Creative Unity | Page 3

man which is his kinship
of love with the Infinite. Thus we find it is the One which expresses
itself in creation; and the Many, by giving up opposition, make the
revelation of unity perfect.
II
I remember, when I was a child, that a row of cocoanut trees by our
garden wall, with their branches beckoning the rising sun on the
horizon, gave me a companionship as living as I was myself. I know it
was my imagination which transmuted the world around me into my
own world--the imagination which seeks unity, which deals with it. But
we have to consider that this companionship was true; that the universe
in which I was born had in it an element profoundly akin to my own
imaginative mind, one which wakens in all children's natures the
Creator, whose pleasure is in interweaving the web of creation with His
own patterns of many-coloured strands. It is something akin to us, and
therefore harmonious to our imagination. When we find some strings
vibrating in unison with others, we know that this sympathy carries in it
an eternal reality. The fact that the world stirs our imagination in
sympathy tells us that this creative imagination is a common truth both
in us and in the heart of existence. Wordsworth says:
I'd rather be A pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing
on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, Or hear old Triton blow his
wreathèd horn.
In this passage the poet says we are less forlorn in a world which we
meet with our imagination. That can only be possible if through our
imagination is revealed, behind all appearances, the reality which gives
the touch of companionship, that is to say, something which has an
affinity to us. An immense amount of our activity is engaged in making
images, not for serving any useful purpose or formulating rational
propositions, but for giving varied responses to the varied touches of
this reality. In this image-making the child creates his own world in

answer to the world in which he finds himself. The child in us finds
glimpses of his eternal playmate from behind the veil of things, as
Proteus rising from the sea, or Triton blowing his wreathèd horn. And
the playmate is the Reality, that makes it possible for the child to find
delight in activities which do not inform or bring assistance but merely
express. There is an image-making joy in the infinite, which inspires in
us our joy in imagining. The rhythm of cosmic motion produces in our
mind the emotion which is creative.
A poet has said about his destiny as a dreamer, about the worthlessness
of his dreams and yet their permanence:
I hang 'mid men my heedless head, And my fruit is dreams, as theirs is
bread: The goodly men and the sun-hazed sleeper, Time shall reap; but
after the reaper The world shall glean to me, me the sleeper.
The dream persists; it is more real than even bread which has substance
and use. The painted canvas is durable and substantial; it has for its
production and transport to market a whole array of machines and
factories. But the picture which no factory can produce is a dream, a
máyá, and yet it, not the canvas, has the meaning of ultimate reality.
A poet describes Autumn:
I saw old Autumn in the misty morn Stand shadowless like Silence,
listening To silence, for no lonely bird would sing Into his hollow ear
from woods forlorn.
Of April another poet sings:
April, April, Laugh thy girlish laughter; Then the moment after Weep
thy girlish tears! April, that mine ears Like a lover greetest, If I tell thee,
sweetest, All my hopes and fears.
April, April, Laugh thy golden laughter. But the moment after Weep
thy golden tears!
This Autumn, this April,--are they nothing but phantasy?

Let us suppose that the Man from the Moon comes to the earth and
listens to some music in a gramophone. He seeks for the origin of the
delight produced in his mind. The facts before him are a cabinet made
of wood and a revolving disc producing sound; but the one thing which
is neither seen nor can be explained is the truth of the music, which his
personality must immediately acknowledge as a personal message. It is
neither in the wood, nor in the disc, nor in the sound of the notes. If the
Man from the Moon be a poet, as can reasonably be supposed, he will
write about a fairy imprisoned in that box, who sits spinning fabrics of
songs expressing her cry for a far-away magic casement opening on the
foam of some perilous sea, in