Waiting for grace

Author(s): Kathleen Raine

Source: India International Centre Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 1 (SPRING 1987), pp. 91-94
Published by: India International Centre
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23001457
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 Kathleen Raine

Waiting for grace

Kathleen Raine sent us these reflections after the conclusion of the week-long

conference—"Tradition: a Continual Renewal", held here in collaboration with

the Indian Council of Cultural Relations, where she had delivered the keynote
address.

the week of our consideration of the theme 'Tradition: A

Continual Renewal' — a theme that for us has ceased to be of merely

academic interest throughout our fast-changing world—some

During remarkable papers were read and searching, thoughtful discussions

took place in the conference room of the India International Centre and outside.

We have all learned much in the — a process not of finding an answer

process
to a question, but rather of dissolving question and answer alike into a deeper

understanding.

The — for there was a question — which we came to ask ourselves

question
and one another, surely, is that to which Raja Rao referred during our discus

sions, formulated by the Irish mystic AE. AE was himself actively involved in

establishing dairy cooperatives throughout Ireland and for many years edited
an agricultural journal, The Homestead. AE's question was, how to make 'the

politics of time' correspond to 'the politics of eternity? That, surely, is the very
task of our life on earth in every time and place and, as we move into the age
of technology, it is still the most important question we must ask and answer.

It was not the purpose of our conference to offer solutions in terms of

and means of use of the limitless — and

practical ways making seemingly
so — material humankind now Still
potentially dangerous powers possesses.
less was it our purpose to suggest that technology is the enemy of the good life.

Some countries too little technology, others too much or of the wrong
possess
kind, but, like it or not, our world has moved into a technological age. It was

not even our purpose to discuss what the late Dr. Schumacher called 'appropriate

technology' or which might better be named, as Keith Critchlow suggested,

91

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92 / India International Quarterly

'wise technology'. We did not meet to discuss technology at all, but those abiding
human values that in all times and places must determine our choices and our

happiness. Not 'the politics of time' but 'the politics of eternity' has been our

theme. Not technology but our own unwisdom is the danger to our world.

Dazzled as we have been by the great recent advances of science and its

myriad applications, have we not tended to forget the politics of eternity? Those

value-systems, without which the soul cannot live, are far too important to be

left to science and technology to determine, as we are swept along in a kind of

fatalism, as if the machines we ourselves have made, had minds and purposes
of their own, which we must serve and obey.

Traditionally, those value-systems have been the domain of saints and

sages and visionaries, of holy men and women, of wise philosophers, and of the
inherited wisdom of a people, handed down the generations by mothers and

grandmothers, in the form of customs and ceremonies, the arts of song and

story and dance, all the crafts of making and doing, which protect and preserve
the innocence and beauty of life; codes of moral conduct and attitudes of mind

passed down from father to son, as in India's Ramayana and Mahabharata.

Here in India one is aware that all this still deeply exists, though not without
threats from without and from within. Ultimately, is it not the sanctity of holy
men and the power of woman—of that powerful life-nourishing feminine prin
ciple whose vehicle here in India is not the dove but the lion—which sustains,
invisibly and from within, the soul of the world?

Nowhere on this at this I think — and never since

planet time, perhaps
the Paris of Abelard, or the Florentine Academy, or maybe even that Alexandria

where the great Plotinus (himself influenced by a current flowing from India)
founded his school of Neoplatonic wisdom — would it have been to
possible
consider these profound matters, as here and now in India. We have been happy
to discover that there is no danger, at least, of a failing of India's age-old
tradition of that ultimate wisdom to which, as Raja Rao has reminded us, India

has always aspired, not with a mere cold intellectual curiosity but with burning

passion. India has produced, during the period from about 1820 to the present
time, as many great philosophers as she did between the seventh and the

thirteenth centuries.

We have heard the voice of that tradition many times from the speakers

during these past days, with something like awe. There is a renaissance of

wisdom astir, it seems. Our western poet, W.B. Yeats, wrote some fifty years

ago that 'the three provincial centuries are over. Wisdom and poetry return'.

The prophecies of great poets are self-fulfilling. And it was to India that Yeats

himself looked for a renewal of our whole indivisible world.

Wisdom and poetry, Yeats wrote: for, do they not go together? Are not

poetry and the other arts the veins which carry the life-stream of wisdom into
the world, circulating through all our lives, nourishing and our souls?
refreshing
We have heard the music of India and seen the beauty of the dance,
everlasting

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whose dancers change but whose deathless ecstasy always renews itself. All

these things have taught us, healed us. Are we to let the television set, a
commercialized technology's substitute for culture, destroy with its lifeless im

ages, that dance, that everlasting music? If this is not to happen, the poets
themselves, the painters, the musicians, the architects of the New Age, must

look to their tasks, look to the source of light and wisdom, or be swept away
by the blind forces of material power we have released into the world, uncurbed

by spiritual vision of the sacred source of all being. There has been a trahison

des clercs — a betrayal the intellectuals of the modern world. Not the
by least,

poets themselves, those 'unacknowledged legislators', have betrayed, under the

all-pervading influence of current materialist ideologies, those very values it is

their task to communicate through their work. And so with the other arts which

but do to heal, our modern ills. Our task — and those of us

reflect, nothing
who one or another of the arts — is to sustain the life of the
especially practice
soul of the world.

What has this Conference achieved? What can any conference achieve?

Not, certainly, a neat packet of answers and solutions that will change the world

overnight. At best we may have changed ourselves a little, in a reorientation

brought about by our meeting together. This surely has been so. We came,
some of us deeply, not to say desperately, troubled about the way things are in

our present world. We have met in devotion to the highest intent of which each

of us is capable. We have, perhaps, offered ourselves in a collective act of what

you, in India, call Yagna; the word is new to me; for we in the West have

largely forgotton the meaning of'sacrifice'. It does not occur in the vocabulary
of our affluent consumerist society. So, at least, Andrei Tarkovsky has told us
in his most recent film, which bears that title, Sacrifice. Whatever misun

derstandings, misconceptions, and prejudices we may each have brought with

us at the outset — I believe I speak for us all — have been resolved, dissolved,
in a collective act of Yagna in which these have been burned up in the fire of
a devotion which has arisen us — to use the Pentecostal Christian
among or,

symbol, descended upon us.

Such a collective act makes a bond, as among spiritual brothers and sisters.
The Rosicrucians, bearers of the light of wisdom throughout Europe's centuries

of declining spirituality, were known as the fama fraternitatis. None knew pre

cisely who these secret brothers and sisters were, but they recognize one another

when they come together. And surely they still come together, here or there in

this world, knitting those secret bonds of the spirit, which form an invisible
living network through which the current of the world's inner life flows.There

is a spirit, AE said, which runs up and down through all things and which can
as easily bring together men and women from the far ends of the earth as we

can bring together our two hands. One life and one work unite all who have

entered into this spirit.

In thanking the Government of India, the India International Centre,

and all those who have brought about this meeting of minds, I would like to

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94 / India International Quarterly

add only that those of us who have come from outside India to participate and

to contribute, have come also to supplicate. There have been moments in the
of the world — all too brief — when AE's vision of the of time
history politics

guided by the wisdom of the politics of eternity has been realized. Such a
moment was here in India, during the lifetime of Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhiji
believed in the politics of eternity and what he represented resounded throughout
the world and enlightened us all. When in 1958 Europe's last great statesman,
General de Gaulle, who was himself alive to those eternal values, sent to India

his Minister of Culture, Andre Malraux, he instructed him to tell Prime Minsiter
Nehru, 'ce n'est pas ce que I'Europepourrait donner a I'Inde, mais ce que I'Inde peut nous
donner,'—It is not what Europe might give to India, but what India can give
us.' We also are deeply aware that such is the truth. □

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