Ardor (57 page)

If one wants to talk about anything religious, some kind of relation has to be established with the invisible. There has to be a recognition of powers situated over and beyond social order. Social order itself must seek to establish some relations with that invisible. All this does not seem to be of great concern to religious authorities at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In the higher ranks of Christian or Islamic hierarchies, or among the pandits of Hinduism, it is easy to find keen sociologists or social engineers who use the sacred names of their respective traditions to impose or sustain a certain collective order. But it would be hard to find anyone who could speak the language of Meister Eckhart or Ibn ‘Arab
ī
or Y
ā
jñavalkya—or could even remind us of such a voice.

In the face of this, the
Ś
atapatha Br
ā
hma
ṇ
a
offers the picture of a world made up
only
of what is religious, with no apparent curiosity or concern about anything that is not. As the Br
ā
hma
ṇ
as see it, the religious pervades every tiny gesture—and even pervades all that is involuntary and accidental. For Vedic ritualists, a world without such characteristics would have appeared meaningless, in exactly the same way as their writings have often appeared to readers of today. The incompatibility between the two views is total. And the disparity of forces is overwhelming: on the one hand a chain of procedures that has succeeded in covering the entire planet for the first time with an invisible digital network; on the other hand a body of texts, partly accessible only in a dead, perfect language, which describes actions and entities that seem no longer to have any importance. Yet the thinking of the Vedic ritualists, in its sometimes unfathomable eccentricity, had this peculiarity: it always posed crucial questions, in the face of which all thinking going back to the Enlightenment shows itself to be clumsy and inadequate. The ritualists did not offer solutions, but they knew how to isolate and contemplate the knots that cannot be undone. It is by no means certain that thought can do much more.

*   *   *

It would be pleonastic to use the word
symbol
in a world where multiple meanings could be found in every tiny fragment. What, for example, would water be a symbol of in the Veda, other than—almost—everything? To apply the Western notion of “symbol” to the Vedic world would rapidly produce a general state of meaninglessness through an excess of meaning. Indeed there is no exact word in Sanskrit for “symbol.”
Bandhu
,
nid
ā
na
,
sampad
: these are words that indicate an affinity, tie, bond, correspondence, nexus, assimilation, but cannot be reduced to official functions, as happened in the case of the symbol.

In the ordinary Western mind, as it has developed over centuries of elaboration before producing hordes of anonymous Bouvards and Pécuchets, it is generally assumed to be quite unnecessary for the vast majority of things to be a symbol of something else, except in certain clear-cut cases where such a role is considered legitimate—and also useful. The
flag
is a good example. But the Vedic world would then be a boundless expanse of flags.

At the same time, a modern Western mind is able to navigate the Vedic texts, though with some difficulty—finding itself at times before obstacles that seem insurmountable—and discover something vital that can be found nowhere else. And the difficulties it encounters are not that much greater than those that a present-day Indian has to face. The distance between Indian and Western cultures of today, though obviously great, becomes negligible when compared with the astral distance of both from the Vedic world.

How does contact become possible? Analogically. In the silent plains of the past, the Veda is most probably the widest, most complex, most ramified area, where people lived granting sovereignty and preeminence to only one pole of the mind: the analogical pole. A pole that works perpetually (and cannot fail to work) in every being, at whatever time, in the same way as its corresponding pole: the digital pole. Under whose dominion the entire world now finds itself living—an experimental condition that is unprecedented. But, though the preeminence of the digital pole is solid and secure, this does not mean the analogical pole is disappearing. And in fact it has no option but to continue working, since physiology demands that it does. Yet at times it works secretly, or in disguise, or at least without letting itself be noticed. On the other hand, digitality was also present and active in the Vedic world, though bridled and trampled upon. And it cannot be otherwise, since this is how our brain and our nervous system are made. This implies, among other things, that nothing can in principle stop them from trying to act and react in ways they once used to, over several millennia. On the scale of the brain, those times are not even so very far distant.

Behind the
Ṛ
gveda
, behind the swarming of gods, behind the seers who saw the hymns, behind the ritual acts, we glimpse something that could approximately be called
Vedic thought.
If this thinking was the most hazardous and consistent attempt at ordering life in obedience to the analogical method alone, that attempt could not last—and we can only be amazed that it has managed to survive in particular places and particular periods, like a wedge of alien material. Yet it is also true that this attempt, vulnerable though it might have been, has also had the strength to keep some of its features alive over a distance of millennia, when other grandiose constructions had sunk. In Greece today, its gods and their rituals speak only through the silence of their stones. The same is true for Egypt, the most hoary of civilizations. But the Vedic
mantras
continue to be recited and sung, intact, sometimes in the same places where they were formed—or even in Kerala. And particular ritual gestures, to which Vedic thought had devoted obsessive attention, continue to be carried out in the
sa
ṃ
sk
ā
ra
, in the sacramental ceremonies that are part of countless lives in India.

*   *   *

The gods dwell where they have always dwelt. But on earth, certain indications about those places have now been lost. Or we no longer know where to find them among old sheets abandoned and dispersed. Meanwhile, life goes on as if nothing had happened. Some think those sheets will one day be rediscovered. Others that they were of no particular importance. Others, yet again, have no idea they ever existed.

*   *   *

Humanity does not have a superabundance of
modes of thinking.
And two—
connective
and
substitutive
thinking—stand out like inimical brothers. Each is based on a statement: “
a
is connected to
b
” and “
a
stands for
b
” (where “
a
implies
b
” is a subset of “
a
is connected to
b
”). There is no form of thought that cannot be subsumed into one or other of these two statements. And they are in a relation of chronological succession, because the
connective
has always preceded the
substitutive
in every place or time, if we take
connective
as referring to the Vedic
bandhus
, and therefore to those “bonds” and “nexuses” that link the most disparate phenomena by affinity, resemblance, and analogy.

The more mature thought is—in the sense of it being multifaceted, all-embracing, precise—the more it practices
both
of its modes to the very end, to the full extent of their potential. To choose one or the other, as if they were two political parties, would be puerile. But it is essential to distinguish their respective fields of application. Neither the
connective
nor the
substitutive
have the capacity to extend to everything. In certain spheres, they become vacuous and inert. The more subtle and effective the activity of one of the modes of thinking becomes, the more it can identify and accurately delineate the areas to which it applies.

Connective
and
substitutive
: the two
modes
of the mind can be so defined by referring to their dominant characteristic. But, if we are referring to the implementation of their workings, they could also be described as
analogical
and
digital
, insofar as the principal way of substitution is through codification—and the number is what enables it to act with maximum ease and efficiency. And the digital mode is applied above all to the realm of quantity, where the result of an operation is a number that substitutes an initial number. Whereas the analogical mode is based on similarity, thus on the connection between entities of whatever kind.

Convention
and
affinity
are other useful terms for defining the two poles of the mind.
Convention
means that, whatever
a
is, it can be decided that “it stands for
b
,” therefore it substitutes it. An impositional principle, not based on argument—and highly effective.
Affinity
means that, for reasons not necessarily clear or apparent, there is something in
a
that it shares with
b
, so that anything said about
b
will in some way involve
a.
At the beginning it is a largely obscure terrain—and destined to remain so to some extent even at the end of any investigation. The perception of affinities is never-ending. We can say where the process begins, but not where it can be ended. The
convention
, on the other hand, begins and ends in the act with which it is established.

This is what we are made of. In the same way that the binary number system, in its simplicity, allows an endless series of applications, so the two modes of the mind lend themselves to supporting the widest variety of constructions that combine or mix together, or repel each other. And each continually referring to the other. Every decision that claims to divide them or declares the predominance of one over the other is useless, because both continue to operate, consciously or otherwise, at every instant, for anyone and in anyone.

*   *   *

The connective mode and the substitutive mode correspond to two irreducible elements of nature—and of the mind that observes it: the continuum and the discrete. The continuum is the sea; the discrete, the sand. The connective mode assimilates itself to the continuum, in that it produces a never-ending amalgam, an uninterrupted strip of figures where each enters the other. The substitutive mode multiplies indefinitely the grains that, seen from a certain distance, compose a single distinct figure, in the same way that the halftone screen allows things photographed to be recognized. More than categories, the continuum and the discrete are dimensions with which the mind works nonstop. And through them the world works. They are “the poles of a fundamental complementarity of thought throughout all time.” The mind and the world draw upon that obscure, inexhaustible background, like craftsmen in the same workshop.

*   *   *

There is nothing pleasant about the picture of someone taking an animal, tying it to a post, and then strangling or suffocating it, or slitting its throat. And yet that gesture formed the centerpiece of solemn rituals, in India and elsewhere. Clearly it must have been considered necessary, inevitable. Instead of concealing it, they flaunted it, surrounding it with bold and mysterious speculations. Then that same gesture, at a certain point during the Christian era, became unacceptable as a public spectacle. But the number of animals killed each day—strangled, suffocated, their throats slit (other methods of killing also came along in the meantime)—never diminished, indeed it steadily grew. There was no more talk of
sacrifice
, except in books. And yet, in laboratories, they talked about test animals being
sacrificed.

Sacrificial practices all have a familiar nature, whether they are celebrated in Cameroon or among the Australian Aborigines, in the American Northwest or in the Temple of Jerusalem, in Mexico or Iran or in Imperial Rome. Examining documentary evidence or archaeological finds, it is impossible to deny that we know—in an obscure way—what they consist of. They are words and fragments of phrases that belong to dialects of one and the same language, of which nowhere is the grammar and syntax worked up to the degree of perfection that we find in the India of the Vedic ritualists. We can say of Vedic sacrifice what was said about the
Mah
ā
bh
ā
rata
: in it is found all that exists elsewhere—and what is not to be found there does not exist anywhere else. Every detail of the sacrificial rites of every part of the world can be illuminated from a passage in the system of Vedic sacrifice, yet there are many details of Vedic sacrifice that can be illuminated only by themselves. Behind the disparate, ramified, discordant practices of sacrifice—so disparate and so discordant that various scholars today, out of speculative cowardice, are tempted to treat sacrifice itself as an invention of anthropologists—the outline of a sacrificial vision can be recognized, and it involves everything. This vision, though ubiquitous and persistent, also has the following characteristic: if it is not accepted, it can dissolve away instantly. There is no obligation to describe, to interpret the world in sacrificial terms. There is nothing to prevent thinking in a way that totally ignores the sacrificial vision. Sacrifice itself can easily be described as a mental disorder. And yet its language cannot be expunged. Irritatingly, it remains and returns. The sacrificial practices have gone. But the word is still used—and everyone seems to understand it immediately, even without being anthropologists. At the opposite extreme, in Vedic India the sacrifice was like breathing. It is therefore a phenomenon that continues to exist even unconsciously—indeed it is an implicit condition of our own lives, in whatever place or time.