Savitri

  VIII

Sri Aurobindo and Kazantzakis

We saw in the previous chapter how Savitri begins with the dawn and the Symbol Dawn—"It was the hour before the Gods awake" —and how, after compressing the history of the cosmos into the events of a single day (including a cosmic revolution in the course of which Death is worsted), concludes with the assurance that "Night, splendid with the moon...in her bosom nursed a greater dawn". In the Preface to one of his charming Oriental tales, the late F.W. Bain, who spent many fruitful years in India and entered into the spirit of Indian culture as few had done before, has introduced a rhapsody to the Indian Dawn:

First comes Night, and Chaos: and then, out of the black

there arises, silently, imperceptibly, irresistibly, the glorious,

the blushing, the beautiful, amber-clouded, opal-shredded,

amethyst-bedappled Dawn. O Dawn, how I do love thee! How,

after a night of blackness and distress, has thy delicious fragrance

raised me from the dead, with its colour and the camphor and

the nectar touch of its rosy finger, softer than flowers, cooler than

sandalwood. Yes, it is necessary to be a dweller in the East, to

taste and understand the religion of the Dawn.⁶⁶

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It is a wonderfully apt phrase: 'the religion of the Dawn'. The Sun, Surya, Savitri—in his four differentiated forms, Varuna, Mitra, Aryaman and Bhaga—is no doubt central to the Vedic religion, but the human approach to them is through the gateway of the Dawn. Kazantzakis, on the other hand, begins with a Prologue to the Sun and concludes with a lament because the Sun has set. Thus the Prologue:

      O Sun, great Oriental, my proud mind's golden cap...

      O Sun, my quick coquetting eye, my red-haired hound,

      Sniff out all the quarries that I love, give them swift chase...⁶⁷

When the wheel comes full circle, when the Sun sets, when Odysseus is 'dead' (that is, when the body becomes spirit and the spirit becomes air), there is heard only, "the ultimate and despairing cry of Earth/ the sun's lament, but with no throat or mouth or voice."''⁸ The 'hollow hush' of this close merely insinuates the essential tragedy of the human situation, whereas the 'holy hush' of Savitri's close is the true meaning of that Divine Comedy.

      This is not merely because Kazantzakis was a Greek and therefore heir to the great tradition of Attic tragedy whereas Sri Aurobindo was an Indian and therefore heir to the Kalidasian tradition, but also because of the different foundations on which they reared their respective epic edifices. Both of them believed in Evolution, and both had had mystic experiences. Kazantzakis, like Bergson, thought in terms of 'emergent evolution'; the elan vital, in their view, struggled and surged to achieve new forms of life. During his vigil on Mount Athos, Kazantzakis saw the Combatant pushing his way upward, and so achieving self-expression in newer and newer forms.

      The Aurobindonian dialectic of ascent being met by a descent from above and the two achieving an integration and a new creation, and so preparing the way for the next rung, and the next, was quite different from the normal Western view of an irresistible evolutionary urge that knows not exactly whither it is going. Kazantzakis, in so far as he was a seer, still saw only with the mind; a general overhead

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vision hadn't opened to him; he saw some steps ahead, but darkness enveloped the rest. There is courage and cunning and resourcefulness and intellectual keenness and even moral earnestness in the story; but it is not touched by the Light from above, because he had not seen it; he had glimpsed the meteor-like ascending Combatant and the red trail left by him, but not the total splendour of the Descent nor the glow of the transformation effected by it. This necessarily colours also the quality and value of the two revelations. Impressive though the roll of the verse, vigorously and vividly evocative though the images, being for the most part but the projection of a vital and mental aesthesis, Kazantzakis' poem seldom rises to the sheer sublime, though rhetorical effectiveness and sensuous extravagance are rarely missed. There is a commendable virtuosity in a picture like that of the Ivory God with seven heads that a pedlar sells to Odysseus:

Below, the most coarse head, a brutal base of flesh...

Above it, like a warrior's crest, the second head

clenched its sharp teeth and frowned with hesitating brows...

The third head gleamed like honey with voluptuous eyes,

its pale cheeks hallowed by the flesh's candied kisses...

The fourth head lightly rose, its mouth a wetted blade,

its neck grew slender and its brow rose tall as though

its roots had turned to flower, its meat to purest mind.

The fifth head's towering brow was crushed with bitter grief...

Above it shone serenely the last head but one,

and steadfast weighed all things, beyond all joy or grief...

The final head shone, crystal-clear, translucent, light,

and had no ears or eyes, no nostrils, mouth, or brow,

for all its flesh had turned to soul, and soul to air!⁶⁹

These are vivid evocations of the successive stages in the evolution of man, from the ape-man through man the hero-fighter, the sensuous hedonist, the mental man, the man of sorrows who has a bottomless pity for mankind, the saintly man who has surpassed the dualities, and so to the disembodied soul. Odysseus fondles the seven heads and

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he is seized by the desire to "mount/the seven stories step by step and fade in flame", but all are but mental constructions, there is no overhead aesthesis here, no new revelation. The number 'three' fascinates Kazantzakis even more than the number 'seven. On his return to Ithaca and after the destruction of the suibid.rs, the minstrel sings how at the birth of Odysseus he had been blessed (or cursed) by Tantalus with a ravenous heart, by Prometheus with "the seed of a great light", his razor-edged mind, and by Heracles with "the unsated blaze", his restless spirit.⁷⁰ Next night he tells his father, wife and son that, in the course of his wanderings, Death had tried to tempt him in three forms:

In cool Calypso's cave he came with laughing wiles...

Heaven and its foundations swerved to serve us both,

Stars vanished in the sea but others blazed with smiles,

and we, two gloibid.orms merged as one, gleamed on

the sands.⁷¹

The second form Death took was that of Circe who lusted with him and infected his mind,

for just as insects slowly sink and drown in amber,

so in my turbid mind beasts, trees, and mortals sank.⁷²

Last came the third form, the most dangerous of all, for now

Death masqueraded like the virgin of a noble tribe

who on the beach smiled softly at a shipwrecked man.⁷³

Calypso, Circe, Nausicaa, these would, each in her own way, keep Odysseus chained to her, but to him life meant moving on and exploring and experimenting, not subsisting in the somnolence of any steady condition. The Combatant lures him on, but he would not "squander my soul's strength on worthless works".⁷⁴

      Savitri, too, is confronted in the course of her entry into the 'inner countries' by the 'triple soul-forces', namely the Madonna of Suffering, the Mother of Might, and the Madonna of Light, but these are apocalyptic visions though they can no doubt be roughly equated

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with certain characters in history or legend. Savitri is presented as the Goddess herself come down to effect the evolutionary change from Man to Superman, from terrestrial to the divine life. Coercing her godhead she has become a woman, and she is willing that the Master of Evolution should deal with her as is fit.⁷⁵

      Although Sri Aurobindo's mystic muse in Savitri is sometimes more of an intoxicated Bacchante-like mistress than a quiet and steady housewife, his heroine herself is an Appollonian, rather than a Dionysian, character. Her prime mark is "a union of strength and silence"⁷⁶ and she is "the forerunner or first creator of a new race".⁷⁷ Her glance is more than Cretan in its strength and steadiness and more than Apollonian in its purity and power. Once again, in the two protagonists of the developing evolution, we see in striking contrast the overhead aesthesis fashioning the one and a vital and mental aesthesis fashioning the other. Between Savitri and Odysseus there is all the difference between the purposive beauty of the Dawn and the fierce energy of a storm. When Odysseus becomes an ascetic after the destruction of his Ideal City, he no doubt transcends the dualities but, after all, it is a bleak enlightenment that cries:

      There is no master now on earth, the heart is free!...

      By the three-hundred-and-sixty-five joints knit to flesh,

      by the three-hundred-and-sixty-five snakes round

      the soul,

      no master-god exists, no virtue, no just law,

      no punishment in Hades and no reward in Heaven!⁷⁸

 His wild dance to the tune of these negations merely scares away the pilgrims who have gathered round him for solace. It is the measure of Odysseus' limitation—as it is that of his creator, Kazantzakis-—that they have reached only the Sahara of Negation, the icy desolation of the Antarctic, but have been unable to take us to the Well of Living Waters. The Everlasting No is a necessary stage in the journey, but not the final one; one must pass that milestone too, and reach the beckoning goal of the Everlasting Yea. This neither Odysseus nor Kazantzakis does, and so The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel can only be called an incomplete or arrested revelation of the total cosmic drama. Neither in its total sweep of Space and Time nor in its insight into the real nature of the evolutionary drama is the 'Modern Sequel' as truly a 'cosmic epic' as Sri Aurobindo's Savitri.

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