Vikram Chandra - Geek Sublime - The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty

Memory too can be gendered. If the past is a foreign country, in modernity’s view it is a feminine one. In that essential text of literary modernism, Heart of Darkness , as Marlow steers his boat up the river, he goes backwards into the past and into a teeming, liquid fertility that is enormously dangerous and seductive. The figure most emblematic of this womb-like wilderness is the “wild-eyed and magnificent” woman who guards Kurtz, “the barbarous and superb woman” who stands “looking at us without a stir, and like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over an inscrutable purpose.” 53Of course, in Conrad’s story, she does not get to speak. Chinua Achebe pointed out that Conrad does not give Africans the faculty of speech, they make “a violent babble of uncouth sounds,” and even among themselves they communicate with “short grunting phrases.” 54

So we are at a point of origin, a state of lesser development. The irony here is that apart from the African languages that Conrad reduces to “babble,” the frightening “throb of drums” that Conrad refers to several times contains a sophisticated artificial language rich in metaphor and poetry. The drummers carried on conversations with each other, made announcements, broadcast messages. James Gleick tells us that this language of the drums metamorphosed tonal African languages into “tone and only tone. It was a language of a single pair of phonemes, a language composed entirely of pitch contours.” The drum language let go of the consonants and vowels of spoken speech and made up for this information loss by adding on additional phrases to each word. “ Songe , the moon, is rendered as songe li tange la manga —’the moon looks down at the earth.’” 55Listeners would hear entire phrases; the drum language dropped information but “allocated extra bits for disambiguation and error correction.” 56“Come back home” would be rendered as:

Make your feet come back the way they went,

make your legs come back the way they went,

plant your feet and your legs below,

in the village which belongs to us. 57

The past and the present speak to us in languages we refuse to hear.

An injured monkey regains consciousness, and begins typing the story of his past life.

The past retelling itself in the present — it seems like an obvious enough image, but the image came to me first, not its suggestiveness. Did I create the image, or did the dhvani make it and I find it? Writers are full of themselves, and therefore ask these kinds of annoyingly mystical questions, but they are also full of echoes of what is not in themselves. On my good days I feel like I can hear and catch these fleeting reverberations. Bind them into language before they disappear.

Sometimes the sheer vastness of what I want to put into fiction terrifies me. I survive by not thinking about the whole. I write my four hundred words this day, and then another four hundred words the next. I find my way by feeling, by intuition, by the sounds of the words, by the characters’ passions, by trekking on to the next day, the next horizon, and then the next. I pay attention to the tracks of narratives I leave behind, and I look for openings ahead. I make shapes and I find shapes. I retrace my steps, go over draft after draft, trying to find something, I am not sure what until I begin to see it. I am trying to make an object, a model, a receptacle. What I am making will not be complete until I let go of it.

When I write fiction, I create an object that I hope will be savored by an imagined someone, somewhere. I show my ongoing work to my wife, my friends, my family, but my real collaborators are always the sahrdayas of the future, the same-hearted ones who will allow my words to reverberate within them. And each person who reads my story will inevitably read a different story, or rather, will create a different story. Anandavardhana insists that

In this boundless saṃāra of poetry,

the poet is the only creator god.

…

A good poet can transform insentient things

into sentient,

and sentient into the insentient, as he likes.

In poetry the poet is free. 1

But I am only half a god.

Perhaps this is why I have always turned to coding with such relief: I can see cause and effect immediately. Write some code, and it either works or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, re-factor — change it, rewrite it, throw it away, and write new code. It either works or it doesn’t.

Poetry has no success or failure. Poetry waits to manifest.

And then there is language itself, malleable, slippery, all-powerful and yet always inadequate. Or perhaps it is my craft that is incapable of manifesting completely the reality of the worlds inside me. I am always translating, always bringing from one realm to another, and always there is something left out, something that drifts outside my reach.

I write in English. The language of the conquerors is the language of my marga , and it is one of the languages of my interior. English — sprinkled with Hindi, Tamil, Punjabi, Gujarati — is what my schoolmates and I spoke to each other during recess, what we used to call out to each other, to curse and to cajole. Some of our great-grandfathers learned Persian, perhaps, in their pathshalas. And before that, their ancestors chanted Sanskrit.

And so, in Red Earth and Pouring Rain , my poet tries to speak in English:

Sanjay moved his head, shut his eye, tried to speak but found his throat blocked tightly by something as hard as metal; he did not know what it was he wanted to say but knew that he couldn’t say it, what was possible to say he couldn’t say in English, how can in English one say roses, doomed love, chaste passion, my father my mother, their love which never spoke, pride, honour, what a man can live for and what a woman should die for, can you in English say the cows’ slow distant tinkle at sunset, the green weight of the trees after monsoon, dust of winnowing and women’s songs, elegant shadow of a minar creeping across white marble, the patient goodness of people met at wayside, the enfolding trust of aunts and uncles and cousins, winter bonfires and fresh chapattis, in English all this, the true shape and contour of a nation’s heart, all this is left unsaid and unspeakable and invisible, and so all Sanjay could say after all was: “Not.”

And yet, even if “Neti, neti” is enough for philosophers, a poet cannot only say “Not this, not this.” A poet must say, “This, this, and also this.” And by speaking, make English say things it cannot say.

I grew up in a Brahmin family, but without Sanskrit. During the second millennium CE, many of the Sanskrit-speaking Hindu regimes that patronized scholarship and poetry were replaced by Muslim kingdoms that used Persian as a court language. This did not necessarily mean neglect — many of these new rulers continued to sponsor poets, schools, and translations; the immense prestige of the language and its role in the sanctification of kingship and power were attractive to the new establishments. Muslims wrote scientific and poetical works in Sanskrit. Many of the Prakrits developed their own thriving literary and critical cultures, but these regional flowerings in the desha were engaged in a vital and mutually revivifying conversation with the marga. During this “vernacular millennium,” Yigal Bronner and David Shulman write: