After a long time of blogging my wanderings around India at onewaveintheocean.blogspot.ca, I have accepted the inevitability of change and migrated (as they say) to this new blog. I am not closing the door to the past, but I am acknowledging that I have changed and begun walking along a new path in my life. This is the most ordinary and the most extraordinary thing about being human, isn't it? I suppose that is why there are so many cliches for the experience of the changes that we human beings experience over and over again.
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| Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque in Muscat |
"It is almost banal to say so yet it needs to be stressed continually: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis." Henry Miller.
Saying something so often that it truly disappears into the background noise and becomes banal is one thing; but then finding just the right words to say it again so that it re-emerges from the cliche and we see it again as extraordinary---well, that is a good talisman for this first reflection on the power and limits of language.
As it turns out, words are the very thing that has been preoccupying me lately, words and their workings through and on human beings. Marshall McLuhan saw language as the first and archetypal 'technology' and that is a clue I have been trying to follow.
But I am forgetting where I am and so let me start with the words right here and now, (on words and their power to transform): today is the first day of the holy month of Ramadan (2015), the time that recalls the long ago time of the divine dictation of the words of the Holy Qu'ran to the Holy prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him). When that occurred it created (or re-created) something utterly unique, a new beginning, a new people. Christians imagine something like that when they say, "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God". Words beyond mere words, then. Holy words, words that act and create.
And still further: I am living in the western desert region of the emirate of Abu Dhabi, formerly called, with an ominous simplicity, 'the empty quarter' (Al Gharbia). It is also being 'renamed' slowly and meticulously with trees and grass and mines and oil wells and solar power plants and peoples, of course, from all over the subcontinent . In this garden blossoming in the desert, there are still echoes of that word that was heard by the intrepid English explorer, Wilfrid Thesiger (author of Arabian Sands) --'the empty quarter'--but they are only echoes now. This too is an act of re-creation, but of a very human kind. It is a filling up and transforming of the empty places by virtue of human vision, desires, technological ingenuity and of course, wealth. It is something to behold, and shows words in action ovGercoming what was once named 'empty'.
The desert is the landscape I see everyday and which surrounds me. There are also landscapes of the mind, however, those we carry around inside us (and which carry our spirit around and around in them). I am thinking not of the desert but of the forest, now, like those Canadian forests in which I walked and wandered and sometimes even got lost as a child. This forest is a good metaphor for the world of ideas or the mind, I have always thought. There are many paths that open up as one walks and possibilities of turning in many directions. Although it is also very true that 'the mind is a dangerous neighbourhood", as a friend used to say. Buddhists are well aware of that. It is full of words and ideas and fantasies and when we follow them around long enough it is very easy to be completely lost in a kind of labyrinth of the ego, or, of course, and to 'miss the forest for all the trees'.
It was one thing to explore and discover yourself there in a new found territory then, but there is also always the risk of being unable to find your way back. And in that sense 'dangerous' things also lurk in the darkness of forests, as the myths all tell us, things that may change everything and shake you to the core. If for example, like Hansel and Gretel, you are kidnapped by a cannibalistic witch and led into the dark deeps of her forest, it would be wise to leave a trail of breadcrumbs in order to find your way out again--should you ever escape and return to yourself again. That fairytale ends happily as most of them do: the children escape the witch, find their way out of the forest and, you guessed it, live happily ever after.
What's missing in the fairy tale is the impact of experience as it changes us, transforms us so that there is no way back and we will never again be what we were before.We can remember, of course, we can follow the trail of crumbs and come out of the forest into a clearing but when we arrive where we began we realize that something is very different. And that is the person that we are and the way we see the world. For experiences--at least the ones that overwhelm us--also transform us. Words may describe these changes only indirectly, and that occurs when we find ourselves suddenly and surprisingly speaking and thinking in a new way.
This shows us a another and deeper power of language with which we human beings are intimately entwined. We use it to create a house for our consciousness and then we inhabit that house we have made. Words cloth us in a story, our story, and give us countless orientations to the world that we come to know through them, and they help us find our way about in it. And when that world shifts dramatically, the foundation of the house crumbles; we search quickly for new words, try speaking them in different ways and begin building a new house for ourselves. So words and ideas shape views of the world and of our self--in a thousand deep and hidden ways. We wrap ourselves around in them like the double helix of our DNA and become one with them. It is only when we wander off into the forest, find ourselves at a loss and then, to mix metaphors, open the door into a surprisingly new and spacious room of the mind, that we realize we have changed. And so has our world, the foundation has shifted, 'up' is 'down' and 'left' is 'right'. There are surprises at every turn for we are speaking a new language and coming to live in a new house of words.
I am and have always been a man of words. I write blogs. I think by writing and my thinking is wordy, grammatical and argumentative: it moves from here to there like the lines on a page. I begins at a beginning and ends at an end, like a Victorian novel. It tries to move slowly and surely filling in all the blanks. In India and now again here in the desert, I have made the most startling discovery, however. I am a quite simply, a child of the print culture of the west, my mind formed and informed by its logic and laws. And for most of my life that worked more or less seamlessly. It just doesn't work here, in the east, (much as our culture has become the exemplar of technological primacy for the rest of the world and especially for many here). People simply cannot jump over their own shadows no more than I can. And so, while I must make the best of it with the resources that I have, that I am, I can look for new points of reference, a new moon and stars to navigate by. There's enough wonder in that I think, for the moment.
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