Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

Consciousness that knows not its own truth,

      A vagrant hunter of misleading dawns,

      Between the being’s dark and luminous ends

      Moves here in a half-light that seems the whole:

      An interregnum in Reality

      Cuts off the integral Thought, the total Power;

      It circles or stands in a vague interspace,

      Doubtful of its beginning and its close,

      Or runs upon a road that has no end;

      Far from the original Dusk, the final Flame

      In some huge void Inconscience it lives,

      Like a thought persisting in a wide emptiness.

      As if an unintelligible phrase

      Suggested a million renderings to the Mind,

      It lends a purport to a random world.

      A conjecture leaning upon doubtful proofs,

      A message misunderstood, a thought confused

      Missing its aim is all that it can speak

      Or a fragment of the universal word.

      It leaves two giant letters void of sense

      While without sanction turns the middle sign

      Carrying an enigmatic universe,

      As if a present without future or past

      Repeating the same revolution’s whirl

      Turned on its axis in its own Inane.

      Thus is the meaning of creation veiled;

      For without context reads the cosmic page:

      Its signs stare at us like an unknown script,

      As if appeared screened by a foreign tongue

      Or code of splendour signs without a key

      A portion of a parable sublime.

      It wears to the perishable creature’s eyes

      The grandeur of a useless miracle;

      Wasting itself that it may last awhile,

      A river that can never find its sea,

      It runs through life and death on an edge of Time;

      A fire in the Night is its mighty action’s blaze.

      This is our deepest need to join once more

      What now is parted, opposite and twain,

      Remote in sovereign spheres that never meet

      Or fronting like far poles of Night and Day.

      We must fill the immense lacuna we have made,

      Re-wed the closed finite’s lonely consonant

      With the open vowels of Infinity,

      A hyphen must connect Matter and Mind,

      The narrow isthmus of the ascending soul:

      We must renew the secret bond in things,

      Our hearts recall the lost divine Idea,

      Reconstitute the perfect word, unite

      The Alpha and the Omega in one sound;

      Then shall the Spirit and Nature be at one.

      Two are the ends of the mysterious plan.

      In the wide signless ether of the Self,

      In the unchanging Silence white and nude,

      Aloof, resplendent like gold dazzling suns

      Veiled by the ray no mortal eye can bear,

      The Spirit’s bare and absolute potencies

      Burn in the solitude of the thoughts of God.

      A rapture and a radiance and a hush,

      Delivered from the approach of wounded hearts,

      Denied to the Idea that looks at grief,

      Remote from the Force that cries out in its pain,

      In his inalienable bliss they live.

      Immaculate in self-knowledge and self-power,

      Calm they repose on the eternal Will.

      Only his law they count and him obey;

      They have no goal to reach, no aim to serve.

      Implacable in their timeless purity,

      All barter or bribe of worship they refuse;

      Unmoved by cry of revolt and ignorant prayer

      They reckon not our virtue and our sin;

      They bend not to the voices that implore,

      They hold no traffic with error and its reign;

      They are guardians of the silence of the Truth,

      They are keepers of the immutable decree.

      A deep surrender is their source of might,

      A still identity their way to know,

      Motionless is their action like a sleep.

      At peace, regarding the trouble beneath the stars,

      Deathless, watching the works of Death and Chance,

      Immobile, seeing the millenniums pass,

      Untouched while the long map of Fate unrolls,

      They look on our struggle with impartial eyes,

      And yet without them cosmos could not be.

      Impervious to desire and doom and hope,

      Their station of inviolable might

      Moveless upholds the world’s enormous task,

      Its ignorance is by their knowledge lit,

      Its yearning lasts by their indifference.

      As the height draws the low ever to climb,

      As the breadths draw the small to adventure vast,

      Their aloofness drives man to surpass himself.

      Our passion heaves to wed the Eternal’s calm,

      Our dwarf-search mind to meet the Omniscient’s light,

      Our helpless hearts to enshrine the Omnipotent’s force.

      Acquiescing in the wisdom that made hell

      And the harsh utility of death and tears,

      Acquiescing in the gradual steps of Time,

      Careless they seem of the grief that stings the world’s heart,

      Careless of the pain that rends its body and life;

      Above joy and sorrow is that grandeur’s walk:

      They have no portion in the good that dies,

      Mute, pure, they share not in the evil done;

      Else might their strength be marred and could not save.

      Alive to the truth that dwells in God’s extremes,

      Awake to a motion of all-seeing Force,

      The slow outcome of the long ambiguous years

      And the unexpected good from woeful deeds,

      The immortal sees not as we vainly see.

      He looks on hidden aspects and screened powers,

      He knows the law and natural line of things.