style in Savitri. The double phenomenon may be illustrated in several ways. The Homeric note of simplicity and depth is struck:
But Narad answered not; silent he sat,
Knowing that words are vain and Fate is lord.15
The Virgilian accent of poignancy and dignity reaches us:
His words were theirs who live unforced to grieve
And help by calm the swaying wheels of life
And the long restlessness of transient things
And the trouble and passion of the unquiet world.16
Homer and Virgil combine in an Aurobindonian tertium quid:
Bear; thou shall find at last thy road to bliss.
Bliss is the secret stuff of all that lives.17
The descent as of a beatific Beatrice into Inferno, untouched by its flames, is felt with a typical Dantesque brevity of suggestion at the end:
His steps familiar with the lights of heaven
Tread without pain the sword-paved courts of hell;
There he descends to edge eternal joy.18
15. Ibid., p. 423
16. Ibid., p. 427.
17. Ibid., pp. 453-54
18. Ibid., p. 592.
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We have glimpses of Nature's moods, coming with a powerful haunting evocation as in that transference into English of a phrase of Vyasa:
some lone tremendous wood
Ringing for ever with the crickets' cry.19
or with an exquisite profundity that hints at the whole secret of art-expression:
I caught for some eternal eye the sudden
Kingfisher flashing to a darkling pool.20
Glimpses of the human situation mix often with those of natural objects, as in that simile cosmically sublime in its sweep:
As a star, uncompanioned, moves in heaven
Unastonished by the immensities of space,
Travelling infinity by its own light,
The great are strongest when they stand alone.²¹
The inner strength of the great is also made intimately vivid in that gesture of Savitri when, confronting Death's subtle arguments and refusing to employ the frail artifices of Reason, which are vain because always open to doubt, she chooses to match all fate with the nude dynamism of her heart and soul in a terrific line which we may term, in a phraseology popular today, superexistentialist:
I am, I love, I see, I act, I will.²²
Here is an utterance deriving its force and resolution from deeper layers of being than the famous close in Tennyson's poem about Ulysses and his comrades:
Made weak by fate and time, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
19. Ibid., p. 385
20. Ibid., p. 405
21. Ibid., p. 460.
22. Ibid.. p. 594.
.
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Those deeper layers render Sri Aurobindo's line more effective art than Shelley's memorable words put into the mouth of Rousseau's ghost in his Triumph of Life:
Before thy memory,
I feared, loved, hated, suffered, did and died.²³
The insufficiency of the mere reason as compared either to the inner soul's moved perception or to the puissant supra-intellectual sight is pictured with an inspired conceit the Elizabethans or the Metaphysicals would have welcomed with a whoop:
A million faces wears her knowledge here
And every face is turbaned with a doubt.24
As unexpectedly striking and happy, though in a different key of inspiration, is the simile applied to the truth-direct ways of the higher harmonies of consciousness to which Savitri's father Aswapathy climbed:
There was no gulf between the thought and fact;
Ever they replied like bird to calling bird.25
The felicity and the novelty that are prominent features of Sri Aurobindo's style in Savitri take at times a compact, strangely figured epigrammatic form heightened as well as enlightened the more by being immediately followed by a verse of simple surprise:
Earth's winged chimeras are Truth's steeds in Heaven,
The impossible God's sign of things to be.26
Ancient motifs and motifs of our own day are equally caught up by the integral inspiration. Even modern totalitarianism is seized in its essence in the occult figure of it that from demoniac planes behind earth precipitates amongst us the Hitlerite power and propaganda:
²³. Lines 198-9.
24. Savitri, SABCL Vol. 28, p. 251
25. Ibid., p. 327.
26. Ibid., p. 52.
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A bull-throat bellowed with its brazen tongue:
Its hard and shameless clamour filling space
And threatening all who dared to listen to truth
Claimed the monopoly of the battered ear;
A deafened acquiescence gave its vote,
And braggart dogmas shouted in the night
Kept for the fallen soul once deemed a god
The pride of its abysmal absolute.27
Even the new physics that has replaced the classical concepts in which "all was precise, rigid, indubitable" enters the poetry:
Once more the world was made a wonder-web,
A magic's process in a magical space,
An unintelligible miracle's depths
Whose source is lost in the ineffable....
A quantum dance remained, a sprawl of chance
In Energy's stupendous tripping whirl:...
The rare-point sparse substratum Universe
On which floats a solid world's phenomenal face.
Alone a process of events was there
And Nature's plastic and protean change
And, strong by death to slay or to create,
The riven invisible atom's omnipotent force.28
But here too the accent is recognisably Aurobindonian. The overhead breath flows everywhere and in the last line we have its art at top pitch. The craftsmanship of that line is remarkable, with its dense humming sound dextrously mixed with other expressive vibrations, and all moving in a metre packing fourteen syllables and a predominantly anapaestic run into a scheme of five strong stresses which are helped to beat out clearly as well as to contain the overflowing music by massed consonants in several places. The five i's and the four o's suggest at once penetration and expansion, the latter as if from an all-round fastness. The v in "riven", pronounced as it is with the upper teeth touching the lower lip, aids the sense of cutting that is in the word, while the v in "invisible" not only supports and
27. Ibid., p. 216. 28. Ibid., pp. 254-55.
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increases the cutting suggestion but also hints by occurring in that particular word and in the midst of several syllables successively short in quantity the marvellous carrying of the power of fission into the mystery of the infinitesimal that constitutes the unseen atomic nucleus. Then there are the two m's with their movement of lip-closure corresponding to the closed secrecy that is being spoken of and they are preceded and followed by the labials b and p respectively which correspond to the initial motive of breaking open the closed secrecy and to the final accomplishment of that explosion. The hard strokes of the three t's mingle a further nuance of breaking. The f of "force" picks up again the fission-power of the v's and completes it with its own acute out-loosening sound accompanied by the somewhat rolled sibilance at the end. The sibilance itself, giving clear body to the softer sound of the pair of s's earlier in the line, achieves the idea of a full escape of the power that was so far not sweeping out of the charmed circle, as it were, of the atom's vibrant energy.
Indeed, the craftsmanship of the line is superb, but its success is different from what most poets might have attained, for it is due to the choice and collocation of particular words so as to create a particular rhythm embodying the vision-thrill of an overhead consciousness. One could be grandly resonant or else deploy a crowded colourful strength and prove a perfect poet thereby, yet fail to charge one's utterance with that vision-thrill - especially when it is a question of infusing into verses about apparently non-mystical subjects the very enthousiasmos of the mantra. Sri Aurobindo succeeds everywhere because he not only is familiar both as mystic and artist with the magnitudes and intensities of our subliminal and supraliminal being, but has also endeavoured to lay on the poor dust of the outer self "the high Transcendent's sunlike hands". Man's earth-born heart is never forsaken by him and it is shown, on the one side, the misery with which it falls short of the Infinite and, on the other, the apocalyptic fulfilment here and now that is possible to it. And the fulfilment is again and again depicted in terms which go home to us and which set forth in a colossal clarity the eternal in the movements of time. For, Sri Aurobindo did not write his epic of 23,813 lines with the disposition of either a sworn surrealist wedded to the obscurely entangled or a strict symbolist cherishing a cult of the glimmeringly elusive. Behind the poet in
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him is the master of the integral yoga whose work, however distant on occasion from familiar experience, was to enlighten and not to puzzle and who, for all his roots in India's hoary past of spirituality, was yet a modern among the moderns and the seer of a new mystical progression, a collective advance in dynamic consciousness from mind to supermind, a whole world evolving Godwards and breaking the fetters not only of political or social tyranny but also of mortal ignorance. A democracy of the Divine liberating the human was his goal, as in those words he puts into the mouth of his Savitri:
A lonely freedom cannot satisfy
A heart that has grown one with every heart:
I am a deputy of the aspiring world,
My spirit's liberty I ask for all.29
29. Ibid., p. 649.
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