Triveni Journal

1927 | 11,233,916 words

Triveni is a journal dedicated to ancient Indian culture, history, philosophy, art, spirituality, music and all sorts of literature. Triveni was founded at Madras in 1927 and since that time various authors have donated their creativity in the form of articles, covering many aspects of public life....

Browning and his Fugitive Vision

Krishna Kripalani

It is possible to appreciate Browning without either dubbing him ‘a metaphysician’ or likening him to a Vedic Rishi, although it may be true that his intellect often indulged in the gymnastics of the former and his vision captured the experience of the latter. And yet Browning was too much of a poet to rationalise before he believed and, perhaps, too much of a poet too to realize, that is, live through it as an enduring experience, what he felt as a fleeting ecstasy. Being too much in love with life, he could not lose himself in Eternity but would be content to accept the experience of ‘instants’ as its evidence. It is these ‘instants’ that give us a clue to his Vision of Being which is felt as a poet and not realized as a Yogi. Many of us–common folk–may have felt the same at rare moments, though, perhaps, not so intensely.

For there are moods in human experience when all thinking is submerged in a deep surge of elevated consciousness. There is felt an expansion of the heart that finds no limit, as though the entire universe is contained in its infinite embrace; or rather, the individuality is so strangely rarefied that it seems to be absorbed into all that is within and without us, and yet be itself.

The state is not one of mental blankness; much less of mental torpor. It is as though an intense but unknown yearning, that cannot define its object, suddenly felt the rapture of fulfillment in its own immensity, and expanded and spread ‘till flesh must fade for heaven was here.’ It is a flood of consciousness as elusive as it is overwhelming,–a consciousness that in swaying seems to sublimate one’s being. It is as though while wondering at the vastness of an ocean you suddenly became one of its silvery waves, and, rising and falling with its heaving breast, you felt you were the ocean itself. Or, losing yourself in the ecstacy of a song; you became the song itself and, floating on the waves of the atmosphere, you struck against the rhythm of every being’s being. Would we not cherish the ‘instant made eternity’?

Though all conscious thinking has ceased, there is present, nevertheless, an undercurrent of mental realization slowly rising to the surface. One suspects that it was while floating in such a beatific blue that the mystic vision of life swam into Browning’s ken. For in that vision reality and fantasy, hope and fear, joy and sorrow, shed off their mutual repugnance and, dancing in an harmonious whole, appear like the soft hues of a rainbow,–refractions of a light that is without colour or form. The broken arcs have gathered into a perfect round. God and Satan seem the same self. For Satan is only God in a fancy dress, given a separate entity by man to stimulate and appease his own ethical prejudice. It acts like the magic mask of the primitive man and serves its purpose by frightening people into settled grooves of accepted ethics.

But, alas for the rarity of life’s charity! The consciousness flows away as irresistibly as it flowed in, leaving behind only a vibration. The faint memory lingers, if only to give a new direction to Browning’s thinking. But the idea without realization is like doing the steps of a Tango, after the music has ceased. Intellectual conception may remain, but the heart, for a while, seems to discern nothing but ‘the infinite passion and the pain of finite hearts that yearn.’ The echo keeps vibrating but the song of Pippa is heard only on New Year’s Day. 1

1 All apologies to Sigmund Freud who, while admitting that the ‘oceanic’ feeling exists in many people, is disposed to relate it to an early stage in ego-feeling, and which later on seeks ‘to reinstate limitless narcissism.’ Civilisation and its Troubles, by Sigmund Freud.

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