Roberto Calasso - Ka

The firmament is a tent that shelters the world. We see the inside of that tent. But what would we see if we were stretched out on the other side? We would be on the back of the world, which Agni treads when he carries messages to the gods. Filled with a surge of dazzling light, we would see the rocaná , the “space of light” that has no end. A pole props up the tent of the sky and what opens out beyond the firmament. A pole, a trunk, a mountain. What is so amazing is not so much the existence that lies below the tent — the matter, the world — nor what is outside the tent — a mass of light — but how there can be a passage from one to the other: how it happens that shabby and perishable substances are ever being renewed by something that one can only suppose is inexhaustible and that settles on things below like a translucent film. This was what the ṛṣis wanted to concentrate on, this was the prime object of their thought. Creation, nothingness, freedom, on the other hand, these were preposterous questions doomed to remain forever deferred, unresolvable.

To approach the soma is to approach exchange. First and foremost Soma is something that passes, that flows, from one place to another, one hand to another. From the Asuras, the mountain, the sky: to the Devas, the plain, the earth. Or, again, in the opposite direction. There is always something violent involved in its passage, which comes as a result of war, or theft, or sale. The Asuras lie heaped in blood. An arrow plucks a feather from Garuḍa as he flies off with the soma in his beak. No sooner has he made his sale than the soma merchant is beaten up. Why? What did he do wrong? It is as if the soma , the substance that is the essence of all substance, that fills mind and veins, that is the ultimate guardian of the world’s existence, could only be obtained thanks to some crime, some act of violence: an excess of giving or taking, a theft, an act of prostitution, as when Vāc offered her body as a trade-off with the Gandharvas. Substitution, which is the wound of exchange, chose to assert itself in the most secret place of substance, there where matter becomes consciousness. If it were not so, everything would remain static, there would be no stories, the world would not even try, albeit in vain, to recompose itself — and perhaps the soma would not allow us to reach the absent, the sovereign, the dazzling flow, that lies on the other side of the world’s back: rocaná , the “space of light.”

Soma isn’t just taste, sense, lymph — all that causes life to live and makes it understandable. Soma is something that circulates. And since the world is a single being, but broken up into myriads of bodies and entities, insofar as Soma circulates, it is something that must be exchanged. The moment when something is exchanged — and hence goes out of itself, crosses a border — is the critical moment, the moment that forces us to recognize that the world is not a continuum. Substitution, sale, theft, prostitution: at such moments a brief convulsion occurs, soon to be effaced. But such moments remind us that every being is suspended in the void. Crossing that void provokes violence. A head rolls, a merchant is clubbed, a queen gives her body to a dead horse, tightens her thighs around his legs. This too must take place if the madhuridyā , the “doctrine of the honey,” is to trickle down.

Exchange is based on the circulation between the body and the world outside. We are alive only insofar as one element — oxygen — is continually entering and leaving our bodies. Only because we take and give with every passing moment. The only area where the Devas showed that they enjoyed a supremacy over the Asuras, a supremacy that wasn’t just a question of brute force, was this: the Asuras sacrificed inside their mouths, while the Devas realized that they would have to sacrifice outside. “The Asuras, in their arrogance, thinking, ‘Why sacrifice to anyone else?’ sacrificed in their mouths… But the Devas went on making offerings one to another.” The existence of an outside, the recognition of the presence of something without, was all that would distinguish, forever, the Devas from the Asuras.

For an instant, and it was the moment when the merchant sold his stalks, substance and substitution converged to the point of coinciding in the soma . Substance (source of every quality, and hence of every likeness and analogy) is that which exists unto itself, needing no other. It is the primordial autism. Substitution is something that exists only insofar as it takes the place of something else. Garuḍa stole Soma from the sky to ransom his mother, Vinatā. It was the first ransom. And the first exchange was payment of a ransom. It was as if exchange could only be conceived insofar as it freed from servitude or guilt. But the liberation involved another crime, another guilt: the theft, then the killing of the soma , prelude to its consumption. With the soma the object of desire appears on the scene for the first time. And since any desire is immediately shared by someone else, or imitated by someone else (and shared because imitated), its object can be exchanged. Or rather: it is that which gives rise to exchange. “Since the king [Soma] has been sold, everything down here is for sale.”

The surface of the wakeful mind trembles without cease, like the surface of the waters. And like the waters, it assumes the shapes of those forces that press upon it. The creatures closest in both nature and name to the “waters,” āpah , were the Apsaras, Nymphs, seductive creatures, sometimes benevolent, always capricious. They could lead you to madness. They came out of the waves like “the first seed of mind”: desire. And this, like everything else, was eager to open out into its own plural. Were the Apsaras so called because they “flowed,” sara , in the “waters,” āpaḥ , or because they were “without shame,” a-psaras? Philologists still dispute the question, solemnly. The Apsaras see them at it — and laugh.

The first pact between mind and matter was sealed upon the waters. Even the gods of Olympus were terrified of breaking an oath made on the waters of the Styx. There is a perennial bond between the waters and the truth. But why should what is fluid, elusive, and mutable coincide with the unshakable precision of the word that enounces things as they are? This is the mystery, the ultimate obscurity of Varuṇa, and it is what makes him more remote than any other god. Between the word and the waters another element slips in, an element in which water and word flow together and mingle: consciousness, the raw sensation of whoever is awake and knows himself alive. This sensation is more amazing than any marvel the eye will ever see. In this regard the ṛṣis were not so far away from Wittgenstein: that the world exists is far more amazing than any how the world exists.

The water flows and reflects. On the one side: time. On the other: the image, the simulacrum, the mental phantom. These opposing liṅgas , “tokens” of conscious life, are already announced in the waters. And only in the waters. If time is sovereign, and almost the model of every sovereignty, the waters of consciousness are the first subjects capable of recognizing the fact. Even that plural — the way right from the very beginning one never speaks of the water but of the “waters,” a multiplicity of feminine creatures — is a token of consciousness: its ceaseless branching out, sprouting new leaves. Drifting around the celestial waters, wandering aimless among his lovers, Soma was the “only seer” amid the waves: the eye that watches the multiple expanse of the wakefulness in which it is immersed.