Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 2. 1936

Letter ID: 1800

Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar

December 14, 1936

Do you mean to say that because I have no joy in writing poetry, it is taking so long for the channel to open? But I don’t see why joy should be a necessary condition for writing poetry.

Art is a thing of beauty and beauty and Ananda are closely connected – they go together. If the Ananda is there, then the beauty comes out more easily – if not, it has to struggle out painfully and slowly. That is quite natural.

I will put in any amount of labour and that should be enough for things to pour down.

Labour is not enough for the things to pour down. What is done with labour only, is done with difficulty, not with a downpour. The joy in the labour must be there for a free outflow. You have very queer psychological ideas, I must say.

How can I have any joy when what I write seems such poor stuff and delivered with much perspiration?

That is your confounded nature. How can the man of sorrows feel joy in anything or any self-confidence? His strain is “O how miserable am I! O how dark am I! Oh how worthless is all that I do,” etc., etc.

But apart from the M of S, you seem to suffer from a mania of self-depreciatory criticism. Many artists and poets have that; as soon as they look at their work they find it awfully poor and bad. (I had that myself often varied with the opposite feeling, Arjava also has it); but to have it while writing is its most excruciating degree of intensity. Better get rid of it if you want to write freely.

But I get a lot of joy reading J’s poetry – I can’t describe it...

I suppose it is because it is what Housman calls pure poetry – stirs with joy the solar plexus.

Where you marked so many fine lines in my last poem, I had hardly felt the thrill while writing them.

That’s the pity of it.

Please give some Force to complete the incomplete poem I have been at. I fear to touch it lest the coming lines should fail in their quality.

Well, it’s that kind of thing that stands in the way.

The first portion I wrote quickly and almost dosing. God knows why dosing?

[Sri Aurobindo wrote z above the s of “dosing”.]

This is a medical spelling.

Probably in order that your waking mind might not interfere. Dozing is often a form of semi-samadhi in which the waking mind retires and the subliminal self comes bobbing up.

Have you finished with Jatin’s long letter regarding dreams, sleep-walking etc.? The reply is overdue, Sir!

I have often tried to begin that, but it is a long affair and before putting pen to paper my courage wilted away.

Guru, sorry? Really? I am very glad, you can be sorry, for then you will do something for me... Why do you say “She seems to be passing etc., etc.”? That simply infuriated J, “... I am writing all this hard stuff which nobody understands, not even Sri Aurobindo! ... I shall stop writing then. And now I am passing from one funny poet to another (Mallarmé).”

Well, if she thinks it derogatory to be compared to such great poets as Blake and Mallarmé! Blake is Europe’s greatest mystic poet and Mallarmé turned the whole current of French poetry (one might almost say, of all modernist poetry) into a channel of which his poems were the opening.

“Mallarmé’s works are, in one word, ‘unintelligible’. Why on earth should I write such things?”

Then why did they have so much influence on the finest French writers and why is modernist poetry trying to burrow into the subliminal in order to catch something even one quarter as fine as his language, images and mystic suggestions?

We told her that she is only an instrument of the Force, and she must surrender to it. “But how can I be sure that it is the Force and not my own making? If Sri Aurobindo assures me of it, I shall be satisfied.”

If it were her own making, she would have written something different. Its very character shows that her mind has not made it.

Is it really true that Mallarmé used to write with a set determination to make his works unintelligible? Can one really do it in that way?

Certainly not. The French language was too clear and limited to express mystic truth, so he had to wrestle with it and turn it this way and that to arrive at a mystic speech. Also he refused to be satisfied with anything that was a merely intellectual or even at all intellectual rendering of his vision. That is why the surface understanding finds it difficult to follow him. But he is so great that it has laboured to follow him all the same.

... J doubts that her poems have enough poetry.

The doubt is absurd – they are poetry sheer and pure.

Our saying and feeling don’t matter much, you see. Sri Aurobindo, Tagore, etc., etc. must acclaim.

I can’t answer for Tagore – ...

Please acclaim, acclaim!

Clamo, clamavi, clamabo¹.

¹ In Latin; I acclaim, I have acclaimed, I shall acclaim.

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