Nirodbaran
Talks with Sri Aurobindo
Volume 1
10 December 1938 – 14 January 1941
31 December 1938
We were thinking how to begin the talk. Time was passing and yet none could find any question. Then Purani came forward with a few paintings of Picasso. There were four or five pictures. One was that of a man and woman, another of a human figure with a birdlike face, and the third of a figure with three eyes.
Sri Aurobindo: There is some power of expression in the picture of a man and woman. The other one looks like a Brahmin pandit with a tiki (tuft of hair) on the head. The face represents the animal origin still left in him and one of the eyes seems the Prajna-chakra, another the throat-centre and so on. When these modern artists want to convey something, the spectators find it difficult to understand. How on earth is one to make out what the artist means – even if he does mean to convey something? It is all right if you don’t want to convey anything but merely express yourself and leave people to feel about it as they like. In that case one gets an impression and even though one can’t put it in terms of the mind one can feel the thing, as in the case of the two figures here. But, instead, if you convey something and say like the Surrealist poets, “Why should art mean anything? Why do you want to understand?”, then it becomes difficult to accept. Take the picture of the Brahmin pandit. It would have been all right without those eyes. But the eyes, or what seem to be eyes, challenge at once the mind to think what it all means.
(Addressing Purani) Have you seen a certain Futurist painting representing a man in different positions? The artist wanted to convey movement in painting – most absurd! You may just as well draw our guest-house “Golconde” walking about.
Each art has its own conditions and limitations and you have to work under those conditions and with those limitations.
Purani: I hope the aspiration for purification will purify the field of art also. Elie Faure has an idea that France sacrificed her architectural continuity of five hundred years for securing the first place in painting in Europe. There is no all-Europe name in painting in any other country.
Sri Aurobindo: Of course. France leads in art. What she begins, others follow. But architecture has stopped everywhere.
Purani: Elie Faure says the machine is also a piece of architecture.
Sri Aurobindo: How?
Purani: Because it is made of parts and fulfils certain functions.
Sri Aurobindo: Then you also are a piece of architecture. Everything is made of parts. The motor-car too is architecture then.
Purani: X finds these paintings of Picasso very remarkable.
Sri Aurobindo: Does he understand anything about them?
Purani: I suppose the more mysterious a thing, the more remarkable it must be!
Sri Aurobindo: People are getting to be mystic without their knowing it. You know, Hitler is a sort of mystic. He says he is guided by an inner voice. He goes into silence in his palace and waits for the voice. Whatever the voice says he will carry out. Jwalanti’s son’s friend writes that he is absolutely undependable. His generals, financiers etc. don’t know what his next step will be. Today he may say one thing and tomorrow he may say quite the contrary and upset everything. Most unreliable and inconsistent. He is possessed by some supernormal Power and it is from this Power that the voice, as he calls it, comes. Have you noted that people who at one time were inimical to him come into contact with him and leave as his admirers? It is a sign of that Power. It is from this Power that he has constantly received suggestions and the constant repetition of the suggestions has taken hold of the German people. You will also mark that in his speeches he goes on stressing the same ideas – this is evidently a sign of that vital possession. But he is not insane. What he says on the whole hangs perfectly together.
I think it is in a photograph in L’Illustration, where Hitler, Goebbels and Goering are together, that the characters of the three come out very well. In other photos the disclosure is not so striking: the expressions get hidden. But here Hitler gives the impression of having the face of a Paris street-criminal. Goebbels shows a narrow sharp-cut face with cunning eyes. Goering is marked by disequilibrium: he was actually in a mental hospital for some time. The three are possessed by forces of the Life plane.
In Hitler’s case it is successful ruffianism with a diabolical cunning and, behind it, the psychic of a London cabman – crude and undeveloped. That is to say, the psychic character in the man consists of some futile and silly sentimentalism. It is that silly sentimentalism that finds expression in his paintings, I suppose.
In a photograph of the Munich Pact I saw Hitler with Chamberlain. This man with a great diabolical cunning in his eyes was looking at Chamberlain, who looked like a fly before a spider on the point of being caught – and he actually was caught.
Mussolini had a great power. But when I saw the photograph of the two dictators together after Munich, strangely enough I found Mussolini almost weak by contrast, as if Hitler could put him in his pocket. Daladier claims to be the strong man of France but he also is nothing beside Hitler.
Nirodbaran: What about Stalin?
Sri Aurobindo: Stalin has the face of an astute and confident ruffian.
No one thought of Hitler as having anything in him. Then came the vital development, the vital Power holding him in its clutch. Mussolini is at least human, with a human character. Hitler is terribly cruel – another trait that comes out very clearly in his photograph. It is strange to see this outburst of cruelty after the humanitarianism of the nineteenth century – it exceeds even the Christian religious tyranny. In ancient times there was at least pride, a sense of honour for which people died. We say that the Romans were cruel, but even they were human if not humanitarian in comparison and they would have been shocked by what is done in Hitler’s Germany, like the deliberate cold-blooded murder of the Jews.
Purani: I was extremely shocked to hear of Von Schleicher being murdered in a new purge.
Sri Aurobindo: Hitler killed the lieutenant who had raised him to power on a charge of immorality, and that again is the London cabman mentality. But it is an instance of his diabolical cunning. He had known all the time of that man’s homosexuality.
Purani: Schomberg was telling me, “Mr. Purani, we say but we can’t act.”
Sri Aurobindo: Because it is only a mental idea. That is what humanitarianism comes to. It can’t act.
It seems strange that the destiny of the whole world should depend on one man and yet it is so – for everybody looks up to him. From one point of view there never was a time when humanity had come down so low as it has now. It looks as if a small number of violent men are the arbiters of humanity and the rest of the world is ready to bow down before one man.
Purani: It is the lowest depth of Kaliyuga, I suppose.