Dear Vyasa:

I am fascinated by how Homer, Ishi, and you “read,” as thinkers and teachers. There is something to say about this, but I cannot quite figure it out now. There is your personal scholarship, the odd encounter with a text that is supposedly written to address this scholarship but, as I now see and admit, misses the mark; but then, there is anyway your humility and generosity in response; well, the teacher in all of you. And there is, finally, my incapacity to really know your thinking, to know the thinking of any reader.

At first, you invoke Ganesha, the scribe dipping his tusk into ink, and you advise that Om Ganesha precedes any undertaking to remove obstacles. Thus, in your usual way, you gift an open path, and I am grateful.

On to your namesake, Vyasa, which you say means to sever and then to join or construct, and this is true about the work of the poet who deconstructs events and remounts, re-members them to understand. In the storytelling of the Mahabharata, Bhishma vows celibacy in order not to have progeny who will be condemned to kill each other. However, the poet-narrator Vyasa, despite this prophecy and perhaps desiring a story, intervenes with his aging member to comply anyway, fathering two sons, and thus must tell the story of what transpires. You think about this, about Vyasa who is implicated in this great epic about civil war, and that neither narrator nor scholar may hide from the responsibility of their personal relationship to history or to ideas. You have said that in the Vedic tradition all histories begin with the word itihasa; thus it is said, and you understand this to mean that every history is a story told, weighted by the knowledge of the teller. It is, you add, this responsibility, not only accountability, that offers truth to storytelling. Knowing that the Bhagavad Gita is itself a later intervention, reinterpretation, and extension of verses added to the Mahabharata, you feel that my family stories are also welcome. Well, if you say so.

Love,