Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 4

Love and Death

ONE of the earliest poems of Sri Aurobindo – a juvenile work – has the title Love and Death. This is indeed the central theme, the core of the inspiration running through the whole of his poetic world culminating in the grand symphony of Savitri. As a matter of fact his vision and the mission of his life are epitomised in those three words, namely 'Love conquering Death.'

I shall leave aside his other works and take up his dramas, his five complete major dramas in which the theme has been developed and the problem set and solved in somewhat different ways but always leading to the same conclusion 'Love conquering Death.'

Death according to Sri Aurobindo is not merely the death or disintegration of the body. Death truly is the death and disintegration of the consciousness. It is unconsciousness, inconscience. Death-bound world is this world of unconsciousness or half consciousness, this world of ignorance.

To grow into consciousness, to rise towards the light is the way to the conquest of Death. To rise in consciousness means to rise out of the shades of egoism; it is the ego that ties man down to this lower consciousness which is the domain of death, and the only antidote of egoism is love, love human or divine.

Perseus the Deliverer is obviously the story of the deliverance of human soul from the siege of the emissaries of Death, the lower consciousness. It is also the legend of the destruction of a darker age of civilisation and the advent of a new age of greater light. The reign of Poseidon represents man in his half animal stage worshipping the dark vital gods. Pitted against that rose later, as the scholars say, the Aryan civilisation represented in Europe by the Greeks – worshippers of the solar

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gods, Gods of Light and Love. The force that transforms darkness into light, passion into pure energy, gloom into happiness, is the touch of Love. Even the human agencies of this divine element acting in the human way express as Sri Aurobindo has shown, something of the magic and beauty and the sense of elevation here below, something from love's higher native state.

In Eric, Love's appeal is to the heroic soul. Love as commonly understood in its human form seems to be nothing else but loose sentiment and feeling, a play of mere emotion. As such it is usually made out to be as sweet as possible and as weak as possible, –even in its external violence. Weakness, frailty is promoted as a woman's character and also her charm and beauty. On the other hand, heroism, force and vigour form the masculine charater. But that is evidently a superficial and a limited and decadent view. A heroic soul to be genuinely heroic and complete must be a loving soul and in the same way love in a woman must carry in it a strong heroic element. The marriage of love and heroism is the story of Eric, how heroism adds force and strength and nobility to love and how love lends grace and beauty and an other-worldly charm to force and strength. In Eric Love attains a stronger, a larger, a royal fulfilment in its human mould, on this earth.

A different, almost a contrary denouement attends Love in Rodogune. Love here passes through the normal tragic trials and tribulations, even through the final trial, even death. But for love it is not the end nor defeat, rather a higher fulfilment. Real gold brightens up, shines gloriously when passed through fire. The end of the body is not the end of love, it exists even while in the body apart from the body and maintains its autonomous existence undimmed by external barriers and difficulties even by the disappearance of the body. The legend of loves frustrated in this life but reunited in another world is not pure fiction but a truth obvious to the seeing eye. In fact Love is an immortal being and human persons are its receptacles and formations for a special play upon this earth. Earthly fate only serves to increase the delight that forms the true body of love.

The Viziers of Bassora represents Love in its mood of frolicsome, almost frivolous dalliance, clothed, it would appear, in

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a body purely made of the fluid, i.e., playful senses. There is no need, no question of moral or social inhibitions – love is in its absolute spontaneous sportive natural state, natural to an earthly being. The beauty that unhindered love displays here has no stain in it, a stain that a more sophisticated and cultured nature contracts: it is the smiling radiance of the unspoiled limpid consciousness of a child. Yes, it is the Brindaban-lila of Love in its very human, very secular movement. Love is here of earth and of an earthy mode and yet somehow it has maintained its purity, its very spontaneity and simplicity has, as it were, miraculously by its very naturalness purified it of its dross and made it akin to something aerial and heavenly.

In Vasavadutta, Love is depicted as something royal and noble and aristocratic, it is something refined and beautiful, an adornment of a consciousness cultured and luminous; it is a special gift bestowed by the Gods only upon a few godly creatures, men and women.

As I have said, love depicted here in these plays of Sri Aurobindo is of earth, earthly, even earthy: it is not, one might say, the Divine Love – embodiment of the Supreme Ananda or Sachchidananda. And yet Love is one and indivisible, it is always and everywhere the same, essentially the Divine Love – in various moulds. And the mould in which Sri Aurobindo has cast even earthly human love is divinely noble and beautiful. Love has been uttered, as it were, by a Divine tongue and it has been transmuted, irised and is full of the redolence of heaven's delight: if it cannot claim to be the very delight of Brahman (Brahmananda) yet it is as the ancients declared, hrahmanandasahodaro – consanguinous, of one blood, with Divine Delight.

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