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

0:01 Namaste. Today we'd like to do a reading in Shri Aurobindo's epic poem, Savitri, A Legend and a Symbol. We're going to start with Book One, The Symbol Dawn, Book One, Canter One, the book of beginnings, The Symbol Dawn. It was the hour before the gods awake, across the path of the divine event, the huge, foreboding mind of night alone. In her unlit temple of eternity, they stretched immobile upon silence march.

0:47 Almost one felt opaque, impenetrable. In the somber symbol of her eyeless muse, the abyssum of the unbodied infinite. A fathomless zero occupied the world. A power of fallen, boundless self -awake between the first and the last nothingness. Recalling the tenor -verse womb from which it came, turned from the insoluble mystery of birth, and the tardy process of mortality, and longed to reach its end in vacant knot. As in a dark beginning of all things, a mute, featureless semblance of the unknown, repeating forever the unconscious act, prolonging forever the unseeing will, cradled the cosmic drows of ignorant force, whose moved, creative slumber kindles the sun's, and carries our lives in its some nambulist whirl. A thwart, the vain, enormous trance of space, its formless stupor without mind or life, a shadow spinning through a soulless void, thrown back once more into unthinking dreams, earth

2:17 -wheeled abandoned in the hollow gulfs, forgetful of her spirit and her fate. The impassive skies were neutral, empty, still. Then something in the inscrutable darkness stirred, a nameless movement, an unthought idea, insistent, dissatisfied, without a name. Something that wished, but knew not how to be, teased the inconscient to wake ignorance. A throw that came and left a quivering trace gave room for an old tired want, unfilled, at peace in its subconscient, moonless cave, to raise its head and look for absent light, straining closed eyes to vanished memory, like one who searches for a by -god self, and only meets the corpse of his desire. It was as though, even in this knot's profound, even in this ultimate dissolution's core, there lurked an unremembering entity, survivor of a slain and buried past, condemned to resume the effort and the pang, reviving in

3:48 another, frustrate world. An unshaped consciousness desired light, and a blank prescience yearned towards distant change, as if a childlike finger laid on a cheek, reminded of the endless need in things, the heedless mother of the universe, an infant longing clutched the somber vast. Insensibly somewhere a breach began, a long, lone line of hesitating hue, like a vague smile tempting a desert heart, troubled the far rim of life's obscure sleep, arrived from the other side of boundlessness, and eye of deity peered through the dumb deeps, a scout in the reconnaissance from the sun, it seemed amid a heavy cosmic rest the torpor of a sick and weary world to seek for a spirit, soul and desolate, to fallen to recollect forgotten bliffs, intervening in a mindless universe, its message crept through the reluctant hush, calling the adventure of consciousness and joy, and conquering nature's disillusioned breast compelled renewed consent to see and feel. A

5:20 thought was sown in the unsounded void, a sense was born within the darkness depths, a memory quivered in the heart of time, as if a soul long dead were moved to live. But the oblivion that succeeds the fall had blotted the crowded tablets of the past, and all that was destroyed must be rebuilt, and old experience labored out once more. All can be done if the God touches there, a hope stole in that hardly dared to be amid the nights forlorn indifference, as if solicited in an alien world, with timid and hazardous instinctive grace, orphaned and driven out to seek a home, an errant marvel with no place to live, into a far off nook of heaven there came a slow miraculous gestures dim appeal, the persistent thrill of a transfiguring touch persuaded the inert black quietude, and beauty and wonder disturbed the fields of God.