Opening remarks
Death presents not only a negative and bleak picture but a nihilistic view of the world.
The creator Death
I curved the vacant ether into Space;
A huge expanding and contracting Breath
Harboured the fires of the universe:
I struck out the supreme original spark
And spread its sparse ranked armies through the Inane,
Manufactured the stars from the occult radiances,
Marshalled the platoons of the invisible dance;
I formed earth’s beauty out of atom and gas,
And built from chemic plasm the living man.
Death claims that it is the power of the Inconscient that has curved ether into Space, filled it with the breath of life, harboured the fires, the energies that has built the worlds. Then Death lit the spark and filled the world with spear-points of light building the starts from the occult radiances. Then it marshalled the dance of energy forming earth’s beauty out of atom and gas. Then from the chemic plasm it built up man.
Thought spoiled the harmony
Then Thought came in and spoiled the harmonious world:
Matter began to hope and think and feel,
Tissue and nerve bore joy and agony.
Then with the coming of man, Thought was born and spoiled the harmonious world. Matter began to think and hope and feel. Tissue and nerve bore agony and joy.
Ignorant personal God
The inconscient cosmos strove to learn its task;
An ignorant personal God was born in Mind
And to understand invented reason’s law,
The impersonal Vast throbbed back to man’s desire,
A trouble rocked the great world’s blind still heart
And Nature lost her wide immortal calm.
The inconscient cosmos strove to learn its task. The human mind then created a personal God inventing laws formed by reason to understand. The impersonal Vast throbbed back to human hopes and desires. A trouble rocked the great world’s blind still heart and Nature lost her wide immortal calm that was there before man came.
Wide incomprehensible scene
Thus came this warped incomprehensible scene
Of souls emmeshed in life’s delight and pain
And Matter’s sleep and Mind’s mortality,
Of beings in Nature’s prison waiting death
And consciousness left in seeking ignorance
And evolution’s slow arrested plan.
Thus this wide incomprehensible world came into existence where souls were enmeshed in life’s delight and pain and the sleep of Matter and the Mind’s mortality. Thus beings were born in the prison of Nature waiting for death. Consciousness was left in a state of seeking ignorance and the slow evolution was arrested.
This is the world
This is the world in which thou mov’st, astray
In the tangled pathways of the human mind,
In the issueless circling of thy human life,
Searching for thy soul and thinking God is here.
Death describes this world in these terms and says that Savitri is moving astray here in the tangled pathways of the human mind, in the issueless circling of her human life searching for her soul and thinking God is here.
No room for soul or God
But where is room for soul or place for God
In the brute immensity of a machine?
There is no room for soul, no place for God in the immense brute machine called the world.
Closing Remarks
Death sees the world as an inconscient brute machine where the mind and life erect fantasy illusions that it calls as soul and God.
About Savitri | B1C3-08 The New Life (pp.28-29)