Talks with Sri Aurobindo

6 APRIL 1940

PURANI: Nirod didn't quite understand how calligraphy...

NIRODBARAN: First of all, what is calligraphy? Good hand-writing?

SRI AUROBINDO: All good handwriting is not calligraphy. Calligraphy is artistic handwriting. Haven't you heard of illuminated manuscripts?

PURANI: Chinese and Arabic books are very artistic, with beautiful borders. It seems William Morris tried to produce Homer's epics like that.

SRI AUROBINDO: The Roman script is too utilitarian to produce a good effect. In England they are trying oriental calligraphy now.

EVENING

As often happened, Champaklal suddenly burst into laughter, looking at Nirodbaran.

SRI AUROBINDO(turning in Nirodbaran's direction): Laughter of yogic communion?

PURANI: There is an idea that D. M. Sen of Shantiniketan will be reviewing The Life Divine in the Hibbert Joumal. But Jayantilal tells me that he is a scholar of Western psychology. He hasn't read much of Eastern philosophy. It will be difficult for him to speak on yogic psychology and philosophy.

SRI AUROBINDO: Then how can he do the reviewing? Of course there is plenty of mental psychology in The Life Divine, as well as yogic.

PURANI: It is very difficult for these people to grasp yogic psychology. I once wrote that the seat of the emotions is the heart, and a critic sarcastically said, "Now we are to believe that the heart is the seat of the emotions!"

SRI AUROBINDO: Well, where then is the seat? Outside the body? Or in some gland?

NIRODBARAN: In the mind.

SRI AUROBINDO: Mind is an abstract term.

PURANI: They will say, "In the subconscient".

SRI AUROBINDO: That is psychoanalysis. There is also a gland psychology and another that runs everything together.

PURANI: Jayantilal met Jung in Ceylon. He gave him your books to read, but he couldn't find much in them. Maybe because he considers himself too great.

SRI AUROBINDO: Jung has said that India has plenty of psychology.

NIRODBARAN: Amal intends to bring out a book of his poems.

SRI AUROBINDO: But he must not expect to be hailed as a great poet or even to have a good sale.

NIRODBARAN: No, he expects to sell about one hundred copies among friends and realise the cost. He asks if you could write a foreword.

SRI AUROBINDO: Oh, no.

NIRODBARAN: "Foreword" is a misnomer, he says; it is a sort of blessing he wants.

SRI AUROBINDO: A puff of blessing?

PURANI: In order to sell well he must be modern.

SRI AUROBINDO: Yes, and publish in England, and moderns like Spender must recommend him.

PURANI: Amal said he listened to H's radio talk on the Ashram. If one good statement was made, it was immediately counteracted by something quite opposite. For example, he said, "I hear Sri Aurobindo is busy writing an epic —a very good thing, but what shall we do with an epic "when people are starving?"

SRI AUROBINDO: When epics were being written in the past, were there no people starving? And surely poetry was not written only for the proletariat? It is the same type of argument as, "Don't get rich when people are poor; don't be happy when people are miserable."

PURANI: Gandhi uses the same argument. He writes against machines, art, etc. Once he wrote from a train to somebody decrying machines and the addressee replied, "I see that you wrote the letter from the train and yet you decry machines." Mahadev Desai, of course, defended Gandhi.

SRI AUROBINDO: He is as inconsistent.