Love: Its Influence on Life and Arts

BY MANJERI S. GOPALAKRISHNAN, M.A.

Certain thinkers are of the view that human life is in no degree superior to the lives of other creatures. Life and death are the voice and silence of Nature. It is to become fully aware of that voice and silence of Nature that poets and truth-seekers strive and struggle. Although the human Intellect has its own faults, the human Will is peerless and unfathomable. When this Will dominates the mind of man, when this Will is not subject to his limitless ambitions, man perceives that he is no more a creature of circumstance. We get a little knowledge of what we are. A new sense of awareness, an intense urge, a wonder at and a desire for loveliness in things develop in our mind, independent of our Will. Love binds our thoughts; and to the external activities we engage in for the satisfaction of our selves, a meaning is achieved, the meaning of experience. We begin to interpret our life in a thousand and odd ways.

“Life is the content of art, and art is the form of life.” ¹ We have nothing to say afresh. But everyone of us who experiences beauty in some form or other desires to express his or her feelings and emotions. In interpreting the experience methods differ. A poet enjoying the music of a skylark or a nightingale attempts at forgetting his own existence. In a moment of peace he recollects his emotion. Rhythmic lines of life and love flow out of a brimming heart. We call it art. It is an art that elevates.

To gratify one’s wishes, one must have the courage to suffer. A mercenary dying in war is not a true soldier of noble wishes. His sufferings and courage have no norm. The anguish in the heart of a poet who wrote that “life stains the white radiance of eternity” (Shelley: Adonais) aspired to grapple beauty. In our passionate wish to perpetuate that which is mortal, we submit to our senses. Our senses revel in Nature. How long? So long as love lasts.

Art interprets life only when man loves that kind of life for which Destiny has fitted him. If any true art represents an aspect of life, it immortalises that aspect which strengthens and elevates the human soul. As love is the supremest force behind life, it is the inspiration for man to expound, sing, carve, or paint.

Everywhere we see everyone talking of love with little knowledge of what exactly its nature is. Some pretend to know much of its influence in moulding the human mind. A few brilliant scholars betray a glimpse of it by stating that love is a creation of human emotions flooding the heart. They doubt whether it is a creation of refined emotions originating from the contact of the senses in a balanced manner with the objects of Nature. In three words, the greatest of men born on earth, Jesus of Nazareth, proclaimed to the discriminating, thinking animal, that Love is God. To attain that state of pure joy, wherefrom no return to a tragic submission to those base qualities staining the radiance of love could occur, one must be conscious of the impeding, distracting thoughts which arise to shake off that noble wish–love to know and become. We all know that what we are, we are not in truth. We change every moment to progress toward that we want to become. Impulse, instinct, intuition, struggle, defeats, imprison us, and escape is remote.

To effect an escape, at once graceful and memorable, the poet sings, the musician expands in rapture, the dancer goes into ecstacy, the sculptor breaks the most obdurate of stones, and the painter takes the red out of his beloved’s lips. “We are transmitters of life,” observes D. H. Lawrence. It is not the politician that transmits life, but the artist, the philosopher, the ever suffering deathless seeker. In this century we have too many critics of art, too many shallow scholars whose convictions are borrowed, whose prejudices are too heavy. They but skim the surface of life.

Why did that famous Swedish philosopher, Swedenborg, speak of Spiritual Nuptials? Did he say Love is Sacrifice? He too like Bentham aimed at the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Why did Oscar Wilde create Dorian Gray? Love must suffer. Love must die to live and transmit. Hardy made his Tess (pure woman) suffer to realise that love is only an aspect of life, which imperishable aspect perishes to survive, to acquire new energy and flow. The primitive Serpent split to create and survive; love governs the tempest life, and life is the content of art.

Life terminates, love decays to live, and art perpetuates both. The famous tales of Edgar Allan Poe, the secret sadhanas of the Vedic seers, the imperceptible idea in the Neti-Neti philosophy –all seem to interpret in many modes the transcendental aim of love. But man has in woman a better image of his own to comprehend, to look deep. Woman means one aspect of love to him. It is not an aspect of sex, not an aspect of ethics or religion or morality or intelligence, but an aspect of understanding, a way to translate, a means to perpetuate, an object on which to concentrate, an experience to immortalise,–in fact, a way of life that becomes the true content of art. Dante was dominated by Beatrice. St. Francis was under the spell of service. Both knew love. It made them meet at the wished point of tranquility. The power which resides in the heart of a man of sorrows, that known secret in the mind and soul of every growing virgin, that which aspires and consumes is love.

The world’s literature reflects but the life of man and his creative passion to extend the frontiers of the mind. Earth has more unacknowledged men of genius than well-known scholars who borrow thoughts from the great and blatantly plagiarise. What is to be the function of man in the future? “Man must think anew about all human problems and not about any particular system or belief. This is lacking throughout the world at present.” Mr. J. Krishnamurti makes this remark for the intelligent man to analyse and perceive the true nature of the psyche. What is needed is that man must fully become unconscious of the critical instinct which always takes his sense off him, to admire and adjust to circumstances in which destiny places him. Critical instinct by itself is not bad. When it affects the psyche from a wrong angle it hampers evolution. Obstructed evolution shatters morality. The dance of life loses its cosmic rhythm.

“Theatrical conceptions, want of imagination and lack of Indian feeling in the treatment of sacred and epic Indian subjects, are Ravi Varma’s fatal faults.” Thus says the late Dr. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy who was an accepted critic of arts. To say that Ravi Varma had no Indian feeling is cruel. A painter of Ravi Varma’s stature painted not to satisfy any critical instinct, not to arouse any sympathy. His imagination was centred in creating one phase of Truth in which his own salvation could be gained. William Blake painted what he sang in ecstacy. The painter’s love is a burning flame of life. A cold critic develops cataract. His erudition and reason give him no ease; to the restless seeker after beauty in works of art, the quest is a source of perpetual joy. The writer does not stand in opposition to a galaxy of critics. Despite the vast strides civilisation has made, man still remains primitive in his moods; it is because his conception of love is physical, superficial, narrow and base.

Music is an idea of the emotions. Dance expounds that idea to stir the slumbering senses which are to waken the soul. The soul realises its affinity with the universe. Its realisation is not perfect, as the affinity is not full. The moment a noble mind repeats an act with little knowledge of values, its aesthetic experience moves toward that sacred dot where Ardhanariswara abides. It is where the voluptuous passions of the heart burn to nothing and where the senses have nothing to carry and deposit.

In these days the desire of the young is for all kinds of political ’isms. Life’s problems are becoming too complex to solve. The restraint and grace necessary to aspire for the highest are expended to fabricate the means to centralise and decentralise the economic resources of a nation.

Where is art? To find an answer you go to the curator of a museum or to an entertainment–movie, musical soiree, dance. We have become strangers to our own planet. A century of war-mongers and art-patrons!

Where is shelter? In the Taj, in Leo Tolstoi, in that hut in the woods where Thoreau dwelt, in the land of the Lama, or in some valley of the Himalayas?

¹ Aesthetic Experience, by Van Meter Ames, University of Cincinnati: from “Essays in Philosophy”: Smith and Wright.