Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

      Born strangely in Time from the eternal Bliss,

      It presses on heart’s core and vibrant nerve;

      Its sharp self-seeking tears our consciousness;

      Our pain and pleasure have that sting for cause:

      Instinct with it, but blind to its true joy

      The soul’s desire leaps out towards passing things.

      All Nature’s longing drive none can resist,

      Comes surging through the blood and quickened sense;

      An ecstasy of the infinite is her cause.

      It turns in us to finite loves and lusts,

      The will to conquer and have, to seize and keep,

      To enlarge life’s room and scope and pleasure’s range,

      To battle and overcome and make one’s own,

      The hope to mix one’s joy with others’ joy,

      A yearning to possess and be possessed,

      To enjoy and be enjoyed, to feel, to live.

      Here was its early brief attempt to be,

      Its rapid end of momentary delight

      Whose stamp of failure haunts all ignorant life.

      Inflicting still its habit on the cells

      The phantom of a dark and evil start

      Ghostlike pursues all that we dream and do.

      Although on earth are firm established lives,

      A working of habit or a sense of law,

      A steady repetition in the flux,

      Yet are its roots of will ever the same;

      These passions are the stuff of which we are made.

      This was the first cry of the awaking world.

      It clings around us still and clamps the god.

      Even when reason is born and soul takes form,

      In beast and reptile and in thinking man

      It lasts and is the fount of all their life.

      This too was needed that breath and living might be.

      The spirit in a finite ignorant world

      Must rescue so its prisoned consciousness

      Forced out in little jets at quivering points

      From the Inconscient’s sealed infinitude.

      Then slowly it gathers mass, looks up at Light.

      This Nature lives tied to her origin,

      A clutch of nether force is on her still;

      Out of unconscious depths her instincts leap;

      A neighbour is her life to insentient Nought.

      Under this law an ignorant world was made.

      In the enigma of the darkened Vasts,

      In the passion and self-loss of the Infinite

      When all was plunged in the negating Void,

      Non-Being’s night could never have been saved

      If Being had not plunged into the dark

      Carrying with it its triple mystic cross.

      Invoking in world-time the timeless truth,

      Bliss changed to sorrow, knowledge made ignorant,

      God’s force turned into a child’s helplessness

      Can bring down heaven by their sacrifice.

      A contradiction founds the base of life:

      The eternal, the divine Reality

      Has faced itself with its own contraries;

      Being became the Void and Conscious-Force

      Nescience and walk of a blind Energy

      And Ecstasy took the figure of world-pain.

      In a mysterious dispensation’s law

      A Wisdom that prepares its far-off ends

      Planned so to start her slow aeonic game.

      A blindfold search and wrestle and fumbling clasp

      Of a half-seen Nature and a hidden Soul,

      A game of hide-and-seek in twilit rooms,

      A play of love and hate and fear and hope

      Continues in the nursery of mind

      Its hard and heavy romp of self-born twins.

      At last the struggling Energy can emerge

      And meet the voiceless Being in wider fields;

      Then can they see and speak and, breast to breast,

      In a larger consciousness, a clearer light,

      The Two embrace and strive and each know each

      Regarding closer now the playmate’s face.

      Even in these formless coilings he could feel

      Matter’s response to an infant stir of soul.

      In Nature he saw the mighty Spirit concealed,

      Watched the weak birth of a tremendous Force,

      Pursued the riddle of Godhead’s tentative pace,

      Heard the faint rhythms of a great unborn Muse.

      Then came a fierier breath of waking Life,

      And there arose from the dim gulf of things

      The strange creations of a thinking sense,

      Existences half-real and half-dream.

      A life was there that hoped not to survive:

      Beings were born who perished without trace,

      Events that were a formless drama’s limbs

      And actions driven by a blind creature will.

      A seeking Power found out its road to form,

      Patterns were built of love and joy and pain

      And symbol figures for the moods of Life.

      An insect hedonism fluttered and crawled

      And basked in a sunlit Nature’s surface thrills,

      And dragon raptures, python agonies

      Crawled in the marsh and mire and licked the sun.

      Huge armoured strengths shook a frail quaking ground,

      Great puissant creatures with a dwarfish brain,

      And pigmy tribes imposed their small life-drift.

      In a dwarf model of humanity

      Nature now launched the extreme experience

      And master-point of her design’s caprice,

      Luminous result of her half-conscious climb

      On rungs twixt her sublimities and grotesques

      To massive from infinitesimal shapes,

      To a subtle balancing of body and soul,

      To an order of intelligent littleness.

      Around him in the moment-beats of Time

      The kingdom of the animal self arose,

      Where deed is all and mind is still half-born

      And the heart obeys