Language is a strange and curious affair. I sometimes still get confused whether it is a tangible or intangible part of culture; I can’t make up my mind. Using language well can be compared to much. It can be like a dance, like a blend of dance moves mixed with precision movements drawn from the martial arts. It can be a war of legs, as in the tango. It can be the casual, almost limpid, lazy movements of a person with a sense of perfect rhythm, dancing to some music playing on the radio while doing this and that and the other. It can be like a body cutting through air and water and executing a breathtaking dive…it can be a painting or a picture capturing more than a thousand words, bringing to mind connected images and emotions. Used well, language transforms intangible feelings and invisible thoughts, brings back memories, gives them shape and form like a clay shaper, makes them real to the hearer or reader. It can be an audio and visual and tactile affair or just one or more. Sometimes it makes its way through and as a stream of silence. The words themselves may bring silence within the mind-space of a reader. Words may sometimes break into one's silent or noisy or chaotic or nonsensical world as well, and make strange and then abiding sense but to only the hearer. Language and writings translate words to pictures and images and thought... Language lets, it seems almost banal and terribly trite to mention, humans communicate.
I know only one language not-too-terribly-badly. I very badly wish I knew Bengali just as not-too-terribly-badly. I sometimes think that I must have spent many, many, many lifetimes utterly illiterate and uneducated. This is not a disjointed thought. I feel that way because I steadily realise sometimes in gentle spasms, in blissful showers that also ache, and sometimes like a cold shock that learning even one language well, understanding it well, and using it well (by which I mean superlatively well) is given to the rarest of the rare. I know that I sometimes don’t quite understand English when I read prose or poetry. And I don’t mean abstruse or badly written material. Neither do I understand much material that is read by many in Philosophy, Sociology, Economics, Political Science, History, Psychology, and so on and on. It’s one thing to digest and then dismiss. I can’t even get over the first hurdle of actually comprehending and following what I read. I don’t quite know how I understand what I do either. I’ve tried to understand this but I don’t think I’ve gotten intellectually wiser about this.
I learnt English at a very early age, and loved the language without thinking or even knowing that I loved it. I loved language and liked using it and liked playing around with words and sentences. I liked the sound and look of words. And I read in snatches and deeply and loved that too but never thought that that reading or writing which I stayed with was something that required thought or needed any justification. By 8, I had a firm and fast friend within me who was telling me constantly and insistently that I must never forget English, and that I had to master it as well as I could. It was something rather remotely similar to walking fast. That may sound weird. But it was a matter of compensating for other stuff that I didn’t have, couldn’t master no matter how much time I was given, and couldn’t keep up with. By Class XI, I remember that I had been maintaining a steady diary and other random note-books for sudden writing urges but stories I could not write. I was not a story-teller. I sometimes started but they never quite got to the end. Some faltered mid-way. I think there are some people who are born story-writers and others who are not. Maybe it is a talent that can be honed and requires a particular hungry and insistent and imaginative mind-set but I don’t have that and didn’t have that. My muse for story-writing is either lazy or non-existent or cannot think beyond what it has seen and heard and lives with. Not a particularly imaginative nor a particularly intense nor passionate muse then, I guess. Or maybe I have a monomaniacal muse. By the time I was finally doing my Master's, I became horribly arrogant and a little too obsessed in how I expressed myself and I was the same way in college. I liked the mode of expression and paid a keen attention to how I said what I did but there was very little I think in terms of content. I simply followed my thoughts. I don’t have any of my diaries or any old writings with me but I’m sure I must have sounded just plain convoluted. I think I had the tendency of adding too much sauce as well apart from sounding unnecessarily long-winded and unwieldy.
I do know though that other authors sometimes influenced how I wrote and terribly. I don’t know whether this happens with everybody but I do know that it happened excessively with me. I was determined by the style of the author I was obsessing over through my school years and in my college years, and I know Agatha Christie, P.G.Wodehouse, Roald Dahl, and Ayn Rand come to mind particularly. Then came the horror of realizing, and at 25, and without the earlier who-cares-about-that attitude that I didn’t know grammar at all. Not only did I not know grammar but I hadn’t followed the basic principles of grammar in my prose (or in the hasty and insane fit of poetry writing that probably all Bengalis fondly go through). And that was that. I taught myself grammar frantically while teaching a bit of grammar to others, but still don’t understand very basic rules and almost nothing of punctuation.
Language is a mighty strange thing. I don’t understand semantics or semiotics or linguistics or anything of that sort. I do know that I don’t like just form without content but sometimes I can see when I read what I do that the form blesses the content with an unusual beauty and tone and an uncanny depth. The only thing I started becoming obsessive about, and with reason, is the use of particular words and knowing whether I wanted to use a particular word in a sentence. I obsess over getting sentences to mean what I want them to mean but don't always succeed. It seems like a very basic thing but I fret over it in a rather paranoid way sometimes. I started pondering more and more about how words can mean something in a general way, given the common dictionary meaning, and yet words and phrases mean something specific to the user and the reader and the hearer and the writer. Sometimes I look up the dictionary to see what very regular words mean. Sometimes I need a dictionary thrown at me. Sometimes I don't look at a dictionary even when I should. Sometimes I think one should come up with a dictionary to give meaning/define words that can mean different things to normal people and to people who might have non-normal experiences.
Humans communicate through language, and the written or verbal way is the only way I've communicated for most of my life, and sometimes it is a beautiful and many-pronged affair….yet I sometimes can’t help wondering and furiously how we manage to communicate through language given that words, turns-of-phrases and even sentences so often have a double-meaning, triple meaning, and depend upon the mood and mentality and mind-frame of the people communicating; on what we choose to pay attention and what we choose to let pass during those moments. The common framework exists and so many layers and hidden layers and more and more emerge and wait to emerge through the dance and music of language sometimes. I can’t quite imagine a world where there is no language but and since I was suddenly exposed to the world of sci-fi literature so late in life, I came across the idea of communication in a 'language' but not in the way we generally understand it, rather late in literature. Only it neither felt like fiction nor fantasy and I didn’t understand the science behind it.
“First there was light”, was there, yes? But did the word come before or after or with the light? I have recently had wondering bouts very late in the night ‘bout the matter of language - physically alone but not exactly lonely, embalmed in a non-silence while carefully examining the red-orange glow of a cigarette, and with sometimes a half-hanging smile for company.
