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”Savitri is the epic of the Victory over death”, said the Mother. The central issue, therefore, is the victory over death both on the individual and
universal levels. Satyavan represents the soul of the earth chained to its sempiternal law of Death. Narad had prophesied that,
Must earth die for all eternity to come? Will someone descend upon earth and release it from its fate? Will someone pass through the astronomer’s black
hole, the impenetrable information barrier, and bring back the secret of Death, bring back Satyavan to an immortal day? Will someone ’disrupt, dislodge by her soul’s force’ the ’block of the immortal’s road’ and
shape anew earth’s fate? Yes. That ’someone’ is Savitri, introduced to us in Canto l:
Apart, living within, all lives she bore;
A!oof, she carried in herself the world;
Her dread was one with the great
cosmic dread;
Her strength was founded on the
cosmic nights;
The universal Mother’s love was hers.
On the day Satyavan is supposed to die, Savitri, immobile in herself, gathered her force in order to confront Time and Fate.
At this point, Sri Aurobindo suspends the description of Savitri and takes us into the many-imaged past of her life through her own canvas of
recollections. It is as if in her gathering of force, she is bringing up her own past, by living it for brief moments. This brief reviewing is needed in order to destroy her past - a necessary act before she can
hope to leap into the future:
As ”Her witness spirit stood reviewing Time,” Savitri saw her childhood, her youth, all the ’well-loved forms now seen no more”, all her
hopes and dreams. In brief, she saw:
Her life’s broad highways and its sweet bypaths fly past her in her memory’s skies. The brightest period in Savitri’s life was perhaps those ’twelve passionate months’ which could be compared to ’paradise groves’. The phrase, ’peacock wings of Love,’ in the verse:
And the paradise groves and peacock wings of Love is indeed very suggestive of the rapture and intensity of Love. Peacock-dance symbolises the dance of joy. It is a dance that is self-lost creating ripples of beauty and joy all around. The many hues of the peacock wings represent the many hues of love itself. And mark, Love is spelt with a capital ’L’ denoting love that is divine in its origin and yet humanly ’passionate’.
And yet, this divine Love and Joy, is at present under the clasp of doom – ’under the silent shadow of doom’ – because it is the shadow of
Death that is fast approaching Satyavan. The phrase, ’heaven raced with hell’, brings out the importance of the day – the day Satyavan must die – because it is on this day that the great victory is either gained or
lost – the victory over Death! The choice is between Truth or Abyss; the race is between Heavens of Bliss or the Hell of Sorrow!
At this juncture, when Savitri was digging into her past, only in order to clear it away and to call out the hidden Spirit in herself, there
is a sudden unexpected turn in her consciousness. Instead of the expected delight and peace of the approaching spirit, ”an absolute supernatural darkness” fell on her.
Mystics say that when ’one draws near to God’, one has to pass through a dark tunnel. T.S. Eliot refers to the dark night of the soul, in his poem
’East Coker’:
”I said to my soul, be still,
and let the dark come upon you
which shall be the darkness of God.”
Eliot borrowed this concept of the Dark Night or the via negative from St. John of the Cross who writes in his book, The Ascent of Mount Carmel:
”... this dark night through which the
soul passes in order to attain to the
Divine light of perfect union of the
love of God.”
There are two ways of going through this passage of the ’dark night’ - the active and the passive. St. John counsels in his book The Dark Night of the Soul the passive way for the beginners: ”The passive way is that wherein the soul does nothing, and God works in the soul, and it remains, as it were, patient.” This is the way which leads the beginner down through a stage of ’utter disgust with the physical’ and takes him to a state of vacancy where everything is nullified temporarily – things of sense and of spirit alike. Sri Aurobindo describes this state as:
An hour comes when fail all Nature’s means;
Forced out from the protecting Ignorance
And flung back on his naked primal need...
As long as one is not ”forced out” of the ’protecting Ignorance’ one does not reach, perhaps that state of vacancy. So, the poet, Eliot,
says:
Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world,
Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Desiccation of the world of fancy,
In open the world of spirit.
This internal darkness is the stage when ’the faculties are at rest, and are working not actively but passively by receiving that which God
works in them.’ So Eliot tells his soul to
Be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing;
wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing;
there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and hope
are all in the waiting
Wait without thought, for you are not
ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light,
and the stillness the dancing ...
wait without love
In the experience of the mystics, this is spiritual vacuity needed for the descent of Grace. It is only
the darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Sri Aurobindo too describes the same purifying darkness as:
What Sri Aurobindo alludes to in the phrase ‘his surface soul’ is perhaps the same thing that St. John describes in The Dark Night of the Soul:
”During this experience the soul is set in this dark night to the end that He may quench and purge its sensual desire. He allows it not to find
attraction or sweetness in anything whatsoever.”
Under the pressure of ‘darkness on darkness’, one is forced to take recourse to the ‘ungarbed within’, the psychic being, the soul-power. All supports
of outer self withdrawn, ‘when fail all nature’s means’, one its compelled to fall back upon the inner entity, the soul-entity. And this kind of ‘purifying darkness’ had now come upon Savitri too:
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