Savitri

  VII

'The Descent into Night'

      Aswapati, having reached this dead end, this cactus end of final frustration in Life's efforts at self-transcendence, is anxious to locate the cause of it all, and so he dons the mantle of giant courage, peers into the "viewless Vast", and sees,

 ...a grey carved mask of Night

Watching the birth of all created things.⁸¹

 He has plunged into an immitigable abyss and recognises therein the sources of misrule, which are really perversions of the sources of order above. Power, presence, light, love—all are here, but only in a twisted and perverted shape. The subtle serpent Ignorance can spew out "a perverse sweetness, heaven-born malefice". Life and love are sicklied over with the baleful coating of sin and fatality, and happiness is doomed to play a losing game of cards with pain, and progress becomes "a purveyor of Death" and lust chases away love, the spurious overwhelms the genuine, and unutterably bleak is "the wasteland of life's descent to Night". And behind this evil empire of misrule there is "a dark Unseen... its breath is a subtle poison". This is the author of the whole book of evil, and he has his own army of slaves to carry out his behests. As Aswapati sees the handiwork of evil—the spectacle of men maimed, suffering, men pitifully helpless—he is aghast; and all the more so because he also sees that the wretched victims do not, and indeed cannot, even recognise "the authors of their fall". Moving farther yet, Aswapati arrives at,

.. .a no-man's land of evil air,

A crowded neighbourhood without one home,

 A borderland between the world and hell.⁸²

 This is the world of the false, the misleading, the self-deceiving, the transient, the slippery, the sardonic, the sinister. The Fiend himself

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wears the sceptre here, but he poses as an angel bright, quotes scripture facilely, and traps his victims in nets woven by their own good intentions. He is armed with sinister powers, and he can turn logic, law, light, letters into instruments of doom. The battle between evil and good is waged here as if it can have no ending; only death is certain, avoid it how we may.

      In these cities of ancient ignorance, there is clash perpetual between warring groups. Men are driven by their egos and false propensities, and man proves wolf to man—homo homini lupus! Hypocrisy assumes Himalayan proportions, and people pose the "worst iniquities on equity's base". In the name of religion, too, shoreless are the struggles that are engineered; but while religion of a sort flourishes, true spiritual seeking is discountenanced. Tyrannies a hundred oppress and slay, and a unity is reared upon force and fraud. A perilous route, this, barring Aswapati's way; too fatally easy it is to slip, to be lost. But Aswapati, armed by prayer and the Name, crosses the murky no-man's-land, though only to confront, "a greater darkness...a worse reign,/If worse can be where all is evil's extreme."⁸³

      As in the circles in Dante's Inferno, beneath Horror's depths are lower circles of deepening Horror. Now Aswapati is in the land of the unashamedly vicious, the licentious and the lost—the "fell dun suburbs of the cities of dream-life". What orgiastic harlotry, what criminal concupiscence! Lust is traded as "a decorative art":

      Impure, sadistic, with grimacing mouths,

      Grey foul inventions gruesome and macabre

      Came televisioned from the gulfs of Night.⁸⁴

Here are the night-clubs, opium dens, and miscalled palaces of pleasure; Dionysian riot, left-hand orgies, and other repulsive practices make "a ritual anguish" that consecrates death; and a new false philosophy theorises evil's rights and glories "in the shimmering rot of decadence".

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           Nor men nor rational creatures are these; rather are they "a race possessed". They have trampled the humane in the mud and set up the reign of 'Big Brother' Evil Unlimited. Called variously Nazi, Fascist, Party, these inhuman sadists impose a "grim totalitarian reign":

All on one plan was shaped and standardised

Under a dark dictatorship's breathless weight.⁸⁵

And the patriot and the demagogue! How they seem to fly skyward borne upon the wings of eloquence, yet how base and inhuman in their motivation and action, ready for even the "lowest reptile's crawl"! A dog is obeyed in office, and the more the dog snarls, the more implicitly is it obeyed! Big Brother, who is demon and goblin and ghoul, yet passes for titan, hero, god, and ordains,

The huge laughter of a giant cruelty

And fierce glad deeds of ogre violence...

Armed with the aegis of tyrannic Power,

Signing the edicts of her dreadful rule

And using blood and torture as a seal,

Darkness proclaimed her slogans to the world.⁸⁶

There struts Orwellian 'double-think' wedded to 'double-talk'; and where is Truth? And what is still more astonishing is that people actually glory in their swinishness and slavery:

Flaunting its cross of servitude like a crown,

It clung to its dismal harsh autonomy.

A bull-throat bellowed with its brazen tongue;

Its hard and shameless clamour filling Space

And threatening all who dared to listen to truth

Claimed the monopoly of the battered ear;

A deafened acquiescence gave its vote,

And braggart dogmas shouted in the night...⁸⁷

Aswapati the "lone discoverer" sees it all, and manages to wade through it without actually contaminating himself. For a time he is threatened by the reigning blasphemies and darkness, he feels the invasion of the thickening Night, he scents the claim of the Abyss for his own soul. But he survives the onslaught; peace and safety return; the mighty Godhead in him awakes to face "the pain and danger of the world", and he meets "with his bare spirit naked Hell".

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