Perspectives of Savitri - Part 2

Real Symbols of Inner Reality

A look at Sri Aurobindo

A well-known British writer and critic has stated recently: "I don't see Sri Aurobindo as a poet at all..." and added,".. .if you press the claim that Sri Aurobindo was a great poet...you will only be detracting from his undoubted importance as a thinker and perhaps a saint. You will never persuade any Western poet or critic."¹ And this view is confirmed by other literati, among them William Irwin Thomson, who suggests that Yogis should on principle be debarred from expressing themselves in verse, since they do it so badly, and cites Sri Aurobindo as an example.

That Sri Aurobindo's poetry runs absolutely counter to the mode that is currently admired in the West is clear—as a brief quotation from a poem by the late British poet laureate Ted Hughes will exemplify:

The stars are no company.

They huddle at the bottom of their aeons, only just existing,

Jostled by every gust,

Pinned precariously to their flutters of light,

Tense and weightless, ready to be snatched away into some

other infinity.

And the broken tree-dwarves in their hollow, near him,

Have no energy for friendship, no words to spare,

Just hanging on, not daring to think of the sucking and

bottomless emptiness of the blast

That grasps at their nape and pounds their shoulders.

[The Musk-Ox, 1981)

Both language and sentiments are about as far away from Sri Aurobindo's utterance as possible.

But does this mean that the lilterati are right? That Sri Aurobindo's characterisation of himself as first and basically a poet, later a Yogi, and only incidentally a philosopher, is hopelessly mistaken? And that the response of all those (including many cultured Britishers)

¹Indian Poets and English Poetry: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna, 1994, p. 30.

who find bottomless wells of inspiration in his poetic works is pure illusion? Surely not. It will be more instructive to inquire what it is in Sri Aurobindo's poetry that prevents him from being recognised, by those who might be supposed best qualified to do so, as a supreme master of English poetic expression, and the greatest innovator in this language since Shakespeare.

A first reason is undoubtedly connected with literary fashions. Sri Aurobindo himself has pointed out how difficult it is to make any sure judgements about contemporary artistic achievement, since the 'close-up' view which our contemporaneity enforces on us almost inevitably distorts our perspective. And there are innumerable historical examples to demonstrate that it is just the greatest geniuses and originators who are most likely to be misjudged in this way. Writers and critics of the last half-century have had their tastes shaped by a critical training which was in reaction against all that the previous hundred years had considered 'poetic' in thought and expression: all luxurious richness of imagery and sentiment, all melodiousness of utterance, have been found suspect. The scientific world-view and the horrific realities that have been forced on our notice in this century have led serious writers to insist on an austerer use of language and to choose themes and images rooted firmly in the physical world—and often in its grayer and grimmer aspects. Anything else has seemed insincere or escapist. Sri Aurobindo's vision and language are so remote from everything that has gained recognition as poetry since the First World War, that for those who breathe that air he is simply unassimilable.

Another, less excusable, reason is connected with a peculiarly British sense of exclusive superiority. How can someone who does not belong to the club—an Indian, and a mystic at that—be admitted to excel in the terrain of the elite? The thing is a priori inconceivable!

It is true that, as Mallarme mischievously pointed out to Degas, poetry is made not with ideas, but with words—just as painting is done not with visions but with paints.

This does not mean, however, that the aim of poetry is purely linguistic, any more than that the goal of art is purely formal. The words and the paints are means, but the end is the revelation—or at least the suggestion—of what lies beyond either sound or colour. Sri Aurobindo puts it: "It is because Art reveals what Nature hides that a small picture is worth more than all the jewels of the millionaires and the treasures of the princes." This is the fascination

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of poetry: the hints and glimpses it gives us of something richer and truer, more convincing and satisfying that lies behind the dull facade of our everyday reality. We recognise a writer as a poet purely to the extent that, by means of word-music, image and suggestion, he can bring us into touch with some vividness and colour and truth our normal unpoetic perceptions miss.

That is the reason why, for many in the last century who turned away from the emptiness and hypocrisy of conventional religion, the worship of Art and Beauty could fill their yearning for significance and deeper truth.

In India there is a tradition that the Kavi sees—and not just a little behind the veil, but into the very heart of things; and that embodying what he sees in inspired, truth-revealing speech, he brings closer to material manifestation the hidden verities that lie potential and preparing there—the true creativity. In Britain, on the contrary, there is no such tradition, no such intuition even. There, poets have always had to struggle with the sense that their creations were mere 'fictions', perhaps even falsehoods; and to counterbalance this doubt, they have tended to anchor their images and their creations firmly to the 'realistic'. We are delighted with the infinite inventiveness of Shakespeare because he gives us 'real flesh-and-blood characters', whom we can imagine actually meeting and conversing with.

So Sri Aurobindo, by fulfilling the Indian archetype of Kavi and Rishi, has done something quite outside the mainstream of English literature. In this sense it is true to say that what he has done is foreign to the English spirit. But in doing this he has not done violence to the English language. On the contrary: he has fulfilled something that was being striven for by its very greatest 'makers'. Something that they have strained for and touched momentarily at instants of peak-attainment, he has sustained and worked out and carried further.

Sri Aurobindo's ultimate poetic achievement is of course Savitri. And nowhere in Savitri is his use of language more powerful, complex and original than in the first half of the first canto of Book One. Here Sri Aurobindo achieves something that I believe has never been attempted elsewhere in world-literature, certainly nowhere else in the history of the English language. The only parallel might be found in the composition of the Rig Veda where, as Sri Aurobindo has shown, an inner psychological sense is carried by an outer one that is physical and ritual. For in this overture to the mighty symphony of his epic,

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Sri Aurobindo fuses multiple layers of meaning—literal, psychological, occult and spiritual—in a single flow of incomparable music.

First we could examine the outermost layer of meaning, which here, as throughout the rest of the poem, rarely predominates, but is always discemable—a kind of fine skin of physical fact, within or beneath which all the other multi-layered levels of meaning open up. On this level, Savitri is an epic in the classical Western sense: its vast length and complexity is held together by all three of the classical unities prescribed by Aristotle: the Unities of Place, Time and Theme. That is to say, the 'action' of the poem takes place within a single 24 hour period, beginning with dawn on the day that Satyavan is destined to die, and ending just before dawn on the following day. It takes place too in one small area: the hermitage of Satyavan's father and the forest around it. And there is only one 'plot' or story-line: that of Savitri and Satyavan and the debate with Yama, and there are no sub-plots involving minor characters. From this sparest and simplest of frameworks, by ' flashbacks' and inner explorations, the poem ranges over its vast extent of time and inner and outer spaces, and touches upon all the high themes that most concern the significance of human life in the Universe.

The poem also fulfills the classical convention of starting 'in the middle of the story': not at the chronological beginning, but just before the climax of the action. The earlier parts of the story are then recapitulated, as Savitri sits beside her still-sleeping husband in the first light of that day which she alone knows to be so fateful, and remembers all that has led up to this moment.

So, as has been shown by K. D. Sethna in a detailed discussion of this passage, the 'symbol dawn' with which the poem begins, is, on this primary level of meaning, simply the dawning of that day on which Satyavan must die; and similarly the night preceding it is, in the first place, the actual physical darkness occupying the world. To overlook this important fact is to miss an essential element of Sri Aurobindo's poetic technique—a technique which precisely mirrors the unique quality of his vision.

In English literature, metaphor and simile have normally been used to illuminate the writer's theme, sometimes merely to ornament or embellish it, but in any case to make something more graspable, living and vivid to our awareness in its explicit, outer aspect. But here, in this prelude to his epic, Sri Aurobindo is not using all these deeply reverberating and evocative epithets and images to make us see more clearly the physical, particular night and dawn: on the contrary,

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these almost disappear under the weight of his images. If we concentrate on them, we can always trace their presence, as a background, or an undercurrent, or, as I prefer to see it, as an almost transparent skin, within and beyond which the real movement of the many-layered meaning takes place. Instead of using inner suggestion and suggestive image to enrich and vivify for us the physical reality, he is using the physical reality with which we are familiar, to make close and vivid for us its many other levels of inner significance. The exoteric, realistic, particular, even factual aspect, though present throughout, does not constitute the main 'burden' or meaning of the poem. And it is precisely this that gives Sri Aurobindo's use of language here its originality, and makes it appear baffling, complex, over-abstract and unnecessarily prolix to critics familiar with a different mode, and unable to enter into the deeper significances with which Sri Aurobindo's symbol is animated.

The hour at which the gods awake is, according to Indian tradition, four o'clock in the morning. In the essay referred to above, K. D. Sethna puts it like this:

What... Sri Aurobindo posits in 'It was the hour before the Gods awake' is a religio-mythical concept that has been part of India's temple-life for millennia: the daily awakening of the Gods.

The Gods are the powers that carry on the harmonious functions by which the universe moves on its progressive path. According to an old belief, based on a subtle knowledge of the antagonism between the Lords of Falsehood and the Lords of Truth, the period of night interrupts the work of the Truth Lords by its obscuration of sight and by its pulling down of the consciousness into sleep. Each day, with the onset of darkness, the Gods are stopped in their functions by the Demons: the Gods pass into an oblivious slumber. Each day, with the advent of light, they emerge into activity and continue their progress-creating career. Traditionally the moment of their awaking, termed Brahmma-muhurta, is 4 am. Every temple in India rings its bells and clangs its cymbals at 4 am to stir the deities, no less than the devotees, into action. The 'hour' therefore, which Savitri depicts at its start may be taken, if we are to be literal, as 3 to 4 am. The termination of this hour is 'the divine Event' mentioned in the second line.²

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But at the same time, this particular dawn, at a particular hour of a particular day—the day of Satyavan's destined death— carries within it all the possible significances that are inherent in that potent ancient symbol. It is the coming of Light into darkness at every possible level of meaning. As Sri Aurobindo puts it in one of his letters to K. D. Sethna, quoted in the essay mentioned above:

... here the physical night and physical dawn are, as the title of the canto clearly suggests, a symbol, although what may be called a real symbol of an inner reality, and the main purpose is to describe by suggestion the thing symbolised; here it is a relapse into Inconscience broken by a slow and difficult return of consciousness followed by a brief but splendid and prophetic outbreak of spiritual light leaving behind the "day" of ordinary human consciousness in which the prophecy has to be worked out.²

This 'relapse into Inconscience' is, as K. D. Sethna points out, in some way figured each night by the earth's passage through darkness, and our—and the Gods'—lapse into the oblivion of sleep. But in the heart even of this unconsciousness some seed of consciousness remains, stunned, oblivious; despite its reluctance, its tamasic longing for total forgetfulness, there is an inescapable stir of aspiration, a longing for light, to which comes the responsive pressure of a searching light from above that compels "renewed consent to see and feel;" and with the response comes the apocalyptic dawn of consciousness: a seed is buried in the hours, which the ages of the earth must labour to evolve to its fulfilment.

But this 'thing symbolised' is also multi-layered. The Mother has elucidated one deepest level of significance in her explanations given to Huta, entitled About Savitri. But the symbol reverberates with other meanings too and can be experienced in other ways.

I myself have sometimes experienced this momentous dawn as the re-awakening to inner consciousness within myself and found its stages described with detailed accuracy by Sri Aurobindo's words. On another level, we can understand this passage as describing the condition of the earth before the coming of the Avatar—the embodied Dawn who can illumine mankind for a brief 'Hour of God' during which is almost disclosed "the epiphany of which our thoughts and

²K.D. Sethna, 'Some Comments on Savitri' in The Sun and The Rainbow, pp. 143-154.

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hopes are signal flares;" but "only a little the God-light can stay." After the divine messenger has passed, we are left to face "the common light of earthly day." Or the whole incident of Savitri's incarnation and her debate with and triumph over Death can be seen as just such a "splendid and prophetic outbreak of spiritual light" at a very early point in human development, leaving a seed to be worked out in the "day of ordinary human development"; the whole course of the poem is resumed and epitomised in these first hundred-odd lines.

And these are not different 'readings' or 'interpretations' or 'possible senses'. Part of the profound possibility of 'ambiguity' in poetic language, as William Empson pointed out, is that it allows several meanings to be present simultaneously in the consciousness of the reader. And here these simultaneous significances are neither accidental nor forced. All are inherent in the poet's vision of the symbol; and he has found the way to evoke them simultaneously in the reader's awareness. At times one level may predominate, at others another, depending on the poet's intention of emphasis or on the receptivity and need of the reader, or a combination of both. Writing from the very highest summits of vision and inspiration, from which Spirit and Matter and all the intermediate planes of manifestation can be seen in a single gaze, Sri Aurobindo has found the mantric speech which enables all to be co-present on the page. To separate the various levels of meaning can only be an exercise of exploration.

As I suggested earlier, this method is just the reverse of the normal one, as Sri Aurobindo's yogic vision is the reverse of our normal human way of seeing. Poets may be—are supposed to be— more awake to subtler realities than the rest of us; but still, for almost all of them, it is the material and physical which is the dominant reality. Through and from the physical they receive hints and intuitions of deeper realities behind. But for Sri Aurobindo, we live in a

...world of fragile forms

Carried on canvas-strips of shimmering Time.

Material phenomena have a reality, but they are most real because informed and animated by deeper levels of significance, as "real symbols of inner reality"—an inner reality which to him is not fleetingly glimpsed and intuited, but solidly, concretely present, filling the "outer skin of mortal fact" with deep meaning.

In Savitri—in contrast to the wide-ranging story-lines of other epics—we have a simple legend which takes place entirely on earth,

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made into the vehicle for a comprehensive exploration of the inner worlds and all the levels of consciousness. And this is the theme, not the story, which is merely its vehicle, or we could say perhaps its embodiment. The tale is given significance by what it symbolises, and not the other way round.

This is what places it out of the experience of most scholarly critics, first because they are not used to seeing language used in this way and, secondly, because their perception of what is being done, poetically, is hampered by the fact that the real theme, the real subject matter, is something they are quite unfamiliar with. The first half of the first canto of Savitri is the overture to a magnificently complex symphony, in which the themes which are to be worked out fully later are touched upon and hinted at and foreshadowed as a preparation for the coming whole. And at the very beginning of his poem, in a particularly compressed and concentrated form, Sri Aurobindo gives us too a foretaste of his poetic method. In these few pages of supreme poetry, now one aspect of symbolic meaning predominates, and now another, as if the total significance of these magic words were a circling sphere of innumerable illuminated facets: a gleam is thrown now from here and now from there, yet none is allowed to stand distinct from all the others: these are aspects of one Truth, the many meanings of one symbol, inseparably fused. It is only natural that such a language should seem 'vague' and unseizable, even incomprehensible, to those who are used to straightforward narrative, clear symbol, transparent allegory, and who lack any key in their own experience or intuition—or even mental conception—to the profounder reverberations which these images evoke.

Nevertheless it is important for us to recognise that what has created in modem writers and critics an instinctive aversion to all rich resonant use of language, all suggestion of possible worlds and planes beyond the scope of earthly vision, is a certain valuable scrupulousness, a salutary caution against empty pomposity, a distrust of high-coloured language which may veil emptiness of thought or imprecision of conception, coupled with a sense that in this disillusioned century it is unsafe to soar too far from earth's well-known if tawdry "realities".

This aversion must make it almost impossible to absorb the rhythms, imagery and word-magic of Sri Aurobindo's poetry with the receptivity that is needed to thrill to its deeper resonances. We may pity this lack of receptivity, but should not take its critical

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strictures too seriously—as far as Sri Aurobindo is concerned: his vision justified his use of language. In the case of our own writings, we may well benefit from a dose of the restraint, the avoidance of over-colouring and fancifulness, that is urged upon us by these sober-minded critics. If we seek to echo Sri Aurobindo's poetic voice without having shared the inspiration from which it flowed, we shall certainly be justifying their severest charges.

SHRADDHAVAN

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