Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

decree,

      The word of Fate that fell from heavenly lips

      Fixing a doom no power could ever reverse

      Unless heaven’s will itself could change its course.

      Or so it seemed: yet from the silence rose

      One voice that questioned changeless destiny,

      A will that strove against the immutable Will.

      A mother’s heart had heard the fateful speech

      That rang like a sanction to the call of death

      And came like a chill close to life and hope.

      Yet hope sank down like an extinguished fire.

      She felt the leaden inevitable hand

      Invade the secrecy of her guarded soul

      And smite with sudden pain its still content

      And the empire of her hard-won quietude.

      Awhile she fell to the level of human mind,

      A field of mortal grief and Nature’s law;

      She shared, she bore the common lot of men

      And felt what common hearts endure in Time.

      Voicing earth’s question to the inscrutable power

      The queen now turned to the still immobile seer:

      Assailed by the discontent in Nature’s depths,

      Partner in the agony of dumb driven things

      And all the misery, all the ignorant cry,

      Passionate like sorrow questioning heaven she spoke.

      Lending her speech to the surface soul on earth

      She uttered the suffering in the world’s dumb heart

      And man’s revolt against his ignorant fate.

      “O seer, in the earth’s strange twi-natured life

      By what pitiless adverse Necessity

      Or what cold freak of a Creator’s will,

      By what random accident or governed Chance

      That shaped a rule out of fortuitous steps,

      Made destiny from an hour’s emotion, came

      Into the unreadable mystery of Time

      The direr mystery of grief and pain?

      Is it thy God who made this cruel law?

      Or some disastrous Power has marred his work

      And he stands helpless to defend or save?

      A fatal seed was sown in life’s false start

      When evil twinned with good on earthly soil.

      Then first appeared the malady of mind,

      Its pang of thought, its quest for the aim of life.

      It twisted into forms of good and ill

      The frank simplicity of the animal’s acts;

      It turned the straight path hewn by the body’s gods,

      Followed the zigzag of the uncertain course

      Of life that wanders seeking for its aim

      In the pale starlight falling from thought’s skies,

      Its guides the unsure idea, the wavering will.

      Lost was the instinct’s safe identity

      With the arrow-point of being’s inmost sight,

      Marred the sure steps of Nature’s simple walk

      And truth and freedom in the growing soul.

      Out of some ageless innocence and peace,

      Privilege of souls not yet betrayed to birth,

      Cast down to suffer on this hard dangerous earth

      Our life was born in pain and with a cry.

      Although earth-nature welcomes heaven’s breath

      Inspiring Matter with the will to live,

      A thousand ills assail the mortal’s hours

      And wear away the natural joy of life;

      Our bodies are an engine cunningly made,

      But for all its parts as cunningly are planned,

      Contrived ingeniously with demon skill,

      Its apt inevitable heritage

      Of mortal danger and peculiar pain,

      Its payment of the tax of Time and Fate,

      Its way to suffer and its way to die.

      This is the ransom of our high estate,

      The sign and stamp of our humanity.

      A grisly company of maladies

      Come, licensed lodgers, into man’s bodily house,

      Purveyors of death and torturers of life.

      In the malignant hollows of the world,

      In its subconscient cavern-passages

      Ambushed they lie waiting their hour to leap,

      Surrounding with danger the sieged city of life:

      Admitted into the citadel of man’s days

      They mine his force and maim or suddenly kill.

      Ourselves within us lethal forces nurse;

      We make of our own enemies our guests:

      Out of their holes like beasts they creep and gnaw

      The chords of the divine musician’s lyre

      Till frayed and thin the music dies away

      Or crashing snaps with a last tragic note.

      All that we are is like a fort beset:

      All that we strive to be alters like a dream

      In the grey sleep of Matter’s ignorance.

      Mind suffers lamed by the world’s disharmony

      And the unloveliness of human things.

      A treasure misspent or cheaply, fruitlessly sold

      In the bazaar of a blind destiny,

      A gift of priceless value from Time’s gods

      Lost or mislaid in an uncaring world,

      Life is a marvel missed, an art gone wry;

      A seeker in a dark and obscure place,

      An ill-armed warrior facing dreadful odds,

      An imperfect worker given a baffling task,

      An ignorant judge of problems Ignorance made,

      Its heavenward flights reach closed and keyless gates,

      Its glorious outbursts peter out in mire.

      On Nature’s gifts to man a curse was laid:

      All walks inarmed by its own opposites,

      Error is the comrade of our mortal thought

      And falsehood lurks in the deep bosom of truth,

      Sin poisons with its vivid flowers of joy

      Or leaves a red scar burnt across the soul;

      Virtue is a grey bondage and a gaol.

      At every step is laid for us a snare.

      Alien to reason