India and the National Value of Art
I would like to say something about his little booklet I picked up when I was visiting Auroville in Pondicherry in India. It is called ‘The National Value Of Art’, by Sri Aurobindo. What caught my eye was that this booklet was first published in six instalments in a magazine in November and December 1909. This was the time between 1890 to 1920 when Art went through a transition from realism to abstraction where Kandinsky played an important part. Kandinsky’s ‘Concerning the spiritual in Art’, was published in around 1912. The whole world was involved in that transition. Auroville was an interesting place to stay in. It was truly a universal township. It was devoted to human unity. I met people from all around the world who had come to stay in Auroville permanently. They had recently completed a meditation hall, which contained the biggest man-made crystal in the world. There was a tracking system that tracked the sun as it travelled east to west so the sun’s rays would focus on the crystal at all times. The crystal was in the centre of the globe and all meditators sat around it to meditate. You could hardly hear a pin drop from inside the dome, and all you could hear was your mind ticking away. Endlessly. Tick tick. Non stop. This or that and everything. Just ticking away. It was annoying to ‘hear’ your own mind. Nothing comes from this noisy mind but confusion. ‘Only stillness speaks,’ as they say. One has to learn to work from that, ‘nucleus of calm.’