Today, while doing some research for an essay on Macbeth, I discovered this website, an attempt
to construct a non-human language, and I was hooked. This person is, beyond all
reasonable doubt, my new hero.
I have always been fascinated by languages, and have been
constructing them since I was a small child. Even before I began to formally ‘invent’
languages of my own, I would often speak (and still do, very often) in
gibberish tongues that tended to annoy everyone around me, especially my
parents, who couldn’t ever get a straight answer out of me. I would love to
play at speaking foreign languages, from German and French to Sioux and
Swahili. It tended to help that I was naturally adept at imitating accents.
My first attempt at creating a ‘language’ (if you could call
it that) was a simple code-based set of symbols to replace the letters of the
English alphabet. I didn’t work on any grammar, obviously, since I was... I don’t
even remember how old.
I have always been obsessed with the fantasy genre, and it
is from there that my fascination for constructed languages stemmed. Being born
in the mid-90s, I watched The Lord of the
Rings films long before I actually read the books, but was fascinated by the
various languages presented in the films. This inspired me to create my own proper
language. May, many half-heated attempts were made, from when I was about
eight, till I was eleven. That was when I actually managed to create a language
of any consequence. It was a hieroglyphic language, with hand-drawn symbols
representing entire words. I didn’t create a proper grammatical structure, but
I did compile a dictionary of about a hundred words. The language itself was
crude, and created on whim, rather than on an evolutionary structure as real
languages are, and, as I recently discovered while looking through my Class VI
school notebooks (in which I had created the language during boring classes),
contained words almost always ending in consonant sounds, particularly ‘-r’, which made the language terribly
monotonous and tiring to speak. Here’s a sentence in the language (which never
had a name): Denar raur duku masku dular!
('Give me more money!' Yes, some of those classes were so boring, we used to come up with gangster dialogue.)
When I was about thirteen or fourteen, I invented a script top
be used in a particular nation in a fantasy land that I had been working on for
about two years then (since November 5th, 2006, to be precise). It
was a rune script, created to be chiseled into wood or stone by the ancient settlers,
which evolved into the lingua franca of
the nation. I decided that I wanted to take this language seriously, and began
to invent its words and grammar by translating texts from English. This proved
to be extremely successful, and by the end of that school year, I had compiled
a dictionary of 269 words. It was around this time that I began to read a lot more
Tolkien, which inspired me to seriously consider working hard on my fantasy and
its language. Unfortunately, school was starting to become a lot more serious
at that point, and my dictionary remained stale at 269 words until very recently
(which is ironic, considering this is definitely the most serious stage of my education
till date). I had begun to work on my language again, but I will have to take a
sabbatical from that area of my life for now.
I had bought a book sometime, called How Language Woks by David Crystal, which I plan to red intensely
this summer. I will have to wait another month before I can actually begin to
work on my language and my ‘world’, but that makes it all the more exciting. At
least I have something to reward myself with after the dreaded board exams.
Maybe, after that, I’ll be able to share my world with you
guys right here, on this blog. Fingers crossed!
So what did I do apart from fall asleep in front of my biology text book today? I looked through the wrong end of my telescope and found out that the magnification is powerful enough to see every pixel on my screen in detail! Woohoo. :|
I also took loads of photos of the sky. Bangalore's having a brilliant spell of exceptionally good-looking skies this week. Here are some of my photos:
I really need to invest in a good camera.
Wow, this has been a pathetic post. Well, at least I'm sticking to my promise of regularly updating this bog.
Bleargh. Ciao.
I finally found the videos of the Indian National Youth Orchestra's performance at Chowdiyah Memorial Hall last May. Watch out for the last piece of the evening, an orchestral rendition of the Rajasthani folk song, Pallo Latke.
So I introduced my family to the magic that is 8tracks a few
weeks ago. Since we have a desktop with a reasonably good sound system, we
often spend our dinner-times jamming out to some vintage 80’s MTV stuff. I had
recently stumbled upon the penultimate playlist- 1,992 80’s pop and rock songs,
everything from The Cure to Bruce Springsteen- so, naturally, I had to turn it
on during dinner last night.
The problem was, of
course, that with a virtually unlimited stream of music from an era when every
song was electrifying, enjoyable, or bearable, and nothing less, it became
rather hard to turn it off, and considering the fact that I had a Biology
practical exam the next morning and I hadn’t once practiced a single floral
diagram, turning it off was something of a necessity. Billy Jean was blasting
out across the living room when I made a deal with 8tracks. I would turn it
off, I said if any song except Take On Me, by Aha, probably the most 80’s 80’s
song out there, and one of my all time favourites (along with Africa by Toto,
and… oh forget it, they’re all genius), came up next. It was a pretty good deal
for the machine- one song in nearly two-thousand. The odds don’t get much
better than that.
I nearly died (of a combination of hypertension and eyes
nearly popping out of my head) when the last notes of Michael Jackson’s classic
faded out, and were replaced by the rhythmic bass and snare of, you guessed it,
Take On Me, by Aha. One in two-thousand. Mind you, there’s absolutely no way to
predict what the next song on a fresh 8tracks mix is going to be, nor is there
any way to control the order, as a listener.
You might call this some form of telepathy. Here
is an interesting blogpost I found, explaining the rational side to the
‘supernatural’ phenomenon of telepathy. While the logic seems sound (I haven’t
even graduated high-school yet, how would I know), and I have had several
similar experiences over the course of my lifetime, it doesn’t explain what
happened last night at all. Oh, I forgot to mention this, but this is probably
the third or fourth time something like this has happened to me, but this time,
it was different in the fact that in all my previous experiences, the second
parties have been live radio stations, controlled by human radio jockeys. If
what the above article details is to be taken as true, and humans collectively
are, in fact, a literal bio-electrical network, all my previous experiences can
be explained, since both the radio jockey and I are both definitely and
completely human.
8tracks, on the other hand is not. 8tracks consists on an
endless number of ‘mixes’ created by its users, containing a number of songs
chosen by them in an order they decide, but when you play a mix, it’s the website
that plays song after song in the predetermined order, no humans involved at
that precise moment when I so desperately willed Take On Me to play next.
In 1996, when the supercomputer Deep Blue defeated
then-reigning world chess champion, the Russian Garry Kasparov, he remarked
that the computer displayed “human” intelligence.
Was I, in fact, communicating telepathically with the
website? This
article talks about a ‘telepathic’ computer that can ‘read your mind’. Hardly
related to what happened with me, since my computer and the website haven’t
been designed to perform that function, and have no way to do so, but it does
open up the realm of possibility whereby telepathic communication between man
and machine becomes possible. Have we so integrated machines and computers into
our society that we have been able to unconsciously allow them to become part
of the aforementioned hypothetical bio-electrical network of the human brain?
Well, yes and no. Yes because the possibility of artificial
intelligence has long been looming, and no because even the possibility of
human-to-human telepathy is merely hypothetical. What may seem uncanny, as was
Deep Blue’s victory over Kasparov, is in fact simple action out of analysis of
observed facts and logical reasoning.
But, since my mind that desired a song that I wanted to hear
had not converted that desire into an input into the website via typing in the
search bar, that thought remained only in my nervous system. There was
absolutely no way to put that desire down as a hard fact for the website to
analyse and act accordingly in response, since, as I mentioned before, my
personal computer was not built with the capability to read my neurosignals.
Yet, the next song that came on was the song I wanted to hear.
What I have overlooked in my logical flow up to this point,
is the fact that, as its website claims, 8tracks is “internet radio created by
people, not algorithms”. So there was in fact a human involved in my
experience. It wasn’t just a computer. So the possibility of telepathy is still
open for discussion, right? The fact that the mix I refer to was created on the
28th of January, this year, ten days before I even became aware of its
existence, poses a metaphorical dead-end to that line of argument.
Maybe not. I found this on an internet forum:
“I cannot prove that any of you exist outside my mind. Just like none
of you can prove that I exist outside of your minds.
Consciousness can be boiled down to this: "me" and "you."
In this case, "you" represents anything that cannot be identified as
"me." Without "me" there is no "you," as there
would be no "me" to even conceive of "you."
So you are all constructs of my mind. This is not where it ends though, as I'm
just a construct of the mind of whatever consciousness happens to observe me.
Now, we've established that "you" only are because of "me,"
and essentially, this reality I exist in exists within me. This is always the part
where I get stuck though.
My vocabulary is not advanced enough to speak the language of creation.
Okay, look at it this way: True it's all very circular and dependent on the
concept of infinity, but if I exist in a reality that exists within me, and you
all exist in a reality that exists within me, and the same can be said of each
and every consciousness in existence, then what are we conscious of?
We're only conscious of ourselves, nothing else. We are one
consciousness, continually segmenting and experiencing itself.”
The most obvious bells ringing on your head will probably
point straight to Jung’s concept of synchronicity.
Jung coined the word to describe what he called "temporally coincident
occurrences of acausal events."
Here’s an example from Jung:
“A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in
which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream, I sat
with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a
gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the
window-pane from the outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in
the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab one finds
in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia
aurata), which, contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt the
urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment.”
All too familiar? In formulating his synchronicity principle, Jung was
influenced to a profound degree by the "new" physics of the twentieth
century, which had begun to explore the possible role of consciousness in the
physical world. "Physics," wrote Jung in 1946, "has
demonstrated...that in the realm of atomic magnitudes objective reality
presupposes an observer, and that only on this condition is a satisfactory
scheme of explanation possible." "This means," he added,
"that a subjective element attaches to the physicist's world picture, and
secondly that a connection necessarily exists between the psyche to be
explained and the objective space-time continuum." These discoveries not
only helped loosen physics from the iron grip of its materialistic world-view,
but confirmed what Jung recognized intuitively: that matter and consciousness
-- far from operating independently of each other -- are, in fact,
interconnected in an essential way, functioning as complementary aspects of a
unified reality.
The belief, in a nutshell- suggested by quantum theory and by reports of
synchronous events- is that matter and consciousness interpenetrate.
I should probably stop now. This looks to be very open-ended, and is full of
arguments based solely on hypothetical evidence. More importantly, I have
satisfied myself to dwell on Jung’s concept, which makes the most sense by far.
For now. Maybe in a few months, I might have something more to say, who knows? Maybe
we’ll have another post like this, which, I must admit, is so very fun to
write, by this August. If not, well, I just hope that my radio-telepathy/uncannily
regular mingling in synchronicity/whatever continues. If you haven’t
experienced it before, it feels utterly brilliant.
Take my word for it.
If anyone has any (interesting) opinions on the whole thing, do feel free to comment. Ah, who am I kidding, nobody reads this blog.
As a reward for anyone who read this post right through to the end, here's Synchronicity II by The Police.
You know that annoying time of day when you're watching A Bit of Fry and Laurie, but you can't get a fiendish medley of the theme from Mind Your Language, bits of Swan Lake, and Never Smile at a Crocodile out of your head? No? Well, I can't say I'm disappointed for you.
And here's the whole of Disney's Peter Pan, just for the heck of it.
So 'ere I sit, after writin' the chuffin'
dickie birds 'temporal' and 'eternal' 'baht a 'undred times in me essay
on ode on a grecian urn in me literature Green, and jammin' ter 'Solidarity' from Billy Elliot (and also tryin' ter figure aahhht 'a the
bloomin' musical is 'excellent for students and children', after 'earin'
the lines "you think yer smart ya cockney shite, ya wanna be
suspicious? When ya were on the picket line, we went and fucked yer missus" in the song). Elton john may be a right pretentious thr'penny
bit, but 'e Bobby can tickle and bite the Mae West musicals. Watch Billy Elliot at the Victoria Palace Theatre in London? Goin' on the Mrs
Duckett list, along wif Caine's 'rcade and Burnin' Man fer Bobby. Yup, that was Cockney. I'm bored. Apparently Cockney rhyming slang was invented so that the coppers wouldn't be able to understand what the criminals were saying, which is why it finally makes sense to me. I mean, who in their right mind would call feet 'plates'? Or heads 'loaves of bread'? But, then again, I don't think anyone who speaks Cockney today is in their right mind. Okay wait, was that not good? Rewind, rewind, rewind...Right, let's start over. In recent weeks, I have suddenly developed and intense fascination for ballet, hence the Billy Elliot stuff. Also, we were discussing Nadsat a while back, and the subject of Cockney rhyming slang came up. QED. Just wanted to make the update. I need to write more on this blog. Oh, my earphones went bust again. These ones. Less than a year this time. Wow. So I'm stuck without music-on-the-go. Not that I'll be going places during the exam, but still...
It has just occurred to me that I have been on this earth for nearly two decades. Eighteen years- that's a long time. And although I have done and seen so much, it feels like I've simply wasted what is probably going to be the best period of my life, for until the end of this stage, I have been getting stronger, getting smarter, learning and learning more, being in a constant state of growth- both physical and mental. Live fast, love hard, die young- that has never made sense to me, and although it still doesn't quite resonate, I'm beginning to sympathise with what it stands for much more. It would honestly be much worthier to have a short, but productive, life, than to have a long one full of unfulfilled ambitions and dreams that cannot become reality because we have grown to weak and tired to work at them. To get out while the going's good and to be remembered for generations, or to keep on going well past your prime, like Michael Schumacher, until you disappear into nothingness and insignificance? I must admit, this is a terribly biased view, but one that has seen enough proof to not seem an impossible fate.
Of course, it remains to be seen if I will even live a life of significance, at all- one worth remembering. I had promised myself, long ago, too far back for me to care to remember, that I would leave a mark. When asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, thought the choice of actual profession would constantly chance, I would always reply "famous". No, not famous enough to be bombarded with paparazzi every time I stepped out to buy the groceries, just that right amount of fame for people to have heard my name, and for a few strangers to recognise me when I would be walking my dog, or dropping or picking up my kids from school. The right balance of fame and anonymity that would entitle me to the benefits of a good life without any of the cons of celebrity life.
Times change, of course, and with them, dreams. I am perfectly comfortable with the reality that I may not be famous (in fact, I'm almost thankful). But living a life of worth? Doing the things I want to? That can never change, for anybody. I swore to myself that, as soon as I could, I would leave this place that I've been living in since I was born. I don't have anything against it. I love Bangalore in all its splendour and quirkiness. I am particularly fond of Indian culture, particularly cuisine. I just can't imagine myself living here as an adult, or raising a family here. It just seems too been-there-done-that, barring, of course, places like Auroville. I swore to myself that I would get up and run away from the sedentary lifestyle that I'm living. The only problem is, I swore that I would be independent by the time I was eighteen. My eighteenth birthday has come and past, and it's almost concrete now that I'll be living this life for the next three or four years as well. Every plan that I make seems to be for "after school", and now, "after college". What next? "After I get a good job?" "After I make enough money?" I don't think I'll ever get out that way. I can almost see it: "We'll go to England after we get married, Sir Walten.", "The Amazon? We can't possibly spend the year in that horrid place!". And soon, I'll be just another old man complaining about the traffic, and how much of a workload the kids have at their regular city school.
I CAN'T LET THAT HAPPEN. I will literally have to fight the urge to kill myself. I have to get out of the goddamn loop. Everyone keeps telling me how dangerous that would be. How, if I did that, there would be absolutely no chance for me to get what I want. I don't resent their opinions, but they are their opinions. There's nothing wrong with what they think, but that doesn't mean I need to think in exactly the same way. "You'll be a dropout! Can you even imagine that?!" they say. Truth is, I can't. But what is wrong about being a dropout? No, I don't want to drop out, I wan't to be well educated. But, in recent years, I have come to realise that that is probably a weakness. The fact that I'd be shunned by most of society, is a fear, and fear isn't healthy. Neither is being a pawn of the whims of society, which, sadly, I am. What's even sadder, is that in the twenty-first century, not being a pawn of society means not being able to really live at all. Woodstock and hippies are long gone. Being independent from society means being worthless.
I could go on for ages, without really reaching any conclusions.
For now, all I can do is hope and pray that one day, I will be able to stand up and say "Fuck it". Until then, I am just going to try and make my life worth living.
I'm off now, to compile a list of all the things I want to do before I'm twenty.
