The Prospects of Memory

D. SHULMAN THE PROSPECTS OF MEMORY You say, ‘After I know what lies ahead, I’ll forget what went before.’ Can you know what lies ahead? How can you forget what went before?1 1. RECOGNITION It is springtime, a sad and lonely spring; Dus. yanta, amnesiac hero of  sakuntala,  is going home. He has Kalidasa’s masterpiece, the Abhijn~ana completed his most recent mission in heaven, destroying Indra’s demon foes; this latest feat has temporarily extricated the king from the forlorn and self-pitying state to which his own forgetfulness had reduced him. This act of forgetting was the central, defining episode of Dus. yanta’s career; and his story, now cyclically moving toward closure in the final act of Kalidasa’s play, is undoubtedly the most famous meditation on memory and forgetting in the whole classical literature of India. It is this aspect of the work that I wish to explore, together with a glance at related themes in the linguistic domain as formulated by Bhartr. hari  ıya, perhaps some decades after K in the Vakya-pad alidasa. Let me remind you of the main lines of the story. Some six or seven years before, Dus. yanta, hunting in the wilderness, had stumbled on the  a, whom he eventually left, pregnant innocent and ravishing Sakuntal with child and with hope, to return to his kingdom. Unfortunately,  a, heedless with longing, was then cursed by the irascible sage Sakuntal Durvasas to be forgotten by her lover – until the moment when that lover would see again a concrete token of their love. In due course  a arrived in Dus. yanta’s court, only to be publicly rejected by Sakuntal the king, who, of course, had no recollection of ever meeting or loving her. Only later, when the ring he had given her, engraved with the syllables of his name, miraculously turned up in the belly of a fish, did Dus. yanta recover the memory of a love now cruelly lost. Despairing, heavy with remorse, he has submerged his sorrows in the military campaign just mentioned. Now, descending through the skies toward the earth, Dus. yanta pauses to pay his respects to the divine Kasyapa on Hemakut.a Mountain. But Journal of Indian Philosophy 26: 309–334, 1998. c 1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 310 D. SHULMAN here he encounters a young boy, fearlessly playing with a lion cub; and the king unexpectedly feels a strange kinship with this child, and  khalu durlalitay  asmai).  a sense of eager hope (spr. hayami He touches him, and his body thrills: He is someone’s child: yet my body delights in a touch that must overwhelm the awareness of that happy man, his father.2 The certain indicator of consciousness and its contents is, we note, the body, which cannot lie. We are firmly within the paradigm of knowledge that dominates this drama: the boy, of course, is Dus. yanta’s own son by  a, the son he has never seen but whom he nonetheless recognizes Sakuntal without realizing it. He knows but does not know that he knows. The next few minutes supply him with several more hints about the child’s identity, and his hope swells to the point where he can say, ‘This story  eva laks.  seems to be aiming at me’ (iyam ı-karoti). . khalu katha mam Notice the wording: there is a story, which seeks a target or a subject; the king may turn out to be the one who supplies this need. Soon hints   give way to certainty: the child is Dus. yanta’s, and Sakuntal a is nearby; the lovers are reunited, not without an initial moment of doubt and confusion; the king’s cruelty has evolved – so he optimistically asserts – into a harmonious conclusion, now that he has been recognized by her   . sam (krauryam api me tvayi prayuktam anukula-parin . amam . vr. ttam . yad  ım   anam   aham idan atm pasyami). Naturally, there . tvaya pratyabhijn~atam are some tears, and something akin to apologies: those whose minds are unclear act even in normally happy circumstances as Dus. yanta did, just as a blind man throws off a garland in panic lest it be a snake. Such, in any case, are the analogies and excuses the king offers the woman he has offended. There is a slight contretemps over the love-token, the slippery ring that was missing at the crucial moment of forgetting and rejection and that   only turned up later, too late to prevent the disaster. Sakuntal a notices it on her husband’s finger; he explains that this is how his memory returned, and tries to give it back to her. She, however, refuses to accept it: for one thing, she is all too conscious of the ‘crooked twist’ (vis. amam) it caused;   moreover, she doesn’t trust it (n. a se vissasami/n a^smai visvasami). This is a remarkable enough statement, which should suffice in its own right to demolish any reading of the story in terms of the technical or   mechanical unfolding of a curse. Sakuntal a has excellent reason not to trust the workings of memory – hers or his – with or without the ring. It is also striking, and rather moving, that the little boy, who has just THE PROSPECTS OF MEMORY 311 met his father for the first time, continues to doubt and suspect him throughout this entire scene. ‘Let me go to my mother’, he cries when   a, Dus. yanta first embraces him;3 and later he complains to Sakuntal ‘Who is this man who keeps calling me his son?’ The certainty that Dus. yanta slowly attains eludes the boy who has triggered it. Still, this is a moment of what another tradition would think of as anagnorisis, with the concomitant clearing up of all residual queries and hesitations on the part of all concerned; the great Kasyapa himself will shortly confirm the tale of the curse and its effects, thus relieving Dus. yanta of the crushing burden of guilt. It was not, after all, his fault; by his words Durvasas had created the mental confusion that made the king forget;  a should let go of anger (this is Kasyapa’s recommendation). Sakuntal One would think – indeed, the scholastic tradition of commentary on this play has always asserted – that the conflict embodied in the play has now been fully resolved, and lasting harmony achieved.   And yet at precisely this concluding juncture both Sakuntal a and  Dus. yanta respond in unexpected ways. Sakuntala accepts the explanation offered, but she still insists, eloquently and correctly, that she herself has no memory of having been cursed. How striking that in the context of this supposedly final restoration of memory the heroine is left in a state of ‘forgetting!’ One might go so far as to see this slight line as actually expressing something of the hidden meta-communication of Kalidasa’s  a has her own expressive explanation of what play. Moreover, Sakuntal happened: her heart was “empty” or distracted because of her longing   so she simply failed to notice the for Dus. yanta (viraha-sunya-hr . daya), curse as it was uttered. It is a convincing statement, once again far   removed from any mechanical rationale; Sakuntal a is speaking, out of experience, of an emptiness that is paradoxically “full” of absence. Equally impressive is the verse that Dus. yanta now sings – surely the culminating articulation of the entire epistemology proper to this drama: Like someone who, staring at an elephant, insists ‘There is no elephant’; who then, as it moves away, feels a certain doubt and, on seeing its footprints, is certain: ‘An elephant has been here’ – such is the aberrant working of my mind. (7.31) The verse is synoptic and precise, as well as paradigmatic in every sense; we need have no doubt about its intended applicability to all  – the ‘aberrant human minds. The king speaks of what he calls vikara working’ of consciousness, an active mode that seems to produce 312 D. SHULMAN memory only in the context of traumatic forgetting. The word or its synonyms and allied derivatives recur throughout our text.4 In the following pages, I will attempt to explore this paradigm of aberration, seen, evidently, as constituting human awareness, identity, and selfknowledge through the internal processes that this drama personifies and displays. In conjunction with this theme, I suggest a particular understanding of what it means to tell or live within an evolving story that is wedded to a name, a telos, or a sign. 2. UNDOING AND RESTORING  – if vikara  is built into consciousness – If the mind works through vikara then it is perhaps misleading to call it an aberration. Looking at the root, vi-kr. , we might speak of an ‘un-making’, a ‘taking [or doing] apart’, perhaps even a ‘de-formation’ (but a deformation that is actually the major component of ‘formation’). There is also reason to think in terms of a process of displacement, which opens space, especially insofar as  to this process is heavily linguistic. In any case, assuming this vikara be a central narrative theme enacted by the king’s expressive act of forgetting, we would surely be justified in describing the plot as a whole as a movement through this deforming dislocation of consciousness in the direction of a restoration or re-location.5 It is, then, somewhat remarkable that one of the opening verses of the play seems to adopt precisely this language, proleptically laying down the major thematic premises of the work (just as the Sanskrit critics so often insist these initial verses are meant to do).6 We first meet Dus. yanta as he is hotly pursuing a deer with his chariot, at the same time admiring the effect of the vehicle’s velocity on his alert perception of the landscape:   . mam  yad aloke suks . vrajati sahasa tad vipulatam  iva tat / yad ardhe vicchinnam . bhavati kr. ta-sandhanam prakr. tya yad vakram . tad api sama-rekham . nayanayor  kim  sve ratha-javat  // [1.9] na me dure . -cit ks. an. am api na par What at first glance seems minute rapidly extends to vast proportions. What is cut in two is soon reconstituted. Whatever is naturally crooked straightens its lines before my eyes. Nothing remains far from me even for a moment, just as nothing stays near. THE PROSPECTS OF MEMORY 313  . mam), Rapid movement magnifies whatever is small or subtle (suks unifies the disconnected, levels the twisted or bent or uneven (vakram), and conflates the distant and the near (seen in temporal context). A  progression sustains a present rich with self-unifying violent (sahasa)  perception. Note in particular the term sandhana, the ‘reconstitution’ that is achieved by whatever has been broken in half (from the root  ‘to place together’, ‘synthesize’). I note in passing that this sam-dha, verse resumes, syntactically and metrically, the basic structure and texture of the opening invocation, with its cosmological concerns, and of other verses still to come – for example, one describing Dus. yanta’s rapid descent in his chariot from heaven toward earth at the beginning of Act VII (7.8). As others have noted, an evocative recursivity is powerfully and deliberately embedded in the structure of this text.7 Texture cannot be paraphrased. Nonetheless, it may be possible to state, in a tentative way, something of the thematic potential of the chariot-verse. Perception seems to incorporate a gap, one that can be bridged by movement. This gap gives rise to a certain distortion in dimension, in contour, in spatial sensation generally. Both the distortion or dislocation and its subsequent levelling are important, as is the directionality implicit in the movement. An initial disalignment or  incongruity give way, through rapid movement, to sandhana, “realignment”. A similar process may take place within awareness – particularly in relation to issues of memory and forgetting. Moreover, we would do well to bear in mind that this opening description arises out of the   hunt; the king’s entrance into Sakuntal a’s wilderness space is mostly, in itself, violent and heedless; and if, as the verse suggests, issues of perception and knowledge are implicit already in the beginning, then there may be an aspect of knowing and seeing that is no less violent than what happens in the spatial domain.8 Dus. yanta’s rapacious intrusion into the wilderness is the first stage of a necessary extrusion of self, a self that is cognitively rather primitive, even impaired; the following stages lead through desire and love to self-forgetting, and thence to  a, naturally, will go through her own, perhaps painful recovery. Sakuntal complementary process, which we first contemplate under the rubric of consequential ‘ripening’. 3. ON CHANGING DIRECTION These complementaries have been noted many times. Raghavabhat.t.a,  the doyen of Sanskrit commentators on the Sakuntala, is also incisively aware of an ongoing, mutually reflective process unfolding within 314 D. SHULMAN the two main figures of this drama. I cite the penetrating analysis by E. Gerow, which is informed both by rasa-theory and by structural . yasastra  concerns proper to the Nat tradition.9 But my primary concern is with issues of forgetting and knowing, and for this purpose it may suffice to concentrate on the pressing contrasts between these two lovers in their oddly non-synchronized movement – within a slightly wider context of enveloping seasonal, thermodynamic, and psycho-chromatic changes. Here the most striking element is, perhaps, the reversed directionality of their respective development. To put it bluntly: Dus. yanta seems quite incapable of forward movement. He is always in reverse, obsessed with retrograde or regressive unravelling. Even the most trivial examples embody this theme to perfection. Look, for instance, at the verse that   closes Act I. Dus. yanta has by now met Sakuntal a and fallen in love;  anam  . nivartayitum) he can, in fact, no longer ‘turn himself back’ (atm from a swiftly developing obsession with this young woman (note that this verb, ni-vr. t, ‘to turn back’, serves as a semantic leitmotif in the  a, too, for her part, has been reluctant to leave the scene; play). Sakuntal she finds a pretext – her foot, she says, has been pricked by a thorn, and her dress is caught on a branch – to linger, looking back at the king. Always the backward glance: Dus. yanta will later revert to it again and again in his mind, as he tries to decide whether or not his love is reciprocated (see 2.12). As she finally extricates herself and leaves, the king finds himself caught up in antithetical movement: My body moves forward, while my mind, out of step, turns back like a silken flag flapping in the wind. (1.31) Such is this lover’s habitual situation; something within him is always pulling him backwards, effectively immobilizing him in terms of forward development. Earlier in this same act, he has an impulse to touch  a, but he checks himself: Sakuntal I wanted to follow the sage’s daughter but was rudely held back by the rules. I haven’t budged, though I seem to have gone and returned. (1.26)10 But is this not the common fate of lovers, especially in the early stages of their meeting? For all that, Dus. yanta seems to have a special penchant for this kind of immobility which, as the plot progresses, may THE PROSPECTS OF MEMORY 315 also reflect an internal conflict in this man caught between desire for  a and the public (dharmic) exigencies that his forgetting brings Sakuntal to the fore.11 Ultimately, it appears to be a strange case of arrested development which, by the time we observe its deepening effects under conditions of separation (in Act VI), has spread like a contagion from the king to the entire natural world: The mango has budded long ago, but still holds back its pollen. The kuravaka, eager to unfold, remains bound up in bud. The cold season has past: still, the cuckoo’s soft moan dies in its throat. Will Memory, god of desire, fail to release his half-aimed arrow? (6.4) It is spring, when love should flourish, when every flower and tree should flow with the fertile juices of desire; Manmatha, lord of desire – here pointedly called by another of his titles, Smara, Memory12 – should be discharging his flower-arrows with abandon. Instead, all of these energies are sympathetically blocked because of the king’s thwarted and frozen inner state. We can articulate this condition more precisely: the natural processes of ripening, flowering, maturation have come to a halt under the pressure of a certain retrograde vision, a backward glance that is now suffused with traumatic memory and remorse. This, it seems, is this lover’s real illness – not merely the self-reproach that emerges out of his episode of involuntary forgetfulness (which was bad enough), but, more powerfully and paradigmatically, a driving, unilateral force of retrospective memory, a mental paralysis suffused by fixed images from the past. But is not all memory retrospective? Definitely not. We can, in fact, distinguish several types or modes of remembering (and forgetting) in Hindu narratives, variously evoked in varying contexts by the Sanskrit root smr. . There is the common variety of retrospective memory, roughly similar to Platonic or other Western notions linked to this term – although there is some question as to whether the past, which does not exist and may never have existed in any sense independent of our construction of it, can in fact be ‘remembered’, or for that matter ‘forgotten’, by any  continuous subject.13 More to the point in the context of the Sakuntala, the operation of this form of memory seems to require a re-cognition, the reapplication of an experienced or cognitively preexisting pattern to a present perception.14 Love, in this light, is actually the memory of prior loving.15 A more powerful understanding of memory in classical texts 316 D. SHULMAN is, however, oriented not backwards but rather, as it were, forward – a prospective form of knowledge, usually only partly conscious, and thus linked with distinctive and often destructive varieties of forgetting. Here there is always something real, and important, that can be forgotten by a subject who is caught up in the process of his or her internal maturation.16 Very often the only remedy for this type of forgetting is the presence of another person, who recognizes the subject and somehow conjures up his or her story – just as Dus. yanta recovers his balance only  when he sees himself as having been recognized (pratyabhijn~ata) by  a, in the scene summarized above. Such prospective memory, Sakuntal together with its correlate, expressive blocking or proleptic forgetting, is  that prevalent variety of mental closely related to the notion of vikara, dislocation or aberration with which we began. Sanskrit smr. also has another important meaning, or range of meanings, connected to modes of making someone or something present; this usage is frequent, for example, in stotra texts directed to a deity.17 In some sense, all forms of memory share this propensity to create, or re-create, an experienced presence. I cannot explore this range more fully here; there is, however, a latent connection between the problem of becoming or being made present and the proleptic type of memory just mentioned. “Forgetting”, that is, may well mean a vanishing of   the subject’s presence. When Sakuntal a presents herself at-court, is Dus. yanta there? But we are getting a little ahead of ourselves. So far we have noticed that our love-lorn hero is strangely subject to processes of epistemic, or emotional, or even perhaps existential regression, in the sense of a predilection for matters or movements backwards, toward  apa  the retrospected past. His natural mode, not surprisingly, is pascatt – one of his favorite words – literally, a ‘backwards burning’, an ‘afterburning’; that is, something akin to remorse. And of course this noble and sensitive man has excellent reason to feel this way, since he so heartlessly, if unknowingly, cast off his beloved wilderness-bride. But was this truly an act of un-knowing? In the moment that marks the effective culmination of the dreadful rejection scene in Dus. yanta’s court, the king is unsure, confused (sandigdha-buddhih. ) – unwilling to   acknowledge the story that Sakuntal a has told, but far from easy in his own mind about this stance. For one thing, his body seems to recognize the woman and to want her (as later, in Act VII, his body tells him that he is in the presence of his son); despite everything, Dus. yanta   is quite unable to turn away from Sakuntal a, any more than the bee can detach itself from the frost-bitten jasmine it cannot enjoy (5.19). THE PROSPECTS OF MEMORY 317 He describes himself, with what we might take for real insight, as  . a-citta-vr. ttih. , ‘one whose mental activity has become vismaran. a-darun cruel through forgetting’ (5.23). That is to say: Dus. yanta knows that he has forgotten something; he knows that he does not know. To put the matter a little differently: there seems to be some difficulty here with Dus. yanta’s experience of sequence. Looking backwards, he is trapped and arrested, unable to advance. At the same time, a certain, half-conscious knowledge is involved; either he knows without knowing that he knows, or else he senses that he is forgetting what he somehow or somewhere knows – apparently in another part of memory or self. In this respect, his forgetting may serve some unsuspected purpose. Perhaps for Dus. yanta, retrograde movement is the only way forward. He himself poignantly plays with this notion of a confusion in sequence in the verse that directly precedes the ‘paradigm’-verse about perception (7.30) with which we began: normally, he says, the flower emerges before the fruit, and the cloud precedes the rain; such is the usual progression of cause and effect (nimitta-naimittikayor ayam . kramah. ). But the divine Kasyapa has reversed this order; the result – the working out of the king’s unfulfilled desire – has preceded Dus. yanta’s vision of the sage. In our terms: an oddly retrograde movement has unconsciously enacted the teleology implicit in an untold story. Dus. yanta’s interest in the linked notions of sequence (krama) and cause is full of meaning. We could ask, taking him as our primary exemplar: what exactly does one forget when one forgets the self? Is this always an act of retrospective amnesia? Or, on the other hand: what is it that we remember when we remember, or recover, ourselves? Does the forgetful self exist in alien form, in guise or disguise? Can the self exist in any other mode? What does it mean for a man to say, ‘My name is Dus. yanta – and I have forgotten the woman I love’? Or even worse: ‘My name is Dus. yanta, and I remember now – because of this token engraved with my name’? 4. ON RIPENING One way to begin to answer these questions is to look at the other  a’s side. Here, in marked contrast to side of the process – Sakuntal Dus. yanta’s story, we seem to find a relatively straightforward, indeed linear sequence. The term best suited to her – one she uses herself to describe her suffering, seen at the moment of final reuniting with  her lover18 – is parin. ama, which we translate as ‘ripening’, ‘evolv a undoubtedly undergoes changes as the ing’, ‘maturing’. Sakuntal 318 D. SHULMAN story develops, and these changes move her from her initial, rather unselfconscious situation in the wilderness towards the city, the royal court, and finally, following her rejection, to the Himalayan hermitage where she will raise her child. As has often been noted, she is, in the wilderness, an embodiment of natural simplicity, innocence, care – more particularly, of pure, still unexternalized potential. She issues slowly and shyly out of this state, gaining, to her sorrow, experience and awareness, rather as if the holistic wilderness creature were being seduced into the generative but inherently painful partiality of the ‘civilized’ city.19 Not by chance, the Sanskrit tradition has always declared that Act IV, the  a takes her leave of the wilderness and central moment when Sakuntal her childhood friends, is the true height of Kalidasa’s construction. Seen from her perspective, the play is focused precisely on this transition and its emotional realities – the same transition that a flower undergoes   when it unfolds. Such, indeed, is Sakuntal a’s power, the secret of her hold over the world-wise king, as he tells us in the famous verse (2.10) comparing her beauty to a flower that no-one has smelled, an unplucked shoot, an untouched jewel, untasted honey. : : : He will be the first to touch her, to awaken her, then cruelly to enlighten her, even as he himself undergoes the opposite movement of, as it were, falling asleep. And this is the point. Dus. yanta wavers in his orientation. While  a emerges from the wilderness in increasing self-evolution and Sakuntal self-awareness, he goes back and forth, never fully aligning himself with either the wilderness or the city mode, with past or future, with retrogression or advancement, with sleeping or waking. He is, as we have seen, more or less suspended between these possibilities. More precisely, in terms of the formation of his consciousness, he appears to be driven in the first instance toward the wilderness. He enters it in the aggressive style of the hunter, quite unaware of what the violence he is inflicting might mean (not merely for its animal victims but, more to the point, for his own internal state); he is then captivated by its beauty and enlivened by desire; he abandons it in order to return to his capital, his duties, his cantankerous harem – and there, in the audience chamber that constitutes the very heart of this ordered, normative domain, he is afflicted by the fatal forgetfulness that will change his life. Can we then deduce that in his case, forgetting actually reconstitutes something of what he has lost – that, whatever else is there, this amnesia is also a strange, displaced, and unanticipated way of re-entering the wilderness mode with its untouched potentialities?  a ripens into wakefulness, Dus. yanta ripens into sleep. He is If Sakuntal moving backwards – trapped in retrogression, on the one hand, but also THE PROSPECTS OF MEMORY 319 apparently very much in need of such reversion to the forest idiom, which offers the only viable alternative to the life of the conventionbound city. No wonder he continually looks back with longing! There is a sense in which forgetting is not only expressive – perhaps in ways that remembering can never be – but also paradoxically pregnant with the incipient discovery of a fuller form of being. This discovery will always be glossed as a ‘recovery’. It requires  an aberrant “un-doing”; and it can also fail, which is to say that vikara, consciousness can all too easily remain mired in retrogression. This is a real danger for Dus. yanta, the dark underside of the great opportunity that he has been given. But there is a deeper aspect to this process. As the story progresses, we see that his obsession with retrospective memory actually hides a more profound act of prospective forgetting. He has forgotten a story that has not yet fully unfolded – the story that ‘aims at’ him, as he says in Act VII, but that might just miss him. He   is perfectly suited to the curse that Sakuntal a unwittingly brings down upon him, the curse ostensibly directed at her, in Durvasas’s relentless but also brilliantly evocative formulation: You were thinking of some man, focused wholly upon him, so you failed to know me when I came near. He, then, will remember you not, no matter how you jog his mind, like an idiot who can’t recall a story told before. (4.1)20  : : : kr. tam),  The story is actually ‘made’ (katham not simply told – perhaps made by the very fool or madman (pramattah. ) who can no longer recall it. As so often, the simile is meant to apply precisely,   and remarkably literally, to the main subject; Sakuntal a will pay the emotional price of her lover’s wandering away from his own story.  a’s “empty” heart, overfull with dreamy On the other hand, Sakuntal longing, is also implicated in the cognitive debacle about to take place; for her, too, consciousness may, indeed must, sometimes slip, skip or stumble. But how can a person wander out of his or her own story? What can this mean, apart from the suggestion of madness or, at least, of wanton heedlessness? Look again at the time-frame of this curse: Durvasas, who utters it, knows what will happen and, knowing it, effects it verbally; the whole sequence is pitched in the determinate future; even Dus. yanta himself will feel obscure but powerful hints of what is about to happen, in the disquieting reaction he notes in himself to the song sung in 320 D. SHULMAN  a’s arrival, a song pregnant with lovers’ the palace before Sakuntal 21 separation. Again there is the sense of a latent, unrealized form of knowledge directed toward the future, a knowledge not available to the subject except on the level of knowing about knowing – the troubling sensation of seeing or feeling what is not fully there (and not seeing what is). But all of this suggests a powerful paradox that lies at the core of this text and provides it with structure: for if Dus. yanta has forgotten his own story, the text of his life as his intentionality and conscious agency had formed it, on another level this act of forgetting must actually constitute his story. Dus. yanta is the man who forgets   – who must forget – the one he loves, just as Sakuntal a’s “fate” is to be forgotten within her own story. Yet this view must also mean that the story itself changes: by the time memory is restored, neither  a is living out quite the same narrative, nor is Dus. yanta nor Sakuntal their experience of self, or of self-awareness, what it was before. In this they are no different from any of us, when we remember. Kalidasa  arata’s  has taken the Mahabh tale of a somewhat egotistical king’s manipulative rejection of a woman he has loved22 and transformed it into a profound essay about knowledge of self and other (in this sense  the Sakuntala is the closest analogue we have in Sanskrit to Sophocles’ Oedipus plays); and for Kalidasa, it seems, self-knowledge may include forgetting as a fundamental component or stage of epistemic experience.  The Sakuntala develops, with amazing subtlety and insight, around this central point of tension, suspended between the countervailing movements of the two main protagonists – the linear, transformative advance of the heroine and the complex oscillation, mostly a reverse progression, of the hero. Together, they describe a complementary choreography of maturing awareness, with the ambiguous “token” – the lost ring – deeply implicated in their separate processes of self  knowledge and self-forgetting. Sakuntal a, as we have seen, is, by the end, very suspicious of the ring, while Dus. yanta seems still to depend on it. Their eerily asymmetrical choreography reveals, upon inspection, other closely related features. Look, for example, at the temporal or seasonal progression the play portrays. Dus. yanta arrives in the ashram in grı.sma, the hot season, as we learn from several passages (the prologue to the play also appropriately praises grı.sma). This is a somewhat unexpected point at which to begin: in Sanskrit one normally thinks of dawning passion as related to vasanta, the spring months of Caitra and Vaisakha (roughly March–April) that follow the cold season and  precede grı.sma. The Sakuntala, however, traces a course from grı.sma through the rains and the cold months to vasanta, which provides the THE PROSPECTS OF MEMORY 321 seasonal setting for the final two acts. In general, the hot season is a moment of blockage, dessication, overheating: the world impatiently   a, this external heating seems awaits the coming of rain. For Sakuntal  an indication of her parin. ama-ripening: she is ripe even beyond the spring-time flowering, truly ready to mature in love, almost bursting with her opening selfhood. For Dus. yanta, on the other hand, another regression seems called for: from grı.sma he will, in effect, have to reach backwards toward another vasanta, toward a ripening that is, in his case, tortuous, retrograde, and indirect. He will have to sleep, to forget, to lose himself – all movements that usually accompany the   rains that lie in store23 – before he can love. Sakuntal a ripens into the full heat of an erotic efflorescence, while Dus. yanta’s love withers in the bud as he himself cools internally to a congealed cloudiness, a frozen unknowing. In chromatic terms, she is a brilliant red throughout, a fiery bud emerging from the creeper; he is a confusing oscillation of red and white, heating and cooling, forward and backward movement, but on the whole tending toward the remorseful pallor of Act VI. It is striking that only the conclusion, when a certain mutuality in self-knowledge and desire creates a modicum of symmetry, allows the suspended springtime of lovers’ union (or reunion) finally to enfold this couple, for the first time, from without. 5. TRIGGERS AND TRACES So there are two lovers, in certain ways disastrously out of step with one another, evolving in seemingly opposite directions, so much so that a great gap opens between them – a gap that is filled with longing, utkan. .tha or paryutsukatva, in various modes, the necessary concomitant of “remembering”, smaran. a.24 Once again, this may seem a fairly normal and predictable situation: longing is exactly what lovers are meant to feel, and not only in ancient India. Still, there is something particular and unusual about this specific case. We can, I believe, characterize this love-sick longing in terms relating to the epistemic focus so evident in Kalidasa’s work and in the philosophical traditions bordering upon it. Here we need to look more closely at the role and meaning of the “token” that seems to hold the key to knowing or remembering. A passage in Act VI states the issue very simply and directly. An apsaras named Sanumatı is flying over Dus. yanta’s capital and hovers low in order to overhear a pathetic conversation between the king and his clown-companion. The king is full of despair: he has by now, with the help of the rediscovered ring, fully recovered his memory, and with 322 D. SHULMAN it an agonizing sense of shame as he thinks back upon the moment   of his cruel rejection of the pregnant Sakuntal a. Much of the agony is apparently irrationally (for the king is mad, or close to madness, as the clown observes) diverted toward this hapless token whose loss supposedly triggered the collapse of memory – the same ring which  a as emblem of his love, and which Dus. yanta had given to Sakuntal was marked with the letters of his name. (We should note that it is the initial revelation of this ring that discloses Dus. yanta’s identity to the innocent girls in the ashram; so central is the role of this eloquent object that the play is, after all, named after it.) In his helplessness and sorrow, Dus. yanta speaks to the ring first in feigned commiseration, then in anger: its karmic store of merit must have been very slight, since it slipped so readily from the paradisiacal situation it had attained on  a’s finger – or perhaps the ring was careless and foolish, thus Sakuntal worthy of blame. : : : The king would like someone or something else to bear this burden, at least in part. He is, however, still (barely) sane enough to recognize the illogicality of this yearning: How could you exchange the gentle, undulating fingers of her hand for the watery depths? This is the question, posed in the first half of the verse, answered by the same speaker in the second half: Unconscious, one fails to notice goodness – as I, for no reason, scorned my love. (6.13) Dus. yanta and the ring have fused into a single unhappy class, that of inanimate objects (acetanam) who cannot ‘notice’ or ‘aim at’ any  quality such as goodness (acetanam gun. am . nama . na laks. ayet). The hero is (or was) one with his token, equally dumb and heedless. Still, the poet finds further scope to explore the necessary role of the ring: he makes Dus. yanta remember, very painfully, how he had given this token  a before leaving her in the ashram, with the instruction that to Sakuntal she count day by day the Sanskrit characters of his name, engraved upon it – until the great day arrived when she would be led off to her husband’s court. Then, of course, the unimaginable had happened: Dus. yanta, in a state of confusion (moha), did not keep his part of this bargain. At this point, Sanumatı, speaking to herself – but is she not the hidden voice of the poet-storyteller? – punctuates the royal moans and THE PROSPECTS OF MEMORY 323 lamentations with an incisive remark, audible only to the audience outside the play: ‘that delightful prospect was disarticulated by fate’  (raman. io khu avahı vihin. a visam . vadido/raman . ıyah khalv avadhir vidhina  visam . vaditah. ). Notice the choice of words: a boundary or limit (avadhi)  has been ‘un-spoken’ (visam removed or diverted from the . vadita), anticipated unfolding of proleptic speech. This clearsighted comment is then, however, followed by an even more direct and penetrating question: ‘Why [after all] should passion of such intensity require any  ahin. n. an . am avekkhadi kaham via edam/ kind of token’ (ıriso an. urao ıdr. so  ’bhijn~anam  ’nurago apeks. ate katham iva^itat, 137)? There is a sense, surely, in which this question echoes through the entire story. It goes unanswered in this passage. Sanumatı has offered it, unwittingly, to us, the audience; neither the king nor the Vidus. aka can hear it. The latter, indeed, slips immediately into his usual oral concerns – he is, he tells us, ‘eaten up by hunger’, a suggestive formulation of the dizzying spatial inversion that properly accompanies the temporal confusion evident throughout this Act. A hungry emptiness has swallowed the always ravenous clown, just as the tricks of retrospective memory have driven his alter ego, the king, to the brink of madness. But for our part we might consider Sanumatı’s question seriously, since it is left dangling, in tantalizing clarity, in the overheated air. This is, perhaps, one of those moments when a text reveals its own ‘autobiography’ by a suggestive gap or discontinuity.25 We have already seen that the technical explanation, linked to Durvasas’ curse, is highly inadequate. And there is definitely no need to doubt the reality or force of these lovers’ hunger for one another, as it is enacted before our eyes in the first three acts of the play. Why, indeed, then, should such passion be in any way dependent upon an object or sign, however charged with feeling, however laden with memory such an object might be? We can attempt an answer both on the basis of the amazingly coherent textures of the Sanskrit text and in the light of somewhat more general concerns about the working of consciousness and, in particular, the function of language in relation to awareness. From the latter perspective,  it seems that the token (abhijn~ana) that sustains memory is, in fact, more like a trigger.26 It is, indeed, a necessary trigger present in all linguistically informed awareness. Moreover, the memory that is being triggered is only superficially and partially retrospective in nature. What is really at stake here is the story that is, as we have seen, ‘aiming at’ (laks. ı-kr. ) our hero, and which he continues, on certain levels, to evade or deny. But then, as I have argued, his act of forgetting is profoundly integrated into that unrealized story, as are all such moments 324 D. SHULMAN of antimnemic displacement or deformation in the course of reaching toward self-knowledge. One remembers in order to forget, just as one must forget in order to know. But perhaps we are once again losing touch with the so very human figures who exemplify this process, and its price. Recall the paradigm verse about the elephant: the human mind works  movement of displacement which makes recognition through a vikara  left behind by somedependent on the ‘traces’ or ‘footprints’ (padani) thing real, but initially denied. Elsewhere, too, in this play the poet shows an interest in such suggestive footsteps. For example, at the very climax of Act IV – the moment always recognized by the Sanskrit tradition as the central node of this masterpiece – Kan. va bids farewell  a by begging her to restrain her tears, which to the weeping Sakuntal obstruct her vision.   asminn alaks. ita-nato^nnata-bhumi-bh age   khalu te vis. amı-bhavanti (4.15). padani marge Your footsteps will go astray on this path, with its hidden pitfalls. Again the verb of aiming/perceiving/noticing, laks. aya, this time is in the context of the steps, or traces, or words, that may go astray (literally, “become uneven”, vis. ama). In general, one observes such traces – or footprints – and detects a presence. In Act III, Dus. yanta,   in the throes of overpowering desire, knows that Sakuntal a must be _ near because of the line of impressions (pada-pankti) in the fresh sand – light in front, heavily depressed in the rear, because of the weight of her buttocks (3.5). He follows these footprints until he achieves . am). The nirvan. a – the vision of his beloved (aye labdham . netra-nirvan erotic domain unabashedly raids the lexicon of metaphysics. In truth, these arenas are in any case deeply intertwined.27 Recall the Upanis. ad’s  claim that “this same self (atman) is the trail (padavı) to this entire world, for by following it one comes to know this entire world, just as by following their tracks one finds [the cattle]”.28 Perhaps even more to the point is the semantic development that takes us from pada, ‘foot’ to ‘line of poetry’/‘throw of dice’ to ‘word’ to ‘object’ or ‘thing’ 29 An object is thus a ‘meaning’ or ‘target’ of a word – or,  (padartha). better, a ‘word-trace’, a footprint, as in the case of our now familiar elephant. An object is the trace left behind by a word. Or we might say that it is the target that the word is aiming at. In another sense, it is an externalization of a process or level of being – perhaps a story – that pre-exists within some inner verbal or linguistic domain. Externalization THE PROSPECTS OF MEMORY 325 and objectification go hand in hand, and always lead from the sign   to the signified (vacya). The token or trigger always precedes (vacaka) the objectified or concretized ‘meaning’. To reach back toward the token, to re-cognize it, is thus to approach the visible reality by way of its latent and determining causes. The same process applies to the formation of consciousness (within which memory has its necessary place), and to the consequent emergence of a living subject, and this process is linked to the verb laks. aya, just mentioned – a verb of aiming at a target whose contours are predefined, hence of observing or perceiving this target, which is, in general, not stationary or stable but constantly shifting, in movement away from its source. This verb, together with the root of return (or retrospection) ni-vr. t and the familiar verb of de-formation vi-kr. , sets up the essential semantic skein within which the narrative of  a is told. We have already seen how Dus. yanta’s story ‘aims’ Sakuntal at him (laks. ı-karoti), having once missed him – and this is but one instance of a rather rich application of this root and its derivatives. 30 The drama is one of aiming, that is, perceiving, in the context of the headlong rush of language and awareness toward objectification, by way of displacement and forgetting.31 If one wants a graphic example, a no doubt unconscious condensation of this primary theme, one has only to look again at the opening image of the fleeing deer and the hunter pursuing it over (once again) uneven paths.32 Later, in Act II, the king’s general unwittingly enhances the image and makes it more precise in his joyful praise of the hunt: ‘a fine archer hits unerringly a  . yad is. avah. siddyanti laks. ye moving target’ (utkars. ah. sa ca dhanvinam cale). The self-objectifying world is never still, and its hidden register, an internal or mental process, is predatory and lethal: A wilderness grew in the sky. In that wilderness a hunter. In the hunter’s hands a deer. The hunter will not die till the beast is killed. Awareness is not easy, is it, O Lord of Caves?33 The problem concretized so poignantly by Kalidasa’s disconnected lovers is addressed in other ways by the philosophers of language,  nk _ arikas.  from Bhartr. hari through the earlier ala I allow myself a slight digression. Once again the root laks. /laks. aya is useful: for we are 326 D. SHULMAN told that cosmogony, an externalization of linguistic being, proceeds  “transferred meaning”. This is a process which can through laks. an. a, be looked at from either end of its dynamic, and from at least two vantage points – as a movement within god, in which parts of her or him assume definition; and as a movement within consciousness, an epistemic crystallization by means of speech. We tend, to our loss, to observe it from the ‘lower’ end, after the unfolding (insofar as sequence is meaningful here) – and it is in this context that we find ourselves trapped in retrospective memory. Let me try to reconstruct, somewhat crudely, Bhartr. hari’s understanding of what actually is taking place each time anyone speaks, or, for that matter, hums, cries, or thinks.  a,  a potentiality that is, in The linguistic trace preexists – as bhavan 34 effect, a form of feeling. This is language in its most subtle mode,  which is also an internal (antara) mode, inherent in all consciousness, even that of babies before they have learned to speak. Moving outwards – we might also describe this as the ripening of a seed35– language  assumes the contours of a sign (vacaka). At this point, however, there is also space, a gap, a rapid movement away – the gap that takes  us toward the vacya, the ‘signified’ as externalized speech, already fully implicit in the sign. Within this opening space, there is room for aspects of abstraction, universalization, and causal sequence (linked to  more important, the movement from vacaka   action, kriya); to vacya  the definition-by-aiming, a ‘secondary’ form of being requires laks. an. a,  or aupacarik    Literally this means that Bhartr. hari calls upacara ı satta. a ‘moving around’, a kind of oral or mental circumscribing of what will eventually become an object by means of these processes of displacement and abstracting universalization. Language, that is, in its self-objectifying and conceptualizing drive proceeds via forms of displaced or secondary existence – what we might think of as metaphoric usage – toward the reification that leaves us with the target already blueprinted by the original trace, i.e. the pada^rtha or object. The critical point, as B. K. Matilal has noted, is that we are dealing with generation as transformation: ‘words are transformed into objects’.36 In fact, it would perhaps be closer to Bhartr. hari to say that this transformation – which may have greater or less degrees of ‘reality’, according to how we choose to understand it – expresses the ultimately linguistic nature of the world, of consciousness, and of the self. All phenomena, from the most interior and subtle to the most external and objectified, are composed of and motivated by (and not merely framed or defined by) the divine vibration that is speech. THE PROSPECTS OF MEMORY 327 It is perhaps worth emphasizing that, in this view, words never ‘stand for’ something; if anything, it is the fully externalized ‘objects’ that ‘represent’ the primary word-traces, and not vice versa. Yet, having gone through this exercise in reconstruction, we now have to extricate ourselves from its compelling hold. Indeed, to no small extent our habitual suffering derives from just such a description as the previous paragraph contains. In ‘truth’ – here we are still following Bhartr. hari – there is no temporal sequence at all. The very description, with its images of stages and process, is pervaded by the fatal force of objectification. Worse, our awareness almost always gravitates to this pole: we are, as it were, imprisoned in traumatic and repetitive objectification, to the point where much of ourselves, the living and moving subjects of awareness, is sacrificed to this false substantialization, a petrifying and deadening reduction to the state of an unconscious ‘thing’ (acetanam) – the state Dus. yanta describes, by analogy, as his own. And all this despite the fact that a living, inner self does exist, and persist, as speech or sound or language (sabda).37 6. ON REALIGNMENT An object is the trace left behind by a word. The full potentiality lies in the linguistic token, never in its realization across the gap. A person is the life left over by a name. A story is a frame, or a direction, within which a person-trace, speaking word-traces, leaves footprints. The story, like a word, like a name, unrolls toward a future that exists already in its hidden seeds. In another sense, the mere existence of this progression is suspect, a gravitating to the most diminished end of the continuum. Token and trace may eventually, or at moments, coincide. If the very notion of sequence in consciousness and language is misleading, what can we say about those parts of consciousness that remain transfixed in a backwards vision, as Dus. yanta is obsessed by regression and retrospection? For him, once the token has turned up, the present no longer has any real power; it can be experienced only in terms of the now-remembered past, which, being remembered, is also painfully lost. True to his character from the start, Dus. yanta is paralyzed by this retrograde vision, which he eventually articulates in the paradigm verse analyzed above. For him, there are only footprints, which can only indicate a perceived absence. He is, we might say, at the very bottom end of the subjugating process that Bhartr. hari describes (before he subsequently negates it) – a consciousness heavy with objects, oriented outward, that crystallizes and petrifies word- 328 D. SHULMAN transforms. This is precisely where retrospective memory comes into play, forcing the past into object status. Bhartr. hari will suggest that only the present is real; both past and future are constructs, constructed 38  mentally through secondary (metaphoric) uses of language (upacara). Dus. yanta shows us a consciousness lost in this fictional displacement backwards, pathologically concretized and regressed.39 Memory, if focused on the past in hypertrophied retrospection, is a kind of madness. Another way to say this would be to suggest that Dus. yanta’s story is, just at this point, missing its aim. Is there another way? Apparently so: Linguistic potentiality exists [everywhere] in latent form; by the same token, nothing can be achieved by means of knowledge that is non-conceptual [and therefore nonlinguistic], even if directed toward well-defined objects. For example, a person may be walking quickly, and he will know that his feet have made contact with grass and soil. Nevertheless, you could not call this a situation of real knowing unless the seeds of that linguistic potentiality are beginning to sprout and the meaning-revealing powers of sounds, whether explicit or implicit, are focused on their proper objects. It is only then that the inner being of a thing becomes accessible to knowing through an energized form of knowledge that is riddled with language; one can then speak of knowing the thing in its visible and externalized form. This [form of knowing] causes memory [smr. ti] to operate once the seeds of sound have become perceptible for some other reason. That is why some teachers see the process of knowing as similar to the process of awakening from sleep. : : : 40 Any real knowledge, Bhartr. hari asserts, is riddled with or penetrated by language (anuviddham : : : sabdena); and it is only in the context of such linguistically active knowing that “memory” is sparked. What is still more striking is that this activity of remembering both activates an apparently preexisting knowledge and orients itself toward the present/future: Just as it is in the nature of fire to give off light, and of inner being to have awareness, so all knowledge is entirely formed by language. Even in a state of unconsciousness there exists a subtle texture of language. The first vision that falls on external objects illuminates them as distinct in form without grasping their causes, in an undefinable mode of perceiving; but when memory comes into play, and one is  upa]  conducive faced with the seeds of such perceptions, a kind of embodiment [ ar to manifestation takes place within the understanding – as one calls to mind verses or chapters previously heard, for example. : : : 41 In other words, the definitive moment in any ‘knowing-event’ is one in which memory comes into play – not by retrospective projection of the already familiar onto the screen of the present, but by a self-manifesting embodiment which is somehow akin to the sprouting or unfolding of a hidden seed. This process has an aspect of restoring or recalling something previously known or heard (perhaps overheard); the act of perception operates within the cognitive contours of what is in some THE PROSPECTS OF MEMORY 329 sense already known. But the image of the buried seed – not a mere analogy, certainly not a metaphor – points to the directionality implicit in this description: memory makes perception manifest in the way any organic unfolding transpires, in a present that contains a pre-conceived teleology of maturation. Once we begin to think of memory as an epistemic movement in the present, with prospective force, other aspects of the problem (Dus. yanta’s problem, and ours) become clearer. ‘What is yet to be is thought of as already being there’.42 Maturation makes manifest an existing, structured reality. This has important implications for the notion of forgetting. It is one thing to forget the past, quite another to lose the knowledge of one’s necessary unfolding. As already stated, Dus. yanta’s retrospective gaze, so laden with pain and longing, may well mask this far more consequential form of forgetting. No wonder his self-awareness is so heavily dependent on the token, the eloquent memory-trigger that, like the subtle sound slowly externalizing itself as story, contains the syllables of his name.  a, by way of contrast: she flowers, ripens, awakens Not so Sakuntal fully, gives birth to the auspicious child she has been promised, without ever being lost in retrogression. If there is anything she cannot remember, it is only something she truly cannot have known – for example, the curse that she never heard uttered. She is, however, subject to a fog of inattention and flooding feeling, within which the curse can operate freely – even if she knows nothing of this; but then in her case no less than her lover’s, the curse externalizes something of an inner process, with its peculiar discontinuities and breaks in awareness. And as we saw, she has her own score to settle with the elusive token. Still, Dus. yanta knows when he forgets and, on some level, even knows what he has forgotten, just as he always knows in advance, without being told, the answers to crucial questions of identity that concern his course.43 A more general formulation of this point would allow for the movement of desire within the interwoven processes of linguistic exfoliation, cosmogenesis, and subjective remembering. Desire propels the word   from pregnant trace to perceptible utterance, vacaka to vacya. In the language of the poeticians, creation – whether of a world of defined  the wish to speak or objects, or of a living consciousness – is vivaks. a, be spoken. This utterance, which is the subject’s self-manifestation, is already there in the seed, awaiting the trigger to begin to germinate and sprout. The living subject is a vivaks. ita – a desired or intended articulation. Language is internally driven toward this external expression.44  But I hesitate to go farther in this direction for fear that the Sakuntala 330 D. SHULMAN might be taken as somehow allegorizing these notions, when such is clearly not the case.  What we can see in the Sakuntala, in the painful process that Dus. yanta undergoes, is the gap hidden within knowledge: forgetting is integral to the self and to awareness. We also see that knowledge contains its own frame – knowing that one knows or, better, remembering that one has forgotten – and that this frame can be detached from its contents. Dus. yanta is aware of his forgetting even as he looks blindly at the woman he wants to remember. Language is woven into this same process in the surprising form of the trigger or token that gives rise to a latent reality. A story aims at a moving telos, all too easily forgotten, though to forget it is, perhaps, to find it via a necessary detour. Memory has direction: when moving forward, it may create a presence. Moving backwards, it falls into a gap. This – backwards – is how human beings often, or even usually, think. In these conditions, hope would seem to lie in some form of re 45 as we saw at the outset: alignment, (anu)sandhana, What is cut in two  is soon reconstituted (kr. ta-sandhanam). Whatever is naturally crooked straightens its lines. : : : (1.9) “Translated” forward into the story, the verse suggests that the hunter’s violent movement into the ashram initiates a process of tortuous realignment already implicit, in nuce, at the start. The hero, overwhelmed by “crooked” retrospection in the middle of his progress, may finally come to “be” himself or to “speak” himself – still a paradoxical act. He has slipped back into his own story from the penumbra seemingly cast outside it, although this story has itself meanwhile changed; it is no longer the same story, though it is still Dus. yanta’s. The difference, for him, lies in the new act of re-cognition that effectively expands the limits of the story and also allows Dus. yanta, perhaps for the first time, to see the woman who stands before him. Perhaps we can now answer the question posed earlier with reference to this progression: to say, ‘I am Dus. yanta (and I love this woman, whom I remember)’ is actually to say, ‘I now coincide, or am realigned, with the linguistic trigger that bears my name.’ 7. ON LONGING There is an affective component to this process of knowing and per ceiving. The Sakuntala is among the most moving of all Sanskrit plays. THE PROSPECTS OF MEMORY 331 Kalidasa states the issue in another strong, insightful verse, one of the best known and most discussed in all of this poet’s works.46 The context   is important: this is the opening of Act V, before Sakuntal a’s arrival at Dus. yanta’s court. Already the king is ill at ease, for he has been listening to the haunting singing echoing from within the women’s quarters (a  floods song whose subject, naturally, is forgetting). Longing (utkan. .tha) his heart – a mysterious, object-less longing – and he sings: Any living being, however happy, seeing beauty, hearing sweet sounds, is overcome with longing, for memory brings to mind what was unrecognized before – loves left over from other lives, still dense with feeling. (5.2) The doubt that has sparked the verse – doubt rooted in a wave of inexplicable yearning – is somewhat distanced by the explanation the king puts forward: one’s karmic memories are ignited by aesthetic experience, and one then feels, without being fully conscious, ancient losses, loves unresolved and unsatisfied, that still live on in some deeper part of our minds. But this hypothesis hardly does justice to Dus. yanta’s inner state, so heavily blanketed by the expressive forgetfulness that   he is about to reveal in relation to Sakuntal a – hardly a “left-over” love. Helpless longing is, it seems, what forgetting feels like (at least in the case of this particular type of forgetting); in this, it is remarkably like remembering. The striking element here is that this longing, this disquiet or dis-ease, emerges out of a state of fullness, an internalization of visual or (perhaps above all) auditory excess.47  the drive within language, We know this fullness: it belongs to vivaks. a, the drive of the self to coincide with its name. In Dus. yanta’s case, forgetting is part of this same drive and retains something of its promise, even as it engenders the predictable mode of restless yearning. But Dus. yanta also shows us the point at which memory turns back upon itself, congealing as retrospection. This distortion, endemic to consciousness,  the “undoing” with which we began and which Dus. yanta informs vikara, claims as the characteristic habit of his mind. A vast pathology lies waiting here, its contours intimated by Kalidasa’s play, where the normative effects of dislocation in perception – the displacement inherent in any awareness “riddled with language” – are at once emblematized and exaggerated by the sufferings of this engaging couple. Look again at the paradigm. The lovers have been reunited, the circle  is the order of the day. Still, Dus. yanta is filled with closed; sandhana a kind of horror: 332 D. SHULMAN Like someone who, staring at an elephant, insists ‘There is no elephant’; who then, as it moves away, feels a certain doubt and, on seeing its footprints, is certain: ‘An elephant has been there’ – such is the aberrant working of my mind. Why this longing? Because we cannot see what is right before us – although we know that it is there. Why do we fail to see? Because perception requires an opening, the space of temporal and linguistic displacement and deformation. These features are normative, structured into thinking. Within this space there arise the disquiet that is born of beauty and the subjectivity that lies between the subtle germination of sound and the enacted story. This disquiet, this yearning, are dependable signs that the subject is present. At moments, in certain contexts, under the influence of the proper token or trigger, we do manage miraculously to re-coincide, remembering forward once again. These are the rare moments when we notice the elephant before us; when we hear ourselves echoing, however subtly, with the resonance of a self that is this sound, this potential, irreplaceable story. NOTES  Annama^caryula kırtanalu, edited by Ponna Lılavatamma (Madras, 1968), 61 (kad. al ud. ipi). 2 _ ^acaryulu, with commentary of 7.19. I follow the edition of Celamacerla Rang  sakuntalam  (Hyderabad: Andhra Pradesh Sahitya Kat.aya-vema (Red. d. i), Abhijn~anaAkademi, 1982). 3 A medieval tradition tells us that Kalidasa, on his deathbed, was prepared to see all his poetic works lost with the exception of this one line; see Lee Siegel, Laughing Matters: Comic Tradition in India (Chicago, 1987), p. 258. 4 Thus 1, after verse 22 (p. 20); 2.5; 3, after verse 6 (p. 59); 4, after verse 3 (p. 79); 7, after verse 20 (p. 168) etc. 5  A. K. Ramanujan, in his unfinished paper on Sakuntala, ‘The Ring of Memory: Remembering and Forgetting in Indian Literature’ (1993), speaks with some hesitation of “reintegration”; but I will avoid this rather loaded term. 6 I take heart from the subtle analysis offered by Visvanatha Satyanarayan. a of verse 1.8 (directly preceding the verse explored below) as encapsulating the entire   okka abhijn~anata (Vijayavada, 1969), subsequent course of the play: Sakuntalamuy 26–28; on 1.9, see pp. 29ff. 7 On the question of recursive structures in the play, see below; Ramanujan, op. cit.; E. Gerow, ‘Dramatic Theory and Kalidasa’s Plays,’ in Barbara Stoler Miller  asa  (New York, 1984), pp. 58–59. (ed.), Theater of Memory: The Plays of Kalid Sheldon Pollock has also stressed the expressivity of structure in the play: “The  may thus be seen as an objectification in narrative form of structure of Sakuntala l THE PROSPECTS OF MEMORY 333  the determinate cosmic plan underpinning the story”. ‘What Happens in Sakuntala,’ unpublished essay, 1983, 14. 8 The verse at the very end of Act I (30) describing the rampage of a mad elephant within the bounds of the ashram – the verse that first separates Dus. yanta from the  a – beautifully re-articulates this notion. newly discovered Sakuntal 9  Journal Gerow, E. ‘Plot Structure and the Development of rasa in the Sakuntala’, of the American Oriental Society 99 (1979), pp. 559–572; 100 (1980), pp. 267–282. 10 ‘Returned’ = pratinivr. ttah. , again < ni-vr. t. 11 The dharmic component in the king’s action is discussed by Raghavabhat.t.a; see also Gerow, op. cit., and Visvanatha Satyanarayan. a, op. cit., p. 98. 12 See Charles Malamoud, Cuire le monde: rite et pensee dans l’Inde ancienne (Paris, 1989), 295–306. 13 This more familiar type of memory should also probably be divided into at least two sub-types, one recursive, the second discursive; but this is a matter for another essay. 14  This understanding is richly elaborated in Kashmir Saivism (the theme of   ~  pratyabhijnana) and in Srıhars. a; I hope to discuss these sources in another essay. 15 See Malamoud, op. cit. 16 Cf. the fine discussion by Visvanatha Satyanarayan. a, op. cit., pp. 80–89, dis “experience”, and tinguishing two components of buddhi-understanding: anubhuti,  “knowledge”. smr. ti, “memory”; the latter may be rooted in non-linear forms of jn~ana, Pan. ini 3.2.112 permits the use of future tense forms for past events in connection  with a word of recollection (abhijn~a-vacane). 17 See discussion by Aditya Malik, Divine Testimony: The Rajasthani oral narrative  ayan  . , Habilitationschrift, Universitat Heidelberg, 1998, 1:22–25; Malamoud, of Devnar op. cit., 297, defining smr. as “fixer avec l’intensite son esprit sur un objet (qui n’est pas materiellement present)”. 18 7, after verse 24 (p. 171). 19 Images of taming wild natural forces recur in the final act, where we find  a’s son, Sarvadamana – ‘All-Tamer’ – playing with a lion cub. Sakuntal 20 There is reason to look closely at the syntax of this key verse. Curses and blessings are always carefully, almost legalistically formulated. Note how in the third  . na sa bodhito ’pi san – the absent lover seems line of the original – smaris. yati tvam almost cursed to remember, before the negative overtakes him in the middle of the line (‘he will remember you : : : not!’). This fits Dus. yanta’s mental state all too well: he does remember, at least enough to know that he has forgotten something. 21 See discussion below in section 7. 22  This obviously beloved epic version of the story lives on in many later Sakuntalas,  ng  sakuntalamu  (in Telugu). for example Pillalamarri Pina-Vırabhadrakavi’s Sr . _ ara23 Thus the god Vis. n. u sleeps on his cosmic serpent during the monsoon months and the early autumn. 24  urvakam  As the grammarians insist, utkan. .tha-p . smaran. am, “memory is first longing”. 25 See Ferrucci, F. (1980). The Poetics of Disguise: The Autobiography of a Work in Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare. Ithaca. 26 Ramanujan, op. cit., 12, speaks of memory as always requiring “a token, a mark, a sign”. In Dravidian, “to remember” is usually to “note the mark” (Tam. kuri, Kannada guruta, etc.). 27 See Siegel, Lee (1983). Fires of Love, Waters of Peace: Passion and Renunciation in Indian Culture. Honolulu. 28  . yaka-Upanis. ad 1.4.7; translation by Patrick Olivelle, Upanisads (New Br. had-aran York, 1996), 15. 334 D. SHULMAN 29 See Falk, Harry (1986). Bruderschaft und Wurfelspiel. Untersuchungen zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des Vedischen Opfers. Freiburg, pp. 122–123. 30 Thus 1, after verse 26 (p. 27); 2.5; 5, after 23 (p. 112), etc. 31 Within this frame bodily awareness, before verbal articulation, has its own logic and space, as when the lovers first meet in Act I, and when Dus. yanta recognizes his son in Act VII. 32  ı bhumir   rathasya Thus the charioteer: utkhatin iti maya rasmi-sam . yamanad mandı-kr. to vegah. (1, after v. 7). 33  (HarAllama Prabhu 319, translated by A. K. Ramanujan, Speaking of Siva mondsworth, 1973), p. 156. 34 See Kirin Narayan (1991). ‘ “According to their Feelings”: Teaching and Healing with Stories’, in Carol Witherell and Nel Noddings (eds.), The Lives Stories Tell: Narrative and Dialogue in Education. New York, p. 123. 35  ıya 1.84. See Vakyapad 36 Bimal Krishna Matilal (1986). Perception: An Essay on Classical Indian Theories of Knowledge. Oxford, p. 397. 37 Bhartr.hari 1.30. 38  ıya in the Light of K. A. Subrahmania Iyer, Bhartr. hari: A Study of the Vakyapad the Ancient Commentaries (Poona, 1969), p. 211; also 115–119. 39 Or, as the sagacious Sanumatı puts it: ‘past and present are all jumbled up  ı apuvvo eso vihan . ain this unprecedented state [of longing]’ (puvvavaraviroh  aparavirodhy     . ). apurva es. a vidhana-m argah maggo/purv 40  ıya, vr. tti on 1.123. Vakyapad 41 Ibid., vr. tti on 1.124. 42 Subrahmania Iyer, op. cit., p. 212. 43  a is available to him, a Ks. atriya; in Act VII Thus in Act I, he knows that Sakuntal he identifies his son before this knowledge becomes explicit. Note the symmetry in these two examples, in line with the general recursive structure of the play (Acts I and VII frame the text in parallel episodes, as has often been noted; see Ramanujan, op. cit.). 44 Bhartr.hari speaks of the inner linguistic activity ‘awakening’ with the urge to   am  . antah. -sabda-vr. ttau): Vakya-pad  ıya 1.51, vr. tti.  ay speak, prapta-vivaks . a-pratibodh 45 I cannot explore here the subsequent history of this term, especially in Abhinavagupta and the Kasmiri Tantra. 46 See, e.g., the comments by Abhinavagupta, in Gnoli, R. (1968). The Aesthetic Experience according to Abhinavagupta. Varanasi, p. 14. 47 I wish to thank Velcheru Narayana Rao for this observation. Institute for Advanced Studies The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Israel