Letters from a Young Poet (35 page)

Patishar
10 September 1894

I've been on the waterway since yesterday morning. There are only marshes on every side—the raised tips of rice stalks—the villages, with their few densely packed huts, float in the distance—a mildly fragrant green lichen extends, congealed, up to quite a distance, so that one suddenly mistakes it for land; on that itself, a variety of waterbirds gather. It's a Bhādra day, there's not much of a breeze, and the slack sails of the
boat
hang limply; the boat has moved sluggishly throughout the day, proceeding in the most indifferent manner. The bright sun of śara
t
falls on this lichen-diffused extensive water-
world, and I sit on a chair near the window with my feet up on another chair humming to myself the whole day. All the morning melodies such as Rāmkeli, which seem so absolutely routine and lifeless in Calcutta, come completely alive in their wholeness over here the moment you evoke them even fractionally. Such an amazing truth and new beauty appear in them, such a universal deep tenderness melts into the air all around, making everything misty, that it seems as if this rāginī is the song of the entire sky and the entire earth. It's like a web of magic, like a
māẏā
mantra
. There's no end to the numberless fragments of words that I conjoin to my tunes—so many one-line songs accumulate and are then discarded throughout the day. I don't feel like sitting down to systematically turn them into complete songs. I sit on this chair drinking in the golden sunlight from the sky while my eyes fall like an affectionate touch upon the moist lichen's new softness, allowing my mind to fill up easily and lazily with whatever comes spontaneously to it—I cannot try any harder at the moment than this. I can remember the two or three lines in the most simple of Bhairabī rāginīs that I spent the entire morning continuously reciting, so I'm attaching an extract as an example for you below —

ogo tumi naba naba rupe eso prāe.

(āmār nityanaba!)

eso gandha barana gāne!

āmi ye dike nirakhi tumi eso he

āmār mugdha mudita naẏāne!
^*

(Oh, come to my heart in new and newer forms

[My constant newness!]

Come as a fragrant song of welcome!

Whichever direction I look, you come to me

To my entranced, shut eyes!)

On the way to Dighpatia
20 September 1894

The water on the other side of the Padma is receding, but it is time for the water to rise on this side. I can see this on every side. There's no end to the different kinds of waterways we're travelling through—marshes, canals, rivers. Large trees have submerged their entire base in the water and stand with all their branches bent over the water—there are boats tied within dark forests of mango and banyan trees, and the village people bathe there, hidden from sight. Occasionally, a village hut remains standing in the stream, the areas all around it completely immersed in water. There's no way one can see any sign of a field, only the tips of rice stalks raise their heads over the water slightly. The
boat
slides through the rice fields with a scraping sound and suddenly enters a pond—there's no grain there—white lotuses bloom in lotus groves and black kingfishers dive into the water to catch fish. Then again, as we go on, at one place we suddenly enter a small river—there's a rice field on one shore and, on the other, a village surrounded by dense vegetation—in the middle, the full stream of water goes on its winding way. The water enters wherever it can—I don't think you all have ever seen the land so defeated. The village people come and go from one place to another sitting on large, round clay tubs plying a plank of wood for an oar—there's no trace of any roads on the land. If the water increases even slightly, it will enter the houses—and then they'll have to use ladders and live on the upper floors, the cows standing day and night in knee-deep water will die, their edible grass become increasingly scarce, snakes will abandon their flooded holes and come and take shelter in the roofs of huts, and all the homeless insects and reptiles of the world will come to live by the side of men. As it is the villages are dark, enclosed on every side by forest cover—and then on top of that the water enters even there and all
the leaves and creepers and shrubs begin to rot, with all the garbage from the cattle shed and people's homes floating around on every side, the water made blue with the stink of rotting jute, and naked children with swollen stomachs and sticklike hands and legs keep splashing around here and there in the water and the mud while clouds of whining mosquitoes hover above the still, putrid water like a layer of fog—the villages in this region assume such an unhealthy, comfortless aspect in the rainy season that one feels nauseated just travelling past them. When I see the housewives getting drenched in rainwater, wet saris wrapped around their bodies in the cold, wet wind, the material pulled up above their knees so they can do their everyday domestic work, patiently pushing aside the water, it is impossible to like what you see. I can't think how men put up with so much hardship and such lack of comfort—on top of this, in every house people suffer from arthritis, swollen feet, colds, fever; there's the continuous whining and crying of boys suffering from an enlargement of the spleen, and they are simply beyond saving—they die one by one. One cannot accept the existence of such neglect, ill health, ugliness, poverty and barbarism in man's places of habitation. We are defeated by every sort of power—we tolerate the depredations of nature, we tolerate the tyranny of kings, and against the intolerable oppressions of the śāstras through the ages we don't have the courage to say a word. Such a race of men should run away from the world and become absolute deserters—they bring the world no happiness, beauty or convenience.

On the way to Boyalia
Saturday, 22 September 1894

Today it's cleared up on every side and there's a wonderful sun up, Bob. A small river, a fierce current which, as we pull against
it, creates a constant
kal-kal, chal-chal
sound that comes to the ear. After getting wet in the rain all these days, the trees and villages on both sides of the river express such a feeling of leisurely joy in the new sunlight of śara
t
! Today the memories of bad days have all been completely wiped away from the sky and the earth. As if the world had never ceased to be joyful. This skyful of golden sunlight has spread itself completely over my mind as well—there the home of all my happiest memories has taken on an amazing and magical aspect in this śara
t
light. When I think that only thirty-two seasons of śara
t
have come and gone in my life, I find it very surprising—yet it seems as if my memory's path becomes increasingly obscure and misty as it travels towards the beginning of time, and when this cloudless, beautiful morning sun comes and falls upon that large world of my mind, then I seem to be sitting at the window of my magical palace, looking out unblinkingly towards a magical mirage kingdom spread out as far as can be seen, and the breeze that comes and touches my forehead all the time seems to bring with it the entire unclear, mixed, mild fragrance of the past to me. How I love the light and the air! Perhaps because of the appropriateness of my name. Goethe had said before he died:
More light!
—if I had to express a wish at a time like that I would say:
More light and more space!
I've said in one of my poems—

śūnya byom aparimāṇ,

madyasama kariba pān

mukta kari ruddha prāṇ

ūrdhva nīlākāśe.

(The empty sky without measure

I shall drink like wine

Freeing the imprisoned heart

Into the blue sky on high.)

I am not yet satiated with what I have drunk of this sky. Many people don't like the fact that Bengal is on level ground, but that's
exactly why I like the vista of its fields, its riverbanks, so very much. When the evening light and the evening peace begin to descend from above, the entire unfettered sky fills up like a sapphire cup; when the motionless, tired, silent afternoon spreads out its cloth of gold, there are no obstructions anywhere—there's no other place like this to keep looking and looking, and to fill up one's heart by looking. That's why I love the seashore so much more than the mountains. The day I arrived at the seashore in Puri—with the white sands stretching desolately in one direction, and, on the other, the dark blue sea and the pale blue sky spread out till the limits of one's vision—one can't quite talk about how my entire inner soul had filled up on that day. That's why I had really wanted to build a small house by the sea in Puri and just be there. Even now, that unhomely roar of the waves comes to my ears like a distant dream. If I could travel as sannyāsīs do so easily from one place to another, then I would give myself up into the hands of this unbounded earth and travel once to many other countries. But the sky calls out with both its arms extended and the home too pulls you back by both your hands. A lot of trouble comes from being an amphibian creature. I'm an amphibian in all respects—the world of the mind and the material world both tie me down equally.

Boyalia
Monday, 24 September 1894

You've written that those who have a greater power to feel are those who suffer more in this world—there's no doubt about that at all—because the capacity to experience sorrow depends on the ability to feel. But I've frequently thought that whether I'm happy or unhappy is not the last word on the subject for me. Our innermost nature continues to feel and to grow through all our
joys and sorrows. Our momentary life and our eternal life may be joined together, but they are not the same—this I can clearly comprehend at times. Our experiences of joy and sorrow in this transient life feed the sources of eternal life. You know perhaps that the green leaves of trees analyse the sun's rays and help in the collection of a substance called
carbon
, and it is that
carbon
which results in fire when we burn trees. The leaves of the trees spread themselves out in the sun and dry up and fall, and then new leaves grow—the transient life of the tree is experiencing the sun and then drying up and falling in the same heat—the eternal life of the tree is gathering an unburnable eternal fire within it. Our leaves of every day, every moment, too spread themselves on every side to experience the joys and sorrows of the world as they flow, and then, burnt by the heat of those joys and sorrows, fall one by one, but our eternal life cannot be touched by those momentary flames—it continuously keeps collecting that energy within itself in an unnoticed and unconscious way. The tree whose leaves are not green is not a tree of the highest class, and its store of
carbon
too is negligible. The man whose ability to experience the everyday joys and sorrows of each moment is poor also does not burn, and his reserves for eternal life too are extremely insignificant. His transient life stays protected from the heat of life's joys and sorrows and he lives for longer—that is, one often sees that the small social world of the day-to-day, the narrow limits of a narrow way of life are enough for him; this doesn't dry up or fall off. They keep the transient relatively stable by covering it in insensitivity; they keep a small number of days so fresh that you would think them eternal; they turn the insignificant business of life into something extraordinary. But life has a rule of checks and balances everywhere which is called ‘
the law of compensation
'. If you try to protect your everyday to keep it alive, you turn your eternity into a dead thing. Those who are completely satisfied with themselves within the narrow boundaries of the material world, those worldly, materialistic men are healthy and happy in the transient world, but
the deep joy of eternity is beyond their imagination, outside their conception—they think of it as the rhetoric of poetry; they don't believe in it with all their hearts. That's why they think it is their life's mission to forsake the happiness that is not of this world and the unhappiness that is of it, and nobody can make them believe in a higher ideal than this, to make them understand that ‘Even those who are suffering from the greatest of sorrows are no more an object of pity than you are.' I don't know if I've made myself clear to you, Bob. The real thoughts of our minds live so far inside that to articulate them properly, to make someone else see them in their true form is very difficult—that's why initially one hesitates to even try. That which is the deepest truth above all for me—that which lives in the innermost sanctum of our lives—that's something we express unconsciously and fragmentarily in many forms, many words and many deeds. But to make it discernible to someone else all at the same time, in fact even to one's self, is very difficult—one is afraid if perhaps the thing that is completely true for one's innermost being may take on an imaginary aspect once it tries to emerge from within.

Boyalia
24 September 1894

I'm ashamed to admit it and it makes me very unhappy to reflect on it, but human company usually makes me terribly uncomfortable, it keeps chafing away at me inside—I want to be like everyone else, to mix easily with everybody, to be happy with simple pastimes and amusements—I keep lecturing myself about this at great length every day, but there is such a barrier surrounding me on all sides that I am unable to cross it however much I try. I am a new creature among men, I never become completely familiar
with them—I'm very distant from even those I have been friends with for a very long time! Since I'm a naturally distant person, I find the forced proximity of men for social reasons very tiring. Yet it's not as if it's natural for me to be completely removed from the company of men; I feel like dropping into the midst of gatherings from time to time—to see what sort of work goes on in which places, what revolutions are taking place—I too feel like participating and helping with those—the warmth of life that comes from human contact seems essential for the mind to stay alive. These two opposing impulses come together when you're in the company of those who are like your very close relations, who don't wear down your mind by rubbing it the wrong way; in fact, they give joy, and so help the mind to work enthusiastically and easily in all its natural activities.