Ardor (37 page)

*   *   *

Rudra’s name is to be avoided. Anyone forced to name him must immediately touch sacred water, for protection. Better to call him V
ā
stavya, ruler of place and of residue.
V
ā
stu
means both: place and residue. “A disconcerting semanticism,” noted Minard, eminent philologist. And yet there is just as much reason to be disconcerted over the Latin
situs
, which means site, place, but also powder, detritus, rust, mold, the bad smell built up over time.
Situs
implies that existence exudes a residue from the mere fact of being sited. There is something
stale
in existence, in that it has always been there. And this may produce a doubt that existence itself, that its site, are a residue, the detritus of a
désastre obscur.

When oblations have been offered, something always remains. And, if nothing remains, the site itself of the oblations will remain, swept clean by the wind. Between order and the thing ordered, there is always a margin, a difference that is a residue: Rudra is there.

*   *   *

Any kind of order involves eliminating a part of the original material. That part is the residue. What is to be done with it? It can be treated as the principal enemy of order, as the constant threat of a relapse to the status that existed before order. Or as something that, going beyond order, ensures the permanence of a contact with the continuum that preceded order itself. The
soma
that issues from the body of V
ṛ
tra is the most precious thing that order can offer. And it is a memory of something that already existed before order, before Indra’s liberating attack.

What criteria can we use to compare two kinds of order? Two kinds of order can be considered as two formal systems. Alternatively we can look at them in relation to what surplus and residue they produce. To what degree do the two comparisons diverge? In the first case: we can evaluate the different extent, functionality, effectiveness of each kind of order, its capacity to remain consistent. Not much more can be said. To attribute a meaning to a formal system would be arbitrary. In the second case: we have to give a meaning to each kind of order, we have to evaluate it. But in relation to what? There ought then to be an order of reference that makes it possible to attribute meaning and quality to all other kinds of order. But this kind of order does not exist. Or at least: this is the condition in which the moderns found themselves, this is the situation in which they were obliged to think. But for Vedic men, surplus and residue were the prerequisites that made it possible to judge the kind of order that excluded them from it. And it could be world order itself,
ṛ
ta
—or it could be any other kind of order undermined and disrupted by people unaware of what they are doing when dealing with surplus and residue.

*   *   *

“The officiant recites the verses continually, without interruption: and so he makes the days and nights of the year continuous, and so the days and nights of the year alternate continually and without interruption. And in this way he leaves open no way of access to the spiteful rival; but he would indeed leave open a way of access if he recited the verses in a discontinuous way: he therefore recites them continuously, without interruption.” Here we see, with full immediacy, the Vedic officiant’s main anxiety: the fear of time being split, of the course of the day being suddenly interrupted, of the whole world irretrievably disintegrating. This fear is far deeper than the fear of death. Indeed, the fear of death is only a secondary—one might say modern—concern. Something else comes before it: a sense of impermanence that is so great, so acute, so tormenting as to make the continuity of time seem an improbable gift, and one that is always about to be taken away. And so it is vital to intervene immediately with the sacrifice, which can be defined as that which the officiant
tends
,
extends.
This tissue of indefinite matter (the sacrifice) has to be “tended,”
tan
-, so that something continuous is formed, with no breaks, no interruptions, no gaps into which the “spiteful rival” who is lying in wait might wheedle his way. It is something that, by reason of its elaborate construction, stands in opposition to the world—a place whose origin appears like a series of breaks, interruptions, fragments in which we may recognize the strips of Praj
ā
pati’s dismembered body. To overwhelm the discontinuous: this is the purpose of the officiant. Overcoming death is only one of the many consequences. And so the first requirement is that the voice of the
hot
ṛ
is as taut as possible, with a continuous emission of sound. How does he take in breath? “If he were to take in breath in the middle of the verse, it would be harmful to the sacrifice.” It would be a defeat through discontinuity, like driving a wedge into the middle of the verse. To avoid it, the verses of the
g
ā
yatr
ī
, the fundamental meter, have to be recited, one by one, without an intake of breath. This creates a tiny, impregnable cell of continuity in the boundless expanse of discontinuity. And so the
g
ā
yatr
ī
meter one day became the bird G
ā
yatr
ī
and had the strength to fly high into the sky to conquer Soma, that intoxicating and all-enveloping fluid in which the officiant recognized the supreme expansion of the continuum.

Such was the terror of discontinuity—and of the injury implicit in every interruption—that they resorted, in the end, to the ultimate weapon of etymology to make it clear: they derived the word
adhvara
(“worship,” that which the
adhvaryu
practices) from the verb
dh
ū
rv-
, “to injure.” Meaning by this that “the Asuras, though desiring to injure them, were unable to injure them and were foiled: for this reason the sacrifice is called
adhvara
, not damaged, uninterrupted.” And so the
adhvaryu
can only murmur, accompanying his constant acts with a buzz in which the individual words are unrecognizable. If he were to articulate them more clearly, he would risk losing his breath, which is life, since the formulas are breath—and the breath “resides in a silent abode.” The power of the
adhvaryu
is concentrated in the indistinct: “All that he carries out in a very low voice, when it is finished and complete, becomes manifest.” For something to assume its purest and clearest form, it has to be born out of something impenetrable, opaque, boundless.

*   *   *

Residue is the memory, the enduring presence of the insuppressible continuum. Whatever kind of order is established, in whatever context and of whatever kind, that order will leave something outside itself—and will have to leave that thing outside if it purports to be an order. That something outside order is residue, but also surplus. Residue is what is left out, surplus is the part left out which is offered up. The meaning of order lies, first and foremost, not in the way the order itself is arranged but in what that order determines to do with the part that does not belong to it. Offer it up? Consume it? Throw it away? That is the part which is cursed and blessed. And depending on what is decided to be done with it, the newly established order acquires meaning. Taken by themselves, as a simple formal configuration, all orders are equivalents, insofar as all coexist at the same level, like crystals cut in various ways. Considered in terms of what is outside them—residue, surplus, but also nature, world—all forms of order are divergent and irreducible, no less than the timbre of one voice in relation to another.

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Among the most memorable metaphysical disputations was the one in which the problem was whether the sacrifice is a curled-up dog. How did that happen? For some time the ritualists had been troubled by certain questions: “What is the beginning, what is the end of the sacrifice, what is its narrowest part, what is its broadest part?” There was no agreement about the answers.

One day a group of theologians belonging to the Kuru and Pañc
ā
la clans, from the Land of the Seven Rivers, were arguing these matters. “Then they came across a curled-up dog. They said: ‘May there be in this dog what will decide who wins.’ The Pañc
ā
las asked the Kurus: ‘To what extent does this dog resemble the sacrifice?’ They didn’t know how to answer. Then Vasi
ṣṭ
ha Caikit
ā
neya spoke: ‘In the same way as [the sacri
fi
cer] lies there joining the twenty-first verse of the
yajñ
ā
yajñ
ī
ya
to the nine verses of the
bahi
ṣ
pavam
ā
na
, so the dog lies there curled up, joining its two extremes. In this position the dog is the same as the sacrifice.’ With these words the Pañc
ā
las defeated the Kurus.”

This is how the most difficult questions are tackled: they come across a curled-up dog
or any ordinary thing—
and they decide that the answer must be there. If the answer isn’t
in any ordinary thing
then it won’t be anywhere else. But the Pañc
ā
la theologian was a learned man and his answer referred back to a very old story. In the beginning, when only the waters existed, Agni sang the verses of the
agni
ṣṭ
oma
so that the waters would recede and he could find food for himself. And it was then that the
sampad
, the “equivalence” or “correspondence,” flashed before him, enabling him to carry on singing without interruption, thereby preventing the other gods from stealing his food. He
saw
then that the dreaded gap which appeared between a particular song (the
yajñ
ā
yajñ
ī
ya
) and another (the
bahi
ṣ
pavam
ā
na
) could be eliminated: if the last verse of the one also became the first verse of the other. With this, the
bahi
ṣ
pavam
ā
na
came to consist of ten syllables, transforming itself into a
vir
ā
j
meter. And
vir
ā
j
is food. QED. And so Agni would never be short of food, and there would never be a break in the sacrifice. This is what Vasi
ṣṭ
ha Caikit
ā
neya was referring to. He thought that the dog curled up before their eyes was the sacrifice as it had become after Agni had seen his vision. This, then, was the precedent to which the theologian referred.

But something else was implied in the answer to the riddle. Above all, that the sacrifice has to be
continuous.
Any break whatsoever would make it worthless, allowing the gods to snatch Agni’s food from him. But here they failed, since now the sacrifice “had become endless” in the words of the
Jaimin
ī
ya Br
ā
hma
ṇ
a
, which adds: “it was like a lighted ember in a pot.” But if the sacrifice is continuous, with no end and no beginning, it also means it is not a human institution. There is no zero point at which a man begins a sacrifice. Sacrifice is something that is always happening. If this is so, the whole world must be seen as the field in which sacrifice is celebrated. The difference between gods and men is primarily this. Certain gods—such as Praj
ā
pati, such as Agni, who
are
the sacri
fi
ce—ensured that the world came to function like an uninterrupted sacrifice. Humans are the last arrivals who become part of the ceremony and perpetuate it, as long as their strength allows them to do so. This, according to Vasi
ṣṭ
ha Caikit
ā
neya, was a first series of ideas that could be elaborated that day, observing the curled-up dog that a group of theologians from the Kuru and Pañc
ā
la clans had come across as they walked along the road in discussion.

*   *   *

We can certainly know the world—and live there—observing only the dealings that occur between mankind and the thirty-three gods. But, if we also take into consideration all that is left out of these dealings, because it forms their background, the residue that does not belong to anyone, then everything changes, in the same way that it would change if, rather than looking at individuals, we look at the background against which they are gradually drawn. But we can better understand the implications of residue with the question of the S
ā
hasr
ī
(which means “she who sees to it that the ritual fee is a thousand [cows]”). The S
ā
hasr
ī
is a dappled cow, of three colors. Or alternatively red. Never approached by a bull. That cow is V
ā
c, Speech, and she appears along with nine hundred and ninety-nine other cows. In all, there has to be a thousand—and no more—because “with a thousand he [the sacrificer] gets all the objects of his desire.” Three hundred and thirty-three every day. The S
ā
hasr
ī
guides them, moving forward at the head of the herd, for three days. Or alternatively she follows them from behind. These cows are also the hymns of the
Ṛ
gveda
(though in fact there are a few more: one thousand and twenty-eight). The S
ā
hasr
ī
, the supreme power of speech, is the thousandth cow: once again the remainder, the residue.