[We have been screening “Meditations on Savitri” at our centre on the first and last Sundays of the month during our evening sessions from 6 to 7pm. The article we are reproducing here, written by K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar in ‘On The Mother’, Chapter 52, ‘Readiness is All’, will be of striking significance to all those of us who have been meditating with this piece of audio visual production by Savitri Bhavan based on The Mother’s work, through Huta in translating selected lines of Savitri into artistic strokes on canvas following periods of deep meditation. This article may also be an inspiration for those who are yet to come across ‘Meditations on Savitri’.]
There was, then, the Polish sadhika Janina who responded to the marvellous insights and illuminations in the Mother's ‘Prayers and Meditations’ and Sri Aurobindo's ‘Savitri’, and rendered them in formulations and depths of colour that revealed an uncanny force and vivacity.
And of particular significance was Huta's first volume of paintings, ‘Meditations on Savitri’, which was released on 15 August 1962. Since her taking permanent residence in the Ashram in 1955, Huta had been struggling to judge from her correspondence with the Mother - within herself to find her true vocation. On 7 February 1961, Mother wrote to Huta:
"You ask me what you must do. It would be better to ask what you must be, because the circumstances and activities in life have not much importance. What is important is our way of reacting to them.
Human nature is such that when you concentrate on your body you fall ill, when you concentrate on your heart and feelings you become unhappy, when you concentrate on the mind you get bewildered."
How to get out of this "precarious condition"? The way of the strong is a severe and continuous tapasya. The other is to divert one's attention from the "small personal self" by dedication to a big ideal or absorption in art or science, or social or political life etc. All would depend on one's sincerity, endurance, effort, struggle - and the sheer will to victory. Huta had awakened to the splendours in the firmament of ‘Savitri’ on the night in July 1954 when "cataracts of divine light and peace" overpowered her and swept her towards a new goal in life. Then, after she had settled in the Ashram, she had "a concrete experience" in her sleep that the Mother was reciting ‘Savitri’ to her: "I heard distinctly her melodious voice and experienced intensely the soothing warmth of her Presence." And the Mother confirmed it: "Yes, indeed, I recited ‘Savitri’ to you and it was passages from Book Eleven – ‘The Book of Everlasting Day’ - the conversation between the Supreme Lord and ‘Savitri’" It was natural that she should now want to render some of the seminal lines and passages in ‘Savitri’ in divinations of line and colour. On 26 September 1960 she mentioned it to the Mother who revealed that she herself "had a great wish to express through paintings the visions I had seen in 1906, but I had no time", and after a deep contemplation added, "I will help you constantly. I will take you to higher worlds and show you the Truth. You must remember the Truth and express it through painting." The next day the Mother gave some preliminary instructions and assured her, "I will put my Force into you so there will be a link between [the] two consciousnesses. Go ahead." But when Huta insisted that her skill and experience in drawing, perspective and landscape were inadequate the Mother said,
"....the Epic is full of visions and they can be expressed by giving only an impression. The most important thing is that in painting you must bring vibrations, feelings, liveliness and consciousness."
And so the great work of visual interpretation and symbolic projection started and continued in a series of meditative sessions. As the Mother has explained in her prefatory note to ‘Meditations on Savitri’:
"’Savitri’, this prophetic vision of the world's history, including the announcement of the earth's future - Who can ever dare to put it in picture?
We simply meditate together on the lines chosen, and when the image becomes clear, I describe it with the help of a few strokes, then Huta goes to her studio and brushes the painting. "
The first volume of ‘Meditations’ included 23 paintings covering the opening canto ("The Symbol Dawn") of ‘Savitri’. Subsequent volumes were to appear in August 1963, February 1965 and August 1966 respectively - the four volumes together, with their 110 paintings, illustrating the whole of book I of ‘Savitri’. It was Lessing who first drew a meaningful distinction between fluid poetic description and the static art of sculpture, but painting can combine the fluidity of poetic suggestiveness with the explicit vividness of a visual art. The very title ‘Meditations’ hints at the fact that here art is but the handmaiden of sadhana. Which means that the rasika too should approach this work as part of his sadhana, and not merely as a student or connoisseur of painting. "It is in a meditative mood," says the Mother, "that the ‘Meditations’ must be looked at," for otherwise we might just fasten upon the appearance and miss the reality. It is not at the intellectual but at a high "overhead" - intuitive or overmental - level that the meaning has been seized and new-created in line and colour, and a like effort of seeing and experiencing is demanded of the rasika. This stupendous body of work spread out in the ‘Meditations’ volumes is perhaps a striving towards the future overhead painting, and what these paintings attempt is the revelation of unusual psychic, occult and spiritual phenomena, through audacities of form, line and colour. The lines in ‘Savitri’ with their arresting quanta of thought and measured tread of sound first strike the ear, but that is only the beginning. There is presently a reverberation through the inner corridors of sense and sensibility towards the still depths of the soul.
Readers of ‘Savitri’ - especially those who launch themselves on "The Symbol Dawn" - are apt to encounter wall after wall of resistance, for image is piled upon image, and there is an apparent density of meaning that seems to defy penetration by the mind. While one is no doubt gripped by the splendour of the articulation and the vast visionary vistas of spirit-scape, one also feels baffled. What is one to make of these images, these symbol-actions, these occult situations:
A fathomless zero occupied the world. ...
Something that wished but knew not how to be
Teased the Inconscient to wake Ignorance. ...
The darkness failed and slipped like a falling cloak
From the reclining body of a god. ...
On life's thin border awhile the Vision stood
And bent over earth's pondering forehead curve. ...
Her passion-flower of love and doom she gave.
All came back to her: Earth and Love and Doom,
The mantric vibrations impinge on the doors of consciousness, there is a call or summons, and there is some response from the innermost countries. But Huta's paintings, which are but a transcription of her and the Mother's joint meditations, have yet to be re-enacted in the rasika's theatre of stillness and awakening psychic dawn. It is, in short, a sadhana - or nothing.
That the "Dawn Goddess" should appear in the opening canto is natural enough. But Savitri is a goddess too, the prophetess of the coming Supramental Dawn, the "Greater Dawn" to be. And for Huta herself - as for many - the Mother was also "a parable of Dawn", a Savitri-power. Dawn, Savitri, the Mother - they are of course different powers and divinities. But they have also their striking affiliations, and Huta was made to seize the truth, and in her paintings the Dawn-Goddess evoked in lines like "On life's thin border awhile the Vision stood" and the Savitri of "The calm delight that weds one soul to all" and "Of her pangs she made a mystic poignant sword" merge into one another, and also with the Mother - a golden three-in-one. And this is verily to reach the mystic heart of "The Symbol Dawn".
There are other paintings also that, with their epiphanic stances, suddenly make clear what had remained obscure when the poem was merely read, or project with a stunning vividness what had seemed a mere metaphor. Thus Plate II transcribes with haunting suggestiveness the idea of the lines:
Repeating for ever the unconscious act,
Prolonging for ever the unseeing will,
And Plate XVI is the very image - picturesque and powerful - of "Man lifted up the burden of his fate". This might be a Samson carrying a colossal weight, or even Krishna holding up the Govardhan Hill, - there is such controlled energy, such determined purpose, such intensity of effect in the painting. And the last Plate is magnificent:
Immobile in herself, she gathered force.
This was the day when Satyavan must die.
Savitri exudes the immobility of infinite strength, and Satyavan-"the soul of the world called Satyavan" - lies stretched before her, glorious in his beauty and the victim of immitigable Doom. The battle is joined-the battle that is to be waged and won in the occult infinitudes of Eternal Night, the Double Twilight and Everlasting Day.
(K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar in ‘On The Mother’, Chapter 52, ‘Readiness is All’, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, Pondicherry)
No comments:
Post a Comment