Gospel & Universe ♒️ A River Journey

Heraclitus: Athens & Allahabad

One flight, fifteen metro stops and a half-hour walk later, you look down at Athens with your newly-minted philosophic eyes. The city below, with its crosses and temples, its markets and tavernas, is the backdrop of a cosmic play, performed in the theatre of Herodes Atticus. Far in the distance, you can almost see the Aegean.

On the left, if you could see that far, lie Crete, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. The professors say that Philosophy and Art began in Greece. Yet your eyes are playing tricks on you, and your mind is full of maps.

You look out over the city but you don’t see a river. And yet you know that the Ilisos River is below you, at the foot of the Acropolis somewhere.

Buried beneath cars and concrete, it flows around the Acropolis and makes it way to the Mediterranean Sea.

You remember the wisdom of rivers, from the Dordogne to the Tiber: everything changes. And you know that rivers drain into the sea, losing the very quality that defines what they are. No wonder poets and mystics are fond of rivers. The Sufis call it the annihilation of the self.

And you know that one sea flows into the next, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Cape of Good Hope. The greatest of mountains crumble into the sea, and everything is swallowed by outer space. Galactic walls shift, and the universe itself is in constant change. It’s just a matter of scale.

Perhaps because rivers, oceans, mountains, and the sky have existed for as long as humans have had eyes, they’re used as symbols, the river entering the sea symbolizing existence & inevitability, and the mountain facing the sky symbolizing power & infinity. Yet each greatness, calculated to whatever power, has its limit. One can see what it means mathematically to double or triple a distance, to say seven leagues to the power of seven. Yet what about seven leagues to the power of infinity — 7 x 7 x 7 x 7 x 7 x 7 x 7, ad infinitum? Seven might be a magical number to some, but does it matter, at such a magnitude, whether it’s a six or a seven? Anything to the power of infinity equals infinity. Or, as Blake put it in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.” This is perhaps why many of the old philosophers loved geometry and numbers, because they were the only way to prove that there’s no end.

The Ganges, though flowing from the foot of Vishnu and through Siva’s hair, is not an ancient stream. Geology, looking further than religion, knows of a time when neither the river nor the Himalayas that nourished it existed, and an ocean flowed over the holy places of Hindustan. (Ch. 12)

Mountains crumble and rivers change their course. The Amazon once flowed into the Pacific Ocean. The Mississippi alters its course every thousand years. Even more dramatically, the Saraswati River simply disappeared.

The Saraswati was a river in the north-west of India. It was along the banks of this river that the poetry of the Vedas was first composed, sometime around the middle of the second millennium BC. In later times, Saraswati was more associated with the Arts than with the river itself. A mix of Athena and the Muses, she still inspires the finest that humans can muster in words, music, and wisdom.

Along her banks the mystic poets chanted, their words flowing down the centuries, from poet to poet, until the great river disappeared. A trick of hydrology played by Time.

And then the Saraswati reappeared, in a subterranean dimension visible only to sadhus and sanyasis, poets and mystics. No longer manifest to the eye, she now flows eastward and unites with the Ganges and the Yamuna at the city of Prayagraj (or Allahabad). The union of the three rivers — or the three graceful goddesses — is marked every 12 years by the largest religious gathering in the world: 30 to 50 million pilgrims come to the great Kumbh Mela, which means the gathering at the waters of immortality.

This seems a million miles from the theatres of Athens and the Aegean Sea. Yet you remember the first time you saw the great river. It was back in 1980 and you were in Rishikesh, in the foothills of the Himalayas northwest of Delhi. You crossed the Ganges on a footbridge, eager to get to the other side, to see the ashram where the Beatles and Donovan played for the Maharishi. The doors of the ashram were closed, so you went down to the river and walked out onto a small promontory.

Even back then you were a fan of Keats. You remembered his poem about the mists surrounding Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in the U.K.

Read me a lesson, Muse, and speak it loud
Upon the top of Nevis, blind in mist!
I look into the chasms, and a shroud
Vapourous doth hide them, — just so much I wist
Mankind do know of hell; I look o’erhead,
And there is sullen mist, — even so much
Mankind can tell of heaven; mist is spread
Before the earth, beneath me, — even such,
Even so vague is man’s sight of himself!
Here are the craggy stones beneath my feet, —
Thus much I know that, a poor witless elf,
I tread on them, — that all my eye doth meet
Is mist and crag, not only on this height,
But in the world of thought and mental might!

Looking out over the Acropolis and the invisible Ilisos River, you wonder what Heraclitus would think of the Indus and the Ganges, and that other river, invisible to the eye, strung with Vedic poems as if on a line of music. Would he see Saraswati’s maidens dancing in single file, out from the mists of time? The major work of Heraclitus, now found only in fragments, begins with the line, Of this Logos being forever do men prove to be uncomprehending, both before they hear and once they have heard it.

Unlike the covered Ilisos River, the Ganges isn’t so easy to overlook! And yet, as big as it already is at Rishikesh, it has a thousand leagues to go before it reaches the sea.

A dozen or so kilometres downriver from Rishikesh, the Ganges flows through Haridwar, which has a smaller Kumbh Mela every 12 years.

What a fantastic jostling of spires, pink lights, and humanity! What a world apart from Paris and the vineyards of the Dordogne, where rivers are rivers and never turn into goddesses. The Hindus think of the Ganges as Ganga, her water flowing down through the locks of Shiva to the Sea. Even more perplexing to those who follow the religions of Abraham, the Sea is called Shiva, Vishnu, Mahadevi, God, Brahman, and the Absolute. The more the merrier.

They sang not even to the God who confronted them, but to a saint; they did not one thing which the non-Hindu would feel dramatically correct; this approaching triumph of India was a muddle (as we call it), a frustration of reason and form. Where was the God Himself, in whose honour the congregation had gathered? Indistinguishable in the jumble of His own altar, huddled out of sight amid images of inferior descent, smothered under rose-leaves, overhung by oleographs, outblazed by golden tablets representing the Rajah’s ancestors, and entirely obscured, when the wind blew, by the tattered foliage of a banana. (A Passage to India, XXXIII)

You’re shaken from this Indian side-trip by loud tourists behind you taking selfies of the Acropolis. You look out again over the city.

Above you hang the stage-lights of the sky and beneath you stands the great theatre of the cosmos, stretching from the Aegean to worlds that you can only imagine.

You imagine sitting on the banks of the Ganges with mud smeared across your brow. You’re a sadhu, a sanyasi, a rishi who can see a river that the camera on your iPhone can’t locate. You feel the river dancing beneath you, deep below. You’re on the banks of the Ganges and at the same time you’re in your cave meditating, high in the mountains around Gangotri, where the Ganges first springs from the earth.

But elsewhere, deeper in the granite, are there certain chambers that have no entrances? Chambers never unsealed since the arrival of the gods. Local report declares that these exceed in number those that can be visited, as the dead exceed the living—four hundred of them, four thousand or million. Nothing is inside them, they were sealed up before the creation of pestilence or treasure; if mankind grew curious and excavated, nothing, nothing would be added to the sum of good or evil. One of them is rumoured within the boulder that swings on the summit of the highest of the hills; a bubble-shaped cave that has neither ceiling nor floor, and mirrors its own darkness in every direction infinitely. (A Passage to India, XII)

You hear the ancient Sanskrit words chanted to the sound of a sitar played by Saraswati herself. The sounds drift across the world, across what Hindus refer to as the akasha of infinite space. The sounds bend here and there into the swooping notes of a flute in the Taj Mahal on the banks of the Yamuna, the acid&drone of a hurdy-gurdy in an ashram overlooking the Ganges, and the sounds of a zither floating in the rafters of a chateau several kilometres north of the Dordogne.

Rivers run everywhere, and everything changes. As you watch the sun set over the Greek theatre, everything seems to be part of a cosmic play — divine comedy, comédie humaine, tragedy, farce — qui sait?

You cannot find him who created these creatures; another [an evil priest or ignorance itself] has come between you. Those who recite the hymns are glutted with the pleasures of life; they wander about wrapped up in mist and stammering nonsense. (Rg Veda 10.82, trans. Wendy Doniger)

This disillusionment is as old as the Modern English you speak. It isn’t something foreign, something that you need to go to the Dordogne, Rome, Athens, or Allahabad to discover.

And like the baseless fabric of this vision, / The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, / The solemn temples, the great globe itself— / Yea, all which it inherit—shall dissolve, / And like this insubstantial pageant faded, / Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff / As dreams are made on … (Shakespeare, The Tempest)

Because we don’t really know the nature of God or the afterlife, we make up theories based on stories. We construct cloud-capped towers and solemn temples in our minds, as we wander along the Tiber, up the Acropolis, or through the countryside east of Bordeaux. Etched into the marble of the Taj Mahal or into the rafters of a private library in the Dordogne, it’s the same rhetorical question: What do we know? The answer of course is: Not much.

From the Acropolis you look down at the Roman theatre, the Odeon of Herodes Atticus. You remember that you were here before, back in 1976, before they put fences around the Parthenon. Back then you were able to sit reading your guide-book version of Greek philosophy, leaning against a column. What kind of difference does 40 years make?

You try to remember that line by Heraclitus about a river, about believing that you’re in the same place, but because time has passed, it’s not the same place at all. The flow also suggests that our lives are just one moment when we dipped our toe into the stream. One fleeting moment that lasts about 70 years. Is that what he meant? And how is that different from Camus’ metaphor, when he likens our being to water running through our fingers?

You remember the words of Marcus Aurelius: “Remember Matter, and how tiny your share of it. Remember Time, and how brief your allotment of it. Remember Fate, and how small a role you play in it.” All of this reminds you of Heraclitus’ notion that life is a fleeting moment that can never be repeated. Potamoisi toisin autoisin something something something.

As you look out over the Roman theatre in Greece, you wonder why you need to remember the exact words, as if this sort of wisdom has to come from one place, or from some deep sage who you’ll never fully understand. Yet what does it matter if it was Heraclitus talking about a river in Greece or Gilgamesh talking about death on the banks of the Euphrates? What does it matter if our understanding of transience comes from Heraclitus or from Shankara, from Cicero or Zhuangzi? What does it matter if you find it in Antigone or Shakuntala, in the Iliad or the Mahabharata, in the Odyssey or the Ramayana? To ruminate comes from Latin, but is cognate with the Sanskrit romantha, “the act of chewing the cud.” Mutability comes from Latin, but is cognate with the Sanskrit minati, “he exchanges, he deceives.”

Still wondering about Heraclitus’ phrase, Potamoisi toisin autoisin embainousin hetera kai hetera hudata epirrei, you admit to yourself that you don’t understand a word of it. It’s not just Greek to you — it’s Ancient Greek! And Ancient Greek is very close, historically-speaking, to Sanskrit, which you also don’t understand. But the connection between the two languages you can understand. And you can understand that even the greatest of rivers changes its course, runs dry, and is swallowed underground.

♒️

Like skeptics, agnostics tend to believe that you can never step in the same river twice. Nor do you breathe the same air or see the same sky. Forget about Proust and his madeleine dipped in tea. The past is an abstraction based on the idiosyncrasies of human memory; the future is an abstract projection based on the limitations of our understanding. And yet it’s worth remembering the experience of living — of dipping your toe in the river, splashing water on your face, wading into the depths, and swimming. Of dipping your madeleine into the tea. It’s also worth knowing that the water is always different, from one moment to the next; that the river has come from sources that are hidden from your experience and from your understanding; that the river is going somewhere you can’t go, unless you’re willing to flow past Bordeaux, Ostia Antica, and Benares into the sea. It’s worth remembering that the river may change its course or disappear, and that the only thing you have is the moment.

Beneath your fingers, you feel the stone wall in front of you and feel the air breathe across the city. From where you are, the lines of experience flow everywhere — in water, on land, or along the ramparts of the Acropolis and into the sky, somewhere in the Milky Way.

The roadways stretch everywhere, from where you never were, to where you are, to where you’ll never be.

You smile wryly at the paradox: you know that you really don’t know anything. And yet you’ve written about it anyway. You can write I don’t know confidently because the phrase expresses a paradoxical understanding of the moment. Yet you still don’t know where those three little words came from or where they’re going.

♒️

Next: Rushdie’s Sea of Stories

Back to Top

Table of Contents - Annotated Contents - Layout - Core Beliefs