SRI AUROBINDO AND T. S. ELIOT

Poetry: As Prayerful Hope

DR. PREMA NANDAKUMAR

There really is no need to be apologetic when one decides to study Sri Aurobindo and T. S. Eliot together. There is, at first, the external appositeness Born on 15 August, 1872, Sri Aurobindo embarked upon super-human endeavours in various fields: politics, philosophy, sociology, Yogi, poetry. Our grateful homage to him who was one of the architects of modern India, one who thrust aside the encrustations of overgrowth on India’s cultural tradition and led us to the very foundations of the Indian culture and restored in us the self-confidence and pride that go with an independent nation. He withdrew from the physical on 5th December, 1950 and was laid in Samadhi on 9th. His influence, however, has been spreading in widening circles in politics, Yoga and literature, enriching the fibres of our cultural consciousness.

And, in 1988 we have celebrated the birth centenary of Thomas Stearns Eliot. Younger to Sri Aurobindo by sixteen years, Eliot too was given a long life leading to solid achievement. Like Sri Aurobindo, Eliot handled poetry not for profanation, but for prayer.

T. S. Eliot himself and Sri Aurobindo guard the student in the same manner. No doubt they are overwhelming personalities and super human achievers. Sri Aurobindo the Yogi whose writings fill up thirty volumes and more; T. S. Eliot the Nobel Laureate whose poetry and criticism have influenced whole generations, as detailed by William Empson:

“I do not propose here to try to judge or define the achievement of Eliot; indeed I feel, like most other verse writers of my generation, that I do not know for certain how much of my own mind he invented, let alone, how much of it is a reaction against him or indeed a consequence of misreading him. He has a very penetrating influence, perhaps not unlike an east wind.”

Comparatist adventure is like walking the razor’s edge. One could always come up with a million superficial resemblances and grow heady with success. For instance, Sri Aurobindo and T. S. Eliot shared an enormous love for cats. The great Yogi had an empathy with the cats in the Ashram and he has even written a charming sonnet on one of them, titled “Despair on the Staircase”:

“Mute stands she, lonely on the topmost stair,

An image of magnificent despair;

The grandeur of a sorrowful surmise

Wakes in the largeness of her glorious eyes.

In her beauty’s dumb significant pose I find

The tragedy of her mysterious mind.

Yet is she stately, grandiose, full of grace.

A musing mask is her immobile face.

Her tail is up like an unconquered flag,

Its dignity knows not the right to wag.

An animal creature wonderfully human,

A charm and miracle of fur-footed Brahman,

Whether she is spirit, woman or cat,

Is now the problem I am wondering at.”

T. S. Eliot, of course, has a whole book of poems dedicated to the feline creature. Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats has fourteen poems to Sri Aurobindo’s fourteen-line sonnet! Irrepressibly natty at times, some of the poems attempt a rare verbal parquetry:

“Old Deuteronomy’s lived a long time;

He’s a cat who has lived many lives in succession.

He was famous in proverb and famous in rhyme

A long while before Queen Victoria’s accession.

Old Deuteronomy’s buried nine wives

And more – I am tempted to say, ninety-nine;

And his numerous progeny prospers and thrives

And the village is proud of him in his decline.

At the sight of that placid and bland phisiognomy,

When he sits in the sun on vicarage wall,

The Oldest Inhabitant croaks: Well, of all ...

Things ... Can it be .... really! .... No! Yes! ...

Ho! Hi!

Oh, my eye!

My mind may be wandering, but I confess

I believe it is Deuteronomy!”

And which of us is not fond of Eliot’s Macavity, that mystery cat, that fiend in feline shape, that Nepoleon of Crime? But, enough of such comparatist pursuit. Let us now come to the indepth thinkers in these poets whose multiple perspective on the human condition today gives us hope that we may yet be saved from the Abyss by recovering our Faith.

The very first thing that strikes us as we draw close to Sri Aurobindo and T. S. Eliot is the fact that both were excellent scholars of the past. Sri Aurobindo had been a student of the Classical Tripos in Cambridge and after his relurn to India, he had taken up the study of India’s classical age in right earnest. The whole panorama of Indian culture amazed him no end: the Vedas, the Upanishads, the epics, classical Sanskrit drama, the Puranas. He quickly settled down to an apprenticeship in translation and was presently engaged in writing brilliant narrative poems based on the myths and legends of ancient India and proceeded to write appreciative introductions to Kalidasa, Vyasa, Valmiki. Sri Aurobindo was no uncritical admirer of this conglomeration in his country’s past. But he could notice the precious gems that lay imbedded in the mind-boggling material committed to the palm-leaves down the centuries. As he wrote to his brother Manmohan Ghose:

“I would carefully distinguish between two types of myth, the religious-philosophical allegory and the genuine secular legend. The former and symbolising spirit of mediaeval Hinduism, the religious myths are a type of poetry addressed to a peculiar mental constitution, and the sudden shock of the bizarre which repels occidental imagination the moment it comes in contact with Puranic literature, reveals to us where the line lies that must eternally divide East from West...There remain the secular legends: and it is true that a great number of them are intolerably puerile and grotesque. My point is that the puerility is no essential part of them but lies in their presentment, and that presentment again is characteristic of the Hindu spirit not in its best and most self-realising epochs. They were written in an age of decline, and their present form is the result of literary accident. The Mahabharata of Vyasa, originally an epic of 24,000 verses, afterwards enlarged by a redacting poet, was finally submerged in a vast mass of inferior accretions, the work often of a tasteless age and unskilful hands. It is in this surface mass that the majority of the Hindu legends have floated down to our century.”

All the same, Sri Aurobindo felt that just as Kalidasa, Magha and others had called the best from these legends and transformed them into “dramas and epics of the most delicate tenderness or the most noble sublimity,” the poets of today also could extract the finest gems from the confounding mass. In Sri Aurobindo’s words,

“To take with a reverent hand the old myths and cleanse them of soiling accretions, till they shine with some of the antique strength, simplicity and solemn depth of beautiful meaning, is an ambition which Hindu poets of today may and do worthily cherish.”

This is precisely what Sri Aurobindo proceeded to do in his poetry and dramas. One of his earliest poems, Love and Death is based on the legend of Ruru and Pramadvara in the Mahabharata and was written “in a white heat of inspiration during fourteen days of continuous writing – in the morning of course.” The poem has the utter beauty of the beginning of spring and the language never fails. Sri Aurobindo made a few important changes to make it easier reading in English. Pramadvara, for instance, became Priyumvada. The Love-Death dichotomy is brought into sharper focus with appropriate arguments. There is Yama’s attempt to convince Ruru of the enormous loss in sacrificing half his life’s span to regain the dead Priyumvada. Old age has its compensations too, says Yama, and shows Ruru, as on a cinematograph, what the young man’s future could bring:

“There Ruru saw himself divine with age,

A Rishi to whom infinity is close.

Rejoicing in some green song-haunted glade

Or boundless mountain-top where most we feel

Wideness, not by small happy things disturbed.

Around him, as around an ancient tree

Its seedlings, forms august or flame like rose;

They grew beneath his hands and were his work;

Great kings were there whom time remembers, fertile

Deep minds and poets with their chanting lips

Whose words were seed of vast philosophies ...”

But Ruru prefers to get back his life of love with Priyumvada rather than lead a life of superior achievement as the founding father of a great race. Sri Aurobindo scoured further the history and mythology of India, Greece, Syria, Arabia and Norway for themes to construct his dramas, Vasavadutta, Perseus the Deliverer, Rodogune, The Viziers of Bassora and Eric. The grand structure of his epic Savitri was reared upon the most wonderful poem in the Mahabharata, the Savitri Upakhyana that is related in the Vana Parva. Thematically he went back two thousand years: he distilled the essence of two thousand years of intellectual and spiritual endeavours by Indian thinkers and Yogis to build the epical argument. By using the symbolistic motif, he also made Savitri utterly contemporaneous. The thrust of the epic’s message is the need for transforming mortal life on earth to the immortal life divine. The key to the epic’s symbolism has been given by Sri Aurobindo himself:

“Satyavan is the soul carrying the divine truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and ignorance; Savitri is the Divine Word, daughter of the Sun, goddess of the supreme Truth who comes down and is born to save; Aswapathy, the Lord of the Horse, her human father, is the Lord of Tapasya, the concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour that helps us to rise from the mortal to the immortal planes; Dhyumatsena, Lord of the Shining Hosts, father of Satyavan, is the Divine Mind here fallen blind, losing its celestial kingdom of vision, and through that loss its kingdom of glory.”

T. S. Eliot did not work in an intellectual vacuum either. For his dramas – Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, The Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerk and The Elder Statesman he sought inspiration in Christianity as well as the classics like the Eumenides, the Alcests, the Ion and Oedipus at Coloneus. His poetry had other inspirations as well. Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance was a major motivation for The Waste Land. Fertility rituals, vegetation cults and magic – in short all that we condemn as totem pole culture in our tribal communities were avidly welcomed by T. S. Eliot as anthropological fertiliser for his poetic creation. Can this unscientific past be reconciled with the scientific present? Yes, says F. R. Leavis;

“It (the anthropological background) plays an obvious part in evoking the particular sense of the unity of life which is essential to the poem. It helps to establish the level of experience at which the poem works, the mode of consciousness to which it belongs ... The part that science in general has played in the process of disintegration is matter of commonplace: anthropology is, in the present context, a. peculiarly significant expression of the scientific spirit. To the anthropological eye beliefs, religions and moralities are human habits – in their odd variety too human. Where the anthropological outlook prevails, sanctions wither. In a contemporary consciousness there is inevitably a great deal of anthropological, and the background of The Waste Land is thus seen· to have a further significance.”

Tiresias, the Tarot Pack, the Phoenician Sailor, Krishna – all these and many more. Consider this note on Tiresias by Eliot himself:

“Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a ‘character,’ is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand, Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.”

What Tiresias sees is a passionless, ludicrous enactment of togetherness, verily a mockery of love and joy. What have we made of the tenderness that brings people together which was once glorified as the soul-togetherness? In the ‘waste land’ of modern concrete jungles and eroded moral values, we are left alone with shadows on the wall. What Tiresias sees is boredom writ large on the face of humanity:

“She turns and looks a moment in the glass,

Hardly aware of her departed lover;

Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:

Well now that’s done: and I’am glad it’s over.’

When lovely woman stoops to folly and

Paces about her room again, alone,

She smooths her hair with automatic hand,

And puts a record on the gramophone.”

By being alert to the seminal properties of myths and legends, Sri Aurobindo and T. S. Eliot acquired a steel frame that no critic has been able to dismantle with impunity. They reinforced this frame with high philosophy. For Sri Aurobindo, it was Evolution; for T. S. Eliot, Catholic theology.

Whatever be the parameters of his writings, the central core of the argument in Sri Aurobindo’s writings deal with his evolutionary philosophy. The argument, reduced to fundamentals, is simple enough. Omnipresent Reality is made up of Sat (Existence), Chit (Consciousness-Force), Ananda (Bliss) and Supermind (Real Idea) as well as Mind, Psyche, Life and Matter. The former quartet has, in the course of involution, become the latter quartet of our terrestrial travail made-up-of Matter, Life, Psyche and Mind. A veil now separates Mind from Supermind. In order to reach the Supermind, many levels above the Mind – Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind – will have to be passed. But it can be done, says Sri Aurobindo in his magnificent tome, The Life Divine:

“Our evolution in the Ignorance with its chequered joy and pain of self-discovery and world discovery, its half fulfilments, its constant finding and missing, is only our first state. It must lead inevitably towards an evolution in the knowledge, a self-finding and self-unfolding of the spirit, a self-revelation of the divinity in things in that true power of itself in nature which is to us still a Supernature.”

The Christian sensibility is ubiquitous in T. S. Eliot’s poetry. There are the powerful lines in The Waste Land that leave an almost physical impact on our psyche:

“Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

–But who is that on the other side of you?”

Suddenly it dawns upon us the hooded man is Christ, our help, our Saviour, our constant friend. And the passage itself is immediately transformed into a Grammar of Faith. We are no more lonely wayfarers in life’s journey. There is always the hooded figure walking beside us. There is always Love, Mercy, Compassion, Redemption accompanying our footsteps, if only we tear asunder the veil of Ego that separates us from this companion. Why then feel lonely in this waste land, this arid modern culture where fathers are strangers to sons and the neighbour might as well be a resident in the antipodes? Come out of your egoistic shell. Eliot tells us, and armed with Faith recognise the Redeemer who is all the time beside you.

Standing in the fragmented civilisation of the West, Eliot could only produce a series of broken images. He could only reflect the reality around and not posit the ideal as a full-fledged image. All the same he admired Dante and did not brush aside the Italian’s poem as an artificial structure intent upon producing only an architectonic effect. Eliot considered The Divine Comedy as the greatest philosophical poem within his experience.

“That is the advantage of a coherent traditional system of dogma and morals like the Catholic: it stands apart, for understanding and assent even without belief, from the single individual who profounds it.”

Sri Aurobindo, at the cost of being dubbed un-modern, Miltonic and tiresome, preferred not to go in for obscurity in presentation. His civilisation was not fragmented, and 2,000 years of continuous religious experience has kept the past alive in terms of practising faith. Descriptive, narrative and, philosophical poetry come as no surprise to the modern Indian whose several literatures have been one long experimentation in understanding the nature of Omnipresent Reality. Hence, Sri Aurobindo’s presentation of Christ is traditional, straight, easily comprehensible.

“It is finished, the dread mysterious sacrifice,

Offered by God’s martyred body for the world;

Gethsemane and Calvary are his lot,

He carries the cross on which man’s soul is nailed;

His escort is the curses of the crowd;

Insult and jeer are his right’s acknowledgement;

Two thieves slain with him mock his mighty death.”

Inclosed in his egoistic shell of separativity, man does not recognise the presence of his Saviour, but the Saviour does not withdraw in despair:

“He carries the suffering world in his own breast;

Its sins weigh on his thoughts, its grief is his:

Earth’s ancient load lies heavy on his soul;

Night and its powers beleaguer his tardy steps,

The titan adversary’s clutch he bears;

His march is a battle and a pilgrimage.

Life’s evil smites, he is stricken with the world’s pain:

A million wounds gape in his secret heart. “

With the help of the religious and philosophical past of mankind, Sri Aurobindo and T. S. Eliot were actually exploring ways to answer the ultimate questions based on Time. What has happened so for; what is happening now; and what is to happen tomorrow? There are the enigmatic opening lines of Eliot’s Four Quartets:

“Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.”

The past has been a glorious achievement. It is true that man’s urge for sin and destruction has played havoc often and decimated civilisations. But the evolutionary urge has triumphed, albeit at a painfully slow pace. To have come up to Mind from mere Matter, that is triumph indeed. Having attained the mental level, has not man accumulated a record of superb achievement? When we do a simhavalokana, what an amazing vista opens before us! Thus Sri Aurobindo:

“At first appeared a dim half-neutral tide

Of being emerging out of infinite Nought:

A consciousness looked at the inconscient Vast

And pleasure and pain stirred in the insensible Void.

All was the deed of a blind World-Energy:

Unconscious of her own exploits she worked,

Shaping a universe out of the Inane.

In fragmentary beings she grew aware:

A chaos of little sensibilities

Gathered round a small ego’s pinpoint head;

In it a sentient creature found its poise

It moved and lived a breathing, thinking whole.”

Nor was this all. Ever since, Mind has been watching the blue heavens and dreams of immortality. T. S. Eliot puts it in his own way, the terribilita of coming face to face with the superhuman achievement of the Mind:

“I have said before

That the past experience revived in the meaning

Is not the experience of one life only

But of many generations – not forgetting

Something that is probably quite ineffable:

The backward look behind the assurance

Of recorded history, the backward half-look

Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.”

What is happening now is verily the subject of Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri and T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. As the world came increasingly under the shadows cast by the rise of Hitler and unbridled militarism, Sri Aurobindo and T. S. Eliot worked on their poems bearing foreknowledge like a Tiresias, a Thrijatha. They experimented with the English language so as to get a plastic medium to put their message across to a humanity frozen with terror. Prof. K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar has pointed out that while T. S. Eliot wished “to get beyond poetry, as Beethoven, in his later works, strove to get beyond music, Sri Aurobindo desired “to leap over the intervening sensory and intellectual barriers and directly reach the soul.” Eliot’s language hisses with a hopeless anger at times:

“Ash on an old man’s sleeve

Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.

Dust in the air suspended

Marks the place where a story ended.

Dust inbreathed was a house–

The wall, the wnscot and the mouse.

The death of hope and despair,

This is the death of air.”

The death of air? But when the nuclear radiation kills air for mankind; what more remains of God’s creation? And if we remember the Vedic insight that Air is Brahman, “Namaste Vayo Tvameva Pratyaksham Brahmsi,” the death of air is the death of God as well, the death of faith.

Sri Aurobindo’s language has a majestic infancy as the scenes around us today are placed one upon another like building blocks to suggest the failure of so-called leaders:

“A capital was there without a State:

It had no ruler, only groups that strove.

He saw a city of ancient Ignorance

Founded upon a soil that knew not Light

A bull-throat bellowed with its brazen tongue;

Its hard and shameless clamour filling space

And threatening all who dared to listen to truth

Claimed the monopoly of the battered ear;

A deafened acquiescence gave its vote,

And braggart dogmas shouted in the night ...”

But must it always be so? Can we not prayerfully hope for a better world? Is it not darkest before dawn? Fortunately for us, both Sri Aurobindo and T. S. Eliot were deeply spiritual in their outlook. And a spiritual view is always a visionary view that is a life of light. Unlike dreams that grow out of our unconscious, visions descend from our super-conscious states of mystic experience. As the Four Quartets makes use of the Christian ideas of Annunciation, the Incarnation, the Passion, and the Eucharist as well as ideas from Heraclitus and the Gita, the poem becomes a message of hope. Eliot makes a conscious effort to rescue modern man who has been felled by a crisis of faith in a scientific and technological civilisation. Hold back for a moment from the careering, blinding life about you; teach your soul to be still to watch the vision of love, the Vijnana of light:

“I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you

Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,

The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed

With a hallow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness

And we know that the hills and trees, the distant panorama

And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away–

Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations

And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence

And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen

Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about:

Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing–

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”

After the moratorium placed on questions, after the soul has been still in the presence of the Lord’s love and compassion, faith blossoms in us. So we tell ourselves. And all shall be well and /All manner of thing shall be well.”

Sri Aurobindo, urged by his evolutionary philosophy, looks beyond the crucified body bringing us faith to the glorified body that posits hope. Such a glorified body is Savitri, after she has performed the Yoga that has ushered in the mind of light. As she begins an inner search for her soul’s identity, the realisation comes to her that the Divine Mother has made her, Savitri, “the centre of a wide-drawn scheme,” the leader who would take the “blind struggling world” to light. The darkness threatening her life with Satyavan being symptomatic of the present human predicament, she would track it to its source, and master and transform it. She journeys into the inner countries of her being and gains the total power of the soul by achieving a great calm, the “Superconscient’s high retreat,” and is now ready for the great struggle.

Sri Aurobindo and T. S. Eliot draw close to each other at the summits of poetic recordation. Stilling the soul is the sure way to strengthen the soul. It is no easy task, and ascent is ever difficult. But the summits should ever be our goal. Man must learn to hunger for the eternal. The earth, for all its dolorous state now, can be transformed yet. Thus Sri Aurobindo:

“The earth shall be a field and camp of God,

Man shall forget consent to mortality

And his embodied frail impermanence.

This universe shall unseal its occult sense,

Creation’s process change its antique front,

An ignorant evolution’s hierarchy

Release the Wisdom chained below its base.”

Therefore T. S. Eliot holds hands with Sri Aurobindo to invoke India’s ancient wisdom.

“O voyagers, a seamen,

You who come to port, and you whose bodies

Will suffer the trial and judgement of the sea,

Or whatever event, this is your real destination.”

So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna

On the field of battle.

Not fare well,

But fare forward, voyagers.”

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