Conrad Aiken's "Samadhi"
by Dr. Ian Kluge
According to The Encyclopedia of Eastern Philosophy and Religion , samadhi is
[in Hinduism] a state of consciousness that lies beyond waking, dreaming, and deep sleep, and in which mental activity ceases. It is a total absorption in the object of meditation... [In Buddhism] Collectedness of mind on a single object through (gradual) calming of mental activity...Samadhi is a non-dualistic state of consciousness in which the consciousness of the experiencing "subject" becomes one with the experienced "object" - thus is only experiential content...."
Readers approaching Conrad Aiken's poem "Samadhi" with these definitions - or others of similar nature - in mind are likely to leave the poem confused and disappointed because the poem's subject matter seems to be anything but non-duality, absorption and "[c]ollectedness of mind on a single subject through (gradual) calming of mental activity" (Ibid.). The first of its three stanzas describes a pursuit through a thick and dark forest; the second, a summer day transformed by the cry of a grackle while the third and shortest, is a rather didactic reflection on the meaning of the experiences described in the previous two stanzas. In light of this, superficial readers might feel tempted to conclude that Aiken, clearly ignorant of the meaning of samadhi, mistitled the poem. Deeper consideration, however, reveals that "Samadhi" is not only Aiken's playful re-casting of this concept in terms of his own philosophical beliefs but - in agreement with more conventional understandings of samadhi - is also a part of the initial "calming of mental activity" (ibid.) required to reach the samadhi state. If Aiken appears to be avoiding the subject matter indicated by the title, it is precisely because he understood the concept - if not the experience - of samadhi well enough to refrain from describing it directly and , therefore, contented himself with a poem about its preparatory phases.
Seen in the second, more conventional light, the poem presents no great especially difficulties to interpretation. The first of its three stanzas begins with a challenge - either to a reader, some implicitly present listener or, perhaps, even to the author himself - to
Take then the music; plunge in the thickest of it, -
Thickest, darkest, richest; call it a forest,
A million boles of trees, with leaves, leaves
Golden and green, flashing like scales in the sun,
Tossed and torn in the tempest, whirling and screaming
With the terrible sound, beneath, of boughs that crack. (l.1-6)
Except for the initial command, "Take then the music" (l.1) there are no special mysteries in these lines which really indicate nothing more than that we must find samadhi not in retreat from the world but in the midst of the changes and troubles of life. It requires only a little reflection to conclude that music, by its very nature unceasingly changeable, serves as a symbol of the perpetual flux of existence. Reader's more familiar with Aiken's thought will, of course, recall that Aiken, influenced as he was by the philosophy of Schopenhauer, consistently uses music to symbolize the various physical and metaphysical processes manifesting in the apparent stabilities of the phenomenal world. However, this deeper view of the imperative to "Take then the music" (l.1) does not change the fundamental nature of the narrator's advice.
In the midst of this fearful turbulence marked by the "terrible sound"(l.6) of "boughs that crack" (l.6) - the sounds of genuine injury and suffering reminding us of the First Noble Truth - "a hush comes; and the wind's a whisper"(l.7) and suddenly "You stand in the dusk" (l.8) listening to a strange sound that comes "suddenly, out of the darkest"(l.10) parts of the forest:
That golden horn, cor anglais, husk-timbered
Sending through all this gloom of trees and silence
Its faint half-mute nostalgia...How the soul
Flies from the dungeon of you to the very portals
To meet that sound!
(l. 12-16)
This sound, a "half mute nostalgia (l.14) because it awakens in us a longing to return to our original metaphysical home characterized in some traditions as heaven, in others as the world of Platonic Forms, or as the void, draws the soul out of the "dungeon" (l.15) of ego and ego-identification towards something more sublime. By calling us to "the very portals"(l. 15) of our conscious identities, the golden sound creates awareness of the limited and even oppressive nature of ego-identification and, thereby, reveals a deep metaphysical longing for experiences and understandings that transcend the ordinary:
...There, there is the secret
Singing out of the darkness, - shining too,
For all we know, if we could only see!
(l. 15-17)
Human nature, it seems, is characterized by a transcendental curiosity to know the "secret" (l.15) of existence, and this curiosity, combined with a nostalgia for our original 'home' impels us to pursue this golden sound or clue, regardless of how much we must suffer in so doing:
We rend our violent way through vines and briars,
Crash through the coppice, tear our flesh, come bleeding
To a still pool, encircled, brooded over
By ancient trees - all's one! We reach but silence,
We find no horn, nor hornsman...
(l.23- 27)
This passage contains a good example of Aiken's philosophical sense of humor. The pool and the trees are so close together that they appear as one: this description is made witty (hence the exclamation mark) by virtue of being an allusion to the notion that in the samadhi state, the subject/object distinction disappears. The pool, symbolizing the subjective mind, reflects the surrounding trees so faithfully that one cannot really distinguish it from the trees and, thereby, it helps create a visual image of the concept of samadhi. However, the narrator also notices a deep silence and, after looking around, finds neither hunter nor hornsman; in doing so, he clearly indicates that the soul's quest is not finished - as he seems initially to have expected - and this discovery leaves him standing
...bewildered in that wood
With leaves above us in sibilant confusion,
(l.33-34; italics added)
While standing, he hears the sound of "the horn once more, but further now"(L. 36) and so he turns "inward to seek it once again"(l.40). According to the conventional interpretation of samadhi as given in the entry from The Encyclopedia of Eastern Philosophy and Religion, the narrator has only attained a natural image of the samadhi state and obviously not achieved the real experience of union. Had he done so, the pursuit would end.
In the second long stanza of "Samadhi", Aiken portrays a scene that is the reverse of the one presented in the first stanza.
Or, it's a morning in the blue portal of summer,
White shoals of little clouds like heavenly fish
Swim softly in the sun...
(l. 41-43)
The scene, in contrast to the previous one, is tranquil. The narrator, "pruning, spading, watching / Black-striped bees" (l. 53-54) in his garden and, taking pleasure in the great poplar that "sings in the light with a thousand sensitive leaves"(l. 45), suddenly finds himself disturbed.
...at the golden core of all that joy
One sinister grackle with a thieving eye
Scrapes a harsh cynic comment. How he laughs
Flaunting amid the green his coffin-colour!
(l. 48-51)
He - though in fact he uses "we" to suggest we might have similar experiences of our own - is "startled"(l. 55) and " in the twinkling of a grackle's eye"(l. 57) loses his common sense view of the world. He
Swing[s] in the infinite on a spider cable.
What is our world? It is a poplar tree
Immense and solitary, with leaves a thousand,
Or million, countless, flashing in a light
For them alone intended...
(l. 58-62)
From this transcendent perspective, he sees that the world and the poplar tree share a single essential nature and are so much alike that he questions if the poplar's leaves are really leaves "or stars" (l. 68). Here too the narrator seems to be well on his way to an experiential realization of samadhi since recognizing the essentially single nature of world and tree is only a short remove from recognizing that he himself shares this essential nature as well. The realization of an essential oneness between himself and the surrounding world would, of course, entail the disappearance of the subject/object distinction, "a total absorption in the object of meditation" (The Encyclopedia of Eastern Philosophy and Religion) and a "non-dualistic state of consciousness" (ibid.).
However, as in the first stanza of this poem, the narrator is frustrated in attaining this goal because
We hear again that harsh derisive comment,
The grackle's laughter; and again we see
His thievish eye, aware amid green boughs.
(l. 69-71)
The grackle's cry - like the sound of the "horn once more" (l. 36) - disrupts a moment of incipient samadhi. The narrator now "touch[es] earth again" (l. 72) and, in words obviously chosen to convey his disappointment and frustration, goes back to digging in "the wormy ground" (l. 73; italics added) while the poplar, "[w]hose gold and green are naught but tricks of light'(l. 75; italics added) "[s]ways like a giant dancer" (l. 74) and the "small, lively, cynic" (l. 77) grackle "laughs" (l. 77). Clearly, the narrator feels as if he's been had -at least for now.
The narrator's disappointment, however, does not seem to last, for the tone of the last, and shortest, stanza of this poem is decidedly optimistic.
Who can see the vision coming? Who can tell
What moments out of time will be the seed
To root itself...
...
And flower gigantic in the infinite?
(l. 78-82)
Though frustrated now, he recognizes that "the vision" (l. 78), the ardently desired experience of samadhi may eventually, at some utterly unexpected moment be his - or ours. Consequently, he admonishes himself, and, by extension, us, to
Walk softly through your forest, and be ready
To hear the horn of horns. Or in the garden
Stoop, but upon your back be ever conscious
Of sunlight, and a shadow that may grow,
(l. 83-86)
We must be prepared for this experience at any moment, either in beautiful and satisfying experiences of "sunlight" (l.86) or in the less promising moments of "shadow" (l.86) that inevitably touch all of us from time to time.
However, the ending of this poem is unsatisfactory for being too easy an escape from the tremendous frustration and disappointment experienced by the narrator in the first two stanzas. He has made so much of these negative experiences that no short, rather starkly didactic conclusion merely telling rather than showing, merely preaching instead of creating an aesthetic experience, can provide an adequate counterweight to the power of the preceding unhappy experiences. The unsatisfactory conclusion of "Samadhi" leaves readers with a three-fold choice: the poem is, ultimately, a failure because of its weak ending; it is, despite its title, a highly ironic poem about the failure to reach samadhi; or, the poet was aiming at something else.
The second possibility may be rejected immediately on the grounds that there is nothing in the main body of the poem that encourages an ironic reading. If anything, the poem seems painfully sincere in its transcendental yearnings expressed in a manner more often encountered in such Victorian poets as Tennyson and Matthew Arnold than in the work of twentieth century poets. Having already discussed reasons why the poem may be a failure on account of its weak ending, it remains to be seen whether or not the apparent failure of the poem's ending involves a re-interpretation of the conventional concepts of samadhi.
In viewing the poem as a whole, a curious - but strangely familiar - pattern emerges in the first two stanzas. The first, concerned with a difficult struggle through dark woods may described as a negative experience which, at its core, contains a hint of the positive symbolized by the beautiful sounds of the cor anglais. The second stanza, on the other hand, presents a positive experience of garden work on a beautiful summer morning - an experience suddenly disturbed by the negative, "harsh, cynic comment" (l. 50) of the grackle. Seen thus, the traditional yin/yang pattern appears: a positive in the midst of the negative and a negative in the midst of a positive. We have here not only a well-known symbol of the inter-action of opposites, but also a symbol indicating the endlessness of the world process as opposites inevitably give way to each other. Neither the positive nor the negative can claim victory and the world process, of which we are all a part and whose nature we all share, goes on forever.
Since the world-process and all of its contributing aspects - including humanity - are a process of perpetual change, then samadhi must be the experience of this change, an experience which, by its very nature, must include the loss of samadhi! In other words, as Aiken sees it, samadhi is not a condition attainable once and for all; it is not a condition in which we may rest because such rest and permanence would violate the very process that constitutes our intrinsic nature and the intrinsic nature of the world. That is why in the first stanza, the narrator cannot remain beside the pool he discovers in the depths of the forest and has to resume his search. Indeed, he hears the horn again, "but farther now" (l. 36) precisely because the illusion that rest in samadhi is possible makes the genuine experience of samadhi - as Aiken interprets it - even more remote. By thinking that he has attained samadhi and trying to remain in this state, the narrator loses it; by pursuing it, as though he did not have it, he does, in fact, attain it! Stated in a more starkly paradoxical form this means that if he has it, he doesn't and if he doesn't, he does.
Does this experience of change meet the essential requirement for samadhi, namely, the dissolution of difference and the realization of essential unity? It would appear so, for if change is the essential nature of all beings, then the conscious experience of change eliminates any essential differences between the nature of the experiencing subject and the nature of the experienced object, between I and thou, here and there, now and then, this and that. In experiencing our own change, we experience the change endured by all other things, and, consequently, experience samadhi. Whatever differences exist among things, are, according to the doctrine of samadhi, merely accidental and non-essential and, therefore, overwhelmed by the experience of one-ness. Stated another way, the experience of change is the experience of the essential oneness of all things, of the "total absorption in the object of meditation" (The Encyclopedia of Eastern Philosophy and Religion).
From this it follows that if we allow ourselves to realize it, we would know that we dwell at all times in samadhi, indeed, that we can never escape the samadhi state because even losing awareness of change is a part of change and, therefore, also an integral part of samadhi. We have it even when we think we don't think. Only our consciousness of this fact distinguishes the samadhi state from the 'non-samadhi' state and, given the ubiquity of change, even this consciousness cannot endure unabated but is itself lost and regained continuously throughout our lives. The loss of samadhi is as much a part of the samadhi state as the state itself.
Aiken's interpretation of samadhi, which may or may not accord with Hindu, Buddhist or Zen Buddhist understandings of this state, is consistent with his own Heraclitean philosophical belief that change is the essential nature of reality and, paradoxically, the only certain, unchanging truth we possess is the fact of perpetual changefulness. He has, in other words, adapted the conventional concept of samadhi to what might loosely be called his philosophy of process which is based on an unconditional acceptance of change itself as our only certainty.
Seen in this light, the poem's last stanza is not an artistic failure but an accurate reflection of what happens in the process itself. Such didactic, 'in-between' pauses during which one is intellectually but not experientially aware of samadhi, are also a part of the whole process; after all, in music - which in the very first line of the poem he urges us to take as our prototype: "Take then the music;"(l.1)- pauses, brief moments of change from change itself, are also necessary for music to be what it is. Consequently, the apparently weak final stanza, may be seen as nothing other than an 'objective correlative' for a part of the samadhi process as it actually occurs. Were this stanza eliminated or made more aesthetically powerful or pleasing, it - and, as a result, the entire poem - would cease to be an accurate portrayal of the samdhi process and, as such, dishonest. That this emotionally and aesthetically rather indifferent period will not last is clearly shown in the poem's final line:
Of sunlight and of shadow that may grow.
(l. 86;italics added)
This line and especially its last word, indicate clearly that the didactic and superficially intellectualized phase represented by the last stanza must inevitably change and expand into the kind of phases portrayed in the first two stanzas. The cycle simply continues and "Samadhi" embodies Aiken's recognition of this fact.
A final note: the interpretive possibilities (others, doubtlessly, exist) discovered in Aiken's "Samadhi" serve as a reminder of the subtitles so often hidden in his poetry. Scholars must not be too quick to dismiss Aiken's work simply because of its superficially unpromising appearance or because most his writing eschews the various stylistic mannerisms and conventions of modern poetry. As :"Samadhi" has demonstrated once again, Aiken's poetry richly repays the time and effort invested in understanding it.
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