Letters from a Young Poet (39 page)

Calcutta
Tuesday, 20 November 1894

To continue with the thought I had brought up in yesterday's letter to you, it seems to me that just as day and night have divided work and rest between themselves, so too have people divided prose and poetry in literature into two sections. Prose clearly belongs to work and poetry to an immense leisure. That's why you do not need to say anything necessary in poetry. Our everyday relationships seem to have almost disappeared in the world that is created for us in poetry. If that wasn't so then the ever-present beauty of the world, the world of feelings, would not have been visible to us. When both these things are true in man's life, and both truths, like day and night, cannot be seen together, then there's a necessity for both prose and poetry. That is why poetry, with its metre, scansion and language, has pushed all connection with the everyday world to a distance; in place of necessity, it has introduced beauty—it has tried to convey to us in many ways and through many gestures the news that completely outside of our field of necessity there is an endless ocean of joy extending boundlessly. I was discussing this division between prose and poetry and the need for that distinction with Thakurdas Mukherjee not so long ago. He thinks that in the future prose will become beautiful to the extent that the particular requirement for poetry will be gone. If what was being said had
been pure argumentation, it would have been much easier, but because there was a great deal of feeling involved, it became very difficult to explain in conversation. I only said briefly that while it's true that level ground is extremely useful for all our work—nobody can deny that—but when you want to act, you need a separate
stage
; if you come down amidst the audience to perform then the illusion is not created in that way in their minds. The subject of performance must be separated from its surroundings and elevated a little and lit up with lights, scenery and music and held up for display, only then will it succeed in imprinting itself upon the mind in a complete and independent way. The language and metre of poetry is like that
stage
and that music—it is because the subject is separated by being encircled by all that beauty that it's able to have such a powerful and complete impact upon our minds, that's why it can take us out of the surrounding poverty to a land of beauty, and we realize we are no longer in our field of work at first glance itself—we make ourselves ready in an instant. But it's very difficult to explain all this properly. Thakurdas-babu did not seem too convinced with what I said. He seemed to think that it is my prose rather than my poetry that's a great deal more poetic in expression, and in his opinion that's what is more natural. He's asked for some of my most recent books of poetry—perhaps he'll write an essay proving that my poetry is my prose and my prose, poetry.

Calcutta
21 November 1894

Aban is sitting in the ground-floor room in that house playing an ālāp on the
esrāj
in Bhairabī which I can clearly hear sitting in the corner
room on the second floor of this house.
^*
You too have written in your letter about Matang's Bhairabī ālāp. Nowadays, before you know it, it's ten or eleven in the morning and then noon—as the day grows warmer, the heart too grows equally detached and melancholy; over and above that, when your ear repeatedly picks up the extremely tender, plaintive tug of the Bhairabī, a tremendous feeling of renunciation spreads across the sky and the sunlight. The melting notes of the Bhairabī rāginī extract the eternal, deep sorrow of this work-laden, suspicion-prone world, made sorrowful by separation, and bring it to you. The raga Bhairabī unlocks from within our hearts the tearfulness of the daily grief, fear and supplication that is a part of man's relation with man; it establishes a connection between our pain and the pain spread across the universe. It is completely true after all that nothing we have is permanent; but nature, by some strange magical power, makes us forget that fact all the time, which is why we are able to do the world's work enthusiastically. That eternal truth, that pain of death, finds expression in the Bhairabī; what it tells us is that nothing will remain of what we know, and that we know nothing of what will remain eternally.

Shilaidaha
Sunday, 25 November 1894

Go—— has survived this time. I didn't sleep almost the entire night the day before yesterday. His boat was right behind mine—I could
hear his groans from time to time and was distressed thinking that he might die. It was a silent night, and my room was completely dark. Lying there on my bed I kept thinking how the life and death of man was shrouded in a terrible mystery—at times the still, silent, everlasting time surrounding me on all sides seemed very cruel. In relation to it, our lives, our greatest joys and sorrows, our noblest hopes and desires are so insignificant—it matters little to it whether I die today or tomorrow. Whether I die alone or whether a million people die swept away in the floods is also of no consequence. The sun will die out completely one day with its entire solar world and everything will freeze up, but even that is nothing to it—so many such extinguished, dead worlds, concealing their millions of years of life and play, wander around the skies today. Every layer of the earth contains the fossils of so many lost life forms, not a single descendant of theirs is extant today. So I was lying on my bed and thinking to myself, to whom should I say, on behalf of this dying man, in this endless darkness, ‘Oh, this poor man is suffering so much'? Who shall understand the value of his life if not helpless people like us? For whom is his pain true? If death is an unavoidable, inevitable occurrence for every living thing, why should one suffer such terrible agony? Unless we think of our most personal and heartfelt joys and sorrows and desires as having an eternal recourse somewhere, a dwelling of eternal empathy, everything seems like the cruellest farce! A son's death takes the form of an absolutely unbearable pain for a mother, but if that has no meaning at all to the eternal, then why this māẏā? My love may mean so much to me, but if it has no place at all in eternity, then it is merely a dream. We are doing our utmost for our country, giving our lives for human progress. But our country is a country only for us, that is, greater than the entire world—man is man only for us, that is, greater than all other living things in the world—if you look at it from the outside then these thoughts and, along with them, all our lifelong efforts are totally farcical. Go—'s impending death seemed terribly grave, terribly important to me; but that was only because
I am a man, because I am acquainted with him and near him—was there any real depth or significance in it? Ants die, mosquitoes die all the time, why do we think those deaths to be so insignificant? When a leaf dries and falls, when a lamp is extinguished by the breeze, why aren't those reasons for grief too? They are no less of a change. To eternity, a solar world dying out, a leaf falling, a man dying, are all the same—so all our grief and our joys and sorrows are only our own. I sometimes think that this world is a battlefield of two opposing forces—one of these is within us and trying to live all the time, and the other is attempting perpetually to kill it—if that were not so then death would have seemed entirely natural to us, it wouldn't have seemed in the slightest bit terrible—we were one way at one time, and at another time we have become something else—there would be no sorrow or grief or wonder entangled there. But our nature says from within, ‘I want to live', it says ‘Death is my opponent—I must conquer it'—yet nobody has ever been able to conquer it. But we go on trying. That's why we feel the pain of death, the grief of death—when the eternal desire of staying alive is repeatedly defeated by death.

Shilaidaha
Wednesday, 28 November 1894

This year, the sandbanks are exactly as they were the first year I came to Shilaidaha by boat, when the limits of the sandbanks could not be seen from this shore. The white sands stretch desolately for miles right up to the farthest limit of the horizon; there is no grass, nor are there any trees, houses or anything at all—that time there were a few wild jhāu clumps, this time even those aren't there. You'll never be able to imagine such vast emptiness unless you see it
with your own eyes. We are used to the emptiness of the skies and the seas, and don't expect anything else there; but the emptiness of land seems the emptiest of all—no movement anywhere, no life, no variety of colour, not a hint of softness anywhere—not a blade of grass in a place that could have been full of the fluidity of grain and grass and birds and animals—just an indifferent, hard, endless bondage of widowhood—the Padma River flows by on one side, on the other side the ghat, tied boats, people bathing, coconut and mango groves—in the evenings the murmur from the bazaar next to the river can be heard and the rows of trees on the Pabna side appear like a dark blue line—deep blue in some places, pale blue in some, green in some, and in between is this bloodless, deathlike pale white—silent, inert, desolate. In the evenings, at sunset, when I walk upon this sandbank I feel a deep expansiveness and boundless freedom in my heart. Nothing anywhere, nobody around, just me, alone. Everything that I have to say, I can spread out upon this land without a mark or a boundary; I am my own companion, my own happiness, I can make everything on my own. Yesterday I was thinking that when our senses cannot feel anything then our minds feel everything for us, the senses are merely the gateway to the mind, so why should we not think that whatever presents itself to our minds even without the help of our senses is true as well? Or why should we not find an equal amount of happiness from it as from truth? I think that's merely because of habit. From the beginning, we are used to experiencing everything through our senses. Now, even if our minds can independently construct many things with the help of the imagination, unless we feel all our joys and sorrows through our senses we aren't able to enjoy them completely. For instance, it is the mind that writes, not the pen, yet for those who are used to writing with a pen, it isn't possible to organize their thoughts orally in the same way as they can when they sit down with a pen in hand. I definitely think that if we can just concentrate a little and prepare and practise, the
materials of the imagination can be used in lieu of the materials of the senses to experience things in the closest, most intimately attainable way. Unfortunately, the powers of the imagination are not always as clear, as detailed or as definite as that all the time. In the mofussil, these powers of mine blossom fully, and I can fill the distance of time and place with my imagination; but in the filth of Calcutta god knows where these magical powers disappear, and my only recourse then is to beg and cry at the door of the senses.

Shilaidaha
Thursday, 6 December 1894

Normally on other days it gets quite warm by this time, and one has to take off one's jobbā—today it's exactly the opposite. The wind outside has begun whistling sharply, the river's waters have become restless and make a splashing sound, yet there's no sign of any clouds, the sun is shining brightly, the birds that root around in the mud are jumping around, their tails dancing, upon the muddy banks by the river, and the porpoises are turning a somersault in the water from time to time. If the wind remains like this in the evening too, I won't be able to go for a walk today. I've recently changed my position a little. I've brought the boat to the middle of the river where a sandbank raises its head above the water and have tied it there. Remember that rhyme?—

epār gaṅgā, opār gaṅgā, madhyikhāne car

tāri madhye base āche śib-sadāgar.

(This side Ganga, that side Ganga, sandbank in between

In the centre of it all sits the merchant-man Shiva.)

I'm sitting here exactly like that sib-sadagar. In the evenings when I go for a walk on the shore I have to take the
jolly boat
and row a short distance; as a result, I get to both row a bit as well as walk. It is the Śuklapaksha nowadays—as soon as I have walked for a little while, the moonlight blossoms, and the limitless white sands of the sandbank assume such a shadowy, imaginary form that it seems to not be the real world at all—as if it's an amazing manifestation of my own mind. God knows when in my childhood I had once heard a description in a fairy tale told by Tinkari-
dāsī
one night while lying under the mosquito net, ‘
tepāntar māṭh—jocchonāẏ phul phuṭe roẏeche
'
^*
[A desolate expanse of field—flowers blooming in the moonlight]—whenever I go walking on the sandbanks in the moonlight I remember those words of Tinkari-dasi. That night in my childhood I had become very restless hearing this one description of Tinkari's—a vast field stretching desolately with sparkling-white moonlight upon it, and a prince on his horse, riding on for some unknown reason—how thrilled I was to hear this! Besides, the prince would inevitably find an incredibly beautiful princess, you see, which made me even more agitated. I had a hope against hope ingrained in my mind that I too, when I was older, might pull off some improbable feat of this sort, and that after facing many trials and tribulations, a certain breathtakingly beautiful being might not be absolutely impossible to attain in some such place. As I walk on the sandbank in the moonlit night, that childhood feeling of the pull of a joyful heart under the mosquito net rises up again in me; wherever I look, everything seems so unreal that all that is impossible attains form, and I walk around enchanted amidst the mirages of my own imagination—it has no limits anywhere, or obstacles.

Shilaidaha
7 December 1894

Nowadays the evenings upon the sandbanks are so wonderful that it's beyond my powers of description. When I walk alone, often after a while Shai—— comes to keep me company and discusses work-related issues. He came yesterday as well. After discussing the arrangements for the transfer of property to another name on the rent roll, etc., for a while, the moment he stopped speaking—I suddenly saw the eternal universe standing silently in front of me that evening. And I was surprised that one man's inconsequential voice near your ear could drown out the silence that fills this infinite sky—in that bare, silent universe what were the rent rolls and the Birahimpur estate records! I didn't reply to what Shai—— was saying, so he thought I hadn't heard him. He asked me again, and I again did not reply, avoiding the matter. He was very surprised and became quiet. The moment that happened, immediately, as I stood watching, a peace descended from that entire silent constellation of stars and filled my heart. I too found a seat in one corner of the meeting at which uncountable millions of stars had soundlessly gathered. Just as they are one each in that endless space, so too was I one, standing beside the Padma upon the desolate sands stretching to the horizon; both they and I had found a place in this astonishing thing called existence. After walking on the moonlit sands till very late at night, I finally returned to the boat, lit the lamp, closed the door, stretched out on the long easy chair and once again began a discussion on the Birahimpur rent rolls. Four pieces of luci with the help of
natun khejur gur
and a glass of milk were consumed. Then, after a little literary discussion, it was time to sleep.