III
The Father saw the dawn. He saw the beauty of the Daughter rising. In the first cold light he was filled by a flame, to the tips of his fingernails. The flame beat there like a wave on rocks — then retreated. Now, in that leaden light, he wanted to go further. But was there a further? Had there ever been one? It was the body of Uṣas, Dawn, first white, now pink, that offered itself to the Father, as the light climbed upward.
The Father desired. This was no longer the heat he lived by, the furnace within that lit up the cavern of the mind. No, this heat was already darting out from his body, licking along Uṣas’s soft skin. The Father got closer and closer to the Daughter, in silence. But why did Uṣas suddenly have the hide of an antelope? The Father was aware of raising antelope’s hooves toward her, to caress her. A stronger light mingled with the radiance of the dawn, a light that emanated from the Father, but dazzled him too. He wasn’t sure whether he was embracing Uṣas’s breasts or the soft fur of an antelope. Prajāpati wrapped himself right around the Daughter, penetrated her, just as she hitherto had nestled in him. For the first time the Father’s phallus opened a path into the darkness of Dawn. Neither spoke. Dawn and heat were superimposed, one on the other, coinciding, as if inside and outside were the same cloth, faintly stirred by the wind. Around them there had never been anything distinct, only now did it seem that an outline began to form. The heat grew, almost to incandescence. All that could be sensed was the breathing of Prajāpati and Uṣas, the almost imperceptible movement of their bodies glued together.
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 Prajāpati withdrew from Uṣas. The arrow pierced his groin, opening a wound no bigger than a grain of barley, while his phallus squirted its seed onto the ground. Prajāpati’s mouth foamed with anger and pain. On her back, almost imperceptibly, the abandoned Uṣas trembled.
Such was the scene that lies behind all other scenes, the scene every other scene repeats, alters, distorts, breaks up, reconstructs, for it is from this dawn scene that the world descends. Were there witnesses? All around was nothing but emptiness — and a gust of wind. Yet there were those who saw, silent and greedy-eyed: thirty-three (or three hundred and thirty-nine? or three thousand, three hundred and thirty-nine?) gods crowded the balconies of the sky. They exchanged glances, annoyed. They said: “Prajāpati is doing something that’s never been done before.” They looked around for someone able to punish him. None of the gods had the power to strike Prajāpati. They exchanged glances again, conspiracy in their eyes, all thinking the same name, never pronounced: Rudra.
The gods harbored an ancient rancor toward Prajāpati. They didn’t understand this solitary, suffering father whom they were constantly obliged to heal through sacrifice. Above all they couldn’t forgive him for having generated Death. For though the gods were the first to gain the sky and had fed ever since on amṛta, the liquid that is the “immortal,” they knew that one day, however immensely far off, Death would catch up with them. They were terrified of blinking their eyelids, because they knew that anything that blinks dies. With staring eyes, they watched the hard stones of their palaces, waiting for a veil of dust to settle there, harbinger of earth and death.
When they saw how Prajāpati was gazing at Uṣas and how Uṣas was responding to that gaze, coating herself in a rosy moistness, the gods were appalled. Not because Uṣas was his daughter. All women were his daughters. But because Prajāpati was the other world. He could generate, but that was all. To touch one of his own creatures, to penetrate her: that would throw every order out of order, would negate the whole world order, of which the gods considered themselves the guardians, even in opposition to their Father.
The first thing the gods thought of was to terrify the Father. They wanted to stop him from touching the Daughter at all costs. Like shrewd surgeons they extracted the most ghastly shapes from inside themselves. Then they put them together to make Rudra. This way the Father would be forced to confront the dreadful side of existence. Infatuation wasn’t everything. Prajāpati couldn’t just abandon himself to that illusion, after having generated them together with Death. Rudra’s sharp cry rang out. That sound that pierces all others. “You’ll remember this, Father,” the gods thought, pleased with their revenge.
The obscure Rudra, still lurking in that undifferentiated fullness that precedes all creation, in that state of being at once implicit and closed in upon himself, agreed to split into a double that turned to face an external progenitor, indeed his own eventual progenitor, Prajāpati. And Prajāpati opened his eyes on the indistinct, recognizing it as his own kin, the substance whence something would detach itself to exist separately. He felt his own daughter Uṣas issue forth from him, spreading first light across tremendous expanse. Then Prajāpati discovered the unprecedented pleasure of one who looks at something he does not possess. For the daughter now stretched out across all that was shapeless, was certainly not the same daughter who had dwelled within him. She was a stranger, the first foreigner. Prajāpati burned. From the tips of his toes to the hair on his head, something was rising within him, transforming and baking him, bringing his body to a state of readiness, as though for something other. Suddenly he realized that this fire was flickering out of him, toward the Daughter.
As Prajāpati moved his antelope hooves (and he hadn’t even noticed the metamorphosis) toward Uṣas, fullness became aware of a breach being opened within, of an airy space, a void between the Father’s body and the Daughter’s. In that same void quivered Rudra’s arrow, the arrow the Archer was, shortly afterward, to let fly at Prajāpati. Shortly afterward: that delay, that interval, was time, all time, all the time there would ever be, all of history, all the stories that would invisibly cloak all existence. It was the precondition of every claim to existence. That arrow reasserted, even as it punished, the breach that had been opened in fullness. It transformed the void, once and for all, into a wound.
Prajāpati’s impulsive gesture, when he turned toward a still unfinished world, was a desire and a letting fly, a hiss. Visṛj-, sṛj-: those are its verbs. In sṛj- there was the letting fly, the spurting forth; in vi- the pervasive spreading out, in all directions. When Rudra let fly his arrow at Prajāpati, who spurted his seed toward Uṣas, this first of all actions likewise split apart. Even in the instant itself, even in that first instant, nothing would ever be one alone. As Prajāpati spread his seed in the void, the arrow opened a wound in his groin, a rift that looked forward to all other rifts. Through that metallic point, the barely created world penetrated he who had created it. It turned against the Father, injected its poison into him. To the fullness that turned impulsively outward corresponded a tiny void that was forming within that fullness.