There are numerous genre of literature, yet more are the schools of criticism aiming at appreciating and analyzing literature. Like every poet and writer differs from each other, similarly every critic and school of criticism differs from the other. The basis of these differences for the poets and writers may be of that of temperament, style and other techniques; critics differ on the subject and method of appreciation. Even in each school of criticism every critic differs from the other due to the subjective elements and temperamental differences that come in. The focus in the present essay is on the method of appreciation more than the subject, the tool of appreciation being consciousness. We see how consciousness plays an important role in creation and reception of a text. The words, as they have power, create the corresponding vibrations and can deliver this vibration into the creation and subsequently into the recipient if he or she is prepared to receive it. We see how beautifully consciousness binds the author, the text and the reader. All the disputes and differences of opinions end when we find these three (the author, the text and the reader) as parts of a continuum and not as distinct entities.   more »

In the preceding post on Speech versus Writing the following comment was made:

This also seems to be what Derrida means when he refers to the prose book as a corpse of language which must be exited from or transcended [54] -- the delimiting of the multisignificant roots has been pursued to its logical conclusion, and the power of the word has been exhausted. The aim of the project of deconstruction, says Derrida, agreeing with Aurobindo, is to get back to metaphoric, poetic language, where the power for signification has not yet been used up

Here is Sri Aurobindo on prose and the word

Ordinary speech uses language mostly for a limited practical utility of communication; it uses it for life and for the expression of ideas and feelings necessary or useful to life. In doing so, we treat words as conventional signs for ideas with nothing but a perfunctory attention to their natural force, much as we use any kind of common machine or simple implement; we treat them as if, though useful for life, they were themselves without life. When we wish to put a more vital power into them, we have to lend it to them out of ourselves, by marked intonations of the voice, by the emotional force or vital energy we throw into the sound so as to infuse into the conventional word-sign something which is not inherent in itself. But if we go back earlier in the history of language and still more if we look into its origins, we shall, I think, find that it was not always so with human speech. Words had not only a real and vivid life of their own, but the speaker was more conscious of it than we can possibly be with our mechanised and sophisticated intellects. This arose from the primitive nature of language which, probably, in its first movement was not intended,—or shall we say, did not intend,—so much to stand for distinct ideas of the intelligence as for feelings, sensations, broad indefinite mental impressions with minute shades of quality in them which we do not now care to pursue. The intellectual sense in its precision must have been a secondary element which grew more dominant as language evolved along with the evolving intelligence....   more »

Reference that prompted this posting is Rich's The Origin of the Words check at http://www.sciy.org/blog/_archives/2008/6/25/3762846.html   more »

Using clues from stars and the Sun’s positions mentioned by the ancient Greek poet Homer, scholars think they have determined the date when King Odysseus returned from the Trojan War and slaughtered a group of suitors who had been pressing his wife to marry one of them. It was on April 16, 1178 B.C. that the warrior struck with arrows, swords and spears, killing those who sought to replace him, a pair of researchers said in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Experts have long debated whether the books of Homer reflect the actual history of the Trojan War and its aftermath. Marcelo O. Magnasco of Rockefeller University in New York and Constantino Baikouzis of the Astronomical Observatory in La Plata, Argentina, acknowledge they had to make some assumptions to determine the date Odysseus returned to his kingdom of Ithaca. But interpreting clues in Homer’s “Odyssey” as references to the positions of stars and a total eclipse of the Sun allowed them to determine when a particular set of conditions would have occurred. “What we’d like to achieve is to get the reader to pick up the ‘Odyssey’ and read it again, and ponder,” said Mr. Magnasco, adding: “And to realise that our understanding of these texts is quite imperfect, and even when entire libraries have been written about Homeric studies, there is still room for further investigation.” …    more »

The present narrative in 40 stanzas composed in August 1998 was first published in my book Passing Moments a selection from which appears here: http://www.sciy.org/blog/_archives/2008/5/12/3686764.html Opportunity is taken to lightly revise it before posting at the sciy. The extensive use and adaptation of Google Images to illustrate some of the themes is the added feature. The narrative concludes with the following stanzas describing the work the Protagonist came here to do.

Even his body’s cells shone
As if countless suns were lit;
The Transcendent’s powers he housed
Where purple majesties sit.

To him thoughts came in serene
Intuitions from the original fount;
Calm words he spoke were words
That had strength death to surmount.

Truth’s abidingnesses he affirmed
In mortality’s devious ways,—
Made his breast a diamond cup
To hold its bliss, its rain and rays.

Nightly aeons had elapsed
For the day of all-love to dawn;
Now in its great resplendence
The wonder of wonders moves on.

Mortal birth he lifted to the sun
And the Will of the High in it willed;
A presence leaned down and things
Promised long ago got fulfilled.
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Passing Moments
Here is a set of poems selected from my book Passing Moments that was brought out by M/S Ultra Publications, Bangalore, India, in 2002, ISBN # 81-87544-03-1. These poems, totalling 49, were written during 19 June-18 July, 1998; another, a much longer narrative running into 40 stanzas, dated 18 August 1998, also followed generally the same style of composition but it has been kept aside from the present selection. While taking the opportunity of presenting these selected poems here I have touched them up lightly at places. But the important feature of this presentation is that of illustrations accompanying them. For this purpose I have capitalized on the Google Images quite extensively, Images with all their amazing variety and abundant creative excellence. But then at the same time there are also several limitations, they kind of putting rigid geometrical boundaries around what the swift and supple enthusiasm of inspiration can convey, they not seizing the much subtler and suggestive feeling of the poetic language. Yet it is believed that one can leap over this not really frozen sense of the image-phrases, even as they do possess a loaded multi-meaninged softness if one is insightful to see what lies behind them; the visual impact they provide can bring something of it when seen in inner association with what the hues and shades are trying to communicate. Perhaps in that respect the revelatory power itself can come out in another living and vivid language of sight and sound, each enhancing the sense more perceptively. But this is an attempt and I do not know how far it has succeeded or is going to be acceptable. In any case, I must express my silent but sincere gratitude to the numerous authors of the Images for this use of their works for my purposes, sometimes with free adaptations of their imaginative and artistic creations, a use which is not for any commercial gains. I hope in the process I’ve not infringed on any copyrights.   more »

I met Paul Lonely last night at a friend's gathering. When I told him a bit about SCIY, he said he was an admirer of Sri Aurobindo's epic poem Savitri, and graciously offered to send me a link to his own new book of "post post-modern" poetry: Suicide Dictionary. I've been looking over his website and his work is quite impressive. E.g., see below the words of one of his many enthusiastic reviewers, the artist-musician Michael Garfield.  ~ ronjon

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I am the voice of a generation starving for an adequate myth. Myths are the carriers and conduits of a vision - the metaphors and narratives around which we organize and accrete our understanding. Every generation has come together within a mythology, and used it to push forward into its fruition. In a way, we are nourished by our myths in return for fulfilling them.

It must be said that my generation has more mythology from which to choose than any before it. We stand before a global buffet of stories, food of all flavors, information crashing in from all sides, an unprecedented panoply of cultural richness. What we lack is an organizing directive, some way to handle all of this humanity without shrinking from its light or dissolving into incoherence at the spectacular diversity of it all. Imagine everyone in the cafe trying to force-feed you simultaneously, and you'll get the idea. In spite of our wealth of culture, we hunger for genuine, hopeful, reconstructive narratives that is, integral myths. Almost no one is telling my generation, or those to come, what to do with this orgiastic diversity of experience. Our myth has been one of dissipation, of dissolution the end of oil, the end of modernity, the end of the biosphere, the end of western hegemony, the end of science, the end of childhood. We are born into a world that has come together just in time to discover it is breaking apart.

But Paul Lonely is changing all of that. What Paul is doing for us - the generation growing up alongside the academic reconstruction of integral theory - is offering us a new mode of experiencing these truths. ... Freed from the conventional trappings of historical spiritual texts, blindingly aware of its own cultural embeddedness and laughing at it compassionately, Suicide Dictionary belongs in a thin pantheon with the paintings of Alex Grey as a message for and from our collective future. It is playful and colorful and fluid, in stark opposition to even the most inspiring theories of the world into which we walk with one eye open. That Paul has used language to communicate this utterly translinguistic vision is a testament to his cleverness his book is winking at all of us from behind the veil, like the Tao Te Ching or its formal predecessor, the Upanishads. Every page rings brightly with the cause to which he is devoted. ...   more »

Imho, this is an important article about the pluses and minuses of religion, an interview with a former nun who has had many deep experiences of what she writes. Highly recommended. ~ ronjon

Karen Armstrong is a one-woman publishing industry, the author of nearly 20 books on religion. When her breakthrough book "A History of God" appeared in 1993, this British writer quickly became known as one of the world's leading historians of spiritual matters. Her work displays a wide-ranging knowledge of religious traditions -- from the monotheistic religions to Buddhism. What's most remarkable is how she carved out this career for herself after rejecting a life in the church.

At 17, Armstrong became a Catholic nun. She left the convent after seven years of torment. "I had failed to make a gift of myself to God," she wrote in her recent memoir, "The Spiral Staircase." While she despaired over never managing to feel the presence of God, Armstrong also bristled at the restrictive life imposed by the convent, which she described in her first book, "Through the Narrow Gate." When she left in 1969, she had never heard of the Beatles or the Vietnam War, and she'd lost her faith in God. ...   more »

In his copy of Arjava’s Poems, Amal Kiran has pasted as frontispiece the pencil impression of Arjava made by himself, Amal Kiran. He is shown clad in dhoti and a buttoned-up shortish kurta, with a walking stick in his hand. He is well-groomed, has a pointed nose and a pointed chin. In this copy of his Amal has, importantly, copied Sri Aurobindo’s comments on the poems. Amal writes about Arjava’s poetry as follows: “As we might expect of a mind trained to careful intellectuality, Chadwick—or Arjava, as he came to be known from the name Arjavananda (meaning "Joy of straightforwardness") given him by Sri Aurobindo—did not achieve closeness to the Ideal through a lavish spontaneity whose very breath is song. A deliberate self-critical compact perfection belonged to him. Instead of taking the Kingdom of Heaven by a stormy frontal assault, he laid slow siege to it and won its treasures by patient compulsion—a victory no less complete though differing in plan and technique. Here too is a superb energy of imagination expended not so much in a royal diffusion as in concentrated exquisiteness or magnificence. We feel, to quote the poet's own words from a sonnet, "a chaos-ending chisel-smite" in each work—a faultless statue emerges in which every line and curve has been traced by an inspired precision…” This is one of the deepest studies on the Ovehead poetry that has come after Sri Aurobindo and it must prove immensely helpful in our critical appreciation as well as creative effort. ...   more »

Sri Aurobindo’s Beyond the Silence is essentially free quantitative verse with a predominant dactylic movement. It is being presented here along with a painting by Huta Hindocha which illustrates the following lines of the poem:

One with the Eternal, live in his infinity,
Drowned in the Absolute, found in the Godhead,
Swan of the supreme and spaceless ether wandering winged through the universe,
Spirit immortal. ...   more »

A cosmic mind
Looked out on all from formidable eyes
Contemning all with its unbearable gaze
And with immortal lips and a vast brow
It saw in its immense destroying thought
All things and beings as a pitiful dream,
Rejecting with calm disdain Nature's delight,
The wordless meaning of its deep regard
Voicing the unreality of things
And life that would be for ever but never was
And its brief and vain recurrence without cease,
As if from a Silence without form or name
The Shadow of a remote uncaring god
Doomed to his Nought the illusory universe,
Cancelling its show of idea and act in Time
And its imitation of eternity.
She knew that visible Death was standing there
And Satyavan had passed from her embrace.   more »

The following poems were penned by a new friend of mine, Rosita Wandallah, whom I met at Burning Man 2007. She's a remarkable writer, performance artist, model, dancer, actor, community leader, project coordinator, global traveler, and international service provider. -- I am honored to know her.

We are all wells of gratitude
deep, plentiful, pure
connected to the
infinite source of all

if only we would drink
more often,
replenish ourselves
with the kinetic wisdom
of the cosmos within

For what is it to live
without gratitude? ...

Poems from Oaxaca-Winter 2008, by Rosita Wandellah

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This is a beautiful essay which first appeared in Dawn Karachi (10 March 2008), with its extraordinary precision and accuracy. The author rightly recognizes four giants of European literature in Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe, but then he also omits Aeschylus and Sophocles, and Virgil and Milton. On being prodded by Amal Kiran, Sri Aurobindo put in three rows eleven of the world’s top poets. They are as follows: Homer-Shakespeare-Valmiki-Vyasa; Dante-Kalidasa-Aeschylus-Sophocles-Virgil-Milton; and in the third row solitary Goethe. When asked about Firdausi for his famous Shah Nameh, Sri Aurobindo declined to opine anything as he was not in a position to read it in the original. About Goethe he wrote: “Goethe goes much deeper than Shakespeare; he had an incomparably greater intellect than the English poet and sounded problems of life and thought Shakespeare had no means of approaching even. But he was certainly not a greater poet… Goethe was a poet by choice.” He was indeed “the last true polymath to walk the earth,” as George Eliot says. Here is the Dawn-essay.   more »

The mystic poetry of the Pondicherry school continues to be neglected, partly because of the media betrayal and chiefly of the lack of seriousness with regard to Sri Aurobindo's theory and practice of poetry. About eight decades ago, the theory of mantric poetry was explained first in the Arya, a little known journal to us. The theory was both revivalist and futuristic. To sum up Sri Aurobindo’s arguments: poetry has been deliberately incantatory in the Vedic age; poetry of incantation was returning through kavis like Whitman, Tagore and Carpenter, poetry will be more deliberately mantric in the future. Now some of us have read that, but we have forgotten to check whether the prophecy is turning true or not. Sri Aurobindo himself took the initiative, writing in that line, making poets in that line, correcting and clarifying the deliberate efforts of his poet-disciples like KD Sethna (Amal Kiran), Nirodbaran, JA Chadwick (Arjava), Dilip Kumar Roy, Harindranath Chattopadhyaya, and others. He has repeatedly told us that beautiful poetry is beautiful poetry even if it is in the current style and that a new experience needs a new style of expression. I have chosen four living* poets from this school to place them before you, with my observation, and to ask for your opinion about them. The first two, KD Sethna and Nirodbaran, wrote poetry under the direct guidance of Sri Aurobindo. While RY Deshpande and Themis, the mystic poets of the 80s and 90s, have been continuing the tradition under the eyes of Sethna and Nirodbaran.   more »

Beside her Satyavan walked full of joy,
Because she moved with him through his green haunts:
He showed her all the forest's riches, flowers
Innumerable of every odour and hue
And soft thick clinging creepers red and green
And strange rich-plumaged birds, to every cry
That haunted sweetly distant boughs, replied
With the shrill singer's name more sweetly called.
He spoke of all the things he loved: they were
His boyhood's comrades and his playfellows,
Coevals and companions of his life
Here in this world whose every mood he knew:
Their thoughts which to the common mind are blank
He shared, to every wild emotion felt
An answer. Deeply she listened…   more »

About Keats Sri Aurobindo writes in The Future Poetry as follows: “Keats is the first entire artist in word and rhythm in English poetry,—not grandiose, classical and derived like Milton, but direct and original in his artistry, he begins a new era.” ...   more »