Текст книги "Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty"

Автор книги: Vikram Chandra

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

9 THE LANGUAGE OF LITERATURE

An injured monkey regains consciousness, and begins typing the story of his past life.

The past retelling itself in the present – it seems like an obvious enough image, but the image came to me first, not its suggestiveness. Did I create the image, or did the dhvanimake it and I find it? Writers are full of themselves, and therefore ask these kinds of annoyingly mystical questions, but they are also full of echoes of what is not in themselves. On my good days I feel like I can hear and catch these fleeting reverberations. Bind them into language before they disappear.

Sometimes the sheer vastness of what I want to put into fiction terrifies me. I survive by not thinking about the whole. I write my four hundred words this day, and then another four hundred words the next. I find my way by feeling, by intuition, by the sounds of the words, by the characters’ passions, by trekking on to the next day, the next horizon, and then the next. I pay attention to the tracks of narratives I leave behind, and I look for openings ahead. I make shapes and I find shapes. I retrace my steps, go over draft after draft, trying to find something, I am not sure what until I begin to see it. I am trying to make an object, a model, a receptacle. What I am making will not be complete until I let go of it.

When I write fiction, I create an object that I hope will be savored by an imagined someone, somewhere. I show my ongoing work to my wife, my friends, my family, but my real collaborators are always the sahrdayasof the future, the same-hearted ones who will allow my words to reverberate within them. And each person who reads my story will inevitably read a different story, or rather, will create a different story. Anandavardhana insists that

In this boundless saṃāraof poetry,

the poet is the only creator god.

…

A good poet can transform insentient things

into sentient,

and sentient into the insentient, as he likes.

In poetry the poet is free. ¹

But I am only half a god.

Perhaps this is why I have always turned to coding with such relief: I can see cause and effect immediately. Write some code, and it either works or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, re-factor – change it, rewrite it, throw it away, and write new code. It either works or it doesn’t.

Poetry has no success or failure. Poetry waits to manifest.

And then there is language itself, malleable, slippery, all-powerful and yet always inadequate. Or perhaps it is my craft that is incapable of manifesting completely the reality of the worlds inside me. I am always translating, always bringing from one realm to another, and always there is something left out, something that drifts outside my reach.

I write in English. The language of the conquerors is the language of my marga, and it is one of the languages of my interior. English – sprinkled with Hindi, Tamil, Punjabi, Gujarati – is what my schoolmates and I spoke to each other during recess, what we used to call out to each other, to curse and to cajole. Some of our great-grandfathers learned Persian, perhaps, in their pathshalas.And before that, their ancestors chanted Sanskrit.

And so, in Red Earth and Pouring Rain, my poet tries to speak in English:

Sanjay moved his head, shut his eye, tried to speak but found his throat blocked tightly by something as hard as metal; he did not know what it was he wanted to say but knew that he couldn’t say it, what was possible to say he couldn’t say in English, how can in English one say roses, doomed love, chaste passion, my father my mother, their love which never spoke, pride, honour, what a man can live for and what a woman should die for, can you in English say the cows’ slow distant tinkle at sunset, the green weight of the trees after monsoon, dust of winnowing and women’s songs, elegant shadow of a minar creeping across white marble, the patient goodness of people met at wayside, the enfolding trust of aunts and uncles and cousins, winter bonfires and fresh chapattis, in English all this, the true shape and contour of a nation’s heart, all this is left unsaid and unspeakable and invisible, and so all Sanjay could say after all was: “Not.”

And yet, even if “Neti, neti”is enough for philosophers, a poet cannot only say “Not this, not this.” A poet must say, “This, this, and also this.” And by speaking, make English say things it cannot say.

I grew up in a Brahmin family, but without Sanskrit. During the second millennium CE, many of the Sanskrit-speaking Hindu regimes that patronized scholarship and poetry were replaced by Muslim kingdoms that used Persian as a court language. This did not necessarily mean neglect – many of these new rulers continued to sponsor poets, schools, and translations; the immense prestige of the language and its role in the sanctification of kingship and power were attractive to the new establishments. Muslims wrote scientific and poetical works in Sanskrit. Many of the Prakrits developed their own thriving literary and critical cultures, but these regional flowerings in the deshawere engaged in a vital and mutually revivifying conversation with the marga.During this “vernacular millennium,” Yigal Bronner and David Shulman write:

the peculiar expressive power of Sanskrit [is] still vital and available … True, Sanskrit is now but one of several literary options. But it brings with it unique assets such as the direct verbal and thematic continuities that transcend local contexts and that, for that very reason, enable a powerful articulation of the regional in its true fullness … Interacting with these vernaculars, Sanskrit is itself continuously changing, stretching the boundaries of the sayable, thinking new thoughts, searching for ways to formulate this newness. ²

So on the eve of colonialism in the early eighteenth century, there was still a thriving – if diminished – cosmopolis. Sheldon Pollock writes:

The two centuries before European colonialism decisively established itself in the subcontinent around 1750 constitute one of the most innovative epochs of Sanskrit systematic thought (in language analysis, logic, hermeneutics, moral-legal philosophy, and the rest). Thinkers produced new formulations of old problems, in entirely new discursive idioms, in what were often new scholarly genres employing often a new historicist framework; some even called themselves (or, more often, their enemies) “the new” scholars ( navya). ³

This ancient, widespread transmission was finally fractured by the establishment of English as the language of colonial politics and commerce, and the institutionalization of new dispensations of morality, knowledge, and power. The upper castes – especially the Brahmins – devoted themselves energetically to adapting to the new networks of wealth and meaning, to converting their social capital into economic capital. Many in the colonial legislative systems thought that Indian knowledge was flawed materially and morally, and that the only “cure” for the ills of the culture was the enforcement of change through European education. The early awe with which the eighteenth-century Orientalist scholars regarded Indian thought and art gave way, Vasudha Dalmia tells us:

to a marginalization of this knowledge and the degradation of the bearers of it to native informants. The Pandits had to deliver the raw material so to speak, the end products were to be finally manufactured by the superior techniques developed in Europe. In other words, their knowledge became valuable only once it had gone through the filter of European knowledge … The loss of authority … was not due to the intrinsic worth of either system, it was occasioned by the weightage awarded to Western scholarship by the political power it commanded. ⁴

Great works in the sciences and arts continued to be written well into the nineteenth century, but the Indian intellectual tradition was almost wholly removed from the educational system. ⁵After Independence, the new Indian state’s official policy of “technology-centric modernization” resulted in the entire native scholastic heritage being described “as ‘traditional’ in opposition to ‘modern’ and, therefore, understood as retrogressive and an obstruction in the path of progress and development which had been given a totally materialistic definition.” ⁶In my early childhood, I heard Sanskrit only in temples or at weddings; in both cases, Pandits chanted verses that the majority of us – children and adults – couldn’t understand. In sixth grade, I began to learn Sanskrit as a compulsory subject at school, and a vast, stifling boredom engulfed me immediately. It wasn’t just the endless rote learning of verb conjugations and vocabulary lists; Sanskrit came to us surrounded by a thick cloud of piety and supposed cultural virtue. Immediately after Independence, a passionate national debate took place over the institution of a national language for the Indian nation state. English was of course a foreign tongue, but southern speakers of Tamil and Malayalam objected to Hindi as the national language because it would put them at a disadvantage in the competition for jobs and advancement. In this context, the eternal language of the cosmopolis was presented as a good choice by some because it now was equally alien to everyone, because it was nobody’s “mother tongue”: “I offer you a language which is the grandest and the greatest,” said Naziruddin Ahmad during a debate in the Constituent Assembly, “and it is impartially difficult, equally difficult for all to learn.” ⁷

Others insisted that Sanskrit was a source of moral virtue, that its verses

breathe a high moral tone and display a precious note of what might be called High and Serious Enlightenment. Persons who are attuned to this spirit through an acquaintance from early childhood with verses of this type … have a balanced and cultured outlook upon life … The message of Sanskrit read or chanted is that of sursum corda, “lift up your hearts.” ⁸

Eventually, Hindi was installed as the national language, but Sanskrit was accorded official status by the Constitution and taught in school. Our Sanskrit lessons were replete with High and Serious Enlightenment; the characters in our readers were pompous prigs of every age and gender who went on and on about Right Action and Proper Behavior. The vast irony was that every Indian child of my generation and after has voraciously consumed the brightly colored pages of the Amar Chitra Kathacomic books, which re-create “Immortal Picture Stories” from India’s vast storehouse of narrative. In these comics, much is taken from Sanskrit literature, and in them, muscled epic heroes behave badly, lop off limbs and heads, tangle with monsters, and go on quests; queens launch intricate intrigues; beautiful women and men fall in love and have sex; goddesses bless and create havoc; great sages spy on voluptuous apsaras and inadvertently “spill their seed” and thereby cause dynastic upheavals and great wars. In short, the beloved Amar Chitra Kathacomics contain all the gore and romance dear to a twelve-year-old’s heart, but we could read them only in Hindi or Tamil or English, never in Sanskrit.

And of course nobody ever told us about Tantric Sanskrit, or Buddhist Sanskrit, or Jain Sanskrit. By the beginning of the second millennium CE, Sanskrit had “long ceased to be a Brahmanical preserve,” but it was always presented to us as the great language of the Vedas. ⁹Sanskrit – as it was taught in the classroom – smelled to me of hypocrisy, of religious obscurantism, of the khaki-knickered obsessions of the Hindu far-Right, and worst, of an oppression that went back thousands of years. As far as I knew, in all its centuries, Sanskrit had been a language available only to the “twice-born” of the caste system, and was therefore an inescapable aspect of orthodoxy. At twelve, I had disappointed my grandparents by refusing to undergo the ritual of upanayana, the ceremonial investiture of the sacred string which would signal my second birth into official Brahmin manhood. This was not out of some thought-out ethical position, but from an instinctive repulsion at the sheer, blatant unfairness of a ceremony and a system predicated on the randomness of birth. Now Sanskrit was being forced on me, with all its attendant casteism, its outdated and hidebound and chant-y ponderousness. As soon as I was offered a choice – a chance to learn another contemporary language to fulfil requirements – I fled from Sanskrit and never looked back, until I had to ask, for the premodern poet in my novel: What makes a poem beautiful?

The poet Kshemendra – Abhinavagupta’s student – left this advice:

A poet should learn with his eyes

the forms of leaves

he should know how to make

people laugh when they are together

he should get to see

what they are really like

he should know about oceans and mountains

in themselves

and the sun and the moon and the stars

his mind should enter into the seasons

he should go

among many people

in many places

and learn their languages ¹⁰

I have a sabbatical coming up. My plan is: (1) write fiction; (2) learn a functional programming language; and (3) learn Sanskrit.

In Red Earth and Pouring Rainone of the characters builds a gigantic knot. “I made the knot,” he says.

I made it of twine, string, leather thongs, strands of fibrous materials from plants, pieces of cloth, the guts of animals, lengths of steel and copper, fine meshes of gold, silver beaten thin into filament, cords from distant cities, women’s hair, goats’ beards; I used butter and oil; I slid things around each other and entangled them, I pressed them together until they knew each other so intimately that they forgot they were ever separate, and I tightened them against each other until they squealed and groaned in agony; and finally, when I had finished, I sat cross-legged next to the knot, sprinkled water in a circle around me and whispered the spells that make things enigmatic, the chants of profundity and intricacy.

When I wrote that book, when I write now, I want a certain density that encourages savoring. I want to slide warp over woof, I want to make knots. I want entanglement, unexpected connections, reverberations, the weight of pouring rain on red earth. Mud is where life begins.

Like palm-leaf manuscripts, the worlds the writer creates will finally be destroyed, become illegible. At least until they are re-excavated and become alive again within the consciousness of a future reader. I don’t worry too much about whose work will “last,” and if mine won’t. I do think endlessly about the shapes of stories, about the tones and tastes that will overlay each other within the contours. I don’t much like perfect symmetry, which always seems inert to me. The form of art rises from impurity, from dangerous chaos. When I can find perfection and then discover the perfect way to mar that perfection, I am happy. As a creator, I want to bend and twist the grammar of my world-making, I want crookedness and deformation, I want to introduce errors that explode into the pleasure of surprise. In art, a regularity of form is essential, but determinism is boring. When I am the spectator, the caressing of my expectations, and then their defeat, feels like the vibration of freedom, the pulse of life itself.

Abhinavagupta’s assertions about rasa-dhvanimay remind Western readers of T. S. Eliot’s objective correlative:

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding … a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particularemotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. ¹¹

This may not be simply a case of two thinkers separated by centuries coming independently to similar conclusions; Indians like to point out that Eliot read substantially in classical Indian philosophy and metaphysics during his time at Harvard, certainly enough to have encountered rasaand dhvani.In 1933, Eliot wrote:

Two years spent in the study of Sanskrit under Charles Lanman, and a year in the mazes of Patanjali’s metaphysics under the guidance of James Woods, left me in a state of enlightened mystification. A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after – and their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys – lay in trying to erase from my mind all the categories and kinds of distinction common to European philosophy from the time of the Greeks. My previous and concomitant study of European philosophy was hardly better than an obstacle. And I came to the conclusion …

… that my only hope of really penetrating to the heart of that mystery would lie in forgetting how to think and feel as an American or a European: which, for practical as well as sentimental reasons, I did not wish to do. ¹²

Eliot’s reluctance – or inability – to “think and feel” across a cultural divide, even as he borrowed certain idioms and ideas ( “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. / Shantih shantih shantih”) was rooted in his recognition that this would require self-transformation at an elemental level, a departure from comfortable, familiar certainties. To someone raised in the tradition of Western analytical philosophy, encountering the goddess in philosophical texts might indeed induce terror, especially if you think all mysteries can be penetrated to the heart; it is no coincidence that Anuttara is sometimes pictured as a “hideous, emaciated destroyer who embodies the Absolute as the ultimate Self which the ‘I’ cannot enter and survive, an insatiable void in the heart of consciousness.” ¹³The terrible goddesses demand that you sacrifice, that you eat foreign substances, that you let the impure and chaotic penetrate you. The ishta-devataor personal deity that you worship will shatter you and remake you.

And yet, when the thunder speaks, we all come away reading a message into the sphota, the explosion of sound. Eliot heard what he needed to, and used it in his art and thought. Programmers create elegant techniques like event-sourcing, they make beauty in code, but many – like Paul Graham – use the language of aesthetics and art to describe their work without engaging with the difference of artistic practice, without acknowledging that the culture of art-making may in fact be foreign to them. Eliot was aware that there was a mystery that he wanted to avoid; programmers, on the other hand, often seem convinced that they already know everything worth knowing about art, and if indeed there is something left for them to comprehend, they are equipped – with all their intelligence and hyperrationalism – to figure it out in short order. After all, if you decompose an operation into its constituent pieces, you can understand the algorithms that make it work. And then you can hack it. Therefore, to make art, you don’t have to becomean artist – that, anyhow, is only a pose – you just analyze how art is produced, you understand its domain, and then you code art. And, conversely, when you are writing code using the formal languages of computing, you are making something that aspires to elegance and beauty, and therefore you are making art.

Abhinavagupta’s description of poetic language and its functions reveals the hapless wrong-headedness of these kinds of facile cross-cultural equivalencies: code is denotative, poetic language is centrally concerned with dhvani, that which is not spoken; the end purpose of code is to process and produce logic, and any feeling this code arouses in an immediate sense is a side effect, whereas poetic language is at its very inception concerned with affect. Rasaarises from the fluctuations of feeling produced by manifestation, so to be aesthetically satisfying, even a play about a meeting between a physicist and his mentor must imbue the theories of physics with personal and emotional ballast, must make the equations resonate with memory. And so on: code may flirt with illegibility, but it must finally cohere logically or it will not work; the language of art can fracture grammar and syntax, can fail to transmit meaning but still cause emotion, and therefore successfully produce rasa.

The “hackers are artists” manifestos and blog posts gloss over these differences, and also remain quite silent about the processes that produce these culminations. For my own part, as a fiction writer who has programmed, thinking and feeling as an artist is a state of being utterly unlike that which arises when one is coding. Programming is very hard, and doing it requires a deep concentration in which I become quite unaware of my surroundings and myself. When I am trying to follow a bug, to understand its origins, time collapses. I type, compile, run, decipher a stack trace, type again, compile, run, and I look up and an hour and a half has gone by. I am thirsty, my wrists are aching, I should get up and stretch, but I am on the verge of discovery, there is one more variation I could try. I type again, and another half hour is gone. There is the machine, and there is me, but I am vanished into the ludic haze of the puzzle. The programmer Tom Christiansen put it succinctly: “The computer isthe game.” ¹⁴

And the poet Robert Hass once said, “It’s hell writing, but it’s hell not writing. The only tolerable state is just having written.” ¹⁵That writing is hell is a well-established commonplace among writers. In a series of published letters titled Writing Is My Life, Thomas Wolfe wrote:

I am back at work now. It is going to be another very long hard pull. I am already beginning to be haunted by nightmares at night. I am probably in for several thousand hours of hell and anguish, of almost losing hope, utterly, and swearing I’ll never write another word and so on, but it seems to have to be done in this way, and I have never found any way of avoiding it … Sometimes I am appalled by my own undertaking, and doubt that I can do it. ¹⁶

And of the not-writing, Wolfe said:

I would say that almost the worst time in a writer’s life are those periods between work – periods when he is too exhausted and feels too empty to attempt a new piece of work, or when a new piece of work is still cloudily formulating itself in his mind. It is really hell, or worse than hell, because writing itself is hell, and this period of waiting is limbo – floating around in the cloudy upper geographies of hell trying to get attached to something. ¹⁷

Most certainly there are writers in the world (Bradbury, Borowski?) who smile while they work, who create fiction and poetry in an ecstatic flow. I’ve never met a single one. Mostly, as far as I can tell, writing is not pleasurable. An interviewer once asked William Styron, “Do you enjoy writing?” and the great man said, “I certainly don’t. I get a fine warm feeling when I’m doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started every day. Let’s face it, writing is hell.” ¹⁸

Georges Simenon was of the opinion that “writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don’t think an artist can ever be happy.” ¹⁹Anthony Burgess was asked if he thought that Simenon was right, and he answered:

My eight-year-old son said the other day: “Dad, why don’t you write for fun?” Even he divined that the process as I practise it is prone to irritability and despair … The anxiety involved is intolerable … The financial rewards just don’t make up for the expenditure of energy, the damage to health caused by stimulants and narcotics, the fear that one’s work isn’t good enough. I think, if I had enough money, I’d give up writing tomorrow. ²⁰

Here’s Abe Kobo on the subject: “The most enjoyable time is when I suddenly get the idea for my work. But when I start writing it is very, very painful … To write or commit suicide. Which will it be?” ²¹Joan Acocella: “Writing is a nerve-flaying job … Clichés come to mind much more than anything fresh or exact. To hack one’s way past them requires a huge, bleeding effort.” ²²Norman Mailer: “I think nobody knows how much damage a book does to you except another writer. It’s hell writing a novel; you really poison your body doing it … it is self-destruction, it’s quiet self-destruction, civilized self-destruction.” ²³

Malcolm Cowley referred to the writing-is-hell whiners as “bleeders,” and thought that their suffering stemmed from their slow, overly self-critical method: “[They] write one sentence at a time, and can’t write it until the sentence before has been revised.” ²⁴This is an attractive hypothesis, but it rather breaks down in the case of writers like Wolfe, who “habitually wrote for long hours, wrote rapidly, and turned huge manuscripts over to his publishers.” ²⁵

I’m a slow writer, but I’m quite content to leave sentences unrevised until the second or third draft, and I know quite well that my first draft will lack architectural coherence and shapeliness. And yet as I write, something grates and scrapes in my chest. I’m never quite in hell, but in a low-level purgatory that I’ve put myself in.

There is the effort of shaping the words, of fighting through the thickets of cliché, as Joan Acocella noted. And there is often that self-doubt alluded to by Cowley. Effort and self-doubt are certainly present in other areas of my life – programming, for instance – but I am never ever in this particular agony except when I write.

“It must be lonely being a writer,” people have said to me. But I like being alone, at least for a goodly sized portion of every day. And working by myself on other things – programming, for instance – is never painful. There is something else altogether that is peculiar to the process of fiction writing, a grinding discomfort that emerges from the act itself: it feels, to me, like a split in the self, a fracture that leaves raw edges exposed.

The premodern Indian tradition investigates the reception of literature thoroughly but remains strangely silent about the actual workings of the creative process. Abhinavagupta, for example, writes that “The poet’s genius [ pratibhā] is not inferred by the audience, but shines forth with immediacy because of his inspiration with rasa… Genius is an intelligence capable of creating new things.” ²⁶ Pratibhais imagination, insight, and seems to be spontaneously creative, playful, an overflow of the interaction between self-luminosity and self-awareness; it flows forth, aided by craft and learning. The Indian aesthetic theorists were “philosophers who dealt with the philosophy of awareness and the philosophy of language,” but they seem to have not been very interested in biographies of literary effort and failure. ²⁷The only reference to the costs of poetic effort I’ve come across is from Rajashekara, who insists that “When the poet after the intense activity of poetic composition wishes for relaxation, the inmates of his family and his followers should not speak without his desire.” ²⁸Which makes me believe that Rajashekhara and Avantisundari got a bit cranky by the end of the poetry-writing quarter of their day.

But the Indian phenomenology of literary pleasure perhaps provides a way to think about literary effort: making a narrative come to life within you requires that you bring alive your own samskarasand vasanas, make active all those latent impressions that lie submerged within the layers of your consciousness. This is why stories are not only constructed, but formed, found. They emergethrough an alchemical process that requires significant concentration, samadhi.The writer experiences these stories as events happening within himself.

“The poet is, indeed, comparable to the spectator,” Abhinavagupta says. “The origin of the rasathat emerges within the reader is the generalized consciousness of the poet … the rasawhich lies within the poet.” ²⁹The implication here is that in the moment of creation, the poet must be both creator (the one who is producing or constructing the aestheticized object) and the audience (the subject that is experiencing the generalized consciousness thus produced). That is, you must simultaneously be in multiple cognitive modes: to produce any semblance of rasayou must remove your ego-self or I-self from the narrative that is forming within yourself, you must allow sadharanikaranaor generalization to occur. And yet, the ego-self cannot be allowed to slip effortlessly into the continuous dream of the narrative, it must stay alert and conscious of the very language it is deploying to construct the story – the story, that living, moving thing which is a part of itself, is another aspect of the self. Experientially, this results in a hypersensitive self-awareness, the very opposite of flow; the writer’s ego-self knows at every moment the abrading of generalization and the terror of its own ephemerality. It is a slow, continuous suicide, a “civilized self-destruction.”

So the experience of the writer during samadhiis more akin to the mental state “(laboriously) milked by yogin” than it is to the effortlessly achieved rasaof the sahrdaya.The yogin know well these beautiful, bleak landscapes of our inner worlds. I once heard the scholar, Tantric practitioner and teacher Paul Muller-Ortega speak about the terrors the yogi faces on the path toward self-realization. Yogic practices didn’t just bring bliss or pleasure, he said. The “yogic ordeal” also made you feel that “you are dying.” And this was true, Muller-Ortega said. “You aredying.” That is, the ego-self that most of us believe to be our true self must die if the identification with the larger, undivided self is to occur. The yogi must confront the mysterium tremendumand pass through it. The path of the yogi is not for the faint-hearted.

The sahrdaya, on the other hand, is granted the spontaneous, temporary suspension of the ego-self through the encounter with art, while tasting – in a concentrated, wondrous manner – consciousness itself, the larger self of the world. The Natyashastratells us that theater was created by Brahma as a fifth Veda, available to people of all castes and conditions; art is thus a democratic meditation through which the ordinary person can taste bliss.