Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 2. 1937

Letter ID: 1840

Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar

February 1, 1937

A terrible prospect? Do you dread that I will find an “easy path into the world of macabre visions by hashish or opium”?

That’s why I call it terrible! However let us hope that one day you will stop on the immoral path to Inferno.

Now a serious misgiving throttles me. It seems you don’t like the poems I am writing at present. Why, Sir?

Why does it seem?

Are they worse than “slow scolopendras” which you like immensely?

Yes, but I don’t like it seriously, only as fun. However, your poems are not scolopendras – so that is not relevant.

If you don’t like, what’s the use of writing such things which are neither fine as poetry nor perhaps helpful to sadhana!

But who says they are not fine as poetry?

In yesterday’s sonnet the sestet seemed to have a Baudelairean turn. Was it due to faulty transcription?

No, it was a good transcription of Baudelaire.

Or perhaps a fine mystic thing was coming, but the surrealist intervened and spoiled it?

There is certainly a change in the inspiration at that point. Probably Nolini’s suggestion has raised up or called down the spirit of Baudelaire and he is trying his best to write spiritual poems through you.

All these questions are in vain, I suppose, and over them you will give a cryptic smile!

Exactly.

Really, Guru, you float easily through the complicated constructions of Dilip, NK and others, while I am your stumbling block. What?

Well, sometimes your constructions are like a lot of finely dressed people (words) crowded together in a dancing-hall, but I don’t know who is the wife of who, and who the bien-aimée, and who the paternal uncle and who the maternal grand-niece. So I have to ask and fix their genealogy and general relations.

There is a conspiracy among the gods to take away Mother into retirement: no Pranam henceforth. Sir, they have taken you away already and if Mother withdraws, well, we can do the same one by one.

Well, if people withdraw into themselves, they might find the Mother there!

We are already finding great difficulty in writing without the Touch. “Hé, writing!” you will shout. But writing is sadhana, Sir.

Which sadhana? Ah yes, I see – অতিবাস্তব পন্থা¹.

R came and said in a pitiable voice that Mother has ptosis of the eye-lids, which may persist, if neglected.

What is ptosis?

Why do people make such prognostications? Suggestions of the kind ought never to be made, mentally even – they might act like suggestions and do more harm than any good medicines could do.

He doesn’t understand nor do I, why Mother doesn’t take kindly to medicines and doctors when the trouble could be cured in a short time. Frankly, I don’t know how much our medicines, not homeopathy, can help.

Then why don’t you understand? If medicines can’t help, what’s the use of putting foreign matter in the eye, merely because it is a medicine? Medicines have a quite different action on the Mother’s body than they would have on yours or R’s or anybody else’s and the reaction is not usually favourable. Her physical consciousness is not the same as that of ordinary people – though even in ordinary people it is not so identical in all cases as “science” would have us

¹ ativāstara panthā: surrealist path.

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