The very words we use to define ourselves or anything in our world, and even the words we use to protest such definitions when we disagree with them, inevitably serve to distort our understanding of the real thing or meaning that the words are supposed to point to; that is, if a “real” thing or meaning can even exist without our use of words to identify it. Deepani Seth interrogates the creative, the destructive, the absolutely necessary utility of words.
“Expression is overrated. Words… why are they so important?”
“In all our years of evolution, if we haven’t learnt to communicate what have we learnt.”
Communication. Expression. Language. Words.
Of these I choose words; words, which claim no higher goal (as thought does); words, which seek to bind all things, all thoughts, abstract or otherwise, into tangible form, so that these may be grasped and conveyed; bound;words, which aren’t always communications or expressions. Sometimes they are just things; clunky hollow things that fall from the mouth, cluttering noisily to the floor. Sometimes they are just symbols, with nothing to point towards.
Sometimes they are just things; clunky hollow things that fall from the mouth, cluttering noisily to the floor. Sometimes they are just symbols, with nothing to point towards.
Into these words I bind myself. My identity I build word by word. I pick and choose the ones that seem to fit, some are chosen only because they sound nice. Some are discarded with time; others stay. Like a patch of blank wall on which several posters are pasted, some over the other, some parts layered over so many times that the paint, attached to the layers over it, begins to peel off, revealing the brick and cement underneath.
But these words, superficial as they may seem, are sometimes necessary – for me to define myself. When exhausted by floating around, either in a vacuum, or in a dense molasses of conflicting conditions, I seek stable ground, a vantage point to stand on, from where I can see myself in relation to the world around me, standing where I can define myself in relation to others, and in some ways at least, understand parts of myself. Then I begin to use my voice, calling out the same words that I have chosen to define myself by, so others may hear and know who I am. So they may recognise me by this identity that I have formulated.
“Just putting something into words…it suddenly makes it clear what you want. Language…”
I use words to define what I need. To recognise and call out against prejudices that I face or have faced, and to put into tangible form, that which I believe is my right. My demands, my protests, my anger against the subjugations and hegemonies that are responsible for keeping me sometimes within and sometimes excluded from the ‘normative’, all take the form of words. For words were the tools used by others to define me. So now I use words, as tools, sometimes weapons, against those norms, against those who are inside where I am excluded, against those who try to keep me bound to their definitions, their norms. I read into their words, dissecting their rules and prejudices. I write my own arguments against those.
Questions lurk underneath. Questions about whether my demands are justified, whether the prejudices and injustices that I claim are real and whether the rights I demand are really the ones I deserve. After all, it may just be that I am fighting battles simply because I have gained access, accidentally perhaps, to weapons.
“Why didn’t you say anything, then?”
“Because I did not have anything to say”
What is it that one needs to say, to reveal, or put into tangible form? What is better left unsaid?
The vantage point that I stand on, and define myself by, is a floating island. It shifts with time, and is shifted around, by the actions of others, and my own. My being, which I have attempted to sort into different compartments, is still, in that layer beneath words, tangled. It is a mass of conflicting conditions. This floating is desirable. The mess underneath is needed. I do not wish to be bound by a new set of words, even if they were chosen by me.
But the movement and the mess are in uneasy conflict with the desire (or the need) for conviction. How do I vouch for the honesty, the sheer necessity of what I say, if I am unaware of the very place from where these needs arise? Here words abandon me. “We are symbols”, they say. “We point at things that are, and that aren’t, whatever it is that you choose to point to.” All that I say, all that I define myself by are symbols only. Even the things that I choose not to say exist only as simulations of that which might not be.
For now I write, I speak. I also read and listen. I am surrounded by words – some of which make no allusion to expression, or even communication. And within these words, and through them, I search for thought, for expression, and for communication. For now, these are the only tools I have.
