Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

of thought:

      A hollow physical shell persisted still.

      All seemed a brilliant shadow of itself,

      A cosmic film of scenes and images:

      The enduring mass and outline of the hills

      Was a design sketched on a silent mind

      And held to a tremulous false solidity

      By constant beats of visionary sight.

      The forest with its emerald multitudes

      Clothed with its show of hues vague empty Space,

      A painting’s colours hiding a surface void

      That flickered upon dissolution’s edge;

      The blue heavens, an illusion of the eyes,

      Roofed in the mind’s illusion of a world.

      The men who walked beneath an unreal sky

      Seemed mobile puppets out of cardboard cut

      And pushed by unseen hands across the soil

      Or moving pictures upon Fancy’s film:

      There was no soul within, no power of life.

      The brain’s vibrations that appear like thought,

      The nerve’s brief answer to each contact’s knock,

      The heart’s quiverings felt as joy and grief and love

      Were twitchings of the body, their seeming self,

      That body forged from atoms and from gas

      A manufactured lie of Maya’s make,

      Its life a dream seen by the sleeping Void.

      The animals lone or trooping through the glades

      Fled like a passing vision of beauty and grace

      Imagined by some all-creating Eye.

      Yet something was there behind the fading scene;

      Wherever she turned, at whatsoever she looked,

      It was perceived, yet hid from mind and sight.

      The One only real shut itself from Space

      And stood aloof from the idea of Time.

      Its truth escaped from shape and line and hue.

      All else grew unsubstantial, self-annulled,

      This only everlasting seemed and true,

      Yet nowhere dwelt, it was outside the hours.

      This only could justify the labour of sight,

      But sight could not define for it a form;

      This only could appease the unsatisfied ear

      But hearing listened in vain for a missing sound;

      This answered not the sense, called not to Mind.

      It met her as the uncaught inaudible Voice

      That speaks for ever from the Unknowable.

      It met her like an omnipresent point

      Pure of dimensions, unfixed, invisible,

      The single oneness of its multiplied beat

      Accentuating its sole eternity.

      It faced her as some vast Nought’s immensity,

      An endless No to all that seems to be,

      An endless Yes to things ever unconceived

      And all that is unimagined and unthought,

      An eternal zero or untotalled Aught,

      A spaceless and a placeless Infinite.

      Yet eternity and infinity seemed but words

      Vainly affixed by mind’s incompetence

      To its stupendous lone reality.

      The world is but a spark-burst from its light,

      All moments flashes from its Timelessness,

      All objects glimmerings of the Bodiless

      That disappear from Mind when That is seen.

      It held, as if a shield before its face,

      A consciousness that saw without a seer,

      The Truth where knowledge is not nor knower nor known,

      The Love enamoured of its own delight

      In which the Lover is not nor the Beloved

      Bringing their personal passion into the Vast,

      The Force omnipotent in quietude,

      The Bliss that none can ever hope to taste.

      It cancelled the convincing cheat of self;

      A truth in nothingness was its mighty clue.

      If all existence could renounce to be

      And Being take refuge in Non-being’s arms

      And Non-being could strike out its ciphered round,

      Some lustre of that Reality might appear.

      A formless liberation came on her.

      Once sepulchred alive in brain and flesh

      She had risen up from body, mind and life;

      She was no more a Person in a world,

      She had escaped into infinity.

      What once had been herself had disappeared;

      There was no frame of things, no figure of soul.

      A refugee from the domain of sense,

      Evading the necessity of thought,

      Delivered from Knowledge and from Ignorance

      And rescued from the true and the untrue,

      She shared the Superconscient’s high retreat

      Beyond the self-born Word, the nude Idea,

      The first bare solid ground of consciousness;

      Beings were not there, existence had no place,

      There was no temptation of the joy to be.

      Unutterably effaced, no one and null,

      A vanishing vestige like a violet trace,

      A faint record merely of a self now past,

      She was a point in the unknowable.

      Only some last annulment now remained,

      Annihilation’s vague indefinable step:

      A memory of being still was there

      And kept her separate from nothingness:

      She was in That but still became not That.

      This shadow of herself so close to nought

      Could be again self’s point d’appui to live,

      Return out of the Inconceivable

      And be what some mysterious vast might choose.

      Even as the Unknowable decreed,

      She might be nought or new-become the All,

      Or if the omnipotent Nihil took a shape

      Emerge as someone and redeem the world.

      Even, she might learn what the mystic cipher held,

      This seeming exit or closed end of all

      Could be a blind tenebrous passage screened from sight,

      Her