i can't help the excerpts. it's probably a disease.

Gacked from

draegonhawke:

Come up with the most illogical, off-the-wall, harebrained, WTF conspiracy theory you can think of for any fandom (or fandoms!) I know about, and I will try to defend it!

One example is "Quistis is actually Pyramid Head." This meme is meant to frustrate, harass, and traumatize me.

In other news, (I should just stop pretending, and replace "other" with "book") I'm now engrossed in Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India by Roberto Calasso. Whoa.

What does the world look like? It's an upturned cup. What's it made of? Bone. Looking up we see filaments of light filtering through cracks and scratches on the vault of that old bone: the stars. On the edge of the cup you can see seven figures, silently crouching, wrapped in their cloaks. They're the Saptarsis, who keep watch. The twins - Gotama and Bharadvaja, Visvamitra and Jamadagni, Vasistha and Kasyapa - are arranged in parallel, gazing at each other. Below, where Atri shines, the cup has a narrow spout. What is it that hangs suspended in that upturned cup, that dark and empty hemisphere? The "glory of all forms," they said. A brain saturated in soma: the mind.

The Saptarsis [aka the rsis] stood guard at the seven gates of the fortress: the ears, the nostrils, the eyes, the mouth, which Atri watched over. Each controlled a breath, inside and outside the cup. The world, which imagined it existed alone, reproducing itself like a reflection in so many tiny, upturned cups of bone, became aware that it lived within an immense cup of bone, which yet was cramped, for only beyond it, as one might glimpse through a thousand tiny chinks, lay the realm of light that floods in.

Calasso grasps and evokes in rich and melancholy prose the cyclical, many-layered nature of Indian mythology. It takes millions of years for the gods to pass from one aeon to the next. A few centuries for mankind. The gods change their names and do the same things as before, with subtle variations. So subtle as to look like pure repetition. Or again: so subtle as to look like stories that have nothing to do with those that came before them. Stories turn and revolve in upon themselves, reversing and shifting and re-reversing roles, so that "there are fathers who are sons of their sons or sons who are fathers of their fathers and their sisters, who are their lovers and wives too." Each chapter in the book seems to present forth a different creation story that contradicts every other chapter's own creation story, yet also confirms them all.

Seen from afar, the rsis looked very like Plato's Guardians. But it wasn't a State they were guarding. A State would have been too small, too circumscribed for a gaze such as theirs, bending down from the stars. They watched over the world, or rather the worlds, each linked to the next like vertebrae in a spine. They were wakeful. . . . The worlds' existence, submerged in and reemerging from the pralaya, from dissolution, could claim some continuity, claim to be the same existence, ever composing, decomposing, recomposing itself, only insofar as its every phase was gathered up in the pupil of the rsis, the cavern where everything echoes and re-echoes.

It shouldn't be possible to make the myths and philosophy of Hinduism so accessible and so obscure, so bizarre and so self-evident, but Calasso has done it. I even recognize direct quotes from the Rg Veda and the Upanishads that I read in my Indian Thought class last year. And then there are just plain cool passages, like the one in which Prajapati, the Creator Father before Brahma, couples with his daughter, Usas the Dawn, for the first time; the jealous gods retaliate by creating Rudra the obscure Archer:

Slowly a dark figure detached itself from the shadow, an archer. His was the first profile, of a darkness that a blade of light was carving out of darkness. He bent his bow. The more he bent it, the more the twined bodies were flooded with incandescence. Rudra yelled as he let fly his arrow. Like a flash Prajapati withdrew from Usas. The arrow pierced his groin, opening a wound no bigger than a grain of barley, while his phallus squirted its seed onto the ground. Prajapati's mouth foamed with anger and pain. On her back, almost imperceptibly, the abandoned Usas trembled.

Then, The Father lay on his back, dying. He was no longer an antelope now. [He and Usas turned into antelopes during sex, for reasons that actually make sense.] He was a man again. A trickle of blood striped one thigh. The obscure Archer watched him. "Give me a name," he said. "You are Bhava, Existence," said Prajapati, the rattle at his throat. "It's not enough," said Sarva, the Archer, "give me another name." "You are Sarva, Everything," croaked Prajapati. The Archer demanded other names. One by one they issued in sobs from Prajapati's mouth, which was foaming blood. "You are Pasupati, you are Ugradeva, you are Mahadeva, you are Vastospati, you are Isana, you are Asani." "It's not enough," said Rudra. "You are Kumara, Boy," was Prajapati's last rattle. Rudra said nothing, leaning on his bow. "For every name you give me, a scale of evil falls from me," he said in a whisper.

And one more excerpt for the road,

Visvamitra said: "What we thought has been thought many times and in many places - and each of these thoughts, successive and coincident, is linked together in a single chain. But there is one thought that was our thought, insofar as it had never before been pursued so stubbornly, nor would be ever again, had never before achieved such sharpness, nor would ever after. One thought that was the arrow that buried itself within us - and that penetrated deeper and deeper into our brains and into every gesture we made. Until ultimately it became our only thought, ultimately would almost dull the minds it had too brightly illuminated. How to describe it? The recognition that the existence of the universe is a secondary and derivative fact with respect to the existence of the mind. Perhaps no more than its efflorescence. That's how we speak of it today, but time ago we would never have used these words. Indeed, we wouldn't even have understood them. Or we would have despised them. But that's not the point . . . Let's go back to where we were: for those brushed by the wing of that thought, the world was the same as before, nothing was the same as before. Nothing would ever go back to being as it had been before. Yet it is not a spontaneous, natural thought. A creeping oafishness is natural. And even we would sometimes have to struggle to rediscover that thought. Far easier to think of oneself as a ghost imprisoned in a box of skin and bone, surrounded by objects as stable as they are solid. But for anyone who opens his eyes on that other thought, all this falls apart and can never be restored.

"It was strange, how it happened. We forfeited history for that thought. As though, the moment it took shape, a saber had swept down from the sky and cut off our hands. We were paralyzed in whatever action it was we had been involved in. Often they were violent actions, the actions of conquerors come down from the highlands and droguht-stricken mountains into a plain too vast, too densely grown and torrid, that we [the Aryans migrating into the Indus Valley around four thousand years ago] were invading - and that would soon invade us. It was this thought that stopped us, nothing else. We went no further, or only sproadically, discovering new rivers and new forests, threatened by dark creatures lying in abmush in scrub and brushwood that knew so much better than we did. All of a sudden the impetus was gone. Something had distracted our attention, forever. Something that made everything else hollow. That didn't mean we settled down to build palaces and temples, canals, gardens, cities with walls. Everything remained much as it was: a camp of nomad warriors who seemed suddenly to have forgotten their old habits, the fury of conquest."

You know those various school anthologies of myths featuring translations so dry they make your eyes burn? Calasso's Ka blows them all out of the water. Despite its being stored in the Fiction section, everything I've read so far jives with the myths, beliefs, and rituals of Hinduism (Calasso also helpfully throws in some Buddhist elements) that I studied as a religion major. For an academic overview so systematic it borders on the anal, you want An Introduction to Hinduism by Gavin D. Flood. Calasso in Ka, on the other hand, makes you see for the first time just how strange and how natural "the mind of India" is.

To drive home exactly how blown away I am by this book, I have already added it to my very short list of "books at gunpoint": I am almost compelled to run out and make everyone read it, at gunpoint if necessary. So, get ahold of Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India by Roberto Calasso if you can.

And, in case all the excerpts distracted you, don't forget the meme back up there.