Touch Me Through Intertices

"... a useful reminder of the radical, even antinomian side of Tagore’s spirituality. This is the Tagore we see in a poem like “The Restless One,” which pictures the divine as pure motion:

You race on, race on, furiously you race
wild, running apace, Never turning your face;
Whatever you have, you scatter with both hands as you go.

When Tagore speaks abstractly about his spiritual beliefs—as in “The Problem of Self,” a selection from lectures that he delivered in America in 1913—he can sound almost Buddhist, calling for the annihilation of the self. “The freedom which Buddha preached,” he writes, can be compared to a lamp that burns its oil to illuminate the world. But the striking thing about Tagore’s poetry is how little affinity he shows for Buddhist notions of detachment, or of the world as a realm of suffering. Tagore does not want to snuff out the self like a candle; he wants to plunge it joyfully into the ocean that is the world. In the “Travel” essay, he describes the sea as “this boundless expanse of prohibition,” in which man cannot live. “But this negation also bore within it a great invitation. The waves were dancing in noisy mirth. . . . Looking at them, one felt as if millions of children had been released from school.”

This image powerfully echoes one of the key realizations of Tagore’s childhood, as described in “My Reminiscences.” As the youngest of fourteen children, he was kept under constant watch by the family’s servants, and was forbidden to go outside by himself. “We perforce took our peeps at nature from behind the barriers,” he recalled. “Beyond my reach there was this limitless thing called the Outside, of which flashes and sounds and scents used momentarily to come and touch me through its interstices. It seemed to want to play with me through the bars with so many gestures. But it was free and I was bound—there was no way of meeting.”

Here, Tagore suggests, was his first encounter with the polarity that obsessed him all his life: inside and outside, free and bound, self and other—finally, life and death. In all his writing, he ranged himself on the side of freedom—political, social, personal. But the surest sign of his genius was the paradoxical way in which he imagined a metaphysical freedom. Ordinarily, we think of life as the realm of free action, death as confinement and nullity. But, for Tagore, it was life that meant confinement in subjectivity, while death was liberation into the free play of being. “The world as an art is the play of the Supreme Person reveling in image-making,” he writes. “You may call it maya”—that is, illusion—“and pretend to disbelieve it; but the great artist, the Mayavin, is not hurt. For art is maya, it has no other explanation but that it seems to be what it is.” ♦

~ Adam Kirsch directs the M.A. program in Jewish Studies at Columbia University, excerpted from The New Yorker

Photo ~ Tagore was delivering a speech and Helen Keller was understanding that by putting a her palm on his lips to feel the movement of lip as she could not hear.