Roberto Calasso - Literature and the Gods

“Yes, Literature exists and, if you like, alone, an exception from everything.”

More than any debate about free verse, this statement really was shocking. In his characteristic manner, “a bit like a priest, a bit like a ballerina,” and with his infinitely delicate and intimidating diction, Mallarmé gave notice that having left by society’s front door, literature was coming back in through a cosmic window, having absorbed in the meantime nothing less than everything. Those words marked the end of a long, meandering story. And they celebrated the moment when a daring fiction took shape and crystallized, a fiction from which the whole of the century to come would draw sustenance, and from which we still draw sustenance today: absolute literature.

“Meters Are the Cattle of the Gods”

Meters are the cattle of the gods,” we read in the Śatapatha . This was the premise, something we find hard to understand today. When we think of meters, we may perhaps glimpse the vague outline of a rhythm, but not much more. Yet it wasn’t always thus, and certainly not for the Vedic seers, the who composed the . To understand what meters are, they thought, one must go back to the gods and beyond the gods, as far as Prajāpati, the Progenitor, that indefinite being who has no name of his own, unless we count as a name the interrogative pronoun Ka (Who?), that unlimited being out of whom the gods themselves sprang. Yet even the Father had been born together with “evil,” pāpman , that evil which is “death,” “While Prajāpati was creating, Death, that evil, overcame him.” Thus the gods were born mortal; the fear of death dwelt within them. “Prajāpati constructed the fire; it was keen-edged as a razor; terrified, the gods would not come near; then, wrapping themselves in the meters, they came near, and that is how the meters got their name. The meters are sacred power; the skin of the black antelope is the form of sacred power; he puts on shoes of antelope skin; not to be hurt, he wraps himself in meters before approaching the fire.” The “meters,” chandas , are the robes that the gods “wrapped around themselves,” acchādayan , so that they might come near to the fire without being disfigured as though by the blade of a razor. Thus the gods sought to escape death. And likewise men — for men always tell themselves: “I must do as the gods did.” When the Taittirīya says, “He wraps himself in meters before coming near the fire, so as not to be hurt,” it is referring to any priest, any man. Today, seen through eyes no longer familiar with rites and with fire, the phrase cannot help but make us think of what, consciously or otherwise, every poet, every writer does when he writes. And of at least one poet I know that this was quite literally true: Joseph Brodsky. When Brodsky spoke of meter, and of the imminent danger that we might forget what meter is, his voice would be tense, as though he were speaking of a mortal peril, speaking precisely, for sure, and soberly, but also with the pathos that a perilous situation demands.

But why are the meters so tremendously important, so much so that even the gods needed them to protect themselves? Everything that exists is permeated by two invisible powers—“mind,” manas , and “word,” vāc , a twinned pair whose distinguishing characteristic is that they are at once “equal,” samāna , and “distinct,” nānā . The work of ritual — and thus any work —consists above all in making sure that this characteristic is not lost in pure indistinction. Thus “mind” and “word” are assigned slightly different ritual utensils: for the one a ladle must be used; for the other a wooden spoon with a curved beak. And two different libations are offered, that “are mind and word: thus he [the officiant] separates mind and word one from the other; and thus mind and word, though equal, samāna , are nevertheless distinct, nānā.” In one respect, however, mind and word are drastically different: in their extension. “Mind is far more unlimited and word is far more limited.” These two entities belong to two different levels of being, but to operate effectively they must team up, yoke themselves together . Mind alone, word alone, are impotent — or at least not powerful enough to take an offering to the gods. The horse of the mind must submit to the harness of the word, of the meters: otherwise it would lose its way.

But how can two such disproportionate beings be yoked together? “When one of the pair in the yoke is smaller, they give it an extra support bar … so he gives a support bar to the word, and like well-paired companions yoked together these two now take the sacrifice to the gods.” That support bar is a subtle metaphysical contrivance — and it is only thanks to that contrivance that the offering has ever been able to reach the gods. Reminding ourselves of its origin will help us understand why the word is never whole, but always flawed in some way or composite, threatened by its own lack of substance — or in any case its insufficient weight.

But what about meter? Meter is the yoke of the word. Just as the “mind,” manas , is so flighty in its movements — a monkey leaping from branch to branch — that it would be quite dispersed if it did not accept a yoke (and every mental discipline, every yoga , is above all a “yoke”); so the “word,” vāc , omnipresent, pervasive, which “blows like the wind, sweeping across all worlds,” bows to the restrictions of meter, agrees to dress up in it as if in colorful clothes, to be wrapped up, as it were, in a preordained arrangement of syllables. Only thus can it reach the heavens, like a female creature covered in bird feathers. And only thus can it make the return journey from heaven to earth. Such facility, such familiarity with different worlds, inevitably makes us wonder: could it be that rather than just leading us to the gods, the meters are the gods themselves? After that thought has occurred, we won’t be surprised when we come across these words: “Now, the gods who govern life are the meters, for it is thanks to the meters that all living things here below are sustained.” With respect to the thirty-three Devas, the meters play a double role, at once subordinate and sovereign: humble and useful like beasts of burden who “when yoked carry weights for men, so the meters, when yoked, carry the sacrifice to the gods.” But at the same time only the meters can get close to the fire without being harmed. And above all: if the gods have achieved immortality, it is the meters they have to thank for it. Once the gods roamed the earth — yearning for the sky. They knew that it was there immortality was to be found. But they didn’t know how to get there. Then Gāyatrī, the female creature who is the shortest and most effective of the meters, transformed herself into a śyena , a hawk or eagle. In that form she managed to steal from the sky the substance death cannot harm: soma . But hers wasn’t the first attempt. Two other meters had tried and failed before her: Jagatī, who lost three syllables in the process; then , who lost one. When Gāyatrī reappeared, with the soma in her beak, her body was made up of her own four syllables plus those her sisters had lost. Meantime the arrow of a mysterious archer, a celestial guardian, had ruffled her plumage and torn off a leaf of the soma plant. Loss and wound thus lurked within the meter that must heal loss and wound. From then on Gāyatrī, , and Jagatī would always follow King Soma. A king can hardly turn up unattended. So who forms his retinue? The meters. “Just as dignitaries, heralds, and captains stand beside the king, so the meters move about him like servants.” Like K.’s assistants in Kafka’s The Castle , the meters go wherever Soma goes. Soma arrives on a chariot carrying the branches of a plant that “grows in the mountains.” But alongside the chariot, those who know will also see the gleam of the meters, like rays around the sun.