Roberto Calasso - Ka

“Wherever life is felt more acutely, that is Rudra,” said a western dancer. The gods thought so too, and were afraid of Rudra. They would see him arrive, suddenly, from the north, a shadowy figure, cloaked in dark gowns, glowing embers in his eyes. Shrewd and smooth-tongued, they praised him, and kept out of his way. The important thing was never to use his name. When pressed, they used the adjective “rudric” rather than the name. They never invited him to their sacrifices. (And what else was life?) They were afraid something irreparable might happen in his presence, afraid the fire might flare up and engulf them all. The gods knew the risks of intensity, because they were intensity itself. They shrank from anything that might shake the world’s cage too fiercely. Even the seers were startled when Rudra appeared, for his mere presence aroused the gravest of suspicions, a fear that had dogged them from the beginning: that sacrifice might not be enough, that it might not be able to draw the whole of reality into itself. At the same time, they called Rudra “King of the Sacrifice.” Why? Again suspicion was at work. Perhaps, outside their rites, their meters, their calendar of ceremonies, another sacrifice was going on, silently, constantly, in the veins of all that is, in the name of Rudra. But how to distinguish such a thing from profusion and massacre?

They were always speaking of the dawn, as if they had never seen anything else. Though in India dawns are brief. The difference between the shortest and longest days is hardly considerable: just four hours. Were they remembering the dawns of another country, a northern homeland, whence they had once descended? Uṣas is everywhere, in the Ṛg Veda. Her name occurs three hundred times. There are twenty hymns in her praise. Some say they are among the oldest. Some say they are among the finest. Nor did they fulfill the function of forming the accompaniment to an offering, since no material oblations were made to Uṣas. The poetic word wrapped around her as though around itself. And no offering to any god could serve its purpose unless Uṣas was witness to it. Recipient of words alone, Uṣas was the precondition of every offering: that flaring up of consciousness that occurs when Uṣas steps forward, uncovering herself.

“True with the true, great with the great, goddess with goddesses, venerable with the venerable,” she would appear from afar, head high, “bright beacon of the immortal,” dripping moisture, on a chariot drawn by pink horses, laden with ritual offerings. Always powdered with the same makeup, “like women on their way to an assignation,” she bathed standing up, the better to be seen, white, gleaming, born from black, buzzing around men like a fly. Why? To awaken them. Awakening: this was the “fine virtue” of Uṣas, her impalpable gift, as the gifts she received were likewise impalpable: mere words arranged in meters. Never the slaughtered animal, never the libation. Just words.

Uṣas has a prefix peculiar to herself: prati- , which is a “coming to meet” someone, a stepping forward, face-to-face, from the furthest distances. The hymn singers never wearied of praising Uṣas’s breasts. “Young and brazen, forward she comes”: thus Uṣas appears. And what is her first gesture? “She bares her breasts. like a loose woman.” Or, with an observation that was also an invitation, they remarked: “Girl full of smiles, bare your breasts when you shine in the east”; “You bare your breasts to make yourself beautiful.” If Uṣas was slow to make the gesture, the singers were quick as chroniclers to remind: “Going to meet men, like a beautiful young woman, she pops out her breasts.”

Awakening is a vision that comes forward. It is the first image that adheres to the mind, flood tide of fullness, of a taste hitherto unknown. It is Uṣas who welcomes the pūrváhūti , the “first ritual call,” which is also the “first thought,” pūrvácitti . There’s a race to be the first one to think of her. And to receive grace is to be the first one she thinks of. Here the goddess is subject and object, coupling without end. Since she is the first. Uṣas is the unique, she from whom all others issue, to whom they return, but she is also — immediately — multiple, surrounded by emulators and look-alikes. She appears “from day to day bearing her many names.” There is no Uṣas without uṣásah , countless “Dawns bearing happy names,” which echo her, disperse her, until you ask: Which one is Uṣas?

Thirteen times the Ṛg Veda speaks of a goddess who is svásṛ , “sister.” Eleven of those times it means Uṣas. Intimate with everyone, no other divinity could boast such an abundance of kinfolk. She was reputed to have many lovers, and often enough they were her brothers — Agni? Pūṣan? Sūrya? the Aśvin twins? She was the only goddess of whom such stories were told. One day the young Śunaḥśepa found himself tied to a sacrificial stake. His father had sold him for a hundred cows so that he could be sacrificed instead of someone else. The appointed time drew near. Then the Aśvin twins suggested he invoke Uṣas. Śunaḥśepa remembered a hymn that had been dear to him, that he had sung many times, thinking of Uṣas, of the lover he had always desired, never believing she would be his. Śunaḥśepa said: “What mortal can presume to possess you, immortal Uṣas, you who love as you will? Who will you choose from among us, o radiant one?” He went on invoking her. Verse after verse, the cords that bound him came undone.

Uṣas and Sandhyā, the two fatal maidens, were Dawn and Dusk. Why was their beauty thought to be superior to any other that would ever be? Those two moments, the unfettering and the fading of the light, this entry into the manifest and retreat from it, were articulation itself, were “connection,” bandhu . But not the usual connection, between two similar and manifest beings, or between two equally visible shapes. Here what emerged was the connection between the manifest and the unmanifest, between two worlds that might have remained forever separate — but which now came together, surfaced together in the bodies of those two girls who look back and flee. This connection tended to become something else too: a coupling. Everybody wanted to couple with Uṣas, with Sandhyā, because coupling is the image of connection: not the other way around. Uṣas and Sandhyā were the image of supreme connection. The first particle of the invisible that penetrated them was time.

Every morning, at first light, they evoked Uṣas, strung together her sixteen epithets, sang in many meters of her gifts, of the endless extravagance they expected from her, a punctual prodigality. These words were to waken her, so that Uṣas might waken them. Each act could find a meaning only if preceded by that other act, awakening, which anchors the mind to what is, existence. But beneath the surface they harbored a dark and growing rancor toward that girl with the copper hair, who brushed against them only to desert them. At every blinking of an eyelid they remembered that Uṣas mocked them as she played, that she always won, then ran off with the prize, with life. Or they thought of her as Varuṇa’s spy, doing his job for him, since everybody knows that for Varuṇa “the blinkings of a man’s eyelids are numbered.” To awaken means to blink one’s eyelids. But the gods do not blink. That was all it took to seal the fate of men who do not want to die. One day someone would avenge them of the wrong done by the fatal maiden with the copper hair. It happened once — and never ceased to happen, right up to Gilda and beyond.

Indra knew the hiding place where the Cows, the Dawns, the Waters, lay concealed. He crouched down in deep dark, waiting to pounce. The dazzling lights of Uṣas’s chariot had barely taken shape when he attacked. He waved a lethal weapon, quite out of proportion with his adversary, that nimble, ivoried chariot, counterpoint to its rider’s ornaments. And Uṣas was already fleeing, hitting high notes of terror. Was it a comedy? Was it a play? Grimly, Indra unleashed his rage on the empty chariot. He split through yoke and shaft. He was like a crazed warrior, tormented by some pain no one understood. And awkward too, in the fury of blows he rained down on that sumptuous and delicate object.