Ka

XI

King Soma — they called him. He was a king and a substance. Of whatever deeds he did, little has come down to us. But he was the object of others’ deeds. Abducted, ambushed, retaken, sold. Then pressed, filtered, slain. These are the things one hears tell of Soma. Rather than a king, Soma is what makes someone king. He is sovereignty itself. He is what all who ever wished to be king have sought. He is a brightness buried in the waters. He is guarded by a Nymph-Snake. Then there was a Nymph and a Snake. Or just a Snake, or just a Nymph. No one who aspires to sovereignty can achieve his goal except by means of the Snake and the Nymph. The Nymph can bite into that substance, chew it, and then with a kiss slip it into the mouth of whichever hero, god, or man turns up.

Soma was brought to earth in the beak of an eagle. Then, they said, “The thinkers have found the form that gives joy, when the eagle brings the juice from afar.” Later, in the words of the hymns, he ascended from earth to sky on the “vessels of truth.” Like Agni an indefatigable messenger, he would sometimes sit awhile on the back of the sky and watch the two tribes he was constantly traveling between: the gods in their celestial palaces, the men on the earth. He yearned for horses, flocks, men, waters. Above all, waters. And the Ten Sisters. He knew it was dangerous to let them, the fingers, touch him. But it was immensely pleasurable too. So Soma sat motionless, head veiled, between the ten shrews and silent girls who brushed him throughout the sacrifice. So much for what took place on earth. In the sky, on the other hand, beyond the rocky vault, he would find the Seven Sisters who glide among the fringed branches of the Milky Way. More slender fingers thrust deep in the shadows. Islands, ponds, river meanders, a delta arching over everything. “How many games with numbers….” he once thought, smiling to himself. But he wasn’t confused. Those seven rivers that divided up the sky were mothers, sisters, lovers, subjects. He entered them like sun in water.

The soma was placed on two wooden boards carefully lined up over two holes dug out in the ground to amplify the sound. An ox skin was stretched over the boards. Five stones were placed on the skin in the shape of a quincunx. The stone in the middle was the biggest.

Soma arrived like a lover ten girls were waiting for: the fingers, the Ten Sisters. They would caress him, handle him, squeeze, kill — but only and always indirectly, through the stones. Because those ten girls were in league with the five stones. The lovers’ tryst was an ambush. Soma, King Soma, would arrive wrapped in a cloth, his robe. They would undo the knot, the turban, revealing a bundle of stalks. Then a celebrant would pick up the cloth and wrap it around the head of the grāvastut, “praiser of the stones.” The cloth would fall on his eyes, so that he couldn’t see. He would be a blind singer. The grārastut would speak with his face turned to the stones and the soma, would celebrate them while the liturgical motions were performed, while the stones murmured their part, rubbing against each other, crushing the soma, but he wouldn’t actually witness the murderous deed acted out before him, until the inebriating white sap hidden in the soma stalks began to flow.

What the Devas and the Asuras called amṛta (and they claimed to be its children too) men called soma, perhaps out of discretion, not wanting to insist too much on that nondeath that the soma did win for them, but never sufficiently, so that it was always having to be won all over again. Without the soma, nothing in the world could shine, nothing shone in the mind, nothing emanated sense. Around that substance — as likewise around the memory of it, indeed mostly around the memory of it — were composed gestures, deeds, hymns, adventures. Looking around themselves at everything in existence, men saw it was all made up of variations of just two elements: fire and this clear liquid. Agni and Soma, the Devourer and the Devoured. “Everything down here without exception is devouring or devoured.” Likewise themselves, moment after moment after moment, devoured, devouring.

As the ṛṣis saw it, creation, the tangible state of the world, was a secondary phenomenon, recent and modern. The first thing to understand was what made perception of creation possible. They saw a flux, the waters. In the waters an eye surfaced: the soma. This was what they meant when they sang, “The rivers that do not deceive, that have made the eye great.” Soma is, “among the gods, he who is awake.” By this we know him: that he is a god who is also an edible substance, and hence the most material; that he is perfect wakefulness, and hence the most immaterial, the nearest to the elusive flow of consciousness.

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.

The “waters” to which the Vedic texts endlessly refer resemble nothing more closely than the jeunes filles of Proust’s Recherche. Did Andrée exist in herself, did Albertine? A suddenly dazed Marcel asks himself in the Prisonnière. Likewise the waters. It’s not for nothing that from their first appearance the jeunes filles are confused against the backdrop of the sea, in an air heavy with the salty, blue spray of the front at Balbec. Then, with imperious self-assurance, Marcel decides that they “embodied the frenzy of pleasure.” And from that moment on, their existence becomes the vertigo of a ceaseless mutability, punctuated by names, scarves, dresses, episodes, golden drops ever different from each other yet no more individual than a succession of lights sparkling on waves. Like a lover, like a ṛṣi, Marcel watches Albertine as she sleeps. In her mute abandon to merest breathing, he sees her as a plant, a stalk. The natural realms mingle together, finding themselves in the same element. They flood silently through the watchful mind, and through prose. The obsessive detail is a bud in the pond. The waters are plurality itself, fringes swinging back and forth, the slight trembling of wakefulness that precedes the word. Immersing itself in them, the mind follows the royal way toward revelation of itself to itself, in its shifting lunar essence. But this is not their ultimate mystery, which only emerges when they appear as messengers in an outside scenario, in the blind structure of matter, eyes closed like Albertine’s, emissaries of a self-sufficient and remote existence, which one can pierce but never grasp.

It happened to many gods, to Mitra, Varuṇa, Brahmā (frequently!), to Viṣṇu and Agni: they would be celebrating a rite, concentrating on what they were doing, on observing the prescribed ritual, when suddenly a female creature — an Apsaras, a goddess, a woman — would enter their field of vision. They would desire her. The fact that she appeared at that particular moment, during the ceremony, surrounded only by sacred objects, would make her all the more irresistible. She was other, the invincible other, the substance forever expelled by the autism of ritual, but who now came back there, triumphant and uplifting. And at the same time: since the rite centered on the soma, this substance they were ever and tirelessly filtering, crushing, pressing, and since that substance then filtered into their minds, or rather filtered their minds, when they drank it, transforming the mind into a luminous cloud, it would now seem that, that cloud had flowed outside them again to appear dressed in a white robe, splitting itself in two, to beguile them, and imposing itself with the certainty of an equation: it is the soma it is the mind it is that female creature.

First among the Apsaras. Urvaśī appeared with her swanlike elegance in the place of sacrifice. There was a jug there that was used for keeping the “overnight” waters, rasatīvarī. Mitra and Varuṇa just managed to grab it in time to shoot their sperm into it. From that jug, that sperm, two of the greatest ṛṣis were born: Vasiṣṭha and Agastya. Then Mitra and Varuṇa pulled themselves together with a shiver and raised their eyes. They saw Urvaśī looking at them, watchful, proud, motionless in her long, white robe. They thought they caught a hint of a smile lifting a corner of her mouth. As if she knew everything they knew and something more too. Then they glared at her with resentful eyes and said: “A curse upon you… You shall go down to the earth, doomed to satisfy the pleasure of the descendants of Manu.”

So it was that Urvaśī would one day discover what it means to fall in love with a man. He was a prince, of course, indeed the first among princes, and a seer. His name was Purūravas — and Urvaśī claimed to hear in that name his “roaring” (ruvan) progress through the clouds. She found him far more attractive, dark, and unpredictable than the gods. And she wasn’t averse to upsetting the Gandharvas, who had been her compànions in love until now but who had one shortcoming: they were all too similar to one another — and to her. Whereas a man, the earth: that was adventure, that — she suspected — would mean suffering too, given that Mitra and Varuṇa had seemed so pleased with themselves when they threw her down into these forests.

When Urvaśī’s passion settled on Purūravas, the Apsaras thought: “What shall I do? Must I show myself to him? So that my beauty overwhelms and terrifies him? So that what always happens between men and women may happen immediately? No, there is something better than that… I want this state to last for a long time, as long as possible, this swooning feeling I get when I’m looking at him…” So Urvaśī decided to transform herself into Purūravas’s charioteer. He was young and very handsome, but Purūravas hardly seemed to notice. He spoke to him as one speaks to an animal about the house — and Urvasi bubbled with pleasure. They got smothered in dust together, racing across desert lands, as far as the horizon. Sometimes they had to get down from the chariot, ford marshes, force their way along impassable valleys, reconnoitering. Then Purūravas would take the lead and Urvaśī would follow him, gazing happily at his back, his neck. The longer Purūravas said nothing, the greater the pleasure Urvaśī felt. She didn’t want Purūravas to think of her as the only person around to talk to, but as something more. She wanted to blend in with his shadow, to become the crumpled cloth of his robe.

They rode through the bush. The charioteer up front, firm hand on the reins. Looking down, Purūravas saw a split in the side, a hole getting bigger. He could see the earth through it, racing away. The chariot was about to break up. Brusquely, Purūravas shouted an order and jumped down to the ground. He looked at the chariot, frowning, while the charioteer tried hard not to show emotion. The chariot seemed to be intact. There was no sign of anything coming apart anywhere. Purūravas climbed up again. The hole reappeared, like a vortex set to swallow him up. Again Purūravas got down from the chariot. Again the chariot seemed to be intact. Purūravas thought he must be going mad. “Charioteer, can you see anything?” he asked tensely. “I can see you, my lord,” said the charioteer. Purūravas looked down again, gloomily. “You’re not mad, it’s me making that hole appear,” said a female voice. He looked up. It was the charioteer, except that now she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. She filled the air, and already Purūravas felt he was immersed in her. He realized he would have to start negotiating at once. “Who are you?” he asked. “I am Urvaśī, an Apsaras. I have been following you around for a year, out of love. Take me with you.” “It’s difficult to deal with a divine being,” said Purūravas. “What do you require?” “A hundred ceremonies of homage. And a hundred jugs of cream a day.” “All right,” said Purūravas. “There’s something else: I must never see you naked,” said Urvaśī. “The other things you ask are easy,” said Purūravas. “But how can we manage this?” “You must always have a cloth wrapped around your loins.” “So be it,” said Purūravas. Urvaśī had also specified: “You can penetrate me three times a day with your rod, you can have me even when I don’t want you.” (Whence the dispute between Vedic scholars, accustomed to arguing over every syllable: most of them understood Urvaśī as meaning “you cannot possess me when I don’t want you,” but Hoffmann, in his study on the injunctive tense, came to the conclusion that she had meant the opposite: “you can possess me even when I don’t want you”; relationships between men and women have been marooned in this ambiguity ever since.) So long as Purūravas always kept that white cloth around his loins. Soon they thought no more about it. They were rarely apart. And then they were sleeping, but even in their sleep their minds continued to mingle. The only impression they had of what was happening outside them was of a succession of blades of light, pointing in different directions. All Urvaśī knew was that when she thought of Purūravas the same words would always come into her head: “Sovereign of my body.”

Urvaśī and Purūravas’s room was always in shadow. But with two bright patches that sometimes melted together: two white lambs, tied to the sides of the bed. “They are my children,” Urvaśī had said. Purūravas had asked nothing more. They treated them with love, and fed them, but never let them loose. The bed, the lambs, Urvaśī’s and Purūravas’s bodies made a single pearly mass.

They slept. The lambs had curled up by the bed. There was a tearing sound, a feeble bleating. Then another tear, another feeble bleat. The lambs had gone. Without them the room seemed no more than a dreary shelter. Urvaśī sat upright, cold and angry, careless of her marvelously slanting breasts. “They’re taking away my loved ones… And there’s no man here to defend me.” Purūravas was deep in a sleep that was carrying him far, far away. Urvaśī’s voice came like a needle in his heart. With a shudder he leapt from the bed. He would rush off anywhere in his rage. There was a dazzling flash. For one long moment Purūravas’s body stood out in sharp silhouette against the air, completely naked. Thinking back on that moment — and he was to think back on it his whole life — Purūravas always experienced the same strange sensation: while he was suspended in the air, his entire body tense as an athlete’s, he was also fighting an elusive woman, very like Urvaśī, but hateful and mocking, who was grabbing his thighs and pulling off the white cloth he was never without. In that dazzling light, Purūravas felt someone, some creature he didn’t know, touching him, handling him, humiliating him. Then all was suddenly dark again. Purūravas rushed out. He came back with the lambs. “I’ve got them,” he said. But Urvaśī was gone.

This was the first time two lovers had ever been separated. For Purūravas it felt as though every sweetness had gone out of the world. He began to wander around. The earth at that time was a mass of vegetable decay. Ferns, riotous grasses, huge trunks fallen flat, plants growing on plants. What was missing was that liberating element: emptiness. Nothing was ever reduced to ashes, because fire was as yet unheard of. Purūravas found that nothing is so important as absence. He tried to get himself killed. He called for the help of some wild beast. Otherwise he would hang himself. Meanwhile he walked on, in no particular direction, ever further from anything he had known.

For some time he’d had no idea of his whereabouts when he found himself by a pond full of lotus flowers. Anyataḥplakṣā, in Kurukṣetra. It was majestically beautiful, but the only thing it offered him was a place to drown himself. Far away across the water, seven swans took shape. Purūravas paid no attention. As they approached the bank, Urvaśī said to her companions: “See that tattered man, with the feverish eyes… I lived with him for some years.” The other swans stretched out their necks, curious and incredulous. “Let’s make ourselves beautiful…,” said Urvaśī. Then they began to preen their feathers with great concentration. At the same time they were getting nearer and nearer the bank. When they touched the ground, they became Urvaśī and the six Apsaras who escorted her everywhere. But now they left her alone.

Acting quite naturally, Urvaśī sat down without a word on the grass next to Purūravas. Her lover lifted his empty eyes and recognized her. “Don’t disappear this time,” he said at once, as if afraid that Urvaśī were a vision. “You are cruel and dangerous, but we have some secrets we must tell each other. Otherwise, in times to come, we won’t have the joy that comes from having said them, at least once, in days gone by.” The stern Urvaśī raised her high cheekbones a fraction. In her contralto voice she said: “What’s the point of talking about it? I slipped away like the first of the Dawns. I’m like the wind, you can’t hold me. Go back home…” Purūravas gazed at her, her hard, elusive beauty: he remembered their first days together, when Urvaśī had begged him to keep her with him and it had been he who wasn’t interested. He had agreed to live with her out of curiosity, and for the vanity of having a divine being beside him, but always thinking of her as a stranger, who could be ditched the morning after. “All right,” he said. “Your friend will be off on his way. I am a companion of death, and I shall know where to find her. There must be some wolf willing to tear me to shreds. If not, I can hang myself.” The trap worked. Urvaśī’s expression was changing. A look of suffering rippled across her features. “Purūravas, don’t die. Don’t get yourself killed. But don’t believe in friendship with women: they have the hearts of hyenas. Go back home.” Purūravas was exultant, because he could see that Urvaśī was giving in. And at the same time he was still afraid she might disappear from one moment to the next. But Urvaśī went on speaking, albeit as though in trance, and to herself more than to him. She recalled the years they had lived together. Pervaded by her presence, Purūravas wasn’t even listening. All he heard were her last words: “I still remember those drops of cream you offered me every day. I can still smell them. It gives me joy to remember them…” Urvaśī had yielded. But immediately she recovered that lucid, determined expression Purūravas had noticed when they’d made their first pact. “All right, from now on we will meet for one night every year. We will have a son. It will be up to you to come to me this time, in the golden palace of the Gandharvas.” Speaking these words, Urvaśī was almost sad, as though thinking: “Of course, it won’t be so fine as before, when we had the two lambs tied to the sides of the bed. But it is all we are allowed…” Then she added: “Tomorrow the Gandharvas will grant you a favor. They are my lovers, they are jealous, it was they who stole me from you. But they will grant you the favor of becoming one of them, one among many. Accept. What matters, for you, is not so much to become a Gandharva, but what you will have to do to become a Gandharva.”

The following day, as solicitous as they were diffident, the Gandharvas explained to Purūravas what he and indeed all men and the earth were lacking: fire. “As a companion of death,” they said, “and you are all companions of death,” they insisted, “you can never gain access to the sky without fire.” That was why the earth was heavy and dull. It knew nothing but growth and decay. Now it would finally be able to destroy, and to destroy itself.

Purūravas went back to earth holding the hand of his son, Āyus, born of Urvaśí. In the forest, not far from his old home, he left the fire and the pitcher the Gandharvas had given him. Before performing what he knew would be a fatal act, he wanted to see the house he had left. He showed it to his son, who thus far had known only the sky and its palaces. A squeaky door opened onto a huge, empty room, full of dust. Against the far wall, a big bed. On the sides at the bottom, Purūravas recognized two hooks and two broken ropes. He said nothing, weeping inside. He went back to the forest with his son. The fire was gone. In its place he saw a tall fig tree, an aśvattha stretching its branches toward him. He broke two twigs off, like a sleepwalker. He rubbed them together, sensing that something was rising along each piece of wood, as when he used to go to Urvaśī’s body and brush himself against her. A light spurted, and it was fire, forever. From that day on those two twigs — and all other pieces of wood later used to make fire — were called Purūravas and Urvaśī.