EPISODE 15: FROM 21st CENTURY BRIXTON TO 10th CENTURY KASHMIR

Welcome to my blog. It will make you think. What it will make you think, who knows?

Last week I went to the Brixton Splash; a street festival organized in part by my son. I lived in Clapham and Brixton for six years between 1977 and 1983 and hence was around during the first riots. In fact as a co-operation between community, police and council, the Splash is a response to those troubled times. Because of the early rain the attendance was initially low but the vibe was good and better when the sun came out. I chatted to my son’s boss and told him how proud I was of my boy and how pleased to feel the changes in Brixton. An hour later my son was locked in a pub while axe carrying marauders ransacked Curry’s.

I have other children living in Bristol and Birmingham, so I feel a little involved and although I know it is all part of the bad news agenda I have discussed previously, I am sucked in to comment.  First must come the acknowledgement that few in power will want to make, i.e. that the rich have the poor’s money. They may justify it through inheritance, through hard work, through their value to society, through their education, through their risk-taking, through their arms dealing etcetera: nevertheless whatever wealth they have is raised from the poor.

In my previous entry I mentioned the Lord’s Club, the spiritual view of society presented in the East in which everyone is theoretical equal, (by virtue of all being one god playing out the different roles) and that the business of life is a bit like a worker’s co-operative where you rotate the jobs on some seasonal basis and all get paid the same. Philosophies like this can be more tenable when you happen to be a fat Brahmin and less so when you’re an Untouchable destined to spend your (much shorter) life with the dirty and the dead. You could just decide that this particular member of the Lord’s club, this spark of divinity, will become a rampaging and murderous one. David Cameron today talked of the tradition in this country of ‘policing by consent’.

Do you consent to poverty while we walk away the all the toys? No? What’s wrong with you? Here’s a lottery ticket, here’s a crap education, here’s £6 an hour, now fuck off and make something of yourself.

Don’t get me wrong. I hate all those obnoxious, foul mouthed, violent, ignorant, and vulgar manifestations of humanity as much as you (if you do) but let us not believe that their petty thieving is anything compared with the murdering, pillaging and exploiting of our leaders and money-makers.

Now, just to show I’m down with the kids, here’s a picture of Abhinavagupta

in an epoch pen-painting in which he is depicted seated in Virasana, surrounded by devoted disciples and family, performing a kind of trance inducing music on the veena while dictating verses of Tantrāloka to one of his attendees - behind him two dūtī (women yogi) waiting on him.

A legend about the moment of his death (placed somewhere between 1015 and 1025 depending on the source), says that he took with him 1200 disciples and marched off to a cave reciting his poem Bhairava-stava, a devotional work. They were never to be seen again, supposedly translating together in the spiritual world.

I will allude to the scene at the beginning of the second Boggy Starless novel in which my hero emerges after a number of years in a cave with an Afghani Sage and Hashish grower.

Among Abhina’s manifold achievements were contributions to the theories of poetics and drama attributed to the Bharata Muni, the 5^th century BC musicologist who laid down the aesthetic rules of drama that still underpin all Indian classical dance and theatre. Muni claimed that when humanity began to suffer from pride and the joyful life became full of suffering, the god Brahma created drama—with its attendants music, poetry, and dance—to uplift humanity morally and spiritually by means of aesthetics (rasa).

Abhina elevated the theory of rasa, (lit. juice, essence, flavour) by equating aesthetic rapture with spiritual exstasis.

The eight basic rasas were identified as Love, Comedy, Sorrow, Anger, Energy, Terror, and Disgust. Astonishment. Later a ninth was acknowledged, shanta-rasa, ‘the specifically religious feeling of peace which arises out of world-weariness’. Abhina likens it to the string of a jewelled necklace; while it may not be the most appealing for people, it is the string that allows the jewels of the other eight rasas to be relished. These rasas, (which of course need not be limited to or defined by these terms), these flavours, are what an artist is intending to evoke in his audience. Why? Why put them through these emotions when already their lives are full of quite real dramas, emotions, comedies and tragedies et cetera? What excuse is there for that?

The answer, according to these sages, is that art is otherworldly or ‘Alaukika’ in its nature and when the right conditions are in place the true aesthetic object does not simply stimulate the senses but also stimulates the imagination of the spectator. Once the imagination is stimulated the spectator aesthete gets transported to a world of his own creation. This emotion deindividualises an individual by freeing him from those elements which constitute individuality such as place, time etc. and raises him to the level of universal. 

The aesthetic experience is the manifestation of the innate dispositions of the self, such as love and sorrow, by the self. It is characterised by the contemplation of the bliss of the self by the connoisseur. It is akin to the spiritual experience as one transcends the limitations of one's limited self because of the process of universalization taking place during the aesthetic contemplation of characters depicted in the work of art. Abhinavagupta maintains that this rasa (literally, taste or essence) is the summum bonum of all literature and art.

The significant word here is ‘transcend’. Why would a philosopher-concern himself with the theatre and the arts? Why, when all your teaching is about spiritual union with Universal Consciousness, would you involve yourself with the fakery of the stage? Answer? Because although the drama is pretence, it has the ability through the rasa, through the aesthetic experience, to take the ‘sensitive spectator with positive taste and mind’ to a higher state of awareness in which they transcend the emotions and experience bliss.

For a moment there, I almost had it, but something slipped away.

Rasa, according to Abhina, ‘Is the universal bliss of the Self or Atman coloured by the emotional tone of a drama,’ and, ‘the developed relishable state of a permanent mood.’ Rasa is characterized by a peculiar state of awareness that simultaneously ‘transcends’ (lokottara) the ‘objective’ configuration and the corresponding ’subjective’ emotion, but is nevertheless, unlike the introversion of a yogin, both receptive to and intent on enjoying the sensory impressions.

I mentioned earlier the love of creation that pervades Shaivism and talks of the world, of which we are part, as Shiva’s garden. Tantra particularly embraces sensuous pleasure as a spiritual path with the idea of transcending an experience at its most intense moment of manifestation. Abhina, perhaps an exemplar Tantric Master, applies the same approach to the arts and hence can conclude that the pleasure one derives out of a real work of art is no less than divine pleasure.

In opening Episode 14 I outlined a number of issues about story-telling that I have been mulling. What have I learned at the feet of the Guptas? Not enough of course: that the creative process is spontaneous, natural and divine; that the aim of a work of art, of kavya, is to give pleasure ‘but this pleasure must not bind the soul to the body’: that the senses are the spectators: that wise spectators, connoisseurs, can experience an aesthetic rapture identical to spiritual bliss.

I know I’m close but not quite there but my feeling about the value of writing is strengthened.

For wiser words on Abhina and Rasa cf //www.svabhinava.org/abhinava/Sunthar-integral/index.php

 

Ps for my audience: In order to appreciate and to enjoy anything beautiful or wonderful one must have taste and approach with a sense of aesthetic appreciation, responsive imagination, the capacity to identify with aesthetic objects, and intuition. (Abhinavagupta).

So sharpen up please.