know, for I have to wait and wait for an expression.Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 2. 1936
Letter ID: 1794
Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar
December 8, 1936
It is really difficult for me to understand how the mind comes in the way, for I seem to think that whatever comes I jot down.
Well, but why doesn’t it come down like a cataract as in J’s case or as a flood in D’s?
Of course, I want to see also if any better things are possible.
See how? If better things come, it is all right; but if you try to find out better things, then that is mental activity.
But if you say whatever comes should be transcribed, I don’t know, for I have to wait and wait for an expression.
Waiting is all right.
Should one then keep absolutely silent and go on waiting and waiting for the things to drop?
What else then is to be done? To hunt about for them? If so, you are likely to put in any damned thing, imagining it is better.
If you say the mind is active, I should think D’s mind is no less.
He often says “This has flowed through me.” How could it if the mind were active? I suppose you mean by mind the transcribing agency? I don’t mean the receiving mind. The receiving mind must be passive.
Can you not elaborate that sentence: “you refuse to enthuse”?
Yes, you say you take no pleasure or joy in your poetry.
Lack of enthusiasm? All right, I shall work and work in whichever way you advise, sitting on depressions and despondency.
That is hot what I mean by enthusing. I mean by it the joy of the inspiration both as it is coming and afterwards.
If you think afternoon will be better for giving Force, I shall write then...
No importance. Force can come at any time.
I shall put plenty of vigour; about confidence I can’t promise yet for it is my conviction that I haven’t as much stuff as they have.
It is a psychological condition, attitude or whatever you like to 
call it that you must get into it,– still, compact, receptive, vibrant to the touch when it comes.
By the way, I had a talk with D regarding mystic poetry. He doesn’t seem to feel much in Blake’s poetry.
It simply means that he has not the mystic mind. It does not make any difference to the value or beauty of Blake’s poetry.
And mystic poetry as a whole appeals to him less than poems with concrete meaning.
Mystic poetry has a perfectly concrete meaning, much more than intellectual poetry which is much more abstract. The nature of the intellect is abstraction; spirituality and mysticism deal with the concrete by their very nature.
He says Tagore’s poem: “All the pooja [worship] accomplished in life...”1 is vastly more appealing to him than “O Beauty, how far wilt Thou lead me?...”2
How is this less concrete than the other?
Or “I have harvested lots of paddy
And while I was harvesting came down the rains.”3
Again how is it less concrete?
Mystic poetry will ever remain for him misty and mysterious and occupy a second place.
That is another matter. It is a question of personal idiosyncrasy. There are people who thrill to Pope and find Keats and Shelley empty and misty. The clear precise intellectual meanings of Pope are to them the height of poetry – the emotional and romantic suggestions of the Skylark or the Ode to a Nightingale unsatisfactory. How the devil, they ask, can a skylark be a spirit, not a bird? What the 
hell has ‘a glow-worm golden in a dell of dew’ to do with the song of the skylark? They are unable to feel these things and say Pope would never have written in that incoherent inconsequential way. Of course he wouldn’t. But that simply means they like things that are intellectually clear and can’t appreciate the imaginative connections which reveal what is deeper than the surface. You can I suppose catch something of these, but when you are asked to go still deeper into the concrete of concretes, you lose your breath and say “Lord! what an unintelligible mess. Give me an allegorical clue for God’s sake, something superficial which I can mentally formulate.” Same attitude as the Popists’ – in essence.
I can’t deny that I got more joy from your explanation of J’s poem. Though I felt the rasa before, when it came to “illuminations of Truth”, it gave me more rasa. The feeling became concretised, so to say.
You mean, it became more intellectually abstract. A glorious concrete, an illumination of Truth is an abstraction, unless it is seen and felt.
There lies the whole difference. You read a poem – mystic or otherwise and feel all the beauty without understanding it, but when the significance also is flashed, the feeling is more.
Not only all the beauty, but all the life and truth of it.
What significance? allegorical significance?
How far can you say that your appreciation is a thing divorced from the flash of understanding that is revealed to you or your living behind the words?
The trouble with you is that you can understand nothing unless an intellectual label is put on it... You are like a person who could not love and enjoy the presence of a beautiful thing or person until you know the scientific category, class or botanical or other description in Latin.
A has written twice about some eruption she is having – she said 
you would write to us about it, but there is no eruption in this book. Please let me know what it is. An “eruption” may mean anything from prickly heat to –
1 Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore.
2 Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore.
3 Shonār Tari by Rabindranath Tagore.