Austerity and "Avesa": Sri Aurobindo's Reconstruction of the Poetic

Abstract

This essay is an endeavour to examine the deeper interlocking structures of Sri Aurobindo's thought that frame his reconstruction of the poetic-as an alternative to the decay and crisis hastened in by colonization and close in its wake, modernity and its gran narratives. His was not a mere superficial involvement with the political an social forces of his times-a mere tip of the ice-berg for him-- but a more profund one that led on to a deeper engagement with the total transformation of human's being. Towards that end he raised cardinal questions about human evolution and spiritual intersection, and problematised the location and position of the human (in his specific system-mental) being. He experienced the anguish and laceration of a soul in the mystical quest of the absolute and it is in his poetry and the continued attempt at a poetic resolution of the situation of being that we sense the evidence of the struggle. And as I attempt to show, the two cardinal features of his aesthetic are austerity- that led him into yogic askesis-and his notion of avesa-that led him on to his theorizing of an overhead aesthesis. Either way his is a philosophy of integral bliss, of ananda, of akhanda rasa.