02.07 - The Descent into Night

1:Never out of evil one plucked good: ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night,

2:Swift and easy is the downward path. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night,

3:A prey to the staring phantoms of the gloom ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night,

4:Solitude wrapped him in its voiceless folds. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night,

5:A city of ancient Ignorance
Founded upon a soil that knew not Light. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night,

6:Ominous beings passed him on the road
Whose very gaze was a calamity: ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night,

7:Took the mind captive in its own net;
His rigorous logic made the false seem true. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night,

8:Pass slowly through that perilous space,
A prayer upon his lips and the great Name. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night,

9:He mastered the tides of Nature with a look:
He met with his bare spirit naked Hell. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night,

10:All on one plan was shaped and standardised
Under a dark dictatorship's breathless weight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night,

11:The reason meant for nearness to the gods
And uplift to heavenly scale by the touch of mind ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night,

12:All warred against all, but with a common hate
Turned on the mind that sought some higher good; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night,

13:Nothing would confess its own pretence
Even to itself in the ambiguous heart:
A vast deception was the law of things; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night,

14:Arrogant, gibing at more luminous states
The people of the gulfs despised the sun.
A barriered autarchy excluded light; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night,

15:Impure, sadistic, with grimacing mouths,
Grey foul inventions gruesome and macabre
Came televisioned from the gulfs of Night. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night,

16:There crawled through every tense and aching nerve
Leaving behind its poignant quaking trail
A nameless and unutterable fear. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night,

17:The lust that warps the spirit's natural good
Replaced by a manufactured virtue and vice
The frank spontaneous impulse of the soul: ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night,

18:Hidden behind the fair outsides of life.
Its dangerous commerce is our suffering's cause.
Its breath is a subtle poison in men's hearts; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night,

19:Falsehood enthroned on awed and prostrate hearts
The cults and creeds that organise living death
And slay the soul on the altar of a lie. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night,

20:Crowding and stinging in a monstrous swarm
Pressed with a noxious hum into his mind
Thoughts that could poison Nature's heavenliest breath, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night,

21:There Ego was lord upon his peacock seat
And Falsehood sat by him, his mate and queen:
The world turned to them as Heaven to Truth and God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night,

22:A formless void suppressed his struggling brain,
A darkness grim and cold oppressed his flesh,
A whispered grey suggestion chilled his heart; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night,

23:The worlds are built by its unconscious Breath
And Matter and Mind are its figures or its powers,
Our waking thoughts the output of its dreams. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night,

24:In booths of sin and night-repairs of vice
Styled infamies of the body's concupiscence
And sordid imaginations etched in flesh,
Turned lust into a decorative art. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night,

25:A new aesthesis of Inferno's art
That trained the mind to love what the soul hates,
Imposed allegiance on the quivering nerves
And forced the unwilling body to vibrate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night,

26:Courage their armour, faith their sword, they must walk,
The hand ready to smite, the eye to scout,
Casting a javelin regard in front,
Heroes and soldiers of the army of Light. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night,

27:Home-Earth
Aloof, its influence entered everywhere
And left a cloven hoof-mark on the breast;
A twisted heart and a strange sombre smile
Mocked at the sinister comedy of life. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night,

28:Nude, unashamed, exulting she upraised.
Her evil face of perilous beauty and charm.
And, drawing panic to a shuddering kiss.
Twixt the magnificence of her fatal breasts.
Allured to their abyss the spirit's f ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night,

29:Only were safe who kept God in their hearts:
Courage their armour, faith their sword, they must walk,
The hand ready to smite, the eye to scout,
Casting a javelin regard in front,
Heroes and soldiers of the army of Light.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night, [T5],

30:The Fiend was visible but cloaked in light;
He seemed a helping angel from the skies:
He armed untruth with Scripture and the Law;
He deceived with wisdom, with virtue slew the soul
And led to perdition by the heavenward path. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night,

31:Only what seemed was prized as real there:
The ideal was a cynic ridicule's butt;
Hooted by the crowd, mocked by enlightened wits,
Spiritual seeking wandered outcasted,—
A dreamer's self-deceiving web of thought
Or mad chimaera deemed or hypocri ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night,

32:It was a no man's land of evil air,
A crowded neighbourhood without one home,
A borderland between the world and hell.
There unreality was Nature's lord:
It was a space where nothing could be true,
For nothing was what it had claimed to be:
A h ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night

33:A force demoniac lurking in man's depths
That heaves suppressed by the heart's human law,
Awed by the calm and sovereign eyes of Thought,
Can in a fire and earthquake of the soul
Arise and, calling to its native night,
Overthrow the reason, occupy the lif ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night,

34:Life clung to its seat with cords of gasping breath;
Lapped was his body by a tenebrous tongue.
Existence smothered travailed to survive;
Hope strangled perished in his empty soul,
Belief and memory abolished died
And all that helps the spirit in its course.
There crawled through every tense and aching nerve
Leaving behind its poignant quaking trail
A nameless and unutterable fear.
As a sea nears a victim bound and still,
The approach alarmed his mind for ever dumb
Of an implacable eternity
Of pain inhuman and intolerable.
This he must bear, his hope of heaven estranged;
He must ever exist without extinction's peace
In a slow suffering Time and tortured Space,
An anguished nothingness his endless state.
A lifeless vacancy was now his breast,
And in the place where once was luminous thought,
Only remained like a pale motionless ghost
An incapacity for faith and hope
And the dread conviction of a vanquished soul
Immortal still but with its godhead lost,
Self lost and God and touch of happier worlds.
But he endured, stilled the vain terror, bore
The smothering coils of agony and affright;
Then peace returned and the soul's sovereign gaze.
To the blank horror a calm Light replied:
Immutable, undying and unborn,
Mighty and mute the Godhead in him woke
And faced the pain and danger of the world.
He mastered the tides of Nature with a look:
He met with his bare spirit naked Hell.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night,

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