Sumana Roy is an author and poet. Her books include How I Became a Tree and Provincials
As Instagram reels and YouTube shorts become our life coaches, and we are reminded by experts that the world outside us is only a ‘manifestation’ of our thoughts, I often grow nervous about my interior. The impurities of the stream of consciousness must be filtered out so that my future can become better, a little more acceptable. This new schooling that now comes to us relentlessly from mindfulness and wellness experts makes me anxious. The external world is also outside our control, but it is perhaps easier to place a vase on a table, build a bridge across a river, prune a tree and fold clothes than letting these verbs work on our thoughts.
The most interesting moments in human history are marked by interventions when the distinction between the outer and inner worlds becomes pronounced or when it seems to collapse. The documentation of watching a play written by Kalidasa, that could produce a range of emotions inside a human being, is one such moment – Bharatmuni is trying to catalogue the relationship between the physical world that exists outside, that has been gathered on the stage, with the responses that are generated inside us. He calls it rasa, a word that can hold in it the same sense of fluidity as stream of consciousness. If the world outside us is composed of all the states of matter, why does the human experience it inside only as fluid?
Even as that question continues to engage us, other developments keep happening around us. One of these impulses was to see the inside the way one could see the outside, like a park or a trapeze artist, for instance. Roentgen would make the park inside us visible through the X-ray machine; the endoscope allowed doctors to see the trapeze-like performance of bacteria inside us. These sightings of our inside, so long left to belief and assumption, would allow in-sights that would mark a bend in art and literature and, soon enough, cinema.
Nearly every century – and nearly every culture – is marked by such an exploration of the relationship between the outside and the inside. The boundaries between the two keep shifting, and the urge to bring down this partition has triggered scientific innovation and experimental art. ‘Get it out of yourself’, a multi-purpose phrase now, comes from this lineage – that it is important for the inside to become outside. More than ever, in this world where everyone has become a producer of distraction, where almost everything inside us is being marketed as ‘talent’, I am occasionally led to think of how hard the expression of the relationship between the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ has been, particularly for women.
Emily Dickinson, whose relationship with the ‘outer’ was complicated, begins by putting an em dash in the title of her poem The Outer – from the Inner to show the separateness of these worlds. ‘The Outer––from the Inner/Derives its Magnitude––/’Tis Duke, or Dwarf, according/As is the Central Mood––’. The opposites – and oppositions – are framed right away in the first stanza: it’s not only the amusing ‘Magnitude’ versus ‘Mood’, their different registers that derive from outside and inside, one of calibration, the other ineffable, outside measurement; there’s also the social categories from the outer world, of greatness and diminishment, ‘Duke’ and ‘Dwarf’. It’s interesting to think of the equivalents of Duke and Dwarf inside us.
We notice Dickinson sharing a geometry of her understanding of this difference – the inner world has an ‘Axis’, the outer a ‘Wheel’, with its visible ‘Spokes’. There’s a play between ‘Wheel’ and ‘while’, and this reinforces the geometry, our conditioning in the cyclical nature of time, the round wheel, the straight spoke, the tilted axis. She doesn’t stop there – she is intent on ‘painting’ this inner world, the ‘Inner – paints the Outer – The Brush without the Hand’. Two things here: it is the Outer that is trapped inside the two em dashes, and I’ve always imagined Emily smiling at this clever trick; this relationship between the outer and inner comes in a poem by a woman who died four years before the publication of The Principles of Psychology. William James would use the phrase ‘stream of consciousness’. Many years before him, Emily had used the metaphor of water to characterise the same inner world: ‘Lake’.
It is of the ‘Lake’ I think when I see the cover of Slyvia Plath’s The Bell Jar designed by the artist Shirley Tucker – a maze of concentric circles that she meant to reflect the protagonist’s ‘inner’ world, what Dickinson in her poem calls ‘the inner Brand’. On the cover of Plath’s book, I see the ripples of Dickinson’s ‘Lake’: what ‘Eyes were not meant to know’. Rasa. Lake. Stream. The ‘Inner’ is always water.