A Very Thin Ridge Between the Marvelous and the Disastrous. Satprem
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THE REVOLT OF THE EARTH by Satprem “Satprem, as if impelled by some irrepressible urgency, publishes today a brief text, feverish and disturbing . Through sudden perceptions, bursts of light and brutal shocks, he will break out of this human life whose very stuff is living death, and cross over to the 'other side' through an all-consuming fire. What Satprem seeks to convey here is a 'miracle' wrenched from the very matter of the body, and how this miracle of a 'new sun' is beyond all words. His book gives a powerful urge to attempt the passage from the possible to the impossible— changing death in order to change life. André Velter Le Monde A very thin ridge between the Marvelous and the disastrous. Satprem Satprem THE REVOLT OF THE EARTH To Sri Aurobindo to Mother who gave me all to my mother and the sea gulls of the Côte Sauvage Through a wonder cleft in the bounds of births . SRI AUROBINDO 1 The Scientific Middle Ages WHEN A SPECIES fails to find its own sense, it dies or self-destructs. We think we are French and Chinese and Russian, yellow and white and black, but that is our first barbarism. We think we are Christian, Hedonist and Muslim or God knows what else, but that is our second barbarism. We think we are scientists and star discoverers— and consumers of every possible species—but that is our third barbarism. We gobble up everything, but who gobbles what ? We know everything, but who knows what ? After the religious Middle Ages, the scientific Middle Ages. And we wonder which is the worst. Yet it’s simple—and very difficult. The evolution of a species does not lie in what it thinks of itself, although the ability to think may help us to hasten the pace and find the sense. For four hundred million years, it has been clear that the evolution of species lies in the body. In the transition from a shark to a little seal on its ice floe, it is immaterial whether one was a yellow or white or black fish, or even a scientific fish, because, anyhow, that science was a science of fish, now outdated. “Wait a minute,” the scientists will say. “We live under the stars, erect on our two legs, we even have telescopes and microscopes—we can count everything, down to the number of your atoms. And we can state with a straight face that there are one billion billion atoms in a grain of salt.” But that is wrong : we do not live under the stars or in this atomic accounting, we live in death. Our science is a science of death, as is our theology. The first fact of evolution, the fundamental fact of life is death—and we see everything, know everything, and feel everything through this Wall of death, just as the fish through its surface of water. The greatest fraud ever committed by the “men-who-think” has been to call this “life.” Here is the most sensational misnomer of all history. One cannot even speak of a symbiosis of life and death, for this “life” is death. It is a necro-biosis. Having lacked the courage to face this simple, primordial fact of the evolution of species, we have embarked on all the wrong directions and all the wrong means of action. And this fact is now staring in our faces. The man of Lascaux dates back fourteen thousand years, and we have not yet been able to find our human secret. What wrong tracks have we then followed ? It is time to “hasten the pace,” if not too late. It is time to find the crack in the Wall, the place in the body where lies the possibility of the next step for our species, or of the next species. But first, in which direction should we search ? Clearly not in an improvement of our cerebral convolutions or of our various ingenuities : the transition to the amphibian did not lie in improving the shark’s fins or in multiplying them. Amphi-bian means one who “lives on both sides” (or who dies on both sides, if you like). We are not in the least amphibian : we “live” on one side only, that of death, and all we know of the Earth, the planets and every possible star—not to mention ourselves—is the “side of death.” What lies on the other side of the Wall—without leaving a corpse behind ? “Come now . on the other side of the Wall lie ‘pure spirits,’ or else a box in the graveyard. Come on now . where is this ‘Wall’ of yours ? We’ve never seen it under our microscopes ! We’ve seen heart failures, tuberculosis, flattened EEGs and bones crushed under a truck, and also vertebrae . in a box. But where on earth is your Wall ? It would be plain to see !” But we cannot see anything, no more than the fish can inside its oceanic fish bowl. We have defined all the “conditions of life” without realizing that they are the conditions of death. We have said, “Beyond so many degrees Fahrenheit, it’s death ; beyond so much atmospheric pressure, it’s death ; beyond such proportion of oxygen, it’s death ; beyond . .” There is no end to all the “beyonds” of life, for they are all the beyonds of death and all the Walls of our prison—within which we think we live the good life (not so good of late). But that is a Falsehood. That simple, primordial fact of evolution might well give us the key to the next step of evolution, or what we may call with Sri Aurobindo, the “New Evolution,” no longer that of Lamarck and Darwin, but the dawn of the first Life on earth—the necro-biosis decapitated of its misnomer. The great Crack in the wall of evolution. A species’ weakness is its best means of transition to something else. The next species is not an “improvement” on the previous one. It is not something added on, like fins, legs, or wings, or like new convolutions, it is something falling away, and that “something” falling away is essentially that-which-causes-the-death of all species. That primordial cocoon enveloping and decaying everything. There is no “superman” : there is another man, or perhaps a first man, because until now there has been hardly anything but mortal animals endowed with an intelligence more or less skilled at escaping their sorry lot, through high or through low. Neither the spiritual high nor the material low can help us, but the inside of our body can—and such a deep inside that we may have to go back to an age farther than that of the trilobites and the lithosphere. We expect nothing from “extraterrestrials,” but we expect a powerful, awesome secret from an unknown intra-terrestrial. Thus we already have a direction—that mortal weakness, and it is the first step to get hold of the key. It is so obvious—to indulge in a bit of . aquatic, and soon amphibian, philosophy—that nothing in this universe can be if not for the sake of joy. A creation or “way of being” for the sake of death, hell and pain makes no sense, unless we say, like those poor gladiators in Roman circuses, Ave Caesar, morituri te salutant, “Hail Caesar ! They who are about to die salute you !” It seems so obvious, too, that this animal body, produced by evolution and built by death—numberless deaths—has no intelligible sense other than to find the secret of non- death and the laughter of joy in this very body issued from death. Such is the great evolutionary challenge, and the next step of our species. The votaries of religion and those of science have misled us. Science and religion alike have crippled us—stultified us, we might say—by robbing us of our own means and of our own evolutionary secret, one by urging us to heaven, the other to a utilitarian Machinery. We are not learned ; we are crippled. Are we even simply “human” ? We have telephones, television, airplanes and what not—every possible means for dying in the prison, scientifically catalogued and padlocked, with all we need to spare us the trouble of finding the key. Also, a medical science that gives us every means to die from its cures. But where is Life in all this ? 2 The Revolt of the Earth DID NO ONE, then, ever find the key ? Still, there was Socrates : “Know thyself.” They murdered Socrates. Still, there was Prometheus, who wanted to bring the divine Fire to men. A myth ? Symbolically, we could say that in the year 399 BC, on the day of Socrates’ hemlock, the West took a fatal turn. On that day we irremediably moved away from the key. From that island of Beauty and grace whose motto was To kalon to epieikes—“that which is beautiful is true”—we were to be slowly seized by Roman barbarism, whose cry still - resounds today throughout our five continents : panem et circenses, “bread and circus” ; then, even more slowly, but more insidiously, by an octopus-like Church which claimed to be the opposite of Roman brutality, but nevertheless ended with a few terrible stakes and confined us in a ready-made and God-sanctioned knowledge from which the only possible way out was the materialist revolt, and the plunge into a certain human filth. A filth from which we cannot break free, despite our . stultifying triumphs.