O Death, not for my heart's sweet poignancy
Nor for my happy body's bliss alone
I have claimed from thee the living Satyavan,
But for his work and mine, our sacred charge.
Our lives are God's messengers beneath the stars;
To dwell under death's shadow they have come
Tempting God's light to earth for the ignorant race,
His Love to fill the hollow in men's hearts,
His bliss to heal the unhappiness of the world.
For I the woman am the force of God,
He the Eternal's delegate soul in man.
My will is greater than thy law, O Death;
My love is stronger than the bonds of Fate:
Our love is the heavenly seal of the Supreme.
I guard that seal against thy rending hands.
Love must not cease to live upon the earth;
For Love is the bright link twixt earth and heaven,
Love is the far Transcendent's angel here;
Love is man's lien on the Absolute.   more »

…How shall the Ideal's unsubstantial hues
Be painted stiff on earth's vermilion blur,
A dream within a dream come doubly true?
How shall the will-o'-the-wisp become a star?
The Ideal is a malady of thy mind,
A bright delirium of thy speech and thought,
A strange wine of beauty lifting thee to false sight…
O soul misled by the splendour of thy thoughts,
O earthly creature with thy dream of heaven,
Obey, resigned and still, the earthly law.
Accept the light that falls upon thy days;
Take what thou canst of Life's permitted joy,
Submitting to the ordeal of Fate's scourge
Suffer what thou must of toil and grief and care.
There shall approach silencing thy passionate heart
My long calm night of everlasting sleep:
There into the hush from which thou cam'st retire.   more »

O human mind, vainly thou torturest
An hour's delight to stretch through infinity's
Long void and fill its formless, passionless gulfs,
Persuading the insensible Abyss
To lend eternity to perishing things,
And trickst the fragile movements of thy heart
With thy spirit's feint of immortality…
The ideal never yet was real made.
Imprisoned in form that glory cannot live;
Into a body shut it breathes no more…
If heavens there are they are veiled in their own light,
If a Truth eternal somewhere reigns unknown,
It burns in a tremendous void of God…
The Avatars have lived and died in vain,
Vain was the sage's thought, the prophet's voice;
In vain is seen the shining upward Way.
Earth lies unchanged beneath the circling sun…   more »

Passing Moments
Here is a set of poems selected from my book Passing Moments that was brought out by M/S Ultra Publications, Bangalore, India, in 2002, ISBN # 81-87544-03-1. These poems, totalling 49, were written during 19 June-18 July, 1998; another, a much longer narrative running into 40 stanzas, dated 18 August 1998, also followed generally the same style of composition but it has been kept aside from the present selection. While taking the opportunity of presenting these selected poems here I have touched them up lightly at places. But the important feature of this presentation is that of illustrations accompanying them. For this purpose I have capitalized on the Google Images quite extensively, Images with all their amazing variety and abundant creative excellence. But then at the same time there are also several limitations, they kind of putting rigid geometrical boundaries around what the swift and supple enthusiasm of inspiration can convey, they not seizing the much subtler and suggestive feeling of the poetic language. Yet it is believed that one can leap over this not really frozen sense of the image-phrases, even as they do possess a loaded multi-meaninged softness if one is insightful to see what lies behind them; the visual impact they provide can bring something of it when seen in inner association with what the hues and shades are trying to communicate. Perhaps in that respect the revelatory power itself can come out in another living and vivid language of sight and sound, each enhancing the sense more perceptively. But this is an attempt and I do not know how far it has succeeded or is going to be acceptable. In any case, I must express my silent but sincere gratitude to the numerous authors of the Images for this use of their works for my purposes, sometimes with free adaptations of their imaginative and artistic creations, a use which is not for any commercial gains. I hope in the process I’ve not infringed on any copyrights.   more »

World-spirit, I was thy equal spirit born.
My will too is a law, my strength a god.
I am immortal in my mortality.
I tremble not before the immobile gaze
Of the unchanging marble hierarchies
That look with the stone eyes of Law and Fate.
My soul can meet them with its living fire.
Out of thy shadow give me back again
Into earth's flowering spaces Satyavan
In the sweet transiency of human limbs
To do with him my spirit's burning will.
I will bear with him the ancient Mother's load,
I will follow with him earth's path that leads to God.
Else shall the eternal spaces open to me
While round us strange horizons far recede,
Travelling together the immense unknown…
Wherever thou leadst his soul I shall pursue...   more »

...Back from the grandeur of my perilous realms
Go, mortal, to thy small permitted sphere!
Hasten swift-footed, lest to slay thy life
The great laws thou hast violated, moved,
Open at last on thee their marble eyes…   more »

(courtesy Google Images)

This paper seeks a long overdue critical exploration of Sri Aurobindo's evolutionary vision and how it might inform contemporary discourse on globalization and those regimes of techno-science whose productions propel its advance. That such a critical inquiry is overdue is regrettable because we live at a time in which we are undergoing what is perhaps our most rapid period of change in human history. We live in an era in which the dislocation of our physical, life and mental worlds seems to result from the pull of three strange attractors accelerating at different speeds.

Gazing out from the edge of digital culture in North America to do a critically inquiry into the future is problematic because our perspectives are already conjoined to the gaze of a culture entrained in exponential change. But what would constitute a future view? An epistemology of the Other? A discourse on the never quite? The future is that distant coordinate which is only know through its proximity to our present. So what does the present teach?

In America we are travelling so rapidly that from here we do not hear the voices of indentured knowledge workers standing in lines of up to mile, amidst the smoke and decay of south India, to compete with the multitudes of Heidegger's “standing reserve” for their conditions of economic bondages; of eight to twelve partitioned hours a day spent facilitating the global flow of virtual capital. Although the gaze from here may sense the desiring nature of the machine it lacks an epistemology for coping with its assemblages and a methodology for resisting its discipline.....

   more »