Текст книги "Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty"

Автор книги: Vikram Chandra

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Perhaps the logician would have agreed, but I can’t help thinking that what also irritated him about Anandavardhana’s investigation was what it made of poets. In response to Anandavardhana’s assertion that dhvaniprovided endless freshness to language, Abhinavagupta observes that there are a limited number of things worthy of description

but by the multiplicity [of dhvani] … these same things become limitless; hence there arises an infinity of poetic imagination taking them at its object … This can come about only if the poetic imagination is endless, and that only if the objects to describe endless; and that only because of the variety of dhvani. ²⁶

Ingalls writes:

What is notable here is that the variety of suggestiveness is placed outside the human mind; it is the cause, not the result of poetic imagination. It is as though our authors thought of the objects of the world as existing in a pattern which rendered them amenable to mutual suggestions when viewed by a great poet. The poet’s imagination, in this view, would be the medium, not the primary cause, of the creation of new worlds. The worlds would already be there through the magic which underlies dhvani.Such a view is in harmony with the origin of the Sanskrit word for poet, kavi.A kaviis a seer, a revealer. ²⁷

“No being (animal or deity) exists with which man has no affinity of nature,” Abhinavagupta writes.

The saṃasāra(world) is beginningless, and every man, before that which he actually is, has been all the other beings as well. The consciousness of the spectator thus possesses (in other words, is varied by …) the latent impressions of all the possible beings and he is therefore susceptible of identifying himself with each of them. ²⁸

Abhinavagupta’s assertion that “everybody’s mind is indeed characterized by the most various latent impressions” is elsewhere more amenable to a purely materialist interpretation which requires no belief in rebirth; but, always, memory – selves which have been forgotten, experiences suffered and cherished and half-buried – is the limitless pool on which the reverberating dhvaniof art enacts its surges and churns out rasa. ²⁹

This susceptibility toward identification with the other, this conjuring up of beings from the endless depths of the self, is what makes

the educative effect ( vyutpādana) [of poetry] … different from that which comes from scripture through its mandates and from history through its narrations. For in addition to the analogy which it furnishes that we should behave like Rama [and not like Ravana], it produces in the final result an expansion of one’s imagination which serves as the means of tasting the rasas. ³⁰

This expansion of the self is available only through the pleasure of rasa, and so “the end of poetry is pleasure, for it is only by pleasure, in the form of an otherworldly delight, that it can serve to instruct us.” ³¹

Poetry as moral instruction gets scant attention from the theorists of rasa-dhvani; when Abhinavagupta does discuss the issue in passing, it is to assure us that

of instruction and joy, joy is the chief goal. Otherwise, what basic difference would there be between one means of instruction, viz., poetry, which instructs after the fashion of a wife, and other means of instruction, such as the Vedas which instruct after the fashion of a master, or history which instructs after the fashion of a friend? That is why bliss is said to be the chief goal. In comparison with [poetry’s] instruction even in all four aims of human life, the bliss which it renders is a far more important goal. ³²

To the objection that there was no way to know if rasareally existed, Abhinavagupta replied, “Wrong. It is proved by our own self-awareness, because savouring is a form of knowledge.” ³³

The urge to savor is universal, but its expression is culturally shaped. Indian movies mix emotions and formal devices in a manner quite foreign to Western filmgoers; Indian tragedies accommodate comedic scenes, and soldiers in gritty war movies can break into song. According to Anandavardhana:

While it is well known that larger works contain a variety of rasas, a poet who seeks the excellence [of his works] will make just one of them predominant …

[But there is] no obstruction to a single rasaby its being mixed with others … Readers with a ready sense of discrimination, who are attentive and intelligent, will rather take a higher degree of pleasure in such a work. ³⁴

To which Abhinavagupta adds:

If the rasathat has been taken in hand extends throughout the whole plot and is fitted for predominance by this extensiveness, its predominance will not be harmed by the introduction, by the filling in, of other rasasbrought in by the needs of the plot and running through only limited sections of the narrative. Rather than being injured, the predominance of the rasawhich appears as an abiding factor throughout the plot will be strengthened. In other words, the subsidiary rasas, although they attain a degree of charm by being fully developed each at its own stage by its own set of vibhāvasand the like, still do not attain such a charm that our apprehension will rest on them; rather, it will be carried on to some further delight. ³⁵

A song in an Indian film is an interlude which exists outside of story-logic and story-time, but within the emotional palette of the film; its function is to provide subsidiary rasasthat will strengthen the predominant rasaof the whole. The first Indian talkie, Alam Ara(The ornament of the world, 1931), featured seven songs. The newspaper advertisements touted an “all-Star-Cast Production” that was “All Talking/Singing/Dancing.”

This is why the Aristotelian unities of British and American films seemed so alien to me when I watched them as a child. But this emotional monotone was also – implicitly – modern and grownup, as opposed to the premodern and childish sentiment-mixing of our own movies. So, self-consciously serious filmmakers in India have tended to eschew the traditional forms beloved of commercial cinema, and have signaled their noble artistic and political intentions by hewing to conventions native to more “developed” countries.

Anandavardhana gives an example of mixing rasas from the Mahabharata; a wife searches for the body of her warrior-husband upon a bloody battlefield, and finds his severed arm:

This is the hand that took off my girdle,

that fondled my full breasts,

that caressed my navel, my thighs, my loins,

and loosened my skirt. ³⁶

Here, the stable emotion of grief is made sharper and more profound by the tasted memory of the erotic. And this provides, for the reader, the savoring of karuna-rasa, pathos.

When I inflict butcheries on the characters in my fictions, I sometimes think about how strange it is that we can savor, even, the horror of battlefields on which entire races die. This is monstrous. We are monstrous.

But savoring is a form of knowledge. And what is most delicious on my palate is a medley of tastes that come together to reveal a dominant rasa.Longer works of fiction that insist on a monotony of emotion always seem awkward to me, incomplete, even if they are elegantly written. But it is not just that the sweet tastes sweetest when placed next to the salty. If savoring is a form of knowledge, then a complexity of affect affords the most to know. I am given pause, I linger, I relish, and I am brought to chamatkara—wonder, self-expansion, awe. When I love a book, a film, a poem, a sentence in a novel, when I am absolutely ravished by it, I always find that my delight is overdetermined, has “more determining factors than the minimum necessary” (as the OEDputs it). Where does that “(final) feeling” come from – from the plot, the pace, the words themselves, all those fading memories of the peripheral characters, from the undertones of emotion that I hardly remember? From all of those, at once. From knowing all of those, together.

The theorists of rasa-dhvanigave me a way to think about writer, text, and sahrdaya.I also gained from them a way to think about literary convention – if in poetry “the savouring … arises like a magical flower, having its essence at that very moment, and not connected with earlier or later times,” and also “the feelings of delight, sorrow, etc., [produced by the representation] deep within our spirit have only one function, to vary it, and the representation’s function is to awaken them,” then the claims made for one particular set of conventions – often rather ambitiously called “realism”—are not only epistemically questionable, they are just irrelevant. There are many ways to manifest dhvani, I told my realist writer-friends. Choose the ones that work for you and your sahrdaya, and leave off with the proselytizing and pronouncements of your virtuous artistic rigor, of your deeper connection to what-really-is.

All this was satisfying enough, but dhvani—or at least resonance, reverberation – was crucial to the structure of the novel I was writing. The book’s shape followed what contemporary literary theorists call a “ring composition,” in which the ending of the narrative somehow joins up with the beginning, forming a circle. A ring composition is often used as a frame, within which further rings are embedded. Elements within a ring often reflect back on each other to form a chiastic structure, A-B-B-A, or A-B-C-B-A. Often, language or tropes or events are repeated, each time somehow changed. “In ring composition repetitions are markers of structure,” the anthropologist Mary Douglas writes. ³⁷Ring composition is a structure used all over the world, in narratives as varied as the Bible and mediaeval Chinese novels, she tells us, “so it is a worldwide method of writing.” ³⁸She adds that “ring composition is extremely difficult for Westerners to recognize. To me this is mysterious.” ³⁹

In India, ring composition is a standard architecture, found prominently in epics like the Ramayanaand the Mahabharata, in poems, in the Rig Veda, and in Panini’s grammar. ⁴⁰When I was writing my first book, I had never heard the phrase “ring composition,” but the method and its specific implications and techniques came readily to hand because – of course – I had seen and heard it everywhere. What I wanted within the nested circles or chakras of my novel was a mutual interaction between various elements in the structure. That is, for one chapter to act as the transformed reflection of another, for a nested story to act as an echo for another story nested within itself, and so on. Each of these connections would – I hoped – act as a vibration, a spanda, and all of them would come together in a reverberation, a dhvani—perhaps not quite in the sense that Anandavardhana used the word, but a dhvaninevertheless – a hum that would be alive and full and endless.

I didn’t exactly plan this architecture, sketch it all out before I began. I knew the general outline, and groped and felt my way into the specifics. I didn’t plan it because I couldn’t have; the unfolding of the story, all the stories, comes from the tension between intention and discovery. There are unbelievably delicious moments when you feel the pieces falling into place, when you find harmonies and felicities and symmetries that you can’t remember constructing, and at those times you cannot help becoming a mystic, believing that you are after all a little bit of a kavi, a seer of some sort.

“We see,” David Shulman writes:

reflections almost everywhere we look in South Asia, in all artistic media and, perhaps above all, in ritual forms … One level – verbal, rhythmic, sonar, or semantic – may be superimposed, with varying degrees of completeness and precision, on another. In effect, two relatively independent relational systems may thus coincide … Correspondence and coincidence of this sort [stem from] the impulse to reconnect and recompose. ⁴¹

Shulman is an American who teaches in Jerusalem, one of those many astonishingly knowledgeable non-Indian Indologists through whom I’ve learned much about my tradition. The global engine of academia is – for the moment – dominated by Western money and scholars, and Indians can get very prickly about being once more subjected to powerful foreign gazes. Tempers have flared over interpretations of Indian history, religion, and metaphysics. But vigorous debate has always been the preferred Indian mode of discovery, and perhaps these arguments too are a kind of mirroring, a reconnection. The world is a web, a net, as is each human being nested within the world, holding other worlds within.

Shulman writes that in India, reiterations and ring compositions

speak to a notion of reality, in varying intensities and degrees of integrity, as resonance, reflection, or modular repetition understood as eruption or manifestation ( āvirbhāva) from a deeper reservoir of existence, a restless domain driven by the undying urge to speak ( vivakṣā). ⁴²

Language itself wants to speak. In speaking, there is pleasure, and by speaking, knowledge is created, and thus the world we know. “Language cuts forms in the ocean of reality,” the Rig Veda tells us. ⁴³This is why grammar– vyakarana—is the science of sciences.

At the beginning of Red Earth and Pouring Rain, a young man picks up a rifle and shoots a monkey. The monkey lives, and when he regains consciousness he finds a typewriter and begins typing. He reveals that in a past life he was a poet who abandoned poetry for revolution. Now he tells – or types – the story of this long-ago life.

The monkey will live as long as his audience finds pleasure in his stories. He transforms memory into story, and gives delight so that he may live.

Abhinavagupta tells us that his teacher said, “ Rasais delight; delight is the drama; and the drama is the Veda,” the goal of wisdom. ⁴⁴

8 MYTHOLOGIES AND HISTORIES

The privileging of pleasure as a mode of knowledge has an ancient pedigree in India, particularly within the many streams of Tantra. “Tantra” derives from the root tan, to expand or stretch, and literally means “extension” or “warp on a loom.” At its simplest, the word can just mean “handbook” or “guide,” and so not all texts with “Tantra” in the title are Tantric – the Panchatantrais a collection of animal fables. There is no one practice or ideology or cosmology that we can identify as “Tantric”—there are monist Tantrics and there are dualist Tantrics. There is Hindu Tantrism, Buddhist Tantrism, even Jain Tantrism. So what is Tantrism? Attempts at definition have resulted in expanding lists of typical characteristics; one scholar notes six identifiers, another eighteen. At the very minimum, one would note that Tantric lineages, transmitted through gurus, use ritual practices, bodily disciplines, and social norms that deviate from Vedic orthodoxy, all in the service of ultimate spiritual liberation and worldly attainment. And, as Sanjukta Gupta puts it, “Tantric sādhāna(practise, discipline) is a purely individual way to release accessible to all people, women as well as men (at least in theory), householders as well as ascetics.” ¹

Most scholars would date the rise of Tantric systems to the middle of the first millennium of the Common Era. ²There is much evidence of the commingling of elements taken from Vedic philosophies and desi rural or tribal traditions. Hugh B. Urban says about the Tantra centred on the shakta-pithaor “Seat of Shakti” at the Kamakhya temple:

The Assamese tradition is by no means a simple veneer of Hinduism slapped onto a deeper tribal substratum. Instead, it is the result of a far more complex negotiation between the many indigenous traditions of the northeast and the Sanskritic, brahmanic traditions coming from north India that resulted in what is among the oldest and most powerful forms of Tantra in South Asia. ³

The eponymous Shakti worshipped at Kamakhya is the Renowned Goddess of Desire. Inside the temple, “Kamakhya is represented not by any human image, but by a sheet of stone that slopes downwards from both sides, meeting in a yoni-like depression.” ⁴The yoniis the vulva; the goddess is believed to menstruate three days a year, during which time the temple is closed. “On the fourth day after her menstruation, the temple doors are reopened, and red pieces of cloth representing the bloody menstrual flow are distributed to the thousands of pilgrims who thereby receive the power and grace of the goddess.” ⁵A majority of these pilgrims are women.

It would be a mistake to reduce this worship of Shakti to only an acknowledgment of biological reproductive power, or of genital sexuality. Urban very correctly argues that

the Indian concept of kamacontains a vast range of meanings that include, but far exceed, the level of sexual desire that has so long preoccupied modern observers. So too, the concept of shakticontains yet far transcends mere political power, also embracing the vital energy that pervades the cosmos, social order, and human body alike. ⁶

In the Tantras, descriptions of sexual practices comprise a tiny fraction of the whole, which usually includes wide-ranging discussions of rituals, metaphysical speculations, and enumerations of deities and the powers they represent; people who have been told that Tantra is “exotic sex” are usually bored witless when they actually try to read one of these texts. Medieval Indians wouldn’t have found the sex, qua sex, especially titillating; kamawas one of the legitimate aims of life, and sex within the constraints of dharma or ethical conduct was often depicted quite frankly. For instance, the Girvanavanmanjari, a seventeenth-century “Easy Sanskrit” primer, is set up as a dialogue between a husband and a wife, which swiftly turns into a teasing erotic game in which each partner accuses the other of being too bashful; the book ends “in the climax of śṛńgāra, with the happy union of the Brāhmana householder and his wife.” ⁷

The deviance of the Tantric systems has more to do with their cosmology and their soteriology. Many of the Tantric lineages are shakta—they worship the goddess as the ultimate reality – and many of them regard kamanot as something to be avoided or discarded on the road to salvation, but as an essential motive force in the human quest for the ultimate reality. So, in these systems, pleasure is good – the joys of the body and mind are not distractions or illusions. According to the Kularnava Tantra,

[In other systems] the yogicannot be a bhogi[enjoyer, epicure], and a bhogicannot be a knower of Yoga. However, O Beloved [Goddess], [the path of the] Kaula [lineage], which is superior to all other systems, is of the essence of bhoga[enjoyment] and yoga.O Mistress of the kula[family]! In the kulateaching, bhogabecomes yoga, and the world becomes a state of liberation. ⁸

The Tantric who belongs to one of these lineages uses all experience, even that which may be socially prohibited or psychologically forbidding and therefore inhibiting of self-recognition. And so the followers of these “left-handed” paths sought spiritual advancement through transgression, through ritual disruptions of the rules of purity and social order. For the advanced practitioner or initiate, the secret and dangerous rites of left-handed Tantra – always approached under the guidance of a guru – were a means of shattering the norms of the normal so that one could know the true, undifferentiated self; this is why these ceremonies included the ritualized consumption of meat and wine, and socially unsanctioned sex – all anathema to Brahminic notions of purity. That which was outside the bounds of purity was to be shut out, according to Vedic norms, but the Tantrics recognized that what was expelled was also tremendously powerful; the Kamakhya temple is shut when the goddess is menstruating because she is then “impure,” but her menstrual flow brings life force to the earth. There is a

profound ambivalence [about] the goddess’ blood and the power that it embodies, a power that is tied to impurity and to the dangerous potency of sexual fluids … The goddess’ menstrual blood is the very essence of this contaminating, chaotic but creative force [from which the world emerges]. ⁹

Some Tantrics sought extreme versions of this antinomian contact with the impure – the Kapalikas carried skulls as begging bowls, smeared themselves with the ashes from cremation grounds, offered blood, meat, alcohol, and sexual fluids to their deities and consumed them as well; they were reputed to practice human sacrifice and ritual ingestion of human flesh. The discipline of the Kapalikas was intended to induce a purposeful derangement from all prescribed norms and notions of otherness and distinction; the Kapalika saw all creation as one.

Members of the orthodox mainstream were fascinated and horrified by such practitioners. Kapalikas were reputed to have fearsome magical powers, and they show up as sinister villains in many narratives. Tantrics of various hues also are depicted as dissemblers and charlatans. In a play by Rajashekhara, a late-ninth-century poet and critic, a Tantric gleefully proclaims:

I don’t know mantra from tantra,

Nor meditation or anything about a teacher’s grace.

Instead, I drink cheap booze and enjoy some woman.

But I sure am going on to liberation, since I got the [Tantric]

Kula path.

What’s more,

I took some horny slut and consecrated her my “holy wife.”

Sucking up booze and wolfing down red meat,

My “holy alms” are whatever I like to eat,

My bed is but a piece of human skin.

Say, who wouldn’t declare this Kaula Religion

Just about the most fun you can have? ¹⁰

But there were also Tantric traditions more attractive to the householder, the person living within society. Abhinavagupta was the most famous and influential member of one such lineage, the Trika branch of a collection of philosophical doctrines and theologies that are sometimes referred to as “Kashmir Shaivism.” In his magnum opus Tantraloka(Light of the Tantras), Abhinavagupta provides a widespread survey and synthesis of all these strands, and an exposition of how all these traditions are subsumed into the “most excellent” form of Shaivism, the Trika (“Triad,” for the many triples in its cosmology, including its trio of iconic shaktis representing the transcendent; the transcendent within the material; and the material). ¹¹In the Tantralokaand later works, Abhinavagupta marries the mystical rituals and esoteric sexual practices of an existing left-handed tradition, the Kaula (from kula, group or family), to the sophisticated metaphysical speculations of Pratyabhijna, “The Doctrine of Recognition.”

According to the Pratyabhijnaphilosophers, the absolute origin of all that exists, the anuttara—that beyond which there is nothing – is a singular infinite, primordial, undivided consciousness, Chiti, which exists before time and space. The first step or spanda—vibration – toward the unfolding of the phenomenal universe is the foregrounding of the prakashaof this consciousness, of its self-illumining fullness. The next state is a negation of this fullness, a void that is vimarsha, self-referential awareness, consciousness as energy. The spandaor vibration between prakashaand vimarsha, the throb of kamabetween fullness and void, between 1 and 0, overflows as a completely free, blissful creative energy, ananda shakti.This creative dynamism, which is totally free ( svatantrya), sets in motion a complex series of further developments which result in the projections of subject and object, materiality, individuality – in other words, all that we know and experience. “Through her own will power, Citiunfolds the universe on a portion of herself.” ¹²

So the entire universe is within Chiti, and is an abhasa—usually translated as “appearance,” but I think better understood here as something like “simulation.” We are inside a giant Holodeck of Consciousness, and what we think of as our own subjectivity is a wilfully contracted portion of Chitiherself. This does not mean we are “unreal,” or that the phenomenal world is somehow illusory or false; within the simulation, the laws of physics are very real and absolute. That brick over there does really exist outside of me, and if you throw it at my head, I will bleed, and my pain will be as real as the brick and you. The universe and you and I and the brick are all epistemically real. But what has been veiled from my mundane consciousness is that the brick, you, myself, and my qualia are all Chitiherself; my experience of my own subjectivity, my vimarsha, is a contraction of Chiti’s principle of self-reflexivity, her dynamic Shakti-tattvaor idam, which “gives rise to self-awareness, will, knowledge, and action.” ¹³ Pratyabhijnais therefore sometimes understood as a supreme monism that subsumes dualism; it is a “Transcendental Realism” that does not deny at all the reality of multiplicity, but locates under that multiplicity a substrate of Chiti, consciousness.

So, why does transcendent Chitiblossom into immanent reality? Because, as Harsha Dehejia puts it, “ vimarśaacts spontaneously and with freedom, it possesses not an act of will but play, not the expression of a lack, but the display of fullness, its action termed kriyāor spandaor svāntantrya, meaning spontaneous and free action rather than karmaor volitional action.” ¹⁴All creation is krida, the spontaneous play of delight, a game. For pleasure, Chitihides herself and reveals herself.

One of the ways in which we know Chitievery day is in our recognition of the reality of other people’s individual subjectivities. Because we are aware of our own freedom ( svatantrya) as subjects, because we are aware of our own self-awareness, we make a guess ( uha) about the freedom inherent in other subjects, outside of one’s own individuality. ¹⁵And this theory of mind, this “awareness of the others’ existence is already a partial recognition of the universal Self.” The reality of Chitialso accounts for intersubjectivity: “If several subjects appear to share a single object of perception,” Isabelle Ratié explains,

it is not because this object would have an independent existence outside of consciousness, as the externalists contend; nor is it because of a perpetual accidental correspondence between various particular illusions belonging to each cognitive series, as [the Buddhist] Dharmakīrti explains … rather, it is due to the absolute freedom of the single infinite consciousness, which is able both to present itself as scattered into a multiplicity of limited subjects, and to manifest its fundamental unity in these various subjects by making them one with respect to one particular object. ¹⁶

The task of the seeker after truth, then, is merely one of recognition: recognition of the nature of the limited self and of that universal self, and recognition that the individual self is Chiti, the macrocosm. You already know you are Chiti, but you have forgotten: “I am free because I remember.” All aesthetic and ritual practices move toward this recognition, which is not merely conceptual but deeply experiential. Rasais a recognition, a recognition of what you have forgotten, that you are blissful consciousness itself.

The Trika-Kaula lineage is infamous for its chakra puja, the circle rite in which a group of male and female initiates engaged in sex with non-spousal partners. Ritualized sex can move one past the limited self, but what is desired is very different than an “intimacy” with a specific other person. Abhinavagupta says in the Tantraloka:

Consciousness, which is composed of all things, enters into a state of contraction due to the differences generated by separate bodies, but it returns to a state of oneness, to a state of expansion, when all of its components are able to reflect back on each other. The totality of our own rays of consciousness are reflected back one on the other when, overflowing in the individual consciousness of all present as if in so many mirrors, and without any effort whatsoever in an intense fashion, it becomes universal. For this reason, when a group of people gather together during the performance of a dance or of song, etc., there will be true enjoyment when they are concentrated and immersed in the spectacle all together and not one by one … but if even one of those present is not concentrated and absorbed, then consciousness remains offended as at the touch of a surface full of depressions and protuberances because he stands out there as a heterogeneous element. This is the reason why during the rites of adoration of the circle ( cakra) one must remain attentive and not allow anyone to enter whose consciousness is in a dispersed state and not concentrated and absorbed, because he will be a source of contraction. In the practice of the circle ( cakra) one must adore all the bodies of all those present … since they have all penetrated [into] the fullness of consciousness … they are in reality as if they were our own body. ¹⁷

The paradox is that once this recognition of self as the vast, primal creative consciousness takes place, nothing changes materially. Multiplicity does not disappear: the universe is not an illusion, it is the manifest form of Chiti, and it is as it is. There is no other better place to go to, no heaven. There is nothing to attain that is not already yours. There is nothing to avoid. In liberation, nothing has been gained and nothing has been lost. You have just remembered something, recognized what you have always been. The only thing that has changed is your awareness of your own fullness, your bliss. In Pratyabhijna, “the primal existential fact is not that of suffering, but that of bliss.” And, as Ratié remarks:

compassion is not primarily the acknowledgement of the others’ pain—which is to say, according to an equivalence drawn by these [ Pratyabhijñā] philosophers themselves, the acknowledgement of the others’ incompleteness ( apūrṇatva) – as it is in Buddhism; on the contrary, it is primarily the awareness of one’s own completeness or fullness – of one’s own bliss.Helping the others is no longer an attempt to fill whatever incompleteness afflicts the others: it is a joyful activity that is not determined by any lack or need and has no other cause besides one’s own fullness, because there can be no selfless activity without the blissful consciousness of one’s own completeness, and because this blissful consciousness necessarily results in an action aiming at the others’ interest. ¹⁸