|
Unused Versions and Omitted Passages A. BOOK TWO, CANTO SIX The passages below have been transcribed from Sri Aurobindo’s last handwritten version of the end of Book Two, Canto Six. An earlier manuscript was revised by dictation and used as the basis for the published text. Sri Aurobindo worked extensively on the first section of the version reproduced below, up to "A Sphinx whose eyes looked up to an unseen Sun."1 The manuscript continues to the middle of Canto Seven, but since the remainder of it contains only minor verbal alterations and few lines not found in the text of the poem, only selected passages are presented here. Some punctuation missing in the manuscript has been supplied by the editors.
Immortal secrecies, seer-wisdoms lost2 In the descent towards our mortal fate Spoke from the figures of her masquerade In a familiar and forgotten tongue, Or peered from the recondite magnificence And subtle splendour of her draperies. In sudden scintillations of the Unknown, Glints from the opaque and strange translucencies, Appearances and objects changed their powers; Things without value heavenly values took, Inexpressive sounds became veridical, Ideas without meaning flashed apocalypse: Wise tokens spelled out gibberish to the untaught, And phrases which meant nothing and meant all Wrapped in defensive armoured visored sight, And oracles and sibylline prophecies Offered themselves by the roadside for a price Increased at each rejection by the mind; Voices that seemed to come from unseen worlds
1 It was probably because of this reworking that the manuscript became separated from the final manuscript of the preceding portion of Book Two. Consequently it must have been overlooked at the time of the final dictated revision, with the result that an earlier version was taken up for this purpose. 2 This line was intended to follow "And wordless mouths unrecognisable." (cf. 189.33). There was a full stop after "unrecognisable" in this version. Page-112 Uttered the syllables of the Unmanifest And clothed the body of the mystic Word; The wizard diagrams of an occult Force Fixed for the world’s magic processes the law Of their precise unaccountable miracle, And hue and figure brought their unsounded deeps Of mindless context to reconstitute In the brooding hush of intuitive stillnesses The herald blazon of Time’s secret things. Amid her symbols of reality (For such they seemed to a vision too remote As we to a greater being symbols are,) His life-walk was and new spiritual home: He moved and lived with them as real forms, Their lives were as concrete as the lives of men, Their touch as vivid as our fellows’ touch; Their divine bodies make our fancies true And bring to us breathing and animate What in ourselves we only think and feel. A grace of scenes quivered around him there That were almost embodied sympathies;3 Their breath of dreams and language without speech Answered to the thought and passion of the soul. There form and feeling were identical, And shape and thought a single harmony; Nothing was there brute and inanimate. These scenes were signs in life’s long miracle-play. In her green wildernesses and lurking depths, In her thickets of joy where danger clasps delight, He glimpsed the hidden wings of her songster hopes, A glimmer of blue and gold and scarlet fire. Along her wandering lanes and chance by-paths And by her galloping rivulets and calm lakes He plucked the glossy fruits of her self-ease Or shared her rich content in browsing herds, The light wayward flitting of her butterfly hours
3 The word "sympathies" is taken from a previous draft; the last manuscript reads "scenes", apparently repeated by mistake from the previous line. Page-113 And her love-callings in the voice of birds, And felt her embodied sweetness in her vales, Her wide hill-breasts glowing in the greatness of morn And the lounging hips of her grasslands’ large sun-sleep And her covert raptures in her forest haunts And the beauty of her flowers of dream and muse. Often in the radiant slumber of her noons He saw incarnate in a swarm of gleams On a glamour and gladness of bright surfaces, A smile of depths, a cry of secrecies, Thought’s dance of dragonflies on mystery’s stream That skim but dare not dip in the murmur and race; Or the levity of her immortal mind He heard in the laughter of her rose desires, Running to lure the bliss of the heart’s surprise Into a world of bloom and song and light And through the scented ways to guide pursuit Jangling sweet anklet-bells of fantasy. A comrade of the silence of her heights Accepted by her mighty loneliness, He sat with her on meditation’s peaks Where life and being are a sacrament Offered to a Reality beyond And stood with her upon the edge of Time Looking into ineffable formlessness, Or climbed a perilous stair in silent Mind And from a watch-tower in self’s solitudes He saw her loose into infinity Her hooded eagles of significance, Messengers of Thought to the Unknowable. Thus close to her in body and in spirit, Identified by soul-vision and soul-sense And made one with all she was and longed to be, He thought with her thoughts, suited to her steps his steps, Lived by her breath and saw things with her eyes, Fainted with her weakness, was powerful with her strength, That so he might learn the secret of her soul. He admired her splendid front of pomp and play And the marvels of her rich and delicate craft Page-114 And her magic of order and her swift caprice, And her indomitable will to be, And thrilled with the insistence of her cry And bore like a Mother’s ardent despot clutch Her force that admits no other way than its own, Her hands that knead Fate in their violent grasp, Her touch that moves, her powers that seize and drive. A will was in her to exceed her forms Impatient to transfigure the finite world, A huge desire to marry the Infinite; He felt in her her hope and her despair, The trouble and rapture of her heaving breasts, The passion that possessed her yearning limbs, Her mind that toiled dissatisfied with its fruits, Her heart that captured not the one Beloved. But all that he could see or she disclose Left still the ultimate secret unrevealed; Something she was unknown to him or her. Always he met a veiled and seeking Force, An exiled Goddess building mimic heavens, A Sphinx whose eyes looked up to an unseen Sun.
Often he was near to a Spirit in her forms Whose passive presence was her nature’s strength; But nowhere could be found its outward trace, Or its stamp on her acts was indecipherable. Only at times, as in a blurred vignette, The eye that looks on the dark side of things Made out an imagined figure from the blot. Amid a fitful sleet of dazzling light Was seen a half-blind chained divinity Bewildered by the world in which he moved: Yet conscious of the light prompting his soul He sought his way amidst her laughter and call And the index chaos of her myriad steps, Led by the fluting of a distant player Towards a total deep infinitude. Around him was the forest of her signs: In an inconsequent crowding sequence came Page-115 The changing coloured roadlights of idea And the hieroglyph of her symbol pageantries And, like strange stars studding the cosmic map, Her landmarks on the tangled paths of Time. In her mazes of pursuit and of retreat All ways she leads him, but no way is sure. To every side she draws him and rejects. Allured by the many-toned marvel of her chant, Attracted by the witchcraft of her moods And moved by her casual touch to joy and grief, He loses himself in her, but wins her not. A fugitive paradise smiles at him from her eyes; He dreams of her beauty he shall hold as his joy, He dreams of his mastery her limbs shall bear, He dreams of the magic of her breasts of bliss. In her illumined script, her fanciful Translation of God’s pure original text, He hopes to find the Scripture Wonderful, Hieratic key of unknown beatitudes. But the word of Life is hidden in its script, The chant of Life has lost its divine note. A fire and colour tint her harmonies, Yet they but bring a thrill of transient grace And brief unsatisfied soon-spent delight Wallowing in ravishments of mind and sense And miss the luminous answer of the soul. An ecstasy of unfulfilled desire Is now the golden summit of her song; A pathos of lost heights is her appeal,4
4 Cf. 192.3, where this line (with "its" instead of "her" before "appeal") occurs as part of a previous passage. The version reproduced here is Sri Aurobindo’s fair copy, revised in his own hand, of the manuscript which, differently revised by dictation, was used for the published text of the canto. In the earlier manuscript, the line in question was written between two columns with no clear indication of where it was to be inserted. It was evidently intended to go with the right column, as in Sri Aurobindo’s own copy (printed above). But when the manuscript was revised by dictation and copied by the scribe, this line was taken with the left column. It remained there through much subsequent revision of the passage into which it was introduced as well as of the passage with which it originally belonged. The extent of this revision has deterred the editors from shifting it back to its original position in the text, though it would read well after "Track the last heavenward climbings of her voice." (193.35). Page-116 A blind heart-throb that reaches joy through tears: She cherishes sorrow as her deepest call. A wanderer on forlorn despairing routes, Along the roads of sound a frustrate voice Forsaken cries to a forgotten bliss. In caverns of the echo of desire There murmurs low a sourdined faint lament, Or lingers upon sweet and errant notes Hunting for pleasure in the heart of pain: Its happier tunes are fragments of an hour. (Cf. 189.34-194.18)
* For being is eternal, endless life. And whatsoever our will, to endure or cease, From life we escape only by greater life. After the body’s death when all seems done, Our acts compel us and perforce we must still Continue in the orbit we have made: Carried from birth to birth, from world to world, There is a mute command from the Supreme, There is creation’s occult need to serve: If earth should perish, another earth would come, Some ancient deep impulsion labours on; All is in labour with incessant birth; No silent peak is found where Time could rest. This was reflected in that greater scene; There flowed a magic stream that could not cease. (Cf. 197.5-17.) Page-117 B. BOOK TWO, CANTO SEVEN
These passages have been selected from Sri Aurobindo’s last handwritten version of the first part of Book Two, Canto Seven. The selections contain most of the lines occurring in this version that are not found in the published text. The manuscript was discontinued after an extensive reworking of the passage corresponding to pp. 212-13 in the Revised Edition. Two versions of this last passage are included below.
A fateful Influence upon creatures stole: Its lethal touch pursued the immortal spirit, On life was laid the finger of cold numb death And overcome with error and grief and pain The soul’s native will for truth and joy and light. A deformation coiled that claimed to be5 The being’s very turn, Nature’s true drive, The twist and curve that cosmos takes in its birth, An idiosyncracy of the Absolute. In every corner ensconced of conscious life A hostile and invading Mind was at work Corrupting Truth with its own formulas, Afflicting Knowledge with the hue of doubt. Nothing was safe from the cunning of its touch Or armed against the irony of its smile. Interceptor of the listenings of the soul It captured the oracles of the occult gods, Cancelled the firm rock-edicts graved by Time, Effaced the sign-posts of Life’s pilgrimage, And on the foundations of the cosmic Law Erected its bronze pylons of misrule. (Cf. 203.4-20)
In silence the inaudible voices spoke, Hands that none saw planted the fatal grain, No form was seen, yet a dire work was done. In the heart, of seerhood’s natural right deprived,
5 This line, found in the previous manuscript, was omitted by Sri Aurobindo in the present version. It is clearly needed to complete the sense. Page-118 The will of God could now no more be read; An iron decree in crooked uncials written Imposed a law of sin and adverse fate. (Cf. 204.4-8)
* It was a space where nothing could be true; For all was other than it claimed to be And none confessed to himself his own deceit But justified his wrong as native right; Each clung to his falsehood as to heaven’s truth, Hiding from his soul, from Nature and from God: A vast deception was the law of things. Only by that deception they could live: In error they moved and breathed and found their force. All that attracted had a hollow charm; Each rainbow brilliance was a splendid lie: A beauty unreal wore a glamour face. (Cf. 206.20-35)
* There Life displayed to the spectator soul The shadow depths of her strange miracle. As might a harlot empress in a bouge, Nude, unashamed, exulting she upraised Her evil face of perilous beauty and charm And drawing panic to a shuddering kiss Twixt the magnificence of her fatal breasts, Allured to their abyss the spirit’s fall. Once it had plunged, it asked not for release, It took fierce joy in the ecstasy of its pains, It found freedom’s taste in a choice of delicate bonds And reigned, sovereign of its own decadence. A plethora of scenes besieged the gaze, Thought-webs that reproduced themselves in life And taught the nature to be what it saw; For it is mind that makes the form of the days With the colours it absorbs from the world’s hues And thought decides the destiny of the soul. Page-119 Across the field of sight she multiplied, As on a scenic film or moving plate, The implacable splendour of its nightmare pomps And her rapture vision of infernal joys: A glory of abominable things. On the dark background of a soulless world She staged between a lurid light and shade Her dramas of the sorrow of the depths Written on the anguished nerves of living things: Her epics of horror and grim ruthless deeds Paralysed pity in the hardened breast, And the spectacle of the degraded soul Dried up the founts of natural sympathy. In her booths of sin and night-repairs of vice Her sordid imaginations etched in flesh, Signed photogravures of her infamy, Published the covered dirt of Nature’s guilt, And foul scenarios hideous and macabre And gargoyle masques obscene and terrible Came televisioned from the gulfs of Night: And twisted caricatures of reality And art chef-d’oeuvres of weird distorted lines Trampled the torn sense into tormented shapes. A Craft of ingenious monstrosities Made vileness great and sublimated filth. (Cf. 212.1-213.5.)
* (Another version of part of the preceding)
Once caught, nothing could help it any more, Torn with the flame of dire beatitudes. It took fierce joy in the ecstasy of its pains And reigned, sovereign of its own decadence. A plethora of scenes besieged his gaze. Across his field of sight she multiplied As on a scenic film or moving plate The implacable splendour of her nightmare pomps And her rapture-vision of infernal joys: On the dark background of a soulless world Page-120 She staged between a lurid light and shade Her dramas of the sorrow of the depths Written on the agonised nerves of living things; Her epics of horror and grim majesty Paralysed pity in the hardened breast, Accustoming to carnage as to a meal, To torture as to a pleasant boxing-bout, Abolishing the mind’s outcry and recoil, The life’s revolt, the body’s antipathy.
C. BOOK FOUR, CANTO TWO
The top and carbon copies of a typescript of this canto were differently revised by Sri Aurobindo on separate occasions. When the canto was prepared for publication in 1950, the text was based primarily on the revised carbon copy, the middle part of which contained extensive additions. A few lines from the other revised copy of the typescript were inserted near the beginning, with minor modifications that show some involvement of Sri Aurobindo in the process. Otherwise this version was not used. The opening portion of the unused version contains significant revision which cannot always be combined with the version on which the final text is based. This is printed below.
A land of mountains and wide sun-beat plains And giant rivers pacing to vast seas, A marvellous land of reverie and trance, Silence swallowing life’s act into its sea And action springing from spiritual hush, Of thought’s transcendent climb or heavenward leap, Home of the mightiest works of God and man Where Nature seemed a dream of the Divine And beauty and grace and grandeur flowered from its dream, Harboured the childhood of the incarnate Flame. Over her watched millennial influences And the deep godheads of a grandiose past Looked out and saw the future’s godheads come. Earth’s brooding wisdom spoke to her still breast; Mounting from mind’s last peaks to mate with gods, Making earth’s brilliant thoughts a springing board To dive into the cosmic vastnesses Page-121 The knowledge of the thinker and the seer Saw the unseen and thought the unthinkable, Opened large doors upon infinity And gave a shoreless sweep to mortal acts. Art and the vision of beauty called to the eyes Figure and hues native to higher worlds Till this world’s images took that greater stamp. Nature and soul vied in nobility. Ethics keyed earthly lives to imitate heaven’s; The harmony of a rich culture’s tones Exhausted and exceeded earth’s full store, Refined the sense and magnified its reach To hear the unheard and glimpse the invisible In subtle fields that escape our narrow ken And taught the soul to soar beyond the known And steal entry into the Immortals’ worlds. Inspiring life to greaten beyond its bounds Leaving earth’s safety daring wings of Mind Bore her above the trodden roads of thought To live on eagle heights nearer the Sun Where wisdom sits on her eternal throne. All her life’s turns led her to symbol doors Admitting to secret Powers who were her kin; Initiate of bliss and child of Light, A mystic acolyte trained in Nature’s school Aware of the marvel of created things Her soul’s gifts she gave, earth-magic’s miracles Laid on the altar of the Wonderful; Her hours were a ritual in a timeless fane; Her acts she made gestures of sacrifice. Invested with the rhythm of higher spheres The word became a hieratic means For the release of the imprisoned spirit Into communion with its comrade gods: Helping to new expression and new form Some immemorial Soul in men and things, Seeker of the Unknown and the Unborn, It drew the veil from Nature’s secrecies. (Cf. 359.1-360.25.) Page-122 D. BOOK FIVE, CANTO THREE
These lines are found, written in the scribe’s hand, at the end of a typed copy of this canto.
Now she travelled through many changing lands, Earth round her was illumined by her joy; Its hours were long supports for rapture’s face; Life was an outbreak of the All-Wonderful. All hope and chance took on a brighter shape: This ordinary life of man could change; The seal was there of the Ineffable.
This meeting cut across old Nature-lines To pen upon its bold decisive page The foreword of her soul’s biography. Two powers had come down from the unknown Beyond To play their part upon the cosmic ground. These spirits linked two lines of eternity, These bodies joined two points of the infinite. These lives must serve the Timeless and Unseen For writing out in symbol human acts The meaning of God’s mystery play in Time.
E. BOOK SIX, CANTO TWO
This is another version, written by Sri Aurobindo in a small note-pad, of the passage following the line, "It keeps for her her privilege of pain." (457.2). The manuscript is difficult to decipher. A few readings are slightly uncertain and some punctuation has been supplied by the editors.
But hard it is for human mind to feel Heaven’s good in life’s crash and the iron grasp of Doom Or tolerate the dreadful mystery Of pain and grief and evil masking God. How can it seize the thousand-sided drive, The single act pointing a million acts, The mystic total of the magical sum Or swept by the world-ocean’s rushing waves Sense mid the wash and spume and loud multitude Page-123 The one all-discerning Will, the touch, the tread Of God’s indivisible reality? Man’s thought is like a diamond cutting gems, Man’s will is like a labourer hewing stones: He cuts into sky-strips the boundless Truth And takes each strip as if it were all the heavens. His knowledge chained to thought and led by words Is gaoled in the divisions it has made. He looks at infinite possibility And gives to its plastic Vast the name of Chance; He sees the long result of the all-wise Force And feels the cold rigid limbs of lifeless Law. The will of the Timeless working out in Time In the free absolute steps of cosmic Truth He thinks a dead machine, an unconscious Fate. It is decreed and Satyavan must die; Her hour is known, foreseen the fatal stroke. What else shall be is written in her soul, But till the hour reveals the fateful script, The writing waits illegible and mute. Her mortal breast hides her immortal Fate. O King, thy fate is a transaction fixed In long advance but altered and renewed At every hour between Nature and thy soul. Its items ever grow and ever change; It is a balance drawn in Destiny’s book. Thou canst open with thy fate a new account Begun upon a stainless virgin page. Thou canst dispute her formidable claim With God as the foreseeing arbiter, Thou canst accept thy fate, thou canst refuse. Even if the Judge maintains the unseen decree Yet thy refusal is in thy credit written: Death is no end, Fate moves, it stands not still. Its will unshaken by the bronze blare of Doom, The spirit soars up stronger by defeat, Its godlike wings grow wider with each fall. Its growth within is watered by its wounds, Its splendid failures’ sum is victory. Page-124 Thy fate touches the abyss to leap at heaven. Thy fate is like an army’s marching ranks; It has many fronts and stands on many lines. Thy future’s map is kept in planes unseen, Thy soul has planned its strategy with God. Thy body’s fate comes first, a column pushed Through the forts of the present to a city unknown; Its march is marshalled by the wheeling stars That carry its cosmic consigns in their light. It sees not where it goes but walks by faith; It smites its way through the world’s opponent powers, Or, frustrate, longs and waits a happier birth. A second front is in a greater plane; Thence thy life-forces drive like rolling waves Its small or large formations towards earth’s days And swell the might of thy terrestrial fate. Or as the wind-gods’ squadrons jostle in heaven, Trumpeting with breath of storm and thunder’s call And their arrows like gold lightnings fill the sky, Such is their coming, such their clamour and charge. In armour bright the shining riders come, Leaders hurrying Destiny’s tardy pace, Victors preparing grander shocks to come. If the soul could rise into that greater plane And with its motions quicken man’s petty life, Erasing the firm consigns of the stars Thy will could then give orders to thy fate. On the radiant skyline of a greater Mind The Ideas that Fate fulfils not yet are seen. The secret Will has its headquarters there That planned the tactics of the things that are And behind them plans for greater things to be. Thence gleam the reconnaissances divine, Thence come the prophet scouts, the observer seers, The godlike dreams, the vast and wide-winged thoughts That cannot yet take shape in earthly life, But here and there small part-fulfilments dawned And of their fragments is our present made. But if the soul could live upon those heights, Page-125 Then would his life be the plaything of his thoughts, His mind could be the shaper of his fate. Above all glows a supramental range. There is God’s staff; there is his High Command. The Truth lives there which oversees the world, Of which all things are the disfiguring robe. O mortal, even now couldst thou receive Only some influence from that marvellous plane, All then would change, divinity be thy fate.
F. BOOK SEVEN, CANTO THREE
These lines were printed in a footnote in previous editions as an alternative to the twelve lines beginning with "Here was a quiet country of fixed mind," (498.5-16).
This narrowed life’s pedestrian thought and will Debouched into a little continent space Where soul was not nor spirit, and thinking mind Laboured content with small finalities. It seemed to it the top of being’s arc And the last circle of the quest of life. It was a paradise for thought’s crowned ease Where nothing more was left to find or know, A tabernacle of wise contented life. Page-126 |