Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

wandered among things half-seen, half-guessed,

      Pursued by ungrasped beginnings and lost ends.

      There life was born but died before it could live.

      There was no solid ground, no constant drift;

      Only some flame of mindless Will had power.

      Himself was dim to himself, half-felt, obscure,

      As if in a struggle of the Void to be.

      In strange domains where all was living sense

      But mastering thought was not nor cause nor rule,

      Only a crude child-heart cried for toys of bliss,

      Mind flickered, a disordered infant glow,

      And random shapeless energies drove towards form

      And took each wisp-fire for a guiding sun.

      This blindfold force could place no thinking step;

      Asking for light she followed darkness’ clue.

      An inconscient Power groped towards consciousness,

      Matter smitten by Matter glimmered to sense,

      Blind contacts, slow reactions beat out sparks

      Of instinct from a cloaked subliminal bed,

      Sensations crowded, dumb substitutes for thought,

      Perception answered Nature’s wakening blows

      But still was a mechanical response,

      A jerk, a leap, a start in Nature’s dream,

      And rude unchastened impulses jostling ran

      Heedless of every motion but their own

      And, darkling, clashed with darker than themselves,

      Free in a world of settled anarchy.

      The need to exist, the instinct to survive

      Engrossed the tense precarious moment’s will

      And an unseeing desire felt out for food.

      The gusts of Nature were the only law,

      Force wrestled with force, but no result remained:

      Only were achieved a nescient grasp and drive

      And feelings and instincts knowing not their source,

      Sense-pleasures and sense-pangs soon caught, soon lost,

      And the brute motion of unthinking lives.

      It was a vain unnecessary world

      Whose will to be brought poor and sad results

      And meaningless suffering and a grey unease.

      Nothing seemed worth the labour to become.

      But judged not so his spirit’s wakened eye.

      As shines a solitary witness star

      That burns apart, Light’s lonely sentinel,

      In the drift and teeming of a mindless Night,

      A single thinker in an aimless world

      Awaiting some tremendous dawn of God,

      He saw the purpose in the works of Time.

      Even in that aimlessness a work was done

      Pregnant with magic will and change divine.

      The first writhings of the cosmic serpent Force

      Uncoiled from the mystic ring of Matter’s trance;

      It raised its head in the warm air of life.

      It could not cast off yet Night’s stiffening sleep

      Or wear as yet mind’s wonder-flecks and streaks,

      Put on its jewelled hood the crown of soul

      Or stand erect in the blaze of spirit’s sun.

      As yet were only seen foulness and force,

      The secret crawl of consciousness to light

      Through a fertile slime of lust and battening sense,

      Beneath the body’s crust of thickened self

      A tardy fervent working in the dark,

      The turbid yeast of Nature’s passionate change,

      Ferment of the soul’s creation out of mire.

      A heavenly process donned this grey disguise,

      A fallen ignorance in its covert night

      Laboured to achieve its dumb unseemly work,

      A camouflage of the Inconscient’s need

      To release the glory of God in Nature’s mud.

      His sight, spiritual in embodying orbs,

      Could pierce through the grey phosphorescent haze

      And scan the secrets of the shifting flux

      That animates these mute and solid cells

      And leads the thought and longing of the flesh

      And the keen lust and hunger of its will.

      This too he tracked along its hidden stream

      And traced its acts to a miraculous fount.

      A mystic Presence none can probe nor rule,

      Creator of this game of ray and shade

      In this sweet and bitter paradoxical life,

      Asks from the body the soul’s intimacies

      And by the swift vibration of a nerve

      Links its mechanic throbs to light and love.

      It summons the spirit’s sleeping memories

      Up from subconscient depths beneath Time’s foam;

      Oblivious of their flame of happy truth,

      Arriving with heavy eyes that hardly see,

      They come disguised as feelings and desires,

      Like weeds upon the surface float awhile

      And rise and sink on a somnambulist tide.

      Impure, degraded though her motions are,

      Always a heaven-truth broods in life’s deeps;

      In her obscurest members burns that fire.

      A touch of God’s rapture in creation’s acts,

      A lost remembrance of felicity

      Lurks still in the dumb roots of death and birth,

      The world’s senseless beauty mirrors God’s delight.

      That rapture’s smile is secret everywhere;

      It flows in the wind’s breath, in the tree’s sap,

      Its hued magnificence blooms in leaves and flowers.

      When life broke through its half-drowse in the plant

      That feels and suffers but cannot move or cry,

      In beast and in winged bird and thinking man

      It made of the heart’s rhythm its music’s beat;

      It forced the unconscious tissues to awake

      And ask for happiness and earn the pang

      And thrill with pleasure and laughter of brief delight,

      And quiver with pain and crave for ecstasy.

      Imperative, voiceless, ill-understood,

      Too far from