Welcome to the prophetic words of one of the 20th century's literary greats, T. S. Eliot:
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.
(The Rock, 1934)
Pause and ponder as to how the poet develops a binary between 'words' and the 'Word' and 'speech' and 'silence'. Doesn't it remind you of what we talked of in my blog post on 'Kashmir Shaivism and the Theory of Language'? Well, hardly surprising, for Eliot was groomed intensively well in Sanskrit Language and Literature from where he imbibed many of the concepts that he later developed in his literary works and literary criticism.
Appropriately enough, his poem, The Wasteland ends with:
Datta Dayadhvam Damyata
Aum Shantih Shantih Shantih
The invocation at the end reminds one of the Vedic prayers, which invariably end on this note. What it is significant here as in all Vedic chants and prayers is the prayer for Peace, which lies in the Transcendent Source of Existence, which is signified by the reference to the 'Word' in The Rock.
Eliot is clearly building up a case, like a modern day Vedic Seer-Poet, for the need to evolve from the world of 'words' to the Supramental plane of the 'Word', the 'anhata naad' Aum, which is the mother of all sounds.
At another place, Eliot speaks of the negation of the self in the act of Creation, as in the act of administering the Mass by a priest. What Eliot is implying is that when a literary artist creates, (s)he transcends his/her personal limitations to let Truth shape his/her vision in his/her works.
When D. H. Lawrence, another great litterateur, proclaims the Novel to be the Book of Life, he echoes this concern of a literary work with a metonymic presentation of the metaphorical vision. Mark how Lawrence echoes Eliot when he declares, 'Trust the tale but not the teller', for the 'novelist is a liar, but the Novel is the Book of Life'.
The Age of Enlightenment heralded an Age of Epistemological Heresy. It privileged one method of discovery of Truth over all others. Not only did it centre reasoning, particularly empirical rationality, as the privileged method of inquiry of Truth, but it also laboured to discredit all other methods such as the imaginative and the intuitive.
Contrasting the Vedantic phase of Indian civilization with its Vedic phase, Sri Aurobindo regards the former as a declension from the latter as the mode of cognition changed from the intuitive to the rational from one phase to another.
Keats presents this fact beautifully, while commenting on the relationship between Reason and Imagination in poetry. He says that in poetry, Reason is in the dock and Imagination, the judge. No wonder, he could utter such mellifluous and prophetic lines as: 'Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard sweeter' and 'Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty'. It would take ages for the rationalist to realize this truth that the poet in Keats realized in the first flush of youth.
Imagination and intuition have in recent times been rescued from the tyranny of reason in critical discourse, but not yet in formal education. Reason continues to hold the fort there. It will take some time for rationalists to realize that there are equally and much more powerful instruments of discovering Truth.
Here, the situation varies from the West to the East. The entire superstructure of Western civilization is based on the edifice of reason. So admittedly, it finds it difficult to admit intuition and imagination into the academia as alternative modes of cognition. But, the East has always been a champion of imagination and intuition, for which it has had to even suffer the contempt of the West as the land of superstition and retrogressive religion.
No wonder, the East abounds in myths and supra-rational legends.
Suffice it to say that the greatest avocation of the literary artist is with discovering Truth in his/her works in the sub-textual folds of his/her work's surface narrative.
#LiteraryTheory #IndianLiterature #Literature #Truth #Epistemology #Savitri #SriAurobindo #TSEliot #DHLawrence #TheBible
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