After What Can Be Said

“The song that I came to sing remains unsung to this day.

I have spent my days in stringing and in unstringing my instrument.

The time has not come true, the words have not been rightly set; only there is the agony of wishing in my heart.”

-Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali

It would be a  winter’s noon with clouds scattered over the skies like drops of paint fallen to the ground from pallet of a busy painter which forms unrecognizable yet striking patterns , when I would wish and fantasize about some suddenness and activity in the firmament. After staring for some time into that massive blue, some white lines would get drawn into the space, and these whitish strokes would rise from their source to somewhere high up in the plane of vision. No matter how much I tried I could not hold them back--------they would rise and… rise, and I could do nothing but follow them with my eyes until they would be too high for a lowly creature like me to even aspire for. I was convinced that I had seen some spirit but neither was afraid nor worried. Somehow it was impossible to pinpoint the emotions that this would generate in my little heart. It was too momentary to be emotion … too subtle to be sensation and, too spectacular to be delusion. I grew up and this familiar experience moved into some remote corner of my brain from which I never summoned it. Three years back, I read Gitanjali and felt all of a sudden, the same hollowness of those passing moments when I thought I had seen spirits, and since I was still not able to recognize what it was, it left a tasteless flavor in my mouth that often comes with knowledge of defeat.

In our lifetime, considering man can think in abstract, millions of thoughts pass through our minds, which are amply supported by our sensory organs which link them to external world. Our senses help us to mould them into words. Thoughts which occur to us in flashes, and which aren't tied to words remain swimming onto the surface of mind; they travel in our consciousness and die with us without ever having a release, much like a bacteria that floats in the air and gets into one’s body through inhalation, and travels all through our system and then quietly leaves it in a bowel movement---like it had entered, without any ceremony or noise!

All my study of literature and philosophy brought me down to this conclusion: Man dominated the nature for he had the LANGUAGE. There are two aspects of language: extrinsic i.e. communication and intrinsic i.e. thought. All animals can communicate and therefore the extrinsic aspect is true to all in animal kingdom. It is the intrinsic part that eventually made a flyer out of a cave dweller. We can think in abstract---can sufficiently express the abstract---can understand the abstract… Therefore we could dream and imagine. We can not only remember things that are of our lifetime but know that of generations before. What our forefathers learnt, they passed onto us. One lifetime is not enough to sufficiently know a thing, let alone understanding the Universe. Each man is 1.6 million years old i.e., the age of Modern Man and of which we reached our youth only some 1000 yrs ago i.e., the dawn of civilization. Thus, we could have what is called the collective human consciousness. What a man can think at the moment and if he is sufficiently able to express and record (even if by word of mouth as was with the Aryans) he can reasonably be hopeful of his thought running down for ages in his kind. That’s why within such a brief time period (on geological scale), Man could dominate Earth. Otherwise there’ve been far more successful species in terms of survival than the Homo Sapiens. Dinosaurs lived for more than a hundred millions years while we are just a million and half old yet they could create nothing. We can.Yes, language and MAN’S LANGUAGE! In a class of psychology, we discussed Memory. What makes a tree? A group of features that we associate with the word saying which would bring to our mind the general picture of a tree. We learn similarly about people, things and places, by assigning them to certain entity i.e., word, an encapsulation of attributes. Therefore, it is no surprise that as a child learns more words, he understands more concepts of the world and remembers more things. Language is memory. Words, the fundamental unit of the memory have meanings. Meanings make recollections. Recollections make nostalgia. It is nostalgia that makes our autobiographical memory---your life as you know it. All your life is words.

Derrideans (followers of principles of Jacques Derrida and his Deconstruction) occupy a significant place in the thought processes of the modern world as they were the first of the groups who could successfully challenge the relationship of language to reality. Every single word that we use in our thought process has a meaning that is abstract for it doesn't exist in the concrete world. We gave tree the name ‘tree’. It would have been same, had we given it some other name. We can’t speak or think without alluding to certain established meanings---meanings that haven’t been defined by us in persons. Who says what must be understood with the word ‘language’? I did not. Yet, I am talking about it by using words whose meanings have been established even before I uttered the first syllable.  A certain state of arousal is anger but another with same degree of disturbance is attraction. Ages before, our ancestors came across a conical rocky thing and called it a ‘hill’. At a little distance, they came across another thing that bore a likeness to the previous one. They called it a hill too---another hill. As they moved about, they came across many more such conical rocky things. They called all of them ‘hill’ and since they were more than one in number, they coined a plural for it. Later on they saw hills that though rocky were not bluish black but red in color. ‘Hills’ began to be of various colors in our memory. Then when we crafted tales, we built them around ‘hills’ of hitherto unseen colors. Yellow hills! Purple! Orange… The Mythical Hills… And then we came across deserts we saw hills that were not rocky. Again metaphorical extension was needed… Our language is our history. With every word that we speak or write, we live history of our advent. The essence of man was his language. It is his language that kept him united across divisions of races, cultures and societies throughout the many periods of grave inequalities. The first of the human societies had a language that provided us with first of our metaphors (the 'hill'. Since then we have only added or modified their metaphors. That link with the original---of being offspring of same mother, is alive in our language—the testimony of a shared paternity. In 1786, Sir William Jones, a British judge in Calcutta discovered that main languages of Europe are related to main languages of India. The similarity between Sanskrit and classical Greek and Latin was established. . A certain state of arousal is anger… but another with same degree of disturbance is attraction. With every word you speak, you carry a past of thousands of years with you.

The older a past is, the more powerful its present is. Often when you deny a certain tradition or epidemic of an opinion, you are time and again forced to resort to words that were built on the beliefs that you deny. Like I found out that the most celebrated atheist of English Canon (and my darling) Percy Bysshe Shelley has used the word ‘divine’ too generously. All that is beyond body consciousness has been historically linked to certain omnipotent and all-pervading concept, called God. Therefore if Shelley had to write about certain metaphysical attributes or experiences, he had to fall back on words that had ‘God’ as their source of origin. That’s why often as a writer or as a thinking individual, one feels trapped and caged. One often discovers irony between the said and intended when you sit down to deconstruct meaning of words. I am a radical feminist, yet when I  have to write about mankind as a whole I use word ‘MAN’ thinking that it takes the other half of humanity in account too, though the image that this word evokes in our mind is essentially that of a male. Jacques Derrida rightly says that all Western languages are irremediably ‘phallogocentric’. There lies the irony. No matter how much we defy the world and its tradition, language (or speech) always maintains that thread with ages old concepts that formed the first of knowledge systems. Therefore gender remains in the languages of feminists and, religion in that of atheists.

So, shall we give up in face of our all-pervading past? No.

The best of authors are those who contribute to the knowledge systems of the world and this means creativity with language. They create a language with new kind of metaphors. The reason why I like Gitanjali so much is because of that creativity with language. The poems are said to be hymns but on reading it, I felt that it is prayer to someone and something beyond the concept of ‘God’.  Many of it were mere sensations, that one can communicate to oneself but not to others. that it seeks to express what we feel but can’t make sense of.  Like I was reminded of those moments of optical illusions----what my heart felt at that precise moment when I felt distinguished. Tagore created a new range of metaphors.  His language though old in its syntax and phonology, was new in meanings. That’s why even Europe could like it.

They say the whole of our history has been nothing but quest to understand ourselves.  Therefore, our questions have remained much the same throughout the ages, although our answers have been different in different times. They say mind can never be silent (unless you are in a state of comatose). No matter how silent the surroundings are, there’d still be images in your mind or that eloquent ‘private speech’ that never waits for an audience to speak--goes on and on… Sometimes when you invest a lot of time with yourself, you may feel for a moment or longer stillness of a kind that you’d forget all of our past. Your language would be devoid of all those metaphors which remind you of your past. Then when you speak to yourself (the private speech) or pick up a pen. It would be a language of naked human self, which only knows quest not conquests.

A new kind of knowledge system can only be built by reaching that naked human self. This would mean understanding ourselves in a new vein. This would facilitate creation of a new set of metaphors. A new kind of language would come into existence. When sex would be stripped off gender, the word ‘Man’ would be replaced by something that would evoke picture of the other half of the humanity too. An androgynous society would come into existence. But I would not be alive to see that.

One day, after reading a bit about Brontes and that feverish passion in which the sisters wrote, I was struck with an odd idea. Why is all our literature such a celebration of abstract? Passion! And great deal of passion! I was conversing with a wise man about the essence of man and his evolutionary history. We moved around the idea of immortality, and concluded that if and when man would be able to avert his destruction through aging his abstracts would change in a dramatic fashion. Or if we are able to form a thriving colony in Mars then Homo Sapiens as we known them would be a thing of past. Such a Man with new sets of abstract and different kind of passions would not be able to identify the passions that we have hitherto lived with. Even if you try to read certain historical romances, you’d be at loss to understand many of the ideals of those ages that they celebrate. I could never understand chivalry and therefore, was much at loss about romantic love (the famous knight in shining armour tales). And then he and I were not talking of some shift in historical forces , what we were talking of would change the very fabric of our being.  The results are bound to be dramatic. What is one thing that doesn’t change with ages? That doesn’t get affected by historical forces, and whose meanings we are likely to cherish for longer periods of time. The answer is inanimate. In eternal time, our relationship with the inanimate alone holds significance. There have been very few works (I do not why) about Man’s relationship with inanimate or our understanding about it. They never talk of water and water beds, but shores and sails.Man can feel with the inanimate but can’t feel for it. Last month, I read Jean Paul Sartre’s Nausea. It tried to explore Man’s relationship with the inanimate. Some hours before, I had cut myself and knew naught about it until I saw a stain of blood on the paper I was writing. I was immediately transported to that image that Sartre depicted in his book. Four lines on a white paper, a splash of blood, together that makes a beautiful memory. My blood on that paper, just a stain… no message in blood! No love letter written in blood or threat given in a bloody fashion… just a proof that next to that white piece of paper there once sat a body that was warmed by blood that moved inside it with a remarkable sense of velocity… A clever piece of writing to present an image devoid of established metaphorical connotations. No abstract. A new line of thought! A new set of metaphors!

People who are able to do what I am talking of are mightiest of beings. You’ve power to rule the mind for only way to defeat a man is by words. Also, the only way to win over a man is by words. When you get into a man through this route you force him to recall your chosen words as he makes sense of the world. When he does that that he unknowingly sees things and says things like you did. The language that you built becomes the fundamental unit of his mind. His memory is of your words.

I am reminded of a conversation with a guy who was reading poetry of Nida Fazli. He told me how he would spend recess all by himself. I was of the same lot though for a different reason. My friends were in relationships and therefore every second that they could spare was spent with their beloveds, and it meant great degree of solitude for me. He did not only spend the recess alone but locked in washroom, often having his tiffin there. I asked him was he bullied. He said yes and mostly because he pissed them of. This made me look at his body. The fellow was too thin to even pose a serious challenge to me and therefore, I was forced to ask him: “How?” He said with some degree of attitude: “I insulted them in very creative ways. By the time they could understand what I meant, I would have slipped off from their fingers. Often I was hunted down for few things that I said days before.” I broke into laughter. I am still smiling as I recall his words. People who have command over language and can understand its semantic intricacies possess great power. Throughout the history of mankind, the only people who could live beyond a lifetime were people who had command over language. It essentially doesn’t mean writers. The geniuses of any discipline, be it literature or science, knew very well as to how to make themselves clear. The change makers are always creative people, and creative people by definition possess knowledge to tie words to the flashes of thought. The greatest leaders, dictators, tyrants, national heroes or even Prophets affected people through their speech, and it was there that they were unique from the masses. Hitler could make stir passions in thousands that gathered to hear him. Gandhi though shy by character, was challenging and exact in his words.

Invent your own language. Write about what you feel. Draw your own images. There are so many ‘hills’ to be crossed in our understanding of ourselves. Let us all try that together. Go about the world with your images, and see the world with your own mind… Hear others, read others but express yourself. In that case, your life would be a legacy of thoughts that needs no heirs to carry forward. The world would be your child.