SRI AUROBINDO – Nirodbaran

Correspondence with
Sri Aurobindo

Volume 2. 1937

January 2, 1937

Hirendranath Dutt, theosophist and philosopher, in one of his articles on Rāslīlā, asks why mystics and yogis use so much the imagery of passion, wine etc. in their description of experiences of Divine Love. Then he quotes Underhill to say “... it [human love] most certainly does offer upon lower levels a strangely exact parallel to the sequence of states in which man’s spiritual consciousness unfolds itself and which form the consummation of mystic life.”

I don’t agree – unless it is a sadhana of the vital plane which then naturally expresses the vital being = love-excitement, love-quarrels, viraha¹, revolt, despair, rupture etc., etc., frequent surrenders, unions, partings.

Dutt has said that according to the Ancients, pleasure of the sex-act is something akin to the Ananda of Brahman. Why? In answer to this, Ouspenski, a famous Russian philosopher, has said: “Of all we know in life, only in love is there a taste of the mystical, a taste of ecstasy.”

Leave out the “only” – and to a certain extent one can agree – but “love” – not “sex”.

The interpreter continues: “Nothing else brings us so near to the limit of human possibilities beyond which begins the unknown. And in this lies, without doubt, the chief cause of the terrible power of sex over human life... Love, ‘sex’, these are but a foretaste of mystical sensations.”

Love and sex are the same, then? There can be no love without sex? This is piffle.

He says further: “Mystical sensations are sensations of the same category as sensations of ‘Love’, only infinitely higher and more complex.”

There is much else besides in mystical experience – there are not only sensations.

He asks: “If that is so, why then is man averse to this intensely pleasurable mystical activity? Because principally he gets the taste of that mystical pleasure in the sex-act, and he is satisfied with it.”

What rubbish! Brahmananda is a substitute?

The sexual creative act is admittedly the supreme and most desired gratification of the senses.

Not to everybody.

The sexual creative act is an exact counterpart of the mental and creative processes of which, the East maintains, it is merely the reflexion.

Don’t catch on. How is sex-gratification a reflex of mental processes – e.g. of the solution of a mathematical or scientific problem or even of the creation of a poem or picture? Because there is a kind of joy in all these things? but it is not the same kind of joy.

The transient character of sex-gratification is regarded in the East as an ordinance of Nature so that man may be led to seek the more sustained delight of mental and spiritual creative effort.

In the East? by whom?

I don’t believe it for a moment. To suppose that if sex-gratification were a more prolonged business, Shelley and Shakespeare would not have cared to write poetry – is blank brutal nonsense – They had something else in them besides the mere animal.

Do you agree with all this, Guru, especially with Ouspenski’s opinion?

What a question to ask me! As if it were at all possible that I would agree to bring down all values to the level of the animal pleasure.

Love may perhaps be a foretaste of mystical sensations, but sex-love also? But people say that sex-pleasure and Brahmananda [Bliss of Brahman] are brothers.

The only truth in that is that all intense pleasure goes back at its root to Ananda – the pleasure of poetry, music, production of all kinds, battle, victory, adventure too – in that sense only all are brothers of Brahmananda. But the phrase is absolutely inaccurate. We can say that there is a physical Ananda born of Brahmananda which is far higher, finer and more intense than the sexual, but of which the sexual is a coarse and excited degradation – that is all.

If the transient nature of the sex-act is an ordinance of Nature to lead man to a more sustained delight of higher things, I fail to see why there is so much pleasure attached to it that they compare it to a foretaste of Brahmananda. You say that it is meant for procreation, but the act of procreation could have been managed without this pleasure.

Certainly, Nature gave it to encourage her aim of procreation. The proof is that the animal does it only by season and as soon as the procreation is over, drops it. Man having a mind has discovered that he can do it even when there is not the need of Nature – but that is only a proof that Mind perverts the original intention of Nature. It doesn’t prove that Nature created it only to give man a brief and destructive sensual pleasure.

I won’t lengthen my perorations and human reasonings. Will you give a satisfactory reply to all these questions tonight or tomorrow?

Well, it can’t be tonight, as there are three tons of correspondence. (It may be less of course in actual weight, I am giving the psychological estimate.)

[In the medical notebook:]

I have added against your notes of the 30th certain remarks which I had no time to write then. You may perhaps pass a glance over them.

January 3, 1937

N.P. complains of much pain in the eyes – frontal headache after half an hour’s reading, eyes watering etc. Manilal advises him to use glasses. He says glasses will cure it.

Glasses cure it, means what? The weakness will disappear and he will be able to read without glasses after a while?

... About the pot-au-feu, apart from all these, may I point out a little flaw in your argument? French people are used to taking a mixed meal, so the quantity of the vegetable would be very small in proportion.

[Sri Aurobindo underlined “very small”.]

Don’t understand. It is a question of the healthiness for the stomach. There is quite enough vegetable in a pot-au-feu to test the stomach and it is not taken once a week only, but often.

Moreover, what French people can take and digest, I am sure Indians can’t. Physically Indians are a far inferior race to the Europeans – an admitted and deplorable fact.

It is the other way round. Indians can digest foods (chillied, curried, strongly spiced) which would send a European to his grave in a short time. Indians have a shorter life but dietetically a much more spicy and hot life.

January 4, 1937

I was very surprised to read a statement of G – he says that a few months ago he felt in sleep as if he wanted to see a woman. He was shocked to find such an impulse in him after over 40 years of struggle to conquer the sex-instinct. He says also that it was one of the blackest moments in his life and if he had succumbed to it he would have been ruined...

Imagine a man over 60 and practising absolute sex-control for over 40 years, as well as control in speech, thought, food, so sincerely, having such a bout.

There is nothing astonishing in that. First of all, even if it had been in waking, it is to be expected. G’s method is ethical, a stern mental control, নিগ্রহ². That keeps down the sex fellow, but does not eliminate him. He can start up at any moment. Secondly, it was in sleep when the mind is not in control, unless you have specially practised control of sleep. I don’t quite understand the black moment and the potential succumbing. Succumb to what? Does he mean that the effect of the desire continued after waking from sleep or he was shocked in the sleep itself, resisted in the sleep?

L, I hear, had a fall from spiritual height, and he is enjoying the life of “Krishna”. What then will be our lot? Alas, alas, where shall we be?

But why did he fall? Because he justified the fall as a great spiritual progress? Of course if you and others do the same, you can’t expect to fare better than he did. But then there is no ground for crying “Alas, alas, where shall we be?”

Isn’t it the same sex-impulse as G’s flaming up in another garb in L’s case? And the sex-impulse who is said to have known heights in Yoga?

[Sri Aurobindo underlined “the sex-impulse who is”.]

Meaning? It was precisely because L considered the sex-impulse to be a height in Yoga that he went for it.

I have been infligé with doubts, and these things are wearing and tearing the soul. Felt almost like rushing away somewhere.

Don’t you think it is rather silly to allow examples like G’s who is not even a sadhak or L’s who did the sadhana of sex-yielding to depress you, as if they had any relation or bearing on the Yoga here.

Any answer or “tons of correspondence” still?

Plenty of tons. But the answer will be given when I have the questions and some leisure together.

About N.P., Manilal says glasses can’t cure the disease and once he takes to glasses, he may have to change them every two years or so.

That of course, but it can’t be called cure.

But that can’t be helped unless his eyes are suspended from reading etc., for if he goes on with his occupations with the defect, it may increase. Of course rest to the eyes wouldn’t do it, nor would he feel any pain. So?

Well, is he prepared to wear specs and accept the sure deterioration of his eyes under their protection?

I am trying to have a dash at Herbert’s French class which begins at 8.15 p.m. So have to change Dispensary time at night – after meditation to 8 p.m. Mother’s approval and a notice can be put up?

Yes.

January 7, 1937

Jatin asks me to send you these questions saying “The answer is immanent but it wants clarification and there is Sri Aurobindo who will do it in a minute.” So will you do it in a minute?

No. You must not ask impossible miracles from me.

He says all sorts of questions arise and temporarily block the way, and he is rather “agitated”.

What is agitating him, the mental question or the problem in a practical form? Anyhow I have tried to answer.

January 7, 1937

7-1-37

Nirod

P has been recommended by Dr. Manilal to put two medicines for her eyes. Mother told her to go to the Dispensary, but she wants a letter of authority so that she may be attended to a little. So here’s the letter. You will arrange.

Sri Aurobindo

January 8, 1937

One misgiving is pressing heavily on my soul. I sense and feel and see that the tone of your letters has suddenly become very grave, rough, stiff and gruff – the owl-like severity with which you had once threatened me. I don’t know what I have done to deserve such a punishment. Or is it because you are getting Supramentalised day by day that you are withdrawing yourself so? There must be a reason if my “sense feel” is correct. Well, if you want to press me between two planks and pulverise me... Well, I don’t want it, you know!

I think your sense feel has been indulging in vain imaginations, perhaps with the idea of increasing your concrete imaginative faculty and fitting you for understanding the unintelligible. As you have now much to do with mystic poetry, it may be necessary. But why object to being pulverised? Once reduced to powder, think how useful you may be as a medicine, Pulv. Nirod. gr II. Anyhow disburden your soul of the weight. I am not owled yet, and my supramentalisation is going on too slowly to justify such apprehensions. Neither am I withdrawing, rather fitting myself for a new rush in the near or far future. So cheer up and send the Man of Sorrows with his planks to the devil.

I don’t understand why P wanted a letter of authority. Has she been made to wait or neglected?... I find that patients here, especially ladies, want to be served quickly – 5 minutes at the most! They can’t wait, they must go, they have work, etc., etc.

Important people, you see – necessary for the world action, লোকসংগ্রহায় চ³, can’t be kept waiting.

A seems much reduced and has become a pucca hypochondriac. We have decided to keep him mainly on milk diet. Vegetables and dal don’t agree with him.

It seems to me that this ought to reduce him more and more. To my experience, not taking food simply eternises the dyspepsia. It is all right for a few days, but to make it a rule kills the stomach. Here I agree with R’s principle of reeducating the stomach and intestines. But all that is only a standpoint. If the medical Science does not admit it, I don’t insist.

And we shall give some assimilable form of cod-liver oil.

No objection to that –

Lastly, he must be given some sedentary work.

But he has his classes?

January 9, 1937

Oh, Guru, you missed my poem altogether? What a disappointment for me!

Didn’t see your book was there, I believe – otherwise would have commented.

By the way, is it again the correspondence that burdens your soul?

Very badly.

My soul is disburdened though, and I am happy and bright.

Good!

January 10, 1937

A has no classes. They have been stopped long ago.

If he has nothing to do, it is natural he should be engrossed with his stomach.

Guru, what do you say to this poem of J’s? I am damned if I understand anything of it. Blakish, Mallarmic? Methinks it exceeds both.

There is no necessity of going beyond Blake and Mallarmé. Their things are often more difficult than this.

Have you any more of these mystic members to compare her with?

[Sri Aurobindo put a question mark above “members” which was not very clearly written. ]

What’s this mystic word?

At the rate she is going, I don’t know, Guru, where she will end. Do you see the end?

Why should there be an end?

I don’t know if anyone will make out anything of her poetry, except your Supramental Self. The explanations of the last two poems, by Jove, are explanations indeed!

You mean they are more unintelligible than the thing explained? That about Dawn and Evening was difficult to swallow, but the end of the 51⁴ seems to me to offer no difficulty at all. It is a magnificent rendering of the large movement of the soul towards the Silence – but of course it may be meaningless to a posterity that will, we may assume, know nothing about either Soul or Silence.

I sometimes try to project my third eye into posterity and see the reactions in its mind regarding J’s poetry. I at once cover up the sight.

Is it your posterity that your third eye sees or posterity in general? Posterity has not had the reaction you speak of with B & M – their reputation grows with the lapse of time.

They will say – Sri Aurobindo gave expositions of this poetry – ha, ha! and he praised it and gave Force for it! The poetess was undoubtedly “queer”, but the Guru?

But do you then find that it is bad poetry? for at fine poetry posterity will not say ha! ha! but at most “Oof! how difficult!” It is only contemporary opinion that is foolishly contemptuous of grand poetry.

Now then, have you any time to help us?

I am afraid I have not sufficient time. Won’t you try again and wrestle with the গভীর⁵ instead of having visions of posterity?...

January 14, 1937

I am slightly depressed about my poetry, Guru. It seems all mind-made.

It is an extremely beautiful poem. What a grumbler you have got inside you! After writing a thing like that, you ought to be licking your lips in satisfaction.

Apart from this depression, these last two days I have been feeling unaccountably rotten, sad, irritated, why? Force, please, O please, please, for heaven’s sake!

No reason. If the Man of Sorrows gets grounds to wallow in agony, he wallows on the ground – if he doesn’t he wallows in the waters – if waters are denied to him, he will wallow in the air. If no he will wallow in the void. But wallow he must. Even if you had written a poem as deep as the sea and as splendid as the sunrise, he would still wallow, if that was his fancy – “wallow and luxuriously wail to the world and its Witness.”

January 15, 1937

About “licking lips”, I shall perorate tomorrow.

It is the licked or the unlicked lips that are going to be vocal?

January 16, 1937

I have used the word প্রমীলা⁶ in a new sense, meaning fatigue, drowse, slumber. D objected to কৃষ্ণিমা⁷ saying it wouldn’t do... Funny thing – this word coinage! Sometimes people accept it, sometimes they reject.

After all when one coins a new word, one has to take the chance. If the word is properly formed and not ugly or unintelligible, it seems to me all right to venture.

If it is not accepted it will remain a blot in the poem. Tagore coined the word তৃণাঞ্চিত⁸ but he laments that people have not accepted it.

– Why a blot? There are many words in Greek poetry which occur only once in the whole literature, but that is not considered a defect in the poem. It is called a “hapax legomenon”, “a once-spoken word” and that’s all. তৃণাঞ্চিত for instance is a fine word and can adorn, not blot Tagore’s poetry even if no one else uses it. I think Shakespeare has many words coined by him or at least some that do not occur elsewhere.

Any opinion, Guru, and does your intuition say anything on প্রমীলা?

I really can’t say what প্রমীলা it is. I think, a rare Sanskrit word. Most people wouldn’t understand it, perhaps.

In your letter of day before yesterday I could not make out a word. Is it: “he wallows in the grave –”? Gracious!

Ground, sir, not grave. A ground need not be a grave.

J is still upset. Please, open your tap a little.

She is terribly unreasonable, and she feels herself too easily “tapped” on the head or otherwise.

If God wills, please will or shall something in this fully blank page.

Nothing to write. You have got the essentials, and I have a damned lot of letters to write.

January 17, 1937

Behold! From where comes this unknown Creeper

Along the woodland path anointed by the rising Moon?

All pain she has tinged with the blue of Heart-stream,

She has made Heaven unveil and break out into murmuring billows.

The magic of her compassion flowers in her hand,

And the thunder-roar that booms the world’s end is hushed suddenly;

In the morn that is the death of the naked skeleton

She stalks over the world, a gathered Fire, voicing her approach.

The Dark One has put on a golden garland,

And on her delicate forehead burns the flame of red sandal –

She, the Eternal Memory, from within the forgetfulness of earth’s depths

Kindles the first spark of the Word born of the churning.

The eye of the waxing Moon at night-end

Pours out of its blue the golden gleam of a dark collyrium.

[Translated by Nolini Kanta Gupta from the Bengali.]⁹

I don’t know what this is driving at.

I am afraid I don’t know either. You have suddenly shot beyond Mallarmé, J and everybody else and landed yourself into the Surrealism of the most advanced kind. Such a line as বিবসনা কন্ধালের মরণপ্রভাতে¹⁰ would make any surrealist poet’s heart wild with joy. I think however you should put up a petition to your Inspiration to rein in this gallop towards and beyond the latest Modernism and give us something less progressive and startling.

The only lines I can make something out of are the first two – the creeper (of the unknown new life) in the woodland path of the moonrise, (spiritual opening) – অভিষিক্ত¹¹ with the moonbeams, I suppose and the third quatrain which is rather remarkable. The Energy (secret in the physical centres) accepted (?) the golden Garland (the garland of the Truth) and She (this Kundalini Shakti) who carries in her the eternal Memory of all things secreted in the apparent Inconscience kindles from the oblivious depths of Earth (the material Nature) the first lightning of the Word of the churning of the Depths i.e. the first bringing up of all that is concealed and undelivered in the consciousness of Matter.

It is a very cryptic but also very significant poetic description of the working of the closed-up Energy in the physical centre when it wakes. The couplet might mean that the white-blue moonlight (spiritual light) pours the golden script of the Truth from its eyes (power of vision). The rest may mean a preliminary consequence of the opening in which the wave of Manifestation of Paradise comes and brightens up the anguish of the Man of Sorrows in you with a stream of soul-blue, with the result that the tempest is stopped, there is the day of death for the confounded Naked Skeleton (of the dead old Adam in you) and a concentrated Fire pervades everything. After which, as I have said, the Yoga Shakti uncoils in your physical centre and starts serious business. Great Scott! I think I have unexpectedly solved the riddle. But বজ্রের রাগিনী¹² still baffles me.

It has some meaning, I suppose, but all mixed up. Do you find any meaning in it?

Well, if my prophetic soul has rightly interpreted it, it is not mixed up but it is recklessly audacious in its whirlingness of cryptic images. Spiritual surrealism with a vengeance.

Unfortunately I had no time – A mass of work standing over from the week and no time to finish even that. I will look more carefully into the poem tomorrow.

Chand’s letter, if you can make out anything.

Have made something out of it by my immense power of divination.

January 18, 1937

So, you have found a splendid meaning in yesterday’s poem, Sir!

Quite involuntarily – it dawned on me as I wrote.

You have asked me to send a petition to my Inspiration, but when the Inspiration is your Supramental Self?

Excuse me, no. This is not supramental poetry – so the inspirer can’t be my supramental Self.

January 19, 1937

Excuse you? What do you mean, Sir? You give inspiration only for supramental poetry? Startling news, Sir!

Where have I said that I give inspiration for supramental poetry either only or at all? You said that your inspirer for this or for any other poem of yours was my supramental self. I simply said that it can’t be, because a supramental self would produce or inspire supramental poetry – and yours is not that, nor, I may add, is J’s or D’s or my own or anybody’s.

We fondly believe that you give inspiration, set apart a time for it, and now you say that you are not the Inspirer?

I say that my supramental Self is not the inspirer – which is a very different matter.

Pray tell me the mystery. Why shirk the responsibility now, because a surrealist poem has come out? You are responsible for it, I think.

Excuse me, no. As the Gita says, the Lord takes not on himself the good or the evil deeds (or writings) of any. I may send a force of inspiration, but I am not responsible for the results.

But did you seriously mean that I should send a “petition”?

Not very seriously. I was only afraid that you might land us in the poetry of the 22nd century – and that might be a long time to wait for somebody to understand us.

All that I do is to remember you and call for your help, and whatever comes I jot down. If I hadn’t done this I would have missed these poems. Tell me then what to do.

No need to do anything, but continue.

If spiritual surrealism is what is in that poem [on Kundalini], then it’s not at all bad. But Nolini thinks that there is not much of spiritual surrealism there.

Well, if spiritual is objected to, let us say mystic surrealism. The European kind is vital swapnic.

Why not send me that surrealist sonnet of yours?

No such thing exists, for it was not a sonnet.

By your statement we fear that a mixture is coming up in our poetry, and you will exclaim one day: “What? Am I the inspirer of these?!”

Not at all. In fact I made no statement.

Was there anything objectionable in yesterday’s poem? Really, Guru, this disclaimer of yours is terribly mysterious; the more I think of it the more I am puzzled.

But there was no disclaimer. I simply got my supramental self out of the way and left the brunt to be borne by my non-supramental self.

All this time we have known, believed and prayed that you give us the inspiration, and suddenly this?

Suddenly what? My statement that your poetry is not supramental? Surely you did not think it was!

Please give a satisfactory reply; otherwise this dread will haunt me whenever I take up pen and paper.

Rubbish! There is nothing to dread.

Nolini has been suddenly inspired to translate that surrealist poem [17.1.37]. Will you have a glance at it at your leisure?

Very good translation.

January 20, 1937

You have relieved us by your answer. But I thought you have only one Self – the Overmental or the Supramental.

Why do you suppose me to be so poor in selves? When everybody has several, I must content myself with one?

Who is this “I” who sends the Force – which aspect, I mean?

“I” is a pronoun only = the Multifarious One.

It would be a pity to stop writing poetry till the 22nd century and have to wait for people to understand it. That would be unyogic, and being untrue to the poet also.

From one standpoint; from the other the prudence of postponing for the fitting century might be classed under যোগঃ কর্মসু কৌশলম্¹³ It would certainly be unpoetic.

What’s your opinion about that bizarre poem – “Good” or “Grand”? what is the word? I can’t flatter myself by taking it to be “grand”, nor can my poetic being take it for “good” without pain.

It was good. I forgot that you did not like “good” poetry, only “fine” and even “very fine”. Let us then promote it to “fine”, but stop short of “grand”.

I can just make out the curve of the r. Please solve the mystery and soothe me a little.

You are wrong; the “r” curve was conspicuous by its absence. Perhaps I was trying to write in a certain kind of modern English style “grood” = “really good”.

I wrote a beautiful poem in the early morning, but I can’t show it to you for it was done in sleep and I have lost it. Pity, isn’t it?

Great pity.

January 21, 1937

How can one like “good”? To you good, fine, very fine, extremely fine, may be all equal! Of course, to the Divine, yes.

Generally one likes good things and dislikes bad things. But you seem to dislike both, which is more Yogic in samata (of a negative kind) than my attitude.

If only I had been your critic in your pre-Divine days and pronounced “good” about your poetry, I would have liked to see your reaction!

My reaction would depend on whether it agreed with my estimate or not. If all my poetry were pronounced good by an undeniable authority, I should be very pleased and perhaps even might lapse from Yogic heights into egoism.

Like “good”, I like “fine” less than “very fine” and “exceedingly fine”, obviously.

In that case, you must dislike very fine poetry also – and plump for the exceedingly fine only. But can any poet always and in every line and poem be exceeding?

I don’t see how you can place fine, very fine, exceedingly fine, on the same level, or how you expect us to like them equally.

They may not be on the same level, but they are all admirable – and good in its own way is admirable too.

Of course, if while saying only fine, you keep within yourself “exceedingly”, it will be all equal to you. I can’t see your within, Sir! “It is good”, “not bad, etc.” shows on the very face of it what it is.

Well, but I can’t be always turning my inside outside with a mathematical precision – especially at a first reading in a gallop. I put an impression or rather dash it down as it comes – and it seems to drop a “very” in the process or a good drops in = fine. In any case “good” does not mean “bad” or “poor”.

I want to know from what angle you see and judge – subject-matter, poetry, plane, consciousness or what?

I don’t see and judge like that – I feel. I have said it is an impression – not an analysis. For an analysis I would have to consider, look from all points of view, analyse, synthetise – no time for all that.

Can one write poems from the same source and yet express different ideas in different ways? Or should one strike a different source?

If you want to go to the same field quite allowable – but a different source in the same field gives a greater ‘originality’ e.g. in the poem of tonight you did that.

J asks: if you have not much time, should she stop sending poems every day?... But, Guru, I hear you can read with electric rapidity, only writing has to be done at a paralysed speed, though I doubt it from the nature of your Supramental script. And much writing is only occasional...

? Many mickles make a muckle – which translated into English means – a lot of small notes takes a big amount of time.

January 23, 1937

I don’t dislike “very fine” poetry. Anything short of that is not pleasant. And certainly I plump for exceedingly fine, not at once, but gradually. You can’t object to that surely?

Rather exacting to demand that everything written shall be very fine.

In A’s case, I’m suspecting T.B. of the intestine. But you know very little can be done, if it is that. After D.L.’s death, he has become such a hypochondriac. I don’t know if we should take an X-ray of his intestine for any T.B. focus.

An examination and suggestion of T.B. would probably finish what little morale he has. To discover it is also not very useful since you say that little = nothing can be done.

January 24, 1937

Then we have to try what we can for A?

Yes.

I am a little discouraged by your answer regarding him.

Why? because I did not favour T.B. research?

Can we not pull him up in spite of everything? What should we do for that?

If you can get the preoccupation of death and grave illness out of his head, that might help. It is his sense of being desperately ill that prevents the force working.

J asks whether she should send her poems every day or twice or thrice a week.

She can send every day. It is only that I have not time always to make any long comments.

January 25, 1937

J can send her poems on alternate days. You have written that long notes are not possible, then we’ll ask only in case of absolute difficulty, when we can’t help asking you¹⁴.

Naturally – but if it [involves] careful reading and [...] writing, I can’t undertake [to] do it that very day; [besides] that I have masses of [work] to do now – not only letters, [but] I have to prepare something [for] A.P.H.¹⁵ otherwise the house will collapse, as they have been [waiting] long without a fresh book. There [are] also translations into French [for journals] which Pavitra is [wanting] me to see, etc. etc. [There] are letters from outside some [of] them very important which are waiting months without [an] answer. If I have to [write] an explanation of 2 poems (her poems are sometimes long) every day it would take too much time. That amounts [to] more than I can do.

She says, “If Sri Aurobindo won’t see my poems whom should I write for? I don’t show my poems to anyone else.”

Where did I say I wouldn’t see them? Too much femininity here!

I was discouraged by your answer regarding A’s case, because the tone of your letter did not give much hope for his recovery.

How can one be hopeful when he is morally down like that?

X-ray would help in a negative way. Clinical diagnosis is not always correct. Very often all the available methods of investigation are insisted upon in these difficult cases. If there were no positive X-ray findings, one could change one’s diagnosis and treat accordingly...

All that is merely the standpoint of medical convenience. You ignore my standpoint. If T.B. is declared, rightly or wrongly his consciousness receives a fatal blow and the spiritual action is as good as enrayé. Yet if it is T.B. of intestines, what is there but spiritual action that can do anything? Medical [Science] can only act in such a case if it changes its philosophy. On that I shall send you an article from the Presse Médicale which may throw some light. In France fortunately medical Science is beginning to open its eyes.

January 26, 1937

Is today’s poem surrealist? If I am going too fast I may put a check. But these blessed images come in so alluring a way that I dance with joy.

Surrealism means a dream-sequence poetry – and modern dreams are extravagant. The images may be all right but they get entangled and intertwisted or else on the contrary one jumps from one to another that seems unconnected.

Please ask Pavitra to send me the French medical journal.

It is with me.

January 27, 1937

May I ask what is the nature of Mother’s ailment?

Occult, with a physical effect in the eye.

[About my poem:]

... Sir, this sounds terribly surrealistic – If it means anything it is splendid – all of it – but what does it mean?

January 28, 1937

I am ashamed and at the same time devilishly glad that Guru has been floored! But isn’t it really a huge joke? ... How is it you didn’t catch any meaning in my poem of yesterday? Nolini sees no difficulty at all. It does mean something positively!

If it means something palpable to you, why don’t you let me into the secret?

You couldn’t make out the meaning of the word বণিতা¹⁶?

In Sanskrit বণিতা usually means a wife – I was wondering whose wife she was and suspecting adultery.

But why do you want the meaning of words? Poetry has to be felt, Sir!

Provided there is something to feel. But if feeling is enough, why ask me or yourself for a meaning?

I have used the word ডালা¹⁷ in today’s poem. It means, as you must know, a sort of a dish in which puja offerings are carried to the temple, so this ডালা, can’t it paint?

Not known in the Royal Academy or any other – this painter.

What sort of poetry am I writing? Who is this Muse creating this havoc as to founder even the Guru?

Surrealist – I suppose. My province doesn’t go so far.

January 29, 1937

I knew that it meant something, but not palpably enough to let you in. It was palpable to Nolini who said moreover that it reminded him of Baudelaire.

A very big compliment, but I don’t know that the parallel can be enforced very far.

I have always said that feeling is not enough, but every time you stopped me, saying that mystic poems have to be felt, lived etc., and not understood. Well?

As I say, feeling or living is quite enough, if there is something to feel or live. But in surrealism the thing to be felt is itself deliberately incoherent.

You have said that your province doesn’t go so far. How then does the surrealist intervene between your Force and my transcription unless you want him to do so?

The Surrealist can intervene anywhere, provided the logical mind consents to be a little drowsy.

This sort of thing has opened suddenly in me, as you know. I think after your surrealistic poem you have passed it on to me.

It may be, but my surrealistic poem was clarity itself compared with this technique.

You must be having additional work now. So shall we stop sending poems?

Well, I don’t know. If they are not too many conundrums –

When there is an operation in the hospital, my services are required and it goes on sometimes till 11 a.m. In that case I may miss meditation. What should I do?

I suppose it happens only once in a way? or is it frequent or the rule?

I hear Mother’s ailment is “red eye”. It may be then conjunctivitis or even iritis.

It is neither.

Medical help no good for the Divine?

Medicines no use for this even if Mother would take them – only rest as complete as possible, especially from reading and writing or any strain of the eye.

January 30, 1937

The first line of my poem of today runs thus:

ওই তব পূর্ণ কুম্ভে কী রেখেছ সখি?¹⁸

[Another line:’]

নিয়ে যাও, নিয়ে যাও সে বিষ-কলসী!¹⁹

J says it is vulgar.

I don’t understand the use of the word vulgar here. I don’t see anything vulgar in পূর্ণ কুম্ভ²⁰ or বিষ-কলসী²¹.

পূর্ণ কুম্ভ may mean breasts, but it takes another meaning in the poem: the inflamed desire of the flesh. Even so, is it vulgar?

পূর্ণ কুম্ভ, if it means the breasts, would be described in English as sensuous but not as vulgar. The word vulgar is only used for coarse and crude expressions of the sensual, trivial or ugly. But it does not seem to me that it should naturally be taken = breast, but indicate the whole vital and physical being regarded as a vessel or jar which can be filled with honey or water or poison. Nothing vulgar in that.

Why not send that surrealist poem? I would very much like to see what is spiritual surrealism.

It isn’t spiritual, it is comic – and I am not going to send it. It is Nonsense Surrealistic not Unfathomable-Sense S²².

Tomorrow, if you like, I won’t send any poem, thus sparing you some time to send me your poem.

No use not sending, as I am not going to send. My reference to it was only a joke.

I hope Mother is better now.

Somewhat.

January 31, 1937

Herbert said yesterday that though Baudelaire is a great poet, he is considered an immoral one.

That is not anything against his greatness – only against his morality. Plenty of great people have been “immoral”.

I had just a glance at Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil and I found this:

“The Moon more indolently dreams tonight

Than a fair woman on her couch at rest,

Caressing, with a hand distraught and light,

Before she sleeps, the contour of her breast.”

What a queer imagination, but vulgar or immoral?

What is there vulgar in it or immoral? It is as an indolent distraught gesture that he puts it. How does it offend against morality?

It is strange that I get a thrill from these bizarre images. Your inspiration will, I hope or fear, give me a Baudelairean fame – an immoral, vulgar poet!

It is a terrible prospect.

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 পন্থা²³.

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

February 2, 1937

Did your remark “people withdraw into themselves” carry a suggestion that “personal touch” is not necessary or essential?...

It is not essential – the inner touch is the essential thing. But it can be of immense help if properly received. For certain things it is essential but these certain things nobody yet is ready for.

Some people believe that whatever is necessary can be had through meditation or otherwise.

Whatever is necessary for the inner being, yes.

As a matter of fact, plenty of people are glad as they can now do whatever they please.

But there was never any necessity for such people coming to the Pranam! It is not obligatory.

I know from my own experience that we have abused the Pranam... Even then I believe very strongly that there is something very great in the physical touch of the Mother, and one can’t afford to lose it under any circumstance; of course one must have the right attitude.

That is it. The Pranam (like the soup in the evening before) has been very badly misused. What is the Pranam for? That people might receive in the most direct and integral way – a way that includes the physical consciousness and makes it a channel – what the Mother could give them and they were ready for. Instead people sit as if at a court reception noting what the Mother does (and generally misobserving), making inferences, gossiping afterwards as to her attitude to this or that person, who is the more favoured, who is less favoured – as if the Mother were doling out her favour or disfavour or appreciations or disapprovals there, just as courtiers in a court might do. What an utterly unspiritual attitude. How can the Mother’s work be truly done in such an atmosphere? How can there be the right reception? Naturally it reacts on the sadhak, creates any amount of misconception, wrong feelings etc. – creates an open door for the suggestions of the Adversary who delights in falsehood and administers plenty of it to the minds of the sadhaks. This apart from the fact that many throw all sorts of undesirable things on the Mother through the Pranam. The whole thing tends to become a routine, even where there are not these reactions. Some of course profit, those who can keep something of the right attitude. If there were the right attitude in all, well by this time things would have gone very far towards the spiritual goal.

Some people, especially ladies, missed the Mother when she withdrew from the Pranam. I didn’t miss her much, why? Is it because my psychic is not very awake?

Or perhaps because the physical consciousness is obscure and the psychic not prominent enough.

There are others quite sincere who like the meditation instead of the Pranam.

Yes, there are some who say they profit much by it.

Are they withdrawing into themselves and getting the Mother there?

They are getting something at any rate.

What’s the right attitude? To be psychically depressed, because Mother is not coming or to try to get her within?

Psychic depression (a queer phrase – you mean vital, I suppose) can help no one. To try to receive within is always the true thing, whether through meditation or pranam.

Can one pray for the Divine? Praying for the Divine to the Divine, not a contradiction?

The Divine Himself can pray to the Divine. There is no contradiction.

I am surprised to hear that even “prognostications” are very harmful. I thought these beliefs were just superstitions.

Prognostications of that kind should not be lightly thought or spoken – especially in the case of the Mother – in other cases, even if there is a possibility or probability, they should be kept confidential from the person affected, unless it is necessary to inform. This is because of the large part played by state of consciousness and suggestion in illness. I shall I suppose one day send you the Presse Médicale with my note (the journal is with me and I shall send it to you, it is no longer with Pavitra) and that will perhaps show the basis.

Ptosis means drooping of the upper eyelid by a paralysis temporary or otherwise.

But, confound it, there is nothing of the kind. The drooping of the eyelid was quite voluntary.

[In J’s poem:] What is the blue bird? Aspiration for the Divine?

The Blue Bird is always a symbol of aspiration towards something Beyond.

February 3, 1937

I don’t quite understand about “the physical consciousness” being obscure.

The physical consciousness is that part which directly responds to physical things and physical Nature, sees the outer only as real, is occupied with it – not like the thinking mind with thought and knowledge, or like the vital with emotion, passion, subtler satisfaction of desire. If this part is obscure, then it is difficult to bring into it the consciousness of deeper or spiritual things, feelings etc. even when the mind or the vital are after these deeper things.

There is a flower called “Aspiration in the Physical”, what does it mean?

Aspiration means aspiration for the Divine, for higher consciousness etc.

February 4, 1937

About Mulshankar’s vomiting, Manilal says that it is there from his birth, it has nothing to do with the accident. I wonder if it is the result of too much meditation and concentration which he used to do.

But surely he did not do a lot of concentration before birth?

February 6, 1937

I hear X has a deep affection, respect and admiration for Y and yet I know that she has suffered a lot at his hands.

[Sri Aurobindo underlined “deep affection”.]

Of course. A womanly woman always appreciates a man who can make her suffer, provided he has a dominating personality. Cave-woman instinct.

X was given some home-truths today. She didn’t like it very much...

Of course not – nobody likes home-truths when they show one’s own inconsistent egoism. If they did not go home, they would be more pleasant.

B has long-standing piles – painful and burning.

He wrote about something like a boil near about + protruding piles and was afraid of being immobilised if it went on. Nothing of the kind?

By the way, is there still trouble in Mother’s eyes?

Somewhat.

I send for information another tragic letter from S – which please return. It appears, it is only a resurrected S that is walking about the Asram since yesterday afternoon!

I say – Dr. Hutchinson, President of the Royal Society of Medicine, in London, says (vide Sunday Times, page 4) that if all the doctors struck work for a year, it would make no difference in the death-rate. The doctors’ only use is to give comfort, confidence and consolation. Now what do you say to this opinion of your President? Rather hot, isn’t it?

February 7, 1937

Friends have I none, Guru; to none can I open myself except to you. don’t forsake me, please.

Certainly not.

I send you a book of poetry²⁴ to have your opinion on the Bengali poems there. They strike me as very powerful and original in the Tagorean age. I think they abound in surrealistic images and have some sort of similarity with my recent poems.

Have read two pages – very fine poetry. Shall read at leisure. But up to now nothing surrealistic. So far don’t find any identity with yours except a certain fullness and boldness of language.

Please don’t keep the book for long. Otherwise Premanand²⁵ will lose all his prem and anand²⁶!

He is always doing that and losing his hair too into the bargain. If he objects to my keeping the book, I will give him a clout on the head which will help to keep his hair on.

February 8, 1937

Did you write: “... I will give him a club on the head...”? He will die, Sir, but if he doesn’t, a doctor will be needed!

Clout, clout. A clout is a harmless thing – at most you will have to put a bandage.

I read the script in Sunday Times, by Dr. Hutchinson. It is not only hot, but a little top-heavy it seems. If the doctors’ function is only to give consolation, I fear many patients visiting us will leave, cursing us. Take B’s case of piles. Will simple consolation suffice?

It depends on the effectivity of your consoling words and confidence in giving drugs. Your words and cheery care may so raise B’s morale that it will affect his piles and, if it can’t do altogether that, your medicine may give so much confidence to the piles that they will walk in and give up the ghost. But it’s all a confidence trick in reality. If the piles are crass and refuse confidence, well –

I asked V if he agreed to this “consolation” treatment. He said, “Certainly!” Then I asked him, “How is it then that your old malady has come back which was supposed to have been cured by R?”

Well, that’s the point. How did R or how does anybody cure? By his medicines or by his “confidence” imparted to the subconscient of the patient?

He answered, “But one doctor may fail and, besides, there is the Force!” Well?

The Force is another matter. Your President Hutchinson or Henderson (or what the deuce was his name?) wasn’t thinking in terms of Force.

But doesn’t R cut short the course of a disease, doesn’t his medicine help to alleviate the patients’ sufferings?

Sometimes. But how?

Anyway, what is your opinion?

My opinion is that Allah is great and great is the mystery of the universe and things are not what they seem, etc.!

February 9, 1937

I have no energy to write or fight. Down in the pool!

Wade out and up.

I have glanced through your translation of J’s poem. But can’t you make some time and put it into metrical form, since you have done so much? The translation, though beautiful, loses much of the magnificence of the original.

This costs no trouble – done in ten minutes – to metrify is the very deuce.

I forgot to report about S. You know he has a cut just above the patella. Due to constant walking it’s a gaping wound. Today while we were dressing it, he fainted! He said I frightened him by saying that it was serious. I said nothing of the kind – except that it may require stitches, which he took to be serious. Just a stitch will do. But he is so nervy! We may wait till tomorrow and see?

Mother has told him to take rest – perhaps with rest he may not need stitching. I don’t think he is very courageous about these things.

February 12, 1937

About my new poetry which you call “surrealist”, many expressions creep in, having hardly any meaning. Some- times a poem becomes a “great success”, at other times it is a misfire.

When one develops a new kind of poetry or a new technique, one must not mind having to find one’s way.

... At times I have to make a foolish face before people when I can’t understand my own expression, and they’ll think I’m writing rubbish...

Why foolish? Make a mystic face and say “It means too much for owls.” The difficulty is that you all want exact intellectual meanings for these things. A meaning there is, but it can’t always be fitted with a tight and neat intellectual cap.

Your cryptic smiles and magnificent silence, don’t lend themselves to any interpretation. You have a very easy way of escape, by saying “Surrealist”.

My “surrealist” is a joke but not a depreciatory one.

D also said “If this is surrealistic, I have nothing to say” – which, at times, is tantamount to saying that under that heading one can write anything blessed or non-blessed.

If you are going to listen to D’s criticisms or be influenced by them, you can’t go on writing these things. His standpoint is an entirely different one. What his mind can’t understand, is for him nonsense. He is for the orthodox style of poetry with as much colour as possible, but not transgressing by its images the boundary of the orthodox. This poetry is a modern “heresy” and heretics must have the courage of their non-conformity.

Now, what the deuce is this Surrealism? I gather that Baudelaire is its father, and Mallarmé its son.

Surrealism is a new phrase invented only the other day and I am not really sure what it conveys. According to some it is a dream poetry reaching a deeper truth, a deeper reality than the surface reality. I don’t know if this is the whole theory or only one side or phase of the practice. Baudelaire as a surrealist is a novel idea, nobody ever called him that before. Mallarmé, Verlaine and others used to be classed as impressionist poets, sometimes as symbolists. But now the surrealists seem to claim descent from these poets.

Does surrealism indicate that the meaning should be always unintelligible, if any? That there may be many expressions which have hardly any significance, coherence, etc.? If it has, so much the better; if none, well, it doesn’t, in any way, affect the beauty of the poem?

This is the gibe of the orthodox school of critics or readers – certainly the surrealists would not agree with it – they would claim they have got at a deeper line of truth and meaning than the intellectual.

Yesterday, you used the term “surrealistic transitions”. What did you mean?

Transitions that are not there of a mental logic.

Transitions that are hardly palpable on the surface?

Not palpable on the surface, but palpable to a deeper vision.

Or do they have no link or reason at all, and come in just as vital dreams come in?

How do you say that vital dreams have no link or reason? They have their own coherence, only the physical mind cannot always get at the clue by following which the coherence would unroll itself. For that matter the sequences of physical existence are coherent to us only because we are accustomed to it and our reason has made up a meaning out of it. But subject it to the view of a different consciousness and it becomes an incoherent phantasmagoria. That’s how the Mayavadins or Schopenhauer would speak of it; the former say deliberately that dream-sequences and life-sequences stand on the same footing, only they have another structure. Each is real and consequent to itself – though neither, they would say, is real or consequent in very truth.

I request you to give a brief discourse on Surrealism. D says, “I feel there is something in your poem, but I can’t catch it.”

D has asked practically for the same, but I would have to study the subject before I could do so.

February 12, 1937

[A letter written to Dilip Kumar Roy.]²⁷

I really can’t tell you what surrealism is, because it is something – at least the word is – quite new and I have neither read the reliable theorists of the school nor much of their poetry. What I picked up on the way was through reviews and quotations, the upshot being that it is a poetry based on the dream-consciousness, but I don’t know if this is correct or merely an English critic’s idea of it. The inclusion of Baudelaire and Valéry seems to indicate something wider than that. But the word is of quite recent origin and nobody spoke formerly of Baudelaire as a surrealist or even of Mallarmé. Mallarmé was supposed to be the founder of a new trend of poetry, impressionist and symbolist, followed in varying degrees and not by any means in the same way by Verlaine and Rimbaud, both of them poets of great fame. Verlaine is certainly a great poet and people now say Rimbaud also, but I have never come across his poetry except in extracts. This strain has developed in Valéry and other noted writers of today. It seems that all these are now claimed as part of or the origin of the surrealist movement. But I cannot say what are the exact boundaries or who comes in where. I suppose if Baron communicates to you books on the subject or more precise information, we shall know more clearly now. In any case, surrealism is part of an increasing attempt of the European mind to escape from the surface consciousness (in poetry as well as in painting and in thought) and grope after a deeper truth of things which is not on the surface. The Dream-Consciousness as it is called – meaning not merely what we see in dreams, but the inner consciousness in which we get into contact with deeper worlds which underlie, influence and to some extent explain much in our lives, what the psychologists call the subliminal or the subconscient (the latter a very ambiguous phrase) – offers the first road of escape and the surrealists seem to be trying to force it. My impression is that there is much fumbling and that more often it is certain obscure and not always very safe layers that are tapped. That accounts for the note of diabolism that comes in in Baudelaire, in Rimbaud also, I believe, and in certain ugly elements in English surrealist poetry and painting. But this is only an impression.

Nirod’s poetry (what he writes now) is from the Dream-Consciousness, no doubt about that. It has suddenly opened in him and he finds now a great joy of creation and abundance of inspiration which were and are quite absent when he tries to write laboriously in the mental way. This seems to me to indicate either that the poet in him has his real power there or that he has opened to the same force that worked in poets like Mallarmé. My labelling him as a surrealist is partly – though not altogether – a joke. How far it applies depends on what the real aim and theory of the surrealist school may be. Obscurity and unintelligibility are not the essence of any poetry – and except for unconscious or semi-conscious humorists like the Dadaists – cannot be its aim or principle. True Dream-poetry (let us call it so for the nonce) has and must always have a meaning and a coherence. But it may very well be obscure or seem meaningless to those who take their stand on the surface or “waking” mind and accept only its links and its logic. Dream-poetry is usually full of images, visions, symbols, phrases that seek to strike at things too deep for the ordinary means of expression. Nirod does not deliberately make his poems obscure; he writes what comes through from the source he has tapped and does not interfere with its flow by his own mental volition. In many modernist poets there may be labour and a deliberate posturing, but it is not so in his case. I interpret his poems because he wants me to do it, but I have always told him that an intellectual rendering narrows the meaning – it has to be seen and felt, not thought out. Thinking it out may give a satisfaction and an appearance of mental logicality, but the deeper sense and sequence can only be apprehended by an inner sense. I myself do not try to find out the meaning of his poems, I try to feel what they mean in vision and experience and then render into mental terms. This is a special kind of poetry and has to be dealt with according to its kind and nature. There is a sequence, a logic, a design in them, but not one that can satisfy the more rigid law of the logical intelligence.

About Housman’s theory: it is not merely an appeal to emotion that he posits as the test of pure poetry; he deliberately says that pure poetry does not bother about intellectual meaning at all, it is to the intellect nonsense. He says that the interpretations of Blake’s famous poems rather spoil them – they appeal better without being dissected in that way. His theory is questionable, but that is what it comes to; he is wrong in using the word “nonsense” and perhaps in speaking of pure and impure poetry. All the same, to Blake and to writers of the dream-consciousness, his rejection of the intellectual standard is quite applicable.

Sri Aurobindo

February 13, 1937

[A letter written to Dilip Kumar Roy.]²⁸

About your points regarding surrealism:

1. I have answered this in my former letter. If the surrealist dream-experiences are flat, pointless or ugly, it must be because they penetrate only as far as the “subconscious” physical and “subconscious” vital dream layers which are the strata nearest to the surface. Dream-consciousness is a vast world in which there are a multitude of provinces and kingdoms, but ordinary dreamers for the most part penetrate consciously only to these first layers which belong to what may properly be called the subconscious belt. When they pass into deeper sleep regions, their recording surface dream-mind becomes unconscious and no longer gives any transcript of what is seen and experienced there; or else in coming back these experiences of the deeper strata fade away and are quite forgotten before one reaches the waking state. But when there is a stronger dream-capacity, or the dream-state becomes more conscious, then one is aware of these deeper experiences and can bring back a transcript which is sometimes a clear record, sometimes a hieroglyph, but in either case possessed of a considerable interest and significance.

2. It is only the subconscious belt that is chaotic in its dream sequences; for its transcriptions are fantastic and often mixed, combining a jumble of different elements: some play with impressions from the past, some translate outward touches pressing on the sleep-mind; most are fragments from successive dream experiences that are not really part of one connected experience – as if a gramophone record were to be made up of snatches of different songs all jumbled together. The vital dreams even in the subconscious range are often coherent in themselves and only seem incoherent to the waking intelligence because the logic and law of their sequences is different from the logic and law which the physical reason imposes on the incoherences of physical life. But if one gets the guiding clue and if one has some dream-experience and dream-insight, then it is possible to seize the links of the sequences and make out the significance, often very profound or very striking, both of the detail and of the whole. Deeper in, we come to perfectly coherent dreams recording the experience of the inner vital and inner mental planes; there are also true psychic dreams – the latter usually are of a great beauty. Some of these mental or vital plane dream-experiences, however, are symbolic, very many in fact, and can only be understood if one is familiar with or gets the clue to the symbols.

3. It depends on the nature of the dream. If they are of the right kind, they need no aid of imagination to be converted into poetry. If they are significant, imagination in the sense of a free use of mental invention might injure their truth and meaning – unless of course the imagination is of the nature of an inspired vision coming from the same plane and filling out or reconstructing the recorded experience so as to bring out the Truth held in it more fully than the dream transcript could do; for a dream record is usually compressed and often hastily selective.

4. The word “psyche” is used by most people to mean anything belonging to the inner mind, vital or physical, though the true psyche is different from these things. Poetry does come from these sources or even from the superconscient sometimes; but it does not come usually through the form of dreams; it comes either through word-vision or through conscious vision and imagery whether in a fully waking or an inward-drawn state: the latter may go so far as to be a state of Samadhi – svapna samādhi. In all these cases it is vision rather than dream that is the imaging power. Dreams also can be made a material for poetry; but everyone who dreams or has visions or has a flow of images cannot by that fact be a poet. To say that a predisposition and discipline are needed to bring them to light in the form of written words is merely a way of saying that it is not enough to be a dreamer, one must have the poetic faculty and some training – unless the surrealists mean by this statement something else than what the words naturally signify. What is possible, however, is that by going into the inner (what is usually called the subliminal) consciousness – this is not really subconscious but a veiled or occult consciousness – or getting somehow into contact with it, one not originally a poet can awake to poetic inspiration and power. No poetry can be written without access to some source of inspiration. Mere recording of dreams or images or even visions could never be sufficient, unless it is a poetic inspiration that records them with the right use of words and rhythm bringing out their poetic substance. On the other hand, I am bound to admit that among the records of dream-experiences even from people unpractised in writing, I have met with a good many that read like a brilliant and colourful poetry which does hit – satisfying Housman’s test – the solar plexus. So much I can concede to the surrealist theory; but if they say on that basis that all can with a little training turn themselves into poets – well, one needs a little more proof before one can accept so wide a statement.

February 13, 1937

[I had asked Sri Aurobindo on 12.2.37, if I could put a stitch to S’s small cut (9.2.37). There was no answer that day.]

By the way did you do your tailoring work with S? I forgot to write that you could stitch away at him as much as necessary.

February 14, 1937

Today I have written three sonnets, Sir, in one and a half hours! What do you say to that?

Remarkable!

I have a fear that the fountain might dry up or that I might go on repeating the old thing.

Why fear? If it happens, you will start something new. Perhaps super-realism.

February 15, 1937

What a disappointment! I thought yesterday’s poem was very fine. It seems it is pretty hard to write exceedingly fine stuff in this kind of poetry.

Well, well, I must reserve the adverbs, or I shall have nothing to put in case you “exceed” yourself.

February 16, 1937

P said about my new poems that they seemed to be more intellectual, but there is not much power; for power comes only from the Psychic. I was rather surprised to hear that from him as I thought Power, Peace, vastness, etc., come from the spiritual consciousness from above...

Power can be everywhere, on any plane. What descends from above is power of the higher Consciousness – but there is a Power of the vital, mental, physical planes also. Power is not a special characteristic of the psychic or of the spiritual plane.

February 17, 1937

So you also fail to tell the precise meaning of the poem!

Who the devil can give the precise meaning of inner things?

Then it will never be understood. People will sarcastically say, “Surrealist! W.P.B²⁹!”

“Write plenty of books”?

The other day Dilip said to M. Baron, “But one can’t understand this surrealist poetry.” He replied, “Why should you understand?”

Exactly – why should you understand? When you can instand, overstand, roundstand, interstand – what’s the need of understanding?

If you don’t understand, how do you pronounce fine, very fine, etc.? By simply feeling?

Queer fellow! As if feeling could not go deeper than intellectual understanding!

Anyhow, it seems the poet has nothing to do but to submit himself to the Force. For, when he doesn’t know what he is talking about, how is he going to improve?

He need not understand, but he can know.

It is like casting a net and depending on luck to catch small or big fish as may be the case. Is there any other way?

Of course there is. Find it out.

See for instance today’s fish. Do you find any head or tail?...

Very nicely coloured gleaming fish.

But seriously, how to write better this kind of stuff? What is the trick?

The trick is to put your demand on the source for what you want. If you want to fathom (not understand) what you are writing ask for the vision of the thing to come along with the word, a vision bringing an inner comprehension. If you want something mystic but convincing to the non-mystic reader, ask for that till you get it.

What do you say to today’s poem?

Very fine, this time.

Well, let us put it in English – without trying to be too literal, turning the phrases to suit the Eng. language. If there are any mistakes of rendering they can be adjusted.

At the day-end behold the Golden Daughter of Imaginations –

She sits alone under the Tree of Life –

A form of the Truth of Being has risen before her rocking there like a lake

And on it is her unwinking gaze. But from the unfathomed Abyss where it was buried, upsurges

A tale of lamentation, a torrent-lightning passion,

A melancholy held fixed in the flowing blood of the veins,–

A curse thrown from a throat of light.

The rivers of a wind that has lost its perfumes are bearing away

On their waves the Mantra-rays that were her ornaments

Into the blue self-born sea of a silent Dawn;

The ceaseless vibration-scroll of a hidden Sun

Creates within her, where all is a magic incantation,

A picture of the transcendent Mystery – that luminous laughter

(Or, A mystery-picture of the Transcendent?)

Is like the voice of a gold-fretted flute flowing from the inmost heart of the Creator.

Now, I don’t know whether that was what you meant, but it is the meaning I find there. Very likely it has no head or tail, but it has a body and a very beautiful body – and I ask with Baron, why do you want to understand? why do you want to cut it up into the dry mathematical figures of the Intellect? Hang it all, sir! In spite of myself you are making me a convert to the Housman theory and Surrealism. No, Sir – feel, instand, overstand, interstand, but don’t try to understand the creations of a supra-intellectual Beauty.

It is enough to feel and grasp without trying to “understand” the creations of a supra-intellectual Beauty.

February 18, 1937

Will a simple “demand” give the thing?

A demand is an aspiration for something – it will bring its answer, not always immediately, but in time.

But which source?

Whatever the source.

Where is the time to ask for all that when one is busy writing?

Have it at any time as the thing you want – whenever you think of your poetry.

I thought of giving you a simple beauty today, but give this instead for you to see if what I demanded from the source has been granted.

If it’s something which means a big advance, you can’t expect it all at once.

Well, Sir, has the source responded?

Responded to what? What were you asking for?

Where does the poem strike you – at the solar or lunar plexus?

It must be the Baron plexus. It is surely your contact with him that has started you on this line.

February 19, 1937

You are a most wonderful God, Sir! More queer than my poems, if you don’t mind my saying so. You have been hammering this surrealism into my soul for such a long time and now you say that I got it from Baron?

You don’t seem to have read carefully my letter to Dilip. I said your poems belong to the Dream-Consciousness, but I had used the word Surrealism lightly – i.e. your poems are not on a line with the actual surrealism of the day, the thing to which the name is given.

But this last poem is Baronic, (I don’t know what Baron’s poems are like, but I mean they have the modern incoherence).

If Baron has anything to do with it, it was only the other day that I first met him.

As this came soon after meeting Baron, I said as a joke that it must have been a real modern surrealistic influence from him.

Well, regarding yesterday’s poem, you seem to have understood the surrealist lines, not the others.

Good Lord! the only lines I understood were those I marked as not entirely surrealistic.

I thought the reverse.

So did I.

Now I find that in spite of your long letters, I have not really grasped what this blessed surrealism is.

I wrote very clearly in my letter to Dilip that I did not know myself what Surrealism is since I have not studied either surrealistic theory or surrealistic literature. I gathered from what I have read – reviews, citations – that it was dream-consciousness of a lower type (therefore incoherent and often ugly). I also explained at great length in another letter that there was a Dream-Consciousness of a higher type. Are these distinctions really so difficult to understand?

February 20, 1937

What does this telegram from Chand mean? All I know is that this loan company is a company in Chittagong where he has kept deposits. Is it the position of his complex self or the self of the company that is risky? Which?

Both perhaps.

One thing is clear that he requires your protection. Well?

Difficult to protect such an erratic genius. However.

February 23, 1937

The difficulty I am faced with in my poetry is that some poems suddenly turn out to be very good, others fall below the mark.

But that is quite usual in the work of all poets.

Everything depends on the Inspiration. But then I can’t change any line or word since I don’t understand what I am writing.

From your explanations you seem to understand all right. The question is about the inspiration itself. It is sometimes more successful, sometimes less – for various reasons. What one has to see is whether what has come through is quite satisfactory in language, image, harmonious building, poetic force. If not, one can call a farther inspiration to emend what is deficient. At first one allows the inspiration to come through without interference, to establish the habit of free flow. But that does not mean one must not afterwards alter or improve – only it should be done not by the mind but by a fresh and better inspiration. If in the course of writing itself, a correcting inspiration comes, that can be accepted – otherwise one does the perfecting afterwards.

You advised me to demand from the source what I want. But I don’t know what precisely I want. All I can say is that the writing should have greater beauty, depth, etc.

That is rather too vague.

... I fondly cherish a hope that one day we shall be able to write like Harin.

Better, I hope.

Perhaps we may not have his fluency.

So much fluency is not necessary. He had perhaps too much.

Nowdays I am having more difficulty in writing. The “abundance” of inspiration seems to have vanished. In one hour I write just one sonnet... I find that plenty of old images and expressions try to come in, which I have to reject mercilessly.

It is probably because of your seeking for something better which makes the mind hesitate – as also the bar put upon the constant repetition of old images. But that is only a transitional difficulty. Still perhaps you are thinking too much while writing?

I concentrate or meditate for a while before writing; at times I go within and then write. But the difficulty is no less. I have to pause after every expression.

Pause to do what? Think? You have to cultivate the power of feeling instinctively the value of what you write – either while writing or immediately you go over it when it is completed.

February 24, 1937

How is my aspiration for greater beauty, depth, etc. “vague”? How to be more precise when one doesn’t know the meaning of what one is writing?

Whatever the reason it is not precise, it is only a general formula which in practice might mean a hundred different things.

The result of the Darshan was very queer: a heavy inert sleep during the day and night. The waking hours passed in vacancy. I felt like a corpse without a soul; even the thought of death passed across my mind.

It looks like a plunge into physical or sub-physical inertia.

Perhaps it was due to fatigue: keeping awake on the Darshan night, for decoration?

Might be. Fatigue sometimes brings that.

... Or have you done something in the sub-conscient physical?

Done what? Raised up the subconscient in the form of a blank? Had no such intention.

Some people had peace, joy, etc. I am not discouraged, but would like to know what happened, and pray to get me into a better state.

Of course this kind of emptiness often happens when the physical is being directly dealt with – the important thing is not to remain in it, but to make it a passage to a new force and better consciousness.

By the way, do you think I should seriously take up French?

I don’t know that it is necessary just now.

Naik proposes that I join the French class they are organising...

Naik’s class as proposed means an active part for everybody. It depends on whether you feel like taking such a part.

February 25, 1937

You spoke about a “formula” yesterday. If you could give it, we could aspire for it and get quick results.

There is no formula – these things are not done by formulas. It is the thing that you want for your poetry that you have to make precise in your perception – and get it.

Or do you mean that one should first aspire for harmony, when that is established then depth, images, etc.?

Harmony certainly, and as much depth as possible and the right images and language giving the thing to be expressed as powerfully built and living a form as possible. But I am not aware that there is any fixed order like that in their coming.

You say sometimes images are forced – How to understand that? Inner feeling?

One can surely feel that if one tries.

My inner vision didn’t tell me that “the book of the Ocean” was a forced image, nor did it tell me that the poem was not cogent enough...

Well then, the inner vision or the subtle sense of these things has to be developed till it is capable of feeling and seeing these differences.

I realise however that all this will take time to develop. Meanwhile one has to stumble, make mistakes and sometimes have good luck.

If one can’t yet see one’s way, one has to feel, if not by experiment.

February 28, 1937

So Dr. Becharlal has gone! Now perhaps the avalanche of the Dispensary work will roll down on me. Will you save and help me?

Help, I can. But save? Well, an avalanche is an avalanche.

March 1, 1937

You find “funny” things in my poems? Then, Sir, you have only to ask me to stop writing.

But why do you object to fun? Modern opinion is that a poet ought to be funny (humorous) and that the objection to funniness in poetry is a romantic superstition.

How is it then that you give remarks “very fine” etc.?

Well, it can be funnily fine or finely funny – can’t it?

If they are really funny, why should I spoil my valuable time writing them when I could sleep comfortably for two hours?

For the joy of the world, of course.

Funny however is used in the sense of “extraordinary”. You can’t deny that these things are extraordinary?

Is that the reason why you don’t give any explanations either? Very well, Sir!

Why should I explain when you can understand and explain yourself? As Christ came to save sinners, not the righteous, so am I here to explain the inexplicable to the non-understanding, not to the understanding.

[There were a few friends who, inspired by my surrealistic poetry, were writing poems in the same vein, and I was sending them to Sri Aurobindo asking him to explain some of the difficult ones. After explaining once or twice he said that if it continued he would go on “strike”.]

But I don’t see the logic of your threat of “strike”. If people begin writing these surrealistic poems by your inspiration, am I to blame and suffer?

The strike is supposed to be against the 4, 5, 6 ad infinitum, not against the two.

My inspiration? When they catch it from you!

By the way, for whom have you to write explanations from set to dawn? One is my precious self?

Yes.

And the other is J?

Yes. I have to explain for her also.

But she is not a surrealist!

Surrealist or symbolist, it comes to the same so far as need for explanation goes.

March 2, 1937

... In spite of your decrying my poems, Sir, there are plenty of beautiful conceptions, you must admit!

Who decries it? Some are funny – I beg pardon, extraordinary – but the beauty is all there.

March 3, 1937

I suppose you have seen that letter of S’s. I left it to the wisdom of the Mother to do what my wisdom failed to decide... What a letter, my God!

Why get upset over such an entirely unimportant thing? S’s letters are like that and nobody attaches the least value to them. I have thrown his letter into the W.P.B. which is the only place that suits it.

March 4, 1937

A has pain in the liver region and near the umbilicus. She was given acid Hydrachlor mix with Nux vomica for a long time. Now we have changed it to mix. Sod. and other salts.

A writes that B told her to take curds when she had diarrhoea (?), and she has been doing so with the results that she is being washed out completely by thick leucorrhea, sometimes also intense shooting pains in stomach lower and upper – spine and loins paining day and night. Asks if she is to continue curds. Asks me to tell you.

By the way what was your objection to Kola for Arjava? I have forgotten. He complains of being very rundown in energy – Mother thought that ten days of Kola repeated whenever necessary (not continued for longer periods) might help to keep it up – and as we have fresh supply of Kola – well!

March 5, 1937

My objection was that Kola contains caffein which is a stimulant, so it can’t be continued for a long period. But surely it can be taken for 2 or 3 weeks – it will be a good tonic after this weakness.

In that case you can give? If it is not with you, take from Pavitra.

March 6, 1937

[P suffering from a carbuncle.] He said that if it was going to be serious, he would as well start for home!

If he wants to go, don’t stop him – let him do so. He was allowed to come here for a month’s experiment to see whether the place suited him and he suited the place. The carbuncle seems to be a negative answer.

What’s your opinion, Sir, on today’s poem?

Quite successful.

March 7, 1937

“Quite successful” only? When will this be followed by a little more warmth and exhilaration, can you predict?

Well, I can write, if you want: “Superlative! Extraordinary! Unimaginable! Surprising! Inexpressible! Ineffable!” That ought to be warm and exhilarating –

I told you that I have written two poems in an hour. Should I have written one instead and revised it to make it a better egg if possible?

No such rule necessary.

But when this stuff itself is not very remarkable, can further labour improve it much?

Only detail corrections needed.

Wouldn’t it be a waste of time?

Yes.

I could write instead another poem if it pours in?

Yes.

Of course one can go on altering and altering till an altogether new poem is created. That is what you do, I understand.

That is for “big” poetry. Short poems I usually revise only once and alterations are not many.

March 9, 1937

10.p.m.

I heard just now that X is again troubled because of some “peacelessness”, and intends to go to Calcutta. May I go to see him? I hope there is no harm in doing so? I know I won’t be able to help him... He cheered me up in my last depression.

I suppose it is useless to discuss, or to persuade either. What will be the best thing to do? I pray that he may give up this mad project... You must keep him, Sir!

There is no harm in your going to see him, but it should be to cheer him and be helpful, not to dispute or lecture. To make him change his mind or cancel his going is difficult now because he has telegraphed to everybody – would be of little use. For something in him is strongly seized with this idea of Calcutta and Almora which has been long ripening and repeating itself, and it has been coming back and back every ten days or so. It would come back again and with greater vehemence. It is better to let him have his relief. He wrote a quite reasonable letter except for his usual silly nonsense about the “grimness” of the morning Meditation – and in answer I subscribed to his going for a few months, and staying at Calcutta and Almora. He was making his preparations quite cheerfully when suddenly he got the idea of taking Y with him (so it is reported) and went to her. She gave him a scolding and lecture. Result – he came gloomy to the Mother, found her “stern” (which she was not) and broke into a tragic despair, praying for death and saying that he would never come back or write again etc. If he is to go, it is surely better that he should go gladly and cheerfully and not in this spirit.

As to the madness of the project it is certainly not the best thing he could have done. But he has got into such a formation of ideas and feelings against the Yoga as it is practised here (he had that always almost) and is so unable to get rid of it that he is unable to have any outward progress until it is broken and no progress (a quiet inward psychic growth he does not want) throws him into fits of despair after every calm period of a few days. He wants to escape or get relief from it by going out. Well, let him try it, by a miracle it might succeed. In any case to hold back always when he says he is in turmoil here is not possible.

March 10, 1937

L has a burning sensation in the mouth and throat.

What cause? She says from mouth to throat is carpeted with pepper and covered with thin pomegranate grains and she suspects an eruption there. Also you have medicated her throat but under the tongue there is fire. Surrealist Poetry is not your monopoly – even your patients write it.

S informed me the other day that her spine had already begun breaking of itself into two.

March 11, 1937

Guru, I was badly hit by X’s going away... The first question is: why has he gone?

The marvel is that he did not go before.

You and Mother have poured and poured all heaven, as it were, on him – affection, sympathy, love, consideration, etc., and yet he complains of dryness of heart here!

By dryness of heart, he means that the vital is not given free play.

You have very admirably explained in NK’s poem Jackal, how the lower nature rushes towards the subconscient, and as soon as I read it I could not resist drawing the conclusion that this is X’s present picture, word for word. Do you agree?

Yes, it is that. A certain part of him which belongs to the lower vital was always rushing and has dragged away the rest.

... Why has this lower nature become so vehement this time?

But it has been rising again and again vehemently for a long time.

Many times he wanted to go but you stopped him; why have you failed this time?

This time I didn’t try. It was becoming like a dog pulling at his leash and moaning miserably. Can’t go on with that sort of thing for ever. So I had promised his outing, Bangalore and Cape Comorin. He changed it to Baroda and Almora after Bangalore. I said, All right. He gave up Almora and perhaps Baroda. I said, All right. Finally no Bangalore, but Calcutta, Almora and anywhere else and several months at least. I said, All right – Then for some reason the old drama (for up till now all was fairly reasonable except the “grim Meditation” affair and the intolerableness of Mother’s withdrawal and loss of the Pranam which had made his sufferings just tolerable), of Mother’s sternness, desire of death, never never shall I come back here – finally joy of going accompanied with sentimental effusions. That’s the whole story.

Will he come back with his lower fires run down and, thus a changed man, jump into the spiritual sea? For a time perhaps, but will not the hydra-headed monster rise up again?

Yes, if there is no radical change. But only Mahakali can bring that about. Up to now we have given her no chance.

Isn’t it true that in Yoga desires enjoyed are more harmful than rejected or repressed?

At any rate in this Yoga.

Some say he hasn’t gained anything substantial. Why, his psychic has surely developed in these 8 years...

Rather say – it was beginning to develop by fits and starts interrupted by periods of vital violent reaction. Of course if he had stayed and gone through it, the psychic should have prevailed in the end. But –

Did he not realise that there is nothing, after all, in lower enjoyments?

He said so always.

After this realisation can there be a fresh necessity for further enjoyment?

If there is no radical change, there can.

Is it possible that he won’t return at all, or will come back after many years?

With X everything is possible.

“Won’t return” seems impossible for have you not said that his success is sure and that you will carry him yourself to his goal?

I put a proviso, “If you are faithful to your seeking for the Divine”.

How is it that in spite of tremendous cost of Force and Energy, you could not change his views about your Yoga?

His mind changed somewhat, but his vital clung to the feeling of frustration by the Yoga and therefore abused the Yoga. It wanted either satisfaction of its play or brilliant experiences to replace them or both together. Not getting its way, it damned the Yoga as grim, horrible etc. All the time it refused to go on steadily with the thing that would be effective.

Quarrels with J, grimness of A, estrangement with N, etc., etc., are they reasons for deserting this Yoga?

For a man with X’s vital they seem governing reasons.

He has read so many of your books, has had so many letters from you, yet he doesn’t give any importance to inner things – calm, silent, steady progress? What have you done then, Sir?

You are speaking as if it was his thinking mind that refused. His thinking mind was changing its attitude. It was the vital mind that refused inwardness, silence etc.

Unfortunately he seemed to think that Mother is harder than you: she is grim and doesn’t love etc., etc.

That is because Mother’s pressure for a change is always strong – even when she doesn’t put it as force it is there by the very nature of the Divine Energy in her. But it was just this change his vital did not want – hence the feeling.

He will suffer terribly, I fear, outside. Is it then his soul’s necessity for further experience? Has the soul any such need?

If the soul had not, it would not be here in this world of Ignorance. It is for the experience of Ignorance that it is here.

It baffles me to think that a man who had so much self-confidence regarding poetry, music, and achieved success with sheer industry, could do nothing in Yoga with so much of your Force...

What a delusion! All the industry in the world could not have made him a poet, a novelist, a prosodist, an effective writer on serious questions... None of you realise that X had talent but no genius before he came here – Tagore is right there, except in music – and even there many criticised him as shallow, limited, superficial; merely pretty, lacking in depth, power, greatness. I saw a letter of an admirer the other day who told X that formerly his music had been full of show and ostentation, but now there was an immense change, it had become true and genuine... But he had a strong vital and Mother and I saw that there was stuff here which could be made into something. And we made it...

He has supported himself in many things, saying that he had your sanction. You gave him absolute freedom...

It was no use interfering – he would have done it all the same. And these things – talks, food, sociality were not the crucial things in his case. To press in his case on these points would only have prevented all chance of his giving an opportunity to the sadhana. It is not necessary in all cases to put this kind of pressure,– it depends on the case and the nature.

Another thing that hurt me was K’s revolt. How could he say such things against you when he broke with X over you and Ramakrishna?

My dear Sir, these fits are periodical with K – it is only the remarks against myself that were new. Ever since he came here, he has been announcing from time to time his departure.

He came here, I understand, on this earth, only for you!

Eh, what?

What has been achieved if after 13 or 14 years of sadhana, there is a lack of faith in the Guru?

Considering what K was, much has been achieved. But in a way nothing is really achieved until all is.

Is that not enough to show that real faith is not yet there?

Faith is there in parts of the being, absent in others.

Now, if K behaves in this way and X can leave the Asram after 8 years, two opposites – what about us?

Opposites, but for the same reasons – a physical mind clinging like a leech to its own wrong ideas of traditional sadhana and a vital that does not want to surrender, to lose independence and its own way of satisfaction.

What have you kept in store for us, Sir? Not sandesh and rasagolla! Will the sadhaks tumble one by one in this way as your Supramental comes nearer and nearer? Then with whom will you enjoy your Supramental? Night and day you are soaring and soaring.

Romantic one! I am not soaring and soaring – I am digging and digging, “Go to the ant, thou sluggard” sort of affair.

You don’t even look to see what fires your wings are throwing on our mortal frames!

My wings are throwing no fire. If anything happens to your mortal frames, it is your own kerosene stoves that are responsible.

Why don’t you give us any word of hope? When will your Gentleman come down, if he will?

Bother your words of hope. I am concerned with getting things done, (if people will kindly allow it and not be making a row all the time) – not with words.

I am shaken to the roots, for I fear I may share no better fate in your hands. Nevertheless all your promises will be fulfilled one day, for the Divine is eternal and so is the soul.

Well, that ought to be enough.

... How is it that a person professing a deep love for you is strongly attached to another one, and asks you to have trust in him or her? Isn’t it a duplicity? I can’t tolerate such conduct, and get rather disturbed...

You speak like a Daniel come to judgment. If you could only be calm like Daniel in the den of lions when these things happen, it would be all right.

... Seeing all this I have made up my mind to cut off all vital human relations...

I say that all that is magnificent, if you can do it. But can’t you see that it is the inward change that is wanted – the inward plunge? These dramatic outward breaks lead only to new joinings. Neither you nor she can keep to it. If there comes a strong ingoing movement, then it is another matter. That of itself would make it possible to readjust the relations or to withdraw if necessary. But splashings about on the surface – will it lead to anything? It does not look like it.

If I have shown X’s other side, it is needless to tell you that I have seen his finer side too, and have profited much by it. Affection can be there even when one criticises somebody, can’t there?

Yes, of course.

Outward breakings away and rejoinings, what’s the use of that? The remedy lies inside you. Try to go inward, find the Mother there, find your true self, your psychic being. Afterwards J won’t matter – you may be her friend or her literary collaborator or neither and it won’t make a jot of difference – I have spoken.

You may congratulate yourself, Sir, on this invasion of surrealism [10.3.37]! But L is better. What have you done with S’s spine? I saw her still going strong; result of your operation?

The spine was surrealistic – her going it strong is realistic.

Krishnayya says that you have asked him to stop Hadensa as it is of no use now.

Nonsense – it is he who wanted to stop, saying no improvement, very costly – So I said, he could stop.

P’s carbuncle is much better – says bandage is now bondage!

Seems much struck by Mother’s force as per cure carbuncle – no gratitude to the doctor. Such is life!

March 12, 1937

All interest in life has disappeared, Sir! Poems are a bore; what prescription?

Shift to a centre within.

Our chief centre has gone!

I suppose he will find plenty of radii in his new-old circumference.

Poor fellow speaks about my affection in his letter. What an illusion!

Illusion? This is poetry, sir.

Yes, Sir, such is life! But in P’s case I must give more credit to Mother, for his quick cure. Good he believes in her Force, for you will have a disciple of the Warrior-land [Punjab] of which you have none.

Have several (not here, but there) but they are almost all neurasthenics!

Only, he is a little too old and too much chaperoned by V!

Great heavens! V has got hold of him – Poor fellow!

We have to get Hadensa tubes for B; shall we?

Yes.

Nishikanta has congestion of throat.

Result of Customs? or of custom?

March 13, 1937

What about my book, Sir? Haven’t decided where you will begin and where you will end? or keeping it for Sunday?

My dear Sir, if you write a Mahabharat, you can’t expect the answer however scrappy to be finished in one or two nights among a mass of other work? Nous progressâmes³⁰ – that’s the state of things.

Still feeling bad – not for the loss of the centre, but don’t know exactly.

No? you don’t feel অনাথ³¹?

Under P, you wrote: “They are almost all nervous thieves”? Gracious!

I didn’t. I wrote “neurasthenics” – neurasthenic Warriors, sir!

And about Nishikanta – “Result of – or of custom?”

Customs (British). Reference to their outing with Dilip.

March 14, 1937

How did you hear of this remark anāth?

Any number of vivid reports of the great event – this detail among others.

I find that as a result of your Force, A has had only one vomit today!

Evidently my Force is growing just as my handwriting is improving!

Doraiswamy better; pain.

Is it that he has a better pain? or that the fact that he has a pain shows that he is better; or that he is better but still has pain? An aphoristic style lends itself to many joyfully various interpretations.

March 15, 1937

Obviously, evidently, undoubtedly, Sir, your Force is growing! By the number of deportees, one can see that!

They are not departees – yet. X gone on a spree – says he will one day come back. V sent as a missionary by the Mother – don’t expect his mission will be very fruitful though. R went for her property – property and herself held up by family, as we told her it would be etc. So no sufficient proof of Force here. If they had all gone saying ফিরব না, কখন ফিরব না³² as X threatened once, the proof would be conclusive.

March 16, 1937

About the “departees”, they may come back all right, but why did they go? Because some pressure acted on the old knots and they had to give up the Yoga, at least temporarily. Once one takes up this Yoga, what is family, property or anything else?

But R didn’t give up Yoga – she was going on very well. Only the idea of her property shut up in others’ hands and ready to disappear, obsessed her. She wanted to bring it and give it to Mother. It was a mistake, for it was not worth the risk and trouble and interruption to Sadhana. But there was a vital push and attachment that made her recur always to the idea.

You have forgotten D.S. who went mad after 8 or 9 years of Yoga?

What Yoga? This idea of D.S. being a great Yogi is a queer thing.

Have you read the letter and poems by X? Anything to communicate regarding the letter?

Nothing special.

The poems seem extremely fine, don’t they?

Yes, I said so.

You can’t call them sentimental this time, Sir, because they are addressed to the Divine!

Well, one can be sentimental with the Divine, if one particularly wants to!

X is having plenty of garlands, meetings, feastings etc. Spree indeed!... Good enough for a change, what?

Change, certainly.

Are you writing a Mahabharat in reply to my “Mahabharat”, I wonder!

I was.

Guru, I hope you won’t “ash”³³ me for spoiling your afternoon “spree”, by this letter, will you?

Where is the spree in the afternoon? Neither afternoon, evening, night, nor morning. Spree, indeed!

Laugh with the sonnets and cry with the letter [X’s], if you can. Very touching! If the “কোমল ব্যবহার”³⁴ of the people there had not been so good, it would have been splendid methinks.

You recommend me a fit of hysteria? No, sir. The sonnets are as usual, quite admirable. So, I dare say, was the কোমল ব্যবহার – By the way, his uncle has developed a carbuncle! And X expects me to cure it! A case for you, sir. After P!

[Regarding a poem of J’s:] The confusions of muddy eddies of life are at an end?

Wish they were! Jehovah!

How far down is your plume? Do you see the great Tail yet?

Tail is there – but no use without the head.

March 17, 1937

Why did you say “I was”? Have you stopped writing the Mahabharat, then?

Because I can make no time – Night after night have to write letters, letters, letters, not to speak of other things.

Everything seems to be queer in this world, Sir, especially in this yogic world! When a fellow [D.S.] works hard at French, medicine, trying to improve the Dispensary and himself, and thereby serve the Divine better, it is bad. Too much concentration and meditation is worse.

[Sri Aurobindo underlined “and himself”.]

There is where you miss the truth and he missed it also – he did not try to “improve himself”, at any rate in any Yogic way – he might try to aggrandise himself but that is another matter. Self-aggrandisement does not save from collapse.

When one follows the rule “eat, drink and be merry” it is the worst.

Well, I never heard that ‘to eat, drink and be merry’ was one of the paths of Yoga – unless Charvak’s way is one of Yoga.

I am coming to X’s view that your Yoga will always remain yours. Nobody will ever catch its head or tail, except a few perhaps. Let us pin our faith on the “Head” now. The tail has noosed many!

It is not my Yoga that is difficult to get the head or tail of – it is your and X’s and others’ views about Yoga that are weird and wonderful. If a fellow is brilliant in French and Sanskrit, you think he is a wonderful Yogi, but then it is the people who are first in the Calcutta B.A. who must be the greatest Yogis. If one objects to spending all the energy in tea and talk, you say “What queer gurus these are and what queer ideas”, as if sociability were the base of the Brahman – or on the contrary you think everybody must shut himself up in a dark room, see nobody, go mad with want of food and sleep – and when we object to that, you say “Who can understand this Yoga?” Have you never heard of Buddha’s maxim “No excess in any direction” – or of Krishna’s injunction “Don’t eat too much or abstain from eating, don’t drop sleep or sleep too much; don’t torture the soul with violent tapasya – practise Yoga steadily, without despondency. Don’t abstain from works and be inactive, but don’t think either that mere work will save you. Dedicate your works to the Divine, do it as a sacrifice, reach the point at which you feel that the works are not yours but done for you etc., etc. Through meditation, through dedicated works, through bhakti – all these together, arrive at the divine consciousness and live in it.” Buddha and Krishna are not considered to be unintelligible big Absurdities, yet when we lay [stress] on the same things, you all stare and say “What’s this new unheard-of stuff?” It is the result I suppose of having modern-minded disciples who know all about everything and can judge better than any Guru, but to whom the very elements of Yoga are something queer and cold and strange. Kismet!

Have you heard that Y is also tottering, or has tottered already? Couldn’t get over the shock of D.S.’s madness?

Y has written to us already. He wants to make a marriage and farewell to the world trip, somewhat like X’s... But he has been tottering, as you call it, ever since he was here, so that is nothing new...

Guru, Chand wants to know what will be the true spirit of surrender for him and how he ought to receive Mother’s flower “Surrender” which he has been getting often.

Why for him? Surrender is the same for everybody.

Any illumination?

None.

There is some law point here and reference to A.P. House³⁵ also. God knows who this B.K. is, who requires your permission to go into all this business. Well?

B.K. is a “disciple” and has been Manager of A.P.H. but is now to be relieved of his duties. He was at the head of some institution in Khulna – forgotten which. Don’t know what status he has for the purpose. Probably he is or was a lawyer – but not sure. Permission be hanged!

March 18, 1937 (Morning)

You perhaps had a hope that at least you would have some respite with no more of X’s voluminous correspondence. Much mistaken, Sir! Much mistaken!

So long as I have not to write voluminous answers.

I am sure next August will be a great victorious occasion with swarms of élites of Calcutta at your feet. Happy at the prospect?

Horrifying idea! Luckily the élites are not in the habit of swarming.

March 18, 1937 (Afternoon)

All these orations, successes, etc. of X, raise another question – whether the Divine also wanted that His name should be spread now.

The Divine is quite indifferent about it. Or rather more privacy would be better for the work.

March 18, 1937 (Evening)

What? X also has a “message”? But all I heard was that he had become restless.

I said that his [Y’s] outing was somewhat like X’s – i.e. a social round.

What, Y has gone out to deliver a “message”? What message, Sir?

There is nothing about message. Marriage, marriage – two marriages, in fact. Not that he is going to marry 2 wives, but he is going to see the misfortune of two others consummated and gloat over it.

But why exactly did D.S. tumble? – if not private. Self-aggrandisement only? Can’t be!

Why not? Never heard of megalomania?

I heard he was touchy regarding his wife and wife touchy about him – My God, grazes the skin, almost, Sir!

Touchy means what? And how does touchiness graze the skin?

Now about X’s tea and butter!...

It isn’t butter – it’s “tea and talk”.

All these were, it seems, generously granted by you to X. No bar, no restriction – full freedom, carte blanche ...

They were granted by me as a concession to his nature, because by self-deprivation he would land himself in the seas of despair – not as a method of reaching the Brahman. He was trying to do what his nature would not allow. It was only if he got intense spiritual experience that he could give up tea and talk without wallowing in misery – Is it so difficult to understand a simple thing like that? I should have thought it would be self-evident even to the dullest intelligence.

You remember your reply to his “ascetic” letter about giving up cooking, shaving his head, etc., etc.? Well, what is this now? Sociability not the base of Brahman, surely? That’s what we all thought, but your sanction and support that each has a different path etc., took our support away.

Because I allowed him to talk, and objected to his making an ostentatious ascetic ass of himself, does it follow that the talk and tea were given as part of his Yoga? If the Mother allowed butter or eggs to Y for his physical growth, does it follow that butter and eggs are the bases of the Brahman? If somebody has a stomachache and I send him to the dispensary, does it follow that a stomachache, the dispensary, Nirod and allopathic drugs are the perfect way to spiritualisation? Don’t be an a – , I mean a Gandhilike logician!

My poems are now getting less surrealistic and losing all charm of incomprehensibility ...

Necessary transition, I suppose.

Also the power of bold expressions, images, etc. are disappearing... Why?

Get them in another way, bold and original but not surrealistic, so that people instead of crying “Very fine but what the devil does he mean?”, will shout “Ah ha! Wah! wah!” in a chorus of approbation for your genius and personality much as X is getting in Calcutta. How do you like the prospect?

March 19, 1937

Nishikanta and Jyoti say, about my recent poems, that there is much improvement. They’re more cogent, harmonious and still retain my originality and surrealism too.

They are more cogent and harmonious; there is also plenty of individuality, fine images, lines and phrases. But the surrealistic audacity of phrase and image is in abeyance. My suggestion is that it has to come back without the surrealism and with this greater clarity and harmony and more perfect building. That’s why I said “transition”.

I say, there’s a fellow in this world who says that besides occasional emissions of normal and orthodox kind with dreams, he gets almost daily slight discharges without dream in light sleep (day sleep or morning sleep renewed after waking) and there are “internal” discharges which don’t come out until there is (after some days, I believe) a proper discharge. This he supposes due to a liquification of the semen due to former bad habits. When there are these internal discharges his head becomes empty and giddy, and he expects if it goes on there will be no head left – or at least nothing inside it. Now I have heard of internal haemorrhage but not of internal discharges which seems self-contradictory in itself as a phrase. I can understand habitual loss of semen or weakness in retention due to past misuse, but what is this? Does your medical science shed any light? have you had any experience in treatment of such things so as to give me a direction for this distressed traveller towards headlessness? What?

March 20, 1937

I am afraid I can’t throw much light on these “internal discharges”, unless it means that instead of coming out they flow back to the bladder due to some obstacle in the urethra. Hardly a possibility.

They can be stopped halfway by will in an emission – but he does not mean that.

If there is constant excitement there might be a constant dribbling also...

But it is only in these two sleeps and without dream. He says waking time is all right.

Or there might be a gleety discharge which may be mistaken for semen.

Hasn’t spoken of that. But would it come only in special sleeps like this?

What does R say on this matter?

Haven’t asked him. Afraid of a resonant explanation which would leave me gobbrified and flabbergasted but no wiser than before.

But is he really sure that they are seminal discharges?

Can’t make out. He distinguishes them from emission, speaks of slight discharges and internal discharges – same thing apparently.

Lastly, if his testes have undergone some degeneration, the internal secretion may be deficient.

How could that be described as internal discharges in two special kinds of sleep?

Is my surmise enough to understand the matter?

No.

J is very much fascinated by the variety in chhanda in Dilip’s and NK’s work, and doesn’t want to rest content only with the old forms. You say both forms can be beautiful. Why not try then this modern form, since we are your “modern disciples”?

No objection to trying. But is the form of Dilip and Nishikanta general in modern Bengali poetry? I thought it was Dilip’s departure and much criticised by many? I don’t think a rule or school can be made of these things. Let each follow his own genius.

যুগধর্ম³⁶ must be satisfied. You can’t pooh-pooh it, when you want things to be intelligible to people. Otherwise they will damn it.

I don’t follow the যুগধর্ম myself in English poetry – There I have done the opposite; tried to develop old forms into new shapes instead of being gloriously irregular. In my blank verse, I have minimised or exiled pauses and overflows.

Lord, sir! If you want to be intelligible and read by people, why do you write symbolic and sometimes almost surrealist poetry?

In your comment on my poetry, why did you underline “audacity”? French sense?

If I had intended the French sense, I would have written “audace”.

The word means boldness, daring. Does it suggest anything more? I don’t like these “suggestions”. One has ego enough and to spare. So please don’t write: you have done this, you have done that!

Don’t understand all this. I thought you would like to get the “audacious” originality back again in full in better form, so I suggested that the transition could very well be moving towards that. What the hell has all that got to do with egoism or with personal effort either?

Why bloat the ego still further when you know that suggestions and that sort of thing are no use? In Yoga, you say surrender, and in poetry – this personal effort business? No, Sir, no!

Wait a minute – Where have I said that there is to be no personal effort in Yoga? Kindly read the passages in The Mother about tamasic surrender and the place of personal effort in the sadhana.

March 21, 1937

I think my expressions were rather surrealistic, so you helled them.

What expressions?

Well, what I meant by “suggestions” was that I shall be led to think it was I, my great personal effort, that brought in the boldness of images, audacity, etc. Won’t that be egoism and personal effort business?

Do you mean that you don’t want your poetry to improve because that would make you egoistic? Very queer, sir.

What about the book, Sir?

What book?

[After I gave a brief interpretation of a poem of J’s, Sri Aurobindo gave a further explanation.]

... Very complicated operation. Kindly explain or translate or do something to remove my bewilderment. I am afraid your prose is becoming as surrealistic as your poetry – full of ellipses and suppressed concepts. Today it has bewildered me thrice (see your poetry book,) where I have had to ask “what expressions?” “what book?”

If these internal discharges can be stopped halfway by will, what happens to them? Do they go back to the vesicles or come out in the urine?

Don’t know – they don’t give any sign afterwards.

... But is it not usual to have losses without dreams in sleep?

Yes, but that is quite another matter.

I hear it is common in people who have misused their parts, and the fact of their getting them after sleep may be due to lack of voluntary nervous control.

In sleep.

Or if the prostates are enlarged, they may press on the vesicles more directly in the lying position, and thus cause the discharge.

Yes, constipation also produces discharge.

I can’t think of any other possibility. Does he unconsciously do involuntary movements in sleep, I wonder!

Not likely.

March 22, 1937

Another letter from Chand – family matters and something about his Bank trouble! What a fine thing to be an Avatar, what?

Why? You think an Avatar has to take in the Bank troubles of his Chands? No fear!

How the devil could I mean that I don’t want my poetry to improve? I certainly want it to improve to its zenith, but it must not bring in the egoistic idea that I have done it by my own power, as your expressions “you have to do this”, “you have to bring this etc., etc.” is very likely to feed the egoism. That’s all, Sir! Not clear?

Well, sir, if I can’t say you, must I write “that body” or “the phenomenon of an apparent Doctor-poet”? Or there must be an impersonal commotion in the apparently personal part which might be pragmatically called “doing this” or “bringing this”. That would discourage egoism; but it might discourage my writing also as well as stifle your poetic inspiration while you stared at the roundabouts.

“What book?” you ask after 2 or 3 weeks? My “Mahabharat”, Sir, or Ramayana, if you like!

Good heavens! who would have thought of that?

Yes, I tried reading The Mother, but the first chapters gave me a fright and made my blood freeze – “no use, no use” resounds everywhere, resulting in the idea of giving up even the ghost of Yoga!

I suggested to you to read the passages referring to the necessity of effort so long as the Force does not take up the whole business.

About “internal discharge”, I had a talk with Rajangam. Could you please wait till tomorrow?

Yes, certainly.

March 23, 1937

... I am now waiting only for the Mahabharat, and in the meantime sharpening my sword!

Well, don’t brandish the sword in the void – that’s all.

[A long report on “internal discharge”.]

Any remedy?

March 24, 1937

Y asked me if I had written to you anything about X, she would like to see your answers. Will you take the trouble, Sir, to cross the portions of your letters that I can show her?

[Sri Aurobindo twice underlined “cross” and “can”.]

Good Lord, sir, I can’t do that. You forget that I will have to try to read my own hieroglyphs. I have no time for such an exercise – I leave it to others.

Today I have written 3 poems, Sir, from 2.30-4.45 p.m. Remarkable, isn’t it?

Colossal!

N had fever in the evening again... Couldn’t find anything in the lungs. Still something incipient may be going on as he had already pleurisy. Anyway, we can give him some medicine – Ayurvedic or allopathic?

That’s the doctors’ business. Whatever has been good for him.

I took Sanganswami to the oculist. He will scratch the conjunctiva a little suspecting something there.

About the remedy I am afraid! [I suddenly took up N’s report.]

Afraid of what? Will make things worse?

But, I suppose, some nerve tonics, sedatives and gland products will have an effect...

I read with amazement – thought it was all about Sanganswami’s eye.

J says she makes no mental effort; tries to keep quiet, yet nothing comes down.

Difficulty of shunting the train.

March 25, 1937

Guru, here is a history, a prayer and a task! I hope you will note the dates of X’s performances³⁷.

Noted, but he is sometimes late in his information. That doesn’t matter though.

He has given me some work – shall I ask Anilbaran and Nolini? But for Anilbaran your sanction ís necessary.

Sanction for what? The suggestion is rather vague.

Shall I send him Arjava’s poems?

If Arjava consents.

You will note, Sir, he writes that he does not doubt that his material success and fame and glory are by your Force, but all doubts are about his yogic success. Can’t understand his contradiction. Does he mean he has capacities in some lines which the Divine can push, but yogic capacity nil, so the Divine can’t pull?

That’s his latest idea – though not so late, for it was growing for some time.

Anyhow... There is going to be plenty of money, Sir, of which Mother has great need!

No objection if it comes.

Please explain your “shunting”. How can the difficulty be solved?

When one has run always on one line with great success, it is difficult to shunt to another. Time, aspiration, inner working. Sorry if I am indefinite, but –

... Despair doesn’t seem to help.

It doesn’t.

On the other hand, it hinders, doesn’t it?

Yes.

A quiet aspiration with faith works best.

Quite so.

Preaching?

Very correct preach.

I told J confidently that poetry is bound to develop.

Of course it will.

Today J named me an “angel of hope”, Sir. From a “devil of despair” to an “angel of hope”? Your Yoga has worked, Sir! You can congratulate me a little.

Mille félicitations!

March 26, 1937

“Mille félicitations”? Thank you, Sir! But just note that it was with regard to poetry only. Yoga has to come. Without that no felicitations are any good, at least for me.

Well, well – all in due time – mille félicités as well as félicitations.

A funny thing happened last night. It began this way: since 6.30 p.m. I had been feeling the Mother’s Presence, and more vividly yours, until I went to bed.

In the evening when I went to the pier, for a while your entire face appeared vividly before my eyes. I was so happy that I forgot the moon above and was drinking in your Presence. Then gradually it dissolved, leaving only the outline. At times it seemed to be before me, at others as if the whole sky was pervaded by your Presence. I returned home, but went again to the pier at 9 p.m. with J. While she was talking, I was perceiving the outline of your Presence, and no other thought came in or went out. J’s talk had no effect on it. Within I was automatically uttering your name and the Mother’s.

At 10.30 p.m. I went to bed, after a short concentration. I was in a sort of semi-slumberous state wherein a great pressure was being exerted on the head. The whole body became hot and was perspiring. The pressure increased so much that I said I must come out of it or burst. It was such a possession. I relaxed myself and rolled into sleep.

I hope you will pick the grain out of the chaff. What sort of an affair is this, Sir? Trying to cut my throat or burst my head?

Very good indeed – that is something like a beginning.

Well, sir, the Presence not finding an entrance into your waking mind easy, tried to take advantage of half sleep to do it. (Half sleep is always a favourable condition for these things). But your body consciousness, not being familiar with such spiritual penetrations, got into a stew – and as a stew is accompanied by heat and steam,– so your body got hot and perspired.

Naturally, when it found so much resistance, it increased to meet the resistance.

Obviously, to burst is undesirable.

Throat not in the picture – Tried to steal a march into your head.

Did I do anything wrong by trying to relax?

It is better to relax than to burst.

... Sometimes I have felt inclined to doubt the Presence, but I think I should not, what?

Certainly not – doubt under such circumstances is perfectly imbecile.

Still a small snake of doubt says (not regarding yesterday’s feeling, though), “It is all imagination –”

Rubbish!

It goes on “If not... why have you to concentrate and call the Presence? By its very nature the Presence should at once make you see that it is there as if it were an object before you, without making you imagine things.”

Sir, is the Presence of a physical nature or a spiritual fact? And is the physical sense accustomed or able to see or feel spiritual things – a spiritual Presence, a non-material Form? To see the Brahman everywhere is not possible unless you develop the inner vision – to do that you have to concentrate. To see non-material forms is indeed possible for a few, because they have the gift by nature, but most can’t do it without developing the subtle sight. It is absurd to expect the Divine to manifest his Presence without your taking any trouble to see it,– you have to concentrate.

Just now, as I am writing to you, I feel as if the Mother were looking at me and you too, but from your invulnerable fortress.

It simply means you have a subjective sense of our Presence. But must a subjective sense of things be necessarily a vain imagination? If so, no Yoga is possible. One has to take it as an axiom that subjective things can be as real as objective things. No doubt there may be and are such things as mental formations – but, to begin with, mental formations are or can be very powerful things, producing concrete results; secondly whether what one sees or hears is a mental formation or a real subjective object can only be determined when one has sufficient experience in these inward things.

What should I do to develop this experience further? It is the very Thing, you see, isn’t it?

Yes, of course. What you have to do is to grow and let the experience grow.

Is this what you call going inward?

[Sri Aurobindo drew a line from the word “inward” leading to his reply.]

No, not quite – but it is evidently the result of some opening from within – for without that opening one cannot become aware of Presences or Forms that are super-physical in their nature.

This experience, I feel, is the means of escape from worldly-pleasures, isn’t it?

Yes.

I feel now some strength; nothing can disturb me in my relation with people. Good?

Exceedingly good.

Please give me some necessary instructions, not depending on my notes, as to what should be done. If I have seen the tail it must lead me to the head!

There is nothing to do but to go on concentrating and calling the Presence within and without you, the opening, the power to receive and let it come. The more the mind falls quiet during or as the result of concentration, the better (no other thought in or out). But no need to struggle for that, must come of itself by the concentration.

March 29, 1937

C is involved in a cheating case; by some compromises he can get out of it...

What does he mean by compromises? Lies? If he goes on with this sort of thing, how the devil is he ever to come out of his messes?

... Z attributes her trouble to R’s insufficient or even negligent treatment. Strange! I saw that R took much care and he cured her of that terrible attack of hiccough. Such is life, Sir! What?

Z is a liar and says anything she wants to – she is also semi-hysteric and believes anything she wants to. Such is life and such are humans.

Shall we try Fandorine? Her back-ache also is due to retroversion of the uterus, probably.

If it is retroverted uterus, Fandorine will have no effect. If it is bad circulation etc., then it is the best. Anyway you may try it.

S.B. has intense itching – the whole body is swollen and red.

But what nature of eruption? She has sent a howl – can’t sleep, etc.

B complains of more pain!

Yes, he has also sent an epistolary howl.

Suggesting enema from tomorrow. Lead and opium lotion for injection. This lotion, as you see, is sedative and astringent.

I suppose it can do no harm?

Is not B too sedentary for a man with piles?

March 30, 1937

The trouble is that people expect their ailments to disappear by a miracle! Doctors are not Gods and Gods are not always miraculous, are they?

Miracles can be done, but there is no reason why they should be all instantaneous, whether from Gods or doctors.

Suddenly at 5 p.m. B’s pain vanished. So I justify his epistle, Sir! His thundering scowl burst your ear!

It wasn’t a scowl, even a thundering surrealist one – it was a tympanum-piercing howl – so one had to do something.

K gave her baby 2 spoons of milk of magnesia. Result – copious motions with blood and mucus discharge; no sleep, restlessness, crying, etc... Looks like irritation due to heavy dose of magnesia! Must K’s babies have something every time she comes here?

Well, if she gives them 2 spoons of milk of magnesia, they are bound to. That was the way D’s last baby got killed here, though M began it before she came. But the result was a dysentery which nothing can cure. But does your Science approve of purging babies of that age? In France, Mother says, the doctors (those who specialise for children at any rate) forbid purgatives being given on any excuse to children under twelve months.

Some Force from you is wanted, for the baby can’t aspire and surrender, Sir!

Exactly! that’s why milk of magnesia should not be given. Any baby treated in that way will need much aspiration and surrender to counteract the results.

[About the patient with the “internal discharge”:] He says that only after slight sleep or rest he feels giddy, weak and the condition lasts for 2 or 3 days. From this he gathers that there has been the discharge.

It is only gathered then! I was insisting that it was not possible, but the fellow ne voulait pas démordre³⁸.

But do you know that he is awfully, terribly and damnably constipated?

I knew he was constipative, but not so adverbially.

By the way, I want to know, just as a piece of information, what Mother is going to do about the awful smell around Belle Vue.

Smell was that of Godard’s prawns. The Municipality has just thundered at him and given notice to the prawns to quit. I am told that there is a sensible odorous amelioration since the last two days.

March 31, 1937

2 p.m.

I asked Mother through Nolini, whether I should give an emetine injection to K’s baby, she said – No medicines to babies under 1 year.

Emetine injection to a child of that age is not approved.

What Mother says is that this is not an illness, but an accident caused by the purgative given. The tissues have been hurt and have to recover. What would be best is to give not a medicine properly speaking but something which would protect the injured tissues while they reformed. Mother does not know whether what is given to adults for that purpose can be administered to children.

They say that the pains seem to have decreased, as the child slept well.

As regards diet, he is given freely barley water, whey and glucose water. Shall we give milk?

Milk might be too heavy. The diet seems all right.

Now I am wondering if Nolini heard it right. Did Mother disapprove only of emetine or all medicines?

Mother had said to me about the purgatives, not about medicines. Emetine for a child like that she would of course never sanction.

March 31, 1937 (Between 2 p.m. and 8.30 p.m.)

31.3.37

Nirod

In view of the nature of the illness of K’s child and its development, I think we cannot take any longer the responsibility – if you think best, we can call in Dr. Valle who, I hear, has a child of his own and ought to have some experience with the maladies of children. You might see him at once, if possible.

Sri Aurobindo

March 31, 1937 (Evening)

...Now emetine being out of the question, we can give what we gave yesterday: 1) Bismuth 2) Soda Bicarb 3) Kaolin...

Kaolin was the kind of thing Mother was thinking of as utilisable.

I asked Nolini, he said – no medicines, no medicines. But your evening answer [to the note written at 2 p.m.] doesn’t say that. It says – no emetine, no purgative, but “something which would protect the injured tissues...” Again at the end you say “Mother had said to me about the purgatives, not about medicines.” It is all very puzzling and I am in a fix...

Well, since medicines have been used, and the atmosphere is not the right one for No-medicine, you can go on,– but nothing violent like emetine. The Mother offered to call Valle and in that case of course the responsibility would be with him, but K has refused.

What do you say, Sir, about this poem? Somewhat forced and artificial, no rhythm?

I am afraid so. Rather drum-drum-drummy-brang-clangy.

I have marked in two places, please see if they jar your ears.

I am afraid they do.

April 1, 1937

Have you ever had a headache by giving up tea?...

Yes, of course. Whenever you stop it suddenly, gives headache in revenge.

Today I stopped the habit of morning tea. The result: a headache since 11 a.m. Or is it the Force trying to break my precious head?

No, it is the tea-habit, furious at being given up.

About K’s baby – there seems hardly any improvement in the number of stools, except that blood has stopped. don’t you think the number should decrease now; if possible, stop altogether?

Decrease certainly – slow down to nothing – but sudden stoppage might not be so good – although usually if it is the right medicine it does happen.

Does Mother favour Dover’s powder? That will reduce the number which was 20 today.

Can’t suggest anything,– since medicine needed, must find your way.

20 motions in a day too much for a child of that age.

April 2, 1937

4.30 p.m.

Guru, finished! My concentration, peace, bliss, all gone! At this moment I am dull, dull like clay and hence am compelled to write and groan.

After I wrote about the experience, the thing gradually melted away. Why? The devil knows. All I have done, if they can come under any criminal section, is that I have enjoyed some food with Anilkumar and Nishikanta, and narrated the experience to X.

That would have been better left undone.

... Suddenly to drop into an underground cell is, I don’t know what.

Everybody drops. I have dropped myself thousands of times during the sadhana. What rose-leaf princess sadhaks you all are!

Sometimes I cannot but subscribe to S’s opinion that this Yoga is not for us... Some say the preliminary stage is the same in all Yogas; only the later stage is difficult here. I don’t think it is true, for here, from the very start, it works for the change of nature, working to the very details, which other Yogas know nothing about. They leave the nature out altogether.

According to those who have practised them, in the old Yogas one has to be prepared to pass 12 years simply disciplining, disciplining without a single experience before one can expect as a right any single experience. If one gets experiences so much the better, but one can’t expect or claim.

Therefore one has to build a strong foundation; consequently more time, more bricks, more work, more money, etc., are needed. Then how can the initial stage be the same as in other Yogas?

Allow me to point out that here there are any number of people who have had experiences which would be highly prized outside. There are even one or two who have had the Brahman realisation in a single year. But it is the fashion here to shout and despair and say we have got nothing and nobody can get anything in this Yoga. I believe the pretensions of the Pondicherry sadhaks to have an easy and jolly canter to the goal or else think themselves baffled martyrs would be stared at with surprise in any other Asram.

Perhaps or certainly, you are giving Force to K’s baby, but why no visible effect? He is an infant, no resistance on his side... You cured D’s acute abscess in the abdomen, simply by your Force and no medicine. Where is the trouble here?

Don’t talk nonsense. It is because he is an infant that the Force cannot work easily on him. D is not an infant.

I am rather worried. No blessed opening in any direction. One has to grope and grope. You don’t give any blessed intuition either!

The Mother has no intuition for medicines for infants – You must find out yourself.

If you like, I will completely stop all medicines and leave him to you and Mother.

That we cannot tell you to do. It could only have been guaranteed at the beginning and with a proper mental atmosphere in the people.

Shall I report twice a day about the baby?

Yes, certainly.

April 3, 1937

(1.30. p.m.)

I thought breast milk should be suspended for K’s baby, when you said that milk is heavy [31.3.37].

It was supposed that you meant cow’s milk. Mother’s milk, if the mother is healthy, is the best medicine for these things – Calomel is not to be given. Also it is better not to follow R’s advice in these matters or to try too many medicines. The mother’s milk and sleep are the most important things for cure – some medicine is a help at the most. More – too many medicines – make things worse rather than better. Anyhow what the Mother wants is for it to be possible for the mother and child to go to Madras tomorrow night with D. She has ordered K to that effect.

April 3, 1937 (Evening)

[After the summary of A’s prolonged treatment had been given:]

So is it hopeful or hopeless?

Hopeful on the whole.

I could not write poetry for 2 days. Along with the heavy work, a disgust for poetry has seized me, just when things were coming up. Misfortunes are usual with me, so no use complaining, what?

Rubbish! Such “misfortunes” are usual with everybody – including myself.

April 4, 1937 (Afternoon)

... It seems K and her child may go, though perhaps a little risky, as absolute rest is indicated...

He will not be running about in the train. What is meant by absolute rest for a child of 4 months? To stay here is much more risky.

Mother’s milk and sleep are now available, though the former not much. What about the number of stools? Can you help that?

Medically, the effective treatment for the case and the person has not been found – Yogically, the mother has proved to be not a receptive instrument and the child also does not answer to the Force except for a short while and in a slight degree – the wisest thing for them is therefore to go.

April 4, 1937 (Evening)

For heaven’s sake don’t include yourself in the misfortunes!

But I never said that I was one of the misfortunes.

I am not Brahma to take them as part of the lila!

I thought everybody was Brahma, সর্বমিদং ব্রহ্ম³⁹. Anyway you are trying to do Yoga, so the sooner you adopt the lila attitude the better. Moreover, plenty of people undergo these “misfortunes” without lamentations – take them as the ordinary stuff of life.

No poetry today either! Hellish!

Well, you can try to straddle back into heaven tomorrow.

For K’s baby, by “absolute rest” I meant that the jerkings in the train may not be very desirable.

I don’t see why it should be worse than other rockings.

I have consulted all the writings on diarrhoea, all give only symptomatic treatment.

There you are in company for once with the homeopaths.

But whatever little the doctors have found by experience to be effective, is not acceptable to you. For instance they recommend Calomel, you Say not to be given...

It is no use discussing these matters – the Mother’s views are too far removed from the traditional nostrums to be understood by a medical mind, except those that have got out of the traditional groove or those who after long experience have seen things and can become devastatingly frank about the limitations of their own “science”.

You remember Valle’s treatment of Valentine? He gave all the blessed things one after another – 2 or 3 emetine in spite of negative stools, opium, etc., till he cured her.

That is to say, he experimented at random – till Valentine cured in spite of all this ill-treatment of her body. And yet you call medicine a “science”.

If I had dealt with the case, I think you wouldn’t have allowed me emetine at all? Why? Because of my inexperience or you don’t want that anything drastic should happen by our treatment?

Certainly not, under your responsibility. Doctors acting on their own can try the kill or cure method – it’s their own business.

I admit it is quite possible for Science to be wrong as it has been shown repeatedly.

Very obviously.

I would have tried anti-serum and astringents, opium etc. and I think most of the doctors would have done that.

Try everything one after the other and together and see if any hits – that seems to be the method.

K doesn’t believe that milk of magnesia is the predisposing cause of the child’s illness.

Of course she won’t, as that would make her responsible.

D says it is quite harmless. But it may be harmful also and it was so here.

If it may be harmful, how can it be declared harmless?

Otherwise I don’t see why after 6 or 8 motions, diarrhoea should have started.

Ideas differ. Both the Mother and Pavitra were horrified at the idea of a child of 4 months being given a purgative. The leading Children’s doctor in France told the Mother no child under 12 months should be given a purgative, as it is likely to do great harm and may be dangerous. But here, we understand, it is the practice to dose children freely with purgatives from their day of birth almost. Perhaps that and overadministration of medicines is one cause of excessive infant mortality.

You didn’t say anything about the medicines for S.

What medicines? Sudarshan? you say she refuses.

April 5, 1937

Have you observed that the bodies of sadhaks and sadhikas have become abnormally sensitive? Even a small dose of medicine produces reactions. Good or bad?

It shows a more sensitive body consciousness – good, if it becomes more sensitive also to the Force.

Last evening’s curry of potato and tomato didn’t keep well, I am afraid. I took it at about 8.30 p.m. and found a bad smell.

Mother tasted it just after meditation – it was then very good still. But tomatoes can’t be kept too long, especially in this hot weather – unless it is very carefully done. Up to 8.30 was probably too long and it must have turned.

April 6, 1937

I have scratched the whole poem out of existence! And yet when I completed it, I was so happy thinking it was something great! Fool!

Every poet is such a fool. His work is done in an exalting excitement of the vital mind – judgment and criticism can only come when he has cooled down.

Well, Sir, any good this poem, or goes to the same basket?

This one is very fine. No W.P.B., please.

I can’t get the current back. Even the taste has disappeared. On the contrary a fear has grown, lest my poems be good-for-nothing.

Nonsense! No poet can always write well – If even Homer nods, Nirod can often doze – that’s no reason for getting morally bilious.

Once I asked you to give some advice as regards the treatment of a patient, you replied: “... I have no medico in me, not even a latent medico.” [1.4.35]

Of course not. If it were there, I would develop it and run the Dispensary myself. What would be the need of a Nirod or Becharlal or Ramchandra?

Then the other day regarding K’s baby you wrote that the Mother has no intuition for infants.

No intuition for stuffing infants with heterogeneous medicines.

Well then, if you have no latent medico and Mother has no intuition for infants, can you tell me how by the force of devotion, faith, surrender, etc., is one going to get guidance from you? If the Divine hasn’t got it, where the deuce will it come from?

What logic! Because Mother and myself are not Engineers, therefore Chandulal can’t develop the right intuition in engineering? or because neither I nor Mother are experts in Gujerati prosody, therefore Punjalal can’t develop the inspiration for his poems?

If the Divine can’t guide me externally which is much easier, how can he guide internally, and if he has no medico, wherefrom will the medico come to him within?

Oh Lord! what a question! To guide internally is a million times easier than to guide externally. Let us suppose I want General Miaja to beat Franco’s fellows back at Guadalajara (please pronounce properly), I put the right force on him and he wakes up and, with his military knowledge and capacity, does the right thing and it’s done. But if I, having no latent or patent military genius or knowledge in me, write to him saying “Do this, do that”, he won’t do it and I wouldn’t be able to do it either. It is operations of two quite different spheres of consciousness. You absolutely refuse to make the necessary distinction between the two fields and their processes and then you jumble the two together and call it logic.

If the medico can be revealed from within, why could it not be revealed from without and tell me to give antidys. serum to K’s baby, which I hear has been administered and found to be effective?

Damn it, man! Intuition and revelation are inner things – they don’t belong to the outer mind.

If you or Mother can’t guide me concretely, how will the guidance come later on, I wonder.

Do you imagine that I tell you inwardly or outwardly what expressions to use in your Bengali poems when you are writing? Still you write from an inspiration which I have set going.

Can you satisfy my logical brain box, Sir?

Your logical brain box, sir, is such a rule-of-thumb, Dr. Johnsonian sort of affair that it is quite impossible to satisfy. If ever you succeed in emptying the brain box of its miscellaneous contents and being mentally silent, then you will discover how these things are done.

If I am to carry on the medical work well, I would like and expect to have an opening in that line... Please don’t say that I cogitate and hesitate. It is precisely that that I want to avoid. Shall I adopt the surrealistic method, i.e. to keep quiet for a moment and whatever strikes first, go ahead with it; only be careful in case of poisons?

There is a vegetable called “bubble and squeak”. That describes the two methods you propose. “Bubble” is to go on tossing symptoms about in the head and trying to discover what they point to – that’s your method. “Squeak” is to dash at a conclusion (supported by a quotation) and ram some inappropriate medicine down the patient’s throat,– that’s X’s method – But the proper method is neither to bubble nor to squeak.

You remember once I told you of this surrealistic method and you cried Good Lord!? [28.10.35, p. 365]

I did and I repeat it; I don’t want this Asram transferred to the next world by your powerful agency.

Once Mother asked me to try this method, i.e. instead of analysing the various possibilities and probabilities and then diagnosing by elimination etc., just keep quiet and go at it.

Well, so that’s how the Mother’s statements are understood! A free permit for anything and everything calling itself an intuition to go crashing into the field of action! Go at it, indeed! Poor it!

What the Mother says in the matter is what she said to Dr. Manilal with his entire agreement – viz. Reading from symptoms by the doctors is usually a mere balancing between possibilities (of course except in clear and simple cases) and the conclusion is a guess. It may be a right guess and then it will be all right, or it may be a wrong guess and then all will be wrong unless Nature is too strong for the doctor and overcomes the consequences of his error – or at the least the treatment will be ineffective. On the contrary if one develops the diagnostic flair, one can see at once what is the real thing among the possibilities and see what is to be done. That is what the most successful doctors have; they have this flashlight which shows them the true point. Manilal agreed and said the cause of the guessing was that there were whole sets of symptoms which could belong to any one of several diseases and to decide is a most delicate and subtle business, no amount of book knowledge or reasoning will ensure a right decision. A special insight is needed that looks through the symptoms and not merely at them – This last sentence, by the way, is my own, not Manilal’s. About development of intuition, afterwards – no time tonight.

Regarding the vaccination you referred to, shall I ask the hospital doctor to come and do a few cases and then from the next day I can do; or shall I ask them to show me a few cases at the hospital? Either can be arranged for. Valle says all the members have to be vaccinated. André says all are not necessary. He has asked me to see him tomorrow morning.

The letter sent to us by Valle with Gaffiero’s counter-signature expressly offered to us the management of the whole affair by our own doctors, so that there should be no intervention of the authorities with all its inconveniences – we have only to make a report of the persons vaccinated and their reactions. They, if we have to vaccinate at all, are just the conditions Mother wants. She does not want their doctors or infirmiers⁴⁰ to come in. So you will avoid that. Ask them to show you a few cases so that you can do the thing yourself – that is the only course Mother sanctions.

Valle of course had to say that everybody was to be vaccinated, but really they are offering us by this arrangement some freedom in the matter which we shall not have if they come in. The Mother proposes to have the workmen and servants vaccinated and a small number of the sadhaks, especially those who go out and mix with the town people – enough to make a sufficient show on paper. She expects that Gaffiero will pass the thing and let the matter drop without insisting more – he is very favourable to the Asram. Only the thing had better be completed before he goes to Europe.

April 7, 1937

Valle seemed to say that one of their members has to be present, to write down the reports etc. which has to be done in a special way and on the spot. It can’t be done by one person. I said we have assistants, we can very well manage it, once shown how. As I pressed my point, Valle seemed rather annoyed thinking, perhaps, “What’s the harm if just a compounder or infirmier comes?”

In their letter they very distinctly stated that they did not want to impose their doctors and infirmiers on us, we could do it well enough on our own and they wanted only our report as to persons vaccinated, reactions, etc. Now they are going back on what they said. I suppose it is because you have shown too clearly that you were somewhat new over the matter –

He also said, “It may not be effective, for the vaccine may solidify or get spoilt in some way.”

It is true of course about the vaccine.

André seemed more liberal yesterday. He said he would come and do the whole thing. He will perhaps bring an assistant.

Do the whole? In a single day? with the same knife? with what kind of sterilisation?

He didn’t insist on all the members. So I suppose he can bring the compounder and finish the servants in one day.

Certainly, all the members are not to be vaccinated. There are people in ill health, some with weak hearts etc. You are going to expose them also to the risk of ‘the reactions’? Sometimes the vaccination knocks people ill for a day or two. If many of the workers are to be down together, who will do the work? People in a state of debility, e.g., N, T, L, X, A, S, those who have already fever, or skin disease, those who are otherwise contra-indicated are all to be included in the hecatomb? The whole thing is preposterous and you must not allow yourself to be hustled into doing anything they tell you. We must first know what we are prepared to do, who have not on any account to be exposed to this poisoning, etc., etc. and do only what we consent to, not what they insist on. I am farther informed that for two days after vaccination one is supposed not to do any physical work or exertion. How then are you going to vaccinate all the servants or workmen in one day? If there are 20 or 30 people down with fever together are you going to trot about all day and night looking after all? This won’t do at all. Everything will have to be carefully considered and arranged beforehand and you must not allow yourself to be hustled into any premature action and arrangements. There is no epidemic raging that all should be done in maddening haste – it must be done little by little in a manageable way. We have not to take them into confidence as to whom we vaccinate and whom we don’t, either, or let them know that we are not doing it to all – unless they themselves say it need not be done to all.

The only way out for the vaccination seems to be that the compounder can come and do a few servants at a time (3 or 4) and you can be there and learn and afterwards you can take up the rest of the thing yourself.

Guru, C’s letter! Do you notice what he says about outside disciples and D’s going? Any truth?

Can’t make out anything from the fellow’s Bengali flourishes. What does he say? I can only make out that B has told to him what Bishwanath told to B about what Mother told to Bishwanath; but what it was I can’t make out – Only that for that reason D and others were allowed to flit. Kindly enlighten.

April 8, 1937

Today 4 persons were vaccinated. It is a very simple affair, but there is going to be trouble, it seems. The assistant says it is not possible for him to come every day only for 4 persons, neither can he leave the vaccines etc. without Valle’s permission. He says there’s hardly any reaction, except a slight fever in children. So what’s the harm in vaccinating more people?... The thing is that they have stock vaccine tubes (sealed) for 50 people – not less than that. Once a tube is unsealed, it has to be used up in a day, or discarded. Today already we had to throw away some. If, by chance, there is none one day, we can simply drop that day. But for that, the assistant said, Valle’s permission is required, otherwise we can buy from the pharmacy. If Valle doesn’t allow the first, we’ll be compelled to buy. But what a cost it’ll be! I’m sceptical about Valle’s permission, because he insists on the staff’s presence and I don’t know that he would like only 4 persons at a time. So what’s to be done about it? Gqffiero will have no objection, I think. But Valle is in charge. And the difficulty is how to say all this in French.

And yet it was Valle himself who wrote saying that they would not impose their doctors or infirmiers upon us!

Valle and Gaffiero don’t pull on well together.

Mother has asked Pavitra to see Gaffiero tomorrow. Pavitra will be going at 9, so you must go to Pavitra’s before 9.

April 9, 1937

“Creating language from the sleep of God”, how can one do that?

From where else are you going to do it? The Word comes out of the Silence. I have myself written about Inspiration bringing “thoughts Hewn from the silence of the Ineffable.”⁴¹ If anybody can’t understand, tant pis pour lui⁴².

I have fallen into the old pit of lack of enthusiasm. Source exhausted, it appears!

Source of enthusiasm? The source of poetry seems to be there, all right.

The vaccination business has been now fixed. If we do only . 4 persons, it will take too long. (Can’t be finished before Gaffiero goes in May.) Suppose, after seeing the reaction, if any, of the fellows done, we increase the number to 10 – half from B.S. and half domestic, or half domestic and half sadhaks?

Workmen not to be touched till the roof is finished – on Tuesday. Then you can have 4 + 4 servants and workmen, + 2 sadhaks. But get a list of sadhaks done (in consultation with Amrita) and we will mark off those who must not be poisoned. For the rest you will have to do those whom you can induce to make themselves victims on the sacred altar of Science, so that Valle can say with self-satisfaction “Ah ha! the Asram has been vaccinated.”

How funny that Valle acceded to Pavitra and was an adamantine rock to me!

Valle said it was only out of compassion for you because you said you knew nothing about it and were so much at sea! He did not put it in that figurative language but it was the purport of his plea.

I am afraid D [a child] has obstinate constipation. I am damned, for, except enema, castor-oil is the drug for children in our “Science”.

All “science” does not recommend castor-oil for children – I think it is a nineteenth century fad which has prolonged itself. The Mother’s “children’s doctor” told her it should not be done – also in her own case when a child the doctors peremptorily stopped it on the ground that it spoiled the stomach and liver. I suppose you will say doctors disagree? They do! When K’s child reached Madras, the first doctor said “Stop mother’s milk for three days”, the second said “Mother’s milk to be taken at once, at once!” So, sir. Anyhow for D Mother proposes diet first – small bananas Pavitra will give, very good for constipation – papaiya if available in the garden. Also as he is pimply, cocoanut water on an empty stomach. Afterwards we can see if medicine is necessary.

April 10, 1937

I wonder why you flared up at the idea of my using the surrealist method in treating patients.

I didn’t flare up. I was cold with horror.

By “go at it” I obviously didn’t mean sending your Asram to the next world! No, not at all. I meant only this: say a case comes with pain in the stomach, loss of appetite, etc., I simply keep silent, suddenly comes to me the suggestion – gastritis, without any analysis of symptoms.

Doctors don’t mean it, when they do that kind of thing. It is not deliberate murder with them, but involuntary or, shall we say, experimental homicide.

Mother told me to practise the intuitive method, I thought “Go at it” was simply my military language! I thought this is one of the ways to develop intuition – if it can be developed. Otherwise how the deuce is it going to come? Going to open suddenly?

She said that you have to stop jumping about from guess to guess and develop the diagnostic insight – seeing what comes from the intuition and then looking at the case to see if it is right. But to take the first thing that comes and act on it, is guessing pure and simple. If after a time you find that your perceptions turn out to have been automatically right each time, then you can be confident that you have got the thing.

How do the most successful doctors have intuition, by a flash or what you call an inner sight?

Some have it by nature and develop it by experience.

Or do they get it by plenty of experience, treating, curing, killing, etc.?

Well, there are some who after killing a few hundreds, learn to kill only a few. But that is not intuition; that is simply learning from experience.

Rajangam thinks that behind their success there is plenty of experience; their familiarity with various diseases, and manifestations, shows them immediately what’s wrong with a case.

Of course, experience is of great importance, but still it is not everything.

Book knowledge will not always succeed in practice, experience will do; but experience must stand on adequate book knowledge. Since you have neither book knowledge nor experience, you have no medico – so no intuition, I suppose.

Excuse me, you can have intuitions – without book-knowledge or even experience.

You will perhaps say that there are plenty of doctors with plenty of experience, but that they are not all successful. True, but the other thing is also true that successful doctors are supported by their varied experience.

Some succeed from the beginning.

How do you solve the tangle?

What is the difficulty? Experience is necessary, book-knowledge is useful for the man who wants to be a perfect doctor; observation and discrimination are also excellent provided they are correct observation and discrimination; but all these are only helps for the flair to move about supported by a perfect mental confidence in the flair.

Then about the inner and outer guidance: of course all this trouble comes from not knowing anything about the queer action of the complex Force formula.

There is also some inability to grasp the philosophy of things.

The internal guidance is possible only when the subject has sufficient receptivity, isn’t it?

Certainly.

When one hasn’t that receptivity, outer guidance will surely be the only course.

How is the outer guidance to give intuition? It only by itself supplies a ready-made course of action which the person blindly follows.

For instance, you give me Force for English poetry – some lines corne all right, others are jumbled, wrong, etc., and these things you correct by outer guidance, i.e. by correcting, changing, etc. till I become sufficiently receptive and then only a few changes will be necessary.

I do so in your English poetry because I am an expert in English poetry. In Bengali poetry, I don’t do it. I only select among alternatives offered by yourself. Mark that for Amal I nowadays avoid correcting or changing as far as possible – that is in order to encourage the inspiration to act in himself. Sometimes I see what he should have written but do not tell it to him, leaving him to get it or not from my silence.

You say the same thing about Gen. Miaja with his military knowledge and capacity. Exactly, if he has these things, he can receive your right Force.

It does not follow. Another man may have the knowledge and receive nothing – If he receives, his knowledge and capacity help the Force to work out the details.

It seems that though you have no patent or latent military capacity, your Force has, and it wakes up in the man the right judgments etc.

Not in this life.

This is all a mystery beyond my ken.

May I ask why? Your idea is that either I must inspire him specifically in every detail, making a mere automaton of him, or if I don’t do that, I can do nothing with him? What is this stupid mechanical notion of things?

The Force having military knowledge, poetic power, healing virtues, etc., the embodiment of the Force also must have the latent general, poet, medico, etc. – sounds strange to me otherwise.

Because you have the damnably false idea that nothing can be done in the world except by mental means – that Force must necessarily be a mental Force and can’t be anything else.

The strangest thing of all is that if the Divine wills, why can’t an effective drug in a case be revealed to him, medico or no medico?

Why the devil should He will like that in all cases?

I am to induce the victims for the sacrifice? Good heavens! Do you want me to be sacrificed by your disciples? Please mark off those who are to be vaccinated, instead of the other way round.

Can’t do that.

Of course my suggestion of voluntary sacrifice was a joke. It is an official order from the Government department, and we can’t contemptuously wave it aside – we can only minimise its incidence.

As to Force let me point out a few elementary notions which you ignore.

(1) The Force is a divine Force, so obviously it can apply itself in any direction; it can inspire the poet, set in motion the soldier, doctor, scientist, everybody.

(2) The Force is not a mental Force – it is not bound to go out from the Communicator with every detail mentally arranged, precise in its place, and communicate it mentally to the Recipient. It can go out as a global Force containing in itself the thing to be done, but working out the details in the recipient and the action as the action progresses. It is not necessary for the Communicant to accompany mentally the Force, plant himself mentally in the mind of the Recipient and work out mentally there the details. He can send the Force or put on the Force, leave it to do its work and attend himself to other matters. In the world most things are worked out by such a global Force containing the results in itself, but involved, concealed, and working them out in a subsequent operation. The seed contains the whole potentiality of the tree, the gene contains the potentiality of the living form that it initiates, etc., etc., but if you examine the seed and gene ad infinitum, still you will not find there either the tree or the living being. All the same the Force has put all these potentialities there in a certain evolution which works itself out automatically.

(3) In the case of a man acting as an instrument of the Force the action is more complicated, because consciously or unconsciously the man must receive, also he must be able to work out what the Force puts through him. He is a living complex instrument, not a simple machine. So if he has responsiveness, capacity, etc. he can work out the Force perfectly, if not he does it imperfectly or frustrates it. That is why we speak of and insist on the perfectioning of the instrument. Otherwise there would be no need of sadhana or anything else – any fellow would do for any blessed work and one would simply have to ram. things into him and see them coming out in action.

(4) The Communicant need not be an all-round many-sided Encyclopaedia in order to communicate the Force for various purposes. If we want to help a lawyer to succeed in a case, we need not be perfect lawyers ourselves knowing all law, Roman, English or Indian and supply him all his arguments, questions, etc., doing consciously and mentally through him his whole examination, cross-examination and pleading. Such a process would be absurdly cumbrous, incompetent and wasteful. The prearrangement of the eventful result and the capacity for making him work his instruments in the right way and for arranging events also so as to aid towards the result are put into the Force when it goes to him, they are therefore inherent in its action and the rest is a question of his own receptivity, responsiveness etc. Naturally the best instrument even is imperfect (unless he is a perfected Adhar), and mistakes may be committed, other suggestions accepted etc., etc., but if the instrument is sufficiently open, the Force can set the thing to rights and the result still comes. In some or many cases the Force has to be renewed from time to time or supported by fresh Force. In some directions particular details have to be consciously attended to by the Communicant. All that depends on circumstances too multitudinous and variable to be reduced to rule. There are general lines, in these matters, but no rules; the working of a non-mental Force has necessarily to be plastic, not rigid and tied to formulas. If you want to reduce things to patterns and formulas, you will necessarily fail to understand the workings of a spiritual (non-mental) Force.

(5) All that I say here refers to spiritual Force. I am not speaking of the Supramental.

(6) Also please note that this is all about the working of Force on or through people: it has nothing to do with intuition which is quite another matter. Also it does not preclude always and altogether a plenary and detailed inspiration from a Communicant to a recipient – such things happen, but it is not necessary to proceed in that way, nor below the Supermind or Supramentalised Overmind can it be the ordinary, process.

[I sent a translation of C’s Bengali letter where he wrote about his lapses.]

... Well, well, I am not so bad after all, am I?

No,– I should say that compared with most people you are quite decent!

But C seems to have made a lot of progress, hasn’t he?

Can’t certify so long as the brothel walks about with him.

C writes about your letter “abortioning” him with regard to his falsehood. Can’t you abortion him of his brothel? (I suppose it is some other word, but it reads like “abortioning”.)

April 11, 1937

You may read, if you like, my letter of 2.4.37. The first part of the letter hardly requires the answer you gave, as fortunately I have got back the condition. But I would like to know if telling of experiences may have a bad effect.

It may.

The difficulty of your Yoga, even in the first stage, seems to me to be greater compared with the other yogas.

The difficulty is a myth. The difficulty is in the change of Nature or transformation which comes afterwards. Otherwise the difficulty in the beginning is the same for this or any other Yoga. Some go fast, some go slow here, also elsewhere.

Sir, here is the enlightenment on C’s letter [7.4.37]: “I have heard from Benoy that Sri Aurobindo is now concentrating on outside sadhaks. A day may come when his work may be done even by those staying outside. Benoy has heard it from Bishwanath who has been told by the Mother, that is why D and a few others have been allowed to come out. Any truth in it?”

No truth whatever! Mother said nothing to Radhakanta⁴³. It is probably one of Benoy’s romances or it may have been built on some casual remark of R – which was immediately turned into “Mother’s saying” with additional superstructures.

This sort of notion is unfortunately current even in the Asram.

There are hundreds of false notions current in the Asram.

The other day K was saying that you have written to him that, even living outside, sadhana can be done, for it is done by the psychic which can receive from anywhere.

Of course it can – there are plenty of people doing it outside in Rangpur, Chittagong, Gujerat and elsewhere. How far they will get is another matter.

So staying here is not absolutely necessary; and simple staying won’t give anything either.

[Sri Aurobindo underlined “simple”.]

Of course not. If simple staying did it, the servants and workmen would be yogis by this time.

... I told him that there is surely a difference between doing sadhana here and doing it outside. There is a great thing in the Mother’s touch etc... He said all that is ভাঁওতা⁴⁴!

? Don’t know the word.

Is it only for physical transformation that staying here is necessary? Otherwise sincere sadhana can be done elsewhere as well as here.

I don’t suppose the later stages of the transformation including the physical would be possible elsewhere. In fact in those outside none of the three transformations seems to have begun. They are all preparing. Here there are at least a few who have started one or two of them. Only that does not show outside. The physical or external alone shows outside.

About the vaccination, Chandulal says some carpenters and painters will not be working on the roof building. So shall I start with them?

That is all right.

Then, as to the sadhaks, if you don’t give a notice, I am afraid everyone will refuse or individually approach you for permission to be left out.

A notice would have to be given, of course. I am marking on the list with a red dot those whom we positively want omitted (but it does not mean all else have to be vaccinated) and with a blue dot those who ought to vaccinate without doubt because they go out and mix with town people or mix with them in some other way. A red line means visitors or short time residents who need not be bothered. Over the rest I am still cogitating.

Can your letter on Force be read out to a limited few?

Yes, but only a few. No copies.

April 12, 1937

Guru, another wire from Chand! “Nirod Asram Pondicherry Biswanath asks look arya Correspondence Tomorrow blessings.” If you understand what he means, please give an answer, if any!

You can wire to him that it is not sanctioned. Nolini will write to Radhakanta.

Besides those whom you have vetoed for vaccination, I’m afraid many others have to be done so. I had to exclude M, J, B and S, for they had pox before.

[Sri Aurobindo underlined “had pox before”.]

Those who have had pox once are not vaccinated? That’s all right. I forgot myself, I think, old Laxmi. Shailaja says he had “got it” (I don’t know whether vaccination or smallpox) a year ago – I have told him to report the fact to you. Vithalbhai has, I suppose, to be exempted, he has several ailments; he says he has been twice vaccinated. Ambu and Nagin are under R’s treatment, the latter for debility – they also I suppose go out. There may be others.

April 13, 1937

Why, Sir, you didn’t know that smallpox fellows are not required to be vaccinated?... A book says one attack generally protects for life, but second attacks are not very uncommon and the protection tends to wear off in time. My theory smashed? Well, exception proves the rule, what?

Well, there are people who say that smallpox attacks immunise for only a few years. But if it is as you say, then there are others, I suppose. There is Amani⁴⁵ among the servants for instance who nearly died of smallpox. I myself had a slight attack in Baroda soon after I came from England – so you needn’t try to come up and vaccinate me.

You have written to Shailaja that the effect of vaccination lasts 5 years, and revaccination is not required within that period.

That is what one book says.

But I gather that French regulation requires vaccination every year...

Why not every week?

Whom are you vaccinating? Mother wants to have the report every day.

How do you like this poem⁴⁶, Sir?

Well, the rhythm seems to me all right and the poem is exceedingly beautiful. A1.

Why the devil am I having a headache these last 2 days?

Supramental trying to find a place in your head?

[Regarding the interpretation of a poem of J’s:] When there is no fire of Aspiration, the psychic opens the door?

It can, by a pressure from above. It may be that the preparation was over, so that the fire like everything else had sunk into silence, waiting for the descent under whose pressure the psychic door flew open.

That is hardly possible in your Yoga. No aspiration, no nothing – says your teaching.

Never taught anything of the kind. I got the blessed Nirvana without even wanting it. Aspiration is the first or usual means, that is all.

April 14, 1937

You seem to be, by the way, like Bernard Shaw in matters of vaccination. Do you deny the profits of one of the greatest discoveries of medicine? Not for yogis, but for the public?

Can’t discuss that. Have not denied partial effectivity, though complete it is not, since it has to be renewed every year, as you say. The whole Pasteurian affair is to me antipathetic – it is dark and dangerous in principle, however effective.

You struck me dumb with surprise, Sir! That poem was exceedingly fine? I thought absolutely otherwise. What does your “A” mean at the end?

It is you who surprise me. I should have thought the poetical quality of these stanzas would have been self-evident. On metre etc. I cannot pronounce, for in Bengali metre I am not an expert – so I only wrote that it seemed all right. What I wrote was of the poetical quality and after reading it 2 or 3 times to make sure, the estimate remains. It is Al (not A) – Al means of the first quality.

April 15, 1937

We are short of three persons for vaccination; I propose to make them up tomorrow.

Make up – how? I thought you had daily only enough for ten vaccinations, and, if all were not used, those remaining over have to be thrown away?

Well, don’t discuss the effectivity of vaccination, if you don’t like, but please enlighten us with your Supramental Light as we are rather hidebound in our glorious “science”.

No time for showing the glorious Science its errors. Too busy trying to get the supramental Light down to waste time on that. Afterwards, sir, afterwards.

Sada & Co. refuse the vaccination point blank! Till now none has succeeded in doing them, they say! Well?

Nothing to be said, unless you tell them to go and be d – d in their own way!

After reading so many Bengali poems and Dilipda’s learned lessons on metre, you ought not to say that you are not an expert in Bengali metre, Sir!

Read them? Flip-flopped through them, you mean – how could all that strenuous technicality remain in the head?

Look at this Bengali sonnet. How is it?

Very fine indeed except for the concluding couplet which might be called a flat drop! What the deuce, sir!? What kind of coupletitis is this illness of yours? anaemia finalis.

Another letter from C, saying that your chiding had wonderful effect, Sir. Lots of worries gone! So it is not my “abortioning”, Sir! [10.4.37] Yours entirely. I am not used to these things, not yet, at least! It was, by the way, “chastising”. Gracious, chastising is miles away from “abortioning”!

Can’t be, can’t be! You must have misread it. I stick to the abortion.

Can the observing of these moral obligations which C mentions be a help in Yoga?

Yes, sir, if done in the right spirit, it will.

J says you called her also “sir”!

So I did – but I was answering to you.

Guru, this poem seems a very fine poem, though I can’t follow it.

You are a very difficult follower. It is because you follow your own mind instead of identifying with the mind of the poem.

[Against a portion of the interpretation I had cancelled:]

!!! What a confusion!

... Rather complicated, this.

No, sir; it is your mind that has got complicated.

... After a talk with J, the poem seems clear and my criticism wrong ...

Luckily I thought of reading the end first, otherwise I would have had to swear at you at length all the way instead of growling slightly here and there.

April 16, 1937

Identifying with the mind of the poem or the poet or with anything else – are all fine phrases to me, Sir.

It is the only way in which poetry can be read – every lover of poetry does it.

But how to do it? God alone knows. From your remark it seems to be very easy. Any process?

No process needed; it is done automatically. Never heard of entering into the spirit of a poem? If you can enter into its spirit, what is so difficult in entering into its mind?

You couldn’t still resist swearing even when I cancelled a portion and corrected myself? Beast of Burden?

Who? I? or you?

Swore a little first, then went into the cancel. Had intended to come back and swear more, but cancelled the farther intention of swear.

What is it, Sir, Sada & Co. to be dead? dead!

No, sir, not dead, but damned! damned! damned!

Very glad to hear, Sir, that you are “too busy”. Only we have been hearing that so often and so long since, that by now the Supramental or any Light should have tumbled down!

It isn’t so easy to make it tumble.

But jokes apart, I hear, from reliable authority, that the Supramental Descent is very near. Is it true, Sir?

I am very glad to hear it on reliable authority. It is a great relief.

What is this medical word, Sir? “What kind of coupletitis”?

Yes, that’s it – like neuritis, laryngitis etc. so coupletitis, illness of the couplet.

It appears that D [a child] is getting 4 motions a day and today blood. Something will have to be done before it gets worse.

April 17, 1937

When we were discussing about the Force and the Spanish General Miaja [6.4.37], you said: “Let us suppose... I put the right force on him...”, why did you say “right”? Is there also a wrong Force? Can’t be, for it is the Divine Force.

Don’t remember what exactly I wrote – so can’t say very well. But of course there can be a wrong Force. There are Asuric Forces, rajasic Forces, all sorts of Forces. Apart from that one can use a mental or vital Force which may not be the right thing. Or one may use the Force in such a way that it does not succeed or does not hit the General on the head or is not commensurate with the opposing Forces. (Opposing Forces need not be Asuric, they may be quite gentlemanly Forces thinking they are in the right. Or two Divine Forces might knock at each other for the fun of the thing. Infinite possibilities, sir, in the play of Forces.)

Even if it can’t be wrong, its efficacy will vary with the power of the communicant. For instance there will be a difference between Ramakrishna’s and Vivekananda’s Force, and therefore in the resultant effectivity or ineffectivity.

Naturally.

What I want to know is whether the Force, applied or directed, is always the right Force. Can there be any mistake in the Force, in its misapplication or in its failure to get the desired result?...

What is a mistake? Eventually the Force used is always the Force that was destined to be used. If it succeeds, it does its work in the whole and if it fails it has also done its work in the whole. ন তত্র শোচতে বুধঃ⁴⁷

My main point is the Intuition. The Force has evidently a close connection with the intuition or any other faculties which are awakened by the action of the Force.

In what way? A Force may be applied without any intuition – an intuition can come without any close connection with a Force, except the force of intuition itself which is another matter. Moreover a Force may be applied from a higher plane than that of any Intuition.

By the way, it seems your Supramental is a magnificent something wide apart by gulfs and seas from all other Powers and Forces.

Certainly, otherwise I wouldn’t be after it.

You won’t say anything about the Supramental till it descends. It is this great mystery about it that makes us pin all our faith on it and the word Supermind goes from mouth to mouth. Ah, if we could have faint glimpses of it!

Not much utility in this mouth to mouth business. If people set themselves seriously to the task of psychic or spiritual opening or development, it would be much more useful – even for the coming of the Supramental. If I tried to explain about the Supramental, it would be all UP with the Supramental. The rest of the lives of the sadhaks would be spent in discussing the supramental and how near Nirod or Nishikanta or Anilbaran was to the Supramental and whether this was supramental or that was supramental or whether it was supramental to drink tea or not etc., etc. and there would be no more chance of any sadhana.

In my Bengali poem of yesterday, you asked me: “What’s this word?” Well, I meant it to be ত্রস্ত⁴⁸, but wrote instead স্ত্রস্ত⁴⁹ A স⁵⁰ sat on top, you could have cut it off.

Thought it ought to go off, but it snapped its fingers and said it was too big and clear and positive to be treated in that way.

Any necessity of making মূর্চ্ছিতা⁵¹ feminine?

Hallo! I thought you were in favour of the feminine being used for everything, even words which were originally masculine and neuter?

স্মৃতি⁵² personified?

স্মৃতি or memory is in all languages feminine and is personified as a goddess or a feminine form – yet you object! Queer! Anyway if she can have a বক্ষ⁵³ why can’t she be figured as a person?

We examined D’s stools – not dysenteric at all...

As regards treatment, how about trying one or two days greens? Boil them in water and give with rice?

Very good idea.

After that we may try a dose of castor-oil. I wonder if he has an anal fissure ... The pain he complains of is at the anus and not around the umbilicus.

If so, can’t it be discovered? If that’s the thing Anthenor pommade is indicated after quarter litre wash – if he’s too young for enema with the tube, a poire might be used.

S has a hard red swelling about the left elbow joint; no cause...

Sir, in this world there is nothing without a cause – unless you hold the ultra-modern view that causation does not exist.

We have been giving some perfumed toilet powder to C for sweating. K asked for it; now S also has asked for it. Don’t know if it is for sweating or “contagion”. Can’t go on at this rate, can we?

No. Can’t give to everybody. They must get their anti-perspiration from the Prosperity normally.

April 18, 1937

D has no fissure. I have advised green vegetables for him.

I forgot to say that the Mother puts her entire veto on castor oil for D.

No luck about Intuition?

None! Too thorny a subject to tackle without leisure and space.

April 19, 1937

By the way S must be added to the list of vaccination impossibles. R asks me to warn you and Amal that if you vaccinate, you will get back your old friends the boils and Amal his old companion the stye. I pass on the warning to you without farther piling up the agony. A very nasty affair this vaccination, in any case.

Guru, this poem is in blank verse. The rhythm seems quite all right. Still the austerity and force have to come, I think, no?

Yes, good rhythm, fine poetry.

Of course, it is not the epic style, but in its kind it is very good.

I don’t like the sound of phāṭi ṭuṭi, do you?

Sounds somewhat too much like somebody dropping and breaking cups and saucers – doesn’t fit in with the rest of the style.

“I go mad when I see a deer in the spring woods ...”

Not really?!!

April 20, 1937

Why ask and exclaim “Not really”? You told us that sincerity is not indispensable in poetry, neither true facts. You should have appreciated the beautiful figure of expression in that line.

Well, it was not a question of reality, but of verisimilitude. And then the vision of you gone mad over a deer was a little upsetting.

I have changed the line to: “In the spring woods I get excited like the bees...”

Umph! This is less upsetting.

I don’t understand the poem. It says the swans, flowing in the shoreless vast, tumble into the sleep of creation. What is this sleep of creation? The swans don’t seem to have come into creation at all, as they are still asleep. Or is it that after aeonic travels high up, the soul comes down into this Ignorance of creation?

Confound it sir, it was when it was above creation that it was awake – in creation it is asleep and dreaming – as you are when you are vaccinating people, though you mayn’t think it – the vaccination is only an ugly dream. You were high up for ages in the Above and then you came down into the cosmic Dream to vaccinate people and write poetry. You are a Swan (or is it a Goose? হংস⁵⁴ you know) who fell asleep in the moonlight and tumbled into a dream of medicine.

What is the epic style? What elements are required for successful blank verse?

I spoke of epic style because you talked of austerity and force. Special austerity and ojas needed for epic style, not necessary in other blank verse.

Speak of English blank verse, if you plead ignorance of Bengali.

Good Lord! you don’t want me to expatiate on all that now? I believe I wrote about it to Amal⁵⁵ – I mean for English blank verse. For Bengali I decline all authority.

Greens seem to have no effect on D. He still has 4 or 5 motions, but no blood. We have to go into the details regarding his diet, the number of motions and their relation.

Yes. What about pastilles charbon both to help against diarrhoea and also to fix time taken for digestion?

I quite agree with you, Sir, about the beastly nastiness of vaccination, though in which way, we may disagree.

It is beastly and nastly in all ways, so there is no room for disagreement.

5 has been put out of the ring and so also Amal.

Then add Ishwarbhai and Madanlal to the Vaccinatory Untouchables.

April 21, 1937

What is this I hear – U decamped last night! D’s departure seems to have come as a tempest and blown away many. Victory of the hostile force you can’t yet handle?

I am not handling any hostile force.

U and A were apparently doing very sincere sadhana, no question about that.

What is meant by sincere sadhana? In the Mother’s definition of sincere, it means “opening only to the Divine Forces” i.e. rejecting the others even if they come. If A and U were like that, how did they go? It would indeed be a miracle.

A seems to have gone for health...

A went, not only for health, but to see his dear Guru who is preparing to shuffle off the mortal coil and for other motives of that kind. Quite natural, isn’t it?

As for U, he has been going some dozen or dozen and a half times, only pulled back with great difficulty. Wants immediate siddhi in perfect surrender, absolute faith, unshakable peace. If all that is going to take time, can’t do the Yoga. Feels himself unfit. Not being allowed to reach the Paratpara Brahman at once, had better rush out into the world and dissipate himsell into the Nihil. Besides got upset by every trifle and, as soon as upset, lost faith in the Mother – and without faith no Yoga possible. Reasoning, sir, reasoning – the mighty intellect in its full stupidity. Understand now?

Each time somebody leaves the Asram, I feel a kick, a shock, a heartquake...

May I ask why? People have been leaving the Asram since it began, not only now. Say 30 or 40 people have gone, 130 or 140 others have come. The big Maharattas, B, Y, H departed from this too damnable Asram where great men are not allowed to do as they like. The damnable Asram survives and grows. A and B and C⁵⁶ fail in their Yoga – but the Yoga proceeds on its way, advances, develops. Why then kick, shock and heartquake?

You said long ago that the Supramental won’t tolerate any nonsense of freedom of movement or wrong movement. Is this the kick he is imparting from high up?... In these two months he has struck a tall tower like K and a fat buoy like D; how many of these!

And what then?

In NK’s letter you wrote that it is the hostile Force that is snatching away people, not the Divine Force that is driving them away. I hold the view that the Supramental is descending concentratedly and that those who resist, who are between two fires, have either to quit or to submit.

Not so strongly or concentratedly as it ought, but better than before.

Even if it were so, that is their own business. The Divine is driving nobody out except in rare cases where their staying would be a calamity to the Asram (for instance it could decide one day to drive H out); if they cannot bear the pressure and rush away, listening to the “Go away, go away” push and suggestion of the Hostiles can it be said then that it was the Divine who drove them away and the push and suggestion of the Hostile is that of the Divine? A singular logic! The “Go, go” push and suggestion have been successfully there ever since the Asram started and even before when there was no Asram. How does that square with your theory that it is due to the concentrated descent of the Force?

The Supramental not tolerating any nonsense comes to that, doesn’t it?... But really, if the more you are busy with getting down the Supramental Light, the more such things are happening, I am afraid you will have to stop the business or let whosoever drops be hanged.

Why should I stop the business – that is to say postpone the possibility for another millennium because A, or U gets shaky or many others look homeward? Will that postponement change the lower nature or get rid of the Asuras?

What’s the idea? What’s the occult secret? You promised to give me some lessons in Occultism – here is an occasion. Please expatiate, and pacify my nervous shocks. Otherwise I have to close down my poetry, vaccination, patients and every blessed thing, and gaze at the sky and exclaim – what? what? what chance?

What occult secret? It is a fact always known to all Yogis and occultists since the beginning of time, in Europe and Africa as in India, that wherever Yoga or Yajna is done, there the hostile forces gather together to stop it by any means. It is known that there is a lower nature and a higher spiritual nature – it is known that they pull different ways and the lower is strongest at first and the higher afterwards. It is known that the hostile Forces take advantage of the movements of the lower nature and try to spoil through them, smash or retard the siddhi. It has been said as long ago as the Upanishads “Hard is this path to tread, sharp like a razor’s edge”; it was said later by Christ “Hard is the way and narrow the gate” by which one enters into the kingdom of heaven and also “Many are called, few chosen” – because of these difficulties. But it has also always been known that those who are sincere and faithful in heart and remain so and those who rely on the Divine will arrive in spite of all difficulties, stumbles or falls. That is the occult knowledge pertinent here.

I have expatiated – but in the line of common sense, not occultism.

I have written 5 sonnets, Sir. Record! Gave a big dose? But are they only great in number, as in your young days?...

Eh?

We are staggered at Romen’s success in poetry. Metre free, blank verse, whatever he touches, comes out remarkable!

Regular metre he has not yet done, but he succeeded remarkably in the free metre of his lyric.

While, in my case, after so many lessons in metre, you damned each one of them!

Surely that’s a misstatement. I believe I gave several of them nice compliments.

Don’t you think D eats too much for his age?

Morning – some raisins, cocoa, 4 slices of bread + banana

Noon – 3/4 bowl rice, curds, greens

Afternoon – fruits

Evening – 4 slices of bread, greens, milk

Night – oranges

Greens and raisins can be stopped. But the diet does not seem otherwise excessive. Raisins may easily irritate.

April 22, 1937

By the way, you didn’t understand me. I didn’t mean that you damned my poems, but my metres or rather my innovations in metres.

Oh that! Of course. Your irregulars were very rough with the poor English language. As for Romen, I understand he simply hooks on to the source and lets it tumble through him. That explains his success: যোগঃ কর্মসু কৌশলং⁵⁷ – যোগ = joining on, hooking on.

Charcoal given to D. He has had 3 motions – all healthy, but rather bulky for his age. What does Mother say to a small dose of Mag. Sulph. or Soda Sulph.?

No.

Sometimes deficient fat digestion, due to liver derangement, may produce bulky stools; but then it would be clay colour. Enema won’t have action on liver.

What is the need of purge or enema, when there is free motion, healthy, though in excess?

Do you know beforehand whom you will vaccinate? If so Mother also would like to know beforehand. (Question of experiments with Force.)

I am afraid I have to multiply exemptions – Khirod, (too busy to have leisure for fever,) Dikshit (do, also very bad health); Atal (do, too busy, also frequent previous vaccination).

By the way, I suppose you enquire before vaccinating, whether they ever had smallpox. Dasaratha Reddy, I believe had some kind of pox here just before going but don’t know if it was small or chicken.

Isn’t it high time that you opened up the medical channel in me, Sir? I feel ashamed that being a doctor I can’t cure cases!

Medical channel? Rather rocky perhaps and sanded – but if poetry could open, why not medicine?

April 23, 1937

How is this sestet, Guru?

Very pleasing. (Going to use new adjectives occasionally).

And this poem, how is it?

Very pleasing also.

I dreamt last night that you said it was an exceedingly beautiful poem. Will it be fulfilled?

I have already said it – so it would be nothing new.

Medical channel rather “vichy”? “Vichy”? and – what? It means anyhow the thing is not easy, but why not?

Rocky, sir, rocky. Sanded – silted up with sand from both sides.

No place for the current. Have to blast rocks, dig out channel, embank.

What about D? He says you gave him a medicine – what medicine? And the result of the charbon? He says it came out after 5 hours. Is that correct? If so, the conclusion?

April 24, 1937

Some other new adjectives? Oh Lord, no! Have enough, your “pleasing” pleases me not!

Dear me, dear me! I was tired of writing fine and beautiful (you forbid “good”) and thought I was very clever in getting a variation. You are hard to please! What do you say to “nice”? “exhilarating”? “épatant”, “joli, très joli”, “surprenant, mon cher”⁵⁸? Let’s have some variety, Sir.

Romen hooks on and Nirod cooks on? No, Sir, I too let it tumble now!

Well, this has tumbled very well.

I am damned, Sir! The only medicine I gave D was one pill of charbon...

As regards diet, I would favour stopping banana and papaya, for they are laxatives, as you know.

Yes, unless it is likely to lead to constipation. Anyhow you can try and see the result.

If Mother sanctions, we can give small doses of Bromide and Tine. Belladonna to inhibit the excessive nervous stimulation.

No medicine.

By the way, M has sprained his foot. You might enquire whether he needs or wants any medical assistance.

April 25, 1937

D doesn’t seem to be digesting curry ... Why not try some olive oil?

Yes. If olive oil difficult to digest, could mix a little lemon juice.

In place of banana and papaya, oranges can be increased.

Yes.

[P had the point of a needle stuck in her palm.] Can’t take it out. Tomorrow is X-ray. What does Mother say?

You can take the X-ray.

M is all right. No medical service required.

Yes. He says it became suddenly and miraculously all right in the last hours of the night’s sleep.

April 26, 1937

[A poem.] What adjectives, Sir? New or old?

Very pleasing again.

P’s X-ray taken. Philaire will see the X-ray plate. If he decides to operate, can it be done? Or should the plate be shown to Mother first?

Mother would certainly like to know before any operation is made, where the thing is, how deep and what the operation would involve.

Some improvement in D’s condition. He wants to eat something in the afternoon. Mangoes are laxative, so I disagree.

Mangoes – no! But care must be taken that it does not swing round to constipation again.

What can we give? Biscuits? He wants sweet biscuits.

Glaxo biscuits perhaps.

One thing, people from the Washing Dt. should not be vaccinated together or immediately one upon the other; but at intervals of a few days, so as to prevent any difficulty in the work in case of hives. The Aroumé depts. are those in which one has most trouble because of dropping off of workers for illness or any other cause.

April 27, 1937

What about this poem, Sir? Pleasing or pleasant?

Both at once and very!

Sadhaks are getting rare for vaccination. Whomever we approach, says “no”, alors?

What’s to be done? Must make the best of it.

Philaire says that P’s needle can be extracted by operation under local anaesthesia.

I suppose it has to be done and we can only hope that Philaire will really prove skilful and manage with least trouble and least unfavourable incidence.

P is of the nervous type and with them there is usually the maximum of trouble.

D had 4 motions ... given half an oz. of olive oil.

Thought he was better!

April 28, 1937

By the way, am I also going into the Amalian relapse? These blessed poems don’t seem to catch. I have now a positive distaste for writing.

I don’t see any relapse. Your Matra-brittas⁵⁹ are always excellent, sonnets up to the mark – Perhaps you miss the glories of surrealism – the magnificent images and smiting lines? Anyhow you have gained in harmony and finish. Perhaps when you magnify and smite again, it will be in a more perfect way.

A spree will improve matters?

Spree, sir, spree! what do you mean?

P’s operation tomorrow at 9.30 a.m. Please circulate some Force!

P in order to facilitate matters for tomorrow, has started menses today. What cheer, brothers? In view of the fact that anaesthetic may be necessary it might be safer to postpone for two or three days – what?

Tomorrow’s list of people for vaccination: Krishnayya, Premanand, Nishikanta ...

Krishnayya? not an unhealthy subject? won’t bite? Besides D.R. badly off for workers. Leave it to you, sir.

K has swelling of left ankle (old injury).

Why revived? She is talking of bone injury etc.

Amrita was to have offered himself as a victim on the altar of vaccination, but he has been kindly bitten by the dog of the Privy Councillor, so although there is no hydrophobic danger, it is better for him to cure before being bitten by the vaccinator.

April 29, 1937

“What⁶⁰ cheer brothers or bothers!” Never heard of such a phrase, Sir! Most 21st century, I am sure. Even Wodehouse hasn’t that!

It is both. You don’t know the story of Pavitra and Khitish and the bother? Pavitra who had just come here with a rather French pronunciation of English, said to K “I am a brother to you all” and Khitish cried out “Oh, no, no!” Pavitra insisted, but Khitish still cried out with pain and politeness in his voice “Oh, no! no! no!” It turned out K had heard all through “I am a bother to you all”! so brothers are bothers and bothers are constant brothers to us, insisting on inhabiting the Asram – or at least visiting it, like the vaccination, P’s needle etc.

[April 30, 1937 ?]

“Why revived?” [K’s swelling in the ankle.] God knows! If I know, it is her dancing gait that has brought it by some twist there. Bone injury indeed!

She has been weeping and saying nobody cares for her because you said it was nothing and I didn’t jump to her bone suggestion. So Mother gave her Siju to embalm her wounded feelings.

A few D.R. workers remain to be vaccinated: N, S, I.K., etc.

Not very eager to have them bitten – what will become of D.R. kitchen if they go over? You don’t want to eat?

...Vaccination today – if you allow Krishnayya.

Allowed.

Here is an English poem⁶¹ written between dozes!

Compliments! you have reached the summit with one bound! Magnificent.

Don’t quite follow what you meant by “magnify” and “smite again”.

Refer back to “magnificent” images and “smiting” lines⁶².

This poem [J’s] is sent as an illustration of what follows.

Tonight there is a mass of correspondence and I have not been able to deal with even half of it. So tomorrow.

J asks why it should be called blank verse. Is it simply because rhymes are absent?

Yes.

Blank verse means verse without rhyme; it is applied usually in English to the unrhymed pentameter.

Is this absence of rhyme made up for by other things?

That is a question of the success of the blank verse as poetry – not of the metrical category into which a poem falls.

Is there a variation of pauses?

In English variation of pauses is not indispensable to blank verse. There is much blank verse of the first quality in which it is eschewed or minimised, much also of the first quality in which it is freely used. Shakespeare has both kinds.

Where is this poem different from a sonnet, except in rhymes lacking?

That is because the sonnet turn or flow has been used without the rhyme which is an essential part of the sonnet structure.

J says she doesn’t think she is really a poet. By Mother’s pressure she has been led to write things.

Mother’s pressure means what? She wanted to write poetry and attempted, at first without much success. Afterwards the channel opened as it did with others.

If she were a poet, she wouldn’t write with so much difficulty. She would spontaneously go on writing like a well gushing out.

Every poet does not write like that. Some of the greatest have written with labour and constant self-correction.

She adds that she would not always fear Mother’s displeasure if she didn’t write etc., etc.

Why should Mother be displeased if she didn’t write? Is it a task that Mother or I have set her against her will?

She says that with the difficulty of blank verse, the dissatisfaction has grown to such a height that she feels like giving up poetry.

Whether to write blank verse or not or to write poetry or not, is purely a matter for her choice. She asked for poetic inspiration and it was given her. Now she seems to complain because it has been given her – it is not her own, therefore not valuable.

Well, Sir, she was saying that before writing today, she had some fear, a lack of confidence lest the blank verse become again unsuccessful.

Why? The one hope of doing well is to write in a cheerful attitude, without too much mental insistence and open herself to the Inspiration quietly and confidently till it comes. Fretting and fuming can only block the passage.

Please give the factors that make blank verse successful. We have read your letter to Amal. Is that all?

I don’t know any factors by which blank verse can be built up. When good blank verse comes one can analyse it and assign certain elements of technique, but these come in the course of the formation of the verse. Each poet finds his own technique – that of Shakespeare differs from Marlowe’s, both from Milton’s and all from Keats’. In English I can say that variations of rhythm, of lengths of syllable, of caesura, of the structure of lines help and neglect of them hinders – so too with pause variations if used; but to explain all that would mean a treatise. Nor could anyone make himself a great blank verse writer by following the instructions deliberately and constructing his verse. Only if he knows, the inspiration answers better and if there is failure in the inspiration he can see and call again and the thing will come. But I am no expert in Bengali blank verse.

April 30, 1937

I told you that D.R. and B.S. workers have almost all been vaccinated. Sadhaks, 30 done, and no more forthcoming. So shall we close the show here?

I suppose it can be closed.

Thank you sir, for the compliments! I have reached the summit, but next time you will find me in the abyss!

The abyss can also produce poetry.

If one could remain there!

In the abyss? why?

May 2, 1937

Shall go tomorrow to enquire about P’s operation ... I think it would be better to see it again on the screen tomorrow evening, for the needle may have shifted.

Yes.

Why do these things – tooth trouble etc., come to the Mother? I hear that you throw them off very quickly when they try to come to you. The Mother could do the same.

I have not to deal with the sadhaks – except through correspondence.

I am feeling feverish, cold in the head, bad headache. Due to sea bath and diving? What a pity!

Pains of pleasure, I suppose.

Which is better:

“To a motionless abode – intense hushed seas”? or “of deep hushed seas”?

My God, sir, the line with its tangle of sh and s sounds would be unpronounceable like Toru Dutt’s “Sea-shells she sells”.

May 3, 1937

Guru, from this quatrain you will see that I have tried a hell of a lot to improve or rewrite it and yet not successful!

“Plunge there like pearls in timeless trance-repose;

Culled from spring-garden of fire-coated seeds.

The nectar-rays of heaven’s golden Rose

Shower on the calm expanse – like pollen beads.”

So I see, but your plunging quatrain plunges and splashes a lot without arriving anywhere near coherence. There is still no possible connection between the ideas and images here and there that go before and after.

[The following questions were put by J:]

How may I learn the epic style of blank verse?

I suppose it is best done by reading the epic writers until you get the epic rush or sweep.

Is it too early for me to learn it? Kindly say a few words, and if there is no harm in my trying it at present, please give some force and inner guidance for it.

Epic writing needs a sustained energy of rhythm and word which is not easy to get or maintain. I am not sure whether you can get it now. I think you would first have to practise maintaining the level of the more energetic among the lines you have been writing ...

May 4, 1937

[The first 3 questions were put by J:]

Kindly say who are the epic writers. I want to read them all. Is your “Love and Death” an epic, and “Urvasie”, and “Baji Prabhou”?

Love and Death is epic in long passages. Urvasie is written on the epic model. Baji Prabhou is not epic in style or rhythm.

Are your 12 recent poems⁶³ too in epic style?

No, they are lyrical, though sometimes there may come in an epic elevation.

Will “Paradise Lost” and “Paradise Regained” help? And who are the other epic writers in English? Kindly mention all the epic writers in all the languages – it is good to know them, at least.

“Paradise Lost”, yes. In the other Milton’s fire had dimmed. In English Paradise Lost and Keats’ Hyperion (unfinished) are the two chief epics. In Sanskrit Mahabharat, Ramayan, Kalidasa’s Kumar Sambhav, Bharavi’s Kiratarjuniya. In Bengali Meghnadbodh. In Italian Dante’s Divine Comedy and Tasso’s (I have forgotten the name for the moment⁶⁴) are in the epic cast. In Greek of course Homer, in Latin Virgil. There are other poems which attempt the epic style, but are not among the masterpieces. There are also primitive epics in German and Finnish (Nibelungenlied, Kalevala) –

Our vaccination list is ready. Will send a duplicate to Mother tomorrow, before submitting it to the hospital.

You will send a copy to Pavitra, for he will have to write to Valle as it was to him that their original letter came.

S has been complaining of her extreme weakness, pains etc. which are so great that she is on her way to death – her ribs can be counted, her stomach etc. have become microscopic; her pains terrible; often she can hardly get up from her bed in the morning; often her breath comes gaspingly through weakness. She says she took medicines from you for eight long days without any change; when she told you, you said “It’s the only medicine I have”, so she dropped treatment. On my telling her that she may have to go to Bombay side for treatment, she says she will prefer to die near to the Mother – not a comfortable prospect for the Mother, but she may live if we give her one cup more milk a day and butter – which have been accorded. Ah yes, before the demand for butter, she wrote that she can’t eat – she feels too ill.

It is true that Mother finds her looking very down and seedy. Any enlightenment from Science?

I send you the poem again. How do you find the effect, on the whole? I have very little credit though, this time.

... I think between us – putting aside all false modesty – we have made a rather splendaceous superrealist poem out of your surrealist affair.

Still, something, what?

Certainly. Mine are only the finishing touches.

May 5, 1937

I hear D is having the same number of motions. Is there any harm in giving an enema?

It could be given with guimauve in it, provided the stock of guimauve is unspoilt with no insects in it. But it is a French medicine with special proportions etc. – you have prepared before? for they won’t know how to do it.

May 6, 1937

Yes, we have prepared it before... Shall give it tomorrow afternoon or day after morning?

Very well.

I have been thinking of studying medical books daily one hour, but can hardly manage it, though at the same time inflicted with doubts as to the utility of studies and lacking in practical experience, I do not know what to do. Please give some Force. Must run two horses, what?

Why not?

The difficulty is still lack of living interest in it – what you call enthousiasmos!

Enthousiasmos does not mean living interest or enthusiasm – it means the inrush of the creative force or godhead, আবেশ⁶⁵ – You don’t need that for chewing medical books.

May 7, 1937

I consulted doctors in the hospital about D’s case. They say it is a mild form of colitis, and recommend Stovarsol – which is a very strong drug; or Biolactyl – a product of intestinal flora, which is very mild. Perhaps Mother won’t favour any medicine.

No. Neither stova nor flora.

A is complaining very much of his ill health, physical depression, lack of energy, which are constantly increasing, so much so that it is impossible for him to do any mental work. Something has to be done. But first we must know the cause. Anémie cérébrale? slow poisoning by liver or kidney? something else? Mother wants you to arrange for the usual examinations (urine, blood) so that it may be found out.

May 8, 1937

[A’s case.] Anémie cérébrale! Good God, no! It is anaemia hepaticus.

[Sri Aurobindo changed “hepaticus” to “hepatica”.]

Who is this hermaphrodite?

... Is blood-examination necessary? for what? Malaria or simple blood-count?

I don’t know – it is to satisfy A. He thinks he has a colonisation of colon bacilli – spreading where they ought not to be (like certain nations) or else liver poisoning or kidney poisoning – he feels in the morning as if he had been poisoned in his sleep. It is to decide between these scientific theories that so many examinations were suggested.

About the treatment, I don’t give anything today depending on your remarks + results of urine exam etc.

Must know first what he has.

Please give some Force tonight to rewrite two poems. A great bother this chiselling business – and uninteresting too. But perhaps it’s pleasant for you as you cast and recast ad infinitum, we hear, your poetry or prose.

Poetry only, not prose. And in poetry only one poem, “Savitri”. My smaller poems are written off at once and if any changes are to be made, it is done the same day or the next day, and very rapidly done.

By the way, you said that these two lines of Amal’s poem:

“Flickering no longer with the cry of clay

The distance-haunted fire of mystic mind”,

have an Overmind touch. Frankly speaking, I thought the first line I too could have written myself. Can you show me where its super-excellence lies?

What super-excellence? as poetry? When I say that a line comes from a higher or overhead plane or has the Overmind touch I do not mean that it is superior in pure poetic excellence to others from lower planes – that Amal’s lines outshine Shakespeare or Homer, for instance. I simply mean that it has some vision, light etc. from up there and the character of its expression and rhythm are from there.

I appreciate the previous lines much more. Amal too is puzzled. Is it definable? Is it in assonances, dissonances, rhythm or what?

No. You do not appreciate probably because you catch only the surface mental meaning. The line [“Flickering no longer with the cry of clay”] is very very fine from the technical point of view, the distribution of consonantal and vowel sounds being perfect. That, however, is possible on any level of inspiration.

These are technical elements, the Overmind touch does not consist in that but in the undertones or overtones of the rhythmic cry and a language which carries in it a great depth or height or width of spiritual truth or spiritual vision, feeling or experience. But all that has to be felt, it is not analysable. If I say that the second line [“The distance-haunted fire of mystic mind”] is a magnificent expression of an inner reality most intimate and powerful and the first line with its conception of the fire once “flickering” with the “cry” of clay, but now no longer is admirably revelatory – you would probably reply that it does not convey anything of the kind to you. That is why I do not usually speak of these things in themselves or in their relation to poetry – only with Amal who is trying to get his inspiration into touch with these planes. Either one must have the experience – e.g. here one must have lived in or glimpsed the mystic mind, felt its fire, been aware of the distances that haunt it, heard the cry of clay mixing with it and the consequent unsteady flickering of its flames and the release into the straight upward burning and so known that this is not mere romantic rhetoric, not mere images or metaphors expressing something imaginative but unreal (that is how many would take it perhaps) but facts and realities of the self, actual and concrete, or else there must be a conspiracy between the “solar plexus” and the thousand-petalled lotus which makes one feel if not know the suggestion of these things through the words and rhythm. As for technique, there is a technique of this higher poetry but it is not analysable and teachable. If for instance Amal had written “No longer flickering with the cry of clay”, it would no longer have been the same thing though the words and mental meaning would be just as before – for the overtone in the rhythm would have been lost in the ordinary staccato clipped movement and with the overtone the rhythmic significance. It would not have given the suggestion of space and wideness full with the cry and the flicker, the intense impact of that cry and the agitation of the fire which is heard through the line as it is. But to realise that, one must have the inner sight and inner ear for these things; one must be able to hear the sound-meaning, feel the sound-spaces with their vibrations. Again if he had written “Quivering no longer with the touch on clay” it would have been a good line, but meant much less and something quite different to the inner experience, though to the mind it would have been only the same thing expressed in a different image – not so to the solar plexus and the thousand-petalled lotus. In this technique it must be the right word and no other, in the right place, and in no other, the right sounds and no others, in a design of sound that cannot be changed even a little. You may say that it must be so in all poetry; but in ordinary poetry the mind can play about, chop and change, use one image or another, put this word here or that word there – if the sense is much the same and has a poetical value, the mind does not feel that all is lost unless it is very sensitive and much influenced by the solar plexus. In the overhead poetry these things are quite imperative, it is all or nothing – or at least all or a fall.

May 9, 1937

Guru, my Bengali poem was not even pleasing this time? Alas! Or did you forget it in the sweep of the cataract that came down into your pen?

Quite forgot all about him! Anyhow not very successful – pretty but wobbly – like someone unsure of his legs but just drunk enough to be sentimental.

... It is quite possible, I am sure, to write such lines like Amal’s, without knowing the technique etc.

Of course.

Amal says the lines didn’t come originally ready-made like that. He had to change and alter, being guided solely by the ear or some vague feeling, and stuck on to the right thing.

Necessarily – until the ear and feeling are satisfied, one has to do that. For overhead poetry to come with a faultless rush one must be very very⁶⁶.

You talk about inner vision, inner feeling, etc., but the blessed writer himself doesn’t know very often he has visioned something; all the same he writes.

That you must have in order to understand and judge about the source, touch etc. But one can write without knowing anything.

Last night, by Jove, was a trial indeed! After constructing the first 6 lines, I was dozing and dozing, and in full doze, wrote the whole poem. So much was the “trance” that after finishing the poem I couldn’t even revise it properly and went to bed. Sleep came immediately!... Really, Sir, your Inspiration or Force has a very queer way of working: by dulling, benumbing and paralysing the senses.

Of course. If you could write in a doze, perhaps you could even achieve something supramental.

You found the original line nice, but no meaning. That is the trouble, Sir! Sometimes you say, “Why the deuce do you want the meaning?” Another time, “Nice line, but meaning?” A contradiction, Sir.

Well, but the other lines have a meaning or try to have. If you wrote all nonsense, then it is different.

No contradiction! Nonsense hangs together and meaning hangs together – but nonsense intervening in sense hangs apart.

Amal says that “concentrated blood” is very fine but how can it be lost in the night?

Concentrated blood sounds like condensed milk. It’s the blood that’s lost or the night?

Sorry, but I had to rewrite the last lines. As they stand they are simply magnificent nonsense.

D, they say, is getting better... One or two more washes, if necessary, will perhaps set him right.

Yes. We can see for 2 or 3 days and give another if necessary.

May 10, 1937

You seem to have “transformed” the sun into a majesty of night!

No, it’s condensed milk – oh, I mean, blood.

To tell you frankly, today’s poem⁶⁷ seems to me very fine, Sir. But you will find many flaws, probably.

It is an English poem and shows that, in spite of lapses in detail, you are getting hold of the language and its poetic turn. It is not so original as the first one, but excellent poetry.

May 11, 1937

I am sending you today’s poem so that you may show me the un-English overtones and undertones and other defects.

What the deuce! Overtones and undertones are not English or unEnglish; but I have pointed out the unEnglish ambiguities. Perhaps you will say that it is a surrealistic poem? But it has too much an air of logical building for that.

If you have time, I would like to know what exactly are these overtones and undertones [8.5.37].

I was speaking of rhythmical overtones and undertones. That is to say, there is a metrical rhythm which belongs to the skilful use of metre – any good poet can manage that; but besides that there is a music which rises up out of this rhythm or a music that underlies it, carries it as it were as the movement of the water carries the movement of a boat. They can both exist together in the same line, but it is more a matter of the inner than the outer ear and I am afraid I can’t define farther. To go into the subject would mean a long essay. But to give examples –

Journeys end in lovers meeting,

Every wise man’s son doth know⁶⁸,

is excellent metrical rhythm, but there are no overtones and undertones. In

Golden lads and girls all must,

As chimney-sweepers, come to dust⁶⁹

there is a beginning of undertone, but no overtone, while the “Take, O take those lips away”⁷⁰ (the whole lyric) is all overtones.

Again

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him⁷¹

has admirable rhythm, but there are no overtones or undertones. But

In maiden meditation, fancy-free⁷²

has beautiful running undertones, while

In the dark backward and abysm of Time⁷³

is all overtones, and

Absent thee from felicity awhile,

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain⁷⁴,

is all overtones and undertones together. I don’t suppose this will make you much wiser, but it is all I can do for you at present.

“Break that chain, find in the soul’s lonely sign

A fountain of volcanic deluge-fire,

The rock-embedded source of spirit-mine

The immortal wine of sovereign Desire.”

Sir, this is a surrealistic tangle. You find a fountain of volcanic fire in a sign and that fountain is the source of a mine (rather difficult for the miners to get at through the volcanic fire) and also in that source is a wine-cellar,– perhaps in the rocks which embed the source, but all the same a strange place to choose. Perhaps for the miners to drink.

Nothing in A’s stools [8.5.37]. Some Vichy water may do him good.

Vichy water has to be taken fresh – stale from France in bottles it is not safe.

May I take a “sea bath” twice a week? It will help in fil- ling up my clavicular depressions and developing my pectoral and intercostal muscles, perhaps. If Mother doesn’t want, I won’t.

Mother is not encouraging the practice but neither is she forbidding it,– except for some. She is neutral. She leaves you free to choose.

[The following questions were put by J:] Is there a difference between blank verse and poetry which is quite epic and blank verse and poetry which is written only in the epic style, model or manner?

I don’t quite understand the point of the question. Poetry is epic or it is not. There may be differences of elevation in the epic style, but this seems to be distinction without a difference.

Surely there must be some difference between an epic, true and genuine throughout, and a poem which is only in the epic style or has the epic tone?

An epic is a long poem usually narrative on a great subject written in a style and rhythm that is of a high nobility or sublime. But short poems, a sonnet for instance can be in the epic style or tone, e.g. some of Milton’s or Meredith’s sonnet on Lucifer or, as far as I can remember it, Shelley’s on Ozymandias.

What are the qualities or characteristics that tell one – “This is an epic”?

I think the formula I have given is the only possible definition. Apart from that each epic poet has his own qualities and characteristics that differ widely from the others. For the rest one can feel what is the epic nobility or sublimity, one can’t very well analyse it.

In Sanskrit epics, e.g. Kumarsambhav, what has made up the rhythm? And how does it sound so grave, lofty, wide and deep?

It is a characteristic that comes natural to Sanskrit written in the classical style.

How can one have all these qualities together?

Why not? they are not incompatible qualities.

English seems to have the necessary tone more easily, but is it possible in Bengali?

I don’t know why it shouldn’t be. Madhu Sudan’s style is a lofty epical style; it is not really grave and deep because his mind was not grave or deep – but that was the defect of the poet, not necessarily an incapacity of the language.

Kumarsambhav was my textbook in I.A., but I have not read all of it. May I ask Kapali Shastri to help me read it?

I don’t know if it is necessary for a poetic, not scholarly reading of the poem.

It is only the 1st seven cantos that need to be read.

May 12, 1937

What does the double line indicate against lines 11, 12?

Double line means double fine.

Good God, Sir, you have made the Spirit a swine!

No, sir, I haven’t, though the spirit often becomes a swine. But you have made the spirit-mine into the spirit’s mine which is a deterioration.

I take my pen to write, a fear creeps in saying that perhaps what I shall write will be un-English and surrealistic and all labour will be lost. You are taking so much trouble and giving your precious time, is it worth while?

It is because you are finding your way. You have got the inspiration, but the mental mixture rises from time to time; that has to be got rid of, so I am taking trouble. I wouldn’t if it were not worth while.

Ishwarbhai is suffering from inability to eat or digest what he has eaten. Mother proposes to treat him like Amrita with nux vomica and with syrup of bitter orange. He will probably come to you for them; give and instruct him.

May 13, 1937

A says his trouble has increased: headache, flatulence, many motions (due to Soda Sulph.). So we shall give him another mixture...

No need of that – he has been having good motions since he is taking Triphala.

[The following question was put by J:]

I would like my present poems to come in a few lines, but the epical tone to be more and more perfect every day.

The epic movement is something that flows; it may not be good to try to shut it into a few lines. There might be a danger of making something too compact. If that can be avoided, then of course it is better to write a few lines with a heightened epic tone than many with the lesser tone.

May 14, 1937

I am having a blessed fever since the morning; aches all over the limbs; a damn business it is, Sir! Could not do any work. Read a detective story as treatment. Taking one Pulv. Glyc. Co.

Detective story as treatment, and Pulv. Glyc. and Company as amusement? Right!

May 15, 1937

A enquired if too many purgatives were good. I wrote to him that they have been stopped. Dr. Becharlal recommends a dose of castor oil or enema, to clear out the bowels.

More purgatives? after the triumph of the soda sulph. and A’s own pathetic question?

May 16, 1937

Please give a few examples of conceit in English poetry. Not very clear about it....

Conceit means a too obviously ingenious or far-fetched or extravagant idea or image which is evidently an invention of a clever brain, not a true and convincing flight of the imagination. E.g. Donne’s (?) comparison of a child’s small-pox eruptions to the stars of the milky way or something similar. I have forgotten the exact thing, but that will serve.

This hill turns up its nose at heaven’s height,

Heaven looks back with a blue contemptuous eye

– that’s a conceit.

O cloud, thou wild black wig on heaven’s bald head,

would be another. These are extravagant specimens. I haven’t time to think out any ingenious ones, nor to discuss trochees adequately – have given one or two hints in the margin.

Some more conceits, ingenious all of them:

Am I his tail and is he then my head?

But head by tail, I think, is often led.

Also

Like a long snake came wriggling out his laugh.

Also

How the big Gunner of the upper sphere

Is letting off his cannon in the sky!

Flash, bang bang bang! he has some gunpowder

With him, I think. Again! Whose big bow-wow

Goes barking through the hunting fields of Heaven?

What a magnificent row the gods can make!

And don’t forget

The long slow scolopendra of the train.

Or if you think these are not dainty or poetic enough, here’s another:

God made thy eyes sweet cups to hold blue wine;

By sipping at them rapture-drunk are mine.

Enough? Amen!

... About Rajani’s blood report, urine and blood are connected as রজনী [rajanī] to দিবস⁷⁵, or blood circulating through the kidney contributes to the formation or excretion of urine. When blood sugar rises beyond the normal it is excreted in the urine. But since his sugar is high with a consequent high sugar percentage in the urine, it has been marked + + in the report.

Well, you haven’t told me if there is any meaning in the + + 2.5 except that it corresponds to the blood urine like রজনী to Diwakar⁷⁶. Does it matter if it is 2.5 or 250 so long as it is + +? When is it considered a high amount and when is it considered very serious? You have said nothing about stool. Nothing abnormal? R is supposed to be suffering from dysentery.

May 17, 1937

You said [9.5.37]: “... For overhead poetry to come with a faultless rush one must be very very”, and left the sentence unfinished. Is it “very very Sri Aurobindo-like”?

But I am not aware that I write overhead poetry with a rush.

Everybody is aspiring to write from the overhead plane, so why not I? Possible?

Maybe.

If one can write all from the highest plane, i.e. Overmind and Supermind plane – as you have done in Savitri, is it evidently going to be greater poetry than any other poetry?

Nobody ever spoke of Supermind plane poetry. Is Savitri all from overhead plane? I don’t know.

... You lay down certain features of overhead poetry, e.g. greater depth and height of spiritual vision, inner life and experience and character of rhythm and expression. But it won’t necessarily outshine Shakespeare in poetic excellence.

Obviously if properly done it would have a deeper and rarer substance, but would not be necessarily greater in poetic excellence.

You say also that for overhead poetry technique, it must be the right word and no other in the right place, right sounds and no others in a design of sound that cannot be changed even a little. Well, is that not what is called sheer inevitability which is the sole criterion of highest poetry?

Yes, but mental and vital poetry can be inevitable also. Only in O.P. there must be a Tightness throughout which is not the case elsewhere – for without this inevitability it is no longer fully O.P., while without this sustained inevitability there can be fine mental and vital poetry. But practically that means O.P. comes usually by bits only, not in a mass.

You may say that in overhead poetry expression of spiritual vision is more important. True, but why can’t it be clothed in as fine poetry as in the case of Shakespeare? The highest source of Inspiration will surely bring in all the characteristics of highest poetry, no?

It can, but it is more difficult to get. It can be as fine poetry as Shakespeare’s if there is the equal genius, but it needn’t by the fact of being O.P. become finer.

Your Bird of Fire which I take as overhead poetry, is full of excellent poetry.

Is it?

Nobody said that O.P. could not be excellent poetry.

If one could write like that, is there not going to be a greater creation in all respects?

Maybe; it has to be seen.

... I suppose all spiritual poetry does not corne from overhead planes.

No, it may come from the spiritualised mind or vital.

I don’t see really why overhead poetry will only excel in expressing spiritual things and not also excel in a superior form than the lower plane poetry.

It may perhaps if the floodgates are fully opened.

Could you enlighten me on your overhead and underhead poetry?

In what way?

In Rajani’s report, you seem to make ++ separate from 2.5%. It is not so.

Not at all, I simply wanted to know exactly what 2.5 indicated, if anything.

We examine chemically first a sample of urine, i.e. by chemical reagents, which is called qualitative test. You ought to know that from your English Public School chemistry, Sir!

Never learned a word of chemistry or any damned science in my school. My school, sir, was too aristocratic for such plebeian things.

Good Lord, the fellow is harbouring all sorts of organisms! Of course, it is in a way expected, for diabetes diminishes resistance to infection. But he is, I gather, coming to supramental treatment soon! Everything clear now?... He doesn’t seem to be taking Insulin treatment.

The Civil Surgeon Fisher who fished him into the hospital, talked vaguely of a possibility of Insulin in the future if the examination proved the necessity, but the new civil Surgeon Kapur who is making him caper out of hospital, positively forbids the use of Insulin. So!

May 18, 1937

[Rajani’s case.] Oh, it is Kapur! Lt. Colonel N. C. Kapur?

I suppose. Can’t be two C. S. fellows with a name like that.

It is very strange your school had no chemistry.

It may have had in a corner, but I had nothing to do with such stuff.

But for I.C.S. you had no science?

Certainly not. In I.C.S. you can choose your own subjects.

Perhaps these newfangled things hadn’t come out then?

They were newfangled and not yet respectable.

The D.R. cart servant has elephantiasis of the left leg. Now it has increased – the whole foot is swollen. He was complaining of pain... Are we not likely to be responsible for any accident (a remote possibility)?

What accident?

... He ought to be given leave for some days till the pain subsides, for with pain to carry on the work will only set up a vicious cycle.

Evidently he ought to be on leave without pay. If pay is given they don’t care. Cart service seems hardly suitable for that illness. There is however a hammerman in the smithy who goes on with a leg like that.

I am afraid my source of English poetry is exhausted before it has begun. The Guru is supposed to take up the shishya’s troubles!

It seems to me to be rather J’s trouble. She writes fine epic verse and says she is unable to do anything worth while – you write a fine sonnet and decide that your inspiration is exhausted. Queer.

Tell me, please, how I should improve. The details are very difficult to manage.

You have the inspiration, whatever you may say. The management of details still defective can come only by practice.

By a lot of reading and writing or only reading?

Either.

Please bring me back that buoyance, faith and joy, force and confidence. Otherwise finished! Your working is extremely fine and diplomatic, I must say. Gave me an exceedingly fine poem to begin with and cheered me up. Then – “Go on, my dear fellow – spading, efforting, labouring and perspiring! Oh it will come, it will come!”

It is not my working, but your moods that are queer. You get something no reasonable being would expect under the ordinary laws of Nature and then you fancy you haven’t got it and wail because everything is not absolutely, continuously, faultlessly, increasingly, inimitably miraculous through and through and always and for ever. In no sadhana that I know of does absolute sustained perfection in everything come with a rush and stay celestially perfect for ever more. If it were so there would be no need for sadhana – one would only have to gaze at heaven a little and grow wings and fly into the spheres a triumphant godhead.

Your overhead poetry. Sir, not a snatch of it has ever come into Bengali poetry – our Bengali poetry?

I can’t say. I can recognise the thing well enough in English, because I know the symptoms of the O.P. abnormality there. In Bengali it is more difficult for me to detect. I suppose I must try to train my ear for that.

May 19, 1937

“Tapering fingers of an infinite Force

Mould life’s grey mire to a bright rhythm of sun:

Through a gold network of vessels lustre-spun

Its luminous blood into earth’s darkness pours.”

Sir, what the hell is the meaning of lines 5,6? What are these clumsy vessels doing there, either? Into whose kitchen have you trespassed? Cooking blood? But why not then “earth’s cauldron”?

Anyhow kick the vessels out. A gold (something) network lustre-spun would sound fine, but I don’t know what something to put as I have not the least idea what you are after. Cryptic, by God!

I am greatly surprised to hear that you have to train your ear to judge the source of Bengali poetry. Is it a question of the ear?

Great Scott, man! Poetry and no question of the ear?

Just the other day you wrote that by the inner vision, inner feeling, etc. one must understand and judge the source of poetry. How does the ear come in now?

Have you read only that sentence and not other things I have written about Overmind rhythm etc.? Only the other day I said, I think, that Amal’s line changed (Flickering no longer) would lose the overtone (rhythmic) and with it the Overmind touch.

If you put the stress on the ear, O.P. would only be a question of rhythm, or at least principally, no?

Very largely. The same words, thought, substance with a different rhythm would cease to be overhead at all. I said that clearly and gave the instance “No longer flickering” instead of “Flickering no longer”. How is it you miss these things?

... Right word in the right place, apart from the substance, of course, is the first criterion.

Why apart from the substance?

All this you can see at a shot, ear or no ear, as if a line is rocketing down from the O.P. just before your eyes –

And ears.

And you say “Ah, it is illumined, that’s Intuition!” That you have to train your ear is a surprise inattendu!

Strange point! Who does not know that without rhythm poetry is nothing? If poetic rhythm is unessential, pray why not write in prose?

Nishikanta’s translation of Amal’s poem⁷⁷ is really splendid, but is it also from the same plane as the original? Perhaps not, for Nishikanta’s plane appears to be rather subtle vital.

Maybe. I don’t remember what plane Amal’s poem came from.

Is the spiritual value of a poem lost in translation by the difference of the planes, though it may be poetically excellent?

If you mean the spiritual substance, I suppose it would be lost. I was looking at the poetic beauty of Nishikanta’s rendering which is on a par with the original. As for the subtle vital, the vital sublimated enters largely into Amal’s poem, even if it is a sort of super-vital.

[D.R. cart man’s case.] By “accident”, I meant sudden heart failure. But Rajangam says there’s hardly any danger of the sort. I saw the man in the smithy – his condition has now become chronic. This D.R. fellow’s condition it seems, diminishes as soon as he takes rest, and comes back with work.

Mother is under the impression he was relieved from cart work. But if it is like that he must take rest.

A “cheer brother” again! [28, 29.4.37] N.P. has hydrocele on the left side, Sir. Dr. R is a specialist in that. Shall we pass him on?

No.

But I hear that R himself is unwell. What’s the matter? Ear trouble? Self-drugging?

(Vital up, perhaps.)

Given A more M.T.

A finds your M.T. – which he says is reduced in dose – ineffective. He says he was as well with Sudarshan or with Triphala.

(I see he says that he is worse than eight days ago – says that Sudarshan and the pills were stopped to try the mixture, but the mixture is not helping perhaps because it is reduced in dose without any compensation such as S or T. He asks also whether it is worth while being treated if the cause of his illness is not known or if it cannot be cured. In fact you have not said for what you are treating him or on what base, so I could not answer. I said I would ask you.)

May 20, 1937

How is today’s poem? Not very successful, perhaps.

Miraculously successful, sir, except for one ornithological detail.

It sounds rather big.

Not only sounds, but is.

Oh yes, you didn’t understand my “vessels”? Because you forgot, Sir, that I am a medical poet. Vessels are not for cooking only – there are also blood vessels; and you should have made it out as blood was also there.

Let me point out to you that vessels of gold can only mean pots and things, not blood vessels. If you say “golden vessels”, it might be otherwise provided you put a footnote “N.B.: physiological metaphor”. For non-medical poetry veins would be better and not puzzle the layman.

... Why the devil does A write all these things to you? Are you prescribing or are we? and what the devil is the use of his knowing the medicines and doses, pray? He could have asked me.

Well, what about the free Englishman’s right to grumble? This is not London and there is no “Times” to write to, so he writes a letter to me, instead of to the “Times”.

Surely, there is a twist somewhere.

There is always a twist, sir, always.

And, didn’t I tell him and report to you that it is his chronic liver trouble – liver enlarged? He has forgotten it evidently!

I knew it was liver, but I had myself forgotten about the enlargement.

Anyway, I won’t fume.

Don’t. Losing one’s hair is always a useless operation. Keep your hair on..

Only tell him, please, that he ought to let us know instead of sending a boy with an empty bottle, if he doesn’t want to present his honourship himself, or shall I tell him myself?

Dear Sir, tell him yourself, tell him yourself. I will pat you on the back in silence from a safe distance.

A servant boy has hookworm; we suggest Eucalyptus + castor oil mixture. So?

Right you are. Go for him, give him castor and pollux.

May 20, 1937

20.5.37

Nirod

We are informed that P has got boils, ringworm and other privileges all over his body and he is scratching himself and wiping the dishes with his busy fingers. This, I believe, is objectionable according to medical science as well as to common sense? You had better interview him and insist on his taking some kind of treatment, also your good advice. What?

Sri Aurobindo

May 22, 1937

There are plenty of alternatives and questions in this poem⁷⁸; I hope they don’t annoy you.

No, it doesn’t annoy – but, sir, you have written a magnificent poem without knowing it and that is absurd. The foam-washed shore on the edge of time is splendid, twilight’s starry heart-beat is splendid; lines 7, 8, 9, 12 are O.K., while the couplet, sir, the couplet is a miracle. If these are not O.P., they ought to be.

Quite awfully fine. Gaudeamus igitur⁷⁹.

The bakery servant’s ulcer is varicose ulcer. Rather difficult to heal, for according to medical science the first step in treatment is rest of the parts affected. But since it is not bad, we may hope to cure it. About the risk, Mother has taken the responsibility.

Mother was told it was a wound and nothing much and the varicose affair was separate.

What responsibility and what risk? No one is responsible for the effects of an illness.

May 23, 1937

Why do you call it “absurd”, Sir, writing a magnificent poem without knowing? If I knew I would have been glad, but there is a greater pleasure in surprises, isn’t there?

Surprise of what? Surprise of not knowing till somebody tells you?

Your remarks are rather mysterious. “If these are not O.P., they ought to be” means they are not? and “these” means also lines 7, 8, 9, 12, I suppose, but you say they are O.K.

I mean just what I say. It is evidently the overhead inspiration that is trying to come, that it changes into something more mental in the transmission. Lines 7, 8, 9 are those that can be suspected of being actually O.P. in rhythm, movement, spirit and turn of the language. But the poetry of the rest is not the less fine for the mental intervention.

O.K. in English is something like all right, quite fit, etc. no?

In American English.

Can your remark on my poem, with the Latin put right, go into circulation?

No.

Amal says it is Gaudumus igitur.

What’s that – that’s not Latin! There is no such word as gaudumus. I wrote “gaudeamus”⁸⁰.

... About the bakery servant – as the Mother knows, standing occupation is not good for these conditions; they tend to increase it. The risk I spoke of is no doubt remote; what happens, at times, is that blood in these veins clots and in that case one may be cured; if that does not happen, the clot can travel to deeper vessels and then to the heart too, or to the brain...

Well, those are things that happen in the course of illness and the employer is not responsible. As for risk, he has to work for his living and it won’t help him if we refuse him work. In Europe a large percentage of the working class have varicose veins, yet their work is standing work all day and they go on with it.

May 24, 1937

In the couplet, Amal says, especially your line “Light through her [earth’s] dead eclipse of mind is poured,” is magnificent. Is it?

Yes.

How I struggled with the line, and you, Sir, by just a touch here and there fixed it up! I wish I could do that.

It is a question of getting the right words in the right places instead of allowing them to wander haphazard. Naturally it depends on inspiration, not on any clever piecing together. One sits still (mentally), looks at the words and somebody flashes the thing through you.

Oh, this blessed mind! But how the hell does it intervene?

By suggesting an inspiration of its own or a form of its own for the inspiration that is coming and in a hundred other ways. The mind is very active and clever for interference.

At times there are good lines, at others utter failures. If I had doubted at every moment, questioned, I can understand.

The mind can suggest as well as question.

I don’t seem to have still caught the metrical rhythm.

It is not the metrical rhythm you have not caught – it is the fact that in English words the stresses cannot be shifted about at pleasure. It can only be done occasionally and within judicious choice.

About the poem of yesterday, this remark will do: “Quite awfully fine ... A magnificent poem”.

[Sri Aurobindo put brackets around “Quite awfully fine”.]

This is too jocular a form for a solemn “remark”. The rest by itself sounds as if you had written the Iliad. Better say more modestly “An extremely fine poem”.

By the way, I know that Mother’s programme is too crammed; still, I was wondering if I could be occasionally or rarely put in edgeways as one of the interviewers. Any decision will be taken with yogic samatā.

Better not press that now. Wait for better times.

May 25, 1937

You seem to have had no time yesterday to read my poem. Golden silence of indifference?

All that was really there last night? How astonishing! I didn’t see it. However I have answered now.

N.P. is complaining of violent pains “just below the joint of the thigh” connected with the rapid enlargement of his hydrocele. Is there any danger of a complication such as hernia – something of the kind was suggested once by somebody in connection with another case of hydrocele, I do not know with what authority. If there is, it ought to be looked to, without alarming a very alarm-able patient. What are the pains due to anyway?

May 26, 1937

In N.P.’s case there is no “rapid enlargement” of the hydrocele. It is of the same size as we saw before.

It was his hallucination then? or fear made him see double?

By the way, can you not send one or two sonnets already written, of yours?

Impossible at present.

May 27, 1937

Rajlakshmi has eczema, can I try the medicine Mother gave for that servant?

Pavitra has some medicine for eczema, you might ask him for it. Mother was thinking to keep the other medicine for some time in case there should be any recurrence of the ulcer of Krishnaswami.

May 28, 1937

In this poem should I put “faint murmur” or “radiant murmur”?

Faint away,– all right – better than radiation.

At night I felt damnably sleepy over the writing. What’s the matter, Sir? Had to jump into bed disgusted.

Result of inspiration I suppose – sends you to sleep.

... P has a very rotten physique, Sir!

Well, you will have to pull him out of this before we send him home.

Shall we show N.P. to Philaire, tomorrow? Operation out of the question, perhaps?

You can exhibit him to Philaire, but operation out of the question.

May 29, 1937

Exhibited N.P. to Philaire. Operation is the only remedy, so?

Mother says NO – So?

The rubber sheet Mother gave for the dispensing table is worn out. She had given a shawl which is very good. Shall we use it then?

You can buy a rubber sheet for it.

Mother does not recollect about the shawl.

There is hardly any substantial result of my writing poetry every night. Should one store up and then spend economically, effectively, splendidly now and then, say twice a week, like Amal? Which method do you advise?

Can’t say. You have progressed much by the present method. Could try the other now and then for perfection if you like.

Perhaps in all the poems there is a touch of inspiration, but is that going to be heightened by storing up for some time and then allowing the gush – that’s the question before you.

It is a question before you, sir – not before me.

Guru, J has been terribly puzzled and worried, myself a little less, about your “too overmental style”!

Ornamental, not overmental.

... She exercised her mental faculty too much? Epic movement has to surpass that?

No, sir – You must read my epic handwriting properly first – afterwards exercise your mental faculty.

May 30, 1937

By the way, you have absolutely forgotten to send that “Presse Médicale” with your notes [2.2.37]. Brooding over it?

No. Went to limbo.

I have progressed much, you say? Very glad and thank you, Sir. But the latest poems don’t seem to come to much, do they?

What the big H do you mean? Don’t come to much? What did you expect more than the praise that has been given? Want to be told that Homer, Aeschylus and Shakespeare all rolled into one were not a patch on you? What’s the idea?

The poem which you have marked throughout with single and double marginal lines, is only a fine sonnet?... Not that I mind very much, but I was surprised to see the remark. Can you clarify?

Again what the damn do you mean? When an English poet achieves a fine sonnet, he feels like a peacock and spreads his tail – and you say “only a fine sonnet”. Well, I’m damned! Surprised myself to see your remark on my remark.

About the poem of yesterday, I don’t feel like changing the last line. The poem hasn’t come to much except as an exercise. You have said nothing about it.

Don’t talk blithering nonsense. Change that line and send the poem back to me.

D seems to be wounded by our and your silence. Do you think he may be more Pondicherry-minded by a little connection: soothing words, one or two poems, etc.?

Yes. Better send some soothing remarks from time to time.

May I know why Mother says No to N.P.’s operation? I want to know your viewpoint. Hydrocele operations are supposed to be without any risk at all. If we leave it as it is, it will grow bigger.

What operation? tapping? I have known cases of hydrocele operation being performed times and times but the thing always came back. It is N.P. who is asking for operation?

May 31, 1937

Will you wake up from limbo and scratch something on the paper?

How can I when the whole thing has gone to limbo?

June 1, 1937

“Sitting alone under the shade of the tree

Wrapt in a hushed profundity of night...”

A tree gives shade in the day – here it is night when all is shade! Please change.

I was struck by R’s sonnet! By Jove, looks like a sheer genii – I mean genius, what?

Perhaps both – genii producing genius.

[The following question was put by J:]

What is the best way to get to the source of epic poetry and have it securely established?

One has to grow into it – there is no other way. Once the epic inspiration has opened, this growth is possible and, if the inspiration is sustained, fairly certain.

Arjava has fever again. He thinks it is due to indigestion. I hear that he takes some syrup cocoa sanctioned and sent by Mother. When I asked him about his diet, he didn’t mention it. Too much sugar won’t do, I think, as already he can’t even digest D.R. vegetables.

There is no sugar put in – the sweetness is that of concentrated cocoa. Mother told him he could take it thrice a day; but it is possible he takes too much of the syrup at a time. The usual rule is to take a little syrup with much water. He is exhausting a bottle in 4 days which is immensely rapid. Certainly too much sweet syrup may not be good for the damaged liver.

June 2, 1937

Yesterday I had a dream of a very beautiful plump boy – Amal’s golden child⁸¹ – who came with tenderness and affection to my side. But he was a lost child whose mother was searching for him, then she found him. I had a very-pleasant feeling. Anything in this?

Your higher being, I suppose. Glad you have found him, if only as yet in a dream.

Why don’t you give me some experience, Sir? Afraid of breaking my head?

All in good time, I hope.

June 3, 1937

How is it, Sir, you had no remarks at all for my poor poem? No lines⁸² either!

Probably was too much in a hurry for remarks or linings.

What about today’s poem?

Quite up to the mark.

I am surprised to hear that the beautiful child in my dream, was my higher being. Why did he go away with his mother if he is my being?

He has no other mother than the Mother, so if the Mother accepts him, what is there to lament over?

... Could you be a little more generous in your explanation so that I may put in some more vigour to find him in reality? And why does it make you glad simply because I have found him in my dream?

What is once found in the inner being is likely to be found in the outer consciousness – that is why.

June 4, 1937

[Question by J:] P says that he is going to write an article on “the only vernacular epic”, Tulsi Ramayan in Hindi. But Meghnadbodh is an epic too in a vernacular. How can he say then that Tulsi Ramayan is the only one? Won’t it be wrong to write like that publicly?

Of course, it is a wrong idea. There is not only Meghnadbodh but Kamban’s Ramayan in Tamil – But I suppose P knows neither Bengali nor Tamil.

I don’t know the cause of Y’s sudden diarrhoea. He took something at Mrs. S’s place, or D.R. mango?

Perhaps. I don’t know. He speaks only of oranges as diet after attack, but he wrote some days ago about [...]⁸³ things. He is asking for green cocoanuts two a day. Mother says green cocoa-nuts can have a laxative, even a purgative effect. What do you say?

This morning, at 4.30 a.m., while returning after urination, K fell down unconscious with froth at the corner of the mouth. At 6.30, he was complaining of terrible frontal headache... He says he concentrated in bed for 20 minutes, before going for urination, quite conscious throughout. He remembers nothing about the fall nor my visit to him, but he answered all my questions quite well.

There is nothing wrong in the system. We must eliminate the possibility of the Force as a cause, since he was consciously meditating, he says, before getting up. I have heard of A falling down once while meditating in standing position.

No previous history of epilepsy.

[No reply.]

June 5, 1937

Strange that you didn’t write a word on K! I wanted you to clear out the possibility of the Force as a cause...

Bunkum about Force. Obviously if a man goes into trance while standing or walking, he may fall down,– Ramakrishna had often to be held up when he went off suddenly while standing. But it doesn’t produce results like that. I don’t believe he is such a mighty sadhak as to go off into nirvikalpa Samadhi⁸⁴ for several hours. Moreover it does not give froth at the lips.

Since I’ve got no instruction, I suppose he has to get the stools and physical examination done independently?

I think so.

About epilepsy, I am not quite sure, for it usually doesn’t occur at his age.

Quite so. If he is sure that nothing happened like this before, it can’t be epilepsy.

June 6, 1937

“Bury these quivering clay’s repeated cries

In the dumb earth’s eternal grave of sighs.”

Shall I make it “clay’s repeated wave” and bring “grave” at the end of the last line?

Eh! how can there be a wave of clay? I have put pit instead of grave – I am damned if I know what it means, but it sounds awfully fine.

K is all right today. Another examination tomorrow.

It turns out that his statement is a lie as I thought – he has had these fits before.

J has eczema on fingers and legs. Oil and sunbath not very effective. She finds that ice application gives much relief when there is itching. But I don’t know really if ice can cure eczema.

Sahana cured her skin with ice, but it was perhaps not eczema.

I thought for eczema the less the water the better it is.

I cured mine with force + very hot water, but I don’t recommend it to others.

Will you kindly ask Mother? Last time J was cured by constant and persistent sunbath + oil. This time?

Mother says she knows only sunbath.

We think A’s illness is chronic mucous colitis... What do you say to screen-examination, and X-ray, if necessary?

If you like.

June 7, 1937

“This gentle breeze free from all petty cares

And fragrant peace of the blue-hearted noon...”

It is rather funny, no? Breeze free from all cares!

Care worried breezes are gentlemen we don’t know – on earth at least..

And breeze rather than the peace should be fragrant, no?

Why the devil should any fragrance of the breeze prevent peace from being fragrant too?

“With a tranced petal of the pale-white moon

Are a vast breath of God that with us shares.”

What does the breath of God share with us? our meals?

Instead of saying “... that with us he shares”, I have dropped “he” in order to be more English.

How does the absence of a personal pronoun make something more English?

The couplet seems flat. What do you say?

Flat! the rhythm is like that of a carriage jolting on a road full of ruts.

I hear Mother kept silent about blood-exam for K?

Why should Mother object? They can do what they think necessary.

June 9, 1937

Can there be fear and anger at the same time?

Fear and anger very often go together. Evidently you have not studied cats fighting ...

Do you think I have a lyrical hand in English poetry or does my gift seem to be more in grave things?

You have acquired the latter better up to now because you have put more practice into it and found your way.

June 10, 1937

I will try lyrics, whatever may happen, what?

All right.

Why do I find your “Songs to Myrtilla” so difficult?

It is a mystery.

I don’t understand a single poem there. The English there seems awfully difficult.

Nonsense. There is nothing difficult about it – it is plain ordinary English.

June 11, 1937

I forward X’s letter. He supports in this letter, very strongly, his belief in human affections. Y came to me just now and recounted her discussion with X on the subject, and her having lost all faith in human love and affections, as a result of her past experiences. Is Y far wrong?

Obviously not. On X’s own argument, if his experience justifies him in believing in human affection, Y’s justifies her in not believing in it.

... One can’t say that there is no truth at all in human feelings and sentiments.

There is a “truth” in everything, the question is what kind of truth and how much of it.

I don’t know what you have written to X about it; he says that he has your support.

I don’t think I wrote anything about that. It was about his power to persuade others and also about his helping a certain person in her illness by prayer.

... The fact is that wherever he has gone, the Goddess of Love has, as if, enjoined all to pour love upon him; so he is a confirmed believer in these things.

What is the fact is that he has vital attractiveness of a magnetic character and naturally⁸⁵ it works in people when he wants it to do so.

By his charm and personality, atheists seem to have become theists, materialists inclined to Yoga, favourable towards Pondicherry, etc., etc.

It is to be seen how far that goes.

Well then, there is an element of truth in affection...

I don’t believe it was the affection that did it. It is the dominating vital force in X. People who were not affectionate by nature, have attached people to them and dominated their minds and lives – e.g. Napoleon.

He also says that he has been betrayed often by friends and suffered much. Is it then his robust optimism that upholds him?

It is a difference of temperament and vital expansiveness.

My questions are: why doesn’t he remain content with these affections? Why does he intend to come here for Yoga?

That is another X.

... If human affections were everything or occupy such a big place in life, why did Buddha and Ramakrishna leave the world? How does Sri Aurobindo leave everything? How do patriots die unknown, unnamed, for their country?

Because they can look beyond their small self to a bigger self or to the Self of All...

Please give a satisfactory reply to all these questions.

I am not going to perorate on this problem but I shall write something brief if you send the book again.

June 12, 1937

Guru, why won’t you perorate? Fear of publicity?

No, Sir. Subject too old and thin.

Do you think X’s affection for me is genuine? I hear that he has spoken very highly of me to others.

Perhaps he feels like that when he writes or when he gets a letter from you; perhaps something in him has got that feeling there always, expressed or latent in a corner. At the same time he used to write to me long lamentations in the desert saying he couldn’t stay here because he had no friends in the Asram.

Human affection is obviously unreliable because it is so much based upon selfishness and desire; it is a flame of the ego sometimes turbid and murky, sometimes more clear and brightly coloured – sometimes tamasic based on instinct and habit, sometimes rajasic and fed by passion or the cry for vital interchange, sometimes more sattwic and trying to be or look to itself disinterested. But fundamentally it depends on a personal need or a return of some kind inward or outward and when the need is not satisfied or the return ceases or is not given, it most often diminishes or dies or exists only as a tepid or troubled remnant of habit from the past or else turns for satisfaction elsewhere. The more intense it is, the more it is apt to be troubled by tumults, clashes, quarrels, egoistic disturbances of all kinds, selfishness, exactions, lapses even to rage and hatred, ruptures. It is not that these affections cannot last – tamasic instinctive affections last because of habit in spite of everything dividing the persons, e.g. certain family affections; rajasic affections can last sometimes in spite of all disturbances and incompatibilities and furious ruptures because one has a vital need of the other and clings because of that or because both have that need and are constantly separating to return and returning to separate or proceeding from quarrel to reconciliation and from reconciliation to quarrel; sattwic affections last very often from duty to the ideal or with some other support though they may lose their keenness, spontaneity or brightness. But the true reliability is there only when the psychic element in human affection becomes strong enough to colour or dominate the rest. For that reason friendship is usually or rather can oftenest be the most durable of the human affections because there there is less interference of the vital and, even though a flame of the ego, it can be a quiet and pure fire giving always its warmth and light. Nevertheless reliable friendship is almost always with a very few; to have a horde of loving, unselfishly faithful friends is a phenomenon so rare that it can be safely taken as an illusion – the enthusiasm of a triumphant return and his own habit of exaggeration, for he seems to take easily social kindness for friendship, is probably responsible for X’s; probably if he remained three years in Calcutta, he might change his tone in spite of his immense capacity for attracting people. In any case human affection whatever its value has its place, because through it the psychic being gets the emotional experiences it needs until it is ready to prefer the true to the apparent, the perfect to the imperfect, the divine to the human. As the consciousness has to rise to the higher level, so the activities of the heart also have to rise to that higher level and change their basis and character. Yoga is the founding of all the life and consciousness in the Divine, so also love and affection must be rooted in the Divine and a spiritual and psychic oneness in the Divine must be their foundation – to seek the Divine first leaving other things aside or to seek the Divine alone is the straight road towards that change. That means no attachment – it need not mean turning affection into disaffection or chill indifference. But X seems to want to take his vital emotions just as they are – tels quels – into the Divine – let him try and don’t bother him with criticisms and lectures; if it can’t be done, he will have to find it out himself. Or perhaps he wants to clap on the Divine to the rest as a crowning ornament – shikhara⁸⁶ – to his pyramid of loves and affections. In that case – Good Lord! I have perorated after all.

I wrote these three funny stanzas last night in a somnolent consciousness. I don’t find any head or tail anywhere.

There is not any head distinguishable, about tail I don’t know.

If the stars are of melody, why the deuce should one weep?

Stars of melody means opera singers, who can I suppose weep. Melodies can also be sorrowful. But if it is real stars you mean, I don’t see why they should weep.

Should it be stars of misery?

Certainly not, the phrase has no meaning.

The last stanza seems too surrealistic. What?

Well, well – there is a rather mystifying and alluring incoherence – Still –

Why the devil am I having so. much difficulty in writing? And so much sleep too? The English stream is drying up or the lyrical attempt bringing the pain of labour?

Probably. It is besides I think the melancholy Jacques in your imagination who is interfering. Perhaps the higher Inspiration wants to find a lyrical form and he cuts in with the sorrowful strains of the past – wrinkles on a smooth face, you know. So the stars can’t manage their melody.

June 13, 1937

Guru, do you find anything in this poem?

Very fine lyric – This time you have hit the bull’s eye. I have altered only a few phrases that were weak.

“Wandering on the wild seas of thought” won’t do perhaps?

Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, is a piece of highway robbery – you might just as well write “To be or not to be that is the question” and call it yours.

Please read Surawardy’s poems and give your opinion on the one about the “old man’s” tears. Amal says that he is under Yeats’ influence.

Am obliged to postpone these tears – mine as well as the old man’s.

At places his poetry is very fine. If only he had left out the melancholic old man’s tears it would have perhaps sounded better, what?

Evidently – the old man’s tears and the young woman’s tennis.

[Regarding J’s narrative:] This whole part seems very poetic, but can poetry come in narrative poems?

Do you mean to say that the rest of the poem is prose or mere verse? Poetry does not consist only in images or fine phrases. When Homer writes simply “Sing, Goddess, the baleful wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus, which laid a thousand woes on the Achaeans and hurled many strong souls of heroes down to Hades and made their bodies a prey for dogs and all the birds; and the will of Zeus was accomplished”, he is writing in the highest style of poetry.

June 14, 1937

Guru, here is the tail of the poem I had begun. I am afraid the typing is as pale as the moon’s eye and the tail as mistily mystifying as the head! What?

Agree.

I hope you get the link throughout. Is it poetic?

Very. Don’t know what it all means, but meaning is superfluous in such poems. The more mystifying the better.

“Voyaging through strange seas of Thought” – highway robbery? Shakespeare’s or Sri Aurobindo’s?

Wordsworth – one of his best known lines.

Medical report – nothing – all old cases.

A wants a tonic for his debility, Kaviraji if possible. Duraiswami has suggested to him “Chyavanpras”. Well?

June 15, 1937

Are some of the lines in today’s poem too long for a lyric?

It does not depend on the length of lines but on whether the rhythm sings or not. If it talks instead of singing, then the rhythm is not lyrical.

Had any time for the old man’s tears and the young woman’s tennis?

No.

[A’s case.] For debility, I know Utile about Chyavanprash. Rajangam, Dr. Becharlal and books say that it is a marvellous remedy for debility etc. So, I suppose, we can get some from Madras when Doraiswamy goes.

Very well.

Is he still consuming the same amount of syrup cocoa?...

He says he has reduced the quantity.

June 16, 1937

You are surely surprised, staggered at the long ethereal lyric I’ve sent you!

Staggered is not the word for it. What on earth have you done?

See, Sir, I sat down to write and it came. I feel it is a good fish.

Fish or fishy?

I have caught, though I’m not sure whether it is a sprat, trout or a salmon, which?

A sprat, sir, a sprat and a weird one at that.

“Hush, tread softly like a bride,

See, the night is dreaming.”

Good God!

“Between the shadows of her curved lips

A white smile is brimming.”

Christ! Woogh!

“Oh, what angels have come to kiss

Her virgin face.

What rapture thrills her soul

With diamond rays!”

Holy Virgin!

“Do not wake her, let her sleep

Through the desert-day.”

Who? Night? Where on earth is she sleeping?

A bit of philosophy and metaphysics has spoilt the poem intended to be a fine piece of poetry, no?

My dear sir, what possessed you to write in this vein of the most tender and infantile Victorian sentimentalism in this year of the Lord 1937? And who or what on earth are you writing about? Night sleeping? What’s the idea? It sounds as if it were the sleep of Little Nell (Dickens).

“Between the crescent tender lips...”

[Sri Aurobindo underlined “tender”.]

Woogh! Night’s lips are tender?

Please try to restore it to its deserving beauty.

I am afraid I can do nothing unless you shed some light on what you can possibly mean. At present I am at sea.

A rather funny idea, no?

Very funny.

Can Night sleep through desert-day?

Never heard of her behaving in this way before.

It will take 3 or 4 days to get Chyavanprash from Madras. Meanwhile A can take Kola, if he wants.

Very well.

June 17, 1937

Sir, I have shoved the poem back to its own century! But that’s what comes of hooking! Where does your theory of hooking go?

It depends on what you hook on to.

I suppose you will put in a corollary now: How the devil am I to shed any light when I don’t know myself what I’m writing?

I always did. I never said that whatever you hook on to, the result will be the same. You have hooked on to two things at a time – one which is Victorian, sentimental, melancholy, tragic-pessimistic and thin in its language, images, emotional tone – the other which is from above, full, coloured, packed with suggestion and significance. The first was in you already, I think – the other has come with the upward opening. In today’s poem both are there, but neither at its best or worst. In stanzas 4, 5, 6 the second comes out strongly, in the last two the first comes out. I have had therefore to reconstruct these last two which were out of harmony with what went before in their tone.

I took the night as a lady who after long travails and seeking arrives at the peace of the Infinite and enjoys the fruit. Is it impossible to symbolise the night or day like that?

The figure of the lady was terribly small and sentimental, much too domestically human for a power like Night.

[Question put by J:]

I chose this story for trying out the epic style: Krishna-Gautami whose only son died, prayed to Buddha to give his life back. Later she became a disciple of Buddha ... I feel almost no impulse to write ... I doubt if the subject is a fit one for trying the epic style.

... As for the fitness of the subject, it depends on how you treat it. The epic tone can be used very well for it, but it must not be pitched too high, as if one were speaking of Gods and Rishis and great heroes as in Homer and Virgil or in Meghnadbodh or similar poems, so the river swelling in echo⁸⁷ of the lamentation of one who is an ordinary woman is out of place. The possibility of epic treatment lies in the subject, the universality of death and grief, the calm high wisdom of Buddha etc.

A called me up in the afternoon. Fever! said no liver trouble...

Mother thinks he would like to have his blood examined at the hospital and on the occasion, a consultation with Valle. She sounded him and he seemed to smile at the suggestion. Anyhow you can speak about it to him.

June 18, 1937

I sounded A. He says he could wait and see how the new drug is going to act. But what’s this blood-examination for? One examines blood for malaria, anaemia and syphilis...

The blood examination is A’s own suggestion. He says his uncle died of pernicious anaemia and how can we know that he is not suffering from pernicious anaemia without a blood examination? It is no use discussing the matter scientifically. If you don’t want him to die of pernicious anaemia like his uncle or of the imagination of it, the safest course is to have his blood examined and satisfy him that he has not got it – then he may consent to live. Our own idea is the consultation with Valle, for which we have a yet unspoken reason – we will see. If not anaemia pernicious or otherwise, he has got hypercholericitis⁸⁸. Nothing to do with cholera, by the way.

I was rather surprised to hear that Amal has given Dover’s powder capsule to L. It contains, as you know, opium, and to give opium without knowing much about it is rather risky.

L had told Mother Amal wanted to give her something which was not a medicine! Dover’s powder is not a medicine?

I would like to have two short-sleeved shirts for operation purpose.

Yes. Ask Romen to do them.

The word “bright” has been repeated. I suppose I could have improved the poem.

Bright, birds, clouds and now the infinite (by my fault) are repeated. Hang it all, sir, let them repeat to their heart’s content.

Do you think this recent sentimentality could be due to Harm’s influence?

No.

I am reading his lyrics at present, so an unconscious imitation of his style?

I don’t know. Harin’s sentimentality is of a different kind.

June 19, 1937

A has again pain in the joints, and fever. Shall we then call Valle without waiting for the effect of the new drug? There is no harm in calling him, I suppose.

A attributes the whole thing to climate and spoke also of his increasing irascibility (which is a fact). You might discreetly find out from Valle if he thinks it is due to climate.

June 20, 1937

No answer to the last portion? [“There is no harm in calling Valle, I suppose.”]

Forgot.

There is no harm. Of course you will ask A first.

No news of A today. What’s that word please – “spoke also of his increasing –”?

“irascibility” – due to liver, he says.

June 21, 1937

In this poem a pale moonlit night appears mist-laden, and leaves seem to smile...

Well you have sharp eyes to see the leaves smile through a mist-laden night.

I have made the leaves quiver, if you won’t quiver at it.

I read it without a quiver.

Don’t see the link of the first line with what follows... Instead of “weary traveller” it could as well be “weary sheep”, I suppose! “I wait and wait like a weary tramp.”

Sheep!!! why not “cat” at once? “I wait and wait like a weary cat” would be very fine and original.

As it is, the poem doesn’t seem to say much, does it? God knows what to write next.

If God knows it is all right. Evidently he knows what he is doing.

It’s a dream which is nothing extraordinary.

Evidently you don’t know when you are inspired.

What kind of poetry am I writing now? Very funny surrealism!

There is nothing surrealist nor funny.

And funnier still that I should write these poems – a logical, medical, practical man, what?

That is your idea of yourself? Queer.

June 22, 1937

How did you enjoy the mangoes, Sir?

Can’t say, as I don’t get them till tomorrow.

Mother didn’t take them, I suppose.

No; she only tastes sometimes.

I hear Mother doesn’t like mangoes at all.

It is not a question of liking.

Yesterday I thought K had T.B. or pneumonia. But where are they now? In one night everything over!

Shobhanallah! With your diagnosis one would have expected him to be already in Paradise.

He had sudden severe pain in the chest, cough, and blood in sputum, with a rise of temperature. On the previous day he had cold and exhausted himself in a long sea-bath. So all this gone overnight. Was it just over exhaustion or Force did it?

Of course, I put a Force.

June 23, 1937

As for K, no, Sir, not in Paradise but in hell of agony, suffering, fever, brown [red] hepatisation, grey hepatisation etc., etc. (nothing to do with liver, though).

What on earth is this hepatisation? Where? Lungs? pneumonic? What etc.? Kindly be less cryptic.

We have got “Chyavanprash” for A. But, they say, it is specially meant for lung diseases, but it is also a renowned tissue builder... All cold producing things, e.g. cold water, curds, lime, fruits, cocoanuts must be avoided.

I don’t understand how a medicine for the lungs can be used in his case. He doesn’t need tissues either; but nervous energy.

June 24, 1937

Rajangam says that Chyavanprash is indicated for everything – a panacea. So can we fire?

Yes, if it can be done without stopping his eating cold water etc. and confining himself to pickles and cayenne pepper.

K – Well, red and grey hepatisation are parts of morbid anatomy. When there is pneumonia, the lungs undergo pathological changes from red to grey and get the solid appearance of liver. So the stages are called red and grey hepatisation. Nothing alarming, you see!

But hang it all! Has he pneumonia or not? Is there fever now? Alarming or not, what is his present condition?

Black despair has swallowed me up to the neck, except for the hand with which I write! As regards sadhana, I don’t find any rosy tint anywhere. All clouded, clouded and shrouded. As regards poetry, same, if not more. Have devoted myself to a task utterly impossible and wholly useless – a foolish attempt.

Whoosh! Anyhow, as regards your poetry, it doesn’t seem to me there is any ground for any indulgence in this black luxury.

June 25, 1937

I told you long ago that K is hale and hearty and that was the miracle: no fever, nothing at all. You said that according to our diagnosis you expected him to be in Paradise; I said no, not so early, but in a hell of suffering etc.; that’s all. That grey hepatisation troubled you, eh?

Naturally, if you say that a fellow who is supposed to be hale and hearty, is brown and grey with a mysterious hepatisation and suffering a hell of agony and not yet in Paradise!

... Please help me to a higher consciousness. Where is the higher Being that I had met with? I seem to have lost everything.

Everything once gained is there and can be regained. Yoga is not a thing that goes by one decisive rush one way or the other – it is a building up of a new consciousness and is full of ups and downs. But if one keeps to it the ups have a habit of resulting by accumulation in a decisive change – therefore the one thing to do is to keep at it. After a fall don’t wail and say I’m done for, but get up, dust yourself and proceed farther on the right path.

June 26, 1937

There is hardly any improvement in J’s eczema. What’s to be done? I can’t try anything else. Kindly ask Mother.

The medicine is practically exhausted – so you will have to find another – we don’t know of any that is effective. Eczema is a thing that comes and goes and comes again.

Why is it taking such a long time?

She writes that she has always had it owing to the peculiarity of her skin – insufficient secretion – some gland responsible. If so –

Can’t you give her a big dose?

If it is constitutional, a big dose will not be sufficient – it is only by a prolonged action that it could cease altogether.

Deviprasad has an enlarged gland below the jaw. He has been having it for a long time. Looks like a T.B. gland.

!!

[Sri Aurobindo put 2 exclamation marks.]

This poem is absolute hooking, Sir! As great poetry usually does, you know, the whole thing simply came down, so it must be a genuinely great creation, what?

Come down it did! As for the great creation, well –

Jatin Bal wants to know the last date for permission; is there such a date?

No.

Can a tentative permission be given?

Yes.

If no rooms are available, can he share my room?

I suppose so, if it is large enough for two.

June 27, 1937

Yes, about J’s gland secretion it is true. Almost every doctor in England attributed her skin condition to lack of gland secretion and almost all said it was thyroid, so they prescribed thyroid pills. And her eczema also is chronic, due to the skin.

But deficiency of thyroid gland does not make people fat? J is not fat. It was thyroid gland medicine which turned T into a life-long skeleton.

Should thyroids be given internally?

I have no idea what are the effects of these pills. These gland medicines seem to be rather risky – only if you are sure.

Can’t interpret your exclamations about Deviprasad! What do you say to cod-liver oil?

He is already oily and greasy enough.

Here is another masterpiece⁸⁹ – hooking on again, and seems a colossal sample of incoherent utterances. Please try to bring it to a Grecian perfection. And if you succeed in the task kindly illumine me.

I have succeeded. Hooked on again and you must admit that everything is now coherent, cogent and masterly!!!

“A solitary pilgrimage of the Soul

Rising from dark tombs of death

Whence began all conscious throbs of life

And end in one ultimate Breath.”

Is the construction O.K.?

I don’t know what you mean by “Whence”. Do you mean that it is from the tomb of death life comes and ends there in the ultimate breath? That is what the construction would mean. But trusting to the capital B I have changed to “To whence”.

How do you find the masterpiece?

Superb, after my dealings with it.

Amal appreciated yesterday’s poem⁹⁰ very much. He says that it has become a very fine poem. Agree?

Of course, very fine indeed!

June 28, 1937

J is not fat, but she seems to think so. People say she is in Tulsi’s group which has naturally alarmed her. And she is thinking of dieting: cutting down rice, bread, etc. What do you say to that?

That seems to me nonsense – in any case cutting down food is not advisable.

S came today with a sad and determined face and said that he could not sleep at all, too much pain. Twice you kept silent over his treatment. Silent again?

How can I prescribe? It is your business.

I admit, Sir, that yesterday’s poem is damned masterly and superbly beautiful. Only if I could be the master! I ask myself, “How much of it is yours? Well, since nothing is yours, why shed tears?”

Can’t say that nothing is yours.

Do you think hooking like this will continue or a time will come when everything will be a finished product?

Certainly, you have sometimes had it; but still usually there is the mixture of an old poetic mind and your own romantic sentimentalism helping it. That luxury has got to go, so that the inspiration from a higher source may come out clear.

“The moon’s pale songs ringing in the dark

Are its own mystery-voice ...”

Can songs be pale?

May, but moon’s songs are rather toffee.

Have you brushed aside Surawardy’s poems?

No, I have combed them only. I send you the results. A few lines are extremely fine, others are very good, others give a fine poetic turn. But he lapses from all that to a modernist rhythmlessness and triviality to which I cannot get accustomed. Anyway – fashion is fashion and the Time spirit has its tricks,– so I leave it there.

June 29, 1937

Yesterday what did you write, Sir – Moon’s songs are rather “toffee”? Toffee! Gracious! Bonbon?

Yes, too sweety-sweety.

July 1, 1937

What do you think now of this piece, Sir? What do you think – fine, very fine, eh? Never mind what you say, I find it damn fine!

Sir, I fully admit it. No need to bully me into assent with a damn. Amen!

The revolution in rhythm is not my fault. Sometimes you allow truncations, sometimes you don’t. What to do?

Revolutions of rhythm must produce new rhythms, not no rhythm at all.

In the other line [“A voice threading the dimness, faintly heard!”] is it “threading” or “threatening”?

Threading, sir – why the deuce should there be a Pondicherry squabble, however faintly heard, in this business?

July 2, 1937

[The following question was put by J regarding a poem she had begun on Buddha:]

Do you think I should change the lines? I realised that I know nothing of Buddhistic teaching except the word Nirvana. Kindly say a few words on what Buddha stood for or taught his disciples.

I don’t know about the change. Buddhist teaching does not recognise any inner self or soul – there is only a stream of consciousness from moment to moment – the consciousness itself is only a bundle of associations – it is kept moving by the wheel of Karma. If the associations are untied and thrown away (they are called sanskaras), then it dissolves; the idea of self or a persistent person ceases; the stream flows no longer, the wheel stops. There is left according to some Sunya, a mysterious Nothing from which all comes; according to others a mysterious Permanent in which there is no individual existence. This is Nirvana. Buddha himself always refused to say what there was beyond cosmic existence; he spoke neither of God nor Self nor Brahman. He said there was no utility in discussing that – all that was necessary was to know the causes of this unhappy temporal existence and the way to dissolve it.

July 3, 1937

I can’t quite make out the link between the stanzas, and some things do not seem logical.

Well, sir, it is quite obvious that your poem is hopelessly inconsequent. For a man of logic (?) such divagations must be a release, I suppose.⁹¹ However there is good stuff in it and I have tried to put the three meanderings right.

... It is not blank verse, Amal says, as there are rhymes – seas, centuries, memories, etc. What sort of a poem is it then? Shall I allow rhymes as they come?

Let us call it modern verse which is never anything, blank or unblank, but rhymes when it feels inclined to and doesn’t when it isn’t.

July 4, 1937

I am sure you won’t find much inconsequence here, and you will be charmed by the subtle beauty of the poem...

Great Jehovah!

... except, perhaps, at places it may be too “toffee” for you!

The toffee is there!

S complains of a lot of weakness, buzzing in the ear, no appetite, sound in the abdomen... I am afraid we have to take an X-ray in order to see if we can do something. Just now he was complaining of burning pain.

You can have the X-ray.

July 5, 1937

...Unless our blessed nature changes, there is no help at all. But change of nature is not a question of a day. Till then suffer like this?

One can decide not to suffer. But obviously otherwise, until the nature changes, there will be trouble.

I shall write in detail about my trouble...

All right.

For J, André advised auto-haemo therapy or auto-sero therapy [blood injection into the muscle] which he says is very good for eczema and asthma.

It must be done by André, if at all. It is very fashionable now. If J consents, you can try it.

There is Rajlakshmi also with the same trouble, so if you allow, we may try André’s treatment.

I don’t think.

July 6, 1937

As for J’s case, you seem to be much behind time, Sir! You don’t favour these new discoveries!

How is that? About the blood injection juggle? I told you it was fashionable and you could fash along with it if you liked or rather if J liked – provided André did it.

S – no relief! We gave him some alkali tablets.

There is a blood curdling letter from S. If it is to be taken as accurate, the whole affair must be nervous, Mother says – She asks if you have tried charcoal tablets with him.

July 7, 1937

You said that it was fashionable, but hinted that you don’t like the fashion: “If you liked or rather if J liked, if at all” – don’t they mean that?

Nonsense, sir. Where on earth did I hint anything? Where did I write that? I said it must be done by André if at all – which had to do with the person who was to do it, not with anything else. For the rest I said if J consents, you can try it. Where the hell in that simple phrase is there anything about either my disliking or your liking or anything else that you have put into it? Really now!

For S, this time we hadn’t tried charcoal, but yesterday we began it and are continuing it. Yes, the letter is blood curdling and his symptoms too, if they are true... God knows how to cure him.

If he does, send him a telephone!

I am almost sure you will howl this time, seeing my poem. But I can’t help it.

I won’t howl, but only sigh.

By the way, I am reading Harin’s lyrics. But I find that his influence does not suit me. My poems become, according to you, sentimental, romantic; while when I read Amal’s poems, there come in unconsciously some lines high and lofty and you smile and say “Aha, ha! This fellow has done something!” How is this? Is there some affinity as far as our Inspiration goes? Amal seems to think so, do you?

Certainly, your real inspiration is nearer Amal’s than Harin’s – the inspiration that makes you write strong and original things. Under H’s influence you seem to become secondhand and reminiscent of past poetry. There is however a lyric vein of another kind which came out in your dream-poems – it is that that sometimes tries to come out in your lyrics – but it is not like Harin’s.

July 8, 1937

Do you think then I should stop reading Harin and read more of Amal?

No, I don’t suggest that.

What about Arjava’s source? Do we have any affinity?

Maybe. His poetry is very fine and powerful.

Guru, C writes that his anti-Mohammedan spirit leads him to violent political speeches and talks. Is it yogic or safe?

Neither. Especially as there is now Muslim Raj in Bengal.

July 9, 1937

S’s pain is now setting into a definite character: acme going down before food and then complete relief by food; then after 2 or 3 hours it resumes. These are, I fear, more ulcer pains, but X-ray revealed no ulcer...

Before food? that seems queer. I don’t see how it can be ulcers, if nothing was shown. More likely nerves.

My boil seems to have subsided, but the blessed legs are aching terribly: can’t walk after my athletic exercises at this old age, Sir. System won’t bear it, it seems. Give some embrocation, please.

You have been doing Olympic sports? What an idea!

July 11, 1937

This boil paining all the time. Please do something, otherwise I can’t do anything.

Why so boiled by a boil?

I am simply fomenting it 3 or 4 times a day. Anything else?

I suppose there is nothing else to do.

I suppose these physical impurities are due to the vital, what?

Eventually, yes.

You know how my vital is. You must have scented it from up there! Still you want us to write [5.7.37].

It is you who proposed writing and I thought it better to let the pen draw something out.

Otherwise you won’t act and will let us go on suffering. Divine Law, I suppose, what?

My dear Sir, I suffer the Divine Law myself – damned slow affair.

... I have now no push at all for sadhana; vital is peace-less, restless and unhappy. Can’t concentrate at all. Life is dull and deathlike in consequence!

Well, what can you expect if you go on yielding either within or without to temptation like that? It sets you at strife with your own mind and higher vital, to say nothing of the psychic.

... Darshan is approaching and I can’t remain in this condition and come to you with a glum face, to see you glum too.

I won’t be glum – I shall receive you with a cheerful grunt.

I kept myself steady for a couple of months, why the devil not one month more? You will say – a usual feature in Yoga. That is no comfort to me. I’m getting discouraged.

Rubbish! Be a spider.

... It’s all an old story, Sir, and it will repeat itself till – ?

Till your vital physical consents to its being kicked out – which may be, if not tomorrow, day after tomorrow if it chooses.

July 12, 1937

Here is Dilipda’s letter. Please solve the duel between the homeopath and the surgeon. He looks up to you for advice...

What’s this rash suggestion in the letter about ear? Surely even a specialist wouldn’t perforate the inside of the ear? Besides Dilip insists on his nose.

But who am I to decide between the two mighty opposites – homeopathic stalwarts (bigots is an unpleasant word) and allopathic stalwarts? The only safe course for a prudent layman is to shake his head wisely and murmur “There is much to be said on both sides of the matter.” But it seems to me that the thing is already done – he has started with the allopathic treatment and will have to go through to the end.

I can’t say much about the pumping and washing of the ear. Do you want him to undergo it?

Pumping and washing sounds very Hathayogic. Harmless therefore let us hope.

This B. Babu has some cheek, I must say, uttering nasty things about you.

Well, it is nothing new. He has been saying nasty things about us for some years past.

But is he really gifted with some power?

I suppose he has or had some powers, but his mind seems to be rather chaotic, accepting all sorts of mental, vital and other perceptions and suggestions as the truth, without discrimination. Barin told me a lot about his wonderful (prophecy and knowing everything about everybody) powers, but I was disappointed to find it a glowing jumble of truth and error both taken as the very truth. No harm in a mixture of truth and error if one observes and goes on steadily clearing out the mixture. But otherwise –

X writes that he can’t go to see K, though that was one of the motives of his going to Calcutta.

It is a pity he could not go to K.

... Why this bitterness against “Asramites”? From where has he really got this idea that we are unsympathetic towards him?

He says some of the Asramites!

On the other hand, I think, most of us have a deep and genuine feeling for him which he doesn’t see because our expression is so different from worldly people’s.

Yes, but X likes universal patting and patting is rare in the Asram, preaching is more usual.

You remember he said that he is a great believer in expression. Is expression the only real thing in life?

No. Expression is all right provided it is the right expression of the right thing. But it is not necessary to be always expressing and expressing.

What do you express when you come and sit like the immovable Himalayas at Darshan? Yet people feel joy, peace, etc., etc.

Of course. But X’s difficulty is that he is accustomed to live outside not inside and feel sensible impacts and react to them – expression you know – The inner silent feeling of things is not much in his line.

... At any rate I don’t believe that the sadhaks are in any way worse than worldly people whose affections and sympathy have blinded X. This place being small, one’s dejects stand out and criticisms come to one’s ears and get magnified.

Yes.

Can he say that he has no enemies, no backbiters outside?

Well, outside being large, he can give them a wide berth.

I have heard it said that ordinary sadhaks – the Toms, Dicks and Harrys – who would be nowhere beside X in the outside world and who would have nothing if they did not have a shelter here – even such people criticise him.

? The quality of the sadhaks is so low? I should say there is a considerable amount of ability and capacity in the Asram. Only the standard demanded is higher than outside even in spiritual matters. There are half a dozen people here perhaps who live in the Brahman consciousness – outside they would make a big noise and be considered as great Yogis – here their condition is not known and in the Yoga it is regarded not as siddhi but only as a beginning.

They say – why, the sadhaks had nothing to sacrifice; they were beggars, and are kept so comfortably here. This is an exterior view of things, isn’t it?

Sacrifice depends on the inner attitude. If one has nothing outward to sacrifice, one has always oneself to give.

A visitor once said, “Oh, how happy you all are here, so comfortably kept, no thoughts and anxieties. Life is plain sailing.” When he was asked to come and stay here, he replied that he had no time!

The difficulty is that most of the sadhaks are still full of desires, so their renunciation is not a thing that becomes very perceptible. If they had the inner tyaga⁹², it would create an atmosphere that people coming here would feel.

... Now I have decided to keep aloof as much as possible from tea-table and music, especially before Darshan. It may hurt X, but I can’t help it.

Perhaps if he understands that it is a preparation for darshan, he may not be so hurt.

July 13, 1937

Shall I pass on your observation about K to X (“It is a pity he could not go to K.”)?

What’s the use – since he has to remain in Calcutta.

Yes, from the description it seems to be the nose and not the ear. But in a previous letter he spoke of the ear. Doesn’t know what he is talking about? Ear-trouble, nose-trouble?

Perhaps he had both.

[The following two questions were asked by J:] Is your “Love and Death” a narrative poem?

Certainly.

Narratives then can be made or written very poetically, not like a mere fact-to-fact story-telling?

But what do you mean by poetically? A fact to fact story telling can be very poetic. Poetry is poetic whether it is put in simple language or freely adorned with images and rich phrases. The latter kind is not the only “poetic” poetry nor is necessarily the best. Homer is very direct and simple; Virgil less so but still is restrained in his diction; Keats tends always to richness; but one cannot say that Keats is poetic and Homer and Virgil are not. The rich style has this danger that it may drown the narration so that its outlines are no longer clear. This is what has happened with Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and Lucrece; so that Shakespeare cannot be called a great narrative poet.

How did you find Monomohon Ghosh’s poems on Love and Death?

I don’t remember anything about them and am not sure that I have read.

S says that he feels very hungry now, especially in the evening. Only milk not enough. I fear to give him anything else at night.

But why is it so bad with him? T gets on very well with her ptosis, keeping only a few rules like not moving about for some time after meals.

July 14, 1937

I think we should replace S’s loss of liver by liver-extract. It is a rather costly medicine, that’s why I hesitate.

He has sent me another tragic letter.

I hear that A has much pain and can’t even move about. But it shouldn’t be so bad, as it is the sole.

Becharlal did not seem to think much of it – said it should be all right in 3 days.

Self: Nose boil seems to be boiling down slowly; but at noon I had a terrible headache, fever too. Feeling fed up, really!

Cellular bolshevism, probably.

July 15, 1937

What’s this “cellular bolshevism”, Sir?

Bolshevism of the cells rising up against the Tsar (yourself). Also the Bolsheviks carry on their propaganda by creating Communistic “cells” everywhere, in the army, industries etc., etc. You don’t seem to be very up in contemporary history.

Guru, there is a whole mass of letters from dear C.

His Bengali handwriting is too much for me.

There is a tangled problem which is absolutely beyond me.

I have read his letter, but can’t make head or tail out of his problem. He will have to solve it himself.

There is a clash between ethics or spirituality and worldliness, so he seeks your advice.

Anyhow he seems to me to be the most loose and impractical and disorderly fellow that ever was, leaving his papers and debts and everything fluttering about all over the world. It will be no wonder if he loses all he has.

July 16, 1937

Guru,

At last C has dared to ask for August Darshan permission. Do you dare to permit him?

Mother considers it wiser for him to abstain. She says “Better not.”

For S, ... I can’t increase his evening meal yet. My idea is to build up gradually the diet so that the system may be accustomed and strengthened at the same time. No use upsetting the stomach, liver, etc. – what?

I suppose so. Don’t understand the ways of a fallen stomach sounds too much like a fallen angel – but S is not that, (no angel, that is to say) whatever his stomach may be.

A has gall bladder trouble and I suspect congestion of right kidney too ... We have to give bile salts, moderate dose of salts ...

Mother says to be careful about salts, as they often help formation of stones.

July 17, 1937

Does Mother mean common salt? I meant mag. sulph. and soda-sulph.

No, she meant medical salts.

Mind and vital rather restless. No interest. Tried to write poetry, wouldn’t come. Can’t get it back. What to do? Forcibly sit down and scratch and scribble?

You can try. It might dribble back like that.

July 18, 1937

Guru,

What the deuce is “Brahman consciousness” [12.7.37]? The same as cosmic consciousness? Does one come to it after the psychic and spiritual transformations?

Is it something like seeing Brahman in everybody and everywhere or what? It is not spiritual realisation, I suppose, I mean realisation of Self? You see I am a nincompoop in this business. Please perorate a little.

Eternal Jehovah! You don’t even know what Brahman is! You will next be asking me what Yoga is or what life is or what body is or what mind is or what sadhana is! No, sir, I am not proposing to teach an infant class the A.B.C. of the elementary conceptions which are the basis of Yoga. There is Amal who doesn’t know what consciousness is, even!

Brahman, sir, is the name given by Indian philosophy since the beginning of time to the one Reality, eternal and infinite which is the Self, the Divine, the All, the more than All, which would remain even if you and everybody and everything else in existence or imagining itself to be in existence vanished into blazes – even if this whole universe disappeared, Brahman would be safely there and nothing whatever lost. In fact, sir, you are Brahman and you are only pretending to be Nirod; when Nishikanta is translating Amal’s poetry into Bengali, it is really Brahman translating Brahman’s Brahman into Brahman. When Amal asks me what consciousness is, it is really Brahman asking Brahman what Brahman is! There, sir, I hope you are satisfied now.

To be less drastic and refrain from making your head reel till it goes off your shoulders, I may say that realisation of the Self is the beginning of Brahman realisation; – the Brahman consciousness – the Self in all and all in the Self etc. It is the basis of the spiritual realisation and therefore of the spiritual transformation; but one has to see it in all sorts of aspects and applications first and that I refuse to go into. If you want to know you have to read the Arya.

Is living in that consciousness an ideal condition for receiving the Supramental descent?

It is a necessary condition.

I heard that no one here was prepared for this Supramental descent?

Of course not, this realisation of the Self as all and the Divine as all is only the first step.

What’s the next step?

The next step is to get into contact with the higher planes above spiritual mind – for as soon as one gets into the spiritual Mind or Higher Mind, this realisation is possible.

Now the big question is: Is the realisation of the Self a state of perpetual peace, joy and bliss?

If it is thoroughly established, it is one of internal peace, freedom, wideness, in the inner being.

Is it a state surpassing all struggles, dualities and depressions?

All these things you mention become incidents in the external being, on the surface, but the inner being remains untouched by them.

Are all troubles of the lower nature conquered finally – especially sex?

No, sir. But the inner being is not touched.

Or is it that sex-desire rises up in the Yogis, but leaves them untouched, unscathed? No at traction for them? It must be so, otherwise how can they be called siddhas⁹³? No danger of a fall from the spiritual state?

It may be covered up in a way – so long as it is not established in all parts of the being. The old Yogis did not consider that necessary, because they wanted to walk off, not to change the being.

Why do you call it a beginning only? What more do you want to do except perhaps physical transformation?

I want to effect the transformation of the whole nature (not only of the physical) – that’s why.

Could you whisper to me the names of those lucky fellows, those “half a dozen people”, so that I can have a practical knowledge of what that blessed thing – “the Brahman consciousness” – is like?

NO, SIR.

How can you have a practical knowledge of it by knowing who has it? You might just as well expect to have a practical knowledge of high mathematics by knowing that Einstein is a great mathematician. Queer ideas you have!

Are they Anilbaran? Pavitra? Datta? Dyuman? Nolini? Radhanand, but he can’t be for he is Brahma himself, so keeps himself secluded like him, no?

???????

July 19, 1937

Self – Pus still coming out. Nose also angry!

What a bad-tempered “pussy” cat of a nose!

I dreamt that the Mother was building a very big hospital in which I would be a functionary... Dream of a millennium in advance?

It would be more of a millennium if there were no need of a hospital at all and the doctors turned their injective prodding instruments into fountain-pens – provided of course they didn’t make misuse of the pens also.

July 20, 1937

Why so furious about injective instruments, Sir? They are supposed to be very effective.

That doesn’t make an increase of hospitals, illnesses and injections the ideal of a millennium.

But why the deuce are those instruments to be replaced by fountain-pens? Want doctors to be poets or clerks? Or is it a hint to me to write more than prescribe?

I was simply adopting the saying of Isaiah the prophet, “the swords will be turned into ploughshares”, but the doctor’s instrument is not big enough for a ploughshare, so I substituted fountain-pens.

A swelling – size of a cherry – has appeared inside my nose... The tip is damn painful. Knifing is not advisable. I hope it won’t leave me with a nose like that of Cyrano de-quoi?⁹⁴

Let us hope not. That kind of nose wouldn’t suit either your face or your poetry.

July 21, 1937

What’s this devil of a condition I am passing through? No interest in anything – as if the whole world were dead, blank. There is no uprush of sex or desire and all that. But still a negative blank state! Experience of Nirvana? Tamasic vairagya? I am simply inactive, trying to keep myself steady and hoping that it will pass in time. But will it? No active way out?

Well, it may be one of two things. (1) The vital has dropped down and says “if I can’t have what I want in this damned world of yours, alright I non-cooperate and ask for nothing.” Hence the flatness – Result of course, tamasic vairagya. This kind of thing often happens at a certain stage of sadhana.

(2) Drop into the physical – first complete acquaintance with the principle of Inertia proper to the physical when it is moved neither by vital, mind, nor spirit. Lies flat waiting for the breath of God or any breath to stir it, but making no move of its own.

Hold on and call upon the Spirit to breathe.

I think you are exerting a damn lot of pressure, what?

Not so much as that – or if so, it is automatic.

July 23, 1937

Guru, after all some poetry has come out. The head and tail seem to be all right, but the body has elongated beyond proportion, no?

The body is all right as well as the head, except for that impossible shining face of a voice. It is the tip of the tail that is defective.

I was urgently called by R to see his wife who had received a wound on the head by falling down... Two accounts were given, one in the morning, another in the evening, for the fall being the cause of the wound in such a place. Both were unconvincing. Better to trust than distrust, what?

Amen!

I asked R if he was going to write to the Mother about it; said no! Very funny!! Relying too much on self or automatic action of the Force?

He did not write when (he says) he was sick unto death recently. Calling the Force in silence!

July 24, 1937

You know V is having difficulty in breathing through the left nostril. Maybe due to polypus. Do you know what he does? He has got some string, besmears it with bee’s wax. passes it through one nostril, brings it out through the mouth, and then puts it into the other nostril. Feels much better! Hathayogic treatment, he says. I have no idea, have you? Any danger in it? Can’t opine myself; only I think the rope is misplaced!

It is done by the Hathayogis with a cloth, I believe, just as they clean their entrails from throat to anus with a cloth. For them there is no danger, for they are trained but if it is done by a self-sufficient ass or even by an untrained amateur simply there may be danger in these things. Mudgaokar the Bombay judge (known to me) tried the cleaning of the nose with water, a simple Hathayoga process, and had trouble with his proboscis in consequence. It did not approve of his way of dealing with it.

Really, Sir, you have caught a magnificent fellow for Supramentalisation, what?

Well, sir, in the supramental world all kinds will be needed, I suppose. Then why not a supramental ass?

July 25, 1937

I hadn’t understood “Psh” in Chand’s letter. Got it at the last moment, by intuition, Sir: Paresh!

Yes.

I see! It needed intuition to find that out!

S’s same trouble continues or worse. Why are you silent on liver extract?

Extract liver – no objection.

A new trouble! Taint of acidity, burning in my throat. The Force is experimenting on me my patients’ maladies to take them more seriously?

Who knows?

What is the damned meaning of this poem⁹⁵? What’s this path? What’s the height? Both being illumed by the moon etc.? It seems I have simply described Nature, giving free rein to imagination. Mystifying, no?

Why do you want any damned meaning? It is a mystic picture – plenty of mystic significance which is best left unintellectualised, but no damned meaning.

A height is a height of being, sir, and the seas are seas of the soul, and the path is a path to infinite peace and light. “That is all we know or need to know” as Keats has been telling you every day for the last hundred years. The path naturally goes across the tranced figure – it couldn’t possibly get home otherwise.

... Please clarify.

Absolutely refuse to clarify anything. Let us leave it in its own radiant swoon of mystic misty wistful light.

Then at the end, what’s the “slumbering seas”, suddenly? Can’t make out.

Why suddenly, man – you have been having seas and waters all the time.

No connections! A horrible mess, Sir! The beauty of the poem is buried under it, I fear, what?

Lord! Lord! If you had intellectualised the business with your connections, there would have been no beauty in the poem or at least no mystic beauty.

Through Surawardy’s poems? Seems to be a genuine poet, no?

Have not inspected the fellow yet. May perhaps do it tonight.

July 26, 1937

Please see Surawardy’s poems and say something communicable to the old man!

Don’t want to communicate – prefer on this point to be incommunicable – not to you of course, but to Calcutta (old man will hear of it.

July 28, 1937

Old man is done?

How done? How am I to know if he is done or undone (by the young woman?)? He is in Calcutta.

What’s this, really? J had eczema and now asthma! Is there any truth in the popular belief that when eczema disappears, asthma appears? Homeopathic theory, they say.

Never heard of it. The eczema of any number of people disappears without their getting asthma. It is the weather and a certain susceptibility in her physical to these things – no need for all these out of the way theories.

S – pain, burning “normal”, i.e. you understand, I hope, this means normal pain.

Yes, of course. It is the patient who is abnormal.

July 29, 1937

Surely you know what I meant by “old man is done”?

Surely I did, but he was not at all done by me, so I had to pass on your question to the young woman.

D wants the poems back, you know.

Well, well – I will try to push my way through him.

People say I am getting absolutely bald, Sir. Two things I feared – one a big tummy and another, a smooth baldness. Couldn’t be saved from one. If you can’t grow new hair, please help to preserve the little I have, Sir.

What one fears, is usually what happens. Even if there were no other disposition, the fear calls it in. Who knows, if you had not feared, you might have had the waist of a race-runner and the hair of Samson.

I read in Mother’s Conversations⁹⁶ that skin, hair and teeth “belong to the most material layers of the being”, so spiritual Force takes a long time to act on them. Is it true?

Painfully true.

Then I have no chance till the Supermind descends?

I suppose not. And who knows what fancies the Supramental may have.

July 30, 1937

This is absolutely a third-rate poem⁹⁷. What to do?

What a queer card you are! It is as good as the others.

No use asking the virtue of the poem!

Very fine and glowing, sir.

July 31, 1937

Guru, here are Dilipda’s letter and poems. He wants to know your opinion. Perhaps in the afternoon you will have some leisure.

What an idea!

Please read each one of the poems. I have glanced through them and they are really wonderful.

Have had time to read only two as yet.

Dilipda says that his poems are now appreciated. Personality incarnate?... And the “old man”? How is he?

Old man suspended by the eruption of Personality – perhaps tomorrow.

August 1, 1937

The last two lines of the poem are too long, perhaps? Oh, N complains of evening fever 100°, for the last few days.

Part of your poetry? Can’t scan it.

I have read Dilip’s poem – there is the force of a new inspiration in the language and the building and turns of thought, something more intense and gathered together. I think there is something less mental, a new and more vibrant note.

I have gone through Surawardy. He has certainly a fine poetic vein, but his success is less than his capacity – The two poems, China Sea and Asoca Tree are very fine – the rest are in a lower pitch; there are fewer deliberate descents into the commonplace than in the old man poems, but also not so frequent, intense felicities of expression and powerful lines.

.. You have perhaps said somewhere that when the Supramental descends, everything will be comparatively easier. Do you mean sex-conquest too?

This force seems to have been pushing strongly in recent days – for there are others who have been stumbling – luckily the stumble gave them a reaction which has made them more awake to the necessity of “no-indulgence”.

August 2, 1937

The notion of “equality” seems to be a bugbear to people who have personal ties, though the giving up of them will be more than compensated by getting the Divine within, for, after all, what are these human ties of ego or sex?

The Yoga cannot be done if equality is not established. Personal relations must be founded on the relation with the Divine in himself and the Divine in all and they must not be “ties” to pull one down and keep bound to the lower nature but part of the higher unity.

What is your idea of special relationship? Won’t predict?

There is nothing to predict. I have been saying the same thing all along (what I say above) and if there is to be any fulfilment of this work, it can be on no other basis. As for founding it on this [...]⁹⁸, it can’t be done.

...There are situations when one is faced with either telling a lie or the truth, and one can’t decide which. Sri Krishna says in the Mahabharata that lies are permitted at times, and that they are as good as truths, e.g. a truthful Muni, by showing the robbers the hiding place of travellers and causing their death, went to Hell. What’s your opinion?

Naturally – nobody is called upon to expose others to death by telling a truth like that. But the lie was not the best way from the spiritual point of view.

You say physical sex action must be avoided by all means. Why so strict on it while tolerating vital-physical lapses?

Because the physical action breaks a law without which the Asram cannot stand and the work cannot be done. It is not a personal matter, but a blow aimed at the very soul of the Mother’s work.

Outside sadhaks indulge and get a child, e.g. Y and others. Mother disapproves and the man who does it has no longer the same grace as before, but he is not in the Asram and his lapse hurts only himself and his wife.

The last portion of your remark⁹⁹ is rather cryptic. “This force” means the Supramental Force?

What the devil! I was speaking of the sex force.

Is it descending, then?

The sex force? By God it is, descending and ascending too.

What did you mean by giving them “a reaction”? Physical reaction?

I meant that they got so alarmed at the closeness to a precipitous fall that they stopped indulging the vital physical.

Have I any chance, Guru, of coming out of this vital struggle?

Of course.

If you are with me, I shall be all right. But don’t be with me as with X. You couldn’t keep him here; forces took him away! Doubt!

I repeat that he took himself away. No Force can take a man away, who really wants not to go and really wants the spiritual life. X wanted the “Divine Response” only, not spiritual life – his doubts all rose from that.

Why do you lay so much stress on our writing everything to you? Can’t we pray to you and ask for help? Isn’t it as good as writing?

Not writing means trying to conceal. That is a suggestion of the vital.

August 3, 1937

Consciousness and intensities can rhyme?

Not that I know of, but all things are possible in a world of infinite possibility.

K’s pus in the eye is not getting less; better inject gomenol and then vaccine, if not cured. So?

You know best – or at least can try.

August 4, 1937

A’s liver again! He has finished 3 Takadiastase bottles. He finds good effect from it. We require another bottle now. Should we buy it?

Buy the take-a-distaste and keep his liver quiet for God’s sake. He shows signs of starting his lamentations again. The bottle to keep the baby quiet!

[The following report was written by Dr. Becharlal: ]

D has pain in the abdomen, liquid motions, vomiting... He has no teeth, so it’s very difficult to masticate the food, hence the tendency to indigestion... He eagerly wishes to be instructed by my Holy Mother, what food he should take tomorrow: usual food or only milk and whey?

Is it not the rule so long as the teeth are not replaced to take only liquid food?

August 5, 1937

I don’t know about Ekalavya’s epidermis. Can he be compared to a বনদেব¹⁰⁰ without being one? But Gods and Goddesses are supposed to be fair, no?

Who says? Krishna was নীল¹⁰¹, other gods have different colours, red, white, black, yellow and green. If he had নীলোত্পল আঁখি¹⁰² what prevents him from being like a বনদেবতা¹⁰³?

August 6, 1937

If you have no light, let these poems remain, Sir.

I have plenty of light and to spare.

Why the devil is this sex force descending and ascending so vehemently now, in place of the Supramental?

If people want it..., what else can you expect than that it should rise?

I don’t know what you mean by descending. It is not a high force from above that it should descend – It is a force from below or around.

Judging by the degree of vehemency, shall I say that the Supramental Force is vehemently coming down in this form? Or it is at least some Divine Force, giving a last kick at the Sex Force?

The Divine Force has nothing to do with it. It is the sex and other lower forces that are attacking in order to make it impossible for the Divine Force to do its work, or the Supramental to descend. They hope to prevent it altogether or, if by some miracle, it still descends, to limit its extension and prevent anything more than an individual achievement.

August 8, 1937

“New centuries open their eyes...” You won’t agree, perhaps, that centuries have eyes?

I agree to everything and anything – let them have ears also. When one can write like that, all objections vanish.

“Appear to me” doesn’t appear very pretty.

No it isn’t pretty – it is first-class.

... Well, anything to say?

I have said it. Why the hell can’t you always write like that? The inspiration came clean through this time.

Z has no fever. I think he should take Chyavanprash; but it is a costly drug, we can’t supply much. I wonder if he has friends to help him with some money.

I believe he has some thousands of rupees stored up with which he is maintaining his populous family in Bhavnagar, (those who have not been able to push themselves in here owing to our stubborn and inhuman or superhuman resistance). But he doesn’t want to acknowledge its existence.

August 9, 1937

Why the hell can’t I write? Why the hell, indeed! Because I don’t want to – that’s all!

My why the hell was an ejaculation, not a question.

If I were to ask you that question, I know your prompt answer would be – no poet can always maintain a high level! Isn’t that the answer?

Obviously, if it is put as a question, that is the only answer. But it wasn’t.

August 10, 1937

Can one break a dream?

I suppose one can. If you are dreaming and somebody pokes you in the ribs and says, “What are you groaning about? Wake up,” wouldn’t he be breaking your dream?

August 11, 1937

S is again bad; pain started right after lunch and other troubles also.

Does he remain quiet after the meal for a sufficient length of time or prances about?

August 12, 1937

Here is a long letter from D. You can skip portions – at the end there is a reference to T. Their quarrel won’t be made up in this life, it seems.

I have glanced through.

Musician-poets at loggerheads – what can you expect?

I thought, in spite of everything, T has a sort of affection for D, no?

So they both said.

There is an engineer who wants to come here for a month. Can’t make out whether he is asking for permission. What’s your opinion?

Can’t make out, myself, anything about any engineer – so have no opinion. Not anxious for a rush this time.

August 16, 1937

J’s eczema is still spreading... She can’t resist scratching it.

How is it to cure if she scratches?

She asks whether it is any good prolonging the treatment with this ointment – Acecholex. So will it be better now to take sun-treatment with oil?

Very difficult to say. This is a thing in its nature obstinate and needing a long treatment. Constant changing of medicaments more often encourages the obstinacy than curing it.

August 17, 1937

The channel is rather choked, as you will see. This poem is no good. Still, better to send it,’ I thought, to get a contact.

There is much “good” in it, on the contrary.

Too busy to give us Force? Darshan is over, Sir!

Darshan is over but karshan¹⁰⁴ is not.

August 18, 1937

“Slumbering birds awake with a start...”

“With a start” O.K.?

No – it makes me start.

Shivalingam (a servant) has a boil on the face. Not very happy about it.

He is not? Hard to satisfy these people!

August 19, 1937

About Shivalingam, I’m sorry! I meant that I was not happy.

I supposed so.

I’m doubtful about this poem. One mind says very fine, another says damn! So?

Both are right – the damner because you didn’t quite get the proper expression, the other because the substance is very fine.

By the way, do you find plenty of repetitions in the ideas?

There are repetitions in the last few poems, variations on the same theme. Vedic, what? Variations fine, though!

August 21, 1937

For J’s eczema and asthma, Dr. André says that anti-anaphylactic injection is very good. Shall we try?

I don’t know what anti-anaphylactic means (my proficiency in quasi-Greek is not very great) but it sounds swell. No objection.

Guru, Anjali and Jatin have written to you regarding their visit here. Perhaps you will give them a reply. It seems they are not very definite about how long they will stay... Jatin can stay with me, but could you avoid putting Anjali with Y? I can’t judge your work, but it is permissible to state the circumstances... Inconveniences, sufferings, etc. do not matter if Mother thinks it is needed for Y’s good...

I have not yet had time to place Jatin’s letter before the Mother and decide on an answer. I shall do so as soon as possible and let him know the result.

Please let me know for future guidance if I should at all interfere in this way.

No objection.

August 25, 1937

25.8.37

Nirod

If Jatin and Anjali are to stay till November, Jatin can stay with you as now; the difficulty is about Anjali. Mother has only 2 rooms that she can offer her and they are both bad. There is the room in Belle-Vue, formerly occupied by Narmada who has shifted now into a better one; it is a very bad room, dark and ill-ventilated and it opens into K’s with only a curtain between. I suppose you know also that the ... sadhikas in the house are fairly noisy and can make themselves very unpleasant when they want to! Alternatively, there is the room next to M’s – also bad, though not so bad as the other. Perhaps you know what kind of neighbour M is – if the next door neighbour does anything of which she does not approve, it will be tempests without end and howling enough to take the roof off. I can’t write these things publicly,... and you will put matters in their fierce naked light before Anjali – for her judgment and decision. She must decide with full knowledge of the circumstances so that she may not blame the Mother afterwards if trouble or discomfort is there. (I may add that even a cricket making a noise near her deprives M of sleep and sends her into flames of wrath or gulfs of depression). So there you are.

Sri Aurobindo

August 26, 1937

“... Breaking all crag-teeth distances

Of the dark abysmal dominion.”

Sir, this “crag-teeth” is a too obvious theft¹⁰⁵.

Y is not pleased with Jatin staying with me. She says because I wanted him to stay with me you agreed... Is it true that you have acceded to my desire?

No. But even if it had been a desire, what objection? To want to put up a friend in one’s room is not a crime. For my part, I am glad to have him there and think it is good for him and you.

... Please give Y some Peace and Protection.

She must be ready to receive it – i.e. she must take and keep the right attitude.

Jatin wants to know if you will write anything more to him.

Yes.

August 27, 1937

Please give me your constant help and protection.

I will certainly give that.

For A’s chronic colitis [6.6.37], we have tried our best, but without any result. Dr. Manilal says why not try homeopathy? Will R take him up?

I don’t know that we are ready to hand him over to R just now at least. Besides, R himself does not seem eager to take any cases.

August 29, 1937

“... Recalling to my memory dim-paced

Foot-falls of a paradisal star...”

But, my dear sir, a star has no feet and the picture of a star walking about on 2 feet in the sky is rather grotesque, so I have had to invent a godhead of a star who can do it all right.

Last night I dreamed that I had gone to a distant relative’s house. There I met a friend of mine looking hideous because his nose had been eaten up by a disease. I thought of curing him by calling down the Mother’s Force. Then I actually felt the Force coming down; when I put my hand on him, lo, he was cured! Miracle and concrete Force in dream?

A feat on the vital plane. If you begin to be conscious of the force there, it ought to travel down before long into the physical also!

Can Jatin and his wife attend the stores¹⁰⁶ on the 1st?

Yes.

Arjava says his medicine for decoction is exhausted, so he has to stop. How is that? It is Sudarshan I suppose. But that can be got at any time from Punamchand’s father as well as any of his other medicines – So they should be ordered in time before depletion.

August 30, 1937

My store seems run down! No words, images or ideas, all gone!¹⁰⁷

Well, if a run-down store can produce a poem like that, it is a miraculous run-down store...

Please give an all-round poking, will you?

All right – I shall try to give the all-round poke.

It seems, according to Ayurveda and common Indian belief, that onions fried in ghee are almost a specific for piles and an admirable laxative. They also have a cooling effect. I know that they make the whole body damn hot, but their heat-properties have a stimulating effect. Any views, popular or personal, on this remedy?

Mother does not know that they are laxative or cooling – it has an energising effect. Perhaps it is effective for tamasic people – it is doubtful if it helps piles. It is taken like that largely in Japan, but it is not supposed there to cure piles.

August 31, 1937

As for S, we have exhausted our means. One thing remains – liver extract which I have withheld till now.

You can try that – since it is his liver – let’s see if it extracts him out of his agonies.

R comes to us now and then for allopathic drugs. Today he came and asked for apomorphine. This drug is only used in urgent cases of poisoning where evacuation of stomach is immediately called for... We don’t know anything about the case. We are asked to give certain drugs, we give; for what case etc. we don’t enquire because he may not like it. What should be done in such cases in the future?

God knows! Perhaps, if it is anything really dangerous, play the Artful Dodger¹⁰⁸ and, otherwise, pray fervently to God that nobody may be poisoned. But for whom does he ask this, I wonder? Alys? He has no other patients except Lakshmi perhaps at the moment.

“Half-veiled figures of unknown splendour

Smile with the happy utterance...”

Can they smile?

May or may not, but smiling here risks being inane; so I dodge the smiles out.

Now that X has returned, J wants to publish- her novel... Is there any fear of complications?

It can be taken up, but I refuse to prophesy anything about complications. X seems to be in a beatified mood just now; perhaps he will be saintly and good-tempered about it, but one can’t be sure.

September 1, 1937

I send you the letter of a diabetic sadhak asking me if he can take rice once a day. I can only pass on the question to you. What shall I reply to his piteous and pathetic request? For enlightenment, please.

September 4, 1937

Guru, I hope you won’t call this a Victorian, sentimental, romantic poem and make me crush my bones by a fall from the sky of ecstasy!

Nothing of that kind in it.

Your bones are safe this time.

September 5, 1937

... By the way, you haven’t returned my medical report book. Mother says it is not there! How? I sent it last night!

Forgot to shove it in. Afterwards it got covered with other books and files – so undiscoverable.

September 6, 1937

What does Mother say about making S a hospital bird for some days? I think he will benefit by it. This neurotics do you know.

[Sri Aurobindo underlined the last sentence.]

What on earth does this cryptic sentence mean?

Only the place is a bit nasty with lots of flies and proletariats.

I fear it might depress him greatly. If nothing has any effect, there might be a consultation with André.

If vetoed, I may try Tonekine injections – (containing arsenic, eau de mer, etc.).

But is this dried liver curable by treatment? Mother says she had an acquaintance who suffered from it, but nothing could cure him. There was nothing left of him but bones and some appearance of skin. Only he kept it up to the age of 80 and died after burying all his relatives and most of his friends. But this S takes just the wrong attitude, making the most of his illness. Just read the letter I send you. What is all this jerks, hammering, beatings, lumpings, movements? Neurotics? facts? if the latter, what do they “indicate” – to use a favourite phrase of sadhaks when relating their experiences.

He said just now that as soon as he took milk in the evening, there was fierce burning.

But what about liver extract?

Meanwhile you can try the sea water etc. tonic.

“Green locks of virgin woods

Waived by a gentle breeze...”

What the deuce is this “waived” – You waive your claim, not your hair.

September 7, 1937

I don’t think S’s ailment is curable. They say that the liver can regenerate. But what about atony of stomach?

If it can regenerate, how do you say it is incurable?

Well, what about it?

He says thai you have asked him to continue treatment – treatment which is of no use? Every day must I hear his long-drawn, ghastly, tragic tales and sit tight and deaf? He says it gloriously – Faith etc. is natural with him. Um! I hope the Force can do something.

I have told him that if he wants to be cured by Force, he must give up all quarrelling, cantankerousness, rancour, complaining, etc., etc., because it is these things that have dried up his liver and debased his stomach – also that agitation and howling stop the Force.

... Anyway, given him Liver pills today.

That’s the Liver Extract?

September 8, 1937

Yes, that is the liver extract... His liver can regenerate, but will depend on the amount of healthy tissue surviving... And atony? How is the stomach going to get back its tone and its position, its lost glands, epithelium, etc., etc.? Homeopathy can do it, I hear.

Well, if H can, then it is possible.

I don’t know about our branch, unless the fellow gets fatty suddenly, perhaps there’s a chance.

Fatty? Rather difficult, but it sometimes happens like the opposite process.

He says he felt a relief yesterday, from 5 p.m. till this morning. He had a diamond smile (teeth, I mean) today. I took the opportunity of showing him that the Force has demonstrated that it can cure and he must satisfy the Force (so easy to sermonise, alas!), we can do almost zero.

Of course it can, if he keeps himself open. But will he?

September 9, 1937

[The first 2 reports were written by Dr. Becharlal.]

P has been getting slight fever nowadays. You will see here the prescription...

Mother says that it would be better to give him Indian medicines out of plants, like Sudarshan or something similar instead of these drugs. Purani had offered some sort of preparation which is given in such cases. Mother would like to know if it can be given.

He is to continue soup of vegetables, if he cannot digest milk. He says he gets nausea by taking milk. He needs rest.

He has been given complete rest for several days; but he is restless and wants to do some work. But he did a little yesterday after the milk which had upset his digestion and become worse. He had been rapidly getting better before that with a medicine given by Pavitra, but which is now exhausted. He was asked again to take complete rest. He says however that you have told him he can do some light work.

I find that Dr. Becharlal has forgotten to mention P’s diagnosis: his eyes were deep yellow, colour of the face also faintly so. Rate of heart 58. No liver enlargement or diminution. So it is diagnosed as jaundice.

Most of these facts were given by B in a letter this morning. But there was. no mention of the non-enlargement of liver. It was that Mother especially wanted to know.

September 10, 1937

Is the sex Force still strong [6.8.37]? What makes it so strong?

It is strong – nothing has made it strong. It has simply come up.

September 11, 1937

... Please give your Force and protection and blessings.

I shall put it there.

September 13, 1937

Dara has a hoarse cough. Had no sleep last night. Takes only milk; has no appetite.

Mother says when he came to pranam today his head was very hot. He complains of the painfulness of his throat which prevents taking anything but tea and milk. What about one or two tea-spoonfuls of honey in a cup of very hot milk? Mother can give him the honey.

Guru, this poem¹⁰⁹ knocked me on the head when you slammed the door on correspondence. Now my head is all right, so it wants to try its luck again. So?

Very beautiful. You seem to have found yourself in English poetry.

“... Dim reminiscences

Of flights across thy skies...”

Too many S’s?

[Sri Aurobindo cancelled the s of “flights”.]

I have beheaded one that was in excess.

October 22, 1937

[Sri Aurobindo stopped all correspondence due to some eye-trouble, and the Mother, instead, took up the medical correspondence.]

Mère, veuillez-vous me dire comment Sri Aurobindo se porte?

[The Mother put brackets around “veuillez-vous” and wrote above it “Voudriez-vous”.]

Très bien, mais je tiens à ce qu’il ne reçoive pas de correspondance pendant quelques jours encore. Si vous avez quelque chose d’urgent à me communiquer vous pouvez le faire.¹¹⁰

I am thinking of giving some milk to Jiban [convalescing from jaundice] at night.

For the milk it might be better to wait a little more –

[A letter from Sitabala:]

Ma! for the last few days I have been having a severe attack of headache... My head feels empty and I cannot walk with S’s steps... I do not have good sleep nor can I eat well. I pray to you for speedy-recovery.

With humble pranam at your feet

your child Sitabala

Nirod

I would like you to see her – It might be “artério-sclérose”. Will you verify it and let me know? I suspect also that she is constipated, it is to be ascertained.

If it is artério-sclérose Pavitra has some good medicine for it –

October 23, 1937

[the Mother]

I am afraid these are not the signs of arteriosclerosis – except the headache... But she is badly constipated which may be the simple reason of her troubles. We shall examine her urine. Please advise what to do.

You might first examine the urine and treat the constipation. We shall see for the rest afterwards.

October 25, 1937

[the Mother]

N was better last night – the temperature remained 102 °... He has eructation, especially after taking milk... There is always a persistent rise of temperature in the evening. There are injections for bringing down the fever, e.g. Diéménal and Omnadin.

Are not these medicines a bit dangerous?

October 26, 1937

[the Mother]

I wonder why J’s eczema, once improved, comes back again. It has been there for 5 or 6 months and is trying to spread...

Have you ever tried to wash the place with a cotton pad dipped in Listerine (pure) dusting afterwards (when dry) with an antiseptic powder?

October 27, 1937

[the Mother]

No, I have not tried Listerine etc., but only Acecholex. First of all we don’t stock Listerine, secondly if it can be procured from the Pharmacie, what antiseptic powder do you suggest? And should there not be a bandage after the dusting?

Not at the Pharmacie but perhaps it can be found in Appadorai’s.

The powder must be a composed one, but for the composition all depends on the patient’s reactions.

The bandage seems to me only good to prevent the scratching.

You saw Jiban at Pranam. Should there be any change in diet?

He seems to be progressing.

If it is convenient, you may reply in French. It will help me to learn the language.

Pas de réponse ce soir¹¹¹ –

October 29, 1937

[the Mother]

For J’s eczema, I wonder if Acecholex is proving to be too strong now; otherwise why should the wound become so raw after scratching?

It may be.

I think tomorrow we shall buy Listerine.

If the skin is too raw it may burn.

N is not very well. He is much troubled by hiccoughs etc... I think his mind will be quiet if somebody stays there at night. Can his adjacent room be spared?

It is not possible as Chimanbhai is arriving and the room is kept for him.

October 30, 1937

[the Mother]

Last night N slept well except for a little hiccough now and then, lasting half an hour. But I wonder why he sleeps so much. We are not giving him any hypnotic except 15 grains of bromide in one dose. Due to Force?

It seems to me more the effect of the bromide and it may be safer not to give him too much of it.

Sitabala got a slight headache after a cold bath... She asks if she could have hot water.

Yes, she can have. Inform Amrita.

October 31, 1937

[the Mother]

... N is the same. Do you advise any outside consultation or Dr. R? Or shall we wait?

We can wait a few days more.

November 2, 1937

[the Mother]

J’s eczema looks very well... Should we try Listerine now or see again with the present medicine, for the last time?

[The Mother marked with a vertical line “or see ... time?”]

Yes, it is better.

Jiban is better now. Dr. Becharlal says he can take a cup of cocoa in the morning. He can also take up his work from tomorrow. Jiban wants your sanction.

Surely he can work now. It will do him good.

November 3, 1937

[the Mother]

Please look at Jiban well tomorrow; we want to know if his diet can be improved.

On Sunday he seemed almost all right – Diet can be improved.

November 4, 1937

[the Mother]

... Shall we give N some solid food? What about Bovril – we have a bottle in stock, or some brandy?

Bovril is better than brandy –

Shall we give Jiban some vegetables or only milk in the morning, to begin with?

Do you think he will be able to digest the milk? He can take vegetables but it would be better if they were simply boiled.

November 8, 1937

[the Mother]

In J’s case, the powder composed of acid salicylic, alum, pulv. calamine Bismuth carb., starch, talc powder has to be cleaned each time we apply Listerine, or shall we clean it with Listerine itself?

Listerine itself can be used for cleaning.

November 9, 1937

[the Mother]

N is taking now: 5 cups of milk, 1 litre barley water, soup, 1 loaf bread, 2 or 3 oranges. Is it sufficient?

It seems to me sufficient.

November 10, 1937

[the Mother]

J says there is much burning by Listerine. I apply it 4 times a day. The powder clings to the surface and forms a sort of hard crust...

It may be that you are putting too much Listerine and too much powder at a time. The powder is only to be dusted. Also the composition of the powder may be changed if it is too heavy and sticky. To remove the crusts once a day you may try vaseline or “glycérolé d’amidon”.

Had an urgent call from M. He says he had high fever (only 101°!), aching body, etc. Looks like a contagion from Nishikanta.

The best would be to disinfect the house with camphor or sulphur or formol.

November 11, 1937

[the Mother]

Camphor or Sulphur is to be burnt like incense powder, isn’t it?

Yes –

I have asked Sitabala to take enema for some days. Can the hot water sent for bath, be used for enema? It is boiled, I suppose.

This is not quite sure. But you can inquire about it –

November 14, 1937

[the Mother]

N’s hiccough is much less, but he is getting very weak.

Is he in bed all the time?

For Jiban, shall we begin with one cup of cocoa in the morning?

You can try –

S says every symptom has increased after Sudarshan. He is raising other problems. Wants a stove for hot water, wants his food sent home in the rainy season, etc., etc. To give a stove simply for a small quantity of water is absurd. He can take it from the Dispensary. The servant can bring his evening meal with mine.

This arrangement is all right. No stove needed.

What about the morning meal? He is going on with one thing after another.

It seems to me that he could go without danger to the D.R. for his morning food.

Bula’s movements of the right arm are still restricted. I don’t think there is any fracture. Shall we see under screen costing Rs. 3, or X-ray costing Rs. 6? Which one?

[The Mother marked “screen” with an arrow.]

Yes, this.

November 15, 1937

[the Mother]

... For N, shall we call in André who is a T.B. expert? Or wait a few more days?

It may be better to call André –

J asks if she should come to meditation in the rain – as the eczema will be exposed to water.

But how does she do for her bath?

November 16, 1937

[the Mother]

J says for the last 6 months she’s been taking half bath, i.e. bath up to the thighs with a lot of acrobatic feats. She just sponges the legs... Should we apply Listerine and powder 3 times now instead of 4?

Yes.

November 17, 1937

[the Mother]

About N, André says, it may be either pleurisy or some liver abscess. He sees no signs of T.B... N is quite upset because we have called in another doctor. So please advise if anything is to be done.

We will see after examination.

November 18, 1937

[the Mother]

N’s X-ray tomorrow. How shall we carry him? Rickshaw may be uncomfortable. Will the car be available?

Both cars are under repair.

J is having a lot of itching. I feel that olive oil, almond oil or cocoagem may do her good. Your opinion, please.

You might try almond oil but see that it is quite fresh. It gets rancid very quick.

Now we are applying Listerine thrice a day.

You might reduce it to twice.

Can milk be given to Jiban at night, and curds at noon?

You can try.

November 19, 1937

[the Mother]

N’s X-ray is done. There is an encysted patch of pleurisy on the right side, and commencement of T.B. over the whole area of both the lungs. André says the condition is bad. He can be shifted to the hospital, but the treatment can also be done at home. André warns that precaution against contagion is to be taken. It seems to Dr. Becharlal and me that the hospital would be better. Here nursing will be very difficult. I wonder how many will offer their services, if they know that it’s T.B. I am not sure that N will agree to go to hospital... If you want that he should be kept here, we shall do our best. But if you want him in hospital, the sooner the better.

P.S.: Though the case is serious, I have not lost all hope. I believe that if you want to cure him, you can do so, as you said the other day, “by some accident”. Our medical treatment for it is next to nil.

[The Mother wrote above “by some accident”, within brackets:’]

Not accident – miracle.

I am wondering if we should keep him and try to nurse him ourselves. The question of diet too is a little difficult...

It is impossible to make proper arrangements here for diet and nursing nor can we run the risk of contagion in an asram of 150 people. Sending him to the hospital is unavoidable. So the sooner he goes the better. It cannot be left to his choice.

November 20, 1937

[the Mother]

Now that N has been sent to the hospital, his room has to be thoroughly cleaned and disinfected.

It must first be disinfected by burning sulphur with all openings closed. Afterwards the furniture will be removed and thoroughly cleaned and the room itself will be whitewashed entirely.

November 21, 1937

[the Mother]

N says he may hire a servant just to be by his side.

That can be done –

5 says he can’t digest the Asram curry at all, and soup and vegetables did him much good.

It is better to give him soup and boiled vegetables.

November 23, 1937

[the Mother]

Guru, I dare to disturb you as daring has become a necessity. I feel utterly blank and am in need of some support, I can’t write poetry by myself, without your help. Have you stopped the correspondence because of your eye-trouble or for concentration? In either case, then, I don’t insist on your seeing my poems. You will understand that I don’t write for the sake of writing, but for a support from you. Please give me a line in reply, after which I won’t bother you any more.

Apart from the eye-question, I have stopped because there are certain things I have positively to get done before I can take up any regular correspondence work again. If I start again now, I shall probably have to stop again soon for a long long time. Better get things finished now – that’s the idea. You must hold on somehow for the present.

November 24, 1937

“O Beauty, write in immortal scroll

The passion of my creative fire.”

I am afraid writing fire in a scroll is too difficult an operation – even for Beauty unless she has become entirely surrealistic since I first made her acquaintance.

November 26, 1937

[the Mother]

V wants to go to see N in the hospital. Should he?

No.

This old man L.N. has come back worse from home. Don’t you think he had better go to Madras and get himself treated there?

That would be the best if he is willing to go –

November 27, 1937

[the Mother]

I examined Dayakar today. He has continuous fever. I’ve asked them to give him milk and soup. Or can soup be omitted?

No, soup is very good.

November 28, 1937

[the Mother]

[The following report was written by Dr. Becharlal:]

For a long time, I have been asking Lakshmi to do some work – to start some light work; at least to move about in the Ashram compound, sit for a few minutes in the Reception Room etc... But I have been told by Champaklal that she has been regularly sitting at the gate at Vithalbhai’s duty time and talking. I have asked her today very gently not to sit at the gate...

It is better also that she should not sit in the reception room.

December 6, 1937

[the Mother]

Sitabala’s headache has a definite relation to food. We suspect ulceration which was previously cured by olive oil. Definite diagnosis is possible only by X-ray. Do you advise it?

Yes, it is better to do it.

December 7, 1937

[the Mother]

Dr. André says that N’s is decidedly a hopeless case. Should his family be informed?

No, it is better not, for obvious reasons.

Can Jiban take regular Asram food?

He ought to be able to take it –

December 8, 1937

[the Mother]

What should be done with N’s things? Shall we distribute the clothes among the servants? Flask, easy chair, blankets, etc...

I was thinking of asking André if we can make a present of all these things to the hospital.

... Should we show A and L to André?

They can both be shown to André. What is to be done in A’s case will depend on André’s diagnosis.

N’s death has touched me a little... If his case had been diagnosed earlier, he might not have died so soon. Here comes in the question of experience as a doctor. Intuition takes a long time to develop and a very energetic sadhana has to be done side by side. If you want to keep me as a doctor, I am tempted to ask you to send me to a big hospital for a period of training. Two or three deaths have occurred since I have come in, and people are perhaps blaming me for my lack of capacity.

I do not believe in the usefulness of a stay in a hospital – the “energetic sadhana” is much better. I can console you by assuring you that those who died had to die.

December 15, 1937

[the Mother]

L has astigmatism of both the eyes. The veins in the eyes are congested. For accurate observation, the oculist says, it is better to dilate the eyes with atropine though it is not absolutely necessary.

Better not.

She has to stop sewing, I am afraid, because even the eye-examination gave her giddiness.

Yes, I have told her already to stop embroidery.

I think it would be better to try sun-treatment before taking to glasses.

It can be tried. But you must give her very detailed and exact instructions as she is a bit careless about herself.

I think B’s is a case of phlebitis, due to chill. It would be better if he did less walking and took more rest.

Phlebitis requires an absolute immobility in bed, but it seems strange that it should be that. Dr. Bannerji told me that the real phlebitis was extremely rare in India. All the same it would be better if he took complete rest for a day or two –

December 17, 1937

[the Mother]

Sitabala says that for her constipation she used to take bran boiled by S. She finds it a bother, so can it be taken raw?

[The Mother underlined “taken raw”.]

Certainly not.

December 18, 1937

[the Mother]

From tomorrow we shall give Shivalingam iodide and mercury, internally. But I wonder if you will like mercury being given.

[The Mother underlined “if you will like mercury being given”.]

No, I do not like.

December 21, 1937

[the Mother]

We examined B today as he was complaining of more pain at night. He has no fever and there is no deep pain, so he will be all right in 2 or 3 days, I think.

Surely it is nothing serious.

May we get bran from Bakery House?

Yes.

December 23, 1937

[the Mother]

L.N. has appeared again... Rajangam spoke to him and he consents to go home after the 31st, if you will sanction.

Yes, it is better if he goes home.

N.P. has again that “terrible pain” on the right side. We are giving him one aspirin and one dose of salt.

N.P. is fearing the results of the salt and asks not to take it.

December 30, 1937

[the Mother]

L has again got a relapse. Shall we call André to see her now or shall we try some tonic injections?

You can call André.

¹ The separation of lovers.

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² nigraha.

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³ lokasaṅgrahāya cha: And for holding together the people.

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⁴ The poem’s number.

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⁵ gabhīr: deep, profound.

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⁶ pramīlā.

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⁷ kṛṣṇimā.

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⁸ tṛṇāñcita: covered with grass.

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⁹ The original Bengali version was sent to Sri Aurobindo. The translation was done on 19.1.37.

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¹⁰ vivasanā kandhāler maraṇaprabhāte. In the morn that is the death of the naked skeleton.

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¹¹ abhiṣikta. Anointed.

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¹² vajrer rāginī: the thunder-roar.

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¹³ yogaḥ karmasu kauśalam: Yoga is skill in works. (Gita, II.50)

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¹⁴ The original manuscript of the following reply is mutilated. The words in square brackets have been partly or wholly reconstructed.

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¹⁵ Arya Publishing House, Calcutta.

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¹⁶ vaṇitā.

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¹⁷ ḍālā.

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¹⁸ With what have you filled your pitcher, my beloved?

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¹⁹ Take away the pitcher filled with poison.

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²⁰ pūrṇa kumbha: full pitcher.

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²¹ viṣ kalasī: pitcher filled with poison.

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²² S stands for Surrealistic.

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²³ ativāstara panthā: surrealist path.

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²⁴ Poetry by Mohitlal Majumdar.

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²⁵ The Ashram librarian.

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²⁶ Love and delight.

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²⁷ SABCL, vol. 9, pp. 445-447. (Previously unpublished passages are included here.)

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²⁸ SABCL, vol. 9, pp. 447-449. (A line previously unpublished is included here.)

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²⁹ Waste-paper basket.

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³⁰ We have made some progress (i.e. “I have made a start on your letter”).

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³¹ anāth: orphan.

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³² Never again shall I come back.

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³³ Reduce to ashes.

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³⁴ komal vyavahār: kind behaviour.

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³⁵ Arya Publishing House, Calcutta.

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³⁶ yugadharma: spirit of the age, Time-spirit.

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³⁷ X’s musical recitals on the radio.

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³⁸ The fellow stuck to what he said; the fellow wouldn’t give up his point.

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³⁹ sarvamidaṃ brahma: all this is Brahman.

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⁴⁰ Hospital-attendants.

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⁴¹ SABCL, vol. 28, Savitri, Book I, Canto 3, p. 41.

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⁴² So much the worse for him.

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⁴³ Manager of Arya Publishing House, Calcutta.

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⁴⁴ bhāṁotā: bluff.

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⁴⁵ The Mother’s servant.

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⁴⁶ “Alor gandha”, Swapnadīp, p. 23.

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⁴⁷ na tatra śocate budhaḥ: the wise man grieves not over that.

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⁴⁸ trasta.

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⁴⁹ strasta.

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⁵⁰ sa.

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⁵¹ mūrcchitā, one who swoons.

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⁵² smṛti: memory.

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⁵³ vakṣa: bosom.

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⁵⁴ haṃsa: swan; has: goose or duck in Bengali.

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⁵⁵ SABCL, vol. 9, pp. 456-457.

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⁵⁶ Here A, B, C are not editorial substitutions.

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⁵⁷ yogaḥ karmasu kauśalaṃ: Yoga is skill in works.

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⁵⁸ “splendid”, “lovely, very lovely”, “amazing, my dear sir”.

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⁵⁹ A type of metre and rhythm.

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⁶⁰ Except for the first reply, all the others must have been given on April 30, 1937.

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⁶¹ “First Word”, Sun-Blossoms, p. 8.

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⁶² p. 919

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⁶³ Transformation, Nirvana, The Other Earths, The Bird of Fire, Trance, Shiva, the Inconscient Creator, The Life Heavens, Jivanmukta, In Horis Aeternum, Thought the Paraclete, Moon of Two Hemispheres, Rose of God. SABCL, vol. 5 (Collected Poems).

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⁶⁴ Jerusalem Liberated

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⁶⁵ āveś.

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⁶⁶ See correspondence of May 17, 1937, p. 939.

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⁶⁷ Fifty Poems of Nirodbaran, p. 19.

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⁶⁸ Twelfth-Night, II. ni. 46-7.

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⁶⁹ Cymbeline, IV. ii. 262-3.

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⁷⁰ Measure for Measure, IV. i. 1.

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⁷¹ Julius Caesar. III. ii. 79-80.

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⁷² A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, II.i. 164.

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⁷³ The Tempest, I. ii. 49.

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⁷⁴ Hamlet, V.ii. 361-2.

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⁷⁵ divas, Night to day.

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⁷⁶ rajani pālit: moon (fostered by the night); diwākar: sun.

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⁷⁷ Agni Jatavedas

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⁷⁸ Fifty Poems of Nirodbaran, p. 13.

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⁷⁹ Let us therefore rejoice

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⁸⁰ “Gaudumus”, Amal says, is my misconstruction of his correct reading.

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⁸¹ “The Sacred Fire”, Overhead Poetry, p. 91.

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⁸² Vertical lines in the margin, denoting the quality of the verses

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⁸³ Illegible words.

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⁸⁴ Total absorption into the formless, supracosmic Brahman.

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⁸⁵ Doubtful reading.

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⁸⁶ Summit, peak.

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⁸⁷ Doubtful reading.

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⁸⁸ A mock medical term coined by Sri Aurobindo for irascibility.

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⁸⁹ “Soul’s Pilgrimage”, Sun-Blossoms, p. 20.

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⁹⁰ “Cry from the Dark”, ibid., p. 29.

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⁹¹ See last paragraph of 21.6.37, p. 972.

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⁹² tyāga: renunciation.

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⁹³ siddha, one who has realised the Divine.

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⁹⁴ Cyrano de Bergerac: A character, famed for his enormous nose, in the play of the same name by Edmond Rostand.

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⁹⁵ “Figure of Trance”, Sun-Blossoms, p. 10

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⁹⁶ Mother’s Centenary Vol. 3, p. 90.

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⁹⁷ “In Moonlit Silence”, Sun-Blossoms, p. 21.

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⁹⁸ One word illegible.

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⁹⁹ See last paragraph of 1.8.37.

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¹⁰⁰ vanadev: god of the woods.

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¹⁰¹ nīl: blue.

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¹⁰² nīlotpal ānkhi: blue-lotus eyes.

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¹⁰³ vanadevatā: god of the woods.

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¹⁰⁴ Ploughing, tilling cultivation, (hard labour).

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¹⁰⁵ “The Bird of Fire”, SABCL, vol. 5 (Collected Poems), p. 571.

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¹⁰⁶ “Prosperity”, as the stores are now called, from where the requirements of the sadhaks were given by the Mother, on the first day of every month.

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¹⁰⁷ “Your Face”, Sun-Blossoms, p. 2.

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¹⁰⁸ A character in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist.

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¹⁰⁹ “Secret Hands”, Sun-Blossoms, p. 3.

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¹¹⁰ Mother,

Could you tell me how Sri Aurobindo is? Very well, but I don’t want him to receive any correspondence for a few more days. If you have anything urgent to communicate to me, you may do so.

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¹¹¹ No reply this evening.

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