A WEEK BEFORE CHRISTMAS 2013, in the early evening, I sat down at my desk to answer a letter. But as I was about to write the words, I felt as if they were escaping me, vanishing into air before reaching the paper. I was surprised but not concerned. I decided that I was very tired, and promised myself to stop work after finishing the note. Trying to concentrate harder, I attempted to form in my mind the sentence I was supposed to write. However, while I knew the gist of what I wanted to say, the sentence would not take shape in my mind. The words rebelled, refused to do as I asked them; unlike Humpty Dumpty, I felt too weak to show them “which is to be the master.” After much mental strain, I managed, painfully, to string a few words together and set them down coherently on the page. I felt as if I had been groping in an alphabet soup, and as soon as I put in my spoon to grab one, it would dissolve into meaningless fragments. I went back into the house and tried to tell my partner that something was wrong, but I realized that as well as write them, I was unable to mouth the words except in a painfully protracted stutter. He called an ambulance, and an hour later I was in the Emergency Room being treated for a stroke.
To prove to myself that I had not lost the capacity of remembering words, only that of expressing them out loud, I began to recite in my head bits of literature I knew by heart. The flow was easy: poems by Saint John of the Cross and Edgar Allan Poe, chunks of Dante and Victor Hugo, doggerel by Arturo Capdevila and Gustav Schwab echoed clearly in the darkness of my hospital room. The ability to read never left me, and a few hours later, I found that I was again able to write. However, when I tried to speak to the nurses, the stammer persisted. After four or five weeks of hesitant speech, it gradually disappeared.
The experience, while terrifying, made me reflect on the relationship between thought and language. If thought, as I believe, forms itself in our mind by means of words, then, in the first fraction of a second, when the thought is sparked, the words which instantaneously cluster around it are not clearly distinguishable to the mind’s eye: they constitute the thought only in potentia. Their verbal cluster allows the mind to perceive the presence of a shape under water, but not in full detail. Caused to emerge by the language of its speaker (and each language produces particular thoughts which can only be imperfectly translated into another language), the mind selects the most adequate words in that specific language to allow the thought to become intelligible, as if the words were metal shavings gathering around the magnet of thought.
A blood clot in one of the arteries that feeds my brain had blocked for a few minutes the passage of oxygen. As a consequence, some of the neural passages were cut off and died, presumably the ones dedicated to transmitting electric impulses that turn words conceived into words spoken. Unable to go from thought to the expression of thought, I felt as if I were groping in the dark for something that dissolved itself at the touch, preventing my thought to form itself in a sentence, as if its shape (to carry on with the image) had been demagnetized and were no longer capable of attracting the words intended to define it.
This left me with a question: What are these thoughts that have not yet achieved their verbal state of maturity? This, I suppose, is what Dante meant when he wrote, “My mind was struck / by lightning bringing me what it wished”: the desired thoughts not yet expressed in words. Aristotle spoke of phantasia as the capacity to make present to the mind something which it has not previously perceived; perhaps in humans, phantasia is the capacity to make this presentation through language. Under normal circumstances, the progress from the conception of a thought in the specific linguistic field of the thinker to its verbal constellation and on to its expression in speech or in writing is instantaneous. We don’t perceive the stages of the process, except in half-dreams and hallucinatory states (I experienced this when, in my twenties, I experimented with LSD). In this process, as in all our conscious processes, what drives us is desire.
Torn between my desire to put my thoughts into specific words and my inability to do so, I tried to find synonyms for what I knew I was trying to say. Again, a simile might help: it was as if, floating down a stream, I had come to a dam that blocked my way and sought a side canal to allow my passage. In the hospital, finding it impossible to say “my thinking functions are fine, but I find speaking difficult,” I managed to say “I have words.” I experienced the expression of negatives as especially difficult. In my slowed-down mental process, if I wanted to say, in answer to the nurse’s question, “I don’t feel pain,” I found myself thinking “I feel pain” and adding “no” to the words. Then, accustomed to my normal rhythm of speech, I would try to answer all at once, but the words would come out as “of course” or “yes” before I had time to frame my thought in the negative. Apparently, in my mind, the stage of affirmation precedes that of negation. (This process of asserting something in order then to negate it is in fact a “prototype of narration.” Don Quixote is presented as a feeble old man in order to deny that he is a feeble old man and affirm that he is a valiant knight errant, and then to deny that he is a valiant knight errant and affirm that he is a feeble old man.)
Perhaps, I said to myself afterwards, this is how one’s literary style works: selectively finding the right waterway, not because of any blockage of the verbal expression but because of a particular aesthetic sense that chooses not to take the commonplace main course (“the cat is on the mat”) but a personal side canal (“the cat slumbers on the mat”).
Lying in the hospital, allowing my brain to be scanned in coffinlike machines, I reflected on the fact that our age has allowed our curiosity that which medieval theologians believed impossible except for God: the observation of our observing, drawing a chart of our own thinking, enjoying the privilege of being both audience and performer of our intimate mental acts—holding, as it were, our brain in our hands, like Dante’s Bertram de Born, who must carry his severed head about as punishment for having parted two who were meant to be united forever.
“The World is like the impression left by the telling of a story.”
—VALMIKI, Yoga Vasistha, 2.3.11
Asking unanswerable questions serves a dialectical function, as when a child asks “Why?” not in order to receive a satisfactory explanation (it may merely elicit an exasperated “Because!”) but in order to establish a dialogue. Dante’s motives are obviously more complex. Under Virgil’s supervision, Dante is confronted with the souls of his fellow men and women, sinners like himself, whose stories he wishes to learn, perhaps because of prurient curiosity (for which Virgil chides him) or to mirror his own condition (of which Virgil silently approves).1 Some of the souls want to be remembered on earth and tell their story so that Dante may retell it; others, like the traitor Bocca degli Abati, scorn the idea of posthumous fame. The encounters all take place through speech, through that poor and ineffectual instrument whose feebleness Dante laments.
Certainly every tongue would fall short
because our speech and our memory have,
for so much understanding, so little wit.2
And when finally Dante is ready to tell his readers his experience of the glories of Paradise, he prays to Apollo. Up to this point the inspiration of the Muses has sufficed, but now he must have the assistance of the god himself, however painful it will be—because the presence of a god is always terrible. Dante compares the process to the flaying of Marsyas, the flute player who presumed to challenge Apollo to a contest and after having lost was tied to a tree and flayed alive. Dante invokes the fearsome god:
Enter my breast and blow your breath
As when you drew Marsyas out
From within the sheath of his limbs.3
Melchior Meier, Apollo and Marsyas: The Judgment of Midas (or The Flaying of Marsyas), 1581. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Bequest of Phyllis Massar, 2011 [2012.136.725]. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.)
With (or generally without) the help of Apollo, we use words to try to recount, describe, explain, judge, demand, beg, affirm, allude, deny—and yet in every case we must rely on our interlocutor’s intelligence and generosity to construe from the sounds we make the sense and meaning we wish to convey. The abstract language of images helps us no farther, because something in our constitution makes us want to translate into words even these shadows, even that which we know for certain is untranslatable, immanent, unconscious. Dante’s initial forest, for instance, is its own ineffable definition, and yet he tries to render it for our comprehension as “dark” (oscura), “wild” (selvaggia), “rough” (aspra), “strong” (forte), “bitter” (amara).4 But semantic innocence is beyond us.
In the final leg of their frightful descent to the pit of Hell, crossing the bank that separates the last chasm of the Malebolge from the ninth circle, where the traitors are punished, Dante hears the loud sound of a horn blowing in the thick gloom. Dimly he discerns tall shapes which he takes to be the towers of a city, but Virgil explains that the shapes are those of giants ensconced in the chasm up to the waist.5 They are the biblical Nephilim, who according to the book of Genesis were the offspring of the daughters of men and the sons of God in the days before the Flood. One of them cries out a few unintelligible words: Rafel mai amech zabi almi. Virgil explains:
He accuses himself;
This is Nimrod, through whose ill whim
a single language is not still used worldwide.
Let’s leave him here and not speak in vain;
for every language is like this to him,
as his to others, that no one understands.6
Nimrod’s speech “that no one understands” has long been debated by Dante scholars. Though most commentators argue that Dante intended the line to be read as gibberish, some have proposed ingenious solutions to the decipherment of the words. Domenico Guerri has suggested that Dante, following the tradition according to which Nimrod and the giants spoke Hebrew, combined five Hebrew words found in the Vulgate. Guerri argues that the original phrase conceived by Dante was made up of the words raphaïm (giants), man (what is this?), amalech (people who touch lightly, who feel their way), zabulon (dwelling) and alma (sacred, secret), distorted, as they might have been by the curse God put on Babel, into the unintelligible Rafel mai amech zabi almi. The hidden meaning of the phrase would then be: “Giants! What is this? People feeling their way into the secret place!”7
Perhaps Guerri’s explanation is correct, but it is scarcely satisfying. (Borges, in his detective story “Death and the Compass,” has a police inspector offer to the investigator a certain hypothesis that might explain the crime. “Your hypothesis is possible, but not interesting,” is the investigator’s response. “You will reply that reality has not the least obligation to be interesting. To which I will reply that reality can forgo that obligation, but hypotheses can’t.”)8 Dante may have used Hebrew words because according to biblical scholarship Nimrod would have spoken Hebrew, and Dante may have distorted these words because Nimrod’s speech is condemned to be incomprehensible. But Dante may also have wished Nimrod’s speech to be not only secret but dreadfully so because he knew that an enigma that suggests an unsatisfactory solution is more terrible that one that can be dismissed as signifying nothing. Nimrod and his workers on their ambitious Tower were cursed with speaking a language whose meaning had been rendered confused—but not inexistent, incomprehensible but not entirely lacking an original sense. That meaning, distantly glimpsed but beyond the full discernment of Nimrod’s audience, will be eternally taken for gibberish. Nimrod’s curse is that he is condemned not to silence but to delivering a revelation never to be understood.
Nimrod’s speech is not unique. Once before, during their descent, Dante and Virgil have heard incomprehensible words, and once before, Virgil has dismissed them. As they enter the fourth circle, where misers and spendthrifts are punished, the travelers come upon Pluto, god of riches and guardian of the circle, who cries out at them in a hoarse and strident voice: “Pape Satàn, pape Satàn aleppe!” Pluto’s words have been interpreted as a demonic invocation to Satan: most commentators, beginning with the earliest ones, have understood pape and aleppe to be exhortations, the former derived from the Greek papai and the latter from the Hebrew aleph. Pluto’s cry, however, is lost on the two poets, and Virgil, with scornful words, causes the ancient god to fall to the ground like “a mast that breaks.”9
A language can be incomprehensible because we have never learned it or because we have forgotten it: either case presupposes the possibility of an original communal understanding. The search for this primordial tongue long engaged scholars worldwide. Centuries before Dante’s era, the Egyptian pharaoh Psammetichus, according to Herodotus, tried to determine who were the first people on earth, and conducted an experiment that was later copied by a number of other rulers. He took two newborn infants from an ordinary family and gave them to a shepherd to bring up in his cottage, with strict orders that no one should utter a word in their presence, though he was to look after them in any other way that was necessary. Psammetichus wanted to discover what words the infants would first speak after their initial babbling. The experiment, Herodotus tells us, was successful. Two years later, the shepherd was greeted by the children with the word becos, Phrygian for “bread.” Psammetichus concluded that it was not the Egyptians but the Phrygians who were the first people on earth, and the primordial tongue was Phrygian.10
In the twelfth century, following the example of Psammetichus, the Holy Roman emperor Frederick II (whom Dante condemned to the sixth circle of Hell among the heretics) tried to determine which was the first natural human language. He arranged for a number of nurses to suckle and wash the children in their charge, but not to speak to them, in order to discover whether the children’s first words would be in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Arabic, or the language of their biological parents. The experiment failed because all the children died.11
Not to be able to communicate with one’s fellow human beings has been compared to being buried alive. In his now classic Awakenings, Oliver Sacks describes the plight of a forty-six-year-old patient whom he calls Leonard L., a victim of the sleeping-sickness epidemic (encephalitis lethargica) which spread through America in the mid-twenties. In 1966, the year Sacks first met him at Mount Carmel Hospital in New York City, Leonard was completely speechless and incapable of voluntary motion, except for minute movements of his right hand. With these he could spell out messages on a small letter-board, his only means of communication. Leonard was an avid reader, though the pages of his books had to be turned by someone else, and he even managed to write book reviews, which were published in the hospital magazine every month. At the end of their first meeting, Sacks asked Leonard what it was like to be the way he was. What would he compare it to? Leonard spelt out for Sacks the following answer: “Caged. Deprived. Like Rilke’s ‘Panther.’” Rilke’s poem, written either in the fall of 1907 or the spring of the next year, captures the trapped sense of the wordless:
His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world.
As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.
Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly—. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.12
Like the “mighty will” of Rilke’s panther, like the persistent will of Leonard, Nimrod’s rebellious will is condemned to verbal immobility.
After the encounter with Nimrod, Virgil and Dante come upon Antaeus, one of the several giants who rebelled against Zeus. The son of the gods of the sea and the earth, Antaeus grew stronger whenever he touched his mother, but he was defeated when Hercules held him aloft and crushed him to death. Virgil treats Antaeus very differently from Nimrod: he addresses the giant politely and asks him to help them descend into the ninth and last circle. To persuade Antaeus (as Beatrice resorted to flattery, Virgil resorts to bribery), he points to Dante and offers:
He can restore your fame on earth;
because he lives and a long life still awaits him,
Unless grace call him to her before his time.
Virgil promises Antaeus Dante’s speech: the giant’s physical action will be repaid with a future verbal one, communication in space is bartered against communication in time. Antaeus accepts (even in Hell we are left certain choices), scoops the travelers up in one enormous hand, and sets them down again “in the deep that devours / Lucifer and Judas.” Then he rises “like the mast of a ship.”13
Antaeus is a bridge, a transport, a ship, but it is Nimrod and his incomprehensible words that tower over the final cantos of the Inferno, because the encounter with Nimrod foreshadows the meeting with Lucifer, the arch-fiend who chose to place himself beyond the redemptive power of God’s Word.
According to Jewish legend, Nimrod was a descendant of Ham, one of Noah’s three sons. From his father, he inherited the clothes God had given Adam and Eve before their expulsion from Eden, which made the wearer invincible; beasts and birds fell down before Nimrod, and no man could defeat him in combat. His clothes made his fortune: because people supposed Nimrod’s strength was his own, they made him their king. Victorious in all battles, Nimrod conquered land after land until he became the sole ruler of the world, the first mortal to possess universal power. This gift, however, corrupted him, and Nimrod became a worshiper of idols and later demanded that he himself be worshiped. Nimrod became known as “the Mighty Hunter of Men and Beasts.” Inspired by Nimrod’s blasphemy, the people no longer trusted God but came to depend on their own powers and abilities. And yet Nimrod’s ambition was not satiated. Not content with his conquests on earth, he decided to build a tower that would reach the heavens and claim them as his domain. In the construction, Nimrod employed six hundred thousand men and women loyal to his cause: the first third were willing to wage war against God, the second proposed to set up idols in heaven and worship them, the last third wanted to attack the heavenly hosts with arrows and spears. Many years were spent building the tower, which reached so great a height that it took a worker twelve months to climb to the top. A brick was considered more precious than a human being: if a worker fell, none took notice of it, but if a brick was dropped, they wept because it would take a year to replace it. A woman was not allowed to interrupt work even to give birth: she would bring her child into the world while molding bricks and, after tying it around her waist with a swaddling cloth, she would continue her molding.14
According to the book of Genesis, “the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth; and they left off to build the city” (11:5–8). Implicit in the Genesis account is the skill of the builders of Babel, whose work required even God to descend from the heavens in order to admire it. The unfinished tower, Talmudic commentators say, was destroyed. A third of it sank into the earth, a third was consumed by fire, and the third that was left standing in ruins was cursed with the power of making passersby forget everything they knew.15
The notion of a primeval single common language that was fragmented into a plurality of languages bears a symbolic relationship to contemporary theories about the origins of our verbal capacities. According to one of these theories (the “gesture first” theory as opposed to the “speech first” theory), we are mimetic animals and the complex imitation of manual actions (copying a hammering gesture in order to request a hammer, for instance) evolved from such pantomimes to early forms of sign language. These proto-signs, in turn, developed into proto-speech, and both the imitative gestures and the utterances gave birth to proto-languages that became the link between the communications of our earliest ancestors and the first recognizable human languages. In the “gesture first” theory, the reason humans have language (and other creatures do not) is because “the human brain is language-ready, in the sense that a normal human child will learn a language—an open-ended vocabulary integrated with a syntax that supports the hierarchical combination of words into larger structures which freely express novel meanings as needed—while infants of other species cannot. Indeed, humans not only can learn an existing language but can take an active role in the shaping of new languages.”16
Chimpanzees, who share 98.8 percent of the human DNA, possess brains that differ from human brains not only in size but also in the range and relative extent of their regions in connectivity and in details of cellular function. Though chimpanzees can be taught to understand spoken words, all attempts to teach them to speak have failed: chimpanzees (and all other apes) lack the neural control mechanisms that regulate the vocal apparatus. Because of their manual dexterity, they can, however, be taught sign language, as well as a symbolic visual language consisting of so-called lexigrams, a reading and writing method “akin to moving magnetized symbols on the door of a fridge.” A bonobo ape called Kanzi was able to master 256 of these lexigrams and arrange them in novel combinations. And yet these combinations, however remarkable, are not equivalent to possessing and using a syntax: Kanzi’s extraordinary ability was compared by scientists to that of a two-year-old child exposed to an ordinary linguistic environment: there it stops.17 But what experience does a bonobo like Kanzi communicate, as opposed to that, however rudimentary, of a human child? What experience of the world is he trying to transmit?
In April 1917, Franz Kafka sent his friend Max Brod a collection of prose pieces that included one he titled “A Report to an Academy.” It is the first-person account of an ape captured on the Gold Coast and transformed, through training, into something resembling a human being, whose language ranges from conventional gestures (handshakes, for instance, that “denote openness”) to speech. “Oh, one learns when one has to, when one seeks a way out,” the ape explains to the learned members of the Academy, “one learns at all costs.” But though the ape can recount, clearly and precisely, the details of his five-year-long education, he nevertheless knows that what he is putting into words is not his experience as an ape but an experience translated into the observation of that experience by his human persona. “What I felt then as an ape,” he says to his expectant audience, “I can only represent now in human terms, and therefore I misrepresent it.” As Kafka intuited, if the ape’s brain is not biologically “language-ready,” as a human one is, any transformation into a human “language-ready” brain—in a literary, symbolic, even perhaps (in a Dr. Moreau future) medical sense—must render the verbalization of the world seen through the eyes of the ape impossible to communicate, much as it is impossible for the human brain (in Dante’s system of belief) to grasp the Word of God and put it in human terms.18 In both these cases, translation is betrayal.
“To go beyond the human is impossible / to put into words,” Dante says of his experience of Paradise, an opinion confirmed by Thomas Aquinas. “The faculty of seeing God,” Aquinas argues, “does not belong to the created intellect naturally, but is given to it by the light of glory, which establishes the intellect in a kind of deiformity.”19 In other words, divine grace can make the human brain “God’s Word–ready” just as education can make Kafka’s ape “human language–ready.” In either case, however, the authentic original experience is necessarily lost in the attempt to utter it.
The progress from proto-languages to languages such as we speak today may have gone through a phase of fragmenting conventionalized verbal expressions or communicative gestures, as an utterance became divided into its component parts or a complex gesture into simpler significant gestures. An utterance that signified, for instance, “there is a stone with which we can crack this coconut” would, according to this theory, be broken up over time into sounds signifying “there,” “stone,” “crack,” and “coconut”—a counterintuitive assumption since it is simpler to suppose that the separate words came first and their combination into a sentence followed later (an assumption perhaps influenced by the single-word speech of Johnny Weissmuller in the early Tarzan films).
The “gesture-first” theory is only a few decades old. More than fifteen centuries ago, in India, a Sanskrit poet and religious thinker known as Bhartrihari developed a theory of language that somewhat foreshadowed these modern findings. Information about Bhartrihari’s life is vague. Even the dates of his birth and death are doubtful: he is thought to have been born around 450 C.E. and to have lived for some sixty years. Popular stories about Bhartrihari are many. One has it that he was a king who, after discovering the infidelity of his mistress, like King Shahryar in The Arabian Nights, renounced the throne and took to wandering in the world. Another says that he was offered the fruit of immortality by a Brahman priest; Bhartrihari, as an amorous gesture, gave the fruit to his queen, who in turn gave it to her lover, who passed it on to Bhartrihari’s mistress, who brought it again to Bhartrihari. Discovering what had happened, Bhartrihari retired to the forest and wrote a poem that ends with these words:
Damn her, damn him, damn the god of love,
The other woman, and myself!20
Bhartrihari’s fame as a philosopher spread quickly to other cultures. Just over a century after his death, I-Tsing (Yi Jing), a Chinese scholar and itinerant, who believed that his homeland was the model for all societies (“Is there anyone in any part of India who does not admire China?” he asked), cited Bhartrihari as one of the luminaries of universal culture.21 Perhaps led astray by his own beliefs, I-Tsing mistakenly portrayed Bhartrihari as a defender of the Buddhist faith. In fact, Bhartrihari’s beliefs were rooted in the sacred Sanskrit texts, the Vedas (a Sanskrit word that means “knowledge”), supposed to have been received by certain elected scholars directly from God and then passed on to the following generations by word of mouth. The Vedas consist of four texts composed in India over a millennium, from approximately 1200 to 200 B.C.E.: the Rig-Veda, or Veda of Hymns; the Sama-Veda, or Veda of Chants; the Yajur-Veda, or Veda of Sacrifices; and the later Athra-Veda, or Veda of Magical Charms. Each Veda is in turn divided into three sections; the third sections, the Upanishads, are speculative treatises on the nature of the universe, the nature of the self, and the relationship between the two.22 All the Vedas are rooted in the belief that the individual soul is identical to Brahman, the sacred power which informs all reality and is equal to it. “Brahman is the vast ocean of being,” it says in the Upanishads, “on which rise numberless ripples and waves of manifestation. From the smallest atomic form to a Deva or an angel, all spring from that limitless ocean of Brahman, the inexhaustible source of life. No manifested form of life can be independent of its source, just as no wave, however mighty, can be independent of the ocean.” Ralph Waldo Emerson translated the idea for a Western audience in his poem “Brahma”:
They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.23
The fifth-century India of Bhartrihari was, for the most part, a prosperous and happy society ruled by the Gupta dynasty. In the early decades of the century, Chandra Gupta II, who took the title “Sun of Valor,” made his reputation not only as a warrior but as a patron of the arts. Under his protection, the great Sanskrit poet Kalidasa became a member of the imperial entourage, and the literary and philosophical court gatherings were famous beyond the empire’s borders. During the reign of Gupta’s son Kumara Gupta, India was threatened by Huns from Central Asia. Having occupied Bactria in the previous century, the Huns for decades tried to enter the Indian Empire, mainly through the Hindu Kush; when at last the invasion occurred, the Hun army had become weakened by the endless skirmishes, and India was able to hold them off. But in the climate of constant threat, the authority of the Gupta dynasty declined, and their powerful empire fragmented into a number of smaller, battling kingdoms.24 It was at this period between the wane of the Gupta rulers and the rise of the Indian Huns that Bhartrihari developed his theory of language.
Several fundamental books have been attributed to Bhartrihari: the Vâkyapadîya, a philosophical treatise on sentences and words; the Mahâbhâshyatîkâ, a commentary on the great yoga scholar Patanjali’s Vâkyapadîyavrtti, a series of notes on his own linguistic treatise; and the Shabdadhâtusamîksha. Bhartrihari began by developing a more or less traditional commentary or exegesis of the Vedas derived from older linguistic theories, but eventually he developed a philosophical linguistic theory of his own. Some of the early masters, such as the seventh-century B.C.E. grammarian Pânini, had proposed a series of rules governing the Sanskrit language that could be applied to the text of the Vedas; in the second century C.E., Patanjali, following Pânini, argued that grammar was the study of the truth of the Vedas and a guide to their recitation. Bhartrihari moved these arguments into the philosophical arena: grammar, he said, could be considered an intellectual instrument to investigate not only the sacred Vedas but also the Brahman, total reality. He postulated that human language was like the Brahman itself, not subject to the avatars of temporal events but something that embraces a timeless and spaceless whole which it names in its entirety and also in each of its component parts. The first lines in the first stanza of his Vâkyapadîya announce Bhartrihari’s conclusion: language is “the beginningless and endless One, the imperishable Brahman of which the essential nature is the Word, which manifests itself at the Creation of the Universe.”25 Without indulging in facile translations, we can note that Bhartrihari’s thesis is in essence much the same as that announced by John in the first line of his Gospel.
Language was for Bhartrihari both the divine creative seed and its resulting creations, both the eternal regenerative force and the plurality of things issuing from it. According to Bhartrihari, one cannot speak of language as being created (either by a divine being or by humans) because there is no time previous to language. As one Sanskrit scholar has it, “Language [for Bhartrihari] is continuous and co-terminus with human existence or the existence of any sentient being.”26
We know that language expresses itself in verbal representations of objects and actions, and in sounds that can be combined in almost infinite ways to name the multiplicity of the universe, and even in that which has no cogent universal existence. Jorge Luis Borges’s Universal Library, the Library of Babel, is a container for this quasi-infinity of words, though the vast majority of them are meaningless: in a note appended to the story, he suggested that a library was not necessary for this colossal project—one volume composed of an infinite number of infinitely thin pages would suffice. In a short essay that predates this fiction by two years, Borges quoted Cicero, who, in Concerning the Nature of the Gods, wrote, “If a countless number of copies of the one-and-twenty letters of the alphabet, made of gold or what you will, were thrown together into some receptacle and then shaken out on to the ground, it would be possible that they should produce the Annals of Ennius, all ready for the reader. I doubt whether chance could possibly succeed in producing even a single verse!”27
Cicero and Borges (and many others) noted that the combinatory art of the alphabet allows for a complete nomenclature of existing and nonexisting things, even unintelligible utterances such as those of Nimrod. Bhartrihari, however, argued that language does not just name things and the meaning (or lack of meaning) of things, but that all things and their attendant meanings derive from language. Things perceived and things thought, as well as the relationships among them, are determined, according to Bhartrihari, by the words that language lends them. This is obviously true of metaphysical concepts. Alice, speaking to the White Queen in Through the Looking-Glass, argues against Bhartrihari that “one can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much experience,” the Queen, siding with Bhartrihari, objects. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”28
Bhartrihari’s arguments opposed both those of traditional Buddhists and the Brahmin Nyâyas (members of one of the six orthodox schools of Hindu thought). The former hold that meaning is a social convention, and the scope of a certain meaning is the projection of a collective imagination of that convention. The word tree designates a type of woody perennial plant because the speakers of English have agreed that the sound tree will denote a plant and not a body of water, and the scope of its meaning includes an oak, a cypress, a peach tree, and others because collectively and conventionally these things are each imagined as a tree. The Nyâyas argue that words have meaning only in reference to external existing things, and combine into sentences just as things relate to one another in the world. Tree denotes that type of woody perennial plant because such a thing as a tree exists in reality, and language allows us to construct the phrase “the tree is in the forest” because in reality a tree and a forest form a real relationship.29
Bhartrihari argued that meaning happens in the act of using language, both in the utterances of the speaker and in the recognition of those utterances by the listener. In implicit agreement with Bhartrihari, later theorists of the art of reading suggest that the meaning of the text emerges from the interaction of the text with the reader. “Reading,” wrote Italo Calvino, “means approaching something that is just coming into being.”30 Bhartrihari called this “coming into being” sphota, a term dating back to Pânini signifying “spoken language,” and in Bhartrihari’s theory it defines the act of “bursting forth,” spouting, as it were, meaningful sounds. Sphota does not depend on the user’s manner of speaking (or writing, so style or accent is not of the essence) but carries a definite meaning in the particular combination of words in a sentence. This meaning is not reducible to its component parts: only those who have not learned a language properly divide a sentence into words in order to understand it. In most cases, meaning is apprehended by the listener (or the reader) as a whole, in an instantaneous illumination of what is being conveyed. This illumination is conveyed by the sphota, but, Bhartrihari argues, it is already present in the hearer’s (or reader’s) brain. In modern terms, the illumination happens when the sphota is received by a brain that is language-ready.
Bhartrihari goes farther. If perception and understanding are innately verbal, the anguished chasm between what we see and what we believe we see, between what we experience and what we know to be true or false in our experience, becomes illusory. Words create the total existing reality, and also our particular visions of that reality; that which we call our world “bursts forth” from the Brahman in verbal, communicative form. This is what Dante, struggling to express what he witnessed in Paradise, described as a “flaying” of appearance to reveal the meaning of experience in human words.
Dante believed that language was the supreme human attribute, given by God to no other of his creatures, neither to animals nor to angels, in order to allow human beings to express what is formed in their God-given language-ready minds. Language, according to Dante, is the instrument that rules human society and makes possible our communal living. The language we use is made up of conventional signs which allow us, within our linguistic circle, to represent ideas and experiences. Language, for Dante, gives existence to the things it names merely by naming them, because “nothing can produce what itself is not,” as he says in De vulgari eloquentia.31 Perhaps for that reason, as a symbol of the unresolvable quest Dante left De vulgari eloquentia unfinished, in the middle of this sentence: “Words that deny must always be placed at the end; all others will gradually arrive at the conclusion with appropriate slowness . . .”32
