On Savitri
THEME/S
After his personal liberation, Aswapati seeks for the key to the realisation of Truth for all humankind. This leads him to search for the parting of the ways, the place where Error creeps into eternal Perfection, and the secret Origin where resides the Power by which the universal condition of Ignorance and Falsehood may be abolished. Withdrawing from the reality of the gross physical realm (sthula jagat) he becomes the Traveller of the Worlds, ascending the serried planes of consciousness that link our dense material base of manifestation with the Unmanifest Infinite Unknowable (avyakta parātpara). He identifies himself with the Reality of each of these planes, becoming their Witness (sākshi) and learning their intrinsic law of being (swabhava) and expression (swadharma). The Second Book of Sri Aurobindo's Savitri deals with this journey, eventually leading to the emergence of the Supreme Mother out of the heart of the Unknowable and the offering of Her boon of transformative Incarnation to Aswapati. As Aswapati traverses the World-Stair, Sri Aurobindo explores the aspect of consciousness native to each level, bringing out its special mode of manifestation and the difficulties and opportunities it presents relative to the Truth. Thus, just as each chapter of the Bhagavad Gita unlocks the secrets of a specific Yoga, each canto of Book II (and in fact, every canto of Savitri) opens a new approach to spiritual union, a Yoga. Leaving the gross material world, the first new realm that Aswapati enters is the world of Subtle Matter. The Mother has called this "true matter", since a supramental physicality will finally manifest through this substance. Matter holds the secret to the realisation of the Divine as embodied Beauty. It is the chosen medium for the representation of Transcendental Reality in concrete form. Thus, it can be seen analogically as the sculptor's stone or clay, subject to a Divine Creative process. How appropriate then, that the way of union offered to the spiritual contemplation of Aswapati that is Sri Aurobindo by this kingdom should be that of the creative artist, the shilpa-yogin.
Sri Aurobindo introduces the theme of creative expression and beauty early in the canto, upon Aswapati's entry into the "kingdom of subtle Matter's faery craft":1
1 Savitri, p. 103.
A world of lovelier forms lies near to ours,
Where, undisguised by earth's deforming sight,
All shapes are beautiful and all things true. ..2
Its intercession with the eternal Ray
Inspires our transient earth's brief-lived attempts
At beauty and the perfect shape of things.3
Soon, the tentative character of "transient earth's brief-lived attempts" assumes the urgency of an imperative. The creative process on earth hides a profounder intentional mystery which Sri Aurobindo introduces but leaves mystically enigmatic.
This mire must harbour the orchid and the rose,
From her blind unwilling substance must emerge
A beauty that belongs to happier spheres.
This is the destiny bequeathed to her,
As if a slain god left a golden trust
To a blind force and an imprisoned soul.
An immortal godhead's perishable parts
She must reconstitute from fragments lost.4
These lines remind us of "the dread mysterious sacrifice"5 that Sri Aurobindo speaks of elsewhere in the epic, the holocaust of the Supreme Purusha, the original "plunge into the Night"6 that initiates an evolutionary manifestation and is renewed in the unconditional sacrifice of each Avatar. It also carries with it the echo of its consequence—
A mutual debt binds man to the Supreme:
His nature we must put on as he put ours.7
This "reconstitution" or "putting on" of the Divine nature by earthly substance is a mediated creative process that reproduces here the perennial dynamics of representation that is the play (Lila) of Shakti and Shakta, the Tapas of Chit calling into Becoming the numberless names and forms of pure infinite Being, Sat, and giving these reality in Space and Time through the agency of Supermind. Sri Aurobindo launches into an exploration of these creative dynamics and in the process awakens cultural echoes of existing theories concerning the
2 Ibid. 5 Ibid., p. 445.
3Ibid., p. 104. 6Ibid,.p.107.
4Ibid., p.107. 7Ibid., p.67.
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human creative act that have appeared in different spatial and temporal contexts, relating these in his all-embracing vision.
However, it will be wrong to look for a logical or philosophical sequence of ideas in the canto. In one of his letters on Savitri, Sri Aurobindo identifies his inspiration as a Dionysian one8 and means by this that the visionary idea-sequences of Savitri are carried on the surge of a strategic development subservient to a dynamic play of spiritual emotion, bhāva. Ideas are introduced and their existential implications outlined in relation to other ideas, before being revisited and elaborated upon. New ideas are inserted into the flow of the unfolding present, unexpectedly modifying our expectations or pointing an indicative finger to the canto's or epic's or humanity's own past or future. Out of this complex weft, we need to disentangle the line of development suited to our intention.
Ancient thought, both in Greece and in India, placed the roots of our creation, like the Gita's Ashwattha tree, above, in the Transcendent. There, distant from our mire-obscured appearances, bums the Logos, the vast solar Truth (satyam bṛhai) that projects the "unfolding Image" birthing the Infinite in Time and Space:
All we attempt in this imperfect world,
Looks forward or looks back beyond Time's gloss
To its pure idea and firm inviolate type
In an absolute creation's flawless skill.
To seize the absolute in shapes that pass,
To feel the eternal's touch in time-made things,
This is the law of all perfection here.9
But a profound difference enters around the 5th c. B.C. between Indian and Greek epistemological views on human access to this realm of the Ideal. This difference is closely related to the birth of Metaphysics in Greece. Metaphysics initiates a systematisation of the human location in Space and Time relative to God, Nature and Society. As a consequence it runs the danger of subjecting the Infinite to a scheme of the mind, reducing it to a concept. This mental perspectivism on the Infinite is an epistemological shift which disorients mind from its ground in Spirit, progressively rendering It inaccessible. The lightning-intuitions of Pre-Socratic "thinking", close
8 Ibid., p. 733: "The mystic Muse is more of an inspired Bacchante of theDionysian wine than an orderly housewife."
9 Ibid., p. 108
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neighbour to Upanishadic utterance, are now replaced by ponderous mental classifications. Though it is Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) who is commonly known as the founder of Western Metaphysics, one of the most articulate thinkers of the modem West, Heidegger (1889-1976) who spent his considerable philosophical powers exposing the civilisational hubris of Metaphysics and the historical consequences of its mental totalitarianism, points to Aristotle's teacher, Plato (427-347 B.C.) as more properly its initiator. Though Plato was not unfamiliar with the Spirit, and in spite of Plotinus's 3n1 c. mystical reinterpretations of his ideas, the beginnings of a problematical relationship, symptomatic of mind's disorientation from Spirit, manifests itself in his works. Plato banishes the poet from his ideal Republic, equating the state of creative inspiration with mental instability, dangerous to the rational lucidities of social organisation. In his view of the process of creative representation, a fixed hierarchy reveals itself extending from the world of Divine Ideas to its secondary and tertiary projections respectively in the world of Nature and in Nature's product, Man. Thus, to Plato, human creation, which is based on sensory reception and response to the world of Nature is "twiceremoved" from the world of Divine Ideas. Nature's expressions are copies from the world of Ideas, while human expression copies from the world of Nature-making the human creation a sorry copy of a copy.10
In the canto under our consideration, Sri Aurobindo invokes this Platonic theory to underline the practical insufficiency of the ignorant human state to have access to the Divine Idea:
Here in a difficult half-finished world
Is a slow toiling of unconscious Powers;
Here is man's ignorant divining mind,
His genius bom from an inconscient soil.
To copy on earth's copies is his art.
For when he strives for things surpassing earth,
Too rude the workman's tools, too crude his stuff,
And hardly with his heart's blood he achieves
His transient house of the divine Idea,
His figure of a Time-inn for the Unborn."
This passage is preceded by one which introduces the idea of human
10Plato, The Republic, X
11Savitri, p.109.
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creation being a copy of "heaven's art." The passage evokes the metallic brilliance of Byzantine sculpture, presenting, in W. B. Yeats's description, an "artifice of eternity."12 There is something lacking here, a mimesis of form and an iconic idea, which attempts a transcendence of the sensible world, but stops short at a mental construct. This is the paucity of the religious art of medieval Europe, where the breath of the Spirit fails to invest the image with concrete life. The divorce of Spirit and Mind formalised in the Metaphysics of the pre-Christian West continues to blight the attempt at a successful ideational art:
Earth's eyes half see, her forces half create;
Her rarest works are copies of heaven's art.
A radiance of a golden artifice,
A masterpiece of inspired device and rule.
Her forms hide what they house and only mime
The unseized miracle of self-bom shapes
That live for ever in the Eternal's gaze.13
A similar, though opposite insufficiency haunts the art of the Renaissance. Verisimilitude, the truth of Nature observed and experienced, now predominates over the spiritual idea in an attempt to return life to art. Though religious themes are often depicted and
12 Sailing to Byzantium, W.B. Yeats, Collected Poems
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, peme in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of entemity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing.
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
13Savitri, P.109.
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are sometimes given bold embodiment in form and, though undoubtedly, supreme geniuses like Leonardo da Vinci, Michaelangelo and Raphael from this period have left some of the most outstanding specimens of art in human history, a scrupulous naturalistic illusionism based on one-point perspective and the play of external light and shade and a principled subjection to the limits of observed human anatomy and emotion perpetuates the separation of Mind and Spirit, Plato's copy of a copy
.
Western philosophers of this period continued to grapple with the problematic relationship between Spirit and Mind, shifting the needle even more emphatically towards the independence of the human Reason and giving rise to the Enlightenment of the IS* century. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), easily the best known of the philosophers of this period, did not fail to address the problem introduced by Metaphysics, identifying its crux and seeking a breakthrough which would free human knowledge from its apologetic relationship with the Spirit. Among Kant's principal contributions to Philosophy are his astute observation of the inability of Reason to apprehend Infinite Being {The Critique of Pure Reason) and his formalisation of Aesthetics as a branch of Philosophy alternate to Metaphysics (The Critique of Judgement).
In his Critique of Pure Reason Kant saw and expressed more clearly than his predecessors that Metaphysics' attempt to objectify the realm of Divine Ideas, of God or pure infinite Spirit, was an incongruity beyond the reach of finite mind and that what resulted from the effort was the subjection of the Reason to a concept, and not a thing-in-itself According to Kant, neither sensible objects nor unconditioned realities such as God, were knowable in themselves to the human mind, since human experience was only capable of knowing sensible objects through a priori cognitive categories. As for Spirit, being by definition unconditioned, no such forms of cognitive understanding would find any foothold, leaving It entirely outside the realm of knowledge. Thus, the legitimate field of Philosophy, for Kant, was the study of the a priori forms of mental understanding as the only accessible grounds of human knowledge. Since these categories of knowing were supposed by Kant to be inherent to mentality, he used the term "transcendental" for them, and called his own Philosophy "Critical Transcendentalism."14 Kantian subjectivism has important
14 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Norman Kemp Smith, London,1929, "Preface" (both editions), pp.7-32.
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consequences for art since, though Kant stationed himself firmly on the irreducible finitude of human cognition, the assumption of universality in the conditions of knowing pointed to an "objective" subjectivism and opened up a variety of German Transcendentalist variants, one of which—Schelling's Transcendental Absolutism— succeeded in establishing once more a Romantic bridge between Mind and the Divine Idea through the theory of the Imagination.
Moreover, if Kant's Critique of Pure Reason abolished Spirit from the legitimate domain of knowledge, his Critique of Judgement could be said to surreptitiously return Spirit into human experience through beauty and sublimity. If the unconditioned infinite Transcendent was irrevocably divorced from the mind, its Immanence in Nature now re-surfaced as the aesthetic experience. A mysterious property inherent in the object of Beauty awoke a pure disinterested delight in the observer, while the experience of the sublime went further to flash a glimpse of unearthly Perfection, an intimation of the Ideal or archetypal world in earthly things.15 Though not immediately manifest in Western Art, the implications of Kant's thinking on the aesthetic experience was to fire the passion of 19* c. Romanticism in Germany and England. Sri Aurobindo dwells on this experience of Beauty and Sublimity in Nature and the ideal worlds with which it brings humanity into contact, relating the experience with psychic awakening through refinement of the senses.
Worlds are there nearer to those absolute realms,
Where the response to Truth is swift and sure
And spirit is not hampered by its frame
And hearts by sharp division seized and rent
And delight and beauty are inhabitants
And love and sweetness are the law of life.
A finer substance in a subtler mould
Embodies the divinity earth but dreams;
Its strength can overtake joy's running feet;
Overleaping the fixed hurdles set by Time,
The rapid net of an intuitive clasp
Captures the fugitive happiness we desire.
A Nature lifted by a larger breath,
15s1mmanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, tr. James Creed Meredith, Oxford, 1952. especially Part I, Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, sections 1-22, "Analytic of the Beautiful", pp. 203-244. (Page numbers refer to the original German pagination. given in the margins of Meredith's text.)
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Plastic and passive to the all-shaping Fire,
Answers the flaming Godhead's casual touch:
Immune from our inertia of response
It hears the word to which our hearts are deaf,
Adopts the seeing of immortal eyes
And, traveller on the roads of line and hue,
Pursues the spirit of Beauty to its home.
Thus we draw near to the All-Wonderful
Following his rapture in things as sign and guide;
Beauty is his footprint showing us where he has passed,
Love is his heartbeat's rhythm in mortal breasts,
Happiness the smile on his adorable face.16
Kant's aesthetics, in spite of admitting a mysterious element in the experience of beauty, remains grounded in sensible Nature. Nevertheless his ideas, though situated in the Enlightenment, may be seen as precursors to 19th c. Romantic thought, thereby inaugurating the transition into our Modem Age of Subjectivism. Particularly, the transformation of his cognitive transcendentalism, in the hands of Romantic thinkers such as Schelling, returns to the creative artist his ancient kinship with the world of Divine Ideas and frees him from the tyranny of the natural world. No longer is the artist an imitator of heaven's imitations; he has discovered now the right to receive directly from the Inner or Higher worlds creations not yet bom on earth or hidden from sight in its occult folds, a prerogative exercised in its fullness only since the late 19th c. However, lacking a tradition in the disciplined invocation of a higher consciousness, the art of modem subjectivism is yet to live up to its promise:
Even in the littleness of our mortal state,
Even in this prison-house of outer form,
A brilliant passage for the infallible Flame
Is driven through gross walls of nerve and brain,
A Splendour passes or a Power breaks through,
Earth's great dull barrier is removed awhile,
The inconscient seal is lifted from our eyes
And we grow vessels of creative might.
The enthusiasm of a divine surprise
Pervades our life, a mystic stir is felt,
16 Ibid., pp. 111-12.
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A joyful anguish trembles in our limbs;
A dream of beauty dances through the heart,
A thought from the eternal Mind draws near,
Intimations cast from the Invisible
Awaking from Infinity's sleep come down,
Symbols of That which never yet was made.
But soon the inert flesh responds no more,
Then sinks the sacred orgy of delight,
The blaze of passion and the tide of power
Are taken from us and, though a glowing form
Abides astonishing earth, imagined supreme,
Too little of what was meant has left a trace.17
In Indian aesthetic thought of the c, such a sinking of the Inspiration would be attributed to a failure of yogic concentration (shithila samādhi)18. Though the six Darshanas were well established and systematic Buddhist philosophy of a high sophistication had made its appearance in India of the pre-Christian era, the Western division between Mind and Spirit remained foreign to the tradition of Indian thinking. Undoubtedly, this was because Philosophy in India was always seen as Darshana, an epistemological framework resting on and facilitating states of yogic realisation. This subordination of thinking to a discipline of practice (abhyāsa) leading to ontological changes which permitted direct knowledge by identity (pratyaksha) of Spirit, is what marks the fundamental difference between Indian and Western Philosophy. The primacy of Spirit and the yoking of human effort to it with an aim to union enters too, into accounts of the human creative process and spawns a tradition of artistic practice known as shilpa-yoga (the Yoga of Art or Art as Yoga).
Thinking of the creative process in these terms can be seen from the earliest Indian texts. In the Nasadiya Sukta of the Rig Veda, for example, That which transcends Being and Non-Being makes Itself manifest as Being through its own mysterious Power, later known as Tapas or Shakti.19 A graphic description of the process is presented in the Aitereya Upanishad:
Yea, the Spirit brooded over Him and of Him thus brooded over the mouth broke forth, as when an egg is hatched and breaks;
17 Ibid., pp. 108-09.
18 Kalidasa, Malavikagnimitra (ed. paranjape), pune, 1918.
19 Rig Veda Samhita,. X129.
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from the mouth broke Speech and of Speech fire was bom. The nostrils broke forth and from the nostrils Breath and of Breath air was bom. The eyes broke forth and from the eyes Sight and of Sight the Sun was bom. The ears broke forth and from the ears Hearing and of Hearing the regions were bom. The skin broke forth and from skin hairs and from the hairs herbs of healing and all trees and plants were bom. The heart broke forth and from the heart Mind and of Mind the moon was bom. The navel broke forth and from the navel apāna and of apāna Death was bom. The organ of pleasure broke forth and from the organ seed and of seed the waters were bom.20
Here the process of Divine creation is outlined in terms of the primary emergence of the organs of experience of the Divine Person (Purusha) through the self-concentration (brooding) of Spirit. From these transcendental subjective determinants the constituents of objective experience are projected. Continuing, the description proceeds to reverse the scheme by speaking of the creation of the human being in the image of the Purusha and of the entry of objective and subjective constituents into the human being.21 A profound experiential equivalence between man and God is established in this way, pointing to the possibility of knowledge by identity in Being and creative capacity. In the canto under our consideration a similar description of the self-representation of Spirit is provided along with a statement of the perpetuation of its creative urge at all levels of its manifestation:
There are realms where Being broods in its own depths;
It feels in its immense dynamic core
Its nameless, unformed, unborn potencies
Cry for expression in the unshaped Vast:
Ineffable beyond Ignorance and death,
The images of its ever-living Truth
Look out from a chamber of its self-rapt soul:
As if to its own inner witness gaze
The Spirit holds up its mirrored self and works,
The power and passion of its timeless heart,
The figures of its formless ecstasy,
The grandeurs of its multitudinous might.
20 The Upanishads, SABCL, Vol. 12, p. 356.
21 Ibid., p. 357.
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Thence comes the mystic substance of our souls
Into the prodigy of our nature's birth,
There is the unfallen height of all we are
And dateless fount of all we hope to be.
On every plane the hieratic Power,
Initiate of the unspoken verities,
Dreams to transcribe and make a part of life
In its own native style and living tongue
Some trait of the perfection of the Unborn,
Some vision seen in the omniscient Light,
Some far tune of the immortal rhapsodist Voice,
Some rapture of the all-creating Bliss,
Some form and plan of the Beauty unutterable.22
The Golden Age of Indian Art is considered to be the period from the late 4th to the 6th c, though astonishing embodiments of Beauty continue to be seen in Indian sculpture and architecture right up to the 16th c. and in Painting at least upto the 18th c. By the 5th c, sophisticated treatises on art and aesthetics, like the Vishnu-dharmottaram, have made their appearance, containing canonical injunctions on standards of form and methods of artistic practice. It is clear from these texts that no use of external models were prescribed for representation, this being replaced by a process of inward concentration {dhyāna) bringing the object of representation clearly and in detail into one's visualisation and uniting oneself in consciousness with it. Coomaraswamy describes this process:
... [It] will appear natural enough that that India should have developed a highly specialised technique of vision. The maker of an icon, having by various means proper to the practice of Yoga eliminated the distracting influences of fugitive emotions and creature images, self-willing and self-thinking, proceeds to visualise the form of the devata, or aspect of God, described in a given canonical prescription, sādhanā, mantram, dhyāna. The mind "produces" or "draws" (ākarshati) this form to itself, as though from a great distance, ultimately, that is, from heaven where the types of art exist in formal operation, immediately, from "the immanent space in the heart" (antar-hridaya-ākāsha), the common focus (samstāva, "concord") of seer and seen, at which place the only possible experience of reality takes place.
22 Savitri, p. 111.
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The true knowledge-purity aspect (jnānasattvarupa) thus conceived and inwardly known (antarjneya) reveals itself against the ideal space (ākāsna) like a reflection (pratibimbavat), or as if seen in a dream (svapnavat). The imager must realise a complete self-identification with it (ātmānam.... dhyāyāt bhāvayei), whether its peculiarities (nānālakshāndlamkṛtam), even in the case of opposite sex or when the divinity is provided with terrible supernatural characteristics; the form thus known in an act of non-differentiation, being held in view as long as may be necessary (evam rupam yāvad icchati tāvad vibhāvayet), is the model from which he proceeds to execution in stone, pigment or other material.23
This is the stringent discipline (abhyāsa) of the ancient Indian shilpa-yogin and the conditions of inner identity practised and experienced by him are presented thus by Sri Aurobindo in our canto:
A communion of spiritual entities,
A genius of creative Immanence,
Makes all creation deeply intimate:
A fourth dimension of aesthetic sense
Where all is in ourselves, ourselves in all,
To the cosmic wideness re-aligns our souls.
A kindling rapture joins the seer and seen;
The craftsman and the craft grown inly one
Achieve perfection by the magic throb
And passion of their close identity.24
And yet, from our modem point of view, which revels in the divine right of its freedom of conception, this inner visualisation on prescribed forms, attributes, postures and proportions seems as constraining as the Western subjection to external reality. It may be pointed out that these prescriptions are only guidelines, evidentiary formulae {pramānāni) seen and shaped by master-yogis to train the consciousness to recognise perfect principles by example—that once these guidelines are mastered in experience, alternate formulations may be produced. This of course is true, but still the temper of our age finds it hard not to refuse the discipline of creating from established canons. At the turn of the last century, the Indian master-artist
23 Coomaraswamy, The Transformation of Nature in Art (2nd ed.), New York pp. 5-6.
24 Savitri, p. 112.
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Abanindranath Tagore affirmed this spirit by advising the modem Indian artist to assimilate the essence of the past but have the courage to tread new ground. The modem shilpa-yogin 's sādhanā, he said, is sajāg-sādhānd, meditation with eyes wide open. In his words: "Every artist must first weave to his own design his dream-catcher's net, then wait—laying one's seat beside the universal traffic—not with one's senses shut—but wide awake. At the initiation of this sajāg-sādhanā, the rigour of this discipline must be welcomed and owned."25 One is reminded here of the Mother's views on the Yoga of the Artist: "The discipline of Art has at its centre the same principle as the discipline of Yoga. In both the aim is to become more and more conscious; in both you have to learn to see and feel something that is beyond the ordinary vision and feeling, to go within and bring out from there deeper things. Painters have to follow a discipline for the growth of the consciousness of their eyes, which in itself is almost a Yoga. If they are true artists and try to see beyond and use their art for the expression of the inner world, they grow in consciousness by this concentration, which is not other than the consciousness given by Yoga."26 The Mother has more to say about the discipline of the artist's training, Abanindranath's weaving of his "dream-catcher's net": "...there is a considerable difference between the vision of ordinary people and that of artists. Their way of seeing things is much more complete and conscious than that of ordinary people. When one has not trained one's vision, one sees vaguely, imprecisely, and has impressions rather than an exact vision. An artist, when he sees something and has learnt to use his eyes,—for instance, when he sees a figure, instead of seeing just a form, like that, you know,... he sees the exact structure of the figure, the proportions of the different parts, whether the figure is harmonious or not, and why ... all sorts of things at one glance, you understand, in a single vision, as one sees the relations between different forms."27
Sri Aurobindo expresses his sympathy with this sense of modem independence. There is no need for us to repeat what a past age has done. Not limiting ourselves to prescribed images of the Gods, a vast adventurous embrace of all life as the field of Yoga, and hence as providing fit subjects for the shilpa-yogin's contemplation and
25 Abanindranath Tagore, Bageshwari Shilpa Prabandhābali, Calcutta, Allahabad, Bombay, 1969, p.1. (Author's translation).
26Questions and Answers, CWM, Vol. 3, p. 105.
27Ibid., Vol. 6, p. 83.
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representation in the new spiritual Age that is seeking for manifestation, is Sri Aurobindo's invitation.28 Moreover, the conditions of yogic representation, in Sri Aurobindo's view, need now be extended beyond wall or canvas to the lived everyday reality of the artist—the Gods must be shaped within to live in us and an inspired dynamic union with the Transcendent's sphere lead us into a Divine Life on earth:
Only when we have climbed above ourselves,
A line of the Transcendent meets our road
And joins us to the timeless and the true;
It brings to us the inevitable word,
The godlike act, the thoughts that never die.
A ripple of light and glory wraps the brain,
And travelling down the moment's vanishing route
The figures of eternity arrive.
As the mind's visitors or the heart's guests
They espouse our mortal brevity awhile,
Or seldom in some rare delivering glimpse
Are caught by our vision's delicate surmise.
Although beginnings only and first attempts,
These glimmerings point to the secret of our birth
And the hidden miracle of our destiny.
What we are there and here on earth shall be
Is imaged in a contact and a call.
As yet earth's imperfection is our sphere,
Our nature's glass shows not our real self;
That greatness still abides held back within.
Earth's doubting future hides our heritage:
The Light now distant shall grow native here,
The Strength that visits us our comrade power;
The Ineffable shall find a secret voice,
The Imperishable bum through Matter's screen
Making this mortal body godhead's robe.
The Spirit's greatness is our timeless source
And it shall be our crown in endless Time.29
DEBASHISH BANERJI
28The Future Poetry, pp. SABCL, Vol. 9, pp. 189-98.
29 Savitri ,p. 110
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