The Poetry in the Making
Is the artist—the supreme artist, when he is a genius, that is to say—conscious in his creation or is he unconscious ? Two quite opposite views have been taken of the problem by the best of intelligences. On the one hand, it is said that genius is genius precisely because it acts unconsciously, and on the other it is asserted with equal emphasis that genius is the capacity of taking infinite pains, which means it is absolutely a self-conscious activity. We take a third view of the matter and say that genius is neither unconscious or conscious but superconscious. And when one is superconscious, one can be in appearance either conscious or unconscious. Let us at the outset try to explain a little this psychological riddle. When we say one is conscious, we usually mean that one is conscious with the mental consciousness, with the rational intelligence, with the light of the brain. But this need not be always so. For one can be conscious with other forms of consciousness or in other planes of consciousness. In the average or normal man the consciousness is linked to or identified with the brain function, the rational intelligence and so we conclude that without this wakeful brain activity there can be no consciousness. But the fact is otherwise. The experiences of the mystic prove the point. The mystic is conscious on a level which we describe as higher than the mind and reason, he has what may be called the overhead consciousness. (Apart from the normal consciousness, which is named jagrat, waking, the Upanishad speaks of three other increasingly subtler states of consciousness, swapna, sushupti and turvya.) And then one can be quite unconscious, as in samadhi—that can be sushupti or tunya—or partially conscious—in swapna, for example, Page 310 the external behaviour may be like that of a child or a lunatic or even a goblin. One can also remain normally conscious and still be in the superconscience. Not only so, the mystic—the Yogi—can be conscious on infraconscious levels also; that is to say, he can enter into and identify with the consciousness involved in life and even in Matter; he can feel and realise his oneness with the animal world, the plant world and finally the world of dead earth, of "stocks and stones" too. For all these strands of existence have .each its own type of consciousness and all different from the mode of mind which is normally known as consciousness. When St. Francis addresses himself to the brother Sun or the sister Moon, or when the Upanishad speaks of the tree silhouetted against the sky, as if stilled in trance, we feel there is something of this fusion and identification of consciousness with an infra-conscient existence.
I said that the supreme artist is superconscious:
his consciousness withdraws from the normal mental consciousness
and becomes awake and alive in another order of consciousness. To that superior consciousness the artist's mentality—his
ideas and dispositions, his judgments and valuations and acquisitions, in other words, his normal psychological make-up—serves as a channel, an instrument, a medium for transcription. Now, there are two stages, or rather two lines of activity
in the processus, for they may be overlapping and practically simultaneous.
First, there is the withdrawal and the in-gathering of consciousness and then its reappearance into expression.
The consciousness retires into a secret or subtle world—Words-worth's "recollected in tranquillity"—and comes back with Page 311 consciousness, the inspiration, as it is usually termed, bears down, sweeps away all obscurity or contrariety in the recording mentality, suffuses it with its own glow and puissance, indeed resolves it into its own substance, as it were. And the difference between the two, the secret norm and the recording form, determines the scale of the artist's creative value. It happens often that the obstruction of a too critically observant and self-conscious brain-mind successfully blocks up the flow of something supremely beautiful that wanted to come down and waited for an opportunity.
Artists themselves, almost invariably, speak of their inspiration: they look upon themselves more or less as mere instruments of something or some Power that is beyond them,
beyond their normal consciousness attached to the brain-
mind, that controls them and which they cannot control. This
perception has been given shape in myths and legends. Goddess
Saraswati or the Muses are, however, for them not a mere
metaphor but concrete realities. To what extent a poet may Still, it must be noted that Coleridge is a rare example, for the recording apparatus is not usually so faithful but puts up its own formations that disturb and alter the perfection of the original. The passivity or neutrality of the intermediary is relative, and there are infinite grades of it. Even when the larger waves that play in it in the normal waking state are quieted down, smaller ripples of unconscious or half-conscious habitual formations are thrown up and they are sufficient to cause the scattering and dispersal of the pure light from above. Page 312 The absolute passivity is attainable, perhaps, only by the Yogi. And in this sense the supreme poet is a Yogi, for in his consciousness the higher, deeper, subtler or other modes of experiences pass through and are recorded with the minimum aberration or diffraction.
But the Yogi is a wholly conscious being; a perfect Yogi is
he who possesses a conscious and willed control over his instruments, he silences them, as and when he likes, and makes
them convey and express with as little deviation as possible
truths and realities from the Beyond. Now the question is, is it possible for
the poet also to do something like that, to consciously create and not to be a mere unconscious or helpless
channel? Conscious artistry, as we have said, means to be
conscious on two levels of consciousness at the same time, to
be at home in both equally and simultaneously. The general
experience, however, is that of "one at a time": if the artist
dwells more in the one, the other retires into the background
to the same measure. If he is in the over-consciousness, he is
only half-conscious in his brain consciousness, or even not
conscious at all—he does not know how he has created, the
sources or process of his creative activity, he is quite oblivious Page 313 The three or four major orders I speak of in reference to conscious artistry are exampled characteristically in the history of the evolution of Greek poetry. It must be remembered, however, at the very outset that the Greeks as a race were nothing if not rational and intellectual. It was an element of strong self-consciousness that they brought into human culture —that was their special gift. Leaving out of account Homer who was, as I said, a primitive, their classical age began with Aeschylus who was the first and the most spontaneous and intuitive of the Great Three. Sophocles, who comes next, is more balanced and self-controlled and pregnant with a reasoned thought-content clothed in polished phrasing. We feel here that the artist knew what he was about and was exercising a conscious control over his instruments and materials, unlike his predecessor who seemed to be completely carried away by , the onrush of the poetic enthousiasmos. Sophocles, in spite of his artistic perfection or perhaps because of it, appears to be just a little, one remove, away from the purity of the central inspiration—there is a veil, although a thin transparent veil, yet a veil between which intervenes. With the third of the Brotherhood, Euripides, we slide lower down—we arrive at a predominantly mental transcription of an experience or inner conception; but something of the major breath continues, an aura, a rhythm that maintains the inner contact and thus saves the poetry. In a subsequent age, in Theocritus, for example, poetry became truly very much 'sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought', so much of virtuosity and precocity entered into it; in other words, the poet then was an excessively self-conscious artist. That seems to be the general trend of all literature. But should there be an inherent incompatibility between spontaneous creation and self-consciousness? As we have seen, a harmony and fusion can and do happen of the superconscious and the normally conscious in the Yogi. Likewise, an artist also can be wakeful and transparent enough so that he is conscious on both the levels simultaneously—above, he is conscious of the source and origin of his inspiration, and on the level plain he is conscious of the working of the instrument, how the vehicle transcribes and embodies what comes from elsewhere. The poet's consciousness becomes then divalent as Page 314
it were—there is a sense of absolute passivity in respect of the
receiving apparatus and coupled and immisced with it there is
also the sense of dynamism, of conscious agency as in his
secret being he is the master of his apparatus and one with the
Inspirer—in other words, the poet is both a seer (kavih) and a Not only so, the future development of the poetic consciousness seems inevitably to lead to such a consummation in which the creative and the critical faculties will not be separate but form part of one and indivisible movement. Historically, human consciousness has grown from unconsciousness to consciousness and from consciousness to self-consciousness; man's creative and artistic genius too has moved pari passu in the same direction. The earliest and primitive poets were mostly unconscious, that is to say, they wrote or said things as they came to them spontaneously, without effort, without reflection, they do not seem to know the whence and wherefore and whither of it all, they know only that the wind bloweth as it listeth. That was when man had not yet eaten the fruit of knowledge, was still in the innocence of childhood. But as he grew up and progressed, he became more and more conscious, capable of exerting and exercising a deliberate will and initiating a purposive action, not only in the external practical field but also in the psychological domain. If the earlier group is called "primitives", the later one, that of conscious artists, usually goes by the name of "classicists." Modern creators have gone one step farther in the direction of self-consciousness, a return upon oneself, an inlook of full awareness and a free and alert activity of the critical faculties. An unconscious artist in the sense of the "primitives" is almost an impossible pheno-menon in the modern world. All are scientists: an artist cannot but be consciously critical, deliberate, purposive in what he creates and how he creates. Evidently, this has cost something of the old-world spontaneity and supremacy of utterance; but it cannot be helped, we cannot command the tide to roll back, Canute-like. The feature has to be accepted and a remedy and new orientation discovered. The modern critical self-consciousness in the artist originated with the Romantics. The very essence of Romanticism is curiosity—the scientist's pleasure in analysing, observing, experimenting, Page 315 changing the conditions of our reactions, mental . or sentimental or even nervous and physical by way of discovery of new and unforeseen or unexpected modes of "psychoses" or psychological states. Goethe, Wordsworth, Stendhal represented a mentality and initiated a movement which led logically to the age of Hardy, Housman and Bridges and in the end to that of Lawrence and Joyce, Ezra Pound and Eliot and Auden. On the Continent we can consider Flaubert as the last of the classicists married to the. very quintessence of Romanticism. A hard, self-regarding, self-critical mentality, a cold scalpel-like gaze that penetrates and upturns the reverse side of things is intimately associated with the poetic genius of Mallarme and constitutes almost the whole of Valery's. The impassioned lines of a very modern poet like Aragon are also characterised by a consummate virtuosity in chiselled artistry, conscious and deliberate and willed at every step and turn. The consciously purposive activity of the poetic consciousness—in fact, of all artistic consciousness—has shown itself with a clear and unambiguous emphasis in -two directions. First of all with regard to the subject-matter: the old-world poets took things as they were, as they were obvious to the eye, things of human nature and things of physical Nature, and without questioning dealt with them in the beauty of their normal form and function. The modern mentality has turned away from the normal and the obvious: it does not accept and admit the "given" as the final and definitive norm of things. It wishes to discover and establish other norms, it strives to bring about changes in the nature and condition of things, envisage the shape of things to come, work for a brave new world. The poet of today, in spite of all his effort to remain a pure poet, in spite of Housman's advocacy of nonsense and not-sense being the essence of true Art, is almost invariably at heart an incorrigible prophet. In revolt against the old and established order of truths and customs, against all that is normally considered as beautiful,—ideals and emotions and activities of man or aspects and scenes and movements of Nature—against God or spiritual life, the modern poet turns deliberately to the ugly and the macabre, the meaningless, the insignificant and the trifling—tins and teas, bone and dust and dustbin, hammer and sickle—he is still a prophet, a violent Page 316
one, an iconoclast, but one who has his own icon, a terribly
jealous being, that seeks to pull down the past, erase it, to
break and batter and knead the elements in order to fashion
out of them something conforming to his heart's desire. There
is also the class who have the vision and found the truth and
its solace, who are prophets, angelic and divine, messengers
and harbingers of a new beauty that is to dawn upon earth.
And yet there are others in whom the two strains mingle or
approach in a strange- way. All this means that the artist is far
from being a mere receiver, a mechanical executor, a passive
unconscious instrument, but that he is supremely conscious
and master of his faculties and implements. This fact is doubly
reinforced when we find how much he is preoccupied with the
technical aspect of his craft. The richness and variety of patterns that can be given to the poetic form know no bounds
today. A few major rhythms were sufficient for the ancients to
give full expression to their poetic inflatus. For they cared more
for some major virtues, the basic and fundamental qualities—-
such as truth, sublimity, nobility, forcefulness, purity, simplicity, clarity, straightforwardness; they were more preoccupied
with what they had to say and they wanted, no doubt, to say it
beautifully and powerfully; but the modus operandi was not
such a passion or obsession with them, it had not attained that
almost absolute value for itself which modern craftsmanship
gives it. As technology in practical life has become a thing of
overwhelming importance to man today, become, in the Such a stage in human evolution, the advent of Homo Faber, has been a necessity; it has to serve a purpose and it has done admirably its work. Only we have to put it in its proper place. Page 317
The salvation of an extremely self-conscious age lies in an
exceeding and not in a further enhancement or an exclusive
concentration of the self-consciousness, nor, of course, in a
falling back into the original unconsciousness. It is this shift in
the poise of consciousness that has been presaged and prepared by the conscious, the scientific artists of today. Their.
task is to forge an instrument for a type of poetic or artistic
creation completely new, unfamiliar, almost revolutionary
which the older mould would find it impossible to render
adequately. The yearning of the human consciousness was
not to rest satisfied with the familiar and the ordinary, the
That is what is wanted at present in the artistic world—the
true inspiration, the breath from higher altitudes. And here
comes the role of the mystic, the Yogi. The sense of evolution,
the march of human consciousness demands and prophesies
that the future poet has to be a mystic—in him will be fulfilled
the travail of man's conscious working. 'The self-conscious
craftsman, the tireless experimenter with his adventurous
analytic mind has sharpened his instrument, made it supple Page 318 awareness but the free and untrammelled activity and expression of the truth and reality it is. Genius had to be generally more or less unconscious in the past, because the instrument was not ready, was clogged as it ' were with its own lower grade movements; the higher inspiration had very often to bypass it, or rob it of its serviceable materials without its knowledge, in an almost clandestine way. Wherever it was awake and vigilant, we have seen it causing a diminution in the poetic potential. And yet even so, it was being prepared for a greater role, a higher destiny it is .to fulfil in the future. A conscious and full participation of a refined and transparent and enriched instrument in the delivery of superconscious truth and beauty will surely mean not only a new but the very acme of aesthetic creation. We thus foresee the age of spiritual art in which the sense of creative beauty in man will find its culmination. Such an art was only an exception, something secondary or even tertiary, kept in the background, suggested here and there as a novel strain, called "mystic" to express its unfamiliar nature—unless, of course, it was openly and obviously scriptural and religious. I have spoken of the source of inspiration as essentially and originally being a super-consciousness or over-consciousness. But to be more precise and accurate I should add another source, an inner consciousness. As the super-consciousness is imaged as lying above the normal consciousness, so the inner consciousness may be described as lying behind or within it. The movement of the inner consciousness has. found expression more often and more largely than that of over-consciousness in the artistic creation of the past: and that was in keeping with the nature of the old-world inspiration, for the inspiration that comes from the inner consciousness, which can be considered as the lyrical inspiration, tends to be naturally more "spontaneous", less conscious, since it does not at all go by the path of the head, it evades that as much as possible and goes by the path of the heart. But the evolutionary urge, as I have said, has always been to bring down or instil more and more light and self-consciousness into the depths of the heart too: and the first result has been an intellectualisation, a rationalisation of the consciousness, a movement of scientific observation and criticism Page 319 which very naturally leads to a desiccation of the poetic enthusiasm and fervour. But a period of transcendence is in gestation. All efforts of modern poets and craftsmen, even those that seem apparently queer, bizarre and futile, are at bottom a travail for this transcendence, including those that seem contradictory to it.
Whether the original and true source of the poet's inspiration lies deep within or high above, all depends upon the
mediating instrument—the mind (in its most general sense)
and speech—for a successful transcription. Man's ever-growing
consciousness demanded also a conscious development and
remoulding of these two factors. A growth, a heightening and
deepening of the consciousness meant inevitably a movement
towards the spiritual element in things. And that means, we By whom impelled does the mind fall to its target, what is the agent that is behind the eye and sees through the eyes, Page 320 what is the hearing and what the speech that their respective sense organs do not and cannot convey and record adequately or at all ?
Like the modern scientist the artist or craftsman too of
today has become a philosopher, even a mystic philosopher.
The subtler and higher ranges of consciousness are now the object of inquiry and
investigation and expression and revelation for the scientist as well as for the artist. The external
sense-objects, the phenomenal movements are symbols and
signposts, graphs and pointer-readings of facts and realities
that lie hidden, behind or beyond. The artist and the scientist
Beyond the shapes of empire, the capes of Carbonek, over the topless waves of trenched Broceliande, drenched by ¦the everlasting spray of existence, with no mind's sail ¦ reefed or set, no slaves at the motived oars, I drove into and clove the wind from unseen shores. Swept from all altars, swallowed in a path of power by the wrath that wrecks the pirates in the Narrow Seas,....multiple without dimension, indivisible without uniformity, the ship of Solomon (blessed be he) drove on.1
Well, it is sheer incantation. It is word-weaving, rhythm-plaiting, thought-wringing in order to pass beyond these frail materials, to get into contact with, to give some sense of the mystery of existence that passeth understanding. We are very far indeed from the "natural" poets, Homer or Shakespeare, Milton or Virgil. And this is from a profane, a mundane poet, not an ostensibly religious or spiritual poet. The level of the poetic inspiration, at least of the poetic view and aspiration has evidently shifted to a higher, a deeper degree. We may be speaking of tins and tinsel, bones and dust, filth and misery, of the underworld of ignorance and ugliness,
All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old,
1 "The Last Voyage" by Charles Williams—.4 Little Book of Modem Verse, Page 321
and the imaginative idealist, the romantically spiritual poet
The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a
lumbering
cart,
all, all the dark spots and blotches on the fair face of earth and humanity
Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart. and he cries out: The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told; and declares the ardent aspiration of his heart and soul:
I hunger to build them anew, and sit on a green knoll
apart,
But the more truly modern mind looks at the thing in a slightly different way. The good and the evil are not, to it, contrary to each other: one does not deny or negate the other. They are intermixed, fused in a mysterious identity. The best and the worst are but two conditions, two potentials of the same entity. Baudelaire, who can be considered as the first of the real moderns in many ways, saw and experienced this intimate polarity or identity of opposites in human nature and consciousness. What is Evil, who is the Evil One:
1 W. B. Yeats: "The Lover tells of the Rose in his Heart"—The Wind among Page 322 Une Idee, une Forme, Un Etre Parti de I'azur et tombe Dans un Styx bourbeux et plombe Ou nul œil du Ciel ne penetre;1 {L'Irremediable}
And therefore it is not so irremediable as it appears to be. For the miracle happens and is an inevitable natural phenomenon, and that is why
Par l'operation d'un mystere vengeur {L'Aube spirituelle)
Heaven and Earth are not incommensurables, divinity and humanity function as one reality, towards one purpose and end: cruel heaven, miserable humanity? Well, this is how they appear to the poet's eye:
Le Ciel! couvercle noir de la grande marmite {Le Couvercle)
In other words, the tension in the human consciousness has been raised to the power, the heat of a brooding consciousness is about to lead it to an outburst of new creation— sah tapastaptva. Human self-consciousness, the turning of oneself upon oneself, the probing and projecting of oneself into oneself—self-consciousness raised so often to the degree of self-torture, marks the acute travail of the spirit. The thousand "isms" and "logics" that pullulate in all fields of life, from the political to the artistic or even the religious and the spiritual indicate how the human laboratory is working at white heat. They are breaches in the circuit of the consciousness, volcanic eruptions from below or cosmic-ray irruptions from above,
1 An Idea, a Form, a Being left the azure and fell into the mud and grey of a Styx where no eye from Heaven can penetrate. 2 An avenging Mystery operating, out of the drowsy animal awakes an angel. 3 Heaven! it is the dark lid upon the huge cauldron in which the imperceptible and vast humanity is boiling. —Les Fleurs du Mal. Page 323 tearing open the normal limit and boundary—Baudelaire's Couvercle or the "golden lid" of the Upanishads—disclosing and bringing into the light of common day realities beyond and unseen till now. If so long the poet was more or less a passive, a half-conscious or unconscious intermediary between the higher and the lower lights and delights, his role in the future will be better fulfilled when he becomes fully aware of it and consciously moulds and directs his creative energies. The poet is and has to be the harbinger and minstrel of unheard-of melodies: he is the fashioner of the creative word that brings down and embodies the deepest aspirations and experiences of the human consciousness. The poet is a missionary: he is missioned by Divine Beauty to radiate upon earth something other charm and wizardry. The fullness of his role he can only play up when he is fully conscious—for it is under that condition that all obstructing and obscuring elements lying across the path of inspiration can be completely and wholly eradicated: the instrument purified and tempered and transmuted can hold and express golden truths and beauties and puissances that otherwise escape the too human mould. Page 324 |