Two poems and two narratives that evoke the inner and outer experience of Auroville, as we sail “towards what splendid shore?”
Selections from the writings of Roger Harris (To read more about Roger Harris, please see the Preface to Mutation, Alchemy & Grace)
Originally published 2017
CITY OF PEACE
City of peace and God’s unguarded light,
City of silence, and the rich unfolding word;
City of love and the laughter of the gods,
City of man, his labour born of dream.
City of harvest, born of canyon soil,
City of rich acres, sown with strong-eyed toil;
City whose song the soul enraptured sings
City of lost boundaries,
Province once of kings
City whose deep calm at sunset does recall
Ages when the earth stood golden,
Heaven-tall;
City on night’s borderline,
Outpost of dawn’s light,
City born of promise
And a conqueror’s delight.
Matrimandir meeting, 1983
From Mutation, Alchemy & Grace (Auroville Press, 2017) p. 147
AUROVILLE
This is our home
Born not of earth,
Though part of earth,
But the sky.
Of ethereal wind-swept whisperings
And a race that borders night,
Of thoughts and hopes and a strange gentle joy,
Vaguely caught,
Like twilight dancing on the leaves
Of a forgotten day.
Though recalled where memory is joy,
Its foreknowledge of love to come
And a sense that we are one.
That when we strive to hold we break
Falling upon the barren canyon rocks,
Until, releasing all, we are one again,
As laughter lights our eyes
And joy does fill our breasts,
As if by an unseen hand caressed
As if by some great presence blessed.
Mutation, Alchemy, and Grace (Auroville Press, 2017) p. 151
PERFECT CONCORDANCE
“I know with absolute certitude that the Supramental is a truth and its advent is in the very nature of things inevitable.”
Sri Aurobindo, On Himself, 3 August 1935
Six years ago, I translated The Mutation of Death by Satprem. I finished two thirds of the book by myself. Then I had a motorcycle accident and spent six weeks in deep coma. The last two years since my exit from coma, I have experienced a mutation, a little perilous.
Since 29 February, the Golden Day according to Mother, the beginning of the supramental manifestation on this planet and in many universes, I live a miraculous mutation, beautiful and wonderful: perfect concordance.
In Auroville, the supramental atmosphere is very powerful. Some people are not very receptive to this active force. As Auroville is a living laboratory for the supramental manifestation, they will have to discover their raison d’être in Auroville, a laboratory of human unity.
We are living in the Age of Aquarius — a prelude to the Golden Age, the Hindu Satya Yuga, which will start on the Winter Solstice, on 21 December of this year 2012, and will mark the end of the mental age and of the Mayan calendar. For the Mayans, it was the end of the world, but in reality it is the end of the mental world and the beginning of the supramental world on the physical plane of the Earth.
Mutation, Alchemy, and Grace (Auroville Press, 2017) p. 181
In the ruined cities of the mind (extract)
Ed rolls in on his bicycle and it’s sambalam (salary) time for the ammas in their slightly gaudily colored saris, with the orange flowers in their hair: how to talk about Auroville except in letters to friends? It can only be lived and life rolls on in its show of actions, gestures, happenings, relationships, comings, goings, concretions, dust and dreams. The jackals howl at night in the canyon and you have trouble getting to sleep, you wake up tired or you wake up remembering some slightly magic dream walking with a friend through vaguely Chinese or Mantuan palaces down long lacquered corridors and out into a landscape scattered with rubble and you look down onto the Bodhi tree, and then over to a wan winter landscape, grey and ashen dotted with barren trees where the grey granite empty round table rests alone on a plain. And where is it we truly live, on which this is an outer haze, a shifting scene, unreal, and yet so real, in which we have to live react create and watch ourselves go by? Drama, suffering, it’s all a great good-bye, a world which cannot stand itself anymore with all its lacquered histories and all its frescoed pasts, and the cries rise out from the ruins of the north, the rubble of a greater age that once had reason to believe in something, anything, and all our armadas break upon the rocks and all our children watch the sunsets and the dawns break through the crevices of dream and we are here to watch the last age out with all its sculptured hopes and all its noble thoughts and its beauty dancing naked with eyes of lust and flame and the cries that rise again as the beast unconquered walks but knows that its end is near.
The ruined cities of the mind surround on every side as a skinny wildcat sleeps in the chair beside me and India Today on the cement table by my typewriter announces a breakthrough in the Punjab, and I remember last night the Matrimandir stood out eerily beautiful, illuminated by a powerful projector, as I bicycled around it before heading back to the canyons beneath the stars, on this our earth, an invisible ship sailing through the galaxies of space towards what splendid shore?
Selections from Mutation, Alchemy, and Grace (Auroville Press, 2017) pp. 62-64
To read more about Roger Harris, please see the Preface to Mutation, Alchemy & Grace
Written by Alan Herbert