Latest / Sri Aurobindo Studies / Savitri: a Legend and a Symbol, Book II The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds, Canto 7 The Descent into Night, pp. 211-214

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Savitri: a Legend and a Symbol, Book II The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds, Canto 7 The Descent into Night, pp. 211-214 · Sri Aurobindo Studies

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  In greater darkness waited a worse reign, if worse can be
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  where all is evil's extreme. Yet to the cloaked the uncloaked
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  is naked. Worst, their God and truth and
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  the supernal light had never been or else had power no more,
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  as when one slips in a deep moment's trance over mind's
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  border into another world. He crossed a boundary whose
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  stealthy trace I could not see, but only the soul feel.
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  Into an armored, fierce domain he came and saw himself
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  wandering like a lost soul amid grimed walls and savage slums of
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  night. Around him crowded grey and
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  squalid huts, neighboring proud palaces of perverted power,
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  inhuman quarters and demoniac wards.
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  A pride and evil hugged its wretchedness, a misery haunting
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  splendor. Prestos fell done suburbs of the
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  cities of dream life, their life displayed to the spectator soul
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  the shadow depths of her strange miracle, a strong and fallen
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  goddess without hope, obscured, deformed by some dire gorgon
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  spell, as might a harlot Empress in a Bush.
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  Nude, unashamed, exulting, she upraised her evil face of
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  perilous beauty and charm, and drawing panic to a shuddering
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  kiss, Twix the magnificence of her fatal breasts.
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  Allured to their abyss, the spirits fall across his field of
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  sight. She multiplied as on a scenic
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  film or moving plate. The implacable splendor of her
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  nightmare pomps on the dark background of a soulless world.
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  She staged between a lurid light and shade, her dramas of the
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  sorrow of the depths, written on the agonized nerves of living
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  things, epics of horror and grim majesty.
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  Wry statues spat and stiffened in life's mud.
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  A glut of hideous forms and hideous deeds paralyzed pity in
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  the hardened breast. In booths of sin and night
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  repairs of vice styled infamies of the bodies.
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  Concupiscence and sordid imaginations etched in flesh
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  turned lust into a decorative art.
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  Abusing nature's gift, Her pervert skill immortalized the
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  stone grain of living death in a mud goblet, poured the Bacchic
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  wine to a satire, gave the thyrus of a God.
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  Impure, sadistic with grimacing mouths, grey fowl inventions,
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  gruesome and macabre came television from the gulfs of
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  night. Her craft in genius and
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  monstrosity, impatient of all natural shape and poise.
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  A gape of nude exaggerated lines gave caricature a stark reality
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  and art parades of weird distorted forms and gargoyle
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  masks, obscene and terrible, trampled to tormented postures.
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  The torn sense. An inexorable evils worshipper,
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  she made vileness great and sublimated filth.
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  A dragon power of reptile energies and strange epiphanies
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  of grovelling force and serpent granders couching in the mire
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  drew adoration to a gleam of slime.
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  All nature pulled out of her frame and base was twisted into
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  an unnatural pose. Repulsion stimulated in earth
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  desire, agony was made a red spiced food for bliss.
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  Hatred was trusted with the work of lust and torture took the
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  form of an embrace. A ritual anguish consecrated
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  death. Worship was offered to the
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  undivine, a new aesthesis of infernos, art that trained the
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  mind to love what the soul hates, imposed allegiance on the
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  quivering nerves and forced the unwilling body to vibrate, too
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  sweet and too harmonious to excite.
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  In this regime that soiled the being score, beauty was banned,
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  the hearts feeling dulled to sleep and cherished in their
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  place sensations thrills. The world was probed for jets of
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  sense appeal. Here cold material intellect was
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  the judge and needed sensual prick and jog and lash that it's
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  hard dryness and dead nerves might feel some passion and
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  power and acrid point of life. A new philosophy theorized
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  evil's rights gloried in the shimmering rot of decadence, or
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  gave to a Python force persuasive speech and armed with
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  knowledge, the primeval brute over life and matter.
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  Only brooding bowed mind change to an image of a rampant beast.
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  It scrambled into the pit to dig for truth and lighted its search
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  with the subconscious flares. Thence bubbling rose, sullying
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  the upper air, the filth and festering secrets of the abyss.
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  This it called positive fact and real life.
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  This now composed the fetid atmosphere.
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  A wild beast's passion crept from secret night to watch its
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  prey with fascinating eyes. Around him, like a fire with
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  sputtering tongues, their lulled and laughed a bestial ecstasy.
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  The air was packed with longings, brute and fierce,
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  crowding and stinging in a monstrous swarm pressed with a
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  noxious hum into his mind, thoughts that could poison
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  nature's heavenliest breath. Forcing reluctant lids assailed
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  the sight. Acts that revealed the mystery
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  of hell. All that was there was on this
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  pattern made.