Prajāpati’s children, gods first, then men, realized that day that, in order to live, one must first of all recompose the Father and recompose oneself, rebuild one’s own body and one’s own mind piece by piece. For if Prajāpati had been scattered and spread across the entire world, how could they — the dust of his bones — claim not to be scattered and spread? Only by patiently sewing, weaving, and tying things together could they expect to acquire a mind — hence a power of attention, rather than a blind vortex — and a body, rather than just limbs bereft of their lymph. This preparatory task would be the task. It would take time, it would take all time. Every one of the three hundred and sixty days of the year. Every one of the ten thousand, eight hundred hours of the year (if by “hour” we mean a muhūrta, which lasts forty-eight minutes). And then? Preparing life took up every hour life offered. When the time was up, the task began again. An empty clearing, a stick scratching marks in the earth.
This was what they must do: build a huge bird — a bird of prey: an eagle, a hawk — of bricks. How else could they conquer the sky? And here a false etymology, ever friend to thought, came to their aid. Brick, they said: citi. Bricks in layers. But what is citi? It’s cit, which means “to think intensely.” Every brick, baked and squared, was a thought. Its consistence was the consistency of their attention. Every thought had the outline of a brick. It wouldn’t disappear, wouldn’t let itself be swallowed up in the mind’s vortex. Rather it became something you could lean on. Something you could place a next thought on — and slowly, crisscrossed with joints, a wall was raised. That was the mind, that was the body: the one and the other rebuilt, with wings out-spread.
This is what they thought:
“True, we live in a blurred and disjointed state. True, what happens inside these boxes of bone that are our heads leaves no trace on the hard, rough material in which we move. And it’s also true that unreality cloaks both ourselves and the things we touch, as if this were the normal state of being. But when we wander about this torpid plain, we do find, here and there, certain places that vibrate like nerves, certain sounds that peal with clarity, almost as though they meant something, and sometimes an emotion will flood through us, as though we had recognized something. Why so? We live in the broken body of Prajāpati, but we will always be tiny ourselves: only an immensely long voyage, if ever we could undertake such a thing, would allow us to glimpse the white cliff that is the further shore of a broken joint. If life is thus, must we then resign ourselves to this opacity, pierced through though it may sometimes be by the pinpoints of these vain reminders? We were warriors once, violent warriors. But no conquest ever helped us rend that blur. So one day we decided to concentrate all our fury in just one patient, grueling task. As long as time itself. Building the altar of fire.
“To arrange ten thousand, eight hundred bricks, one must start from the edge, from the frame of everything: of the world, of meanings. Start from the place where naturally we are. And the beginning will have something incongruous and obsessive about it: a few stones placed beside an empty clearing. But once formed, a frame evokes a center. And that was the fire of our minds: invisible right to the last step. It had to lie at the center of time, of the endless hours that surrounded it; at the center of the intense thought that made the bricks, that was those bricks laid one upon another. When they reached that point, touched that center, it would, as through a bundle of nerves, affect everything, as far as the furthest of the bricks, as far as the tip of the eagle’s wing, as far as the most distant of days. That is what is meant by the altar of fire. But did this come to pass? We shall never be able to say. Why not? When we arrived at that point, time had run out, the year was gone. We would have to begin again, on another clearing, with other sticks, other bricks.
“Apart from the building of the altar of fire, no sacrifice will ever be enough to make us immortal, because each uses too many elements or too few. They don’t have the right number. And the right number is the one that corresponds to the wholeness of time: ten thousand, eight hundred bricks, as many as there are hours in the year, which is Prajāpati.
“But what gives us this faith, śraddhā, in number and building? Seen from afar, we must look like bricklayers gone mad. From close up, we are a challenge to find a sense in what we do. There’s a moment when we scatter sand on the altar. Why sand? ‘It’s the part of Prajāpati that was lost.’ A vast and numberless part. Who could ever count it? When Prajāpati came to pieces, most of him was lost. And, ‘Prajāpati is the whole brahman,’ the texts tell us. That dust, sole inhabitant of the heavens, reminds us how much has been lost.
“We are devotees of the distinct and the articulate, but the infinite festers in our bones. We must circumscribe it, as our skin circumscribes a weave of stuff in which we might otherwise lose ourselves, and which includes, among other things, death herself. Yet this is the only way to live. We are not so ingenuous as to imagine that our building is sound. There is nothing more flimsy and fragile than sacrifice and the place of sacrifice. If it is to work, it must be wrapped in the cloud of the immeasurable and enclose the immeasurable within itself. The greatest must be contained and embraced in the smallest. Thus the sand. Thus the silence, which gives rhythm to the rites. Thus the murmuring that sometimes goes on behind. The sand, the silence, the murmuring: emissaries of the incommensurable. A gesture to that part of Prajāpati we can never reconstitute. Amorphous, inexhaustible.”
In the beginning, Prajāpati didn’t know who he was. Only when the gods issued from him, when they took on their qualities, their profiles, when Prajāpati himself had shared out their shapes, forgetting none, sovereignty and splendor included, only then did the question present itself. Indra had just killed Vṛtru. He was still shaken by the terror of it, but he knew he was sovereign of the gods. He came to Prajāpati and said: “Make me what you are, make me great.” Prajāpati answered: “Then who, ka, am I?” “Exactly what you just said,” said Indra. In that moment Prajāpati became Ka. In that moment he understood, understood it all. He would never know the joys of limitation, the repose in a straightforward name. Even when they had recomposed him, in the ten thousand, eight hundred bricks of the altar of fire, he would always be a shape shot through by the shapeless, if only in those porous stones, svayamātṛṇṇa, avid of emptiness, that were placed at the center of the altar and allowed it to breathe.
Home of the dark germination of all that is, Prajāpati could hardly have an identity comparable to those who issued from him. Yet, in time, he would take his place alongside them — a god like any other, to whom victims are sacrificed, oblations dedicated. Spared the burden of bringing it about, he observed life more calmly now. It relaxed him to mix with the other gods, to lose himself among them. He liked the lower ranks best. Life was a spectacle that no longer depended on him. He loved to watch it, but would still get pains in all his joints whenever he was grazed by the wing of a desire. Which was little more than a memory now. For even desire had migrated into innumerable others. So Prajāpati waited for the moment when he would be forgotten. It began imperceptibly: long liturgies, lists of gods, from which his name would suddenly be missing. Gestures forgotten. Offerings overlooked. Were they considered superfluous, perhaps, for a god so discreet as not to demand them? For a first, long moment, no one noticed, in the celestial crush, that Prajāpati was gone. Everything went on as it always had, no function faltered. For a long time nobody realized, until one evening, as the shadows drew in, someone began to tell the legend of the beginning. At which, once again, there emerged, if only in words, the image of an elusive, indistinct, faceless figure, who had no name, and whom they could only call Prajāpati, Progenitor.