Geek Sublime by Vikram Chandra
… that my only hope of really penetrating to the heart of that mystery would lie in forgetting how to think and feel as an American or a European: which, for practical as well as sentimental reasons, I did not wish to do.12
Eliot’s reluctance—or inability—to “think and feel” across a cultural divide, even as he borrowed certain idioms and ideas (“Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. / Shantih shantih shantih”) was rooted in his recognition that this would require self-transformation at an elemental level, a departure from comfortable, familiar certainties. To someone raised in the tradition of Western analytical philosophy, encountering the goddess in philosophical texts might indeed induce terror, especially if you think all mysteries can be penetrated to the heart; it is no coincidence that Anuttara is sometimes pictured as a “hideous, emaciated destroyer who embodies the Absolute as the ultimate Self which the ‘I’ cannot enter and survive, an insatiable void in the heart of consciousness.”13 The terrible goddesses demand that you sacrifice, that you eat foreign substances, that you let the impure and chaotic penetrate you. The ishta-devata or personal deity that you worship will shatter you and remake you.
And yet, when the thunder speaks, we all come away reading a message into the sphota, the explosion of sound. Eliot heard what he needed to, and used it in his art and thought. Programmers create elegant techniques like event-sourcing, they make beauty in code, but many—like Paul Graham—use the language of aesthetics and art to describe their work without engaging with the difference of artistic practice, without acknowledging that the culture of art-making may in fact be foreign to them. Eliot was aware that there was a mystery that he wanted to avoid; programmers, on the other hand, often seem convinced that they already know everything worth knowing about art, and if indeed there is something left for them to comprehend, they are equipped—with all their intelligence and hyperrationalism—to figure it out in short order. After all, if you decompose an operation into its constituent pieces, you can understand the algorithms that make it work. And then you can hack it. Therefore, to make art, you don’t have to become an artist—that, anyhow, is only a pose—you just analyze how art is produced, you understand its domain, and then you code art. And, conversely, when you are writing code using the formal languages of computing, you are making something that aspires to elegance and beauty, and therefore you are making art.
Abhinavagupta’s description of poetic language and its functions reveals the hapless wrong-headedness of these kinds of facile cross-cultural equivalencies: code is denotative, poetic language is centrally concerned with dhvani, that which is not spoken; the end purpose of code is to process and produce logic, and any feeling this code arouses in an immediate sense is a side effect, whereas poetic language is at its very inception concerned with affect. Rasa arises from the fluctuations of feeling produced by manifestation, so to be aesthetically satisfying, even a play about a meeting between a physicist and his mentor must imbue the theories of physics with personal and emotional ballast, must make the equations resonate with memory. And so on: code may flirt with illegibility, but it must finally cohere logically or it will not work; the language of art can fracture grammar and syntax, can fail to transmit meaning but still cause emotion, and therefore successfully produce rasa.
The “hackers are artists” manifestos and blog posts gloss over these differences, and also remain quite silent about the processes that produce these culminations. For my own part, as a fiction writer who has programmed, thinking and feeling as an artist is a state of being utterly unlike that which arises when one is coding. Programming is very hard, and doing it requires a deep concentration in which I become quite unaware of my surroundings and myself. When I am trying to follow a bug, to understand its origins, time collapses. I type, compile, run, decipher a stack trace, type again, compile, run, and I look up and an hour and a half has gone by. I am thirsty, my wrists are aching, I should get up and stretch, but I am on the verge of discovery, there is one more variation I could try. I type again, and another half hour is gone. There is the machine, and there is me, but I am vanished into the ludic haze of the puzzle. The programmer Tom Christiansen put it succinctly: “The computer is the game.”14
And the poet Robert Hass once said, “It’s hell writing, but it’s hell not writing. The only tolerable state is just having written.”15 That writing is hell is a well-established commonplace among writers. In a series of published letters titled Writing Is My Life, Thomas Wolfe wrote:
I am back at work now. It is going to be another very long hard pull. I am already beginning to be haunted by nightmares at night. I am probably in for several thousand hours of hell and anguish, of almost losing hope, utterly, and swearing I’ll never write another word and so on, but it seems to have to be done in this way, and I have never found any way of avoiding it … Sometimes I am appalled by my own undertaking, and doubt that I can do it.16
And of the not-writing, Wolfe said:
I would say that almost the worst time in a writer’s life are those periods between work—periods when he is too exhausted and feels too empty to attempt a new piece of work, or when a new piece of work is still cloudily formulating itself in his mind. It is really hell, or worse than hell, because writing itself is hell, and this period of waiting is limbo—floating around in the cloudy upper geographies of hell trying to get attached to something.17
Most certainly there are writers in the world (Bradbury, Borowski?) who smile while they work, who create fiction and poetry in an ecstatic flow. I’ve never met a single one. Mostly, as far as I can tell, writing is not pleasurable. An interviewer once asked William Styron, “Do you enjoy writing?” and the great man said, “I certainly don’t. I get a fine warm feeling when I’m doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started every day. Let’s face it, writing is hell.”18
Georges Simenon was of the opinion that “writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don’t think an artist can ever be happy.”19 Anthony Burgess was asked if he thought that Simenon was right, and he answered:
My eight-year-old son said the other day: “Dad, why don’t you write for fun?” Even he divined that the process as I practise it is prone to irritability and despair … The anxiety involved is intolerable … The financial rewards just don’t make up for the expenditure of energy, the damage to health caused by stimulants and narcotics, the fear that one’s work isn’t good enough. I think, if I had enough money, I’d give up writing tomorrow.20
Here’s Abe Kobo on the subject: “The most enjoyable time is when I suddenly get the idea for my work. But when I start writing it is very, very painful … To write or commit suicide. Which will it be?”21 Joan Acocella: “Writing is a nerve-flaying job … Clichés come to mind much more than anything fresh or exact. To hack one’s way past them requires a huge, bleeding effort.”22 Norman Mailer: “I think nobody knows how much damage a book does to you except another writer. It’s hell writing a novel; you really poison your body doing it … it is self-destruction, it’s quiet self-destruction, civilized self-destruction.”23
Malcolm Cowley referred to the writing-is-hell whiners as “bleeders,” and thought that their suffering stemmed from their slow, overly self-critical method: “[They] write one sentence at a time, and can’t write it until the sentence before has been revised.”24 This is an attractive hypothesis, but it rather breaks down in the case of writers like Wolfe, who “habitually wrote for long hours, wrote rapidly, and turned huge manuscripts over to his publishers.”25
I’m a slow writer, but I’m quite content to leave sentences unrevised until the second or third draft, and I know quite well that my first draft will lack architectural coherence and shapeliness. And yet as I write, something grates and scrapes in my chest. I’m never quite in hell, but in a low-level purgatory that I’ve put myself in.
There is the effort of shaping the words, of fighting through the thickets of cliché, as Joan Acocella noted. And there is often that sel
“It must be lonely being a writer,” people have said to me. But I like being alone, at least for a goodly sized portion of every day. And working by myself on other things—programming, for instance—is never painful. There is something else altogether that is peculiar to the process of fiction writing, a grinding discomfort that emerges from the act itself: it feels, to me, like a split in the self, a fracture that leaves raw edges exposed.
The premodern Indian tradition investigates the reception of literature thoroughly but remains strangely silent about the actual workings of the creative process. Abhinavagupta, for example, writes that “The poet’s genius [pratibhā] is not inferred by the audience, but shines forth with immediacy because of his inspiration with rasa … Genius is an intelligence capable of creating new things.”26 Pratibha is imagination, insight, and seems to be spontaneously creative, playful, an overflow of the interaction between self-luminosity and self-awareness; it flows forth, aided by craft and learning. The Indian aesthetic theorists were “philosophers who dealt with the philosophy of awareness and the philosophy of language,” but they seem to have not been very interested in biographies of literary effort and failure.27 The only reference to the costs of poetic effort I’ve come across is from Rajashekara, who insists that “When the poet after the intense activity of poetic composition wishes for relaxation, the inmates of his family and his followers should not speak without his desire.”28 Which makes me believe that Rajashekhara and Avantisundari got a bit cranky by the end of the poetry-writing quarter of their day.
But the Indian phenomenology of literary pleasure perhaps provides a way to think about literary effort: making a narrative come to life within you requires that you bring alive your own samskaras and vasanas, make active all those latent impressions that lie submerged within the layers of your consciousness. This is why stories are not only constructed, but formed, found. They emerge through an alchemical process that requires significant concentration, samadhi. The writer experiences these stories as events happening within himself.
“The poet is, indeed, comparable to the spectator,” Abhinavagupta says. “The origin of the rasa that emerges within the reader is the generalized consciousness of the poet … the rasa which lies within the poet.”29 The implication here is that in the moment of creation, the poet must be both creator (the one who is producing or constructing the aestheticized object) and the audience (the subject that is experiencing the generalized consciousness thus produced). That is, you must simultaneously be in multiple cognitive modes: to produce any semblance of rasa you must remove your ego-self or I-self from the narrative that is forming within yourself, you must allow sadharanikarana or generalization to occur. And yet, the ego-self cannot be allowed to slip effortlessly into the continuous dream of the narrative, it must stay alert and conscious of the very language it is deploying to construct the story—the story, that living, moving thing which is a part of itself, is another aspect of the self. Experientially, this results in a hypersensitive self-awareness, the very opposite of flow; the writer’s ego-self knows at every moment the abrading of generalization and the terror of its own ephemerality. It is a slow, continuous suicide, a “civilized self-destruction.”
So the experience of the writer during samadhi is more akin to the mental state “(laboriously) milked by yogin” than it is to the effortlessly achieved rasa of the sahrdaya. The yogin know well these beautiful, bleak landscapes of our inner worlds. I once heard the scholar, Tantric practitioner and teacher Paul Muller-Ortega speak about the terrors the yogi faces on the path toward self-realization. Yogic practices didn’t just bring bliss or pleasure, he said. The “yogic ordeal” also made you feel that “you are dying.” And this was true, Muller-Ortega said. “You are dying.” That is, the ego-self that most of us believe to be our true self must die if the identification with the larger, undivided self is to occur. The yogi must confront the mysterium tremendum and pass through it. The path of the yogi is not for the faint-hearted.
The sahrdaya, on the other hand, is granted the spontaneous, temporary suspension of the ego-self through the encounter with art, while tasting—in a concentrated, wondrous manner—consciousness itself, the larger self of the world. The Natyashastra tells us that theater was created by Brahma as a fifth Veda, available to people of all castes and conditions; art is thus a democratic meditation through which the ordinary person can taste bliss.
In a sustained act of attention, the sahrdaya absorbs the foreign substance of another’s language into her body, mind, and spirit; the form of the language and the sphota, the explosion of its meaning, take shape within her single-pointed concentration and the heat of her imagination; the dhvani or reverberation of this encounter causes an instantaneous, infinite cognition of memory-elements that dissolve into the story or poem, bringing it to life. This melting of the heart is a transfiguration which deploys the body and desire and mind: both the sahrydaya and the Tantric cry out, camatkara, camatkara! And both, if they practice enough, risk enough, will experience an expansion of the imagination and thus be transformed by this praxis of pleasure.
Is the writer then a kind of entry-level yogi, engaging in a daily practice that mingles asceticism, dangerous mental disciplines, multifarious cognitive states, suffering and joy? There have been many figurings of the artist in recent history: Romantic seeker-explorer, drunken hedonist, bohemian outcast, manic depressive, social reformer, truth teller, tortured confessor of secrets. Perhaps it would be apposite to set next to these a portrait offered by Madhuraja, Abhinavagupta’s contemporary and student:
[Abhinavagupta] sits in the middle of a garden of grapes, inside a pavilion made of crystal and filled with beautiful paintings. The room smells wonderful because of flower garlands, incense-sticks and (oil-) lamps … The room is constantly resounding with musical instruments, with songs and with dancing … Abhinavagupta is attended by all his numerous students, with Kṣemaraja at their head, who are writing down everything he says. To his side stand two women, partners in Tantric rites (dūtī), who hold in one hand a jug of wine, śivaraasa, and a box full of betel rolls, and in the other hand a lotus and a citron. Abhinavagupta has his eyes trembling in ecstasy. In the middle of his forehead is a conspicuous tilaka made of ashes … His long hair is held by a garland of flowers. He has a long beard and golden (reddish-brown) skin; his neck is dark with shining yakṣaparīka powder … he sits in the Yogic position known as virāsana [the pose of the hero]. One hand is held on his knee holding a rosary with his fingers clearly making the sign (mudrā) that signifies his knowledge of the highest Siva. He plays on his resonating lute with the tips of his quivering fingers.30
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In recent decades there has been something of an Abhinavagupta revival, an increasing interest—in India and elsewhere—in his work. This is due, in no small part, to a fascination with the person one glimpses in the texts—with the sheer range of knowledge, the confident voice, the subtlety of the mind; his contemporaries regarded him as “Shiva incarnate,” and one feels the glamour across the centuries. As often happens with culture heroes, his life shades off into legend: around 1025 CE, he and 1,200 followers are said to have entered a cave, singing a hymn Abhinavagupta wrote to Bhairava (the terrifying manifestation of Shiva); none of them were seen again. We have twenty-one of the books he wrote, and know of twenty-three other now-lost titles.1 His grand masterwork, the Tantraloka, has been translated into Hindi and Italian, but still awaits an authoritative and complete translation into English. “Abhinavagupta Studies” is a fast-expanding field because much remains to be done.
Efforts to restore Sanskrit to some semblance of its former glory are afoot. At the time of this writing, a nonprofit group based in Bangalore, Samskrita Bharati, has begun the task of translating the Amar Chitra Katha c
Something of the same wide-ranging cultural aspiration fuels some governmental attempts to bolster the teaching of Sanskrit. In 2010, the BJP-led Uttarakhand state government proclaimed two villages to be “Sanskrit Villages,” which meant that funding was provided to teach all citizens—including Dalits—the language. Uttarakhand has “a separate Sanskrit Education Department, 88 government-aided Sanskrit educational institutes, and 47 Sanskrit colleges giving ‘Shastri (BA)’ and ‘Acharya (MA)’ degrees.” But in one of the villages, “people learnt to speak the language with much hope and now wait in vain for the gains that were to follow.”3 The Congress government that followed dropped the project, so the villagers’ ambitions of being appointed Sanskrit teachers for other villages remain frustrated.
The Special Centre for Sanskrit Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi has more explicit aims: Sanskrit computational linguistics, Sanskrit informatics, Sanskrit computing, Sanskrit language processing. There has also been an effort over the past two decades to reintroduce the Indian scholastic tradition into humanities departments, and students have responded with enthusiasm. Controversies have flared over some of the more clumsy attempts by academic nationalists to proclaim—by fiat—the continuing relevance and accuracy of “Vedic astrological science” and similar subjects. Sanskrit departments are still Brahminical redoubts, within which Dalit students face active prejudice.