Letters from a Young Poet (31 page)

On the way to Shahjadpur
Friday, 6 July 1894

I'm en route now. Yesterday in the afternoon, just as we were about to untie the boat, a clerk came up with folded hands and pleaded,
‘Your lordship, it would be better if you set out tomorrow morning rather than today.' When I asked why, he said it is the conjunction of three lunar days today, and therefore very inauspicious for travel. I said I would prove that the day was an auspicious one for travel—I would reach Shahjadpur quite safely. So saying, I snapped my fingers in the face of all the planets, stars, and days of ritual and set off. On the way the Padma was flowing terribly fast in places—the swollen water whirled around and crashed on the shore; the
boat
didn't want to move forward at all, all its joints began to shiver and tremble; those towing the boat found it impossible to keep their feet steady despite stooping low and pulling with all their strength; I thought to myself, now I suppose it's the turn of all the planets, stars, and days of ritual to snap their fingers under my nose. After a while, once we had crossed the Gorui and reached the real Padma, it was possible to raise the sails—then we proudly and forcefully cut our way across the chest of the opposing current and proceeded to make our way dancing over the waves. At five or six in the evening we managed to enter the Ichamoti River….

In the evening, we tied our boat to a ferry ghat near Pabna town. On the shore there were some people singing to the accompaniment of the tabla, a mixture of sounds entered the ear, men and women walked down the road with a busy air, the lamplit houses were visible through the trees, there was a crowd of people of all classes at the ferry ghat. The sky had a very dark cloud of a single colour, the evening too was darkening, lights came on in the row of usurers' boats tied to the other shore and brass bells began to sound from the temple for evening prayers—sitting by the
boat
's window with the light extinguished, my mind was filled with the force of a most wonderful feeling. A living, pulsating beat from this human habitation seemed to pierce through the cover of darkness and strike my breast. Under this cloudy sky on this intense evening, how many people, how many desires, occupations, jobs, homes—and so many mysteries of life contained within those homes—so many people so near each other, brushing up against one another,
resulting in so many thousands of sorts of collisions and reactions! This vast population, with all their good and bad, all their joy and sorrow, had become like one to enter my heart from either shore of the tree-lined, small, rainy river like a tender, beautiful rāginī. I think I had tried to express something of this feeling in my poem ‘
Śaiśabsandhyā'
[Childhood Evenings]. What it means, in brief, is perhaps this, that man is small and transient, yet the stream of life—full of the good and the bad, of joys and sorrows—will flow on with its ancient, deep murmur as it always has and always will—one can hear that eternal hubbub at the margins of a town in the darkness of evening. Then the impermanent and individual daily life of man dissolves in that entire undifferentiated melody and enters the heart's silence like the single tone of a great ocean—a very vast, spread-out, melancholic, mysterious sound without beginning or end, without questions or answers. I don't think I can quite explain or describe the state of my mind last evening. There are times when the larger currents of the world enter our hearts through some tear or rent somewhere, and then they resound in a way that is impossible to translate into words. That is why I've noticed that I have not managed to write poetry about many of the deepest and most intense feelings of my heart, which may have occasionally found expression in my writing only as the merest hint.

On the way to Shahjadpur
7 July 1894

I spent the day reading a
Polish novel
called
The Jew
. Fate had ordained that the novel be an unreadable one—I managed to somehow desperately finish it only because I had started it. It's difficult to understand the dutiful compulsion to complete something only because one has started it. It's not exactly a
sense of duty—Loken is partly correct when he says that all our mental faculties have a certain pride. Our minds don't ever want to easily admit that we are inconsequential or impermanent or defeated by the smallest of obstacles—that's why they often keep themselves awake with the utmost effort. Our resolve too has a certain pride—it has started something, so it wants to take it through to the end, even if it means going against itself. That stubborn and wasteful pride has made me sit the entire long rainy day in a closed room and finish a huge, unreadable book full of disjointed argumentation—it gave me no satisfaction other than the satisfaction of having finished it. I had wanted to write, but you can't write in this damp and closed situation. I was thinking that I've written to you every day every time I have travelled down this narrow, winding Ichamoti River—and I'm writing to you this time as well. My letters from the provinces are all written from the same places, the same scenery and the same situations every time—if you look at them all together I've no doubt they'll be full of numberless repetitions. Perhaps I've used the exact same language again and again. When you're in Calcutta it is easy to say something novel at every moment—but in the rural outback there are only two subjects, nature and my own self—both subjects give me immense joy—and there's no dearth of variety in these two subjects too—but man's ‘
point of view
' and the language and powers with which he expresses himself are limited—so there's nothing to do but repeat one's self thousands of times. Having heard the same things over and over again you must have my state of mind and daily life in the provinces more or less by heart—perhaps you could forge one of my letters from the provinces quite easily. This time if it had not rained and been sunny instead and I had been able to sit by the window and look at the scenery outside all day, perhaps I would have written the sorts of things to you about this winding river that I have already written at least four times; and I would've thought that I was writing it all down for the first time. Not only that—I would think that the indescribable
feelings and thoughts that arise in me when I see the banks of the Ichamoti River are as huge and important news to you as they are to me—and that expressing them appropriately and completely after gathering them up by their roots from the inaccessible parts of my mind and sending them to you in their entirety—is a desperately urgent task. Nowadays it has been proven that those who are writers by race are a sort of madmen. That seems to be substantially true to me. To feel sad if you're unable to express your thoughts is certainly a kind of madness.

Baṛ-dada isn't satisfied until he has written his
boxometry
. Birendra writes on every wall and on every flowerpot on the second floor, drawing the sun and writing in the middle: ‘sun'—one can't describe how painstakingly slowly he writes, rubbing it out so many times, and with so much care. God alone knows what particular happiness resides in the correct expression of that sun both for him and for the world. I too suffer from a similar madness, only the subject and the form are different. Those who are completely and entirely mad don't know how mad they are. I know that I am crazy in one part—however much I want to or I try, I will not be able to tie that part down in this life; whatever my intelligible part pledges, my madness does not protect but destroys.

Shahjadpur
10 July 1894

One doesn't want to lose sight of any part of the lives of those who are close to us and those whom we would always want to keep near us—but if you think about it properly, it's funny in what little measure two people, even if they are very close, remain conjoined together in every line in this life. A person we have known for ten years—what a great part of those ten years have been spent
not knowing him—perhaps if we do our accounts for a lifelong relationship we will find that we're not left with very much in hand at the end. And that is only the knowing that comes of seeing; beyond that there's the knowing of the mind. If you think about it like that then everybody appears unknown to you, and we realize that there is not much chance of getting to know anybody really well—because after a couple of days we will have to be completely separated, and that before us, countless millions of people have lived their lives under this sun and blue sky and met in rest houses and separated again and been forgotten and then removed. Thinking in this vein may make some of us want to renounce the world, and one may feel, ‘then why'—but in me, it's just the opposite. I want to see more, know more, get more. Sometimes I think, here we are, just a few self-conscious living things who have raised their heads like bubbles floating in the ocean of life and have bumped into one another in a sudden coming together—and it is doubtful if the quantity of wonder, love and joy that has been created by this coming together will ever be built up again in all time. In one place in Basanta Ray's poetry there is a line—

In a moment we lose hundreds of centuries

It's quite true that man may experience the conjunction and disjunction of a hundred centuries in a moment. That is why one feels every moment is invaluable. The words aren't new, but to me they seem so astonishingly new sometimes! This time before I left, on the day that S—— had come to Park Street in the afternoon, you were sitting at the piano, I was preparing to sing, when suddenly looking at you all I thought, here you were in the afternoon, your hair tied, wearing fresh clothes, on a particular cloudy day in front of an open window at the piano, and a person called me, standing, leaning upon the piano lid, S—— sitting and waiting to hear the songs—just a bit of astonishing business in the endless flow of events through time.
It seemed that whatever beauty, whatever joy this contained was limitless, and that the light emanating on this cloudy afternoon was an amazing gain. I don't know why the routine materiality of the everyday is sometimes suddenly torn a little for just a moment; then it seems to me that with my newborn heart I can see the scene in front of me and the present event reflected on the canvas of eternal time. Then the fact that you all are who you are and I am who I am—and that I'm looking at you and listening to you and thinking of you all as my own and you too are thinking of me as your own—comes to me again as an amazing thing that I can see in a new and vast way. Who knows if such an amazing occurrence will ever happen again! I quite frequently see life and this world in a certain way so that the mind is filled with limitless wonder—I may not be able to quite explain that to anybody else. That's why a lot of things become so much for me that someone else may think it to be unnatural and excessive: ‘overreacting to every little thing'. One of the virtues of habit is that it manages to lighten and thereby lessen many things, protecting the mind from outside impact like a shield, but habit cannot ever completely envelop my mind—to me, the old seems to be new every day. That's why my
perspective
gradually becomes different from other people's, and I have to test with trepidation anew where each one of us is situated.

On the way to Calcutta
13 July 1894

We managed to enter the Ichamoti River. What a lovely, bright day it was! You couldn't turn your eyes away from the scene on either side of the small river. There were hardly any clouds in the sky—the forests at the edge of the river and the dark green
fields of crop happy in the sunshine, the breeze sweet—I sat like a king reclining comfortably on five or six pillows piled high on the bed next to the window—somebody had spun a dream upon my eyelids—the fishermen caught fish, women washed clothes, boys falling in the water created a rumpus, cows grazed, storks sat upon fields submerged in water, all of it looked like a picture. It's impossible to try and describe exactly why all of it was feeling so wonderful to me. We say that a beautiful thing is like a dream for exactly the reasons that we say it is like a picture. Otherwise the saying is actually a bit strange—it wouldn't be wrong to say that a picture was like a thing, but to say that something was like a picture is in one sense saying it the wrong way around. But the real meaning of it is that in a picture we see only one part of a thing that is held up before our eyes, so what becomes most intense in our minds is the pleasure we feel in partaking of the beauty of the scene. I feel that the function of
Art
is to carefully separate out that part of the world that we love from the rest to hold it up in its brightness, undiluted and on its own. The
artist
's job is to strain that part out from the surface of truth and then put it on view. That's why I feel that pure
art
is in pictures and music—not in literature. Man's language is far more voluble than man's paintbrush or his voice, which is why in literature we mix in too many things—in order to express beauty we give information or advice, and say many other things. Anyway, we use phrases such as ‘like a picture', ‘like a song', ‘like a dream' very frequently—but that's not the important thing. We think of beauty as more heavenly than truth, delight more heavenly than knowledge….

But over here my
boat
is not advancing any further. We had come this way trusting that the wind that had obstructed us on the Yamuna would be favourable for us on the Ichamoti. But to trust in the wind is not a very intelligent thing to do. People have divided madness into forty-nine classes and named them the forty-nine winds. And, truly, among the five elements, wind contains a level of madness in excess of almost any other.

Calcutta
15 July 1894

How shall I describe the beauty of what I saw when the steamer left the Ichamoti behind and came upon the Padma towards evening? You couldn't see the ends of the horizon anywhere—there were no waves, everything was full of a calm seriousness. When that which can whimsically create a storm right now takes on a beautiful and pleased aspect, when it hides its huge force and power in a form full of sweetness and dignity, then its beauty and glory come together to create the most amazing and generous wholeness! Slowly as the twilight gathered density and the moon rose, all the chords seemed to begin to resound in my entranced heart.