Savitri

  IV

'The Kingdoms of the Little Life'

      Life in its heavenly origin is no doubt a principle of pristine purity and power; but as it sinks in the mire of the earth, it cannot help sharing for the nonce somewhat of the dolour and density of the soil. For a while, then, life is inevitably yoked to "an instinct driven Ignorance", and must perforce draw the heavy chariot of pain ; only instinct and sense- perceptions rule the Kingdom of the Little Life. But 'mind' is not long in soliciting and directing life, fitfully and uncertainly at first, but presently with more concerted and ambitious aim. Mind-crowned man has made his appearance on earth , and he is rich in endowments and his life is full of possibilities.

      He becomes a mind, he becomes a spirit and self;

      In his fragile tenement he grows Nature's lord.⁵⁴

From matter to life, from life to mind, and from mind to-he doesn't know yet. There is a continuous striving, there is a progressive effort but the desire is dogged by incapacity, the aspiration is followed (if at all) by only partial achievement. There are random movements, purblind advances; there is progress surely, but along an exasperating zig-zag path of toil and difficulty. Still must the spirit of evolution press on further and further, toward s newer and newer horizons:

      Matter dissatisfies, she turns to Mind;

      She conquers earth, her field, then claims the heavens...

      Ascending slowly with unconscious steps,

      A foundling of the Gods she wanders here

      Like a child-soul left near the gates of Hell

      Fumbling through fog in search of Paradise.⁵⁵

      Aswapati is eager to mark the steps in the arduous evolutionary spiral. This means really a return to the beginnings, and a survey of the whole track. And so,

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Along swift paths of fall through dangerous gates

He chanced into a grey obscurity

Teeming with instincts from the mindless gulfs...⁵⁶

At the very bottom life is intimate with death, indifferent alike to beauty and light. In this nether empire of the little life, there are divers petty kingdoms, each with its own badge of limitation and circumscribed sovereignty.

      See life first crawling out from her "cabin of mud" where she had lain mute and rigid for ages. It is a "weird and pigmy world", a world of automatic responses; a world of gropings, wrestlings, false starts and futile results; verily "a vain unnecessary world" marked by "meaningless suffering and a grey unease". Yet Aswapati finds a meaning even in these obscure beginnings of life. Even here the world is somehow charged with the beauty of God. The slime and the mire somehow yield a wondrous progeny.

The world's senseless beauty mirrors God's delight.

That rapture's smile is secret everywhere;

It flows in the wind's breath, in the tree's sap,

Its hued magnificence blooms in leaves and flowers.⁵⁷

Life in cells, in micro-organisms, in worm, in reptile, in insect— even this life is not devoid of meaning.⁵⁸ No doubt about it, Being is involved even in these lower realms and darkened vasts:

Even in these formless codings he [Aswapati] could feel

Matter's response to an infant stir of soul.⁵⁹

In the adjoining second Kingdom of the Little Lite, Aswapati marks "a fierier breath of waking life". Here "an insect hedonism" flutters and creeps, and there are "dragon raptures, python agonies", and "great puissant creatures with a dwarfish brain, and pigmy tribes". This is the stupendous "animal experiment". Here within a narrow circuit are packed the ages of Geologic time, the giant lizards and mastodons that have perished without a trace, the mammoths, now only preserved as fossils; these are the mighty that have shortsightedly disinherited themselves.

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           There are the mammals, too, and early primitive man; creatures of Nature red in tooth and claw, they have been content to work for the body's wants,—"content to breathe, to feel, to sense, to act", no more. Selfhood and Breed (in the elemental sense in which Robert Bridges uses the terms in his poem, Toe Testament of Beauty) spin the animal plot, and primitive man is engaged in grovelling in the "grooves of animal desire". Even when man leaves the jungle and forms community and society, and raises town and fortress, he must needs maim and mangle himself with slaughter, plunder, rape, fire and deceit and so enact the drama of self-wrought misery. The Heroic Age of epic striving and failure and misery is but another milestone on this ambiguous march:

      An animal in the instinctive herd

      Pushed by life impulses, forced by common needs,

      Each in his own kind saw his ego's glass;

      All served the aim and action of the pack.⁶⁰

Men and women living in walled-up isolation moan that understanding is difficult; quick to quarrel, they fight among themselves on account of colour, creed, region, or possessions and so, even so, they go round and round 'the prickly pear' and round and round again.

      The third of the Kingdoms of the Little Life manifests the emergence of the intellectual man, a 'push' from below facilitated by "a masked intervention from above". The mind and its forces are whole Himalayas of power marked by heady leaps of thought, ballistic missiles of aspiration, and veritable Sputniks of comprehension. This gives a new intensity and edge, a greater depth and wideness, to human life. No limit, really, to man's desire for empire. An insatiable hunger for power possesses the mind of man as it surveys the past and views the future. What if death itself could be overcome?

      Its right to be immortal it reserved,

      But built a wall against the siege of death

      And threw a hook to clutch eternity.⁶¹

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Yet the mind, a giant helper upto a point, degenerates soon into a serious liability. Logic itself proves often deceptive, and theorems can stifle the human soul. Preoccupied with the glamorous appearance, man tends to lose infinitudes of the soul within. "Dwarf lusts and brief desires" chain him to the earth-crust, and the mind too acquiesces in the fall:

      Absorbed in the little works of its prison-house

      It turned around the same unchanging points

      In the same circle of interest and desire,...⁶²

Whatever the seeming achievements of the mental being, however impressive the march of civilisation, the crux of the human situation remains unsolved. A total emancipation is yet to arrive. Aswapati can sense in this Kingdom of the Little Life,

      .. .no vast perspectives of the spirit,

      No swift invasions of unknown delight,

      No golden distances of wide release.⁶³

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