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Readings in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri: a Legend and a Symbol, Book I, Canto 1 The Symbol Dawn · Sri Aurobindo Studies

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  Namaste. Today we'd like to do a reading
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  in Shri Aurobindo's epic poem, Savitri, A Legend and
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  a Symbol. We're going to start with Book
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  One, The Symbol Dawn, Book One, Canter One, the book
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  of beginnings, The Symbol Dawn. It
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  was the hour before the gods awake, across the path
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  of the divine event, the huge, foreboding mind of
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  night alone. In her unlit temple of
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  eternity, they stretched immobile upon silence march.
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  Almost one felt opaque,
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  impenetrable. In the somber symbol of her
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  eyeless muse, the abyssum of the unbodied infinite. A
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  fathomless zero occupied the world. A
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  power of fallen, boundless self -awake between the
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  first and the last nothingness. Recalling
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  the tenor -verse womb from which it came, turned from
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  the insoluble mystery of birth, and the tardy
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  process of mortality, and longed to reach its end in
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  vacant knot. As in a dark beginning of all
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  things, a mute, featureless semblance of the unknown,
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  repeating forever the unconscious act, prolonging
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  forever the unseeing will, cradled the cosmic drows of
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  ignorant force, whose moved, creative slumber kindles the
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  sun's, and carries our lives in its some nambulist
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  whirl. A thwart, the vain, enormous
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  trance of space, its formless stupor without mind
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  or life, a shadow spinning through a soulless void,
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  thrown back once more into unthinking dreams, earth
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  -wheeled abandoned in the hollow gulfs, forgetful of
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  her spirit and her fate. The
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  impassive skies were neutral, empty, still. Then
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  something in the inscrutable darkness stirred, a nameless
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  movement, an unthought idea, insistent, dissatisfied,
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  without a name. Something that wished, but knew not
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  how to be, teased the inconscient to wake
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  ignorance. A throw that came and left a
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  quivering trace gave room for an old tired want,
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  unfilled, at peace in its subconscient, moonless cave,
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  to raise its head and look for absent light, straining
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  closed eyes to vanished memory, like one who
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  searches for a by -god self, and only meets the
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  corpse of his desire. It was as though, even in
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  this knot's profound, even in this ultimate
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  dissolution's core, there lurked an unremembering
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  entity, survivor of a slain and buried past, condemned
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  to resume the effort and the pang, reviving in
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  another, frustrate world. An unshaped consciousness
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  desired light, and a blank prescience yearned towards
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  distant change, as if a childlike finger laid on a
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  cheek, reminded of the endless need in things, the
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  heedless mother of the universe, an infant longing
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  clutched the somber vast. Insensibly
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  somewhere a breach began, a long, lone line of
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  hesitating hue, like a vague smile tempting a
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  desert heart, troubled the far rim of life's obscure
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  sleep, arrived from the other side of boundlessness,
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  and eye of deity peered through the dumb deeps, a
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  scout in the reconnaissance from the sun, it seemed
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  amid a heavy cosmic rest the torpor of a sick and
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  weary world to seek for a spirit, soul and desolate,
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  to fallen to recollect forgotten bliffs, intervening
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  in a mindless universe, its message crept through the
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  reluctant hush, calling the adventure of consciousness
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  and joy, and conquering nature's disillusioned breast
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  compelled renewed consent to see and feel. A
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  thought was sown in the unsounded void, a sense was
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  born within the darkness depths, a memory quivered
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  in the heart of time, as if a soul long dead were
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  moved to live. But the oblivion that succeeds
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  the fall had blotted the crowded tablets of the
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  past, and all that was destroyed must be rebuilt,
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  and old experience labored out once more. All
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  can be done if the God touches there, a hope stole
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  in that hardly dared to be amid the nights forlorn
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  indifference, as if solicited in an alien
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  world, with timid and hazardous instinctive grace,
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  orphaned and driven out to seek a home, an errant
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  marvel with no place to live, into a far off nook
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  of heaven there came a slow miraculous gestures dim
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  appeal, the persistent thrill of a transfiguring
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  touch persuaded the inert black quietude, and beauty
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  and wonder disturbed the fields of God.