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
