Dear Reader,

I think great poetry is usually simple and sincere. It comes from the heart and it touches our heart because it is honest and true. Even great epic poetry or the great poetic Shakespearian tragedies endure in our conscious appreciation because they show us what life is. If great poetry often describes great people and great events, it also always allows us to step into those roles, to feel what they feel.

One famous commentator said that he feels that it is because of Shakespeare’s compassion that he is still remembered and loved. I think he is right because when I read Shakespeare’s vast work, I see how deeply he inhabited all of his characters. Their joys and, often, untold sorrows became his own.

Sri Chinmoy has written nearly one hundred thousand poems, an amazingly prolific output no matter which standard we might choose to apply. I like his poetry for its tremendous variety and scope. At the start of his literary journey, now more than half a century ago, he chose a lyrical, imagistic style to convey his ideals and experiences. More recently, he has adopted a more aphoristic expression. These newer poems are usually concise but compact, and they speak with an understated power.

I like what Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his essay entitled ‘Nature’ (1836), “To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.”

Emerson is stating here that when children see the sun or beauty in the natural world, that that beauty actually becomes a part of them; they assimilate it in the depths of their being. Good poetry is practical. It becomes a part of us and it teaches us how to live.

Maybe that’s why the holy scriptures of so many different traditions are often great poetry. I’d be hard pressed to find a greater epic poem than the Bhagavad Gita, or more heart-wrenching lyrics on love and loss than the Song of Songs. The many narrators of the Gospels assume a simple, reportorial style that is moving for its frankness and humility.

Sri Chinmoy wrote in 1962 that “In the bright days that are dawning upon the earth well may we look for the leaven of transcendental poetry to uplift the whole human mass.”

The idea of referring to poetry as “leaven” is very interesting. Leaven is something that will help us to rise and to grow into our truest, fullest selves. I suppose that this is the loftiest aspiration of poetry.

For people interested in Sri Chinmoy’s poetic work, I would eagerly refer them to his wonderful Seventy-Seven Thousand Service-Trees Series, which is at this writing more than halfway completed.

This series belongs to his recent, pithy style of simple and often instructional verse. They are far from didactic, however, as they express universal truth with deep feeling and imagination. Some of the poems hit home without the use of imagery:

Humanity’s patience
Is wearing thin.
This is, indeed,
A great tragedy.
–Sri Chinmoy
(Seventy-Seven Thousand Service-Trees #20385)

In other poems, he incorporates vivid imagery:

There is no bird above me.
There is only one blue-gold bird
Inside my heart,
And its name is my soul.
—Sri Chinmoy
(Seventy-Seven Thousand Service-Trees #9764)

And, in some of these poems, the imagery is implied:

The wisdom of all the sages:
Never see darkness
In any human being.
—Sri Chinmoy
(Seventy-Seven Thousand Service-Trees # 32,679)

God’s first Smile was born
The day humanity awoke
To His Light.
—Sri Chinmoy
(Seventy-Seven Thousand Service-Trees #1421)

Our comedies reach God’s Mind-Door.
Our tragedies reach God’s Heart-Room.
—Sri Chinmoy
(Seventy-Seven Thousand Service-Trees #23138 and #23139)

In Macbeth’s eulogy to his wife, Shakespeare also expresses intense, visceral feeling almost without any images at all:

She should have died hereafter.
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time...
—William Shakespeare

In an article I wrote for the Sri Chinmoy Inspiration Group, I discussed the mantric power and grace of Sri Chinmoy’s poetic work in some detail.

While in prose, it’s the content that matters, in poetry, it is the graceful struggle between form and function which gives it its unique thrill and interest.

I like what Rabindranath Tagore said on poetry: “I wonder why the writing of pages of prose does not give anything like the joy of completing a single poem. One's emotions take such perfection of form in a poem, they can be taken up by the fingers, so to speak. While prose is like a sackful of loose material, incapable of being lifted as you please.”

I wish the reader good luck in finding good poetry, whether it be in the form of a poem, or a noble sacrifice, or an amazing insight into what life really means.

I cannot resist the temptation to close with Walt Whitman’s conclusion to his masterpiece, Leaves of Grass:

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
—Walt Whitman

Further Reading
www.poetseers.org
www.writespirit.net
www.srichinmoylibrary.com
America In Her Depths by Sri Chinmoy | SriChinmoyLibrary.com

Mahiruha Klein
Editor

Title photograph: Other Lives by Pavitrata Taylor

The Spirituality Of Emily Dickinson

Sumangali Morhall

Lyrics And Music

Noivedya Juddery

My Friend Nick

Barney McBryde

Poetry Of Hafiz

Palyati Fouse

Sri Aurobindo's Poetry

Abhinabha Tangerman

The Ecstatic Poetry Of The Sufis

Tejvan Pettinger

Walt Whitman's Elegy To A President Slain

John-Paul Gillespie

RX: Write a Poem, Read a Poem, Find Vision’s Shore

Sharani Robins
 

The Eighth Day

Kamalika Györgyjakab

Tears For Dead Children: An Incident From Malaysia

Jogyata Dallas

Ben Jonson On Grief And Faith

Mahiruha Klein

 

The Spirituality Of Emily Dickinson

Sumangali Morhall
 

Emily Dickinson referred to herself as a pagan. Some biographers would go so far as to label her a druid for her worship of nature. But was this apparently stubborn heathen life really built on atheism?

On the surface what seems a blatant rebellion against the Christian reforms sweeping New England in the 19th Century could be misinterpreted as a lack of spiritual inclination. If we look beneath even a single veneer we will undoubtedly find true spirituality at the heart of her endeavour; far from snubbing God, but simply insisting on no less than a first-hand experience of Him.

The poet shunned religious doctrine, but did she shun religion? Certainly not as a whole, and even then it may be merely a matter of syntax. The words 'religion' and 'spirituality' may at times be used interchangeably, and at others a fine distinction must be made. Charles Anderson chooses to make no distinction, using the word 'religion' in its broadest, and perhaps most primal sense:

"The final direction of her poetry, and the pressures that created it, can only be described as religious, using that word in its 'dimension of depth.'"

Emily inherited the Puritan traits of austerity, simplicity, and practicality, as well as an astute observation of the inner self, but her communication with her higher Self was much more informal than her God-fearing forefathers would have dared. The daughter of the 'Squire' of Amherst, she came from a line of gritty, stalwart pioneers, carrying what was almost considered the blue blood of America. Her family was far from poor, but she did not lead a lavish life, for the Puritans abhorred luxury and waste (even a waste of words, which trait the poet may have done well to inherit).

She accepted the Puritan ideals of being 'called' or 'chosen' by God, and fully embraced the merits of transcending desire, but not the concept of being inherently sinful:

"While the Clergyman tells Father and Vinnie that 'this Corruptible shall put on Incorruption' it has already done so and they go defrauded."

She had faith in her own divinity, so perhaps she was yet more certain of God than her peers. She did not claim to fully understand Him, or even to have perennial faith in all His Ways—her poetry bears a continuing strain of doubt—but she certainly did not fear Him. The inner freedom this afforded her—rare for a woman of her time—brought her to the point of being almost cheeky in her familiarity and certainty. This confidence fed her poetry sumptuously, and gave it the well-known child-like quality. To her, truth was in nature. In that beauty she could see and feel God directly:

"Some keep the Sabbath going to Church —
I keep it, staying at Home —
With a Bobolink for a Chorister —
And an Orchard, for a Dome —

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice —
I just wear my Wings —
And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,
Our little Sexton — sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman —
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last —
I'm going, all along."

Emily did actually attend church regularly, sometimes traveling to hear some of the rousing and charismatic preachers who stamped their mark on that era. She was often moved by these sermons, perhaps as compelled by the speaker's delivery and the construction of words as the message within them. But this was not enough to entice her to succumb to the fierce religious revival. One by one her friends received an inner calling and were 'saved,' officially accepting Christianity. Members of her close-knit family eventually followed suit, including her strong-willed father, and finally her brother, Austin, perhaps her closest ally. Emily would not commit to something she could not sincerely feel, even under the unthinkable social pressure that surrounded her.

Until the age of 30 she continued going to church, although she was excluded from certain meetings and services open only to those who had been 'saved'. She became increasingly reclusive throughout her 30s. It is tempting to see her seclusion as further evidence of spiritual asceticism. Her spiritual path was certainly intensely lonely in such a social climate, but she craved aloneness more and more, and seclusion somehow formed a symbiotic relationship with her art. Increasingly her art became an expression of her spirituality.

Immortality ("the Flood Subject" as she called it) consumed Emily's consciousness. Dwelling on death was natural in those times as illness and general hardship frequently took lives around her, her awareness heightened further by the many years spent in a house adjoining a cemetery. But dwelling on death was also almost a spiritual practice, a 'graveyard meditation,' a means of focus, breathing life into the concepts of Eternity, Infinity and Immortality.

Poet and philosopher Sri Chinmoy said of the poet:

“Emily Dickinson wrote thousands of psychic poems. One short poem of hers is enough to give sweet feelings and bring to the fore divine qualities of the soul.”

“With a deep sense of gratitude, let me call upon the immortal soul of Emily Dickinson, whose spiritual inspiration impels a seeker to know what God the Infinite precisely is. She says:

“The infinite a sudden guest
Has been assumed to be,
But how can that stupendous come
Which never went away?’”

What drove her consistently was that she needed truth, and at any cost. She needed to see it with her own eyes and feel it with her own heart, not grasp at it in the words of a clergyman but explain it to herself through her own words. It seems she was even ready to die for her cause:

"I died for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.

He questioned softly why I failed?
“For beauty,” I replied.
“And I for truth, -the two are one;
We brethren are,” he said.

And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.”

Emily's truth-seeking was a spiritual quest that governed her inner life, and naturally blossomed through her poetic works. Her own words, in a letter to a friend, succinctly claim Eternity and Immortality as her own. Perhaps they also presage the enduring spiritual appeal of her writing, far beyond the short span of her life:

“So I conclude that space & time are things of the body & have little or nothing to do with our selves. My Country is Truth.”

Sumangali Morhall
York, England

 

Lyrics And Music

by Noivedya Juddery
 

At the end of the last century, BBC Radio conducted a survey to choose the greatest songs of the past 100 years. When the votes were counted, the number one song was “Yesterday”, credited to the great songwriting team of John Lennon and Sir Paul McCartney (though as most fans of the duo would know, that particular song was all McCartney’s work). Music critics often talk about a “perfect” pop song. So what made this one more perfect that anything else?

Surely it was the melody. In a story he used to enjoy repeating, McCartney heard it in a dream, and awoke with some deeply inane lyrics: “Scrambled eggs” was his original title. He changed the lyrics not due to profound inspiration, but because they matched the tune.

The three-minute popular song, the one that echoes in your head, has long been a standard. With the songs that have lasted the decades, the melodies can be sublime, or at least wonderfully catchy. The lyrics, however, are usually less than profound, inserted so that we have something to sing rather than simply hum. In a love song, we can somehow predict that anyone who is waiting (or indeed, waitin’) will also be anticipating (or anticipatin’), simply because it rhymes. Common, two-syllable words will miraculously gain extra syllables, in order to match a tune, when phrases like “doo-be-doo” and “sha-la-la-la-la” simply won’t do. Most of it isn’t really poetry – or at least, the “poetry” is no weightier than the nonsensical limericks of Edward Lear.

But there are exceptions. Just as some great pop songs have been written by great composers, they have also been the work of great lyricists. It seems terribly unfair to discover that, in some cases, a songwriter has been miraculously blessed with both capacities. Yet some of the great pop songs have demonstrated such genius.

Like Keats and Shelley (or Mozart and Chopin), many of the great songwriters peaked while they were young. The melody of “Yesterday” might have single-handedly elevated it to greatness, but McCartney demonstrated a penchant with both music and poetry when he wrote “Hey Jude” four years later. At the time, he was 25. There was nothing complex about this song. Both music and lyrics were disarmingly simple. Advice for a friend, an offer of consolation.

“Hey Jude, don’t make it bad.
Take a sad song, and make it better.”

But how could poetry appear in a pop song? Aren’t such songs constrained by a melodic structure? Moreover, aren’t they simplistic by their very nature? Shouldn’t great poetry be complex, in order to be deep?

Some would say so. Some would say that pop songs “cheat”, using music to add strengthen to their poetry. But at times, it is the very simplicity of pop music, in all its notoriety, that makes a song so powerful.

Paul Simon was 26 when he wrote “Bridge Over Troubled Water”. Another ode to friendship. Another song whose lyrics and melody merge perfectly.

“When you’re weary, feeling small,
When tears are in your eyes, I will dry them all.
I’m on your side, when times get rough.”

Once again, simpler than the simplest – and when combined with Simon’s melody, powerful enough to leave a strong person shaking like a leaf. The lyrics make a beautiful tune even more moving than it would otherwise be. The music takes the lyrics and turns them into poetry. Music lovers have long thumbed their noses at the shameless simplicity of pop music, preferring to analyse their Rachmaninov or their Wagner. In some cases, however, simplicity makes a song profound.

Pop songs were not always so simple. The first popular song, using the imperfect logic that “popular” means sales of over a million copies, was “After the Ball”, written by a songwriter-for-hire named Charles K. Harris. In 1892, it sold five million copies of sheet music. (Recording technology wasn’t quite advanced enough at the time.) Though Harris could neither read nor write music, he worked out the rather sophisticated tune on his banjo. It was a love song, but with considerably more detail (in both words and music) than “Yesterday” or “Hey Jude”, or indeed, most popular love songs you can name from the past seventy years. It told a story: Boy meets girl, boy sees girl kissing another man, boy feels cheated and leaves, girl dies of a broken heart because she loved boy deeply the other man was only her brother. (Yes, the story even had a twist worthy of Saki or O Henry.) Songs at the time were far more complex creations, in which each verse advanced a tale of misery or joy.

Harris survived on the royalties of “After the Ball”, so he never needed to write another song. (In the days of sheet music, he was perhaps a precursor to the “one-hit wonders” of later decades.) Yet “After the Ball” survives. Chances are you can hum it, or at least recognise the melody. The same probably can’t be said of other popular songs from the 1890s. They might have caught the mood of the time, and had beautiful tunes, but did they have the perfect blend of music and lyrics that Harris’s composition can boast?

“Many a heart is aching, if you could read them all. Many the hopes that have vanished, after the ball.”

Of course, it will never be known whether Harris had the capacity to write more than one great song. But the greatest songwriters, masterful as both poets and composers, are still an exclusive group. Irving Berlin was a superb tunesmith, and could certainly think up catchy lyrics to go with his melodies, but he wasn’t exactly a poet (even if “no business” and “show business” make such a contagious rhyme). Bob Dylan wrote scores of powerful lyrics, but less powerful tunes. Some of the most celebrated composers in the songwriting world – George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Elton John – usually had others to write their lyrics.

Yet the idea that popular music is too simplistic for poetry is, well, overly simplistic. It is in simplicity that some of the world’s great poetry has been revealed. Moments of poetic brilliance can be heard almost everywhere — and occasionally, they have even been heard in the Top 40.

Noivedya Juddery
Canberra, Australia

 

My Friend Nick

by Barney McBryde
 

Once, long ago, I could be found every Monday night in the lounge bar of the Albion Tavern on Wellesley Street across from St Matthews-in-the-City. It was ‘Poetry Live’ night. It must be admitted that the poetry interested me a lot less than the beer did. Admittedly, after a couple of pints of Lion Red the poetry did seem to get quite interesting too. (Of course, after accepting the spiritual life seriously, I completely gave up alcohol). My friend Nick was a poet and would read his work there.

Were any of the men and women at the microphone on those nights, sending their verses out across the smoky, alcoholic air, ‘great poets’? Some of them were ‘famous poets’ but who could judge if they were great? Probably only another great poet could tell – certainly I couldn’t; I could only tell that the beer was good.

I had come across a few poets who I thought might be pretty great.

The fact that Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Catholic priest gave him a certain appeal for me, but it was the sheer voluptuousness of his language that hooked me when we studied his verse in my last year at school.

...Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, wherever an elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle in long lashes lace, lance, and pair.
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
Of yestertempest’s creases; in pool and rut peel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fueled, nature’s bonfire burns on.
But quench her bonniest, dearest to her, her clearest-selved spark
Man, how fast his firedint, his mark on mind, is gone!...

Later I stumbled across John Betjeman. Whether the fact that he was the Poet Laureate—charged to write on demand for the Queen—meant he was really a great poet or meant that he was really not a great poet, I couldn’t judge, but to me he was great for he could make one nostalgic for days which one had never lived; wistful for a lost era which one had never experienced. I never had a nanny; I never grew up in that England of public schools and misty cycle rides on the heath, but having read his poem of that name, how could I not fall in love with ‘Myfanwy’—with the wide-eyed, adoring love of a child?

Then what sardines in half-lighted passages!
Locking of fingers in long hide-and-seek.
You will protect me, my silken Myfanwy,
Ring leader, tom-boy, and chum to the weak.

At University I studied Classics. I read and studied the work of many Greek and Roman authors long judged to be great, but the one who struck me most was Virgil—Publius Virgilius Maro. Of the epic writers, it was cool to prefer Homer, but I recall sitting in the kitchen of my flat in Christchurch when my flatmates were—thankfully—out, the tears streaming down my face as I read Book II of Virgil’s Aeneid—his account of the fall of Troy.

The poem had been written 2,000 years before I read it; had been written in a world completely alien to my experience and about events ancient and lost even then; had been written at the command of a dictatorial ruler (Augustus) as a straight piece of propaganda to bolster the legitimacy of his government, and yet... and yet it hit me with a visceral impact. It spoke across ages to the universal human experience. Sir Laurens van der Post once asserted that all humans are psychologically either Greeks or Trojans. I had no doubt which I was as I hunched weeping over the pages of Virgil, reading of the destruction of my home town.

It certainly seemed that a trend was emerging in poets I considered great. It helped to be dead!—and perhaps—judging from Virgil—the longer the better.

The poets at the Albion Tavern on a Monday night seemed to be perhaps a little too alive to be great.

When I spoke at the funeral of my friend Nick I said:

‘...But Nick always seemed to me a quester after truth. He would never confess to have found any or even claim to know quite what it was but, like a figure in a fairy tale, he followed the tracks of that truth. He pursued it, and those glimpses of it through the trees - glimpses that we read about in his poems—those glimpses inspired him to keep pursuing it. He pursued it with a sincerity and a seriousness that may have masqueraded as frivolity but was real...’

Perhaps now, nine years in his grave, he too begins to inch towards greatness.

Once he wrote:

I walk not alone,
But hand in hand
With the child
That I also am,
Who chatters
And wonders;
Whose fears
Shake me,
Whose innocent,
Watching eye
Can fill
Mine with
Tears.

Barney McBryde
Auckland, New Zealand

 

Poetry Of Hafiz

by Palyati Fouse
 

“I'm suggesting poetry or Great Poets as the theme for this upcoming issue of Inspiration-Letters.”

“Hah!” the involuntary sound originated deep in my belly. This month’s topic is out of my league. The exclamation was exasperation. I like poetry but do not go out of my way to pick up a book unless it is one written by Sri Chinmoy or Panorama, a semi-annual book written by my fellow students of Sri Chinmoy. I have, ahem, contributed.

With the wave of a hand, I put the idea of an article out of my mind. Then, I remembered Hafiz.

I came home one day to find a surprise in my mailbox. A friend from the past sent me a copy of I heard God Laughing: Renderings of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky. Who is this Hafiz? I dismissed the gift and sung-sighed, “A poetry book, great.”

Some days, maybe even weeks later, on a deeply troubled night, I randomly picked it up from the pile of unread books on the floor beside my bed. I looked at the face of the man in the illustration. I first saw Hafiz as being bent over, but when I really looked that was not so. Bent over is not befitting Hafiz. Instead, he was serenely sitting next to a stream holding a staff and petting, of all things, a deer. Dressed in a long cloak and a hat embraced by a scarf, this old man with a well kept fuzzy beard had the audacity to be the personification of calm, have love in his eyes and a goofy, knowing grin. Why was this Hafiz smiling at me like that when I was feeling blue? Curiously, why was I feeling his love? “This is an illustration,” I told myself, “Get a grip.”

The very first words of Hafiz I ever read were:

“I wish I could show you,
When you are lonely or in darkness,
The Astonishing Light
Of your own Being!”

Stop, take a breath, absorb. I was stunned.

Except for the poem, “The Absolute”, by Sri Chinmoy, few other poems I had read affected me to my core like these did. It could have been my vulnerable state at the time, but no. When I just typed them, I got the same feeling, deeply personal, deeply loved, as if Hafiz had written them solely for me to make it crystal clear my soul is astonishingly beautiful. Your soul is astonishingly beautiful. Could there be any greater wish as we struggle through the challenges of life today?

These few lines made me take stock and contemplate my soul from the standpoint of the beauty of the universal light and that it is my soul’s light that is the link to God, my true self. It gave me instant peace and joy to momentarily realize who each of us is: a spark of God.

Daniel Ladinsky, the interpreter of this volume of Hafiz’ ghazals says that each one is a short love song about the length of a sonnet. His interpretations of the literal translations of H. Wilberforce Clarke in 1891 are called “renderings”. Because of the difficulties in translating from Hafiz’ native Persian, Ladinsky endeavors to “reflect the sweetness and profundity” keeping the spirit rather than the form of Hafiz’ words. To this I say, “Bravo, well done. Mr. Ladinsky”. For one who can write with so much sincerity that the reader feels the heart of the words again and again hundreds of years after they were put to paper is the sign of greatness.

Hafiz lived c. 1320-1389 and continues to be a beloved poet in the Persian world. He was a wanderer and sung or recited his poetry spontaneously while others wrote it down. His insights appreciate the struggle of our never ending need to grow and transform from human love to divine love. His words convey the deep, universal love of what Hafiz calls the Divine Beloved who supports each and every human being whether we believe it or not. His writing has a light, playful tone which makes his profound poetry fun, clear and easy to read.

The following is the rest of the poem that the above verse belongs to and a few more selections from I Heard God Laughing.

MY BRILLIANT IMAGE

One day the sun admitted,

I am just a shadow.
I wish I could show you
The Infinite Incandescence (Tej)

That has cast my brilliant image!

I wish I could show you,
When you are lonely or in darkness,
The Astonishing Light

Of your own Being!
 

PULLING OUT THE CHAIR

Pulling out the chair
Beneath your mind
And watching you fall upon God—

What else is there
For Hafiz to do
That is any fun in this world!
 

YOU DON'T HAVE TO ACT CRAZY ANYMORE

You don’t have to act crazy anymore—
We all know you were good at that.

Now retire, my dear,
From all that hard work you do

Of bringing pain to your sweet eyes and heart.

Look in a clear mountain mirror—
See the Beautiful Ancient Warrior
And the Divine elements
You always carry inside

That infused this Universe with sacred Life
So long ago

And join you Eternally
With all existence—with God!

Palyati Fouse
Alaska, USA

 

Sri Aurobindo's Poetry

by Abhinabha Tangerman
 

The name of Sri Aurobindo will reverberate in the hearts of truth-seekers and poetry-lovers alike. As a spiritual Master and possessor of the highest states of consciousness he fed the spiritual hunger and quenched the spiritual thirst of countless aspirants who yearned for the fruits of the spirit. His silent, yogic gaze, wreathed in compassion, directed many a wandering soul to the Heart-Home of God. As a poet he conveyed the message and essence of the highest Reality through divinely inspired and soul-stirring words, illumining the searching mind and thrilling the aspiring heart.

Sri Aurobindo was a seer-poet par excellence. A seer-poet is he who not only sees and feels a higher and divine truth, but also is endowed with the capacity to make others see and feel that truth, by virtue of his inspired poetic voice. Sri Aurobindo is one of those rare, mystic poets whose words bring down a higher reality and by dint of their intrinsic mantric quality make that reality tangible and palpable. The words themselves build a world of spiritual perfection and awaken an inner urge in the aspiring reader to attain that heavenly kingdom, which resides deep within his own heart.

The voice of Sri Aurobindo’s poetry is powerful; the body of his poetry is subtle. His poetry is indeed steeped in satyagraha or soul-force, making it a splendid vehicle for spiritual upliftment and fulfilment. Each line rings with a melodious beauty; every stanza resounds with a powerful truth. When reading Sri Aurobindo, one sometimes feels a majestic greatness stir deep within:

“Rose of God, like a blush of rapture on Eternity’s face,
Rose of Love, ruby depth of all being, fire-passion of Grace!” [1]

Sometimes a deep, soulful and peerless beauty, as in these lines:

“Who was it that came to me in a boat made of dream-fire,
With his flame brow and his sun-gold body?” [2]

And always an all-encompassing and all-knowing wisdom, born of inner mystical experience:

“This world behind is made of truer stuff
Than the manufactured tissue of earth’s grace.” [3]

Throughout his life Sri Aurobindo strove for a poetry which was loyal to the inherent and natural laws of metre, rhythm and rhyme, yet was not bound by them in any immutable or rigid way. Sri Aurobindo studied metre extensively and composed many poems that followed new and previously unexplored schemes of metre in the English language. He devised his own set of laws for the proper use and purpose of metre. In his sublime essay “On Quantitative Metre” he exposes his theories, arguing that metre and poetic rhythm are not things to be caught in fixed, hard-and-fast rules of quantity, but should rather be subtle, flexible and willing to bend to the suggestions of the inner ear. He felt strongly that metre should serve the poetic inspiration by heightening and sublimating it, not vice versa by dictating and governing the poetic speech. As he himself so eloquently puts,

“The poet least of all artists needs to create with his eye fixed anxiously on the technique of his art. He has to possess it, no doubt; but in the heat of creation the intellectual sense of it becomes a subordinate action or even a mere undertone in his mind, and in his best moments he is permitted, in a way, to forget it altogether.” [4]

In his highly informative and thought-provoking book “The Future Poetry”, Sri Aurobindo gives his own enlightened ideas not only on the technique of poetry, but also on the very nature, essence and ultimate goal of poetry. The role of the poet then, according to him, is to serve as an instrument or a channel of the divine Ananda, the delight of the soul. The seer-poet is he who most succesfully brings down this delight from its higher regions into the essence and substance of his poetry. In Sri Aurobindo’s own words,

“A divine Ananda […] is that which the soul of the poet feels and which, when he can conquer the human difficulties of his task, he succeeds in pouring also into all those who are prepared to receive it.” [5]

One must read Sri Aurobindo’s poetry and read it again and again to fully grasp its richness, vastness and inner profundity. For the secret wealth of the soul is hidden within its lines. To read his poetry then becomes a spiritual exercise, nay, a spiritual experience, more than anything else.

Abhinabha Tangerman
The Hague, The Netherlands

[1] Excerpt taken from “Rose of God” by Sri Aurobindo
[2] Excerpt taken from “The Dream Boat” by Sri Aurobindo
[3] Excerpt taken from “The Inner Fields” by Sri Aurobindo
[4] Excerpt from “The Future Poetry” (pg. 12) by Sri Aurobindo
[5] Excerpt from “The Future Poetry” (pg. 11) by Sri Aurobindo

 

The Ecstatic Poetry Of The Sufis

by Tejvan Pettinger
 

The best selling poet of America in 2006 was not Whitman, Dickinson, Frost or Emerson but a Sufi mystic; Jaluddin Rumi, who was born in Afghanistan, on the borders of the Persian Empire (Iran). Rumi is one of the best known Sufi poets but digging deep into the realms of Persian literature we find a wealth of Sufi poetry which even today retains a universal and timeless appeal.

Sufism is the mystical branch of Islam. It has its roots in the Qu’ran and the Islamic tradition, but at the same times encompasses the universal mysticism that we see in other spiritual traditions. The essence of Sufism is the simple path of loving God. The Sufi Masters sing of the all-pervading love which inundates their being when they become one with their “beloved”. If there is just one goal of Sufism, it is to overcome the attachment to the binding ego and attain liberation through realising one’s identity with God. And thus the Sufi poets speak of dying to be born again, a concept similar to other mystical traditions.

Often the great Sufi poets lived during times of religious fundamentalism. The authorities censored them, because they openly taught that man could have a direct contact with God. As a result poets such as Hafiz developed an increasing array of metaphors and synonyms to describe God. Frequently we come across references such as Friend, Beloved, Father, Mother, the Wine seller, the Problem giver, and the Problem solver. This ambiguity in describing God served a dual purpose. Firstly it made it difficult for his poetry to be censored for its unorthodox mystical ideas. It also illustrates the inherent difficulty a poet has in describing the nature of God. The infinite is beyond all name and form, how can the poet describe that which is beyond words?

In love, nothing exists between heart and heart.
Speech is born out of longing,
True description from the real taste.
The one who tastes, knows;
the one who explains, lies.
How can you describe the true form of Something
In whose presence you are blotted out?
And in whose being you still exist?
And who lives as a sign for your journey?
—Rabia al Basri (1)

However, despite the difficulties of describing their experiences, the words of the Sufi Seers still tease, cajole and inspire us to look beyond the page and into our own hearts. For those who love words, it is necessary to have poetry, which can take us beyond the domain of the intellect. Hafiz beautifully describes the purpose of a poet.

“A poet is someone who can pour light into a cup, then raise it to nourish your beautiful parched, holy heart.” (2)

Frequently the Sufi poets use worldly imagery to describe their mystical experiences. Hafiz talks of visiting the wine seller to become inebriated with the overflowing cup of wine.

“Look! There is wine in the glass eye of the Winebringer
That intoxicates reason and leaves you with a hangover of happiness!” ( 3)

Here the wine refers to the nectar of divine ecstasy. The wine seller is the Giver of Divine Grace. Madness is merely a reference to the inner ecstasy of communion with God. It is delightful paradox that the Sufis use worldly imagery to describe that, which is beyond the world.

The Sufi masters believed that outer religious forms were useless, unless they inspired the inner devotion. Poetry was their tool to poke fun at the pompous and arrogant. They took great delight in exposing hypocrisy, pride and vanity.

“O hypocrite, you are so perfect, why do you criticize the lover of wine? Don’t worry, the sins of others won’t count against you in the Good deed book of God.” (4)

Their poetry is also a reflection of their unconventional, direct approach to God. The poems of many Sufis follow no obvious course. They have not been planned by a thinking mind; they flit effortlessly from one subject to another. We not do feel we are reading about a personality of say Hafiz or Rumi. We feel we are reading only about an inebriate devotee of God. The opinions of the world leave no effect on the poet who has transcended the norms and conventions of society. The poetry is a living expression of the timeless nature of the mystic. It comes from the source of all inspiration and requires no explanation to expand upon it.

“A mystic knows without knowledge, without intuition or information, without contemplation or description or revelation. Mystics are not themselves.” (5)
—Attar

An overriding theme of Sufi poetry is the expression of the relationship between lover and beloved. It is strongly reminiscent of the devotional bhakti tradition of Hinduism. At times they express the pain and agony of separation, at other times we get a tantalising insight into the unimaginable bliss of divine communion.

“I have found nothing in all the world that could match his love”
—Rabia al Basri. (6)

“All year round the lover is mad,
unkempt, lovesick and in disgrace.
Without love there is nothing but grief.
In love.. what else matters?
—Rumi

The Sufi poets combined a rare combination of lyrical eloquence with a profound mystical revelation. There words are timeless, appealing to the hearts of those aspiring for truth and beauty.

To be or not to be
Is not my dilemma.
To break away from both worlds is not bravery.
To be unaware of the wonders
That exist in me,
That
Is real madness! (8)
—Rumi

Tejvan Pettinger
Oxford, England

(1) Rabia al Basri – “Reality”
(2) Hafiz The Subject Tonight is Love—Daniel Ladinsky
(3) In Wineseller’s Street by Thomas Crowe p.57
(4) In Wineseller’s Street by Thomas Crowe p.38
(5) Attar— The Hand of Poetry— 5 Mystic Poets of Persia— Lectures by Inayat Khan, Translations, Coleman Barks p.59
(6) Rabia al Basri “Brothers, my peace is in my loneliness.”
(7) Rumi – Whispers of the Beloved – Maryam Mafi and Azima Koln p.20
(8) Rumi – Whispers of the Beloved – Maryam Mafi and Azima Koln p.48

 

Walt Whitman's Elegy To A President Slain

by John-Paul Gillespie
 

Walt Whitman's status as poetic innovator and father to American verse is undisputed today, but while alive he enjoyed little public acclaim and only minor distribution—and much notoriety. But Whitman was critically acclaimed right from debut; Ralph Waldo Emerson, so-called "father of American literature" wrote to the poet personally upon receipt of “Leaves of Grass”, proclaiming "I greet you at the beginning of a great career," and later described Whitman's poetry as "a remarkable mixture of the Bhagvat Ghita and the New York Herald."

Lauded and republished around the world—especially so in England—Whitman never saw a broad appeal or readership at home—the main subject of and intended audience for the majority of his poetry—albeit in a single poem which, ironically, the poet himself thought very little of: "O Captain! My Captain!"

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring.
      But O heart! heart! heart!
      O the bleeding drops of red!
      Where on the deck my Captain lies,
          Fallen cold and dead.

With layout set deliberately to resemble a ship approaching a destination, “O Captain! My Captain!” is a masterful but rare example of rhymed, rhythmically regular verse by a poet renowned for innovative form and structure. There is no doubt the use of rhyme was intentional; written as immediate response to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865, it served to create a fittingly sombre, exalted effect; a bitter-sweet elegy of commiseration and commemoration.

The poem was published to immediate acclaim in the New York City Saturday Press, and was widely anthologised during Whitman's lifetime. He would be asked to recite the poem in public lectures and readings so often that he is quoted as saying "I'm almost sorry I ever wrote [it]," although it had "certain emotional immediate reasons for being."

Envisioning Lincoln as archangel captain, the poet is said to have dreamed the night before the assassination of a ship entering harbour under full sail, an image dominant throughout, and the poem was deliberately typeset to appear on page like a ship approaching its destination.

It could be argued that in Lincoln Whitman saw the living embodiment of his poetic ideals: uniter of the nation, kindred opponent of slavery, harbinger of a future golden—a future of universal freedom and brotherhood which the poet envisioned as American destiny; tangible reality as well:

I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,
Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,
Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,
Stuff'd with the stuff that is coarse and stuff'd with the stuff that is fine, One of the Nation of many nations, the smallest the same and the
largest the same
(Song of Myself)

Poet Sri Chinmoy succinctly describes Walt Whitman's poetic and national vision as interchangeable: "When the wind and storm of today bring in the golden Tomorrow, Whitman will shine forth, haloed in a new glory on the new horizon. His poems and his nation's consciousness are inseparable."

Lincoln's death was a violent blow to Whitman's American vision and confident proclamation. Already traumatised by the division of the just ended Civil War, “O Captain!” was written at a time of great despondency and personal soul-searching.

The poem saw its first official publication as an addition to Whitman's Drum-Taps Civil War poems. He wrote, a little later, another poem for Lincoln, his famous “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom'd”.

Ever the perfectionist, Whitman revised “O Captain!” in 1866 and then again in 1871, a trademark practise of continual revision and never-ending improvement. His life work, Leaves of Grass, was revised continually from first publication in 1855 until 1892—the year of his death; the name for the final, definitive version, which included “O Captain!” is thus 'the Deathbed edition.'

John-Paul Gillespie
Auckland, New Zealand

 

RX: Write a Poem, Read a Poem, Find Vision’s Shore

by Sharani Robins
 

“Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.”
-Carl Sandburg

Words for this article finally began to flow when I was spontaneously moved to tears upon reading two-time Pulitzer prize winning American poet Carl Sandburg’s comment, “Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.” It only seemed fitting that I should begin an article about poetry with tears and pangs in my heart. Having written numerous poems on my love of poetry, it is so dear to me that I sometimes get a little crazy on the subject of it. Somewhat unoriginal in my affections -- the likes of swans, rainbows, nature’s palette and places like Paris pale in comparison to my exuberance for writing and reading poetry. I came across Sandburg’s words when I was browsing through quotes of famous thinkers and poets on the subject of poetry. I was spontaneously moved to tears because his definition of poetry embodied my feelings so perfectly.

His talk of echoes and shadows hints at hidden and unknown realms that are brought to the fore through concepts gathered together into a family of words called a poem. The echo could be an echo/shadow of emotions and memories that one is trying to resolve or an echo/shadow of beauty and sublimity that the poem is trying to make manifest. Because poetry reaches for realms beyond the mundane, calling it a dance with the shadow emphasizes the hidden and even unknowable worlds found in ordinary viewpoints. Pulitzer prize and National Book Award winner Wallace Stevens shares Sandburg’s sentiment when he states,

"The poet is the priest of the invisible."
-Wallace Stevens

Despite the artistic building blocks of echo, shadow and the invisible, I’m left by the side of the road when it comes to highbrow poems that are not accessible without great explication and analysis. A friend of mine, herself a Radcliffe alumna, told me that one time she asked a Harvard professor what type of poetry Harvard likes to publish. The professor answered her by saying in essence - poetry that doesn’t rhyme and that cannot be easily understood.

My love of poetry veers away from the strains depicted by this professor and embraces rhyme and simplicity. For underneath the veneer of simplicity one can often find profundity and wisdom as well. This almost child-like style is the type of poetry that I love to read and write the most. Inside its practice, I find two powerful aids to the quality of my life – poetry as therapy and poetry as vision’s promise. The prolific poet Sri Chinmoy’s following words evoke this continuum,

“A poem starts in streaming tears and ends in soaring smiles.”
-Sr Chinmoy

In the composition of poetry, I find a palliative remedy to process life issues with which I am grappling – the “streaming tears.” It also serves as well as a tool to open up a broader visionary horizon filled with the promise of greater possibilities – the “soaring smiles.”

Poetry as Therapy
Some of the poems I have written are cathartic exercises giving voice to inner battles. Their therapeutic value rests in the permission to carve out space for acceptance as the first step of the journey towards wholeness. By voicing the struggle, I legitimate all parts of my being.

Is my neediness
the trembling foghorn
revealing the shore
underneath the mists
of public me?
Hiding a giant
in a jelly jar
preserves
a sweet and sour
harvest.

Jealousy ruins like
the streets of Pompeii
or a buried Atlantis
drowning
all glimmer
of transformation
day.

While my cathartic poems find me face-to-face with demons from my past, writing poetry also holds out a glimmer of light in the darkness. My following poems hint that in my spiritual seeking, the act of reaching out to God leads out of the wildnerness.

A crown of criticism
my seeming sovereign Lord
Bottle fed
from childhood up
knowing only
prickers and thorns
If I never manage
to succeed
in this
transformation play
May I love God
more and more
around the corners
of the boulders
in the way.

Were you hiding
in a barrel?
all your problems
cured in brine.
Give yourself
lock, stock
and barrel.
God’s Love
will finally
you entwine.

Even when problems loom large, writing poems taps into an altered consciousness that becomes my lantern in the night. A little research discovered that I am not alone in my perception of the therapeutic role poetry can play in our lives. Originally called bibliotherapy, the use of poetry for emotional healing has gained increased acceptance within the therapeutic community. While most are probably more familiar with art therapy as a tool for growth and learning, I could only nod in recognition when I learned that there is an entire organization called the National Association for Poetry Therapy. Poetry therapists facilitate group discussion of one’s reaction to evocative poems as well as encouraging clients to express themselves in writing their own poetry. The organization’s website tells us that in America they trace their origins back to treatment ideas proposed by Benjamin Franklin in the first hospital in America, founded by him as well. Their website also tells us that Dr. Benjamin Rush, considered the father of American psychiatry, included the writing of poems by his patients as part of their treatment.

Poetry as Vision’s Promise
While my poems that articulate inner struggles facilitate greater self-acceptance, Sri Chinmoy’s words about poetry remind us that poems are also meant to end “in soaring smiles.” In his book Poetry: My Rainbow-Heart-Dreams, he states,

“A poet is he who envisions the ultimate, absolute Truth.”
-Sri Chinmoy

As if tuning into a higher frequency, some of my poems – especially those expressing my love for poetry – reach towards vision’s beckoning call. I wrote a poem in this vein 13 years ago.

When we dance with poetry
truth waltzes into our living room
reality dons its Sunday best
and the dew holds the promise
of a glorious morning.

One of my whimsical poems also addresses the impact poetry can make upon individuals and society.

Poetry is a teacher
in the life learning book.
It changes your perspective
and even how you look
at a hidden
corner nook.
Poetry is a dreamer
who sits upon a perch
and brings a revolution
that can rival any church.

Indeed I find that I can sift through my poems scratched on scraps of paper, printed from the word processor or etched in my memory and feel that some sort of guardian angel is speaking to me and trying to teach me life's greatest intent if I can only listen carefully enough.

For this reason, I always come back to poetry. My inexplicable love of it brings a smile to my lips in moments of tribulation and I can find guidance and answers to my problems in stanzas written more than ten years ago or as recently as today. Some of them offer at least a glimpse and shadow of sparkling vision and promise. My following poems harken to this aspect of Sandburg’s poetry dance.

Who knew that life itself
could spring up on its toes
like a ballet dancer
pirouetting from
illusion darkness
into God’s
ever-beckoning love.

Jump the staircase
to Heaven
three steps
at a time
when you
fly the kite
of devotion
with God-longing twine.

The crayon box opens
for a colour waterfall
Watercolours spill
into puddles of light
No boots no umbrella
a heart thunderstorm.

Writing and reading poetry convincingly offers a prescriptive and hopeful role in our lives. With tongue in cheek, I will write out an RX on the prescription pad which states,

Next time you are feeling blue
instead of crying boo-hoo
just try to write a poem or two.

If you experiment with this approach, I am sure you will find that Sri Chinmoy’s following poem can spell out truth in your own life as well.

“Poetry has proved,
In my case at least,
To be a sunlit and shortcut way
To my destination.”
-Sri Chinmoy

 

The Eighth Day

by Kamalika Györgyjakab
 

He wanted the eighth day to be just like the seventh. And then just like the ninth, tenth, ten millionth. To lean back, put his hands on the back of his head and watch and wonder silently. Without interfering. By then the skylarks and vultures have tried out their wings, the wind knew how speedily or skulking he has to move in order to slightly stir oak tree branches or to sweep away all the golden leaves from the ground.

While having a cup of milk he watched the sun pushing up his orange-red head on the east horizon, and thought of the evening when he would be watching it sinking down on the west. But around noon he had a strange feeling. Still there was something that wasn’t there. Around 4 p.m. he had to admit clearly: something was indeed missing. The job is not yet done. In fact everything was as good as he had wanted, even his own little unplanned surprises came out very well, but somehow the soup needed salt. He needed someone to confirm that things went well so far, that the lush green of the nearby forest was the shade exactly suitable for whispering secrets and that the vine grapes turned the right hues of purple.

He stood up with a sigh and clapped. There came the nicely combed boys, clearing their throats, adjusting lutes and guitars. It was clear that the sunrise and the lush green of the bush had efficiently inspired them. They could flawlessly, tangibly reproduce it. One could feel the air draft created by the wing of a hawk, one could shut his eyes and yet see the perfect bright orange blaze of that morning... Yet he sighed. He made a dismissive hand movement and let them go back to the garden. It wasn’t their fault. He couldn’t explain to himself either what was not to his liking. After all, they perfectly depicted all he had done and seen.

He lay back again and concentrated. First with a question mark (what exactly do I miss?), then with a growing certainty (Yes, I want them not to faithfully describe my deeds. I want them to add that salt in the soup!). So, he created poets.

Soon he found himself in an old armchair on his terrace, amidst dozens of them, and the dozen dozens of their wine flasks, fulfilled and shattered dreams, dry and fresh cut flowers and pens and knives and blades and photographs and magnificent or senseless life stories, agreements and arguments, lost and won battles, lost and won women... He had a great time. They all spoke differently, they seemed to agree, although never really listened to what the other speaker had uttered, then they seemed unable to find a common point. But they all seemed to have something to say to him, even the one who notoriously shunned his eyes and tried to escape his view. Some wanted to ask for little or big favours, some just complained, some just explored his terrace and house. He was actually quite pleased to imagine the dozen dozens of different versions of the same sunrise he had watched the same day, interminably long hours before they gathered at his place.

Nevertheless, by 6.30 p.m. on this late September day (the Eighth day) he knew again, that he was still unsatisfied. The soup tasted salty enough, but it was a heavy feeling he had. So many things taste salty, things like blood, sweat and tears. He had wanted that salt in its pure form. Lightly, without the feeling of guilt or approval, without the blood, sweat and tears that accompany the great things of life. He wanted the essence from beyond all these.

He didn’t mind the guests praising, complaining, swearing, cursing, wanting, yearning, longing, adoring or hating any of the things and beings they wanted. But he had an increasing uneasiness at the bottom of his stomach. ‘It looks like they don’t get the point’, he thought, but didn’t say a word. Somewhere deep beyond his gaping sense of void he liked them. But in an unnoticed moment he managed to retire from the terrace, on tip-toe he moved across the salon, went down the stairways, silently opened the back door and escaped out in the never ending garden that ended however in a never ending forest. And there, already close enough to his natural bush fence he saw the unhurriedly moving fellow in dark grey suit, almost camouflaged by the descending twilight. There came Kosztolányi. Dezső Kosztolányi from Szabadka or Tátraszéplak or Budapest or maybe even Vienna. He leisurely wandered across the September afternoon and the garden-cum-forest. Their eyes met and they both felt a surge of happiness welling up from deep. He now knew what he had been missing earlier that afternoon.

‘Where have you been? You missed most of the discussions.’ He asked Kosztolányi. The poet replied:

“Drinking the cellar dry is not for me,
no dinner tempts me, nor patisserie.
I’d sooner raid that storehouse of belief
eternity has hoarded and defy
the void with never ending signs of life.
You bring on the ripe clusters of the vine,
my patron and protector, hand of fate;
bring me on too, I tremble on your line,
but look my spirit and my spine are straight.
My arm still has the power to command;
another draught, another, ever fill
and ever gild, immeasurable hand;
my head’s unbowed, no autumn shows there still.
The melon yields her ripeness; white as milk
her baby teeth are sparkling in the gum;
exhausted wasps find shelter in the silk-
soft garages of flowers in full bloom;
the grapes are almost splitting with their sweetness;
struck dumb with joy, the mouth is rendered speechless.”

‘I see,’ he said, ‘continue my son, just go on. What else do you want to tell me?’

“The earth has never been so richly tinged
with madness and enchantment, the trees prattle,
the sky drops loops of crazy colour, fringed
with bright vermilion flaming into purple,
the dusk blows kisses to the mist and sinks
with her in one enormous wave of pink.
Tell me, if you can, what place this is,
What lost domain of childhood fantasies?”

For the first time on this eighth day, while facing this fellow, he finally felt sincerely happy. He looked at the poet and wondered whether it was the right thing he had done to Kosztolányi. But in the poet’s eyes there was no reproach. Two years had passed since he became aware of his mortal disease, thirteen years have passed since he lost a friend but managed to make a great novel out of it, seventeen years since he lost his homeland annexed to another country with his relatives still living there, and only days and hours since the continuous little losses of his everyday life. Nevertheless, Kosztolányi was smiling. He had that little mysterious smile that strikes through his portrait pictures.

He smiled too. He was one step ahead and knew what was next and after next, but then something came to his mind. ‘Actually, one more year, why not? Let’s give him enough time to write it down. Otherwise I will be the only one who has heard all this.’ But he didn’t say a word.

For some time they looked at each other. He knew that the poet was temporarily feeling better, out of hospital, able to do this long walk across the fields and meadows and orchards and vineyards and bushes and village pathways... The poet knew it too that this was TEMPORARY.

At this thought a big realisation dawned on him. He almost turned pale when he suddenly understood that Kosztolányi knew something more than he did. Yes, Kosztolányi knew indeed the meaning of TEMPORARILY, even the stem, the root of the word: TEMP.

‘Yes, he knows TIME. And that’s what I don’t. To me it’s the same whether the seventh day or the eight or the ninth or the eighteen thousandth... Now that I got what I wanted... But this poet does know the difference between day seven and twenty seven of this September. And surely does he know the difference between 1917 and 1927. He just doesn’t know 1937 and he won’t know it ever’, he thought and smiled back to Kosztolányi.

‘You may want to ask something, if you have covered such a long journey. You have some question, haven’t you?’

‘No, thanks. Oh, still, yes, actually there’s so much to ask’, said the poet.
“So tall a sky, such wonder beyond reason.
Why are the stars so huge today, of all days?
Each afternoon the kitchen is ablaze
with crockery delightful to the senses.
What is one to do with confidences
of this nature? Whose epiphanies
are these? Who buffs the hills and scours the sky?
What pantheistic store of memories
invites me to relive the centuries?
Orion’s helmet – is it sparkling still?
Why are all things laundered in this thick
celestial vapour? Whose responsible?
Why stare, enchanting one? It’s only magic.
Sweet flame of being, may your fire be drawn
however aimlessly, through dusk and dawn,
arrest the clock and calendar, destroy
this rotting intellectual granary,
and raise my flag of youth, in attitudes,
of grace, above the festive altitudes.”
(Szeptemberi áhitat, Pieties for September)

‘Fine, you don’t need to come in, but before you go back, at least quench your thirst here by the spring. And as long as you can, be my guest at 3 a.m. in your Budapest window. I like your “Dawn drunkenness”, he said loudly.

‘Oh you mean that poem?’, replied Kosztolányi, sure I can still quote it, I still feel so. He began reciting his own poem written on an early dawn...

“I also realise there is time for leaving,
but in my racing heart one string held firm and bent
to song, and I began to sing the firmament,
that unlocated Unlocatable,
out of reach and unobtainable
in life or death. My muscles slacken,
already, my friend, intimate
with much more dust and clay than I can reckon,
yet I was a guest at the party of a great anonymous potentate.’

They both smiled and nodded. It was late, the dusk turned on chilly breezes on this eighth day of creation.

Kamalika Györgyjakab
Luxembourg

The quoted translations are from one of the rare geniuses able to transliterate our sophisticated language, George Szirtes and they were originally published in the bilingual anthology of Hungarian poetry entitled: The Lost Rider, published in 1997 by Corvina Books Ltd., Budapest

 

Tears For Dead Children: An Incident From Malaysia

by Jogyata Dallas
 

It wasn't at all like the glossy travel brochures. On the beach in front of the Swiss Garden Hotel near Kuantan, Malaysia, the waves were a dull caramel brown, not blue, muddied by rivers swollen with silt and rain and falling on grey, not golden, sands. This dawn it was still raining and after thirty minutes of running along the hard sand the Swiss Garden had disappeared into the mist far behind me.

Even in this desolation there was a kind of beauty and you revelled in the emptiness and solitude – to be alone in this wilderness of sea, sky, endless shoreline reminds us of a truth about ourselves that is both certain and finally consoling.

At the far end of my outward journey I stopped at a derelict picnic spot on an embankment above the tide – here a dilapidated table, wads of old newspaper, an abandoned wicker basket, a broken plastic chair chained absurdly to a tree. On the table an English language newspaper was smoothed out, the only deliberation in this pathos of scattered things. It was as though smoothed down by a careful hand, quite immaculate in presenting itself to my curious eyes.

And then a jolt to see there, row after row, the faces and photographs of so many dead children, laid out on the memorial pages in epitaph. Some were melancholy as though some premonition of their end had come upon them, others smiling in their best clothes and bright with life, unsuspecting and innocent of what would surely come. Beneath each the sentiments of mourning families, some touching, others platitudes dulled by convention yet all that could be said in the face of such despairing grief. And no explanation as to their sudden demise.

Sitting there in the rain, poring over each child’s face, you wanted to reach out with your arms as though to protect each one from life's harshness – how it touched the heart, the neat rows of dead children, the random arbitrariness of life.

In the face of such a monumental sadness your own petty things fly away and you are left with a sense of wonder to be among the living, the consciousness-spark between the darkness at each end of physical existence. Confronted by the portraits of the departed children you are reminded of the sacredness and brevity of your own life, that brief moment of sunlight, and you understand more clearly that each little thing you can do, or just to call out to God with an absolute sincerity, counts for something and finally measures your life's worth. Yes, each and every such moment is a powerful, redemptive thing and finally all that will remain of you.

The dead help us and remind us of what is real in our living. Beneath your wet skin you feel the slow drumbeat of your heart – your sudden tears, as much for yourself and the somber, hard mystery of human life as for the neat rows of dead children, dissolve into the rain and merge into the grass.

Jogyata Dallas
Auckland, New Zealand

Photograph: Kedar Misani

 

Ben Jonson On Grief And Faith

by Mahiruha Klein
 

There are a few poems that I like a lot. One of my favorite poems is a little masterpiece by Ben Jonson. It is called “On My First Son”.

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy ;
  My sin was too much hope of thee, lov'd boy.
Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
  Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
Oh, could I lose all father now ! For why
  Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have so soon 'scaped world's and flesh's rage,
  And if no other misery, yet age !
Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say, Here doth lie
  Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.
For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such
  As what he loves may never like too much.

Many people consider Ben Jonson to be the greatest poet of his age, after Milton, Donne and Shakespeare. So, I suppose that would make him the fourth greatest poet of his time.

Of course to be considered the fourth greatest poet, during the era in which the very greatest of all English poetry was produced, is in no way a mean feat!

I suppose this poem, a twelve-line masterpiece, is one of the poems on which Jonson’s reputation so securely and justly rests.

I think this poem, while very moving even upon a casual reading, offers more and more insights as we read and reread it.

I like how Jonson tries to restrain himself as much as possible in this poem, but sometimes he cannot. I mean, he read and admired the Roman Stoics, and their ideal that the best way to brave life was to maintain poise and dignity under all circumstances.

When I look at the first two lines, we see Jonson trying to maintain his composure even in the face of terrible loss, in this case of his beloved son:

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy.

“Farewell, thou child of my right hand…”

The line starts out almost as if he were a lawyer drafting some kind of dry official document, or a soldier dismissing his subordinates. But after the comma we get “and joy”.

The second line also begins very formally: “My sin was too much hope of thee”. But then he writes “lov’d boy”. It is almost as if Jonson is fighting within himself, trying to maintain his dignified and stately public persona while grappling with these overwhelming feelings of grief and longing.

The next two lines are also very interesting:

“Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.”

I find it interesting because in this couplet he maintains a very correct, legal tone. It is almost as if he were reading some passage from the Book of Common Prayer.

But we see in the next line:

“O could I lose all father now! For why”

We saw in the first two lines of the poem that Jonson was unable to maintain his cool demeanor for even a single complete line of poetry. But in the next two lines, as I have just said, he kept the feeling completely impersonal. Here, however: “O could I lose all father now!” his composure abandons him.

I’ve always been struck by this phrase in this poem: “O could I lose all father now!” There is such a big difference between the statements “I wish I had never been a father” and “I wish you, my son, had never existed”. In a sense, he is mourning himself, the part of himself he had invested and identified with his son.

If we go back to the first line of the poem, “Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy” it is almost the loss of his son is equivalent to the loss of a bodily limb, his right hand. Michael Vance in his wonderful essay, Heaven’s Due, talks about this idea convincingly and eloquently.

When I lost my mother, some ten years ago, I did not, at first, feel much emotional grief. Rather, I felt a terrible pain in my chest and abdomen that lasted for weeks and weeks. It was only after some therapy and meditation that I realized I wasn’t really allowing myself to feel the pain of her death, the impact of her death, on me. And that is perhaps a normal reaction. I felt terrible physical pain because I wasn’t able to accept the emotional hurt that losing her meant. It was only after I allowed myself time and space to grieve that the physical pain left me.

Perhaps Jonson was referring to a similar phenomenon when he bid goodbye to his “right hand” and cried, in anguish, “O could I lose all father now!”

This line:

O could I lose all father now, for why

Is also interesting to me for its use of enjambment. The words “for why” stand alone, almost like an existential plea for comfort and explanation.

In the next lines :

“Will man lament the state that he should envy?
To have so soon ‘scaped world’s and flesh’s rage,
And if no other misery, yet age.”

We know that part of the Christian liturgy during Jonson’s time involved references to the three main enemies of man: the World, the Flesh, and the Devil (please see Jonquil Bevan’s article Ben Jonson’s ‘On My First Son’ and the Common Prayer Catechism from Notes and Queries (March 1997 v44 n1 p90 (3)). But here, Jonson can only mention the World and Flesh. He cannot bring himself to even think of the idea of his son in hell.

“Rest in soft peace, and asked, say here doth lie
Ben Jonson, his best piece of poetry.”

These two lines yield a lot of interesting ideas when carefully examined. I mean, ‘piece’ and ‘peace’ rhyme. If I think of ‘peace of poetry’ instead of ‘piece’ I immediately think of a lullaby- a peace poem.

It is also significant that Jonson named the child after himself. So when he says “here doth lie/Ben Jonson...” we do not know if he is referring to his son or to himself. Somehow, when I read these lines, and their intentional ambiguity, I can almost think of the poet getting into the grave with his son, his arms wrapped around him. Of course, that may very well be a purely subjective response on my part.

What surprises me about these lines also is that they are deeply moving, but they are not sentimental. In the first two lines of the poem, we saw Jonson struggling to find the right tone, between clinical stoicism and unabashed emoting. Here, at last, he has found it. We see how Jonson’s classical restraint allows him to call his son “his best piece of poetry” and it is heartfelt, perhaps even devastating, and yet totally believable and convincing.

In the last two lines of the poem:

“For whose sake, henceforth, all his vows be such
As what he loves, he never like too much.”

The conclusion fits in perfectly with the opening lines of the poem: “Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy/My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy.”

Perhaps Jonson is suggesting that everything in human life is ephemeral and fleeting. We cannot really attach ourselves to anyone or to anything, because everyone is mortal.

But he is not saying that he will not love anymore; he is just saying that he will try not to “like” what he loves too much. There is a difference between liking someone and loving someone, I suppose. But I would be hard-pressed to pin down what exactly that difference is. I mean, to like someone immensely is to love him, as well.

I wonder if Jonson is dealing with the difference between disinterested, abstract love, and ordinary, human love. I like what Sri Chinmoy says about the difference between pure divine love and love on the ordinary plane:

“First of all, let us try to know what love is. If love means to possess someone or something, then that is not real love, not pure love. If loves means to give oneself, to become one with everything and everyone, then that is real love. Real love is total oneness with the object loved and with the Possessor of love. And who is the Possessor of love? God. Without love, we cannot become one with God. Love is the inner bond, the inner connection, the inner link between man and God, between the finite and the infinite.”
—Sri Chinmoy

Rainbow-Flowers

It is also possible that Jonson might be using “like” in a different sense- not in the sense of to be fond of something, but rather as a variant on the word, “liken” to make one think “like” something else.

Jonson was a classical scholar and probably knew that in the ancient Jewish tradition, people did not name their children after themselves because it was bad luck. The Angel of Death might get confused and take the child rather than the parent, as both have the same name. I’m stating this speculatively, as I don’t know how well acquainted Jonson actually was with Jewish traditions and rites (there were no Jews in England at that time except for a very tiny Sephardic community in London). But it is an interesting possibility and Jonson at least knew enough Hebrew to make a pun on his son’s name, Benjamin, which is literally “son of my right hand”.

When I read this poem out loud, I am surprised at how affecting and moving it is to actually hear it. It seems written for the stage, for public performance, but the feelings it contains are utterly personal and intimate. That is to be expected, because Ben Jonson was the most famous and celebrated poet of his day (and was made what we would call the English poet laureate in 1616), and yet he also wrote many pieces of a very personal and heartfelt nature. In this poem we see a perfect combination of the two sides of his unusual personality.

Jonson was a remarkable individual, to say the least. He was a priest, a soldier, a courtier, a linguist and a playwright. His poem “To The Memory of My Beloved Master William Shakespeare” is probably the most beautiful and gracious tribute ever penned by one master poet to another.

If his reputation these days takes a back seat to that of Shakespeare, Milton and Donne, then I can say with true confidence that Jonson did pen poems, like “On My First Sonne” to which all three of these great men would certainly have bowed in utmost reverence and admiration.

Mahiruha Klein
Philadelphia, USA

Dear Reader,

A few years ago, I went to the Egyptian Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I went to see one particular artifact - that of a fragment of the head of an Egyptian Queen. Only the mouth and the chin remain of the bust, but the grace and fluidity of the image is practically unmatchable. The stone, yellow jasper, is exceedingly difficult to work with, and I cannot account for the incredible mirror-like finish of the piece.

It’s a famous image; I knew it from books long before I ever saw it. But there was something haunting about being in the very presence of this 4,000 year old sculpture, created by a genius whose name I will never know.

The modern artists, especially Picasso, have pointed to the arts of the ancient world, and also of Oceania and Africa, as an important source of inspiration. That’s not surprising as great art has always celebrated and strengthened our human oneness.

To be a human being means to have a constant thirst for self-transcendence. Through art we seek truth, contact with the divine or simply a broader understanding of life. My meditation teacher, Sri Chinmoy, has created thousands of paintings and sketches which appeal to me through their sheer simplicity and harmony. Like the artists of the ancient world, Sri Chinmoy allows himself to be a channel for a higher force to express itself. He creates, also, for the sheer joy of creation. What a breath of fresh air in our mercenary global art scene!

We are all artists. I think the simplest form of art is to laugh. It’s amazing that, confronted with the hard facts of human existence, if ever we can laugh at them. Humor, like art, transcends time and culture. Great art makes us humble, but it very often also makes us laugh at the amazing mess we “higher” animals make with our meddling in nature’s plans.

I hope the pieces here inspire you as they have inspired me - to see the whole world inside your heart, and all human history encoded within Keats’ magical lines:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty - that is all         Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. (From “Ode On a Grecian Urn”)

Mahiruha Klein Editor

Table of contents

Myth And Moment by Jogyata Dallas

  

My Grandfather’s Mysterious Visitors by Kamalika Györgyjakab

Written To A Muse by Abhinabha Tangerman

  

Paris, Je t'aime! by Sharani Robins

Reflections on Picasso and Masaccio by Ed Silverton

  

The 'Way' Of Photography by Pavitrata Taylor

The Universal Language by Barney McBryde

  

Memories Of Collecting by Mahiruha Klein

Myth And Moment

by Jogyata Dallas

Photography! Now there’s an exotic theme and intriguing challenge for the bluestockings and literati of Inspiration-Letters. Next month we’ll be asked to ‘write a passionate rebuttal of Stephen Hawking’s gravitational entropy theories on the Big Bang origins of the universe’ or something equally unpredictable – all to keep us on our toes.

Come to think of it, though, I actually have owned a couple of cameras over the years. The first I left under the goalposts on a rugby field while a group of us rushed up and down the field shouting at each other ( yes, playing frisbee) - when I returned for my camera it had gone, disappeared out of my life with it’s happy, morally bankrupt new owner. The second was given to me very generously in New York by a friend and I spent the long flight home swotting up on the instruction manual - when I got back, thoroughly expert in all aspects of it’s functioning, I found it didn’t actually work. But all this at least qualifies me to say a little on the subject, doesn’t it?

We take our camera and peer through a small rectangle at the fluid passing of life unfolding all around us - a white swan moving silently as a paper boat on a dark lake; a group of huddled friends posing on a cold mountain; the sun falling slowly into the beauty of evening clouds. Images and memories, immortalized moments salvaged from the long sweep of time.

I like the sepia brown, out of focus, grainy photos of the box-Brownie era more than the realism of today’s photos with their painstaking fidelity to detail and cold clarity and precisions of colour. The former are more useful and thought provoking and convey a sense of time passing and the mythology of our lives. Here’s one of the infant Jogyata circa 1957, my runner-up entry in our Auckland Sri Chinmoy Centre’s fiercely contested ‘Most Beautiful Baby Competition’ - cute as pie with my button nose and dimples all over and brown cardy. Grown people have been known to sigh. From different stations in time we stare at each other, me and I, one looking forward into the unknowable future, one looking back at what that future held and became. You wonder, how far have I come, what have I learnt, what other things lie waiting? What a long journey from there to here where I find myself now. Every single atom of my body is different. Holding the photo in both hands and staring at it, trying to work out in what sense this was ever me. Like a surveyor’s peg struck into a landscape to measure topography and altitude and space, a photo of ourselves from long ago is a defining marker in our personal history. These odds and ends of photos that turn up from our past are signposts in some inner landscape against which other insights can be measured and understood. But what, but what?

I don’t much regret that most of my personal photos—there never were very many - have been lost over the years and where, looking back, my life seemed to have veered too far off course, I was often the architect of their demise. The English novelist Lawrence Durrell wrote that we live lives based upon ‘selected fictions’ - where one of the fictions of my personal history became too unpalatable in retrospect, all photographic evidence was consigned to the purgatorial bonfire.

Among the surviving odds and ends, each little freeze-frame moment plucked out of time seems now quite fascinating. To see oneself, or others dear to you, as we actually were, perfectly preserved on film as though cryogenically frozen in 2D, and now a clue to certain existential questions. Tiptoeing among the surviving detritus, tiny windows into the mystery of our personal evolution, I feel like an anthropologist stumbling across the preserved footprints of a dinosaur on a dried up lake bed, marveling at a long ago reality. Flipping through a dog-eared, last surviving family album - already ransacked and depleted by gleeful, shrieking relatives - I ponder over these glimpses of the past, as though by looking deeply enough, or long enough, some understanding that feels so close might emerge off the pages. By arresting time we can also reclaim it, relive it, flesh out each image from the past with all the memories of the mind. Take this image, this memory - my father gazes back at me from a far off time, dressed in his brown corduroys and faded tartan shirt, sitting in his favourite armchair and tamping tobacco into his pipe. My mother, solicitous and kind, brings his slippers, stokes the fire, announces dinner. She allows me to have my pudding first if I promise to later eat all my greens. I promise, and tuck into plum cake and icecream. My sister, sensing parental partiality, kicks me under the table and gloats at my loud ouch. I remember, I remember.

Am I still somehow the same, was everything meant to unfold like this? You flip through the album looking for clues like a Beagle searching for rabbits, searching the bric-a-brac of the past for insight. Had it not been these, would other possible lives have led to the same destination - or to unimaginably different endings? Is our journey forward pluralistic, all the different routes we might have taken inevitably converging at the same end point—or not? I ask because so many of the big things of our life seem founded upon tiny, utterly capricious moments.

Take this photo for example from 1980. As randomly as a feather carried on a breeze, I crossed a city street one day late in that year and wandered into a café in search of a cooling drink - and that was how, in an utterly fortuitous, whimsical moment, I first encountered Sri Chinmoy. That profound and life changing moment seems so capricious. Might the breeze have carried me as easily through another doorway to a different end? I don’t know. But photos give us a clue as to our soul’s intention. And the river, to mix our metaphors a little, always seems to find it’s way to the sea.

Here’s another snap of my father in his last days, lying fully clothed in his bed with a hand-knitted balaclava over his head to keep out the cold - he watches me with lacklustre, faraway eyes and I peer at him through the camera lens, coaxing a tired smile. Days later when the slowing gasps of his breath ended, I sat there with a lifetime of memories and held his hands until the fingers turned cold, hugged his rough face and adjusted the woolen hat as though to warm his cold ears before kind nurses finally shooed me away. Inside the death of anyone you love is all the grief of our race, the timeless sadness that attends the end of life and teaches the beginnings of compassion.

  

Then to walk aimlessly down hospital corridors where others are weeping at their own private tragedies and consoling each other, escaping out into parklands where schoolboys play cricket under a big blue sky. I like looking at this photo though every time its pathos jolts the heart - yet so much of feeling and love and memory and what it means to be a human being is rediscovered here, or lost if it wasn’t for this little treasure from past times.

Photography, like all art, is essentially autobiographical. We film what we see but we also reveal how we see – the signature and imprint of ourselves is unmistakably there in our themes, our choices, our perceptions. The thankfully vanished albums of my long ago were filled with hunting scenes and wild places – this is what I saw, this in part is what I was. This history has fallen into the sea, replaced by kinder things and new selected fictions. The photos we keep of our history reveal much of ourselves and the things that have most shaped us, touched our hearts. Perhaps our lives are the sum total of all our most intense moments. My private gallimaufry of snaps - permanently disarrayed in random tattered envelopes – reveals an equally tangled mind that recognizes only few compass points and constants: my Guru’s smiling face the lodestar, watching me from a gallery of portraits in my room. And my wife Subarata – six years since she left the world and her presence still fills my life, poignant in photos from childhood to last breath. How well I remember her sudden tears and quick emotions, the sad months of her last illness. Sometimes on lonely nights you wander among these albums and photos of your life as though to reconnect with something lost and not replaced, a void that only God can fill.

It’s odd that photos - images and illusions of life - can help us see life more clearly. Pictures and film lack the third dimension of substance and depth and also the sensual, tactile dimensions such as fragrance and touch, and then life itself. Hold a flower up against the photo of the flower and this is clear. No photo of our dear teacher Sri Chinmoy will ever capture what it is like to stand before him in meditation, any more than the breathtaking panorama of a mountain or a clear night sky can be caught on film – our favourite photos are only those that most approximate.

At times when we are lost to the world or out of sorts we can look at our photos and smile again, haul ourselves back up. For disciples, a treasured photo of their teacher brings out the bright colours in their consciousness and acts as a portal into the secret and sacred universe of the soul, a touchstone to reality.

And in nature photography, a good image lifts us out of a world dulled by urban living and humdrum repetition to bring beauty and surprise, to really see once again. Both art and nature lift us out of the banal where we get caught, into new ways of seeing and realms of fresh beauty and delight.

Jogyata Dallas Auckland - New Zealand

My Grandfather’s Mysterious Visitors

by Kamalika Györgyjakab

Who were they and why did they come?

I was about to write a winter story with lots of snow and even more ice when the message came: our Mahiruha would like some essay on art. OK, I will try. But it is so hard to get rid of this winter, not only the topic of my would-be story (postponed till...), but also of the real one outside. March began with an abundant snowfall. That Friday afternoon I stumbled in knee-deep fresh snow on my two miles long way home from the place where the bus-driver dropped me off saying he simply couldn’t drive any further across this all-white hilly landscape. Two weeks later the waking spring still clenches its teeth and freely allows the wildest winds to ravage all over the villages and fields. The thick overcoats and completely windproof, waterproof jackets are still on us as the days grow longer and the nights become shorter.

It was a similar enduring hopelessness that enveloped us about twenty years ago, too. When will it end finally? And how? Will it end at all? These were the questions we silently asked ourselves day after day back in the communist era in Transylvania. But now, at least I know what I didn’t know at that time: every winter ends. It is a law that cannot be overruled or changed. Not even by the harshest, coarsest, rudest dictators. Neither by their armies, security apparatus, whistle-blowers, squeakers and bootlickers... Every winter ends one day, even the intellects’ and souls’ darkest frozen encagement - time...

Many questions of mine have been answered since those black days in Romania. Except the ones I asked on that winter day: who were those three and how did they come? I am afraid I will never get to know this. If my grandfather was still alive, I could ask him. But chances are high that he wouldn’t know it either. My grandfather was a man of lands, of grains and fields and forests and horses, he hadn’t read too many books until he grew too old to make hay.

He knew however more things than I could find in the books available in our mother tongue at that time. He was already an adolescent when the First World War broke out. Seventy years later, after a mug of beer he would still remember some of the songs sung in another age, in another country, yet in the same village. He grew into a man and he grew old in the same town, but around him the borders changed two times, so he changed passport and nationality, but not mother tongue, neither conscience nor religion. He knew every tree in the forest, every road around the town. He knew every river and brook, every forest pathway. He showed me the places where battles were fought, today’s potato fields watered once upon a time with our forefathers’ blood when Tatars invaded and scorched up our villages, when my ancestors refused the Habsburg rule, when they boldly went against the Austrian-invited allies from the Russian tsar’s army... when they lost all they could lose: their horses, cattle, sons and freedom.

My grandfather remembered the times BEFORE, before the big red revolution sequestrated his hardly earned properties, before his forests became the state-owned hunting grounds of the dictator and the bosom-friends of the latter one, before the “Comrades” forbade our language, before artists emigrated because they no longer could speak up, before food and fuel was rationalised to monthly portions distributed after night-long queues in front of the almost empty shops...

And he spoke to me. That was the root of all problems. He told me the truth. Thus he made me dangerous. By telling me, who he and my other forefathers were, he told me also who I was. That made very clear to me, who and what I was NOT. It was good and also perilous to know this at a time our dictator decided to eradicate 3000 Transylvanian villages for they were useless, obsolete and above all, proved a past that should be erased from history books. By God’s Grace this project could never be realised, but for some years the sword of Damocles kept hanging above our heads.

But long before that, when I was really still a child, we had that long and heavy winter. Towards the end of it, it still looked as if it had just started. In those days, cars were not allowed to circulate at all between November and March, for there was no gasoline. For us kids, this annoyance of our parents meant rather an unbothered roaming in neck-deep snow on the roads themselves after each abundant night-long snowfall. In a March or late February morning like this I ventured on the long and really arduous road to school. One kilometre of stumbling and raising my feet high all the time, covering the last section with totally wet boots and socks. Before leaving I asked my granddad to make me a snowman by the time I got back home. Apart from asking him once to buy me a toy – a painted bird that one could wind up like a clock and that would move around then – I don’t remember asking him anything ever.

I didn’t ask, because although we were sharing the same family house with my father’s parents, my mother was terribly upset with my paternal grandparents. My ever-open compassion-hearted mother, who would always send much-treasured food and delicacies to my poorer schoolmates or to needy neighbours, was very unforgiving whenever it came to her father-in-law. The reason of her staunch, inveterate and unceasing reproachful attitude was that my grandfather had had a hidden amount of money, and when the time came in 1977 he had given it away for a good cause forgetting to allocate a single penny to my parents. Ten thousand Romanian “Lei”-s were a significant sum in the nineteen seventies, more than a yearly salary of an average state-employed accountant like my mother. My parents didn’t have a home of their own. My mother’s parents gave everything they had to my mum, this is how my parents could buy a car. My paternal grandparents gave nothing, but at least they allowed my parents to have two rooms in their house. My mum would have loved to move away from there and live her own life and the mentioned money would have helped my young parents considerably. However, fate compelled my mother to sacrifice her dream of independence. The entire amount went away in an unexpected manner and thus my grandfather bought himself a place fifteen years later on the wall of my room in Budapest. He was the only family member of mine who managed to secure himself (or rather for his photo) a fix spot on a wall decorated by pictures of lotuses, snow-capped mountains, cosmic gods and famous rock climbers. Until the day I moved away from Budapest and stashed all my things in boxes he was hanging there on a framed black and white picture, on horse-back, proud, straight-backed, smiling, as a young father of two small children looking into a brighter future. Little had he known then on September 13, 1940 about what was yet to come. With a radiant face he looked as if he had thought, that yet there was a shortcut to the future.

How did he manage to gain my appreciation? In March 1977 a severe earthquake left the country in rubble. The capital, Bucharest was the most affected, but our town wasn’t spared either. The reconstruction lasted for years. Day after day I would be seeing the ruins of an already run-down fortress and the collapsed dome of our community church, the focal point of the lives of my fellows, the ethnic minority Hungarians of Transylvania. This church was built in the times of the Renaissance, at a place of a yet earlier smaller chapel. The first mention of the settlement dated back to 1321 A.D. and since those early days, whenever an enemy approached the place it was behind the walls of this small fortress that the local population, above all women and children could find shelter. Inside the walls the white church was first a Catholic church and when the waves of Protestantism invaded Transylvania, it was converted for ever. Its gothic shape, pure, ascetically plain white walls are my first memories of talking to God and also, of learning the history of man’s quest for a religion closer to God. These memories include also a hidden side-wall relief work representing the head of some big-eyed humanlike-being with Latin inscriptions underneath, some text from the fifteenth century of which at that time I only understood one single word “Daczo”, a still occurring Hungarian surname, probably that of a noble person or some leader of those bygone times.

  

After that dream- and wall-shaking, howling night in March 1977 only heaps of broken stones cried into the wind. Obviously, there was no money to start it all over again. The communist state would definitely not afford to sponsor the reconstruction of a minority, state-alien, irredentist, separatist, what worse, RELIGIOUS community building in the middle of the most feared Hungarian enclave of Romania. Out of question. It was German and Dutch volunteers and village communities that came with their big hearts and donations to enable the local priest and my irredentist, grandfather to buy and mix cement and to lay stone upon stone. Over seventy years old, my regime-fiend grandfather would put up his helmet day after day and go along with other volunteers to build the fortress and church back. In addition to that, he dug out that secret money and donated it in its totality for the reconstruction costs.

More than twenty years later, each time I visit my hometown and light-heartedly spend probably much more money there than those long-inflated ten thousand Leis, I walk home over the hill and I see the fortress, the tower of the church and the graveyard nearby. And I know that the earthly rests of my grandfather have a calm, unharassed sleep there. Regardless of my poor mum’s sacrificed freedom, he did the right thing. The church-tower is still standing erect there and can be seen from far.

So, it was this grandfather of mine to whom I said that winter morning: “Please, build a snowman for me by the afternoon.” I thought, I could ask him this favour, after all he had both time and snow beyond measure. Off I went along the almost tunnel-looking pathway to school and then to a school-theatre rehearsal. I reached home sometimes in the late afternoon, but still in daylight, since it was March already. The moment one enters our yard-gate one has an encompassing view of our entire yard, the two flower-gardens on its two sides, the backyard with hens and our dog as well as the barn at the end of it. So, basically I could see in the first second whether my snowman was there or not.

Well, it wasn’t there. What I saw made me run closer. Instead of a snowman, consisting of a huge snowball upon which there would be another, somewhat smaller snowball topped by a yet smaller snowball decorated with coal eyes and carrot nose, as one can expect from any decent snowman, I found there three statues. Aristotle, Socrates and Plato. Or Demosthenes, Cicero and Seneca. Or they could have been Marcus Aurelius, Julius Caesar and Octavian, or Martin Luther, Jean Calvin and Zwingli Ulrich, or why not, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Rafael? Maybe Transylvania’s great governors from the hoary past, Gabor Bethlen, Istvan Bocskai and Ferenc Rakoczi? Or Goethe, Schiller and Rilke, perhaps George Mallory, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, mayhap even Robert Frost, Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg... whoever. But definitely not some ordinary people. Three men, three busts on completely smoothed surface, perfect flat pedestals, three noble visages, far-penetrating eyes, bold cheekbones dashing against an unknown medium, all three of them looking into the same direction as they were lining up one next to another.

Who were they and how did they come? What message did they bring along for the ephemeral time between a heavy snowfall and the first spring sunbites? They were there mute, nobly raising their heads, not searching my regard, but rather looking somewhere far behind and above my head, and my grandfather next to them, just finishing with the last touches of his smoothing board. He had been working on my snowmen, his statues since I left in the morning. He used no carrot, no coal, no coloured material, only snow, water and smoothing or plastering tools. He wiped his front and with a smile inaugurated and gave over his artwork to me. Then he went into the house for he had cold. I was staring at the three visitors flabbergasted. Me, the ten year old proud owner of three white Carrara marble statues in the backyard standing with my feet growing roots into the snow beneath...

Then I had to go inside too, the dusk came with chillier breezes. I don’t remember much of that evening. One thing I find still strange though. Although my grandfather had never ever even drawn a sketch, neither my father, nor my mother seemed to be surprised at all, they left the wonder unmarked. Just as if it were so normal that we have three busts of three exceptional fellows in our backyard. Just as if my grandfather was a Rodin in disguise. Well, he wasn’t. He was a man of truth, of lands and forests, of arable fields and hard work, a man of horses and bicycles and also of a good beer sometimes. A man of stonesolid faith. A servant of the church, an expert of grains and herbs and cows... But he was definitely not an artist.

Just two days after that deep snow session my wonderful statues were reduced to small forsaken stubs soaking in icy water. I am the only one to know that on a late winter afternoon Aristotle, Socrates and Plato paid a voluntary visit to my grandfather, or were summoned by him there for my sake. Of course, they could have been Marcus Aurelius, Julius Caesar and Octavian, or Martin Luther, Jean Calvin and Zwingli Ulrich, or why not, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Rafael as well. I don’t remember their faces well enough to compare them now to illustrations representing famous people of the past. But I do remember the smoothness and white nobleness of their faces. They definitely were there, maybe all simply to tell through their short-term snowstatue-carrier that every winter ends one day. That this is a decree which cannot be overruled by dictators and superpowers.

Oh yes, maybe that’s what they had to convey. Or, otherwise, who were they, and why did they come? Who will they visit next?

Kamalika Györgyjakab Hungary

Written to A Muse

by Abhinabha Tangerman

"Euterpe glanced her fingers o'er her lute, And lightly waked it to a cheerful strain, Then laid it by, and took the mellow flute, Whose softly flowing warble filled the plain: It was a lay that roused the drooping soul, And bade the tear of sorrow cease to flow" (from "An Ode to Music" by James G. Percival)

She is capricious, fickle, hard to please. She lets you wait for her in desparation for many long hours - and decides not to come. Then the next day she suddenly comes, unexpected, unannounced. Queen of arbitrary appearances, mistress of magical moments, empress of eloquence, embodied by the unseen, subtle thought-wave tickling the brain, instilling in the subtle sense a heightened awareness of the divine reality. She is inspiration. She is the Muse.

If we look her up in a dictionary or an encyclopaedia we come to learn that there were originally nine muses, representing the nine goddesses of arts and science. None other than Zeus was their father. He graced them with melodious names, fitting to their high positions: Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia and Urania. A temple erected in their honour was called a 'Mouseion', a name we now give to the venue where the fruits of their inspiration can be found: the museum.

It was not wise to contend with these high-learned gals, as the daughters of king Pierus found out when they entered into a singing competition with the muses and were badly defeated. The muses were not satisfied with victory alone, for legend has it they changed the nine princesses into magpies. The Sirens - mythological creatures with the body of a bird and the head of a woman - whose enchanting and spellbinding songs issued from their rock in the sea sent many a sailor to an early sea-grave, also tried their luck and pitted their musical skill against that of the muses. The Sirens suffered not only defeat, but also the loss of their feathers, as the muses plucked them out to make crowns out of.

The lesson learned is that one should not compete with muses. But instead of competing with them, one can invoke their presence and let their inspiration's flow create works of wonder and beauty, whether in painting, poetry, literature, music or drama. Homer's famous opening lines of the Odyssey still serve as a strong testimony to the idea that the muse of inspiration should be invoked first and foremost in the artist's creative life: "Sing to me, o Muse, of the wise man who traveled far..."

It sometimes makes one wonder why certain periods of history are blessed by an exorbitant amount of creative inspiration and flourish with an abundance of refined and soul-stirring art, whereas other periods seem almost deprived of true artistic beauty and lack a higher inspiration and vision. Could this be explained by the suggestion that the artists of these more prosperous times had more faith in the guidance of the muse and consciously or unconsciously invoked her presence? Or by the assumption that the muse herself was more active in these periods, scattering her seeds of inspiration freely about, and more withdrawn in others, retired behind the walls of her castle on the Olympus, unseen and unheard by mortal eyes and ears? Do we invent the gods or do the gods invent us? An eternal question to which no clear-cut answer has been provided. Perhaps it is a little of both.

But enough 'musing' on her rich tradition and past, for the past - as they say - is dust. What you and I want to know is how we can successfully invoke the muse here and now; how we can tempt or persuade her to descend from her pink cloud and mingle with our crying efforts, so that we can create something beautiful, something worthwhile, lasting and satisfying. For too often have we endured her cold silence and the empty hours of her absence. Too often were we to rely on our own limited faculties, forced to be satisfied with mediocrity. Yet when she finally shows herself, she leaves too early, before her work is properly done and we are left with two sublime lines of poetry or a few inspired brush strokes while the rest of the painting and poem are doomed to the well-meaning sweat of our human brow, missing their promising claims to immortality.

  

So how can we capture the muse permanently and bind her to us irrevocably? When looking at and observing the lives of the great Masters of art, there seems to be only one answer: one needs to practise diligently, ceaselessly and untiringly. Practise makes perfect, as the old adage goes. It seems a terrible cliché, but then again, what is a cliché? A cliché is nothing other than a core truth too often heard and too little practised. Hence it loses its hidden truth-power, becomes tedious and from tediousness quickly grows into a despised cliché. But its essence is truth, changeless and eternal. Practice makes perfect. There you have it.

Van Gogh practised, Vermeer practised, Rembrandt practised. Shakespeare practised, Milton practised, Whitman practised. They all worked hard and gained the muse's blessings. No magical formulas then, no secret mantras or ancient rites to win the muse's favour? No other way to her Olympian castle but through toil and labour? Perhaps not.

Yet there are hopeful words of wisdom for those who long to be in her close company. For there might be another way open to us, a hidden path, a shortcut to the muse's dwelling. This shortcut is revealed by someone who seems an intimate friend of the muse, having written thousands of books and poems, created over a hundred thousand paintings and composed many thousands of songs. Someone whose artistic fruits are aglow with a special, uplifting and otherworldly light and beauty: spiritual teacher Sri Chinmoy. Sri Chinmoy has encouraging words for the budding artist:

"Right now you are at the mercy of inspiration. If you don't have any inspiration you cannot write anything. ... But if we have become very highly developed seekers, then we acquire the capacity to compel the bird of inspiration to stay with us for as long as we want. Anyone can develop that capacity, provided he prays to God, meditates on God and devotes himself to the inner life." (from: "Sri Chinmoy Speaks, part 9")

In the end the answer is a calling to our deepest soul: to connect ourselves with the very Source of creation deep within us and establish a vibrant link to its fountainheads of ever-flowing inspiration. A lofty task indeed. Let us try!

Abhinabha Tangerman The Hague - The Netherlands

Image: Detail from "The Allegory of Painting", The Muse Clio - by Johannes Vermeer

Paris, Je t'aime!

by Sharani Robins

Such a francophile in my younger days, at long last I visit France. I went to Paris for several days with the Sri Chinmoy Centre and it fulfilled my dreams and expectations beyond my imagination! I felt and appreciated that "Je ne sais quoi!" in every aspect of the culture. I have never seen such density of beauty in every detail, every building, every direction you look. Hemingway was right when he said in his book "A Moveable Feast" that once you experience Paris it will stay inside you for the rest of your life.

Contrary to the stereotype, we also found people to be most helpful and not put off by our being Americans speaking English. After we came down the hill from Sacre Coeur on a vertical tram, we needed to find a subway station to get back to our hotel near the Montparnasse train station. We asked a lady "metro?" and it was pretty funny. She looked at us rather baffled as we said metro about a half dozen times. Suddenly a light bulb went off in her eyes and she said, "Ah, metro!" You see we were pronouncing it with emphasis on the first syllable especially the first two letters like the word let, pet or set. She pronounced it with a flourish of a rolled r and an emphasis and elongation of the second syllable that made me think of the word Bordeaux with a nicely rolled r.

As soon as she realized what we needed, she very kindly explained where the nearest station was (I forget but it was probably a combination of simple English and French for her answer to us). I understand some French so it all started to blur together for me. I knew I was like a duck to water when my American companion answered a question of mine with the word no and in my head I saw the word spelled as no with the n on the end of it (French spelling non). All superlatives have long since been exhausted over the years in regards to Paris so rather than repeat them yet again I settled on the metaphor of Paris being a ballet dancer. I was a ballet fiend as a kid and lived, ate and breathed ballet dancing. As I got older, the ballet school I studied at took it all pretty seriously and I had to make a decision to either dive in further or according to their preference just quit. Excelling in school meant a lot to me too at that time so I ended up quitting my study of ballet. Plie, releve, grand jete et change! Au revoir!

Paris is like a ballet dancer because every little movement in ballet has to embody grace and beauty. The act of simply walking across the floor or raising your arms has to be accomplished with intense grace, style and beauty. In fact, people used to kid me because I couldn't walk with a normal gait outside of class - they said I always seemed to prance with a little spring to the feet when just walking. This my friends is a telltale sign of a ballet dancer.

So in every little detail Paris contains that same kind of grace and beauty. Whether the food, the art, the architecture, the clothing/fashion, all is permeated with an underlying and delicate beauty. Like a ballet dancer crossing the floor even as an art form, so too Paris manages this in its mere existence. I find it more than easy to see why so many writers, artists and intellectuals from America became expatriates in Paris in years gone by. Oh to be a fly on the wall at Shakespeare & Co. and to rub elbows with Gertrude Stein and others.

  

Finally, can you imagine me saying all this and I didn't even go to the Louvre or the Orsay Impressionist museum? We only made it to one museum - the Rodin museum but that alone was overpowering in its impact. I think I could go back to that museum countless times and still receive something from Rodin's sculptures. It wasn't really spring yet in Paris but it was in the Rodin museum gardens that I found one lone flowering tree to frame Les Invalides (where Napoleon's tomb is) in the background of the picture. Heaven, I was in camera heaven!

The world around me seemed so drab after I got back that Mother Nature had to present a spectacle of light and clouds and rain while coming home from work. As if a line was drawn in the sand (sky), the area that I was driving out of was dark, dark purple/black and stormy with steady rain. Ahead of me on the other side of the line in the sky it was mostly clear and the sun was emerging from a few clouds as it set. As it descended towards the horizon , dazzling columns of light radiated up to the sky right through the clouds.

Because it was raining where I was at and the sun was up ahead, I put on my rainbow chasing cap and did eventually see and photograph a partial rainbow once I got to Providence. Rainbows have brought me back to the charm of coastal and somewhat rural New England. Bloom where you're planted they always say. But guaranteed to bloom for sure if you're ever planted in Paris. My photos of the trip can be viewed at my "American in Paris" album.

Sharani Robins Rhode Island - USA

Reflections on Picasso and Masaccio

by Ed Silverton

A few years ago I had the good fortune to visit Barcelona for a week and feast my eyes and heart on that city's rich visual heritage. During this time I visited the Picasso museum, which chronicles his life by displaying drawings, paintings and sculptures selected from his prolific output. It does appear true that in his youth he could draw as well as many a master before him. `Conventional' in execution, his early drawings are testament to his huge talent and skill, which he used in various ways throughout his career.

As Picasso went through life, he seemed to be searching for a way to draw like a child again and produce works that had the simplicity and spontaneous magic of a child's creation. However, there is a period in his life around 1922-23 when he produced the works that I love the most. I have a card entitled `Mother and Child', a reproduction of a Picasso whose original is currently in the Baltimore Museum of Art that is so beautiful it almost makes me weep to see it. It shows two figures so utterly at ease with each other, in a soft and tender exchange that it conveys perfection in contentment and mutual self-absorption.

Softness and tenderness are two qualities that actually rarely appeal to me in the art world, which is funny as these heart qualities often come to the fore when I'm trying to do something myself. Maybe it's because so much of what is in the art- world does not appeal to me that I welcome the `justice-light' aspect of powerful art. I imagine it cutting through the dross of mediocrity and soppy sentimentality that is often seen in works alluding to something higher or deeper but lacking any solid foundation. How can I say this? Well I can only go on my inner feeling when I look at art and if a piece moves me then I am grateful and encouraged, and if it doesn't move me, then I move on.

  

I would like to recommend Masaccio (1401-1428) to anyone that has not heard of him. He is regarded as the first great painter of the Italian Renaissance and greatly influenced those who came after him. I love his work not because of his ground-breaking use of perspective, but for the power and emotion that underpin them. Two of his pictures that move me most profoundly are frescoes painted for the Brancacci Chapel, Italy. They are: `Saint Peter Baptizing' and `The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise'. These contain a volcanic energy that simmers and boils, barely contained within the painted surface of the works. It came as no surprise to me that he was a deeply spiritual person and his religious works reflect this. In contrast, many of those who came after him produced work that was technically more advanced and refined but lacking spiritual depth. Michelangelo had power, Raphael had refinement, Leonardo had vision, but Masaccio had Purity and for me, Purity wins

Ed Silverton Bristol - England

Image: "Mother and Child" by Pablo Picasso, 1922, (Baltimore Museum of Art)

The 'Way' Of Photography

by Pavitrata Taylor

The editor asked Mr. Pavitrata Taylor, a seasoned, expert photographer, to share his views about the philosophical aspects of photography. The questions and Pavitrata's answers follow.

Is there a ‘Way’ of photography? Photography is amorphous; it is all things to all people. For me, photography is a celebration of life. Some would say, ‘That guy has too much time on his hands.’ However, you can only start with yourself, and reveal your own hopes and aspirations through your art. If there is such a thing as a ‘Way’ in photography, I would say it is defined in the phrase: ‘To be a pilgrim through the visual world’. That is how my good friend Uranta puts it. I like that, I like it a lot. It implies an integrity of outlook, a dignity and depth of purpose that I believe should always be invested in one’s creative perceptions. I also like it because it goes beyond photography; you don’t have to know anything about cameras to be that pilgrim. However, photography can certainly help in focusing one’s awareness, to develop an inner eye through which the beauty of the seen world is transposed and revealed.

Photography is at once practical and mysterious. See something that interests you. Click. Take the picture. It can be as simple and perfectly workable as that. However, if you aspire to remain in a visually perceptive consciousness, things happen on another level; you start to understand Henri Cartier-Bresson’s evocative quote: ‘Every circumstance has its defining moment; the good photographer will be aware of it before it happens.’ It sounds strange - pretentious even - but good photographs do seem to quietly present themselves. In certain situations one can just feel there is a fine photograph nearby. Sometimes the backdrop is there, but an element is missing - you don’t know what it is yet, but often if you simply wait, something will happen that will complete your untaken photo. Eyes need a distance, but they also need a place to rest, a touchstone that draws the photo together or complements the whole; perhaps someone moving through an otherwise still place, or a small and bright object in a vast space, or maybe a point of stillness in a busy scene.

On the other hand the heart will have its way - the concept of the well-composed photo may be confounded by our feelings about people, places, and events. We would all rather have an ordinary photo of someone or something special to us than an amazing photo of something or someone we have no feeling for. My Scottish gran was an exceptional person with rare qualities. My favorite photo of her is a small, faded, tattered snapshot I took when I was sixteen - it has no artistic merit whatsoever but remains one of my favorite photos.

Which is better- digital or film? For convenience, editing, speed, control, web, email etc, the answer has to be digital. For quality, color and ‘presence’, then I would say film. In my experience, a good negative scanner and a well-exposed negative, with careful post-processing, will give better results than digital. It’s not all about resolution; it’s also about quality of color and subtleties of tone. Digital images often seem to have an inherent ‘flat’ feeling to them. The best quality of all is from a projected slide, it really is the closest you can get to the original view. However, the ‘original view’ may not be what you want.

The other problem with digital photography relates to some of the points mentioned in the answer to the first question. Rather than honing one’s visual and technical skills to the point where the photo is realized at its most perfect moment, with hundreds of images now available on modern memory cards, there is a tendency to just take lots of photos. We all do it, and it doesn’t make us better photographers, it just tends to make us more obtrusive and intrusive. At grand events we go into overdrive, snapping and chimping - even taking photos just to check the exposure level! I am the worst culprit here, and ‘fess up to the fact. The only plea I have in my defense is that I refuse to put any camera into drive mode, whereby one holds the shutter and it just keeps taking pictures continuously. I salvage a little dignity by at least taking each photo individually! It’s surprising how much more careful and considered our digital photographs become when we only have a few possible images left on the memory card! Then we frantically start chimping to see what we can delete to make more space so we can just go into digital overdrive again! What a game! Digiots, aren’t we just? Digital idiots! You have every right to laugh at us! Until you get your first digital camera that is, and you become a chimper yourself!

On the plus side, digital cameras do make the process more sociable - the joy of sharing with others the photo just taken. It may be also be that people are relying on you to take a good photo of an unrepeatable event, and in that case the digital aspect helps in ensuring you don’t let people down. The control aspect is important. Anyone who has had their negatives lost or damaged by a lab will appreciate the relative security of the digital image. The other great thing about digital images is that they can be copied without loss of quality. You could, on the other hand, see this as a curse: the uniqueness of a single negative or slide is lost, and that which was once totally original has become endlessly duplicated, each replication identical to the first.

  

What makes a great photographer great? I read something today that made me chuckle. ‘A great photographer is someone who doesn’t show you their dud photos.’ There is truth in that. Photography, being so easy and accessible, is very enchanting. But after a few years you look back on your previous output and wince. A while ago I went through photos from my first few years with a camera. While patiently looking through several thousand slides, prints and negatives, deludedly thinking, ‘Ah, let me once again peruse these pearls,' I came up with only thirty competent photos, of which just five were good enough to print! In the end only one of these got enlarged, which is the picture of a clown waiting for a bus. I do even have some ‘issues’ with that one picture, but it’ll have to do, as they say.

My photography got a lot better once I started working in black and white. I took far fewer photos, knowing each one required darkroom time - but the ones I did take had a considered and thoughtful feeling about them, helped by the fact that I was able to work on them in the darkroom to get what I wanted. I don’t actually think you have to go through all this bupkas to produce great photographs as though it is some arcane art form for which you have to suffer! I just try and make up, with patience and determination, what I lack in talent!

I would say it is difficult to produce consistently good photographs without a thorough technical knowledge of your camera. You also need an ongoing awareness of composition, tone, form, and the way light works. To get the photo you want time after time, you need to be able to visualize the way you’d like it to ultimately look before you press the shutter. The photo you really want may be very different to what is actually there. It is that ability to take what you see and change it into what you can imagine that defines the photographer as an artist: the sum of experience condensed into a heartbeat. For all that, whatever you do to the image afterwards will not turn a poor photo into a good one.

For any serious photographer then, I would say that the original image from the camera is just the starting point. The darkroom or the editing program then become the tools whereby you actually begin to resolve this image with your original vision for the photograph. Whatever way you work, in the end your picture is just a set of shapes and colors on paper or screen. First of all these have to work together as an abstract arrangement. Underneath the illusion of the subject matter of great photographs or paintings you will invariably find a coherent balance where all the elements of form, tone, and light come together in harmony. I guess it’s a classic idea of visual aesthetics, and if you aspire to it your photos can only improve.

For all that, there are photographs that are haphazard - where the subject matter is so powerful in its immediacy that it renders irrelevant all the rules about what is or isn’t a good photo. One of the reasons that I like Henri-Cartier-Bresson so much is that he had the rare ability to combine both aspects; to capture a seemingly ordinary and random event in an exquisitely balanced and resolved way. His work shows a real mastery of visual synchronicity. It also reveals that in some way perfection can be found in the simple events of everyday life, if you know how to see them. To ‘see’ like that you really have to be fully alive in each moment. That is the exhilaration, the joy of photography - and for me that is where photography and spirituality meet.

Pavitrata Taylor London - England

The Universal Language

by Barney McBryde

It is often said that the arts form an international language - a language that transcends the spoken languages of humanity, that unites where there can so easily be division, that communicates fluently where there can so easily be misunderstanding

* * *

There are those who go to art school chiefly to drink red wine and air their pretensions at parties. Certainly I did both as much possible, but I also applied myself strenuously and with dedication to the work - I was going to make the most of my time there.

We did little purely academic work - mostly we rolled up our sleeves and made art - but once a week we had an art history lesson and for that I think in the course of a year we had to write two essays. One I wrote about the Fauves, the Nabis, ‘Le Talisman’ painted on a cigar box and all that. The other I wrote about Alphons Mucha - the great Czech artist, the man who more-or-less invented art nouveau.

Writing that essay introduced me to an artist who impressed me hugely and who was to influence my own art to a large degree in future years.

Eight years after writing that essay I found myself standing on a pavement in Prague, my finger hovering over a doorbell above which in neat script was written the, to me, improbable name - ‘Mucha’.

When I plucked up courage to push that bell, an elderly woman put her head out an upstairs window and we shouted at each other for a while before she disappeared. Fortunately she reappeared at the door and even more fortunately she spoke impeccable English which meant she more-or-less understood when I explained that my brother was married to a woman whose grandmother was her cousin. This was a fact that I had only recently learned.

Admittedly it wasn’t a great link, but, since she herself was Alphons Mucha’s daughter-in-law, it did mean that Alphons Mucha’s son’s wife’s mother’s sister’s great-grand-daughter’s husband’s brother was. . . me - could I come in and take a look around?

It wasn’t actually the studio Mucha had worked in - that had been commandeered by the communists for an embassy - but it did contain many of his possessions - his easels, his brushes, his furniture, his stuffed owls - and a great deal of his art. For me to be guided by this genteel old woman around the house was an impossibly special event.

Hanging on the wall amongst the other art were several paintings of a small boy - his round, angelic little face framed with golden curls. My guide gave him a fond, octogenarian smile and said, ‘. . . and this is my husband.’

Art not only speaks across space, across cultures and languages, it speaks across time. It is a time machine by which the past may communicate with the present. By means of these daubings on canvas, Alphons Mucha could communicate to me a hundred years in the future his ideas, his feelings, his dreams, his aspirations; could move and provoke and influence me and my view of the world. Here in this room he could present to this woman the man that she had loved, borne a son with and buried - and introduce him to her as he had been long before she even met him.

A few days later I was on a bus wending its way deep into the Moravian countryside.

That road to Moravsky Krumlov was a road to another world - narrow, winding, lined with trees and little allotments and small orchards and green meadows and wayside shrines to Christ and His mum and Saint John Nepomuk. We passed through villages with unpaved roads and a drain down the middle of the main road.

  

The village of Moravsky Krumlov was a little more substantial. It was here that Alphon Mucha’s much-ignored magnum opus, his series of twelve enormous paintings of Slavic history - ‘the Epic of the Slav People’ - was housed in a large and dishevelled chateau on the outskirts of the village. As it said on my 40Kc ticket to get into the chateau - ‘From 1963 the cycle, thanks to the town of Moravsky Krumlov, has been installing on local castle. Extraordinary interpretation of paintings and their eventful destiny attract notice of the present visitors.”

In Moravsky Krumlov nobody spoke English. I mimed my way into getting a room at the Hotel Jednota and some food at the shop.

When I arrived at the chateau, there was a guide showing a bus-load of school children around. I was touched to see them sit on the floor before a vast painting as an old lady talked so gently to them of the epic past of their own nation.

Those of us who suffered under the disability of being foreigners had to make do with a few photocopied sheets of paper as our guide. They were in French, German or English and explained some things . . . but made others more mysterious with their peculiar style:

The painting of the early days of the Slavs was described - ‘They were peasants than hunters. Thus gaining some property they were attractive for nomadic tribes from the east and the regardless Goths from the west’; St Cyril was described notably as protecting the Slavs from the ‘violet Christianisation carried out by the Germans’; the Painting of Tsar Simeon of Bulgaria was noted for the technique used - ‘the whole picture is painted in Byzantine many coloured and made-up way’; there were even some moral exhortations - ‘Peter Chelcicky advances him repressed his anger and blames him for not to repay evil for evil, because if he resists the evil, the evil is multiplied in the world only.’ Sound advice . . . perhaps.

Language divided us but art spoke across the divide.

In the end one needed no written explanation. The power of the art spoke direct to the eyes and heart of the viewer, sweeping one up in the artist’s broad vision of life.

Neville Chamberlain - British prime minister - said of Czechoslovakia before the Second World War that it was a far away country full of people of whom we know nothing. Wandering, a mute alien, around the streets and fields of Moravsky Krumlov, or deciphering the halting attempt at communication across a language barrier in that art catalogue, I often felt he was actually right. But the art - it spoke with the eloquence and passion of a native speaker. Words were finally superfluous. The language of art was doing its job.

Barney McBryde Auckland - New Zealand

Image: "After the Battle of Vitkov 1420" by Alphons Mucha

Memories Of Collecting

by Mahiruha Klein

It’s really hard for me to let go of objects that have sentimental value for me. Unfortunately, being a sentimental slob, that encompasses just about every damn thing I own!

Oh no, I can’t let go of this copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy! My uncle bought it for me after I came in second at the debate-and-speech tournament in Yardley (fifteen years ago!). Or- true, this potted plant has been dead for a year but it lasted longer than all the other ones I forgot to water!

Am I alone in being a maniacal collector of things I don’t really want? Do other people who don’t own record players belong to LP clubs?

I guess I can salvage some dignity in that I have rather high-brow tastes in what I collect. Six copies of the complete works of William Shakespeare, for example. And, incredibly enough, they’re all the same. But the covers are different and I guess that justifies my expenditure.

When I go to Europe to see my sister, I bring back lots of Euros. I keep them in a drawer and I go through them every once in a while, admiring the shiny coins. They are of course useless in America, but sometimes I go to my local health food store and ask them if I can buy my granola in Euros. Usually they think it’s funny.

My mother, like me, was a collector. An amateur art dealer, she collected mostly neo-Expressionist pieces. I dislike most modern art movements intensely and was happy when people would come to our in-house gallery and take away the hideous paintings and give us money for them. She promised me she wouldn’t display any art in my room and that made me happy!

I don’t have a lot of things to remember my mom by. I have a few photographs of my bar mitzvah, where she’s smiling at me, with her hands on my shoulders. I also have a big portrait of her, painted when she was just a little girl. It’s a painting of a small, quiet child with beautiful green eyes. I keep it in my closet and look at it from time to time. Perhaps I will send it to my sister, and I will just keep the photographs because they give me more joy.

  

I’m happy I don’t really hoard art, at least. That gives me lots of freedom to go to the art museum, to see really great works of art. At its best, it teaches us not only how to see, but also what happiness and fulfillment really mean. Perhaps that’s why I love and admire Cezanne and Gaugin so much. Not being trained in art history, I cannot give any weighty or considered reasons as to why I feel so drawn to these artists’ works. I can only say that Cezanne imbued his paintings with the most remarkable details. His work is always endlessly interesting and captivating. There is always more to see.

Gaugin inspires me because he traveled all the way to Tahiti for the sake of his artistic journey. Now that’s commitment! And his paintings are so different from anything else; so mysterious and otherworldly and yet so solidly grounded in the technique of the Old Masters that I never get tired of them.

Maybe art is about acceptance. Life can be tragic, confusing and unsettling. Art is an opportunity for us to face the difficulties of life and to make sense out of them. A constructive response to suffering, we create a garden out of the debris, a rose rising up from the dirt. We can reformat or reformulate our troubles to discover Cezanne’s skies and Gaugin’s beaches inside them. We can transcend ourselves, and I think our journey towards perfection is the most beautiful art of all.

Mahiruha Klein Philadelphia - USA

Image: "Mont Sainte Victoire" by Cezanne, 1885-1887