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direct association with ‘word’ and, therefore, ‘meaning’. The ‘greatest high’ for Langford and
his friends was reporting from the battlefield. Working in the midst of death, and taking the
risk of being killed even while remaining uninvolved, became everything to them. It became
the meaning of their lives. Death in Western and Christian tradition is also ‘meaning’, either
taken as the final reality, or as the unique way to achieve resurrection in eternal life. In the
Eastern tradition death represents a failure to achieve purity of the Self, or Enlightenment, and
yet a soul is allowed to return to the earth for another life, and another chance at self-
revelation. While suffering death is the ultimate pain and that which each created entity must
seek to avoid, it is the necessary precursor to the microcosmic renewal of an individual,
enabling another opportunity to achieve Enlightenment, which will free the individual from the
curse of further deaths. On the macrocosmic scale, the dissolution of the fourth age of Kali-
Yuga—the age of cosmic death and putrefaction—is an equal and indispensable part of the
universal cycle.
Koch’s association of ‘Dis’ with ‘meaning’ is an especially important yet paradoxical
element, with so many correspondences and shared roots in both Eastern and Western tradition
that it becomes something of a labyrinth in Koch’s symbolic scheme. Adrian Mitchell remarks
that this is one of the many instances in which Koch reveals
the spiritual agencies we are really confronting in these fictions, giving them
their proper names. A potent mystery is encountered and identified; but of
course can never be fully explained, or it would not have retained its enduring
authority as mystery. (Mitchell, 1996, Ancestral Voices, 8)
It might be tempting to say that in his eclectic semiotic constructions Koch either never
tries or is not quite able to bring all of the disparate elements together into a unified whole.
This would be a serious argument against his work’s success, but in his defence one must see
that the Asian symbols he is working with are not liable to being tidied up. Zaehner calls
Hinduism ‘a vast and apparently incoherent religious complex’, and does so without an iota of
disrespect. Koch is trying to avoid the sin of Orientalism, which would be to appropriate Asian
symbols and use them as suits his purposes. Rather, he is following Zaehner’s counsel to
‘attempt, at his peril, to distil from the whole mass of his material the fine essence that he
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