Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

mind lives far off from the authentic Light

      Catching at little fragments of the Truth

      In a small corner of infinity,

      Our lives are inlets of an ocean’s force.

      Our conscious movements have sealed origins

      But with those shadowy seats no converse hold;

      No understanding binds our comrade parts;

      Our acts emerge from a crypt our minds ignore.

      Our deepest depths are ignorant of themselves;

      Even our body is a mystery shop;

      As our earth’s roots lurk screened below our earth,

      So lie unseen our roots of mind and life.

      Our springs are kept close hid beneath, within;

      Our souls are moved by powers behind the wall.

      In the subterranean reaches of the spirit

      A puissance acts and recks not what it means;

      Using unthinking monitors and scribes,

      It is the cause of what we think and feel.

      The troglodytes of the subconscious Mind,

      Ill-trained slow stammering interpreters

      Only of their small task’s routine aware

      And busy with the record in our cells,

      Concealed in the subliminal secrecies

      Mid an obscure occult machinery,

      Capture the mystic Morse whose measured lilt

      Transmits the messages of the cosmic Force.

      A whisper falls into life’s inner ear

      And echoes from the dun subconscient caves,

      Speech leaps, thought quivers, the heart vibrates, the will

      Answers and tissue and nerve obey the call.

      Our lives translate these subtle intimacies;

      All is the commerce of a secret Power.

      A thinking puppet is the mind of life:

      Its choice is the work of elemental strengths

      That know not their own birth and end and cause

      And glimpse not the immense intent they serve.

      In this nether life of man drab-hued and dull,

      Yet filled with poignant small ignoble things,

      The conscious Doll is pushed a hundred ways

      And feels the push but not the hands that drive.

      For none can see the masked ironic troupe

      To whom our figure-selves are marionettes,

      Our deeds unwitting movements in their grasp,

      Our passionate strife an entertainment’s scene.

      Ignorant themselves of their own fount of strength

      They play their part in the enormous whole.

      Agents of darkness imitating light,

      Spirits obscure and moving things obscure,

      Unwillingly they serve a mightier Power.

      Ananke’s engines organising Chance,

      Channels perverse of a stupendous Will,

      Tools of the Unknown who use us as their tools,

      Invested with power in Nature’s nether state,

      Into the actions mortals think their own

      They bring the incoherencies of Fate,

      Or make a doom of Time’s slipshod caprice

      And toss the lives of men from hand to hand

      In an inconsequent and devious game.

      Against all higher truth their stuff rebels;

      Only to Titan force their will lies prone.

      Inordinate their hold on human hearts,

      In all our nature’s turns they intervene.

      Insignificant architects of low-built lives

      And engineers of interest and desire,

      Out of crude earthiness and muddy thrills

      And coarse reactions of material nerve

      They build our huddled structures of self-will

      And the ill-lighted mansions of our thought,

      Or with the ego’s factories and marts

      Surround the beautiful temple of the soul.

      Artists minute of the hues of littleness,

      They set the mosaic of our comedy

      Or plan the trivial tragedy of our days,

      Arrange the deed, combine the circumstance

      And the fantasia of the moods costume.

      These unwise prompters of man’s ignorant heart

      And tutors of his stumbling speech and will,

      Movers of petty wraths and lusts and hates

      And changeful thoughts and shallow emotion’s starts,

      These slight illusion-makers with their masks,

      Painters of the decor of a dull-hued stage

      And nimble scene-shifters of the human play,

      Ever are busy with this ill-lit scene.

      Ourselves incapable to build our fate

      Only as actors speak and strut our parts

      Until the piece is done and we pass off

      Into a brighter Time and subtler Space.

      Thus they inflict their little pigmy law

      And curb the mounting slow uprise of man,

      Then his too scanty walk with death they close.

      This is the ephemeral creature’s daily life.

      As long as the human animal is lord

      And a dense nether nature screens the soul,

      As long as intellect’s outward-gazing sight

      Serves earthy interest and creature joys,

      An incurable littleness pursues his days.

      Ever since consciousness was born on earth,

      Life is the same in insect, ape and man,

      Its stuff unchanged, its way the common route.

      If new designs, if richer details grow

      And thought is added and more tangled cares,

      If little by little it wears a brighter face,

      Still even in man the plot is mean and poor.

      A gross content prolongs his fallen state;

      His small successes are failures of the soul,

      His little pleasures punctuate frequent griefs:

      Hardship and toil are the heavy price he pays

      For the right to live and his last wages death.

      An inertia sunk towards inconscience,

      A sleep that imitates death is his repose.

      A puny splendour of creative force