Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India, by Roberto Calasso

Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India, by Roberto Calasso


As usual, Calasso's narrative is as rich, intricate, and bizarre as its subject matter.

The destruction of Daksa's sacrifice, the most radical criticism of sacrifice, came from within the sacrifice itself: it showed how irresistibly sacrifice is transformed into massacre, and thus looked forward to the whole course of a history no longer yoked to sacrifice. [emphasis mine] (p. 86)

Not only was ritual no longer able contain violence but multiplied it, like a machine, not of desire now but of disaster. Indeed, might not ritual itself, this faith in the absolute precision and truth of gesture, be the very thing, in the end, that was provoking the worst of evils? (p. 314)

No one recognized him. Shiva begged before Shiva's temples. Sometimes the devout would trample him as they thronged to worship. Sometimes he would writhe and yearn like a madman lost among other madmen. He was the nameless, he who has no country, no caste, he was the lover forever bereaved, the murderer who cannot be pardoned, the missing person who is missed by no one. (p. 88)

"Wherever life is felt more acutely, that is Rudra," [y Rudra=Shiva] page 47.

Shiva felt sympathetic, and, murmuring words they would never hear, addressed them as follows: "Whether the world be a hallucination or the mind be a hallucination, whether all return or all appear but once, the suffering is just the same. For he who suffers is part of the hallucination, of whatever kind that may be. What then is the difference? This: whether in the sufferer there is- or is not- he who watches him who suffers." More than that, for the moment, he would not say. (p. 89)

shades of Edgar Allen Poe, there.

"Who is that damn woman hiding in your hair?" said Parvati. Once again she couldn't stop herself. "The sickle moon," said Shiva, as though thinking of something else. "Oh, so that's what she's called, is it?" said Parvati, in a tone that would one day be the model for all female sarcasm.

"Of course, you know that perfectly well," said Shiva, more absentminded than ever.

"I'm not speaking about the moon, I'm speaking about your girlfriend," said Parvati, snarling.

"You want to talk to your friend? But your friend Vijaya's just gone out, hasn't she?" said Shiva. Parvati went off, white with rage. (p.117)

Ahimsa doesn't mean to refrain from violence. But to exercise violence- which is there in any event and involves everyone- in a certain way, without wounding. To wound is more serious than to kill.... The obligation not to wound the living (and everything is living), and the obligation toward the truth: the two were pronounced together, and ahimsa came before satya[truth], as if getting to the bottom of the one word discovered the other. (p. 151)

"In what are you experts?" they asked us. In the sensation of being alive. (p. 163)

This much we know: that if one seeks to define almost everything- or rather; everything except a single point [as if in relation to that point]- that point must remain undefined. As in geometry, one cannot do without an axiom. And an axiom is not defined. An axiom is declared. (p. 173)

"You see that Agni means fire- and you are satisfied. You think that such a precious and dangerous element deserves a great many honors. But you are wrong. Agni's secret name, the name the gods use when they speak of him- and it is also a common word in our language- is agre, 'forward.' Before he is fire, Agni is everything that goes beyond us, the dazzling light that darts ahead of us wherever we are. When we go forward, we are merely following Agni. Man's conquests are the scars Agni leaves behind in his progress across the earth." (p. 195)

The first of all states, the one to which, after each event, one returns to as a final barrier, behind which we shall always meet the same barrier and so on and on for all time, is the birth of fire from the waters. Of Agni from Soma. The liquid fire. (p. 197)

What is the esoteric? The thought closest to the vision things have of themselves. (p. 202)

The world is a broken pot. Sacrifice tries to put it back together, slowly, piece by piece. But some parts have crumbled away. And even when the pot is put back together, it’s pitted with scars. There are those who say this makes it more beautiful. To know the head of the sacrifice also means to know the sacrifice that happens in the head, that cannot be seen, that has no need of gestures, implements, calendars, liturgies, victims- or even words. (p. 218)

"You are that" tells us that, whatever appears to us, "you are that": that thing is within you, is in the Self, which- immensely larger than any thing, spreading out from the barley grain hidden in the heart- includes within itself, little by little, every shape that appears. Nothing is alien to it. And being everything that appears gives us the basis for understanding everything that appears. (p. 369)

Of course the true word would win, but it would be diminished by the clash. Truth does not compete with facts. Truth is not a tool. (p. 383)

Residues are ubiquitous. They hem us in on every side. The crucial things is how we deal with them: do we eliminate them? cultivate them? Sometimes they contaminate, sometimes they enhance. (p. 401)