Ka by Roberto Calasso

Author:Roberto Calasso [Calasso, Roberto]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-01-31T05:00:00+00:00

They were sitting on three stools. Dadhyañc had a view of the Aśvins’ almost identical profiles as they focused their attention elsewhere. One of them said: “When we were still children, we were given certain words that were attributed to Prajāpati and that none of the Devas or Asuras claimed to have understood, though they had committed them to memory. These were the words: ‘The ātman, the Self, released from every evil, subject neither to age, nor death, nor suffering, nor hunger, nor thirst, whose desires and whose thoughts are reality, this one must seek, this one must strive to know. He who achieves that ātman, that Self, and knows it, shall possess all worlds and all desires.’” Then the other Aśvin said, as though taking over from where his twin had left off: “Could it be that the sovereign of all words is this ātman, a reflexive pronoun that declines like a masculine noun, a word we’ve used every day without thinking, without sensing that this was the secret, that it was to this we must come?” The more baffled they felt, the more they wanted to learn—they told Dadhyañc. He looked them in the eye and said: “The ātman comes before the aham. The Self comes before the I: the reflexive pronoun comes before the personal pronoun: why? The most basic thing is not that a being says ‘I’: all animals say ‘I’ from the first moment they emit a sound. Between Self and I there is but one difference: the Self watches the I, the I does not watch the Self. The I eats the world. The Self watches the I eating the world. They are two birds, they sit on opposite branches of the same tree, at the same height, at the same distance from the trunk. To anyone watching them, they are almost the same. Like yourselves. No one can separate them. The first words the Self said were: ‘I am.’ Nothing existed as yet when the Self said: ‘I am.’ The I owes its existence solely to the fact that it was pronounced by the Self. From the start the two had the shape of a person, puruṣa. Even though the whole world would later appear from the Self and the Self would sink into it right to the tips of his fingernails, still the Self and the I too preserved the form of a person. Which is why we speak to them and they to us.”

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