bhattacharya, l. - language as creative expression

8/13/2019 Bhattacharya, L. - Language as Creative Expression

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Language as Creative Expression

Author(s): Lokenath BhattacharyaSource: India International Centre Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 2, LANGUAGE (JUNE 1984), pp. 177-186Published by: India International CentreStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23001657.

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LANGUAGE AS EXPRESSION

Language as Creative ExpressionLokenath Bhattacharya

EvEN in the darkest and deepest caves of his consciousness, mannever attains a state free from speech. He thinks he has reason tobelieve that, at times, he has discovered this speech everywhere in theuniverse and, specially, in the origin itself of the universe. The creationof all life, he assumes, has been simultaneous, if not synonymous,with the creation of speech.

The manifest world of whatever the senses or the mind canperceive or imaginethe hiranya-garbha or the golden embryo of theRigvedais peopled by words, spreading itself coolly, and comfortably,beyond the borders of time and space, into layers and layers of lightand darkness, not just crying for expression but simply by beingexpression.

A name here, or a flower there, it is an expression. A pain onlysensed, as yet nameless, is no less a nomenclature of the samedescription. And they are all words, already fully expressed, irrespective of the minds in which they may, or may not, have evoked images,irrespective also of whether such words are already articulated orlying merged in silence. Silence itself is an expression, a splendid andripe fruit for anyone to savour. It is even greater, since silence is notonly an expression, but the mother of expression, two states of anexistence merged into one.

A word may be added here about the Indian concept of chandas,177

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178 LOKENATH BHATTACHARYAwhich originally meant revealed lore, but later came to be identifiedwith the metre which gave an utterance a rhythm and bound its contents together. The hymns that man sang spontaneously to God werethe earliest literature produced by him. They were motivated by hisrealisation that, after all, he is but a toy, kridanaka, in the hands of hismaker. The chandas or revealed lore, in its formal as well as expressional aspect, meant for the ancient. Indian everything that covered(chadayati, from which chandas) his sins and he submitted himselfcongenially to his prayer, which represented for him God's breath inman returning to its source. This was for him the logos or the Word,and all other utterances seemed a mere waste of breath (vacoviglapanam). This expression of deep religious sentiment, thoughprimarily restricted to the verse form, was soon thrown open to beused by one and all (prapattih sarvadhikara), without any distinction ofcaste, creed, or nationality.

A distinction may be made here between, on the one hand, thatspeech which is the symbol of creation and, on the other, language asunderstood in common parlance. Even in the latter case, man findshimself confined to the limits of his language, to which limits, nodoubt, the German philosopher Wittgenstein refers when he says,The limits of my language signify the limits of my own world (Tractatus, 5.6). What follows from such a remark is that there are otherworlds and other expressions which, as they lie beyond the reach ofmy language, are not known to me. The creative man's craving, fromtime immemorial, has been to push the limits of his language to suchextremes which alone can open for him the realm of superior expressionas distinct from utterances amounting to a mere waste of breath.

It does not need to be stressed that nothing intelligible in thisworld can be attained without the help of language. This is theprimary instrument that man possesses not only for understandinghis world, but also for registering the effects of his action.

This explains why language has remained an essential concern ofphilosophers in the East and West; why it is a favourite topic forpsychologists and linguists; why the intricate techniques and methodsemployed in psycho-analysis have to pay an ever-increasing attentionto the subject; or the fascination that it has always exercised for poetswho, particularly, more than any others, have ceaselessly strived tocarry the effect of speech to the farthest possible limits-so that theunseeable can at last be seen, the inaudible heard, the unspeakablespoken. Do remove, 0 Sun, cried out the author of the Isopanishad(verse 15), the lid of the golden vessel in which the face of the Truth



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LANGUAGE AS CREATIVE EXPRESSION 179

lies concealed. The sun, which is the subject of the prayer expressedin the verse, represents for the poet his own power of expression,which he desires to be forceful enough to hit the target and tear apartthe veil.Speech, of which language is but a part, holds the key to knowledge and action. If language, a system based on symbols, could bedeveloped as an essential means of communicating and preserving

knowledge, it is because of its proven ability to represent the worldin its infinitely diverse material as well as spiritual aspects, to organise,structure, and give form to that representationin short, to make theuniverse intelligible and a subject for man's reflections. As Benveniste,the eminent French linguist, remarks, Language furnishes thefundamental configuration of properties which the spirit recognises inthings. To think, he adds, is to manipulate the signs of language.

Can there be a thought then which the power of speech cannotpenetrate? Or is it a continuation of the same line well within the realmof speech, but nevertheless a portion of which must lie in darknessand beyond the reach of utterance? It will be necessary to come backto this question later.The point to be made meanwhile is that the symbol that is

language represents a sublimity of sophistication of the human spiritwhich, since the primeval utterances of man, has, using the means oflanguage, never ceased to wonder at the mysteries of the universe.In the matter of creative expression, some such of the first utterancesof man have often reached a peak of excellence which not only remainunsurpassed in later annals but also exemplify, for posterity, qualitiesthat must constitute the core of any creative expression worth itsname. One of those qualifications is the omnipresence in them of theimmaterial, the irrational, the beyond.

IIThis topic suggests to my mind the mystery which surrounds theword 'inspiration'; and the nature of the experience which it producesin man. I am reminded, in this connection, of Plato who said, Godhas given the art of divination not to the wisdom, but to the foolishness of man. No man, when in his wits, attains prophetic truth andinspiration; but when he receives the inspired word, either hisintelligence is enthralled in sleep, or he is demented by some distemperof possession (Timoeus, 71). The view expressed is clearly one ofinspiration as an ecstasy or possession, which may have few advocates



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180 lokenath bhattacharyatoday. Perhaps the pejoration implied in the statement can be softenedby explaining that what Plato may have meant to emphasise is thepreponderant role of the irrational in an experience of this kind.

I am also reminded of the Hindu conception of the subject, itstheory of inspiration and revelation, its long oral tradition, andespecially its division of literature into the two broad categories ofsruti, that which is heard, meaning thereby the divine voice receivedby the human ear and then directly communicated to posterity throughpen or oral teaching; and smriti, that which is stored up in memoryand denotes learning mastered through observation and study. I amreminded of the rishis, the ancient poets and seers of the Vedic hymns,who are described to have seen the sacred texts before expressingthem in words.

The Sanskrit term for poet, kavi, etymologically means visionary;and the human poet is said to be a facsimile in miniature of the creatorof the universe who too is described as a visionary. The following verse(No. 8) of the Isopanishad specially comes to my mind:Bright and bodiless, pervading all, without scar or sinews, pure andunpierced by evil, he, who is the seer (kavi), omniscient, transcendent and uncreated, has duly allotted to the eternal world-creatorstheir respective duties.However, unlike the theory explaining inspiration as a purelyexternal phenomenon, an intrusion of a foreign element into thesystem, the emphasis here is on the discovery of the revealing forceas identical with the agent receiving the revelation. I am indeed He,that Purusha, who dwells there, says verse 16 of the Isopanishad.I thought of the difficulty in understanding every individual word in

the poetry of Saint-John Perse. Would the help of a dictionary beconstantly sought then for a better comprehension of that poetry or,if the general meaning had already been grasped, should it not sufficeand should I then just go on reading line after line, absorbed in theatmosphere they create? The very idea of that atmosphere possessedmy soul: that pitch of the poet's voice, the tone; and his audience, themagnified man exposed to the great winds and oceans of Time; theelements; the poet performing as a priest the invocation ceremony ofthe journey.

The thought of the elements, and of a special tone of the poet,also reminded me of lines from contemporary Greek poetry, lines suchas these from Elytis:



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LANGUAGE AS CREATIVE EXPRESSION 181On your lips there is a taste of stormBut where have you wanderedAll day long with the hard reverie of stone and seaAn eagle-bearing wino stripped the hills bareStripped your desire to the bone.

(Marina of the Rocks)From a news item quoting a new study of atomic fallout andnuclear waste, I was led to ponder over the possibility of an impendingcollapse of the world. The warning contained in the news was that thepolar melting and its effects causing widespread floods, heat waves,and monsoons could strike us all by the year 2000. The end of the

world will continue to weigh on the minds of men for thousands ofyears to come, until the final scene of the drama is enacted and thecurtain drops. Would it then be the apocalypse predicted throughoutthe ages, signifying a complete cessation, a negation of all life? Itcould also be the pralaya conceived by our seers, in which state thegolden dust of the pre-creation era would return and remain, mergedinto an endless oneness.When life has ceased to exist, it may be argued, it matters littlewhat view of that cessation is taken; since no one will be there then

to take any view whatsoever. But what happens then to all this chatterof mankind, his vibrations, his desire for expression, his language,speech? Does it then lead us on a return journey, through dark andsilent alleys, to the primeval source of expression? Any worthwhilereflection on language and creativity of expression must have thisphilosophic postulate as its base.Ill

Marcel Proust, the illustrious French writer needing no introduction,found, on the contrary, the possibility both of the permanence ofthe present moment as well as its immortality only in the past and inits restoration and reconstruction through a cultivated processwhichhe sees as a journey in search of lost time . His approach is incontrast to the Rigvedic pronouncements, and those of later Indianliterature. The mention of Proust in combination with Rigvedic pronouncements may be surprising, since one may have understandablereservations about the epoch and the society depicted in his work. Ifthe Proustian example is specially chosen to be cited here, it isbecause of two principal reasons;

First, few contemporary writers have grappled with the subject ofwhat ultimately constitutes the core of creative expression as intensely



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182 LOKENATHBHATTACHARYAas Proust has done. His discovery has not remained confined to meretheory, but is exemplified as a living proof of that theory validated inthe recording of events reconstructed from his past life, in his ownunparalleled words. Secondly, and more importantly, its apparentcontrast with the Rigveda and similar literature notwithstanding, thediscovery of Proust, in its final effect, attains the same aim of crossingthe order of time as also achieved in the superior expressions ofspeech embodying the ancient hymns.

Proust remarks:A minute that has crossed the order of time, has re-created in us the man crossing, as he experiences the minute, the order of time. And that such a manshould be confident in his Joy, one understands that well, even If the simple tasteof a madeleine does not logically appear to contain the reason for this joy; oneunderstands that the word death' has no meaning tor him: situated beyond time,what could he fear from the future ?

The reference in the quotation is to one particular instance, a muchknown one among others in Proust's life, through which the sensationof such a minute could be produced. The instance was his tastingof a madeleine, a small cake, while sipping a herbal drink, which hadthe effect of an ignition and, in a flash, revived in him the memory of along lost world. The whole village of Combray of his childhood dayswith its people, odours, and sounds seemed to jump out from thevery cup of that herbal drink.

When such rare and privileged moments arrive in our life, Prousttells us, we can have the intuition of ourselves as absolute beings .Therefore, he pleads that the theme of time which destroys, respondsto a complementary theme of memory which preserves, The pointhere is that this preservation will have to be captured in a transformedspeech which alone can serve as a passport to eternity. To be equallynoted is the point that the question here is not about just any kind ofmemory, but about the manner in which the past is evokedwhichmakes all the difference, in the example of Proust.

It is a manner of what he himseif has described as his searchfor lost time, which cannot be carried on in a world ordinarily calledreal and which in actual fact is irreal or at least unknowable, becauseof the simple fact that it is so much distorted by our passions that wecan never see it in any other form. There is not just one universe,there are millions of themindeed, as Proust himself says, as manyof them as there may exist apples of the human eye and signs ofhuman intelligence which wake up every morning. There is no use,



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therefore, living amidst these illusions or only for them; what isnecessary is to revive the past in us and re-live it, after havingsearched and re-searched the nooks and corners of our memories totrace out from amongst them the lost paradises which, Proust affirms,are the only paradises existing anywhere.As illustration of what is sought to be said, here is a complicatedbut luminous sentence from Proust; complicated because of its syntaxand structure; and luminous because of its content, affirming theimportance the Proustian principle attaches to the meeting between amemory involuntarily aroused and the sensation it produces, whichforms the basis of the creative impulse. He says,If the memory, thanks to oblivion, could contract no link or throw no chain ofbondage between it and the present minute, if it has remained at its place, on itsdate, if it has kept its distances, its isolation in the hollow of a valley or at thepoint of a peak, it makes us suddenly breathe a new air, precisely because it isan air which one has breathed before, an air purer than the one desired vainlyand repeatedly by the poets to reign over the Paradise and which could not havegenerated this profound sensation of renewal if it had not been breathedalready, because the true paradises are those which one has lost.

Although not always apparent, there are certain points in theProustian conception of creativity which have a profound resemblanceto the classical Indian doctrine on the subject. Our real I, heremarks once, which occasionally seemed dead for a long time butwas not so entirely, wakes up, becomes animated, by receiving thecelestial food brought to it, food which is precisely that permanentessence habitually hidden from things and suddenly liberated bymemory, a fugitive contemplation of eternity . When such a thinghappens, the bells, in celebration of the event, start ringing in theinnermost silence of the heart; and that language which alone iscreative expression is born.

IVAccording to traditional Indian thinking, speech is possessed of apower which in its supremacy is second to nothing else. While in itsloftiest form it is the divine vibration , the core of the reality, in adownward movement it regulates the appearance and disappearanceof the worlds. It can also limit itself, bringing the empirical world intoexistence and becoming the human languagethereby lending itselfto chances of error and slavery. But even then, it never ceases toretain its power of deliverance, as the omnipresent reality remainshidden only to the ignorantnot to the adept who will have themeans to recognise it.



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184 LOKENATH BHATTACHARYAHere is how Vac, or speech, speaks of herself, as she is feminine,in a Rigvedic hymn (X. 125.4-5):The man who sees and breathes, who hears what is spoken, obtainshis sustenance only through me. There are those who dwellby my side but do not know: you who have hearing, listen, I amtelling you the sacred truth. Yes, it is I who am speaking andthese are my words which both the Devas and men will welcome. Imake him mighty whom I love, I make of him a Brahmana, a Rishi,a gifted man.

Speech, says the Taittiriya Brahmana (II. 8.4-5),is endless, beyond all creation, immense. All the gods, the gandharvas, men or animals live in it. It is in speech that men have theirfoundation. Speech is the syllable, the first born of the Order,mother of the Vedas, the navel of immortality.

The syllable itself is known in Sanskrit by the term akshara whichagain, according to traditional etymology, means that which does notslip away or perish and, therefore, is imperishable, indestructible,eternal. From the Rigveda, the earliest available record of Indianliterature, akshara is found associated with sacred speech, present inthe very beginning of the universe:

With the dawning of the earliest of mornings the great eternal(akshara) manifested itself on the body of the cow. Revering,therefore, the wishes of the devas I proclaim: great is the singledivinity of the devas. (III. 55.1)But if energy is speech and speech energy, if the whole world of

action can express and assert itself only in and through speech, it isno less true that the movement of speech, in the beginning of itsjourney, must start from a point to which it must also return at theend, and that point is silence, the great void or Sunyaa grand andunique frame in which the splendid work of creation is contained.Here the celebrated Rigvedic hymn of creation comes to mind:

Darkness v/as there concealed in darkness and an indiscrimaintechaos pervaded all\ only the one enveloped by the void manifesteditself through the might of tapas. As the primal germ of the mind,there arose desire in the beginning-, the sages searched their heartswith wisdom to find the kin of existence in non-existence.(X. 129. 3-4)



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Another question may arise at this point When silence has beentransformed into speech, is it within its power to express fully andtotally a reality experienced? The question is linked with the one asked earlier here: can there be a thought lying beyond the reach ofutterance? Once again the Vedic seers come to our rescue as it isin India more than perhaps anywhere else that the whole subject ofspeech and its scope has been given a most elaborate treatment. Intheir attempt to describe the profound experience realised by them,the Vedic poets have often expressed their sense of the inadequacyof language. A Rigvedic hymn (1.164.45) speaks of four grades ofspeech known to the men of divine wisdom, three of which make nomotion and must be kept in secret while only the last quarter of itis given to man to utter. So language as spoken, or written for thatmatter, can express only the one-fourth part of what has been experienced; the rest must remain submerged in eternal silence.

The same idea is expressed elsewhere (Yajurveda, VajasaneyiSamhita, 30.19) in a slightly different manner: While the eloquentman is for the finite, the mute is for the infinite. What, then, is thesolution to one seeking creative expression? The universal answerto such a question points to the inevitable recourse to the symboliclanguage expressing a little but suggesting much more, since for asymbolic language which does not yield a straightforward logicalmeaning it may be easier to come close to the target because of thesimple fact that it is neither the business of logic nor within itspower to hint a transcendental significance, which alone is the concern and content of any creative expression worth the name. Hencethe importance, in such an expression, of the irrational and thebeyond.

Not unexpectedly, the reference to that quarter of speech whichis the only expressible part of it has an exact parallel in the description of the Purusha, the manifestation of the divinity, in anotherfamous hymn of the Rigveda which says:Such, indeed, is his magnificence, though Purusha is greater thanthis. All beings constitute only a fourth of him, while three-fourths,his immortality, rest in the supreme region. (X.90.3)

This makes the expressible speech identical with the manifest world,while the totality of speech achieves a complete oneness with theultimate reality.The difference that so obviously exists between words that areno more than a mere waste of breath and that form of speech



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186 LOKENATH BHATTACHARYA

which alone can be creative expression is also highlighted. A Rigvedichymn says:

There is the man who sees Vak (speech) without actually seeingher, like the man who hears but has not heard her, while to anothershe reveals her lovely form as does to her husband a loving wife,finely robed. (X.71.4)Verse 7 of the same hymn, a good specimen of poetry, makes thedifference even more accentuated:

Friends, though ail endowed with sight and hearing, differ in thequickness of their mind. While some may look like pools reachingto the mouth or armpit, the others resemble lakes in which a mancan bathe.The language that is creative expression has to be such a lakein which a man can bathe. There is no other way-indeed, no otherway.Our present discussion has only tended to circle around what is

a still centre, a perpetual point, any journey towards which cannotbut be in the form of a devotee's circumambulation, involving neitherprogress nor regression, and where hitting the mark with a surearrow is no more than a metaphor. In conclusion, we can only echothe sentiments expressed by a Rigvedic poet in the following verse(VI.9.6):My ears strive to hear, and my eyes strain to seethis expanded light residing within my spirit.My mind wanders far and wide, beyond its confines;What am I to speak, and what, indeed, am I to think?

bhattacharya, l. - language as creative expression

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