On Savitri
THEME/S
PART IV
From Death to Deathlessness:
Lucretius and Sri Aurobindo
George Santayana expects every great poet to be a philopher, a prophet and a seer: "The distinction of a poet—the dignity and humanity of his thought—can be measured by nothing, perhaps so well as by the diameter of the world in which he lives; if he is supreme, his vision, like Dante's, always stretches to the stars."1
Two other poets whose vision, literally and metaphorically, stretches to the stars are Lucretius and Sri Aurobindo. In Book I of De Rerum Natura Lucretius promises to reveal the ultimate realities of heaven and the gods. Applauding this attempt of his Virgil, in his Georgics, identifies him as the poet "who hath availed to know the causes of things and hath laid all fears and immitigable Fate and the roar of hungry Acheron under his feet."2 Sri Aurobindo also attempts, in his Savitri, the twin tasks of knowing the causes of things and laying all fears and immitigable Fate and the roar of Death under his feet, though in a very different way. Commenting on the plan of his magnum opus, the Indian poet points out that it expresses "a total and many-sided vision" and "aims not at the minimum but at an exhaustive exposition of its world-vision or world-interpretation."3 This is true of the Roman epic also. Raymond Frank Piper, an American professor of philosophy, considers Savitri a cosmic poem that "illumines every important concern of man, through verse of unparalleled massiveness, magnificence, and metaphorical brilliance."4 This tribute is richly deserved by De Rerum Natura also.
Though no two poems can be as widely different from each other as those of Lucretius and Sri Aurobindo with regard to the time, clime, race and milieu that gave birth to them, very surprisingly, they deal with many common themes, their major preoccupation being with man's confrontation with death. The Roman epic written
1Quoted in Prema Nandakumar, A Study of Savitri, Ashram, 1962, p. 436.
2Quoted in Walter E. Houghton and G. Robert Stange, ed. Victorian Poetry and Poetics, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1968, p. 422.
3Quoted in A.B. Purani, Sri Aurobindo's Savitri: An Approach and a Study, Ashram, 3rd edition, 1970, p. 35.
4Quoted in Perspectives of Savitri, Vol. 1, ed. R. Y. Deshpande, p. xlvii.
during the first century B.C. gives poetic expression to "the first principles of the Epicurean philosophy of life summed up in the formula: God unterrifying; death unworrying; the good accessible; the bad endurable."5 The vision of Savitri echoes the aspiration of the ancient Indian Rishis:
Lead me from darkness to light
From death to immortality.
Attempting to discourse on the nature of things, Lucretius promises to open up the first beginnings of things, out of which nature gives birth to all things and increase and gives them nourishment and into which nature dissolves them back after their destruction. If the fear of the unknown is to be dispelled, we must grasp the principle by which the courses of the sun and the moon go on, the force by which everything on earth proceeds, and find out by keen reason what the soul and the nature of the mind consist of. We have to admit that nothing can come from nothing since things require the seed before they can be bom and brought into the fields of air. All the objects around us have an origin and an end, a birth and a death but they do not originate from or pass away into nothing. Matter exists in the form of particles that are totally solid and so hard that it is impossible to split one.
After stressing the indivisibility of the elements and their eternal immutability Lucretius demolishes the other theories of matter. Those who hold fire to be the matter of things and the sun to be formed out of fire alone have strayed most widely from reason. To claim like Heraclitus that no real thing except fire exists appears to be sheer dotage. The pluralistic theories of Empedocles and others are also equally wrong. The four elements—earth, water, air and fire without void—cannot account for motion and do not provide a satisfactory explanation of the vast variety of objects in the world.
Raising some objections to the geocentric closed world of the Aristotelians, Lucretius waxes lyrical about the infinity of the universe. The existing universe is bounded in none of its dimensions; for then it must have an outside. There can be an outside of nothing,
5 Quoted in T. James Luce, ed. Ancient Writers: Greece and Rome, Vol. II, Lucretius to Ammianus Marcellinus, New York : Charles Scribner's Sons, 1982, pp. 603-AO.
All the citations from De Rerum Natura are from the text found in this volume.
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unless there were something beyond to bound it. Since space is infinite, matter must also be infinite.
The innumerable tiny particles that constitute matter are always falling through space in a sort of rain. As they fall they occasionally swerve aside from a straight line and come into collision with other atoms. Nothing that falls naturally is ever seen to swerve because all swerves are too small to be perceived. Swerves must be so rare that they do not upset the general predictability of the behaviour of matter. If we examine our own actions, it is clear that they cannot be explained simply as the predetermined outcome of the fall and collision of atoms.
Whence comes this will, I ask, wrested from Fate,
By which we go wherever pleasure leads?6
Lucretius claims that in addition to downward fall due to weight and collisions, a minute swerve of atoms causes this. Concerning the shape of atoms and its effects on the perceptible qualities of compounds, the poet contends that there must be a vast amount of variation at the perceptible level and that variation in the shapes of atoms can account for all the perceptible varieties of things, for different tastes, sounds, smells, colours, temperatures and textures and also the different species of plants and animals. Even life is a derivative property, a function of the shapes and numbers of the atoms that constitute the living creature. Since the universe is infinite and contains an infinite supply of matter, there are worlds besides ours. Just as worlds come into being by the natural processes brought about by commissions of atoms, they all perish too.
Rejecting the theory of the divine nature of cosmic order, Lucretius ventures to affirm and maintain that to believe that for the sake of men the glorious nature of the world has been set in order and that it will be eternal and immortal is sheer folly.
In no way is the universe arranged
For us by gods—it has so many flaws!7
Why does nature give food and increase the frightful race of wild beasts dangerous to mankind? Why do the seasons of the year bring
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diseases in their train? Why does untimely death stalk abroad? For both heaven and earth, there has been a time of beginning and there will be a time of destruction. Even the holy divinity cannot prolong the bounds of fate or struggle against the fixed laws of nature. How were the earth, the sky and the sea created?
It's sure that atoms did not take up posts,
Each at its purposed station, wittingly,
Or skilfully coordinate their moves.
But multitudinous atoms in uncounted
Ways, from infinite time moved on by blows
And by their own weight influenced, have come
To try out every mode of union,
To element all things they can create.8
The growth of the world is a slow process, the first step being the formation of seeds, i.e., groups of atoms that have the power to adhere together and to retain others as they collide. Lucretius, following in the footsteps of his master, asserts that the regularity of the motions of the heavenly bodies can be attributed not to the gods but to nature. He also ventures to give an exquisite imaginative account of the growth of living forms from the earth and the advancement of human life from primitive men who lived in the woods and caves to civilised beings who could create agriculture, cities, music and war. Every step in the progression was made possible by necessity coupled with human ingenuity and there were, of course, numerous false steps causing fear and frustration.
Aristotle's dictum that "Nature does nothing in vain" is rejected by Lucretius on the ground that a million atomic collisions produce no result whereas only a few make the seeds of mighty things. The earth produced numerous creatures but only the fittest survived.
All such that could not act nor move at all
To flee from harm or seek for sustenance
And many other prodigies earth made—
In vain, since nature stopped them from increase.9
In Book I of Savitri, Sri Aurobindo gives his account of the evolution of the universe from the Night of Nescience to the awakening of the Dawn of the Spirit. "It was the hour before the
8 Ibid,. V: 419-26.
9 Ibid., V: 843-46.
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gods awake." The gods that preside over the various functions of the cosmos had not awakened and begun their work. There was only the all-pervading figure of Night, a dark woman asleep in her unlit temple of Eternity, who "lay stretched immobile upon Silence's marge." She had a nightmare and shrank from the thought of embarking upon the adventure of the mystery of birth and the tardy process of mortality. It is when the mind of this Night gives its consent that the cosmos can come into being. Something undefinable stirred in the depth of her nescience. Consequently, repeating for ever the unconscious act, she brought into existence this vast material universe. When the Night consented to the birth of the dawn, she was almost forced to fulfil her role of the mother by being reminded of endless need in things.
A ray of life-consciousness emerged first and this outbreak of the light of life was the coming of "a scout in a reconnaissance from the sun" to seek for a spirit. While seeking for the fallen spirit, the ray of light called upon the Night to take up the adventure of consciousness and joy and it compelled renewed consent to see and feel. The stir in the heart of the Night succeeded in contacting the light of life. The birth of this aspiration converted the sleeping Night from a careless to a careful mother of the universe. It is by no means an easy task to make the body, create the needs of life and of the soul. For this the Night requires the help of the superconscient Transcendent Divine. Finally, it is the double action of the constant inflow of light from above and the inner urge from below that forced the worlds' blind immensity to sight. Then the darkness fell from the body of the unknown entity like a robe and revealed "the reclining body of God."
Now Dawn makes her appearance, bringing the hope of fulfilment, the promise of realisation to the aspiration that has been bom on earth.
Almost that day the epiphany was disclosed
Of which our thoughts and hopes are signal flares;
A lonely splendour from the invisible goal
Almost was flung on the opaque Inane...
Ambassadress twixt eternity and change,
The omniscient Goddess leaned across the breadths
That wrap the fated joumeyings of the stars
And saw the spaces ready for her feet.10
10 Savitri, p. 4.
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She is "a message from the unknown immortal light," the message being that the Light will fulfil its work and establish on earth the life divine.
In this poetic account employing "the technique of the overmind interpretation of life," Earth representing the masked Infinite contains within it the upward drive and the downward drag of the evolutionary movement that has created the cosmos. Love representing the Divine grace that sacrifices its perfection in order to save creation from the prison of Inconscience is the immortal element in mortals. Dawn symbolises the "perpetual awakening of the light of consciosness from the Night of Nescience which gives rise to the cosmos."11
In Sri Aurobindo's view man is not a mere material phenomenon, as there are hidden powers in him which can be awakened by following a path of inner discipline. Evolution is a gradual growth towards supreme knowledge, leading man towards self-transcendence. The world is an unfinished work and its fulfilment lies in her manifesting higher planes of consciousness upon her surface by realising perfect Knowledge, unerring Will and unflagging Delight. There is, therefore, a divine presence in and behind the world-process.
The mind as well as the body, Lucretius asserts, is material and its atoms are dispersed at death. There is no immortality and our life is limited to this world. It is while we are here that we must win our happiness. Just as the body is liable to violent diseases and severe pain, so is mind to sharp cares, grief and fear; it follows that it is its partner in death as well. Since vital sense is in the whole body, if on a sudden any force with swift blow cuts it in twain, the power of the soul will, without doubt, at the same time be cleft and cut and dashed in twain together with the body. The soul is neither without a birthday nor exempt from death. Souls do not make for themselves bodies and limbs; nor can they by any method find their way into bodies after they are fully formed; for they will neither be able to unite themselves with a nice precision nor will any connection of mutual sensation be formed between them.
Lucretius is certain that, whereas each thing can grow and abide, it is fixed and ordained. A tree cannot exist in the ether, nor clouds in the deep sea nor can fishes live in the fields nor blood exist in woods nor sap in stones. Thus the nature of the mind cannot come
11 A.B. Purani,Op. cit, pp. 126-27.
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into being alone without the body nor exist far away from the sinews and blood. (Ill: 784-89) Death, therefore, is nothing to us. We felt nothing before we came into being. We must, similarly, be unconcerned about our disappearance in the future. If we have enjoyed life we should be ready to depart like a guest leaving after a good dinner. If life has been a grievance, why should we seek to make any addition to be wasted perversely in its turn and lost utterly without avail?
Having the courage of his convictions, Lucretius claims that the Epicurean theory can account for phenomena like perception, illusions, dreams, memory, imagination and even love. He brings in the Epicurean concept of simulacra of "images" to explain these. The human mind is made up of very fine atoms, whose motion is altered by the impact of films which arise from external objects; they strike the sense organs, and transmit their motion to the atoms of the mind. When we have seen an object several times we form, as it were, a permanent image or a concept in our mind; these concepts, by their combination, constitute our thought. Imagination and other activities of the mind are explained by the same theory. Some simulacra are of such fine texture that they escape the coarser filters of the sense organs and impinge directly upon the atoms of the soul.
The ruthless materialism of philosophers like Lucretius is subjected to close scrutiny in Savitri. In the dialogue between Savitri and Death, the latter champions the cause of Materialism:
All thy high dreams were made by Matter's mind
To solace its dull work in Matter's jail,
Its only house where it alone seems true.
A solid image of reality
Carved out being to prop the works of Time;
Matter on the firm earth sits strong and sure.
It is the first-born of created things,
It stands the last when mind and life are slain,
And if it ended all would cease to be.
All else is only its outcome or its phase:
Thy soul is a brief flower by the gardener Mind
Created on thy Matter's terrain plot;
It perishes with the plant on which it grows,
For from earth's sap it draws its heavenly hue:
Thy thoughts are gleams that pass on Matter's verge,
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Thy life a lapsing wave on Matter's sea.12
Death contends that everything stands upon Matter as on a rock and that if Matter fails all, crumbling, cracks and falls. He also claims that he formed earth's beauty out of atom and gas and built the living man from chemic plasm.
But where is room for soul or place for God
In the brute immensity of a machine?
A transient Breath thou takest for thy soul,
Bom from a gas, a plasm, a sperm, a gene,
A magnified image of man's mind for God,
A shadow of thyself thrown upon Space...
Immortality thou claimest for thy spirit,
But immortality for imperfect man,
A god who hurts himself at every step,
Would be a cycle of eternal pain.13
Savitri is, therefore, advised to accept her lot as an earthly creature and to obey the earthly law. She has to submit to the ordeal of Fate's scourge and suffer what she must of toil and grief and care.
Savitri is not cowed down by the almighty Death; nor does she feel frustrated by his sophistry. She tells him that he speaks truth, but a truth that slays. He is told the truth that saves. The Divine, a traveller, made Matter's world his starting point. God covered his face in Matter, infinity wore a boundless zero's form, eternity became a blank spiritual vast. The Timeless took its ground in emptiness, so that the spirit might adventure into Time. The spirit built a thought in nothingness; Matter was made the body of the Bodiless and slumbering life breathed in Matter. Mind lay asleep in subconscient life and became active in conscious life. Man became a reasoning animal, measured the universe, opposed his fate, conqured the laws, became master of his environment and now hopes to become a demigod. Savitri tells the dire God:
Yes, I am human. Yet shall man by me,
Since in humanity waits his hour the God,
Trample thee down to reach the immortal heights,
Transcending grief and pain and fate and death.
12 Savitri, p. 615. 13Ibid., p. 618.
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Yes, my humanity is a mask of God:
He dwells in me, the mover of my acts,
Turning the great wheel of his cosmic work.
I am the living body of his light,
I am the thinking instrument of his power,
I incarnate Wisdom in an earthly breast,
I am his conquering and unslayable Will.14
It is foolish, in Lucretius's view, to seek refuge in the gods and to suppose all things to be guided by them. Nothing is more ridiculous than to charge them with wrathful deeds against man. No act, therefore, is more pathetic to him than to be seen with veiled head to turn to a stone and approach every altar and fall prostrate on the ground and spread out the palms before the statues of the gods and sprinkle the altars with the blood of beasts. It is time which brings forth everything before man's eye and reason develops it to the highest point. But unfortunately mankind, without being satisfied with anything, always toils vainly and to no purpose and wastes life in groundless cares as it has not learnt the true end of getting and the extent to which genuine pleasure can go.
Claiming to have willed to mount the illustrious chariot of the muses and ascending to heaven to explain the true law of winds and storms and all the other things which happen on earth and in heaven, Lucretius describes what the Greeks called meteorologica, the wide range of phenomena including thunder and lightning, clouds, rain and rainbows, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, the flooding of the Nile and even magnetism.
The blue sky is shaken with thunder because the ethereal clouds clash together when the winds combat from opposite directions. We hear the thunder with our ears after our eyes see the flash of lightning, because things always travel more slowly to the ears than those which excite vision travel to the eyes. Thunderbolts are born of dense clouds piled up high; for they are never caused when the sky is clear or when the clouds are of a slight density. The earth, filled in all parts with windy caverns, lakes and rivers, chasms, cliffs and craggy rocks, quakes above from the shock of great falling masses, just as buildings besides a road tremble throughout when shaken by a wagon. In order to understand all these natural happenings, one should remember that "the sum of things is
14Ibid., p. 634.
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unfathomable and to perceive how very small, how inconceivably minute a fraction of the whole sum one heaven is, not so large a fraction of it as one man is of the whole earth."13 All things with heaven, earth and sea included are nothing to the whole sum of the vast universe. Also on earth there are elements of things of every kind—many which are helpful to life, many which cause diseases and hasten death. Numerous things that are noxious and dangerous may pass through the ears, make their way through the nostrils. Not a few are to be shunned by the touch or avoided by the sight.
Lucretius, like his master Epicurus, places gods in a region remote from this world, in the "interworld" spaces, living a life of happiness and being totally indifferent to the affairs of men:
The Gods' majesty I see, and their quiet home,
Which no winds shake, no clouds soak with their showers,
No snow compacted hard with sharp frost spoils
With its white fall: a cloudless sky forever
Mantles it, joyful, with a radiant light
Nature supplies their needs: through all of time
No single thing lessens their peace of mind.16
In the parable of the search for the soul in Savitri this view of gods is dismissed as the attitude of ignorant human beings when faced with Fate. A mighty voice invading mortal space urges Savitri to arise and vanquish Time and Death. But her heart replies:
My strength is taken from me and given to Death,
Why should I lift my hands to the shut heavens
Or struggle with mute inevitable Fate
Or hope in vain to uplift an ignorant race
Who hug their lot and mock the saviour Light
And see in Mind Wisdom's sole tabernacle,
In its harsh peak and its inconscient base
A rock of safety and an anchor of sleep?
Is there a God whom any cry can move?
He sits in peace and leaves the mortal's strength
Impotent against his calm omnipotent Law
And Inconscience and the almighty hands of Death.17
15De Re rum Natura, VI: 649-65. 16Ibid., III: 14-24.
17Savitri, pp. 474-75.
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But the Voice exhorts her to seek God's meaning in her depths:
In the enormous emptiness of thy mind
Thou shalt see the Eternal's body in the world,
Know him in every voice heard by thy soul:
In the world's contacts meet his single touch;
All things shall fold thee into his embrace.
Conquer thy heart's throbs, let thy heart beat in God:
Thy nature shall be the engine of his works,
Thy voice shall house the mightiness of his Word:
Then shalt thou harbour my force and conquer Death.18
Man is not simply what he appears to be. All the world's possibilities in man are waiting as the tree waits in its seed. The unborn gods hide in his house of Life. Man is not a free being he imagines himself to be.
Above us dwells a superconscient god
Hidden in the mystery of his own light:
Around us is a vast of ignorance
Lit by the uncertain ray of human mind.19
This is only the first self-view of Matter. There is a greater Self of Knowledge waiting for man. "It shall descend and make earth's life divine." There are summits of man's being which are divine. Eternity and Divinity are his birthright. Light comes to man from above. "He calls the Godhead into his mortal life."
Earth must transform herself and equal Heaven
Or Heaven descend into earth's mortal state.
But for such vast spiritual change to be,
Out of the mystic cavern in man's heart
The heavenly Psyche must put off her veil
And step into common nature's crowded rooms.20
And this according to Sri Aurobindo is the destiny of man on earth.
While explaining the reproduction process, Lucretius reveals his utter contempt for love itself. How does a man fall in love with a
18Ibid, p. 476 19Ibid., p. 484. 20Ibid, pp. 486-87.
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lady? He who gets a hurt from the weapons of Venus, whatever be the object that hits him, inclines to the quarter whence he is wounded, and yearns to unite with it and join body with body. It is wise not to fall in love because the sore gathers strength and becomes inveterate by feeding, and everyday the madness grows in violence, and the misery becomes aggravated. The healthy-minded would avoid passionate involvement with a lover; for any passion leads to agonies of mind.
One is shocked by the crude view of love-making presented by the Roman poet. The burning desire of lovers, at the very moment of enjoying, wavers and wanders undecided and they cannot tell what first to enjoy with eyes and hands. What they have sought, they tightly squeeze and cause pain of body and often imprint their teeth on the lips and clash mouth to mouth in kissing, because the pleasure is not pure and there are hidden strings which stimulate to hurt even that from which spring those germs of frenzy.21 The passion of love is the one thing of all in which, when we have most of it, then all the more the breast burns with fell desire. The poet's extraordinarily bleak moral attitude to love is evident when he says that to be in love with a single sexual partner is to risk the pangs of jealousy and the torture of rejection and that it is better to take sexual pleasure where one finds it.
This kind of denigration of love is categorically rejected in Savitri, which, in fact, is the greatest celebration of human love. Death, of course, argues like Lucretius himself in Savitri:
What is this love thy thought has deified,
This sacred legend and immortal myth?
It is a conscious yearning of thy flesh,
It is a glorious burning of thy nerves,
A rose of dream-splendour petalling thy mind,
A great red rapture and torture of thy heart.
A sudden transfiguration of thy days,
It passes and the world is as before.
A ravishing edge of sweetness and of pain,
A thrill in its yearning makes it seem divine,
A golden bridge across the roar of the years,
A cord tying thee to eternity...
Love cannot live by heavenly food alone,
21 De Rerum Natura, IV: 1078-88.
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Only on sap of earth can it survive.
For thy passion was a sensual want refined;
A hunger of the body and the heart.22
But Savitri's reply to the dark Power is a paean to love:
My love is not a hunger of the heart,
My love is not a craving of the flesh;
It came to me from God, to God returns.
Even in all that life and man have marred,
A whisper of divinity still is heard,
A breath is felt from the eternal spheres.
Allowed by Heaven and wonderful to man
A sweet fire-rhythm of passion chants to love.
There is a hope in its wild infinite cry;
It rings with callings from forgotten heights,
And when its strains are hushed to high-winged souls
In their empyrean, its burning breath
Survives beyond, the rapturous core of suns
That flame for ever pure in skies unseen,
A voice of the eternal Ecstasy.23
Stressing the divine nature of love, Savitri later tells Death that she has triumphed over him within:
...Love must soar beyond the very heavens
And find its secret sense ineffable;
It must change its human ways to ways divine,
Yet keep its sovereignty of earthly bliss...
Love must not cease to live upon the earth;
For Love is the bright link twixt earth and heaven,
Love is the far Transcendent's angel here;
Love is man's lien on the Absolute.24
Lucretius dwells at length on the folly of those who are scared of death. Many of the fears and anxieties in man's life many be traced back to the origin in fear of death, which is often unacknowledged and hidden. It is this fear which urges men to every sin, prompts some to put all shame to rout, others to burst as under the bonds of friendship. In seeking to shun death, men have betrayed their country and dear parents. Just as children dread every thing in the thick
22Savitri, pp. 610-11. 23Ibid, pp. 612-13. 24Ibid., p. 633.
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darkness, grown-up men fear in the broad daylight things not a whit to be dreaded. We can free ourselves from this irrational fear if we realise that soul and mind are evolved with the body, grow with its growth, ail with its ailments, and die with its death. Nothing exists but atoms and void. The overriding law is that of evolution and dissolution everywhere.
Globed from the atoms, falling slow or swift
I see the suns, I see the systems lift
Their forms; and even the systems and their suns
Shall go back slowly to the eternal drift.
Thou too, O Earth—thine empires, lands and seas—
Least, with thy stars, of all the galaxies,
Globed from the drift like these, like these thou too
Shall go. Thou art going hour by hour, like these.
Nothing abides. Thy seas in delicate haze
Go off; those mooned sands forsake their place;
And where they are shall other seas in turn
Mow with their scythes of whiteness other bays.25
All the myths about Hades, according to Lucretius, are but allegories of the torments of needless anxieties in life. Tantalus is the man who lives in fear of the gods; Tityos is the frustrated lover; Sisyphus is the ambitious politician wooing the people for support. Fools create a hell for themselves on earth. One should tell oneself that even the best of men are dead and gone. Among the celebrated poets of the past Homer bore the sceptre without a peer but now he sleeps the same sleep as others. By his own spontaneous act, the great philosopher Democritus offered up his head to death. Even Epicurus passed away when his light of life had run its course. Each man, while he is alive, tries to fly away from himself, though self clings to him in his despite. A sure term of life is fixed for mortals and death cannot be shunned. Why should one hesitate and think it a hardship to die?
The epic of Lucretius ends with a gruesome account of the great plague in Athens at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. This is understandable if we bear in mind that the ultimate aim of the poet
25 Quoted in Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, New York: Pocket Books, 1961,p.l00.
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is to exhort mankind to have the courage, strength and wisdom to face death—even death by plague—with equanimity. The poet begins with a graphic sketch of the misery caused by the deadly disease.
First of all they would have the head seized
With burning heat and both eyes blood-shot
With a glare diffused over; the livid throat
Within would exude blood and the passage
Of the voice be clogged and chocked with
Ulcers, and the mind's interpreter
The tongue drip with gore, quite enfeebled
With sufferings, heavy in movement,
Rough to touch.26
This is followed by a frightening catalogue of the symptoms of death, certain to be noticed:
The clouded brow, the fierce delirious expression,
The ears too troubled and filled with ringings,
The breathing quick or else strangely loud
And slow-recurring, and the sweat
Glistening wet over the neck, the spittle in
Thin small flakes, tinged with a saffron—
Colour, salt, scarce forced up the rough
Throat by coughing. The tendons of the hands
Ceased not to contract, the limbs to shiver,
A coldness to mount with slow sure pace
From the feet upwards.27
The havoc wrought by the disease is not less alarming than the consternation caused by it:
And though bodies lay in heaps above
Bodies unburied on the ground, yet would
The race of birds and beasts either scour
Far away, to escape the acrid stench, or
Where anyone had tasted, it drooped in
26 De Rerum Natura, VI: 1147-55.
27Ibid., VI: 1183-94.
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Near-following death...
Funerals lonely, unattended, would be hurried
On with emulous haste...
Then too every shepherd and herdsman, ay
And sturdy guider of the bent plough
Sickened; and their bodies would be
Huddled together in the comers of a hut,
Delivered over to death by poverty and
Disease. Sometimes you might see lifeless
Bodies of parents above their lifeless children,
And then the reverse of this, children giving
Up life above their mothers and fathers...
All the holy sancturaries of the gods too
Death had filled with lifeless bodies,
And all the temples of the heavenly powers
In all parts stood burdened with carcases;
All which places the wardens had thronged With guests.28
The ostensible purpose of the Roman epic is to allay the fear of death. But towards the end of it Lucretius is seen to revel in the description of the destruction caused by death.
Savitri celebrated a human being's conquest over death. Savitri's encounter with death is presented as a fierce fight between Love and Death. The God of Death is viewed almost as a philosopher of the type of Lucretius, advocating all that is negative and wrong:
O dark-browed sophist of the universe
Who veilst the Real with its own Idea,
Hiding with brute objects Nature's living face,
Masking eternity with thy dance of death,
Thou hast woven the ignorant Mind into a screen
And made of Thought error's purveyor and scribe,
And a false witness of mind's servant sense.
An aesthete of the sorrow of the world,
Champion of a harsh and sad philosophy
Thou hast used words to shutter out the Light
And called in Truth to vindicate a lie.
A lying reality is falsehood's crown
28lbid., VI: 1215-88.
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When Satyavan dies in the forest, Savitri feels the presence of death, "the Shadow of a remote uncaring god." He appears to be "a limitless denial of all being that wore the terror and wonder of a shape" and the "refuge of creatures from their anguish and world-pain." While cycles of history had passed, stars had dissolved, he yet looked on with unchanging gaze and watched life, the writhing serpent. Asking Savitri to go back to her transient kind he tells her: "O sleeper dreaming of divinity, sorrowful foam of Time, your transient loves bind not the eternal gods." Man is but a fragile miracle of thinking clay, the child of Time. It is the mind of man that creates all these unreal images and the incurable unrest. But Savitri asserts her greatness: "I was thy equal spirit bom. I am immortal in My mortality. My soul can meet the stone eyes of Law and Fate with its living fire. Give me back Satyavan to do with him my spirit's burning will." Death declares his superemacy: "I have created all things; I destroy them. I have stamped life with my impress, the life that devours. I compel man to sin that I may punish him, I goad him to desire and then I scourge him with grief and despair."
Treating him with contempt Savitri answers: "My God is Will and he will triumph. My God is Love and sweetly suffers all. Love's golden wings have power to fan thy void. I shall remake thy universe, O Death."
Death proudly declares to the human soul: "What are you? A dream of brief emotions, glittering thoughts, a sparkling ferment in life's sunlit mire. Against the eternal witnesses would you claim immortality? Death only is eternal. I, Death, am He; there is no other God. Everything is bom from me, lives by me and returns to me. The world is created by me with the inconscient Force. I am the refuge of your soul. Gods are only my imaginations and my moods reflected in man. Your soul is also myself."
But Savitri boldly chides him: "O Death, who reasonest, I reason not. Reason that scans and breaks but cannot build or builds in vain because she doubts her word. I am, I Love, I see. I act, I will."30
Finally, Death realises that he has been waging a losing battle against Savitri and asks her: "You have Knowledge and Light but have you the power and the strength to conquer Time and Death? If you are the supreme Mother show me her face. Let deathless eyes
29Savitri, p. 621. 30Ibid, see pp. 589-94.
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look into the eyes of Death." Savitri looks at Death and a mighty transformation comes on her. In a flaming moment of apocalypse the Incarnation thrusts aside its Veil. The Power descends into the centres of the body. She commands Death to release the soul of the world, called Satyavan. Death is still unwilling to obey her order and stands against her. He calls to his strength but it refuses his call; his body is eaten by light. The Shadow soon disappears vanishing into the Void.
Then God's everlasting day surrounds Savitri. A voice rising from the heart speaks to her: "I am Ecstasy. You and Satyavan can ascend into the blissful home and live there as the gods who care not for the world."
Savitri knows what she wants and therefore resists this temptation also:
I climb not to thy everlasting Day,
Even as I have shunned thy eternal Night...
Earth is the chosen place of mightiest souls;
Earth is the heroic spirit's battlefield...
Thy servitudes on earth are greater, king,
Than all the glorious liberties of heaven.31
Savitri pleads with the Voice to weld them to one in its strong smithy of life:
I know that I can lift man's soul to God,
I know that he can bring the Immortal down.32
At the end of a long dialogue, the Voice acknowledges Savitri's identity: "O Savitri, thou art my spirit's Power. There are great things concealed in God's Beyond. Now mind appears to be the leader of the human race. There are greater destinies and mind is not the last summit of human destiny. A day will come when man will realise divine life. All earth shall be the Spirit's manifest home. The hour must come of the Transceadant's will. The end of Death, the death of Ignorance will also come. For that Truth must descend on earth and man must aspire to the Eternal's light. But this is also bound to happen."33
Envisioning the ultimate victory of man over death, Savitri ends on a note of hope. It becomes evident at the end that the Indian epic is a complete rebuttal of Lucuetius's world-view. With regard to all
31Ibid., p. 686. 32Ibid,p.687. 33Ibid, see pp. 703-08.
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the major issues relating to Matter and Spirit, Love and Death, man's evolution and his future, Savitri rejects the Roman philosopher's contentions. But there is no doubt that De Rerum Natura would have been constantly one of the issues in the mind of the Indian Seer-Poet as an inspiring model urging him to bring forth the true truth about the nature of things.
P. MARUDANAYAGAM
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