Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

sensible design

      Looks vibrant back to some interior might.

      A Mind not limited by external sense

      Gave figures to the spirit’s imponderables,

      The world’s impacts without channels registered

      And turned into the body’s concrete thrill

      The vivid workings of a bodiless Force;

      Powers here subliminal that act unseen

      Or in ambush crouch waiting behind the wall

      Came out in front uncovering their face.

      The occult grew there overt, the obvious kept

      A covert turn and shouldered the unknown;

      The unseen was felt and jostled visible shapes.

      In the communion of two meeting minds

      Thought looked at thought and had no need of speech;

      Emotion clasped emotion in two hearts,

      They felt each other’s thrill in the flesh and nerves

      Or melted each in each and grew immense

      As when two houses burn and fire joins fire:

      Hate grappled hate and love broke in on love,

      Will wrestled with will on mind’s invisible ground;

      Others’ sensations passing through like waves

      Left quivering the subtle body’s frame,

      Their anger rushed galloping in brute attack,

      A charge of trampling hooves on shaken soil;

      One felt another’s grief invade the breast,

      Another’s joy exulting ran through the blood:

      Hearts could draw close through distance, voices near

      That spoke upon the shore of alien seas.

      There beat a throb of living interchange:

      Being felt being even when afar

      And consciousness replied to consciousness.

      And yet the ultimate oneness was not there.

      There was a separateness of soul from soul:

      An inner wall of silence could be built,

      An armour of conscious might protect and shield;

      The being could be closed in and solitary;

      One could remain apart in self, alone.

      Identity was not yet nor union’s peace.

      All was imperfect still, half-known, half-done:

      The miracle of Inconscience overpassed,

      The miracle of the Superconscient still,

      Unknown, self-wrapped, unfelt, unknowable,

      Looked down on them, origin of all they were.

      As forms they came of the formless Infinite,

      As names lived of a nameless Eternity.

      The beginning and the end were there occult;

      A middle term worked unexplained, abrupt:

      They were words that spoke to a vast wordless Truth,

      They were figures crowding an unfinished sum.

      None truly knew himself or knew the world

      Or the Reality living there enshrined:

      Only they knew what Mind could take and build

      Out of the secret Supermind’s huge store.

      A darkness under them, a bright Void above,

      Uncertain they lived in a great climbing Space;

      By mysteries they explained a Mystery,

      A riddling answer met the riddle of things.

      As he moved in this ether of ambiguous life,

      Himself was soon a riddle to himself;

      As symbols he saw all and sought their sense.

      Across the leaping springs of death and birth

      And over shifting borders of soul-change,

      A hunter on the spirit’s creative track,

      He followed in life’s fine and mighty trails

      Pursuing her sealed formidable delight

      In a perilous adventure without close.

      At first no aim appeared in those large steps:

      Only the wide source he saw of all things here

      Looking towards a wider source beyond.

      For as she drew away from earthly lines,

      A tenser drag was felt from the Unknown,

      A higher context of delivering thought

      Drove her towards marvel and discovery;

      There came a high release from pettier cares,

      A mightier image of desire and hope,

      A vaster formula, a greater scene.

      Ever she circled towards some far-off Light:

      Her signs still covered more than they revealed;

      But tied to some immediate sight and will

      They lost their purport in the joy of use,

      Till stripped of their infinite meaning they became

      A cipher gleaming with unreal sense.

      Armed with a magical and haunted bow

      She aimed at a target kept invisible

      And ever deemed remote though always near.

      As one who spells illumined characters,

      The key-book of a crabbed magician text,

      He scanned her subtle tangled weird designs

      And the screened difficult theorem of her clues,

      Traced in the monstrous sands of desert Time

      The thread beginnings of her titan works,

      Watched her charade of action for some hint,

      Read the No-gestures of her silhouettes,

      And strove to capture in their burdened drift

      The dance-fantasia of her sequences

      Escaping into rhythmic mystery,

      A glimmer of fugitive feet on fleeing soil.

      In the labyrinth pattern of her thoughts and hopes

      And the byways of her intimate desires,

      In the complex corners crowded with her dreams

      And rounds crossed by an intrigue of irrelevant rounds,

      A wanderer straying amid fugitive scenes,

      He lost its signs and chased each failing guess.

      Ever he met key-words, ignorant of their key.

      A sun that dazzled its own eye of sight,

      A luminous enigma’s brilliant hood

      Lit the dense purple barrier of thought’s sky:

      A dim large trance showed to the night her stars.

      As if sitting near an open window’s gap,

      He read by lightning-flash