The Ultimate Word1

I can only go from where I am. We can only move from where we be: that is, if there is movement, going, going is going goingness.

Gatagatagamyamanam. Change implies the changeless. We live by myths. Myth is just the poetization of movement, of becoming. Thus sacrifice, yagna, the symbolic burning by Agni, the fire god, of the concocted movement, and so of the object. Sanctification is dissolution. Time burnt is poetry made. When time and place are burnt to ash—that is, the concrete object is—only light shines over. There is now no one, thus nowhere to go.

But I am here. Every movement I make is samskara, ritual, every statement I make the sanctifying word, mantra. In this ambit of sacrifice, with the pragmatic statement of who I am, and where I am placed, I speak. Let me start, as my Vedic ancestors did, of where I am. In every statement of sacrifice, my ancestors spoke of the mythic Mount Meru (whether it is beyond the Pamirs, as some have explained, or beyond the beyond, who cares?)—south of the Mount Meru, one said at the sacrificial hearth, and in the Jambu Dvipa (the isle of the jujube fruit) down the Himalaya, and south of the Godavari, I sit, I used to say, on the bank of the Cauvery—here I sit, I, so and so, Ramakrishna Sharma, etc., etc. Also I would add, I am, say, in Kaliyuga,2 and in the twenty-seventh year of the sixty-year cycle, on the twenty-eighth day of the lunar month, and on this star conjunction of Rohini or Aswini—I sit for sacrifice. Look, look, how the fire burns, it burns royally. This same fire, remember, kept safely and well fed in its earthen pot, and in its pure proper corner, will also burn me—burn me when I am dead. Someone, my son, will keep the cremation fire burning till all my body is consumed, and he will then throw the firewood poker into the subsiding flame. Then, when all is burnt, he goes home, the son, whosoever he is, and wheresoever I am. And his, the son’s turn too will come (for, as you see, everything turns in a mandala, a circle), and when his head bursts too, sometime later—where has he gone, I ask of you? He, if he could speak, could say, where? Nowhere. It can never become. The myth of I (sitting to the south of the Meru, etc.)—I, of the ancestry of Angirasa (the great Vedic sage, etc.), I never was, I never will be. The myth was exploded by fire (my head did, of course)—and nothing ever happened. And that’s delight, pure poetry.