Savitri

IV

Mystic Poetry and the Mantra

      If overhead poetry is the high-ranging Himalayas, then the mantra is their ultimate peak, Everest itself. Rhythm, verbal form, thought-substance, thought's radiant soul-quality, all fuse in the mantra to produce the effect of an incantation. When a Vedic rishi articulates a mantra, it really surges with a potent inevitability from the depths of his soul, and presently sinks into the depths of the hearer's soul, leaping over or penetrating intervening barriers like the analytical intellect, the sensory faculties, the bodily sheaths. Sri Aurobindo himself describes the process thus:

      Its message enters stirring the blind brain

      And keeps in the dim ignorant cells its sound;

      The hearer understands a form of words

      And, musing on the index thought it holds,

      He strives to read it with the labouring mind,

      But finds bright hints, not the embodied truth:

      Then, falling silent in himself to know

      He meets the deeper listening of his soul:

      The Word repeats itself in rhythmic strains:

      Thought, vision, feeling, sense, the body's self

      Are seized unalterably and he endures

      An ecstasy and an immortal change;

      He feels a Wideness and becomes a Power,

      All knowledge rushes on him like a sea:

      Transmuted by the white spiritual ray

      He walks in naked heaven of joy and calm,

      Sees the God-face and hears transcendent speech...²⁸

The mantra is actually a creative force emanating from the highest overhead level, charged with the rapturous and lustrous potencies of the spirit, and using as its native language "a revelatory, inspired, intuitive word limpid or subtly vibrant or densely packed with the glory of this ecstasy and lustre."²⁹

      While the overhead aesthesis has wide-ranging heights and depths for its action, the mantra has a much more restricted play, though when it does come into action its effect is unerring and long-lasting. The Vedic mantra has been called the kamadhenu, the divine cow; it is cloud-like, raining profusely; it is laden with metaphysical, psychical, and physical meanings. But when the mantra falls into the receptive ear, sinks into the awakened soul, apprehension turns to enjoyment, enjoyment to ecstasy, and ecstasy even to samadhi when,

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"in the language of psychoanalysis the ego returns to the primal rhythm."³⁰

      This really brings us to the region of mysticism and mystic poetry. While, of course, it is convenient to classify the mystical planes broadly as occult, psychic and spiritual;³¹ while all these planes are equally beyond speculative reason, it is nevertheless the spiritual that is quintessentially the mystical mode of direct apprehension of Reality. 'Mysticism' could be derived, says Rufus M. Jones, from one of two German words: either from mystizimus "which stands for the cult of the supernatural, for theosophical pursuits, for a spiritualistic exploitation of psychical research", or from mystik "which stands for immediate experience of a divine-human intercourse and relationship."³² Aswapati first explores the many occult worlds without, while Savitri explores the "inner countries" of her own psyche: but all mystical roads lead ultimately to the Divine. As Canon Overton puts it, "That we bear the image of God is the starting-point, one might almost say the postulate, of all Mysticism", and the goal is "the complete union of the soul with God".³³ And the Hindus have been described by Lin Yutang as "natural mystics," ³⁴ for the aim of the spiritually awakened in India has always been to achieve the union of the atman, the individual soul, with the Brahman, the omnipresent Reality.

      The double assumption of mysticism is that the universe is a cosmos, a macrocosm, and that it can be apprehended by man's awakened soul, the microcosm.³⁵ The thirst for self-transcendence, the reaching out of oneself to grasp a greater, the desire of the human moth for the Star of the spiritual firmament, these are recurrent phenomena in the world of man, particularly in the region inhabited by the 'van of humanity', the so-called mystics. Theirs is a supra-rational consciousness, in which,

...the knower, the knowledge and the known become one

again.. .This quality of consciousness has been given many names

—cosmic consciousness, the mystic vision, the unitive life, etc.—

but it is certain that these refer to one and the same thing which

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in its fullness and permanence constitutes Enlightenment. It is

the great returning home to God, with the God-like potentialities

(which were there latent from the beginning in consciousness)

now fully unfolded.³⁶

All mystics need not be poets—at any rate poets who have actually written poetry—but all poets are perhaps also mystics in disguise (or without disguise), and at least the overhead aesthesis must partake of the mystical experience. Benjamin Kurtz is thus right when he observes:

Is not mysticism of the essence of all deep aesthetic

experience? If mysticism is a visioned conviction of a super-

sensuous super-rational reality in which all things are somehow one

without losing their disparateness, mysticism being thus a solution

of the paradox of unity in variety, then each profound aesthetic

moment is at least potentially mystical. For in that moment the

mind is moved with a feeling of metaphysical identity of unlike

things.³⁷

Western thought generally gives to intuition the role that Sri Aurobindo gives to the several overhead powers, but that the primary inspiration behind poetry (and art) is supra-rational is universally conceded. Thus, Herbert Read says:

All art originates in an act of intuition, or vision.. .The process of

poetry consists firstly in maintaining this vision in its integrity,

and secondly in expressing this vision in words.. .in the process of

poetic composition words rise into the conscious minds as isolated

objective 'things' with a definite equivalence in the poet's state of

mental intensity. They are arranged or composed in a sequence or

rhythm which is sustained until the mental state of tension in the

poet is exhausted or released by this objective equivalence.³⁸

The poet A.E. (George Russell) has acknowledged how words would rise from within like a water-lily from the bottom of a tarn: "The words often would rush swiftly from hidden depths of consciousness

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and be fashioned by an art with which the working brain had but little to do".³⁹ William S. Haas, again, makes the same point:

All original and creative ideas occur in a shock-like inspiration.

And this is regardless of whether they belong to the religious,

the philosophical, the artistic or the scientific sphere. Their

appearance resembles a sudden burst of light... The sensation of

the individual is a feeling of being lifted above the regular flow

of the psychological and intellectual stream. One touches for that

illumined moment another realm.⁴⁰

Arduous preparation of one or another sort may have preceded, and all the materials may be ready; yet the timing of the spark from heaven is always an unpredictable factor. Whenever the shock of recognition may come, it is certain to rock the whole being with the tremor of ecstasy; it is as though one is being seized and held by a prepotent superior power.

      Generally speaking, all aesthetic experience is a kind of rebirth, "a making of oneself and of one's world, the self which was psyche being remade in the shape of consciousness, and the world, which was crude sensa, being remade in the shape of language, or sensa converted into imagery and charged with emotional significance".⁴¹ The artist, the kavi (the poet), is truly a creator; he creates "new reality in a supra-rational, visional manner and presents it symbolically or metaphorically, as a microcosmic whole signifying a macrocosmic whole."⁴² Intuition (taken as the short-hand for the overhead powers) may thus be accepted as the gateway to the divers realms of aesthetic experience.

      It is not enough—perhaps it is not quite necessary—to be learned or clever or subtle; aesthesis is not the same thing as logic; what we call the 'magic' of poetry is merely this irrational onrush or surge of inspiration from uncharted regions. Not so much irrational as supra-rational or overmental, for these overhead powers function far otherwise than as the dark muddy powers of the subconscious and unconscious. These overhead powers (including Intuition) may light up, "various areas of experience, but when the intuitive mind is directed towards the things of God, intuition is called mystical intuition and the knowledge so possessed, mystical knowledge."⁴³ Aesthesis like this induces in the reader, the responsive sahrdaya, an experience similar to the originating experience, thereby holding together in a trinitarian close embrace the kavi, the anandamaya, and the sahrdaya?⁴⁴

      We have so far tried to see the filiations between 'overhead' poetry, mantric poetry, and mystic poetry. All 'overhead' poetry is not mystic poetry, neither is all mystic poetry necessarily mantric. At the top, at the very top, 'overhead' poetry is mantric as well as mystic. It is marked by the highest pitch of flight, the most radiant articulation, with the thought alive and rhythm irresistible, and all aglow with a soul-quality that gives the mantra a distinctly incantatory efficacy.

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