Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

all would cease to be.

      All else is only its outcome or its phase:

      Thy soul is a brief flower by the gardener Mind

      Created in thy matter’s terrain plot;

      It perishes with the plant on which it grows,

      For from earth’s sap it draws its heavenly hue:

      Thy thoughts are gleams that pass on Matter’s verge,

      Thy life a lapsing wave on Matter’s sea.

      A careful steward of Truth’s limited means,

      Treasuring her founded facts from the squandering Power,

      It tethers mind to the tent-posts of sense,

      To a leaden grey routine clamps Life’s caprice

      And ties all creatures with the cords of Law.

      A vessel of transmuting alchemies,

      A glue that sticks together mind and life,

      If Matter fails, all crumbling cracks and falls.

      All upon Matter stands as on a rock.

      Yet this security and guarantor

      Pressed for credentials an impostor proves:

      A cheat of substance where no substance is,

      An appearance and a symbol and a nought,

      Its forms have no original right to birth:

      Its aspect of a fixed stability

      Is the cover of a captive motion’s swirl,

      An order of the steps of Energy’s dance

      Whose footmarks leave for ever the same signs,

      A concrete face of unsubstantial Time,

      A trickle dotting the emptiness of Space:

      A stable-seeming movement without change,

      Yet change arrives and the last change is death.

      What seemed most real once, is Nihil’s show.

      Its figures are snares that trap and prison the sense;

      The beginningless Void was its artificer:

      Nothing is there but aspects limned by Chance

      And seeming shapes of seeming Energy.

      All by Death’s mercy breathe and live awhile,

      All think and act by the Inconscient’s grace.

      Addict of the roseate luxury of thy thoughts,

      Turn not thy gaze within thyself to look

      At visions in the gleaming crystal, Mind,

      Close not thy lids to dream the forms of Gods.

      At last to open thy eyes consent and see

      The stuff of which thou and the world are made.

      Inconscient in the dumb inconscient Void

      Inexplicably a moving world sprang forth:

      Awhile secure, happily insensible,

      It could not rest content with its own truth.

      For something on its nescient breast was born

      Condemned to see and know, to feel and love,

      It watched its acts, imagined a soul within;

      It groped for truth and dreamed of Self and God.

      When all unconscious was, then all was well.

      I, Death, was king and kept my regal state,

      Designing my unwilled, unerring plan,

      Creating with a calm insentient heart.

      In my sovereign power of unreality

      Obliging nothingness to take a form,

      Infallibly my blind unthinking force

      Making by chance a fixity like fate’s,

      By whim the formulas of Necessity,

      Founded on the hollow ground of the Inane

      The sure bizarrerie of Nature’s scheme.

      I curved the vacant ether into Space;

      A huge expanding and contracting Breath

      Harboured the fires of the universe:

      I struck out the supreme original spark

      And spread its sparse ranked armies through the Inane,

      Manufactured the stars from the occult radiances,

      Marshalled the platoons of the invisible dance;

      I formed earth’s beauty out of atom and gas,

      And built from chemic plasm the living man.

      Then Thought came in and spoiled the harmonious world:

      Matter began to hope and think and feel,

      Tissue and nerve bore joy and agony.

      The inconscient cosmos strove to learn its task;

      An ignorant personal God was born in Mind

      And to understand invented reason’s law,

      The impersonal Vast throbbed back to man’s desire,

      A trouble rocked the great world’s blind still heart

      And Nature lost her wide immortal calm.

      Thus came this warped incomprehensible scene

      Of souls emmeshed in life’s delight and pain

      And Matter’s sleep and Mind’s mortality,

      Of beings in Nature’s prison waiting death

      And consciousness left in seeking ignorance

      And evolution’s slow arrested plan.

      This is the world in which thou mov’st, astray

      In the tangled pathways of the human mind,

      In the issueless circling of thy human life,

      Searching for thy soul and thinking God is here.

      But where is room for soul or place for God

      In the brute immensity of a machine?

      A transient Breath thou takest for thy soul,

      Born from a gas, a plasm, a sperm, a gene,

      A magnified image of man’s mind for God,

      A shadow of thyself thrown upon Space.

      Interposed between the upper and nether Void,

      Thy consciousness reflects the world around

      In the distorting mirror of Ignorance

      Or upwards turns to catch imagined stars.

      Or if a half-Truth is playing with the earth

      Throwing its light on a dark shadowy ground,

      It touches only and leaves a luminous smudge.

      Immortality thou claimest for thy spirit,

      But immortality for imperfect man,

      A god who hurts himself at every step,

      Would be a cycle of eternal pain.

      Wisdom and love thou claimest as thy right;

      But knowledge in this world is error’s mate,

      A brilliant procuress of Nescience,

      And human love