Ideate.

The power of symbols is often misunderstood, and more often than not, misrepresented in an essentially simplistic manner that speaks nothing of its immense capabilities. A symbol is more than a metaphor: a metaphor can only function as the subject wants to, the metaphor itself giving in to be a mere mirror the image borne in which is redundant but for the need to understand. A symbol is an image of the thought itself, a symbol is an idea. Ideas are the birth of revolutions, and ideas supplanted with ideal communication can give rise to a sociopolitical system wherein the society recognises, unmistakably, what it needs, and the politicial system, the means to provide for those needs. An idea is the recognition of the need for construction, the need to grow, the need to understand, the need to tolerate, the need to believe, and ultimately as well as inevitably the need to trust. When the idea is expressed, it conjures a mask as if delivering identity to the expressor, which it does, and the mask is a symbol of the expression’s beliefs. Ideas, however, are very large in number, and the effective communication of them so as to invoke a majority, a recognisable shout amidst the vox populi, is difficult. Ideas vary. What they vary about is anybody’s guess; they are born from morals, values, beliefs, faiths, nativity, social behaviour, the environment and the way in which the person concerned takes to the world in general. Ideas are miniscule, and are therefore quickly ignored. The one good idea flickering for a moment as hope peeking out of Pandora’s box has to be identified and seized as if it were a chance, for you know not when such an idea will be born again. It is your discretion that will serve as the utmost authority in nursing ideas that suit your needs – that, in other words, comply with the activities which concur with the fortification of your skills on whose employment you have what you need, but not necessarily that you have what you want.  

The ability to ideate indicates the ability to evolve. The normality with which we conform in order to establish a routine in our lives, so as to determine the nature of our existence itself, has to be subjected to change so we, the constituent living units that collectively define the normality, can identify that change and thereby, recognise and utilise the idea of progress. The momentum generated by this progression could be made widespread, as a revolution trigger-employed to bring in fresher ideas as well as to sustain the chain, the end goal of which is indicated clearly by the element whence the idea was inspired and the need of the individual. In order to do so, we use the symbolisation of ideas. Although an idea dwells in the mind of one person, at most a group of people who think alike, a symbol is universal. A symbol retains in its perception its very own history, its design and its purpose. A symbol is transcendental in that it reaches beyond the barriers that society has to offer – it bears an innate meaning that is understood as the same by even the different. For example, even though the concept of love assumes different forms in different peoples, the Taj Mahal is understood as being a symbol of love by all. It is in this transcending skill that an idea in one man’s head exposes itself as a tool of change. Blowing up the Taj Mahal, say, will, for a few, will be the loss of a wonderful piece of architecture, but for everyone else, the act itself will speak of an idea that is going against love. Just as we are identified by our ideas, the idea itself is given form and tangibility in actions when it speaks through symbols. 

This is the fundamental footing of semiotics. Through the novel he writes, the author symbolises his ideas in the form of characters, plots and the associated imagery, and the reader understands them by interpreting them for himself. Without having to write that the woman sitting in the corner of the room was sad, the author can place her in darkness, and develop a colouring and mood that contrasts with the rest of the room. Although it is hard to explain why the portrayal has so-so effects on us and not in any other way, it can be understood that the conveyance of ideas becomes easiest when they each are depicted as symbols. 

Simplistic Semiotics

Inspired by Umberto Eco and his styles of writing, I took to semiotics in a carefree manner. Only after getting into the subject did I realise how semiotics was much more than using picteresque symbols as metaphors to dictate the way the reader thinks when he is reading what you’ve written. Semiotics has more to do with the ‘why’ than with the ‘how’. The more and more they questioned, the more and more I was left clueless. Why does a gloomy and clouded evening mean sorrow? Why does the rising sun against an orange horizon signify beauty and serene? We all know what words to use and when, but I don’t think we really understand specifically why such descriptions mean some things. After this, I took up R. K. Narayan’s ‘Malgudi Days’. ‘Malgudi Days’, you should know, is the tale of a small boy named Swami and his experiences in the fictional village of Malgudi. The village itself is very much realistic with its own municipality council, government offices, bank, post office, even printing houses and the occasional animal poacher. However, it is Narayan’s writing that makes the difference. He is not like Eco, or even Pamuk or Tolkien. His language is simple and crisp, balanced finely between casual colloquiality and impeccable tones of formality. It’s as if he actually lived in the village once, and is now only recollecting from his memories. There are not many interpretations of the colours splashed around the town, and seldom any detailing when it comes to emotions. He freely lets the reaer to explore – marking the difference only when it is that every reader understand the same things and is never mislead. That is semiotic perfection.

Umberto Eco’s writing, on the other hand, is like Peter Jackson’s filming: very detailed and informative. There is no event or happening left out, irrespective of whether it has any relevance or not. In this case, Eco tells the reader too much and then, lets the reader come to a conclusion derived from what he or she understood to be relevant. In this case, the text becomes too long and often dragging along at some points. In ‘The Name of the Rose’, the contextual setting of the book was a splendid choice: an Italian monastery in 1327. During that period, Christianity was undergoing a tumultous renaissance of its own, and witch burnings were growing to be commonplace. The lengthy and loquacious dissertations on Christian theology seemed relevant because it all pertained to what was going on then. However, in ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’, Eco steps across the very-distinguishable line between necessity and redundancy. Pages upon pages of Brazilian mysticism and Italy during World War II makes the book seem like an encyclopaedia. The same can be said of ‘The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana’. Now, as far as arguing with me is concerned, my comparisons are based on my literary history. I don’t have any specific likes and dislikes as such, and nor am I specialised in any form of literature. Juxtaposing Narayan against Eco is just a way for me to bring to light the variance in semiotic densities and how, even a lesser number of words can paint a picture as good as extreme exposition. 

 

The Magic Of Knowing Everything And Still Liking It

Not everyone takes to writing the same way. To some, writing is just an inconsequential gay inconsequential past time that should be done only if it is absolutely necessary that you do. At the other extreme where I stand, writing is everything – ‘everything’ to the point that I sometimes wonder if humans would one day evolve into beings capable of communicating only through written messages. In today’s world, in today’s commercialised scenario wherein it is mandatory that you belong to some network or the other in order to set your sights on success, connectivity is everything. A simple idea like Twitter is now being touted as the next big thing for small businesses. In such a world, how can anyone not consider journalism as an important business? I say that in the context of most of us taking it for granted. We all expect the newspaper to be splayed on our doormats at 6 in the morning, but there’s a group of people toiling all day to make that happen. And that’s always the feeling that gets to me when I read the paper: you can only truly appreciate something when you know how hard it is effect it. I always thought playing a guitar would be cakewalk – but that was before I cut my fingers on the strings trying to strum a stupid little tune.

Anyway, that’s my take on writing. And whenever I write, it feels like something so magical, you know. I guess I’m one of those people on this planet who think writing is magical; since everything is some form of an art or the other, there must be at the least a few people who think it is magical! But let me tell you, writing is more magical than you can think it will ever be. We can either speak or write, and for an inorganic form of communication to take up half of everything being communicated is a conquest of sorts. Ever since little scratches were made on stones, man has come a long way in refining language and the scripts that go with it.

Taking a little detour, I’d like to tell you how hard it is to create something. For example, suppose that you’re using a car. Any car that runs on petrol or diesel has a minimum of 40,000 nuclear parts in it. And all parts are part of a network of pipes, tubes, cooling systems, and so on and so forth. Nothing is attached freely to anything. In building such a car, what would you build first? The engine? What about the power supply? The battery? What about the power supply again? The dynamo? What about the wheels that power it? The power transfer mechanism? What about the engine? And that is where a bit of research was initially involved: in trying to figure out what went where. Once that was finalised, a manufacturing plant was set up and an assembly line was modeled after the designs that stemmed from the research. However, if you noticed, all this happened because everyone who worked with mechanical engineering knew where they were headed. They all wanted to build a machine that would work like the latched-D-gate: with a constant input, there would be a specific output.

But in languages, that is not the case. All though we might have inadvertently triggered the factors that led to evolution taking shape, we never were and never will be in a position to control and guide the pathway of evolution itself. It’s something like a Mobius strip: make on and then try drawing a line which is completely blocked from eyesight in a two dimensional frame of reference. Some part of the line will still be visible, although it is drawn only on one side of the paper. We can make a Mobius strip, but we can’t hide the line. If we made a normal strip and made the line disappear, it would become development – or making the car in other words. When we started off, we never knew where languages would end up. But we kept improvising it because that is what we thought was favourable. If we are to progress this way, we’ll never be able to get to the ideal language – but ideal languages don’t exist (the very thought of it is absurd!). And so, here we are. We didn’t know what our goal was, other than the fact that we knew we waned to simplify things; we only did what we thought was right. Therefore, there is nothing to say that languages would have ended up like this whether we wanted it or not. It only leads us to the fact that there could have been any other language in the stead of English. And that is what makes the languages we have today more beautiful! There could very many more, but it was these that took form and shape and materialised in the form of images in our heads.

And that is also what makes writing more valued, rather more worthy to be valued. Now, writing is a tool used to convey information through the simultaneous structuralisation of perspective, grammar and logic – the end result of which constitutes a sentence. With these elements, we know for a fact that we have conveyed something or the other; what I’m saying is that such realisation is also very miraculous. Just by improvising on something, we believe that we are making it simpler. However, since we know no other alternative that might exist in its absence, we don’t have any options. And dangling at the end of this feeble thread lies the future of every language.

And what lies at the other end? What lies at the end which is pulling it higher and higher? The need to communicate as well as to picturise. Speech was the first mode of communication – it was created in order to generalise some ideas and actuate conformity in order to fortify any efforts made towards a single goal. Writing had to take form in order to preserve any such communication. It delivered repeatability and timelessness. What was before dust in the wind or sand on water is now an engraving on stone. And how something as inanimate is capable of projecting so much imagery is something else altogether. And with these many uncertainties involved, don’t you think writing is a magical wand that can perform magnificent feats?

The answer to that question is what divides the readers from the writers!

The Loss Of Meaning: This Chancy, Chancy, Chancy World!

Just like the many organs of the human body enable us to feel, see, hear and speak, the languages we write in, the stories we weave out of them, are given life when we use meanings and symbols to let them feel, see, hear and touch. Not everything is just words. In fact, there are a very few things that are just words – probably definitions of other words.

When you read something, when your eye passes over a sentence, when your brain understands what is being said in what context, you immediately form an image in your mind. That is when little words of four or five letters quiver with the possibility of an infinite interpretations. It is not mandatory, nor is it impossible, that a word, phrase or a sentence be interpreted in just one way. If so, everything would be so rigid, as if creativity had been subjugated to the death of imagination – as if creativity itself had ceased to exist. It would mean the eradication of signs, symbols, explorations, adventures, possibilities, myths, legends, mysteries, the eradication of fascination and wonderment! We are humans, and as humans, we are always curious. As much as we dig deep into the earth and fire rockets into the sky, it would be a sad day when we know everything there is to know. Purpose would be lost, meaning would be lost. Men and women will drop whatever they are doing: what is the necessity, after all? What happens at the end? What happens after I nail the painting into the wall? I will only be looking at it; I will not be able to into it. As much as we need to know, we don’t want to know everything. That is, indeed, a dreadful end to the quest for knowledge: the truth that you now belong in an old world, where you conquered every mystery there was left to conquer. You are king now, but a king of old men sitting by their sickles in the fields, but a king of old women who see no children in their bleak futures, but of children who fear growth itself.

And so, we have creativity, we have imagination, we have wrongs, we have mistakes. Only by weaning out a contrast between two apparently similar objects do we identify and define difference itself, and only with the emergence of a difference do we recognise progress. Change is the unit of time, time is the herald of change. If we hadn’t been able to detect change itself in the first place, time would be a futile requirement. The clock face would be a redundancy: you don’t see a changeless reality reflect the ballet of the three hands. That is why we see mistakes as the stepping stones to success – only, the proverb forgot to tell you mistakes are the the only way to success. The need for imperfection has never been so profound.

So there, I have established that meanings and interpretation are integral to civilisation.
But even in the presence of meanings, it is always up to us to interpret it right. Availability: excellent. Validity: eternal. Truth: can’t say. We have variance in variety. We have millions and millions of words floating around us in the form of speech and image, and it is up to us to understand them in such a way that the interpretation reflects our purpose in the need to understand it. Man does not simply look at the bark of a tree and launch into a list of the metaphors it brings to his mind. He will have his prejudices, his experiences that have fostered them; he will have his reasons, his dreams that have inculcated them; he will have his perceptions, his company that has required it. He will conform to something that finds logic in his beliefs. He will not so easily go against himself. If there are holes, he will plug them. He will construe in the beginning when it seems right and normal, and then he will construct in the end to make it seem so. The imperfection of the self recapitulates imperfection in the world. We cannot, at the same moment, account for all the factors affecting our decisions. We will have assumptions, some ignorances, in coming to our conclusion. Rigidity prohibits probability. If something is to stay so independent of the passage of time, it must either be extremely vulnerable to the subversive forces of nature – in which case it will soon die – or it must be unresponsive.

Take up this micro-scenario. You are reading a story wherein the author has failed to mention the time of day he is referring to. Suddenly, you come across a paragraph which seems to help you in piecing together different pieces of information to conclude that it is night time in the tale. Also, suppose that the words ‘darkness’, ‘loneliness’, ‘blind’, etc., are not mentioned anywhere. Even so, the conclusion only seems logical as to be night. That is the power of symbols: the author can choose to deliberately exclude straightforward adjectives of a phenomenon. Instead, he can choose to employ the imaginative power of the reader to build his or her own physical appearance of the scene and the characters. A good example would be Milan Kundera‘s works, which concentrated more on the mental make-up of the persons.

The need to interpret, rather than to take for granted, is only recognised by itself when exposition is limited. If the author takes time to expose everything about the scene to the reader, the reader will find it hard to from those mental images from which he or construes the message waiting to be conveyed. As much as the author’s imagination is exploding with newer and newer concoctions, he must limit himself to what is really necessary.

• If quoting fact A suffices that fact B follows, then fact B is redundant if printed.
• If fact A may or may not imply fact B, then fact C can be mentioned to corroborate that it is, fact B that is being spoken about.
• If fact A and fact B are both mentioned, fact C can be left up to the reader’s imagination.

But each meaning must exist independently – it can not depend on the other meanings. If a word is interpreted in one way, then the implications must be unchanging. The study of semiotics, for example, sometimes deals with the interchangeability of symbols, and how two symbols at the same time can yield one meaning. However, two meanings cannot lead the interpreter to the same symbol.

Anyway, I have narrowed down the plausibility of probabilities to the constraining of exposition. But, even then, there is a personal remaining to be made: whether to interpret, or not to interpret. This is a very foggy subject for me. In trying to quantify perception and understanding through the definition of cognition and recognising, I now find myself limited by an anticipation. Something tells me I am on virgin territory, fresh land, something new and unexplored! Where do meanings themselves stem from? When we know we have to interpret a riddle in order to understand its implication, why do we take for granted that there will be mystery waiting to be uncloaked? How do words give birth to ideas? Simply put, even if I were to be an expert on a matter, why do I inherently know that there will always be something unknown to me lurking in the corners of it?

If that was my black cloud, this is my silver lining: the thought does not shatter belief. It evokes curiosity and fosters self-inspiration.

Semiotic Stigma!

Writing a story, according to me, can be done in two ways. The first way is to throw yourself into the story and then narrate things as if you were a first-hand witness to all of it. This way, the amount of exposition and verbosity becomes highly controllable and the story takes on a form of being compact and, at the same time, full. It attains that wholesomeness that makes it look as though it might have actually happened. The second way to write a story is what I would like to call ‘ideating’. The types of stories to which this style becomes applicable are of the genres of fantasy, sci-fi, etc., wherein the plots are one of a kind and are impossible to happen to us in the near future, are couldn’t have happened in our history. In such circumstances, you have the unique opportunity to define your own world and in itself, your own circumstances as it were! The flexibility it endows you with imparts to you the ability to guide more than develop the character’s personality development. In a standard story, by which I mean something that could have happened, you can probably say:

The sun rose over the eastern horizon, igniting a streak of anger across the skies.

But when you define, say, your own planet and your own cosmos if need be, you can get started with more than one sun rising out in the morn. For example, by causing two suns to rise over the horizon, you can establish a similitude with an important (plot) event and use the rising as a simile to either contrast or complement that plot event.

The eastern sun was born early, a fiery orb rising slowly across the yawn of a few hours,

defeating the darkness and ignorance that prevailed in the nights amongst the townsfolk. The southern sun, by now at the peak of its brilliance, could do little to claim the younger light. Swift though it had been, its purpose itself was diminished by its size.

Many good authors prefer to work with fictional worlds not just because the number of plausible plots increases by a large amount, but also because the character development need not conform to our stately or societal needs. The flexibility, in this case, lies in being able to comment on or criticise, in ways more than one, some aspect of the author’s life which he or she is, say, not fond of. The problems of over- or under-exposition (grave ones, indeed!) do not arise because there exists no benchmark or reference to compare it against. What you create is new, and is the only one of its kind. For example, you asking me for 1 quintal of bananas will have me giving 100 kgs of bananas. But if you ask me for 1 Gimli‘s weight in bananas, I will have to refer to LoTR to find out for myself the quantity of bananas you expect from me. In other words, 1 Gimli‘s weight in bananas will exist as a normalcy only in LoTR, and therefore can not withstand comparison.

One other thing is that by adopting this genre for the story at hand, the author compensates for the insufficiencey of information in one field of study by shifting the focus from the plot to the information itself. This way, instead of gathering the information required to build the plot, the author can now build the plot based on the information that is available.

I have commenced writing a novel which is based in a different section of the cosmos and has its own race of people for me to work with and manipulate. Now, there are two reasons I chose such a set up:

1. a friend put it in my head to write something along those lines, but with him in front as the Dark Lord!

2. working with such fictional people does not put any pressures on me as to define who they as though were humans, because they are not and live under different circumstances.

There are a few more things I came across in this endeavour. I have completed some 30 pages of it, with approximately 11,300 words. It is shaping up pretty well, I should say, except for one thing: I don’t know whether it is slow or fast paced. 30 pages down the line, I have introduced only 2 main plots. The difficulty, which I purposefully didn’t mention above, is that since most of the components of the story don’t comply with the expectations of the reader from a perfectly earthly story, the author, apart from being possessed with the flexibility, has now the freedom to write as he wishes. Therefore the amount of control that must now be exercised is greater in order to just keep the plots in line with each other. To control your fingers is one thing, to control your imagination is so completely another. You can’t help but, for one moment in between, think of the plots and character lines you can explore. In fact, I’d like to introduce one more concept of my own here: I call it ‘delineation’. Any story must be delineated to a good extent. If a story has, say, 6 plots, I will like it (and also think of the tale as ‘wholesome’) if they don’t lie in a straight line, or one after the other such that the introductory stages coincide with the first plot and the climactic stages with the sixth plot. The ‘Harry Potter’ series was like that. The author, J. K. Rowling, introduced newer characters in each book who brought in newer plots. Although, I do agree that each book in itself was completely delineated. On the other hand, ‘The Lord of the Rings’ by J. R. R. Tolkien, was extremely wholesome in that characters present in even ‘The Silmarillion’ appeared in the trilogy. It was as if the universe that Tolkien had created could, in fact, exist, even thought it involved so much pseudologia and fantasia.

(One reason for this is that even though the ‘Harry Potter’ series were as fictional as ‘LoTR’, the plausibility of something happening that particular way in the respective books is greater in Tolkien’s work than in Rowling’s. For example, The Battle of Helm’s Deep is more believable in its depiction than Harry’s encounter with the Inferi. This is what delivers the ‘kiddishness’ to the work – being able to correlate different sections of the text as comprising of the same plot thread is more capable by an adult.)

All said and done, story writing is a very stress-busting experience, I tell you. You are God: your creations are yours to live. You can kill anyone, you can give life to anyone. That’s too much power, and if you had the right mindset, I think you would enjoy it as much as I did. The only thing is, those who do write stories do it for the money, and therefore go for conformity with the larger audience, and that is where all the semiotic stigmas of the author creep in. Like myself!

(Note: these ideas I’ve “introduced” might already exist. It’s just that those are the words I use to identify those elements of story writing.)

The Writers' Crib

By the writers’ crib, I don’t mean their cribbing; I mean their tool-room, the place where they derive their ideas from, their sources of inspiration. A writer begins to write when he wishes to express his ideas, when he believes that there might be others who will want to learn of what he has learnt, understood or perceived. The language he chooses to use will be the language he finds most convenient to write in, one in which his grammar and the way he structures his sentences will reflect perfectly in the messages that the reader comes to understand. There must be no conflict, and there must be an inherent brevity that says the writer need not use an unnecessary number of words to express himself completely. The style of writing, the flavouring of the text, which he employs will deliver the mood of the text, and thereby let the reader know which side of the argument he is on, if indeed there is one. If not for an argument- well, I think there are always arguments: this conforms to my principles of a binary world! The language and the grammar decided, next is the perspective if the writer. Now, the perspective is, I think, independent of the subject at hand. Why do I think this? Because, herein the good earth I think there are a set of symbols, a set of signs, that tell us that there exist an interconnectivity between all things, objects as well as beings. Whether the writer writes of a pencil, or of the Vietnam war, he will always write in a such a manner as to reflect his perception of the world and those who inhabit it. This perception cannot be stolen from the mind’s eye, and cannot be changed easily. Perception as I would define it, is an understanding that is born from our innate personality. Moreover, this personality doesn’t come to account for our perception just by the name, but also by what it exhibits in turn: our up bringing, our religion, our nativity, our patriotism, our identity, our imbued humanity. The degree to which we adhere to these elements of our living defines our perception, and narrows it or broadens it depending on how we exercise them. And now, looking beyond the perception, there is nothing but objectification. Objectification is identification, not association. Perception is. When we perceive an object, we identify it, true, but then, we also move on to understand our relationship with it. When we believe that we have a possibly meaningful relationship in the offing, we give the object a name. By giving a name, we have established association.

When, at our most basic levels, we are confined to the mind and how it perceives the objects around us, our perception of the more complex ones follows a simple mathematical principle: we tend to break down those complex events into smaller and smaller ones, until we have in our hands a multitude of the simple events.

Now, the symbols in this earth. What are they? How do they look like? I don’t know. Are they there? Yes they are. How do you know? Let me tell you. Look at this picture.

Red 'X' in white?

What do you see in this picture? Do you see a red ‘X’ on a white page? Of course you do. Everyone does. But what everyone fails to notice is that, why do we always see only the red ‘X’? Why not the white background? Why don’t we see the white background as having a red-coloured ‘X’ shaped cavity? Or why don’t we see a white pattern on a red background?Why do we tend to prioritise the symbol over its background, and why do we not consider the background itself as a symbol to be existent? Well, in this particular case, it may have been because of the familiarity of the symbol as an alphabet, but what about a very many number of other symbols? Simply, why do we associate more with those symbols that are easier to perceive? The difficulty to perceive another symbol doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist!

Imagine this. There is a stainless, white wall. Perfectly white. There is a perfectly white table in front of it. On this table is a semi-hemispherical orange bowl. If you were to stand at a distance of around 3 metres, how would you know that that orange coloured object is a bowl? First and foremost, you will know that by its shape. The curvature, and a flat section towards the bottom will tell you that it is a bowl. What gives this bowl an image of being curved? This is obtained from its relation to its background. If man had been living in a world composed only of circles, and if the line hadn’t been discovered yet, he would not know of linearity. He will be able to perceive only curvature, and therefore, he will not identify the circle for what it is. Similarly, since man knows the line, he can recognise the circle for what it is. Deriving another analogy, the shape of the bowl is understood by how it cuts out the background. In this case, you know the object is a bowl only by how a section of the wall is hidden from your sight: the section that is hidden is instead covered by an orange, semi-circular patch.

Therefore, if you were to think of it, there is a red ‘X’ on white paper, or there is a red ‘X’ shaped cavity in the white symbol that is the paper. The difference between the two is prioritisation. Through this selective prioritisation, we allot a certain density to some parameters we find easier to work with, and therefore, write about. This is the reason more than one single perception exists in the world. Look at the number of symbols you have splattered have around you in your daily life. Have you ever wondered whether the symbol you perceive is the only symbol in sight? Those for whom there seems to be no harm in this selective prioritisation can move on. But for those who are seeking a solution to something, this is some food for thought.