Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 4
(...) me since she was a girl of twelve in frocks and secondly because she is not only a very gifted person but gave me the impression that she was somehow dissatisfied with life and was tending to become “questful” as I put it. She told me very candidly her ambitions etc., but asked my advice. I asked her to get into the habit of prayer. She agreed at once as she sorely misses her loved brother who died in a state of spiritual ecstasy saying to their mother, “I have realised, mother, that the meaning of life is in vSb – and I don’t regret to have to leave this life.” He had become a sort of mystic after his marriage and left business and lived in seclusion. He cast a deep influence on Bharati whose seeking dates from her dear gifted brother’s conversion. She does want to visit Pondicherry next November and I offered to ask her to be my guest in my flat as I have always looked upon her as a little sister of mine.
Please let me know if I can confirm this invitation when she writes as she will soon. For most likely she will come next November or February at the latest – for she is very eager to imbibe your influence.
Well, that is not legally, you know, only psychic. Mother is doubtful about the advisability from the public point of view. If a room is available at the time, Mother will give it, but this is not certain. Permission for darshan is, of course, given.
I can talk well on faith – perhaps you would never have guessed it if I hadn’t told you, what? – and she was much impressed. She is very serious-minded and had depth and firmness of character always – and the whole family has lived a pure abstemious moral life.
But they have stopped at ethicality so far – till the death referred to of an idol of the family. So I want you to guide Bharati a little not only with your silent force but with your directions, etc. – a few lines will do as you wrote about her two poems I sent from Madras. You know I have always wanted to bring people I have genuinely loved or liked to your feet – and that with not a shred of egoistic motives. I simply want because I feel they should want also.
But I won’t write more today as I have to write my serial for the Press for which I have offered the royalty to Mother a month or two ago.
Consulting with Rajani I have written to Arup Singh my Sikh friend to contribute for the purse on your 72nd birthday. I hope something will come out of it. Rahim has promised Rs. 100 and R. contributes Rs. 100. So....
I am not surprised that you could not follow the poem all through – probably nobody could really do that except the poet. Somebody once said of modernist poetry that it could be understood only by the writer himself and appreciated by a few friends who pretended to understand it. That is because the ideas, images, symbols don’t follow the line of the intellect, its logic or its intuitive connections, but are pushed out on the mind from some obscure subliminal depth or mist-hung shallow; they have connections of their own which are not those of the surface intelligence. One has to read them not with the intellect but with the solar plexus, try not to understand but feel the meaning. The surrealist poetry is the extreme in this kind – you remember our surrealist Baron’s question, “Why do you want poetry to have a meaning?” Of course, you can put an intellectual explanation on the thing, but then you destroy its poetical appeal. Very great poetry can be written in that way from the subliminal depths, e.g. Mallarme, but it needs a supreme power of expression, like Blake’s or Mallarme’s, to make it truly powerful, convincing, and there must be sincerity of experience and significant rhythm. In this poem the rhythm is not there throughout and sometimes the writing becomes too mental and falls from the deeper inspiration towards the obvious; some images are rather forced; but these defects are inevitable in a technique like this, for it is the most difficult to maintain if the poem is of some length. I have marked the passages that struck me most, those that reach a certain kind of perfection; there are others that come near it.