Savitri

    II

      THE GOSPEL OF DEATH AND THE

VANITY OF THE IDEAL

The gossamer evanescence of this twilight world tempts Death to try his wiles once more. See this unsubstantial pageant, he tells Savitri ingratiatingly; this is the source of her idealistic dreams and cravings, mere ethereal stuff as dreams are made on—no more, no more!

      The ideal dwells not in heaven, nor on the earth,

      A bright delirium of man's ardour of hope

      Drunk with the wine of its own fantasy.³⁰

And love, is there such a thing as love? Flesh calls to flesh no doubt, and lust calls itself love! Death grows subtly rhetorical, as if pitying the human lot and man's capacity for self-deception:

      O human mind, vainly thou torturest

      An hour's delight to stretch through infinity's

      Long void and fill its formless, passionless gulfs,

      Persuading the insensible Abyss

      To lend eternity to perishing things,

      And trickst the fragile movements of thy heart

      With thy spirit's feint of immortality.³¹

Love has a miry origin and can never rise to the spiritual heights which the resourceful human mind creates in the air. Ideals, however alluring they may be, when they are sought to be translated into actuality,

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become of the earth, earthy. If there be God indeed, he too is not of the earth; why should he care to entangle himself in the stupidities of the earth? There have been avatars, messiahs, founders of great faiths and what have they achieved in the end?

      Vain was the sage's thought, the prophet's voice;

      In vain is seen the shining upward Way.

      Earth lies unchanged beneath the circling sun;...³²

Why must Savitri harp upon love! Is it any more than the flesh hungering, the nerves burning, the mind dreaming, the heart fluttering? With casuistry worthy of Milton's Belial or Comus, Death tries to wear down Savitri's wall of resistance to the invasion of falsehood. Ah yes, love's momentary thrill seems "a golden bridge across the roar of the years"; but, alas! spent soon, all too soon. The honey that turns to bane, the heaven that leaves hell behind! Even had Satyavan not died, would love for him have suffered no change? Love dies a thousand deaths—"a word, a moment's act can slay the god". Worse than the death of love is love's inevitable decay:

      A dull indifference replaces fire

      Or an endearing habit imitates love:

      An outward and uneasy union lasts

      Or the routine of a life's compromise:...

      Two strive, constant associates without joy,

      Two egos straining in a single leash,

      Two minds divided by their jarring thoughts,

      Two spirits disjoined, forever separate.

      Thus is the ideal falsified in man's world:

      Trivial or sombre, disillusion comes,...³³

Better than such humiliating decay is the total death of love—or of the lover. Death thus has saved Savitri from love's decay and has saved Satyavan, too, from a like fate. Savitri should "chastise" her heart with this knowledge and be reconciled to her lot, forgetting "the joy and the struggle and the pain".

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            Savitri has no difficulty in exposing the hollowness of Death's fabric of specious reasoning. She tells him straight: love has come to her from God, and such love is heavenly, partaking not of the corruptions of the flesh and heart. Besides, all love, even the most flawed, provokes "a whisper of divinity". Nor is ideal love unrealisable on earth. Hasn't there been a Lord of Brindavan:

      One who came love and lover and beloved

      Eternal, built himself a wondrous field

      And wove the measures of a marvellous dance....? ³⁴

Satyavan and she had loved each other since the beginning of things; their love will never change, for only one heart beats within her breast, "and one god sits there throned".

      Although one attempt has misfired, Death accepts no defeat but tries again. Cannot Savitri yet realise that her thoughts are mere hallucination? Vain, all vain is her "longing to build heaven on earth". Matter is the only ultimate reality; soul itself is but "a brief flower by the gardener Mind" created on "Matter's terrain plot". In self-deception lies no safety. What boots it to camouflage the reality of matter with dazzling dream-fabrics of resourceful Mind? Death is the universe's sovereign ruler, and it is, thanks to him, that nothingness has taken 'form':

      I formed earth's beauty out of atom and gas,

      And built from chemic plasm the living man.

      Then Thought came in and spoiled the harmonious world:

      Matter began to hope and think and feel,

      Tissue and nerve bore joy and agony.³⁵

Death would perhaps like Savitri to believe that Mind is an aberration, the source of much disaffection, the illusory father of lies and dreams and sighs. What presumption! "Born from a gas, a plasm, a sperm, a gene", yet to assume the god, affect his powers, and wish to divinise earth! There is no true wisdom because all human knowledge is error's make; and human love is but "a posturer on earth-stage/Who imitates with verse a faery dance". Children of the dust must return to the dust, leaving not a rack behind; such is the adamantine law. Death concludes with the appeal compounded of derision and seeming solicitude:

      How shall the will-o'-the-wisp become a star?

      The Ideal is a malady of thy mind,

      A bright delirium of thy speech and thought,

      A strange wine of beauty lifting thee to false sight...

      O soul misled by the splendour of thy thoughts,

      O earthly creature with thy dream of heaven,

      Obey, resigned and still, the earthly law...³⁶

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