Literature and the Gods

VII. “Meters Are the Cattle of the Gods”

“Meters Are the Cattle of the Gods”

M eters are the cattle of the gods,” we read in the Śatapatha . This was the premise, something we find hard to understand today. When we think of meters, we may perhaps glimpse the vague outline of a rhythm, but not much more. Yet it wasn’t always thus, and certainly not for the Vedic seers, the who composed the . To understand what meters are, they thought, one must go back to the gods and beyond the gods, as far as Prajāpati, the Progenitor, that indefinite being who has no name of his own, unless we count as a name the interrogative pronoun Ka (Who?), that unlimited being out of whom the gods themselves sprang. Yet even the Father had been born together with “evil,” pāpman, that evil which is “death,” “While Prajāpati was creating, Death, that evil, overcame him.” Thus the gods were born mortal; the fear of death dwelt within them. “Prajāpati constructed the fire; it was keen-edged as a razor; terrified, the gods would not come near; then, wrapping themselves in the meters, they came near, and that is how the meters got their name. The meters are sacred power; the skin of the black antelope is the form of sacred power; he puts on shoes of antelope skin; not to be hurt, he wraps himself in meters before approaching the fire.” The “meters,” chandas, are the robes that the gods “wrapped around themselves,” acchādayan, so that they might come near to the fire without being disfigured as though by the blade of a razor. Thus the gods sought to escape death. And likewise men — for men always tell themselves: “I must do as the gods did.” When the Taittirīya says, “He wraps himself in meters before coming near the fire, so as not to be hurt,” it is referring to any priest, any man. Today, seen through eyes no longer familiar with rites and with fire, the phrase cannot help but make us think of what, consciously or otherwise, every poet, every writer does when he writes. And of at least one poet I know that this was quite literally true: Joseph Brodsky. When Brodsky spoke of meter, and of the imminent danger that we might forget what meter is, his voice would be tense, as though he were speaking of a mortal peril, speaking precisely, for sure, and soberly, but also with the pathos that a perilous situation demands.

But why are the meters so tremendously important, so much so that even the gods needed them to protect themselves? Everything that exists is permeated by two invisible powers—“mind,” manas, and “word,” vāc, a twinned pair whose distinguishing characteristic is that they are at once “equal,” samāna, and “distinct,” nānā. The work of ritual — and thus any work—consists above all in making sure that this characteristic is not lost in pure indistinction. Thus “mind” and “word” are assigned slightly different ritual utensils: for the one a ladle must be used; for the other a wooden spoon with a curved beak. And two different libations are offered, that “are mind and word: thus he [the officiant] separates mind and word one from the other; and thus mind and word, though equal, samāna, are nevertheless distinct, nānā.” In one respect, however, mind and word are drastically different: in their extension. “Mind is far more unlimited and word is far more limited.” These two entities belong to two different levels of being, but to operate effectively they must team up, yoke themselves together. Mind alone, word alone, are impotent — or at least not powerful enough to take an offering to the gods. The horse of the mind must submit to the harness of the word, of the meters: otherwise it would lose its way.

But how can two such disproportionate beings be yoked together? “When one of the pair in the yoke is smaller, they give it an extra support bar … so he gives a support bar to the word, and like well-paired companions yoked together these two now take the sacrifice to the gods.” That support bar is a subtle metaphysical contrivance — and it is only thanks to that contrivance that the offering has ever been able to reach the gods. Reminding ourselves of its origin will help us understand why the word is never whole, but always flawed in some way or composite, threatened by its own lack of substance — or in any case its insufficient weight.

But what about meter? Meter is the yoke of the word. Just as the “mind,” manas, is so flighty in its movements — a monkey leaping from branch to branch — that it would be quite dispersed if it did not accept a yoke (and every mental discipline, every yoga, is above all a “yoke”); so the “word,” vāc, omnipresent, pervasive, which “blows like the wind, sweeping across all worlds,” bows to the restrictions of meter, agrees to dress up in it as if in colorful clothes, to be wrapped up, as it were, in a preordained arrangement of syllables. Only thus can it reach the heavens, like a female creature covered in bird feathers. And only thus can it make the return journey from heaven to earth. Such facility, such familiarity with different worlds, inevitably makes us wonder: could it be that rather than just leading us to the gods, the meters are the gods themselves? After that thought has occurred, we won’t be surprised when we come across these words: “Now, the gods who govern life are the meters, for it is thanks to the meters that all living things here below are sustained.” With respect to the thirty-three Devas, the meters play a double role, at once subordinate and sovereign: humble and useful like beasts of burden who “when yoked carry weights for men, so the meters, when yoked, carry the sacrifice to the gods.” But at the same time only the meters can get close to the fire without being harmed. And above all: if the gods have achieved immortality, it is the meters they have to thank for it. Once the gods roamed the earth — yearning for the sky. They knew that it was there immortality was to be found. But they didn’t know how to get there. Then Gāyatrī, the female creature who is the shortest and most effective of the meters, transformed herself into a śyena, a hawk or eagle. In that form she managed to steal from the sky the substance death cannot harm: soma. But hers wasn’t the first attempt. Two other meters had tried and failed before her: Jagatī, who lost three syllables in the process; then , who lost one. When Gāyatrī reappeared, with the soma in her beak, her body was made up of her own four syllables plus those her sisters had lost. Meantime the arrow of a mysterious archer, a celestial guardian, had ruffled her plumage and torn off a leaf of the soma plant. Loss and wound thus lurked within the meter that must heal loss and wound. From then on Gāyatrī, , and Jagatī would always follow King Soma. A king can hardly turn up unattended. So who forms his retinue? The meters. “Just as dignitaries, heralds, and captains stand beside the king, so the meters move about him like servants.” Like K.’s assistants in Kafka’s The Castle, the meters go wherever Soma goes. Soma arrives on a chariot carrying the branches of a plant that “grows in the mountains.” But alongside the chariot, those who know will also see the gleam of the meters, like rays around the sun.

But there is a danger inherent in the life of the meters. Ceremonies sap their strength. Always last in everything, by the time men found the meters they had already been used up by the gods; they were worn out: “Now the strength of the meters was exhausted by the gods, because it was through the meters that the gods reached the heavens. And the chant is rapture, mada: the rapture that is in and in sāman, which is sap, and that sap he now injects into the meters and so restores their strength; and with their vigor now renewed the sacrifice is celebrated.” If we wanted to know why inspiration is necessary, here at last is an explanation. That “rapture” which we call inspiration is the only resource we have for reviving the meters, worn out as they are by the rash use they were once put to, not by men but by the gods. Without that “rapture” the meters would remain inert, like plants longing to be watered, mute testimony to that exploit which, through the power of a body of syllables, made the gods immortal.

If the gods reached the heavens through a form, how much more will men have need of form if they are to reach the gods. And only the meters will allow men to become creatures who, though mortal, know how to use the forms the gods used. The meters are our témenos, the form within which all forms appear. As if coming to us through a bright mist (the one Bloom-field called the “Vedic haze,” perhaps?), all this strikes a chord, even for the reader in the West who knows nothing of Vedic rituals. It is as if those rituals had immediately developed and indeed pushed to its ultimate consequences something that in the West was to nourish not so much ritual as that extraterritorial and elusive creature we call literature. Now we begin to see why literature is so often connected to immortality, and in a sense far more radical than the, to tell the truth, rather modest achievement of being remembered by future generations.

And only now do we see why for all its many metamorphoses there is one element that literature seems never to relinquish: form. Yet it is never too explicit in laying claim to it either, nor does it seek to establish its sovereignty. Which makes us wonder: what is the myth of form? And for some time we search for it in vain, albeit convinced that, as for every other essential entity, form must have its myth. Greece offers us only the Muses, who are not so much figures of form as delicate hints of the power that every form emanates: possession, that knowledge shared by Dionysus and Apollo at Delphi, whose premise is that the mind is a hollow space constantly invaded by gods and voices. The Muses, who are above all Nymphs rangées—well-behaved Nymphs, that is — make sure that the forms do in fact take possession of us and cause us to speak following rules that may be more or less occult, the way music, Leibniz thought, is governed by an occult mathematics. But if the Muses are the supreme well-springs and custodians of forms, who are the forms themselves? Another group of female creatures: the meters who turned themselves into birds with bodies made of syllables.

It was the Vedic seers who chanted them and exercised them without cease. And it is to those seers that the cult of form, in its purest, most abstract, and most penetrating version goes back. Nor did they stop at that, but went so far as to foreshadow every claim to the self-sufficiency — even autism — of the poetic word. For since the elaboration and refinement of the word, its becoming , “perfected,” and thus Sanskrit, was likened in the hymns of the to every sort of activity — from the harnessing of horse and cart, to weaving, anointment, grooming, milking, cooking, seafaring — and since the Vedic seers “assimilate and confound what they compare, not having the impression that the image is a notion objectively heterogeneous to the thing that prompted it,” the practice of the hymns leads to a condition where everything that is said of the object is also applied to the word that names it; or at least one observes a “constant slippage from one register to the other.” So much so that “one could argue that the whole is an allegory.” But an allegory of what? Of itself. So Mallarmé’s sonnet “in ix,” which the author himself said was “allegorical of itself,” turns out to be a sharpened splinter of light gleaming back into the past so far as to shine on that collection of hymns thought to be primordial and “nonhuman,” the .

In order to make such extreme and all-embracing claims for the word of the hymns, the Vedic seers had to have a solid “base,” No, more than solid: unshakable. And that base was the syllable. First and foremost they were makers not of words but of syllables. Syllables were the prima materia of their alchemy. If Mallarmé would remark on the wondrous phenomenon by which any fact transforms itself into its “almost vanishing vibration,” Vedic doctrine had long before superimposed on that a second and no less wondrous phenomenon: the evanescent sound substance of the syllable was celebrated as the indestructible, “the nonfluent,” One can squeeze a juice, a “flavor,” rasa, from anything, says the Jaiminīya . But not from the syllable: because the syllable is itself the juice of everything. It thus lives on — untarnished, inexhaustible. And from the syllable all else flows. Or rather, only the syllable allows everything to be fluid, vivid. Motionless before the barrier that was the rock of Vala, the uttered syllables. And those syllables they chanted split the rock. From the fissure burst forth the hidden Cows, the Waters. Nor have they ever stopped flowing. For if they did the world would stiffen in paralysis. This is the premise behind the Vedic meter, which is syllabic, not quantitative. Everything forms from combinations of different numbers of these sound molecules. And a mysterious allusion tells us that “what for men is a number, for the gods is a syllable.” But what is a “syllable,” ? While in modern languages “syllable” has no connotations beyond the phonetic, the Sanskrit belongs to that narrow circle of words, like brahman, where an ungovernable drift of meanings overwhelms a hypothetical first meaning — hypothetical because eventually we begin to wonder if there is such a meaning, or in any event whether it can claim priority. The most obvious example is brahman. where the first meaning might be “ritual formula” or “enigma,” as Louis Renou and Lilian Silburn have maintained. But the Saint Petersburg Dictionary listed seven meanings. In the case of the , the priority of the meaning “syllable” is clear enough, as the whole of hymn 164 of the first —or “circle”—of the suggests. And on this the first commentaries we have agree.

Etymologists of ancient times understood to be that which na , “does not flow,” with a privative prefix a. And for once modern linguists agree. Including Mayrhofer, who only adds a parallel with the Greek phtheírō, “to corrupt” and “to destroy,” whence áphthartos, unvergänglich, and so the Italian imperituro, or the English “imperishable,” which, from a certain moment on, was to be the dominant if not exclusive meaning of .

The syllable is that which remains unscathed. When the woman theologian Gārgī challenged Yājñavalkya in the highest and most tense duel of thought of which we have record — and not even the Greece of the sages and sophists produced its like — the stern, brusque seer was asked to name the weft on which different things were woven, for Gārgī was a famous weaver. Eleven times Yājñavalkya answered her, naming the weft of the water, the winds, the atmosphere, the worlds of the Gandharvas, the worlds of the sun, the worlds of the moon, the worlds of the constellations, the worlds of the gods, the worlds of Indra, the worlds of Prajāpati, the worlds of brahman. At which point he in turn challenged Gārgī: “Do not ask too much, take care that your head doesn’t burst.” But Gārgī was fearless, and pressed on. She said: “That which, oh Yājñavalkya, is above the sky, that which is beneath the earth, that which is between the sky and the earth, that which is called past, present, and future, upon what weft is this woven?” Yājñavalkya replied: “On the ether, ākāśa.” But this still wasn’t enough: “‘And the ether, what is that woven on?’ He answered: ‘In truth, oh Gārgī, on this [on the syllable, on the imperishable], of which the brahmans say that it is neither thick nor thin, neither short nor long, neither flame nor liquid, neither colored nor dark, neither wind nor ether, it doesn’t stick, is without taste, without smell, without eyes, without ears, without voice, without mind, without heat, without breath, without mouth, without measure, without an inside, without an outside. It does not eat and is not eaten.’”

Yājñavalkya’s words mark the turning point in the history of the : from now on this neuter noun that means “syllable” would appear in the texts as an adjective meaning “imperishable,” and thus effacing the “syllable.” But originally the two meanings coincided. How do we know? The tells us: “When the ancient Dawns rose, the Great Syllable [mahed m] was born in the footprint of the Cow.” “Footprint” is a translation of pada, a key word in the enigmatic lexicon of which the is woven, and it means “foot,” “paw,” or even “limb, articulation” of a line of verse, and finally “step” or “footprint.” As for the cow, and again drawing on the enigmatic lexicon, this is vāc, Word, Vox. And “vāc is Gāyatrī, because vāc sings [gāyati] and protects [trāyate] all this [universe].” Even as it issues forth, then, the syllable is already meter, as another hymn by enigmas will hint: “The wild Cow lowed as it fashioned the flowing waters; it became of one pada, of two padas, of eight padas, of nine padas, of a thousand syllables in the supreme place. From her flow the seas, on her live the four regions of the world. On the syllable that flows from her [] lives all this [universe].” “The nonflowing that flows,” it is on these two words that the enigma converges, as if all the fluidity of life were made possible only by something that doesn’t flow. The syllable is the meeting point between pure vibration and form, the meter.

The syllable, the meter, the word: the circle expands. But it doesn’t close. For that to happen the syllable must be answered by its counterpart: the fire. The syllable is effective only if spoken before and in counterpoint to the fire. At every kindling of the fire, as the sacrificer rubs the two pieces of wood together, a chant can be heard in the background, the sāman that gives new vigor, while “the hotar holds himself ready to start reciting the appropriate mantras at the first wisp of smoke that will rise from the lower drilling block. When the drilling fails and the smoke disappears, the mantra, too, ceases; to start again when the smoke appears again. One can say that the mantra bears the fire, or that the fire begets the mantra.” Only reciprocal generation — as between and Virāj, at once goddess and meter — can serve as an account of the relationship between the meters and the fire. Gāyatrī is a robe that wraps and protects from the sharp blades of the flame. But Gāyatrī is also a “firebrand,” samidh: “Gāyatrī, when kindled, kindles the other meters; and once kindled the meters bring the sacrifice to the gods.” It is said of Agni Jātavedas, Fire Knower-of-Creatures, that he sparks within the syllable, in that most arcane of places, which is “the matrix of order,” yónim.

Only an intimacy, a mingling, a superimposition as extreme as that between the syllable and the fire can guarantee the continuity of the world for the moment. This is the ultimate enigma behind all the ciphered names: the “imperishable” consists of a sound sustained by a transitory breath and in a devouring blaze that will go out as soon as no fuel is fed to it. The imperishable is what most appears to be ephemeral. The continuous is entrusted to a breath that may run out at any moment and to a flame that an unknown hand must constantly tend. But that is precisely what the rites are for: to weave continuity. Otherwise life would fall apart in broken stumps. Above all this is what the meters are for: to give continuous measure to our breathing. Otherwise how would we know when to take a breath? The Śatapatha observes: ‘If [the officiant] took a breath halfway through a line, there would be a crack in the sacrifice”: it would be a first defeat at the hands of the discontinuous, which would force its way into the middle of the line like a wedge. To make sure that doesn’t happen, one must at least recite the lines of the Gāyatrī, the shortest of the meters, one by one, without breaking them to take a breath. Thus a tiny, unassailable cell of continuity will be formed in the serrated extension of the discontinuous.

Passing the baton like relay runners, the meters act first and foremost upon time; they make sure that it isn’t interrupted: “Above all he recites the verses in a continuous way: thus he makes the days and nights of the years continuous, and thus the days and nights of the year alternate in a continuous, uninterrupted way. And in this way he leaves no path open to the evil enemy; in fact he would leave one path open, therefore, if he recited the lines jerkily; he recites them smoothly without interruptions.” What emerges quite dramatically here is the Vedic officiant’s overriding anxiety: the fear that time will be broken, that the day’s progress will suddenly be interrupted, that the whole world may be left in a state of irretrievable dispersion. This fear is far more radical than the fear of death. Or rather, the fear of death is a secondary manifestation of it — a modern manifestation, we might say. Something else precedes it: a sense of precarious-ness so extreme, intense, and lacerating as to make the continuity of time appear as an improbable gift forever on the point of being withdrawn. So it is that one must act at once by making the sacrifice, which we can define as that thing which the officiant tends, extends. This weave from an indeterminate material, this first text, which is the sacrifice, must be “tended,” tan, so as to form something connected, something without a tear, or interruption, or break, through which the “evil enemy” who is always ready to strike might creep in; something that, because of the elaborate nature of its composition, can stand up against the world, which presents itself to us as a series of “isolated” entities, of tears, interruptions, and fragments, in which we recognize shreds of the dismembered body of Prajāpati. To overcome the discontinuous: this is the officiant’s goal. Conquering death is just one of the many consequences of that. So the first requirement is that the voice be, so far as is possible, tense, a constant issuing of sound. That is how one day the Gāyatrī meter became Gāyatrī the bird and had the power to soar up to the heavens to conquer Soma, that intoxicating and encompassing liquid which the officiant recognized as the supreme expansion of the continuous.

An immense distance separates the from the lógos of Saint John’s Gospel. Lógos is articulate discourse, a concatenation of meanings. is the irreducible vibration that precedes meaning, composes meaning, but is not absorbed into it. When , the Great Syllable, is identified in a sound, that sound is om, which is an interjection, not a noun. Om is “the syllable that expresses assent.” Before stating anything about the world, gestures its acceptance of the world. The very moment it sets out to articulate, the word approves the world. And that moment will remain forever pre-eminent over whatever meaning is then attributed to the world, just as the moment of waking stands out from the flow of consciousness that follows. And still today, “the cry OM! is the commonest sound heard at the sacrifice.” An incessant “yes” encompasses every gesture and every word. That “yes” to all existence, which for Nietzsche would coincide with the revelation of the eternal return, had always been there throughout every Vedic rite, its sound halo.

From the syllable one passed, imperceptibly, into the meters. The Vedic meters were the first example of the worship of form. And it was a pure form, an empty form that preceded any meaning because itself invested with the highest meaning of all: “Oh Gāyatrī, you have one foot, two feet, three feet, four feet; you do not have feet [pad], because you don’t fall [you do not perish, na padyase].”

But if the meter does not perish, what about those who use it? Mounting on the meters, the gods conquered the heavens — immortality. And men? Beside the “unborn” gods there are gods who achieved their state “with actions.” Could men do it too then? “The immortal has the same origin as the mortal,” say the hymns. So the Vedic seers didn’t exclude this eventuality. But has it ever happened? At least once — or so we are cryptically told. And to three brothers, the Rbhus. Their names were Vāja, , Vibhvan. “Sons of men,” like everybody else, but unusual for their eyes, because they had “eyes of sun,” , like the gods. Their family name includes the r- which designates that which is well articulated: above all , the “order” that is “truth.” The heraldic word of the brothers was -, “to fashion,” the same word used to describe the syllable that “fashions” the meters and the waters. Before anything else they were great craftsmen: carpenters, blacksmiths. For the Aśvins they fashioned a three-wheeled chariot that roamed the heavens without reins. They made it “with the mind, with thought,” mánasas pári dhyáyā. For Indra they caused two bay horses to appear. But they also contributed to the work par excellence, which is the sacrifice: “For Agni the Rbhus fashioned sacred formulas [bráhma ].” which men then used in their rites. So those who sacrifice today consider themselves “children of the .”

In the end, with the strength of their works, they conquered the heavens. Not because they were devoted to form, but because they practiced the devotion that is form: “By means of the arts by which you gave form to the cup, by means of the invention by which you made the cow from hide, by means of the thought with which you composed the two bay horses, by means of all this you three have achieved divine status.”

Stella Kramrisch wrote of them: “The are the archetype of the artist.” Of the kind of life they led on earth we know very little: once they fashioned a cow from cowhide and reunited “the mother with the calf.” When their parents were left lying on the ground, like “sacrificial poles decomposing,” they poured youth back into them.

In the heavens, Indra and the Aśvin twins welcomed the as friends. They had a great deal in common. But the other gods were generous too, conceding the the third libation in the sacrifice. This is all the more remarkable since, having achieved immortality, the gods had always been spiteful and treacherous towards men. Never did they show greater zeal than when wiping out the last traces of their successful sacrifice on earth so that men wouldn’t be able to follow suit. But this happy ending in coelestibus was not, as it turns out, the end of the brothers’ story. That would have been too straightforward, too clear, too unambiguous. And no artist’s story is ever straightforward, clear, and unambiguous. Paradoxically, although they’d made it to the heavens, the had not yet accomplished their real work. Getting there had just been a preparation. Now came the big gamble. One day, “having wandered about a great deal,” the arrived “in the house of the sacrificer Savitr.” A little-known god, Savitr is the Impeller, the Agohya, “he from whom nothing can be hidden.” It was Savitr who gave the the seal of immortality. And it was in his house that the slept for twelve days, a prodigious suspension of time, during the winter solstice. Thanks to that sacred hibernation the grass would sprout again on the earth far away when winter was over. The brothers were woken by a dog, who was the celestial Dog. But the most important thing that happened at house was that the , who were human craftsmen, met , the divine Craftsman, jealous custodian of the soma. Thus began the most mysterious phase of their lives. What we know of it is fragmentary and comes without a shred of explanation. As follows: the cup from which the gods and drank the soma was unique. It was the only one. The looked at it, studied it. Then they “reproduced that cup of the Asura [] that was unique four times over.” How did they do it? By taking careful measurements: using their art, which was māyā, “the measuring magic,” as the illuminating translation of Lilian Silburn puts it. eyes gaped when he saw “those four cups, shining like new days.” And at once he said: “We shall kill them, these men who have profaned the divine cup of the soma.” Quite what happened next is not clear. Female shadows appear on the scene. Of it is said that he took refuge among the wives of the gods. Of the we hear that “they led the maiden to safety, under another name.” But we don’t know who the maiden was. Only one thing do we know for sure: those four shining cups, perfect copies of the unique cup, ruined forever the relationship between the gods and those first artists, those first men to share divine immortality. The had trespassed too far into the place where fetish and reflection grow together and part. So long as the unique exists, the simulacrum is its prisoner within. But no sooner are the cups multiplied than an unstoppable cataract of simulacra rains down from the sky. The world has lived off them ever since — all this was hardly likely to please the gods; for if the copy cancels out the unique, then in the wake of the copy comes death. What are the first simulacra if not images and apparitions of the dead? Which takes us back to that long-lost time when the gods too trod the earth, as mortals. It wasn’t something they wanted to be reminded of.

Whoever calls forth the copy performs the most momentous of gestures, in the heavens. Which then resonates on earth. Why did they do it? We are not told. When their friend Agni asked them, the answered: “We did not profane the cup, which is of noble origin. We only spoke of the way the wood is shaped, brother Agni.” They seem to be saying: we were mostly interested in the technical aspects. It is the reply by which one recognizes the artist.

But the gods didn’t forgive them. Even their friends, even Agni together with the Vasus, even Indra with the Rudras, even the Viśvedevas, excluded them from the three pressings of the soma, at morning, noon, and dusk: “Here you shall not drink, not here.” Aloof as ever, Prajāpati looked on. He turned to Sav: “You taught them, you drink with them!” did so, and he in turn invited Prajāpati to drink with the . Alone with those left alone. As for the gods, they said “the made them nauseous because of their human smell.” One never becomes immortal enough.