Image: “Watering the roots of the wishing tree”, retrofuturistic concept art © Mukesh Singh for Grant Morrison’s 18 Days based on the Mahabharata, Liquid Comics. Lo-res public copy.
Over 2023–2024, I wrote two longform lyric essays for Asymptote Retellings, a blog column featuring essays on the translations of myths in world literature.
My thanks to my lovely editor Bella Creel who lets me play joyfully in my multiversal sandbox but always asks the necessary questions that make the work better.
My thanks also to Asymptote, who published, long back, my first multilingual poetry Grammar of the Goddess and first experimental translation Vibhuti Pada: The Chapter of Dubious Glories (Chapter 3, Yoga Sutras of Patanjali). This publication occupies a truly unique place in bringing visibility and support to world literature and translation—130 countries, 116 languages, and 19 Nobel laureates at last count—all without steady institutional funding. Please support them if you can.
Click the titles to read the essays in full on Asymptote. More coming in 2025 in a slightly different format!
This is my last post for this year, a little ahead of schedule. I really appreciate that you’ve read and supported 🌳 The Enchanted Forest ✨. Thank you 🙏🏼
The Dance of Śiva
All myths are acts of translation through space and time, mind and word—one way or another. Here we have a myth whose genesis was, in itself, an ambitious act of translation. Drawing from Sanskrit and Tamil sources as well as science and art, this essay explores the myth and metaphor of the cosmic dancer.
Featured under Editors’ Picks, ‘the best longform nonfiction storytelling’, on Longreads; selected by Peter Rubin (WIRED).
Excerpt 1
A life in which the gods are not invited is not worth living. It will be quieter, but there won’t be any stories.
– Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony
There was sound and the sound was colossal. From within the pulsing sound, from the heart of the creation and dissolution of the cosmos, a single beat could be heard—ḍam1. Incantatory, the beat started to repeat—ḍam ḍam ḍam ḍam ḍam ḍam ḍam. The beat was coming from the ḍamaru, a small handheld drum. There was a god and he was dancing. He was Śiva and he shook all the worlds.
Excerpt 2
“In the night of Brahma, Nature is inert, and cannot dance till Shiva wills it: He rises from His rapture, and dancing sends through inert matter pulsing waves of awakening sound, and lo! matter also dances appearing as a glory round about Him. Dancing, He sustains its manifold phenomena. In the fulness of time, still dancing, he destroys all forms and names by fire and gives new rest. This is poetry; but none the less, science,” Coomaraswamy writes.
There has been a long line of physicists—Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Oppenheimer, and many others—who, regardless of whether they are confounded or outraged or intrigued or inspired by Indian intellectual traditions, engage with its philosophies, texts, and practitioners. But it is not until Capra’s much-lauded and much-criticised 1975 book The Tao of Physics that the door to such crossovers is unlocked in the popular imagination. When a door is open, all sorts of things tend to blow in, but I digress.
keywords
#sound #word #grammar #language #translation #art #sculpture #movement #yoga #dance #physics #religion #myth #knowledge #enchantment #transformation
language tags
English, Sanskrit, Tamil
place tags
CERN, Chidambaram, Himalayas, India, Kailasa, Mir Space Station, Tibet
writer tags
Akkā Mahādevī, Aldous Huxley, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Appar, Bharata, C Sivaramamurti, Carl Sagan, Fritjof Capra, Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell, Pāṇini, Patañjali, Roberto Calasso, Stella Kramrisch, Ursula K Le Guin, Vidya Dehejia, Vladimir Lenin
Image: Shiva Nataraja in an artwork of unknown title © Abhishek Singh. Lo-res public copy. His art is the real deal, able to transmit in real time the awesome cosmic principles underlying divine forms and functions.
Serpentine
Drawing from mythological, religious, and shamanic traditions across the world, this essay attempts to trace the winding path of serpents across world literature, seeing within the philosophical concepts, complex stories, and atavistic emotions they inspire.
Featured on Lit Hub Daily: June 25, 2024, ‘the best of the literary internet, every day’.
Excerpt 1
In every story, if you go back, as far back as you can, to the point where every horizon disappears, you find a snake, the tree, water.
– Roberto Calasso, Ka
When the word nāga (Sanskrit: serpent) is uttered, the first syllable must rear its hood in the air like a cobra, and the second must root into the earth like the coil it lifts itself from. The sound is the word. Where the ouraeus, the symbol of the rearing Egyptian cobra, Naja haje, is found, it’s an unmistakable mark of sovereignty, the golden hood that guards the head that wears the crown. The symbol is the deed. Sound, symbol, story—myth is the skin beneath the skin of the world, that which shapes from within.
Excerpt 2
Long before there were Bollywood films featuring icchādhārī nāgins—shapeshifting snakewomen—in tales of love and magic, treasure and revenge, and quite a lot of dancing; long before I learned the phallic significance of serpents (girl dreams of snakes, ōhō, they say, hand to flushed cheek); there was nature and myth and lore close to the ground, closer to home.
The first thing you notice is that the temperature drops. When you step off the roughly paved circumambulation path of the elegant Kerala temple, you enter a different world. Blue sky gives way to cool, densely green grove, green water body. The earth under your bare feet is no longer the red-brown coastal alluvium; it feels altogether different—gray-black and cottony soft, achurn from the invisible work of earthworms, padded with fallen leaves slowly turning to humus. Hundreds upon hundreds of species—fauna, flora, funga—grow wild together. There are rare medicinal plants. And, of course, snakes. Sarppakkāvu in Malayalam (Sanskrit: sarpa, serpent), sacred serpent grove. Beneath spreading arayāls (Ficus religiosa) and pērāls (Ficus benghalensis), ancient serpent deities carved from black granite, lone or twinned, plied with crystal salt and turmeric and sesame oil lamps. Sometimes milk, for the milk ocean. You do not take away a single leaf from the grove; you do not pluck a single flower. You protect, and in return, you are protected.
keywords
#serpent #tree #water #word #name #language #liminality #knowledge #enchantment #transformation #myth #religion #shamanism
language tags
Aboriginal languages, Akkadian, Arabic, Egyptian, English, Fon, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hopi, Italian, Latin, Malayalam, Nahuatl, Old Norse, Sanskrit, Spanish, Yucatec
place tags
Amazon, Australia, Benin, Brazil, Egypt, England, Gondwana, Greece, Himalayas, India, Kerala, Mesopotamia, Norway, Peru, Sumer, Togo, United States, Yucatán
writer tags
Aldous Huxley, Dante Alighieri, Frank Herbert, Friedrich August Kekulé, Heilung, Hesiod, JK Rowling, Jeremy Narby, John Milton, Ovid, Roberto Calasso, Rudyard Kipling, Saemund Stigfusson, Snorri Sturluson, Umberto Eco, Ursula K Le Guin, Vonda McIntyre, Wade Davis
Image: Basohli Serpents, India, 17th C, Artstor
#asymptote #retellings #longform #essay #lyricessay
In published pieces, I use IAST for lossless transliteration/romanisation of Indic scripts, or similar systems where necessary for other scripts. For this newsletter, however, I stick to simple spelling. Update: Such a mix isn’t working. I’m going to use the systems throughout. Hope you enjoy diacritics, special characters, and suchlike as much as I do! Words might look more complex, but we’ll be closer to them in sound and spirit.