Savitri

       III

'The Glory and Fall of Life'

      The passage from the world of subtle matter brings Aswapati to the life-realms, where the 'vital', the principle of life, has full play. The law of life here comprises birth, growth, decay and death. With an endless but blind appetite the life-principle explores all possibilities, regardless of consequences. Change and danger, pain and defeat, are the playfellows and pests of this region. Here people sit and 'hear each other groan'; dolorous their converse, transient their joy; pure felicity forever eludes. But thought-sick though life be and knotted with failure, yet Life too derives from the Timeless and carries the memory of "a lost world rapture".

      Strange that, at the heart of pain, joy—or the hope of joy—should have her sovereign shrine. But so it is indeed. It may be that the visible prospect is barren and bleak. The sky lours, the earth yawns, the end seems sure.

      But near and real to the longing heart

      And to the body's passionate thought and sense

      Are the hidden kingdoms of beatitude.⁵¹

 At first they are dreams, hopes, visions merely; but they signify or embody the shape of things to come.

      There is clearly a veil or gulf between earth appearance and the other reality, between 'earth-fact' and 'dream-truth'. This veil once pierced, this gulf once crossed—this must happen sooner or later—the dream would become fact and reality would arrive. The "inscrutable Supermind" would help "the hazardous experimenting Mind" in its endeavours to end the Nescience and reach upto the Truth. All will then be possible. But in the meantime life is tied to the circuit of deception and failure. Life is almost in love with "amorous Death" and sleep imitates "extinction's peace". Man despairs of chastening and harmonising "his cosmos-chaos of personality".

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         Such alas! is the picture of the fallen state of life. But how to describe the 'other' state, the power and the glory? How to paint the colours of paradisal felicity? How to visualise the splendour of the 'dream-truth'? Aswapati, however, can see this glory unfolding before him:

      There were summit-glories inconceivable,

      Autonomies of Wisdom's still self-rule...

      There sat the oligarchies of natural Law,

      Proud violent heads served one calm monarch brow:

      All the soul's postures donned divinity.

      There met the ardent mutual intimacies

      Of mastery's joy and the joy of servitude

      Imposed by Love and Love's heart that obeys

      And Love's body held beneath a rapturous yoke...⁵²

It is the life we know here, but purged of all its taints and the limitations of "death, desire and incapacity"; it is life without twist or crookedness, without pain or satiety, but instinct with "heavenly variety". So fashioned in freedom and power, life will "explore the measures of the rhythms of God", and weave,

.. .her wizard wonder-dance,

A Dionysian goddess of delight,

A Bacchant of creative ecstasy.⁵³

Aswapati, even as he sees this world of bliss, knows "no way to enter into its joy". From the sleep of matter's inconscience has emerged the play of life and the attendant strife of the dualities: mind has sprouted, and with it doubt, and the engines of sorrow and joy. Life as it came from Heaven to colonise the earth had suffered a profound change, and all her sweetness has turned into "a maimed desire", and terrestrial existence, exemplifying the 'Fall of Life', has become but "an episode in an eternal death". Such is the 'evil mystery' of the human lot!

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