Mangesh Nadkarni
Instalment– 19
Vague fields were there, vague pastures gleamed, vague trees,
Vague scenes dim-hearted in a drifting haze;
Vague cattle white roamed glimmering through the mist;
Vague spirits wandered with a bodiless cry,
Vague melodies touched the soul and fled pursued
Into harmonious distances unseized;
Forms subtly elusive and half-luminous powers
Wishing no goal for their unearthly course
Strayed happily through vague ideal lands,
Or floated without footing or their walk
Left steps of reverie on sweet memory's ground;
Or they paced to the mighty measure of their thoughts
Led by a low far chanting of the gods.
Lines: 117 – 129 (page 602)
This, as we saw in Canto One of Book Ten, is a description of the land of twilight Savitri is now passing through along with Death and the soul of Satyavan. This is indeed a land of vague enchantment, where nothing is substantial. So far, there has been silence all around them. Then was heard the booming voice, calm but relentless, of the God of Death. There was something about that voice which seemed to abolish all hope and cancel all the golden truths one would like to believe in. It also made the delightful world through which they were passing appear frail and thin. Death spoke to Savitri thus:
Death: “O prisoner of Nature, dreamer of visions, every thing around you is unsubstantial; you are yourself a creature of thought enjoying an insubstantial immortality in the realm of ideals. Look at these fleeing light-tasselled shapes; these are like unbodied images painted by man’s illusions on some ethereal raiment. These shapes figure a rapture of things that can never take birth on earth. Here hope builds on hope, cloud satisfies cloud, one phantom breeds another. All this is sweet. This is the stuff from which your ideals are made. The real fabricator is thought and the motivation comes from the heart’s desire. The ideal has no place to dwell; it can dwell neither in heaven nor on earth. Drunk with the wine of his own fantasy, man has created all these images in a frenzied excitement of hope. The blue of the sky is a creation of the vision’s error, so is the arch of the rainbow. These are all the tricks caused by the error in the viewer’s vision. What you call the soul is indeed your mortal longing.
This angel in your body you call love has wings which take the colour of your emotions and it is born in a ferment of your body. With the death of the body which houses it, love too must die. It is a passion of your yearning cells; it is flesh that calls to flesh to serve its lust. It is your mind that seeks an answering mind and dreams awhile that it has found its mate. It is your life that seeks a human prop to sustain its weakness, lonely in the world. Love is a hunger that feeds on another life. It is a beast of prey that pauses in its prowl; it crouches under a bush in splendid flower to seize a heart and body for its food. And it is this beast which you call love and you dream that it is immortal and a god.
O human mind, love is at best an hour’s delight but you vainly torture it and try to stretch through the long void of your enter life and its passionless gulfs. You are trying to lend eternity to something as fleeting as love. You trick yourself into casting the fragile movements of your heart into the spirit’s pattern of immortality. All here is born out of Nothingness and is encircled by the emptiness of space as long as it lasts; it is held aloft for awhile by some Force we do not even understand and it relapses into the Nought from which it has come. Only the mute Alone can exist forever and in that Alone, there is no room for love.
You clothe love’s perishable mud with the ideal’s gorgeous and unfading robe which you have woven on the Immortal’s borrowed loom. The ideal always remains an ideal, it is never made real here. When you try to imprison it in a body, it doesn’t live any more; when shut in a body, it ceases to breathe. Intangible, remote, and forever pure, it is a sovereign of its own brilliant void. It descends reluctantly to earth and inhabits a white temple in man’s heart where it shines but is rejected by his life. Immutable, bodiless, beautiful, grand and dumb (in the sense of not having the capacity to propel itself into realisation), the ideal sits immobile on its shining throne; it receives man’s offerings and his prayer but is too dumb to act. It has no voice to respond to his call, no feet on which it can move, no hands to take his gifts. The ideal is a fanciful and unsubstantial statue of the bare idea; its light stirs man the thinker to create an earthly semblance of diviner things. Its coloured reflections fall upon man’s acts. His institutions are its tombs (cenotaph: a tomb or a monument erected in honour of a person whose remains are elsewhere); he signs his dead conventions with its name and clothes his virtues with the Ideal’s ethereal robes, hiding their littleness with the Divine Name. The ideal has for its face only an outline covered by a luminous vapour. Yet the bright pretence of ideals is insufficient to hide their impoverished and earthly make.
All we have is the earth and not a heavenly source for the ideals. If heavens there are, they are veiled in their own light. If a Truth eternal somewhere reigns unknown it burns in a tremendous void of God, for Truth shines far from the falsehoods of the world. How can the heavens come down to unhappy earth, or the Eternal lodge in drifting time? How do you expect the Ideal to come down and walk on the miserable earth, where life is only hard labour done hoping in vain for better things? Life is a child of Matter and is sustained by Matter, a low-burning fire in the furnace of Nature, just a brief wave that rises only to break upon a shore in Time. It is a toilsome and laborious march with death as its only goal.
Even the Avatars have lived and died in vain (without being able to change life’s basic nature or quality); vain was the sage’s thought, the prophet’s voice; in vain is seen the shining Upward Way. Earth lies unchanged beneath the circling sun – she loves her fall and no omnipotence can erase her mortal imperfections, or force upon man’s crooked ignorance Heaven’s straight line, or colonise a world of death with gods.”
(This is quite a damning indictment on all ideals and idealists. The God of Death now speaks like a philosopher criticising idealism. As this encounter continues, you will see him changing his position, but whatever position he takes, from that position he mounts as ferocious an attack on the stand taken by Savitri. He combines effectively, common wisdom, philosophic acumen and sarcasm and tries to make an effective case against Savitri’s idealist position. And here he attacks the very heart of her enterprise, namely, love. Savitri has persisted in following him in the forbidden land of death in pursuit of the man she loves – Satyavan. The aim of her heroic effort is to get back Satyavan because she loves him. Death tries to impress on her how unsubstantial this ideal of love is like all ideals. Like all ideals it feeds on human fancy and never gets realised on earth. The world from which all ideals come is an unsubstantial world built by man’s thought which project human desires into this world. Since these have no contact with the earth, the ideals can live only in their ethereal world. Just as there is no physical reality to the blue of the sky, nor to the arch of the rainbow, so also there is no reality to any of the ideals. The Ideals are mute, lame and inert; they have no will in them to propel themselves into realisation. The institutions raised to house the ideals end as their cenotaphs, empty tombs, because the ideals never live on earth, never get realised on earth; they are too insubstantial to have bodies. Ideals cannot descend on earth which is such an unhappy place full of falsehood and corruption. Then he comes out with a severe indictment on all idealists which stings but it is not entirely untrue:
The Avatars have lived and died in vain,
Vain was the sage's thought, the prophet's voice;
In vain is seen the shining upward Way.
Earth lies unchanged beneath the circling sun;
She loves her fall and no omnipotence
Her mortal imperfections can erase,
Force on man's crooked ignorance Heaven's straight line
Or colonise a world of death with gods.
Lines: 101 – 109 (pages 609 – 610)
It can not be denied that in spite of the appearance on earth of prophets and men of God from time to time, great souls who appear to be Avatars, the load of suffering on the back of man is still crushing. Man is still being lashed by falsehood, ignorance, ego, and death. The shining upward way shown by these great souls remains untravelled after some time and earth lies unchanged. This is because we seem to love the fetters of ignorance which hold us down here. The omnipotence, or the power that is needed to erase the imperfections of man has not yet descended on earth. The human nature continues to be crooked like the tail of a dog, it can not yet be transformed and made straight, therefore we have not been able to colonise this world of death with immortal gods, which, we believe, is our secret destiny.
The God of Death now mounts almost a frontal attack on Love, his bete noire. Love is his favourite target because for Savitri puts it at the apex of the spiritual values to be pursued in life. He does this by presenting a cameo portraying the transience of love among humans. Its sarcasm is biting and cynicism chilling. It reads like an outline of one of the modern novels. Let us listen to the God of Death.
Death: “O high priestess in the holy fancy’s shrine, who with a magic ritual in earth’s house worships the ideal of Love, what is this love your thought has deified? It is only a conscious yearning of your flesh, it is glorious burning of your nerves.
What is this love thy thought has deified,
This sacred legend and immortal myth?
It is a conscious yearning of thy flesh,
It is a glorious burning of thy nerves,
A rose of dream-splendour petalling thy mind,
A great red rapture and torture of thy heart.
A sudden transfiguration of thy days,
It passes and the world is as before.
Lines 113 – 120 (page: 610)
However rosy love may appear, however magical its breath, it passes as suddenly as it comes, and then the world looks as dull as it always looked. But as long as it is alive, it gives a ravishing edge of sweetness and pain to life, a thrill in its yearning makes it seem divine, a golden bridge across the expanse of years, a cord tying you with eternity. And yet how brief and frail! How soon is spent this treasure wasted by the gods on man, this happy closeness of soul to soul, this honey of the body’s companionship, this heightened joy, this ecstasy in the veins, this strange illumination of the sense !
(Consider these lines which is a telling comment on normal human love and see how simply and yet cunningly they are crafted:
If Satyavan had lived, love would have died;
But Satyavan is dead and love shall live
A little while in thy sad breast, until
His face and body fade on memory's wall
Where other bodies, other faces come.
Lines: 131 – 135 (page 610)
When the poet says, “But Satyavan is dead and love shall live”, we expect him to say something less biting about love than what he actually says. First he says it shall live only for a short while in her memory, until even this is obliterated by the tangible reality of other bodies, faces. In five short lines, the poet arrests the short-lived character of all vital love in a memorable way. Let us now continue with what the God of death has to say.)
Death: “When love breaks suddenly into his life, man steps first into a world of the sun. In his passion he feels the heavenly element hidden in himself. But only a small sunlit patch of earth has caught the marvel of heaven’s sunburst. The snake is there, and the worm in the heart of the rose. A word, a moment’s act, can slay this god of love. His immortality is indeed very precarious – depending entirely on uncertain circumstances This god of love has thousand ways to suffer and die; he cannot live by heavenly food alone; he can survive only on earthly sustenance.
You must realise that your passion is a sensual want refined, it is no more than a hunger of your body and heart. Your want can tire and cease, or turn elsewhere, or love meet a dire and pitiless end by bitter treason, or wrath inflicting cruel wounds and thus separate the lovers. Or, your unsatisfied will may depart to others when love’s joy lies stripped and slain. Then a dull indifference replaces the original fire of love or an endearing habit imitates love. An outward and uneasy union lasts, or the routine of a life’s compromise. Where once the seed of oneness had been cast, two strive, constant associates without joy, two egos straining in a single leash, two minds divided by their jarring thoughts, two spirits disjoined, forever separate. Thus is the Ideal falsified in man’s world. Trivial or sombre, disillusion comes; life’s harsh reality stares at the soul.
Death saves you from all this disenchantment and frustration and saves Satyavan too. He now is safe, delivered from himself. He travels to silence and felicity. Call him not back to the treacheries of earth and to the poor petty life of animal man. In my vast tranquil spaces let him sleep in harmony with the mighty hush of death, where love lies slumbering on the breast of peace.”
This indeed is a most impressive case that Death builds against love. You cannot hold him guilty of either misrepresentation or of indulging in too much exaggeration. Nor is he spreading a falsehood. What he says is in fact true of all vital love.
He catches the magical moment when two people fall in love and graphically describes the precariousness of the whole thing. There are a thousand ways in which love can die. As he says, Love “has a thousand ways to suffer and die.’ He correctly diagnoses the nature of this love. It is a “sensual want refined”, “a hunger of the body and the heart’. And like everything that originates in the vital, it is short-lived. And when love dies, for whatever reason, “an endearing habit imitates love’, or “the routine of a life’s compromise”. Love is an attempt to find one’s identity in someone else; it is “an adventure of heavenly powers”. It fails because the vital is not the locus of true love; it can only reflect true love. True love belongs to the soul. When one fails to use the vital love as a ladder to reach its true source, and wallows in it, it gets spent soon. And when that happens, the lovers begin to resemble two egos tied to a single leash, each growling against the other and trying to pull in the way it chooses.
At this point we can note that the God of Death has seen only a very limited aspect of love. Savitri will slowly show him the other, more divine aspects of love.
