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SECTION EIGHT:
FORGING A NEW LANGUAGE

Sri Chinmoy’s chosen medium of expression is the English language. We are inclined to think of this language as an instrument of great richness and flexibility, having absorbed the influences of other languages and cultures for thousands of years. Yet if we enquire more closely into the nature of words that were progressively assimilated in this way, we shall find that they were in the main words of practical utility, words pertaining to commerce, manufacture, building and agriculture. The capacity of a language is judged by its power of expression and, since commercial interests have continued to remain paramount, the English language has proven to be a powerful communicative vehicle in this field.

The capacity of the English language to reveal the inner life of man, however, has never attained the same maturity. It is possible that this deficiency is due to the lack of any great spiritual text at its source. Where other languages, for example, distinguish between self-love, human love and ecstatic love for the Divine, English is unhappily forced to strain the one word to its limits; we speak of Heaven and hell, but the numerous higher and lower worlds that are adumbrated in the scriptures of India have received no attention – at best we refer to the first, second and third circles of hell; the physical mind, the intellectual mind and the intuitive mind are not differentiated and countless central spiritual qualities — such as purity, light and wisdom – are dependent upon single, much-used words to convey their entire meaning.

As a result of the absence of fine spiritual nuances in the language, there has arisen a relatively small class of visionary writers (including Shakespeare, Keats, Hopkins and Emily Dickinson) who, not content with the language as they find it, have tended in varying degrees to create their own medium of expression: Shakespeare speaks of “self-affairs” and “self-breath” while Hopkins, using a similar process, fused nouns, adjectives and verbs together to form unusual combinations, such as “heart-fleshed,” “clearest-served” and “hung-heavenward.”

In our present day, undoubtedly the greatest innovator in the language is Sri Chinmoy. Having little need for the utilitarian words in which English abounds, his sole poetic material is the sparse array that it offers of words for spiritual essences. Moreover, because Sri Chinmoy’s mother tongue is Bengali, with its immense spiritual refinement and subtlety, he has further encountered the difficulty of working with an instrument that is far less malleable to his vision, crudely formed in some areas, at times obdurate and blunt. It is hard to fully appreciate the peculiar plight of the spiritual poet who, returning from the heights of mystic vision, feels impelled to share the fruits of his experience with all men. Bringing news of an unknown realm he casts about him for correspondences from the known world that will make his experience more accessible, he strives for precision among the half-world of names and forms for his invisible but certain reality.

In order to exact a greater accuracy and expressiveness from the English language, Sri Chinmoy has developed a number of creative, but hitherto largely unexplored principles inherent in it. The first and foremost of these is the principal of compression. It emerges in the poetry as a technique both of style and of form.

Although, by the sum of its individual parts, Ten Thousand Flower-Flames may be considered an epic of the soul, it is fundamental to the poet’s intuitive method that this vast body of wisdom be presented in fragments – as gleams, shafts of light, flames. We cannot seize so great a vision all at once but we can approach it by degrees, through myriads of separate illumining moments, until we have absorbed the whole of it and find ourselves in the presence of a powerful and wordless “seeing.” The major activity of compression in the first instance, therefore, is to enclose his infinite vision within the bounds of numerous finite forms. Sri Chinmoy does this by telescoping inner experience into its major outlines and divesting it of any claim to individuality:

AGAINST MY HEART’S CLIMBING CRY

Against my heart’s climbing cry
No opposition can dare
To have any permanency.

(4409)

This poem exists as a pure declaration of resolve, removed from the supportive context of personal history. This very act of penetration to the core of experience constitutes the poet’s first act of reduction. Using only the barest components he establishes the positive upward movement of the aspiring heart and then sets into relation with it his refusal to admit any disruptive movement. What force exists in this negation! The choice of the verb “to dare” seems to quell even the faintest suggestion of any uprising of the negative forces. And because great energy is required to annihilate, this repudiation works retrospectively to confirm the solid strength of the heart. The poet’s re-arrangement of syntax so that “permanency” falls as the final word of the poem sustains this energy to the close and binds the first and third lines together with a slanted rhyme.

The poet’s compression of his message into the miniature world of the stanza creates a tension between the extreme brevity of this form and the wide scope of this subject. Where this might have led to a certain enigmatic quality, however, the poet exercises perfect control of diction to produce a language of exemplary clarity. Even when the poems are replete with suggestions of mystery and wonder, there is no crowding of elements:

THE SUPERNAL MYSTERIES

If you can weather danger-clouds,
Then the supernal mysteries
That lie behind the terrestrial vagaries
Will all be yours.

(3219)

In spite of the mystic vastness behind these sets of terms, they are neither tenuous nor obscure. Within the deliberately plain style of the poet’s long reflective sentence they appear as part of a natural sequence.

In the same way that the poet invites us to follow the track of his meditative thought in the above poem, he frequently uses the stanzaic form to incarnate a spiritual process. In these poems the technique of compression is evident in the poet’s careful patterning of words and phrases, his use of parallelism and internal linkings. The reader is gradually led from one perception to another so that, at the close of the poem, he sees a blended succession of truths. It is an aesthetic of glimpses that resolves into an act of beholding:

 

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