Once Upon A Time

Never in the history of my reading has my own ignorance been so ruthlessly yet gracefully exposed as by Roberto Calasso’s scintillatingly challenging book, “Ka.” Its opening sentences are as startling as any in all of literature: “Suddenly an eagle darkened the sky. Its bright black, almost violet feathers made a moving curtain between cloud and earth. Hanging from its claws, likewise immense and stiff with terror, an elephant and a turtle skimmed the mountaintop. It seemed the bird meant to use the peaks as pointed knives to gut its prey.”

Devoid of tendentious commentary, helpful pointers, crutches and even the comforting “Once upon a time” that safely removes the scene from the immediacy of the present (as the French poet and autobiographer Michel Leiris once remarked), the reader is thrown into this book that Calasso later simply describes as “[a] long story. All stories are long stories.” Calasso’s story revives my faith in the power of books to alter a well-worn and comfortable reading pattern to which I had grown accustomed.

As the author of two profoundly resonating books, “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony” and “The Ruin of Kasch,” and as the publisher of Adelphi, one of the world’s best publishing houses because of its uncompromising literary and intellectual standards, Calasso flies in the face of the sheer awfulness and brutality which are the defining hallmarks of the 20th century. Darkly realistic, his books present an understanding that we live in a time of great forgetfulness--that to many, yesterday is the past, last week is history and a year ago is prehistoric time. He proves that human history and thought are accessible in some way to the intelligent imagination and that nothing is too esoteric, too obscure to be beyond reach.

Moving from the very dawn of creation by way of a ransacking of the various ancient texts, the Rig-Veda, Upanishads and others, “Ka” begins as does “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony” with the question of how did creation begin: “Stories never live alone: They are the branches of a family that we have to trace back and forward.” The immense eagle darkening the sky at the book’s opening is Garuda, just hatched from his egg, the child of a beautiful woman named Vinata and Kasyapa, a turtle. Garuda, perhaps like the reader moving into this tale of deities and other creatures, is a disoriented, confused newborn. The unwinding of the story begins with Vinata’s simple decision: “My child, it’s time for you to know who you are.” In the book’s 15 sections, Calasso pursues this desire to know by telling the stories of many types of creation--of death, of love, of time.

While many of the figures in “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony” were familiar from books or movies based on popular Greek myths, it must be said that in “Ka” we are adrift, and the glossary of characters, including Kafka, Proust and Tolstoy, which the author supplies, goes on for more than 35 pages. While some of the words that he defines are familiar--how can they not be since we are aswarm in America with a sea of gurus: dharma, Brahman, Buddha--others are more obscure and strange to the ear: Prajapati, soma, Janaamejaya, Parvati--I could go on filling all these columns with the map of my ignorance.

Calasso’s creation of the world starts with the moment when the progenitor, Prajapati, lord of all creatures, goes beyond himself; when he sensed “he had a companion, a ‘second’ being dvitiya, within him. It was a woman, Vac, Word. He let her out. He looked at her. Vac ‘rose like a continuous stream of water.’ She was a column of liquid, without beginning or end. Prajapati united with her. He split her into three parts. Three sounds came out of his throat in his amorous thrust: a, ka, ho. ‘A’ was the earth, ‘ka’ the space between, ‘ho’ the sky. With those three syllables the discontinuous stormed into existence.” And the reader will follow that saga down to the death of the Buddha, centuries upon centuries later.

“Ka” demands attention to its unfaltering treatment of these mythical stories, which are never treated as mythical but rather simply as another possible way of existence. Take, for example, this exchange between Narada, a son of Brahma, and Krsna, the “dark one,” when Krsna asked: “ ‘Now tell me about the life when you were a worm and tried to avoid the chariot of the king.’ ‘Of course we are always attached to our bodies, even when we are worms,’ said Narada. He smiled but somewhat nervously. The stories Krsna liked most were the ones about the two lives when Narada had been transformed into a woman. ‘Even though you have lived as a woman and borne dozens of children, before climbing over their corpses that time to pick up a mango, you never understood anything about women.’ ‘You might be right,’ said Narada. ‘For example, I don’t understand how you manage with all these queens.’ ‘But these are not women,’ said Krsna, suddenly gloomy, and he went back to staring at the chessboard.” Later it is mentioned that Krsna is unwell and he will get better only if “someone will bring him the dust stuck to the feet of certain women.”

Such exchanges demand attention, yes, and why we should pay attention is surely a legitimate question. There is a temptation to answer that the reason has to do with the absence of any glib rationalization by the author, a delightful baiting of the reader to rise to the occasion of learning new, unfamiliar things. A text such as “Ka” selects its readers, and they know who they are ahead of time (much like those reading the sign which used to be affixed to the gate of the Playboy Mansion in Chicago, Si non oscillas noli tintinnare--”If you don’t swing, don’t ring”).

We must read “Ka” and appreciate its refusal to compromise. Calasso restores the otherness of the Indian mind in the same way that he tried to endue with life the mythical Greek world in “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.” In “The Ruin of Kasch,” he set out to reformulate our easy understanding of the creation of the so-called contemporary mind by vivifying, among other figures, the nearly forgotten figure of 19th century philosopher Max Stirner and his book, “The Ego and His Own,” through which “a global and irreversible loss of dignity took place, and then became our foundation.”

As someone coming from Italy, a land either decorated or littered with the ruins of many previous civilizations, Calasso is astonished that nothing--no structure, no ruins--remains of the Indian civilization that generated these ancient texts, songs and hymns. Calasso is stunningly amazed:

“Between the conquering Arya and the Buddha: a thousand years and not a single object. Not a stone, not a seal, not a city wall. Wood: burned, rotted, decayed. Yet the texts speak of paintings and jewels. Immensely complex metrics--and the void. One thousand and twenty-eight hymns collected in the Rig-Veda. Not a trace of a dwelling. Rites described in the most meticulous detail. Not a single ritual object has survived. Those who glorified the leftover left nothing over themselves, except what was filtered through the word. A highly articulated language, fine-wrought as a palace. But no palace remains. Had the texts been lost, the India of the Arya, the India of the Veda, might never have been. Then finally, in the reliefs of Bharhut and Sanci one touches stone. And already it is crowded. Genies, dancers, tradesmen, that nameless crowd so useful for filling the void. But the void is ever present: protected by a parasol, where the Buddha was.”

And such pleas by Calasso remind one, of course, or at least I was sent to, the final sentence of that other void, “The Waste Land” by T.S. Eliot, which reads in the Sanskrit, “Shantih shantih shantih.” My calling to mind Eliot is the result of the provocation of “Ka,” as is going to the “Mahabharata,” “The Hindu Scriptures” published by the Everyman Library, the rereading of an old beaten-up college paperback of the “Bhagavad-Gita” and then a seeking out of the scholarship of the distinguished Sanskrit scholar Heinrich Zimmer.

Denis Donoghue once suggested that Ezra Pound assembled his writings to urge into being an ideal prince to whom Pound could be the advisor. Roberto Calasso does something similar by assuming that his reader is intelligent, civilized and well-read. He hopes that the reader, like Garuda, will experience, “a sense of vertigo and intoxication. The hymns blazed within him.”

“Ka” provides the necessary assurance that these mythical and cultural characteristics, contrary to all available evidence, are not the hallmarks of a dying human type. Although we are living in a civilization as disdainful of its physical surroundings as that which created these wonder-filled Indian myths, there is yet the complex disturbing anxiety as to what will remain and how are we, as in “Ka,” to understand the imperative, “Children are born to ransom their parents.”