Apropos of Two Vast Negations — 4

Apropos of Two Vast Negations — 4

“Thou hast come and all will surely change”

Savitri has grown up into a marriageable age but such is the dazzle and the majesty and the splendour of hers that no hero-prince dares to approach her claiming her hand. But knowing who she is her yogi-father bids her to find one who would be the lyrist of her soul, the second self for whom her nature asks. In it she shall meet a greater God, her own self beyond Time. Savitri sets on the quest and driving her carved golden chariot she eventually meets Satyavan in the far lonely Shalwa forest. The Poet introduces him as follows, Savitri’s second self:

A Veda-knower of the unwritten book

Perusing the mystic scripture of her forms

He had caught her hierophant significances,

Her sphered immense imaginations learned,

Taught by sublimities of stream and wood

And voices of the sun and star and flame

And chant of the magic singers on the boughs

And the dumb teaching of four-footed things. ||102.15||

Helping with confident steps her slow great hands

He leaned to her influence like a flower to rain

And, like the flower and tree a natural growth,

Widened with the touches of her shaping hours. ||102.16||

This “her” is the “ancient Mother in her groves”, she who gave him the knowledge of the Veda. It is in that knowledge that he contributes his bit, “Helping with confident steps her slow great hands”. But that bit is not yet sufficient, it waiting for the arrival of Savitri.

Let us, however, just scan this complex narrative:

But this Veda-knower is himself someone absolutely exceptional. The Greeks believed that if one drinks wine from an amethyst cup he never gets drunk howsomuch he might drink.

Rare is the cup fit for love’s nectar wine,

As rare the vessel that can hold God’s birth;

A soul made ready through a thousand years

Is the living mould of a supreme Descent. ||102.57||

He is holding in him God’s birth in the union with Savitri. In his passionate courtship speech he tells about his deeds and asprations, that his one fervent yearning is to clasp in his hand the feet of the World-Mother who shapes and brings about what is destined in the world’s soul:

I carved my vision out of wood and stone;

I caught the echoes of a word supreme

And metred the rhythm beats of infinity

And listened through music for the eternal Voice. ||103.38||

I felt a covert touch, I heard a call,

But could not clasp the body of my God

Or hold between my hands the World-Mother’s feet. ||103.39||

That is where the destiny has got stuck. In the ardent seekers of this creation there is only a fragmentary success, they living only in fragments, all the lofty Vedantic glories offering only something of the Beyond with not much concerned about the lot of mortality here.

In men I met strange portions of a Self

That sought for fragments and in fragments lived:

Each lived in himself and for himself alone

And with the rest joined only fleeting ties;

Each passioned over his surface joy and grief,

Nor saw the Eternal in his secret house. ||103.40||

I conversed with Nature, mused with the changeless stars,

God’s watch-fires burning in the ignorant Night,

And saw upon her mighty visage fall

A ray prophetic of the Eternal’s sun. ||103.41||

This gets intensely accentuated even in the case of those who shed diamond light. But that transcendence left Matter empty of its Lord, without the sovereignty of divine contents in it. There is present in all the pursuits the non-recognition of awakening the material base to hold and expand the wonders of divine possibilities in it. It is not much really the Denial of the Ascetic; it is the lack of exploration of the divine depths of Matter, that which are covered by the dense Inconscience. But this Veda-knower at once sees the ray of Hope in one he is seeing in front of him, the alert soul at once getting the sense of triumphant fulfilment:

I sat with the forest sages in their trance:

There poured awaking streams of diamond light,

I glimpsed the presence of the One in all. ||103.42||

But still there lacked the last transcendent power

And Matter still slept empty of its Lord. ||103.43||

The spirit was saved, the body lost and mute

Lived still with Death and ancient Ignorance;

The Inconscient was its base, the Void its fate. ||103.44||

In this rare cup there is the sparkling wine of wisdom and foreknowledge:

But thou hast come and all will surely change:

I shall feel the World-Mother in thy golden limbs

And hear her wisdom in thy sacred voice. ||103.45||

The child of the Void shall be reborn in God. ||103.46||

My Matter shall evade the Inconscient’s trance,

My body like my spirit shall be free:

It shall escape from Death and Ignorance. ||103.47||

The joy of the Vedantic ascetic, not knowing the amazements in the breast of stone and rock with their mind closed, is busting out in alchemic smile of incarnate Savitri. It was a planned accident, a well-workout design that these two souls have met in the lonely Forest, and recognised each other’s complementarity. This is how it got happen:

A look, a turn decides our ill-poised fate. ||102.22||

Thus in the hour that most concerned her all,

Wandering unwarned by the slow surface mind,

The heedless scout beneath her tenting lids

Admired indifferent beauty and cared not

To wake her body’s spirit to its king. ||102.23||

So might she have passed by on chance ignorant roads

Missing the call of Heaven, losing life’s aim,

But the god touched in time her conscious soul. ||102.24||

Her vision settled, caught and all was changed. ||102.25||

Equally fascinating is the fate that led Satyavan that day on an unusual path:

That day he had turned from his accustomed paths;

For One who, knowing every moment’s load,

Can move in all our studied or careless steps,

Had laid the spell of destiny on his feet

And drawn him to the forest’s flowering verge. ||102.18||

The deed was done, and the prospects of a divine life upon earth got unfolded.

Savitri Book 5 Canto 3 – Satyavan and Savitri

The paintings are by Huta

The Winds of Wonder

Apropos of Two Vast Negations — 4

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