Nirodbaran

Talks with Sri Aurobindo

Volume 1

10 December 1938 – 14 January 1941

1 August 1940

Sri Aurobindo: Hitler wants peace not in Romania only but all over the world.

Purani (laughing): Yes, he has already said he does not understand why the war should go on.

Sri Aurobindo: He would say, “Now that I have won, why should it?”

Nirodbaran: The newspaper says there is a great concentration of troops along the French Channel coast to attack England.

Sri Aurobindo: Troops? Not ships? A concentration of ships is required.

Purani: Perhaps they will swim across with swimming belts and allow themselves to be arrested.

Sri Aurobindo: Swimming parties can’t be arrested.

This man Leavis is less partial to Ezra Pound than to Eliot. He says Pound’s earlier poems are a preparation for later ones which have rhythm, form, etc., but have no substance. Have you found any wonderful rhythm?

Purani: None. Isn’t that poem “O Apollo … tin-wreath” by him? Nolini said tin-wreath is wonderful! (Laughter)

Sri Aurobindo: Yes, it is in Greek tina; most idiotic it is. And he says it is a great pun; not a pun but most idiotic.

Purani: I told you Amal’s joke that Pound is not worth the penny! (Laughter)

Sri Aurobindo: Among all these people only Eliot has done something.

Purani: Yes, though he has no form, he has substance.

Sri Aurobindo: Yes, and rhythm and energy. No wonder that old English people can’t enjoy their poetry and they call it idiotic. It is a new kind of decadence. The old decadence was intellectual. The intellect was sterilised and petrified but this is dotty and crazy.

Purani: Yes, if “You are thinking? What are you thinking?” can be called poetry!

Sri Aurobindo: And striking rhythm! He admits that few people read poetry. That is good, he says, for then poetry becomes more precious. It is like Einstein’s theory; only five or six people understand it.

Purani: And they also differ among themselves.

Evening

Purani: Westerners say that ancient Indian art is religious and spiritual.

Sri Aurobindo: That is because only these types still exist. There was also secular art which has been destroyed.

Purani: And Indian art is not so much aesthetic as expressing some religious emotion – the artists wanted more to express these emotions and feelings than to make the work a piece of art or aesthetic. And if they became art, it was in spite of themselves.

Sri Aurobindo: Nonsense. If art is not aesthetic, it is not art. Indians have no aesthetic sense, they mean to say? What about the Indian idea of rasa?

Purani: Coomaraswamy says all art must pass through the intellect in order to be real art. The Modernist conception also is like that to a certain extent.

Sri Aurobindo: What the Modernists aim at is to make their sensations pass through the intellect, sensations in place of emotions. Sensations not only of the vital but the physical too. As they say, Hopkins’s poetry must be heard not only through the ear but through the body. And it is these sensations modern poets are labouring to express through their poems.