We have come up to the stage of earth’s wheeling ‘in the hollow gulfs, forgetful of her spirit and her fate.’
The impassive skies were neutral, empty, still.
The skies are absolutely impassive; they are not
reacting to anything. They are ‘neutral’, neither pleasant nor unpleasant,
neither giving rise to joyous sensations nor to happy ones. They are ‘empty’,
there are no clouds, there are no patterns. And all is ‘still’, there are no
winds, nothing is moving.
Then something in the inscrutable darkness stirred;
A nameless movement, an unthought Idea
Insistent, dissatisfied, without an aim,
Something that wished but knew not how to be,
Teased the Inconscient to wake Ignorance.
In such a state something moves, there is a stir. In that
‘inscrutable darkness’, a darkness which cannot be analysed, fathomed,
something moves. And what is it? ‘A nameless movement’: it is a movement, but
it cannot be called by any name. it is an ‘unthought Idea’; it is a
self-existent Idea, not a product of thinking. ‘Insistent’, repeating itself,
demanding. ‘Dissatisfied’, it is obvious that there is some dissatisfaction of
seeking: and yet it is ‘without an aim’, it wants, but what it wants is not
clear. This something wishes to come into being but it does not know how to do
so. And it goes on to exert pressure on the Inconscient, which is there. There
is no consciousness yet. That Inconscient is teased, urged by this insistent
movement ‘to wake Ignorance’. Sri Aurobindo explains that this is not to be taken
merely as a metaphor; for to him the Inconscient is very real, as concrete as
anything else. This Inconscient has to be disturbed, goaded, prodded into
action, into some awareness. There has to emerge some consciousness before
there can be Ignorance, maybe a partial consciousness, a semi-consciousness,
some kind of awareness, before Ignorance can appear.
A throe 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 of vanished memory,
Like one who searches for a bygone self
And only meets the corpse of his desire.
As soon as the nameless movement stirs, there is a
throe, a moving wave in the atmosphere and that leaves a vibrating trace. And
in leaving that trace, it gives ‘room for an old tired want unfilled’. There is
some want somewhere which is not satisfied and it is an old want. When the
throb appears, this hidden, unsatisfied want get room to emerge. Where was it
till now?
The hidden want was lying in the subconscient levels in
a dark ‘moonless’ cave. From that cavern, its hidden place, this want raises
its head. Since it is coming from a dark cave, naturally it is looking and
straining for light which is not there in its cave. This want has had a past
and some memory of it. It has been light at one time, but that memory has
faded; yet something of it remains and that is why it is straining its closed
eyes, trying to remember. The poet brings a striking simile from life.
It is an experience, I suppose, of most of us that
often we look for something which had moved us before. At times an old memory
revives and we want to have that fulfillment again. We want to be what once we
were, maybe for a while. It may be to indulge an old desire. But when the
situation is recreated, we find that it no more yields the same satisfaction
and we are disappointed. The old thrill is missing. We meet only a dead corpse
of our old desire that has departed.
Perhaps it is permissible for me to be a little
reminiscent at this stage. As you are aware, I have been to
Like one who searches for a bygone self
And only meets the corpse of his desire.
I suppose these lines apply to everyone at some time or
other in life. We think that our desires which are intense today will be so
always. A year hence, when the object fulfilling that same desire turns up, we
find we have no more the old liking for it. Our desire is dead. Desires are
fleeting, transient, and they die quickly, leaving phantoms behind.
Now, from has this old tired want come up?
It was as though even in this Nought'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 another frustrate world.
Nought is zero, negation. Everything of the previous
creation has been dissolved. Only a small core is left. And in that core,
something lurks, it is an entity. It doesn’t quite remember the past that has
been slain and buried. Only this little entity seems to have survived. The poet
doesn’t say exactly an entity, but ‘as though’, as if it is there. This little
entity finds itself ‘condemned’, forced against its will, ‘to resume the effort
and the pang’, the effort of the last cycle of evolution and the pang of that
effort. It had hoped it was all over, but now it is condemned to resume all of
it. The previous round was sufficiently frustrating, and this is another
‘frustrate world’ ahead.
An unshaped consciousness desired light
And a blank prescience yearned towards distant change.
The unshaped, unformulated consciousness that is spread
everywhere desires and seeks for light. In that vast expanse there is a
‘prescience’, a feeling of something to come, though nothing definite is known.
It is a ‘blank’ prescience, a kind of vague presentiment. There is some
foreknowledge of a distant change that is to come and replace the present state
of negation. And there is a yearning for that change.