Words of Wisdom

In the concluding chapter of Herman Hesse's Siddhartha, the ageing titular character speaks with his boyhood companion Govinda. 'Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish,' he says, 'Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.'

Even knowledge itself now presents some challenges. As Yuval Noah Harari discusses in Sapiens, the premodern traditions of knowledge such as Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Confucianism asserted that everything important to know about the world was already known and revealed to us in scriptures. Ordinary mortals gained knowledge by delving into and understanding them properly. But the Scientific Revolution changed all that - it was a revolution of ignorance. Its great discovery was that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions, and that no concept, idea or theory is sacred and beyond challenge. So if our knowledge is flawed, what hope our search for wisdom? And to what extent do our existing means of communication influence or limit our understanding or potential? Is our desire for wisdom - surely our species' ultimate quest - constrained by our lack of the right tools?

Throughout my life I have encountered a multitude of communication tools, though I speak only one language, my native English - a vast, complex, nuanced and ever-growing language. According to Simon Winchester's The Meaning of Everything, on completion of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1928, it catalogued 414,825 words which were reckoned to be all that were then known to comprise its lexis. By the release of the 1989 second edition this had grown to 615,100 words and work is underway on what is currently being called the Revised Edition - no-one is certain when it will be finished and it may include a million words. But, rich and seemingly comprehensive though the English language may be, there exist many experiences or conceptions we wish to capture or express for which it is singularly unsuited.

When I was young, my father worked for a furniture manufacturer and would sometimes bring home rolls of dyeline architectural drawings so we kids could use the rear white expanses as doodling paper. Perhaps that influenced my choice of Technical Drawing as a subject in high school and eventual career in design? Potentially it sowed the seed for my current facility with visualising environments drawn in orthographic projection - plan, elevation, etc. - that we are familiar with through real estate ads and building applications. Indeed, despite the diversity of alternative communication tools now available to spatial designers, from perspective drawings or constructed models through to digitally rendered virtual walk-throughs, to this day I prefer a two-dimensional plan, not simply to read its lines and symbols but to mentally immerse myself within its depicted volumes and forms. My skill with this quite specialised drawn language had served me well, so I never thought to question its enduring relevance.

Somewhat less successfully, also while still a child, I was introduced to another written language - that of modern music notation. Through lessons in piano, flute, music theory and singing I came to recognise the aural possibilities hidden within the tracery of dots and strokes arrayed on the bass and treble staves of sheet music. But mine was never more than a middling musical talent - I knew only that a note of such shape and location meant a particular key on the piano or fingering on the flute, for a duration of so many beats. I was little more advanced than those who play via colour-coded keys or who remember the melody of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star by counting 1-1-5-5-6-6-5, 4-4-3-3-2-2-1, as I never heard the music until I played the notes. Years later I shared a house with a talented multi-instrumentalist and composer, and recall the day I found him sitting in silence at the kitchen table with pen and paper. 'Writing a letter?' I asked. 'Composing a score,' he replied, 'but it doesn't sound quite right as yet.' It had never even occurred to me as a possibility - as I was able to inhabit a drawn room, he was able to hear a written score. Here was someone truly conversant in a language with which I was clearly a mere novice.

Then, in my late twenties, I worked briefly with a dance school and was tasked with building a two-and-a-half metre diameter open-framework icosahedron - a regular polyhedron comprised of twenty equilateral triangles. The students had been set the challenge of recreating Passacaglia, a 1938 work by choreographer Doris Humphrey which had subsequently been rendered into a graphic language called Labanotation. Through standing within the icosahedron and aligning their torso, head and limbs with particular facets or vertices, the students were able to decode and physically enact the notation, thereby learning the dance's movements. The eventual performance was truly magnificent and yet again it was a revelation to me that such a language even existed.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, in Tractatus Logico - Philosophicus, famously observed 'The limits of my language are the limits of my world.' Despite their revelatory appearance in my life, all the languages discussed above, each with remarkable capabilities to capture and communicate, are however simultaneously laden with potential shortcomings, possibly even imposing limitations on the fields of endeavour they aim to assist. There are, admittedly, other dance notations but Labanotation seems perhaps poorly suited to capture the rippling liquid movements or robotic pops and freezes of hip-hop dance. Music notation has been with us now for many hundreds of years, yet in 1978 Brian Eno clearly felt it inadequate to capture the essence of his seminal album Ambient #1: Music for Airports. He therefore devised, and printed on the LP sleeve, differing graphic renderings for each of its four ethereal, minimalist compositions. Plus, in the field of architecture, many of Frank Gehry's buildings, such as the landmark Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, were only possible due to significant advances in the computer languages of architectural software - dramatically removed from the drafting skills I learnt in my teens and leading William Mitchell to observe in Frank Gehry, Architect by J. Fiona Ragheb, and echoing maybe Wittgenstein's statement above, 'Architects tend to draw what they can build and build what they can draw.'

It is true that spoken languages other than our own, born of different cultures, have produced words to describe objects, that express concepts, or which capture feelings that did not previously form a part of our relatable experience due solely to their absence from our own vocabulary. Yet a great part of the very richness of the English language is its willingness to adopt such words from other tongues whenever they best serve the purpose, hence schmooze from Yiddish, faux pas from French and schadenfreude from German. Or, on a slightly more positive note, the melancholic beauty of imperfection and impermanence which can only truly be captured by the Japanese wabi-sabi.

Equally, there are many who have addressed perceived shortfalls in the English language via alternative means, not least Ray Bradbury in Dandelion Wine, his reminiscence of childhood in small-town America. He revels in unexpected metaphors such as, 'The grass whispered under his body.' And, 'Insects shocked the air with electric clearness.' Or Allen Ginsberg's grammatical abandon in Howl with, 'Jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon, yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes.' But, irrespective of the multitude of words already at our disposal or those we may yet coin anew - irrespective of our facility with grammar and how we might write or type within its plastic forgiveness - irrespective of the diversity of humanity's cultures and their perpetual r/evolutions - irrespective of our global desire to move beyond information, beyond knowledge, to truly seek and find wisdom - we seem strangely locked in a cycle of repeated errors or at best a stumbling two steps forward and one step back.

Just maybe our true fault - our greatest ignorance and the concept we most need to challenge - is our current acceptance of the languages we use in our search for wisdom? Just maybe Siddhartha was wrong? Maybe wisdom, once sought and found, can indeed be communicated, but in a language as yet unknown? I don't know its shape or sound or if it is indeed either written or spoken. Does it exist in colour or aroma - is it tactile or otherwise felt as pure emotion? But whatever form or tone, hue or scent, texture or sensation - find and learn it we must, and soon. A language rich with terms entirely different from those of our troubled past, coined for the urgent needs of our yet turbulent present and which can guide us toward conceiving and realising a positive collective future. Together, we must craft these words of wisdom.

Submission for New Philosopher Writers' Award XVII: Communication

The Shared Table

The shared table – it’s a powerful image, a symbolic motif, which exists in many cultures and has persisted through time. It speaks of welcome, generosity, camaraderie, peace and plenty – a veritable wealth of ‘feel good’ qualities. Depicted in paintings (Bruegel’s ‘The Peasant Wedding’ or Renoir’s ‘Luncheon of the Boating Party’), or described in meticulous detail (who can forget ‘An Unexpected Party’ that opens the narrative of Tolkein’s ‘The Hobbit’?), even celebrated as an exemplar of community building through the current trend for ‘long table’ events to reunite disparate, though neighbouring, resident groups and reinvigorate urban streetscapes – increasingly abandoned in this era of online shopping and virtual social interaction.

But where, in truth, does the power of this image reside? Is it in the table itself (an inanimate, utilitarian item of furniture); or the assembled company of family and friends (or foes); or is it perhaps in the arrayed food and drink (especially the drink!); the particular environs (a private home, a village longhouse, a city laneway, an outback campfire); the overlapping, interwoven or contradictory topics of conversation (or argument); or perhaps all of these and more, in combination – the whole being far greater than the sum of its parts? Maybe it is the very notion of ‘the shared table’; the idea itself, particularly in the afterglow of a full stomach and an alcohol hazed mind or the special, elevated glory of reminiscence?

Surely the mere table seems barely worthy of serious consideration? In 1963 my family arrived in Australia as ‘Ten Pound Poms’ under a government immigration scheme. After a short interval in a hostel and some rental properties we moved into our newly constructed project home in the suburbs and the very first item of furniture my father made was a simple, small, circular, Formica-covered, kitchen-come-dining table. For the ensuing fifteen-plus years the vast majority of our family meals (breakfast, lunch and dinner) were consumed around this unremarkable creation. Initially we sat upon some of the upturned plywood tea-chests that had carried our worldly goods on the ship from England. These were replaced in time with a vinyl-upholstered banquette and three of the ubiquitous 1960s, mustard-coloured plastic Sebel stacking chairs. The food was common fare – Corn Flakes or Weet Bix breakfasts, sandwich or soup lunches, meat and three veg or Friday treats of take-away fish and chips for dinner – but always eaten together and pretty much always accompanied by chat, banter, discussion, debate, questions, answers, laughter or perhaps even occasional tears? Still, nothing remarkable, just a stereotypical mid-century picture of nuclear family ‘normality’.

So should we look next at the gathered diners? In a world which has increasingly embraced the notion of the supremacy and inviolate sanctity of the individual, it is only too easy to lose sight of the simple reality that we all, the entire human species, owe the greater part of our success (if indeed our current global predicaments can be classed as success?) to collaborative and cooperative behaviours. Is it this union of effort that we unwittingly evoke on those occasions we come together to dine? A raising of glasses and tearing of loaves to celebrate our combined, continued survival in ever-changing circumstances? WS Gilbert (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame) is oft quoted as uttering ‘it isn’t so much what’s on the table that matters, as what’s on the chairs’, though it remains unclear if his praise is for the individuals or the group. A less generous observer, with a Darwinian bent, would suggest we are simply happy if the company is comprised at least in part of one or more of our subsequent generations – children and grandchildren successfully carrying our genetic makeup into an unknown future.

Moving on to the, hopefully, bounteous feast piled upon platters and spilling from jugs (and therefore disregarding Gilbert’s contemptuous dismissal of the victuals as contributing true significance), any contemporary observer would be forgiven for thinking we seem currently to have a preoccupation with food bordering on obsession. Our popular media (be it film, television, books, newspapers and periodicals, or the truly immense online universe of blogs, archives or ‘foodie’ sharing sites) is full to bursting with recipes, reviews, recommendations and constant reminders that delicious food can be delivered to our door in minutes at the mere tap of an icon. Certainly, a delectable offering can provide its own myriad delights but for many of my personal recollections of joyous occasions around a laden table, the food has been relatively plain fare – simple sausages and salads, beer and bread. These are not the kind of dishes one imagines would elevate the repast, imbuing it with beneficent significance or indelibly imprinting a memory.

So perhaps we should consider the environs? Foundational to Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs are both food and shelter, so clearly a conducive environment, a welcoming space, can contribute significantly to our comfort and happiness. But is it the critical element that converts simple consumption and chat into community and human flourishing – the ‘eudaimonia’ of the ancient Greeks? That we still recall with fondness, gatherings hampered by such as the draughtiness of a large wedding reception marquee; the relentless burning sun of a summer afternoon’s beach-side barbecue; the assault of sound within a busy trattoria or the too-small-to-swing-a-cat confines of a share-house eat-in kitchen, suggests that we can overlook most inconveniences in the right circumstances. So pleasant environs seem perhaps more desirable, than critical?

Which finally brings us to examine the conversation. David Greenberger proposes (Smith Journal, Volume 12) ‘the purpose of most conversation is to allow two people to be in the same place and time together’ which suggests that discussion is merely the glue for the assembled company. A proposition reinforced by Roman Krznaric’s observations (The Wonderbox) that conversation ‘is the unseen thread that binds [communities] together and it is time we took it more seriously.’ It is ‘a dialogue that creates mutual understanding’ and ‘has the potential … to inspire new ways of thinking and living together.’ Heady and, yes, empowering stuff but permission, binding, dialogue, and inspiration do not exist in glorious isolation but act as agents upon the participants. Participants, no less, that are relieved from immediate concerns of hunger and whose minds and tongues are relaxed perhaps with alcohol. So then maybe it is indeed the aggregate of diners, feast, comfort and conversation that creates the magic?

But here’s the thing – being in the kitchen, the centre of the home, our family table was also utilised for so many other activities; communal stirrings of the Christmas puddings; cranking the spirit-printer handle for each year’s ‘Newsletter’ to relatives in England; sitting reading with head enshrouded by the plastic bonnet of the Sunbeam hairdryer. Also, I was not a particularly voracious eater as a child and my parents insisted that our plates be scraped clean before we might leave the dinner table. Many an evening I waited, pushing the food dispiritedly around the plate until all the other family members had grown weary of my tardiness and departed to other activities (homework perhaps or the lure of the television) –  only then to move, quietly and unobserved, to open the cupboard under the kitchen sink and deposit any unwanted morsels in the bin. So the table had, for me, both positive and negative associations.

And then, just yesterday, my mother decided that after over fifty years of continued daily use, she no longer had need of this table in her recently acquired, retirement village, one-bedroom apartment. ‘Could you please take it away and either sell it for cash or donate it to charity?’ Could I? In truth, I could not. I dismantled and removed it but, despite having no immediate use for it at all and little space to store it, I have it stashed in a corner of the garage – awaiting who knows what future fate? To simply dispose of it seems somehow a betrayal or denial of all that has occurred upon and around its silent surface.

Because you see, a table is an anchor; a point of insensate stability around which all the other elements, participants and activities can find calm waters and a secure mooring. It is the enabler; it carries the trenchers of food and forgives the spills of liquor; it places the diners in visual, verbal and physical proximity whilst providing a rest for their elbows (or foreheads!); it proudly proclaims the purpose of the space it occupies, be it small suburban room, grand municipal hall or the infinite besparkled dome of the heavens; it passes no judgement on all that might be said – good or bad, calm or heated, reflective or inspirational; it is the facilitator of all that occurs in its small realm of influence. The table, in essence, embodies the very notion of sharing. It is the idea. For all its apparent simplicity, we should respect and celebrate its power and significance in our lives. I propose a toast – ‘To the shared table!’

Finalist for New Philosopher Writers’ Award XVI: Food