Jottings - Slice of life - 192 ( musings on sound and meaning of words and symbols. The Helen Keller story, its film adaptions)
The miraculous connection between the word and thing is one of wonder, and it is at the same time the essence of language and communication. Somehow, in a manner mysterious and profound, human brains are wired to make linguistic connections spontaneously at the age of two or three. At a seminal moment within first two years of a child's growth, in an event that really cannot be predicted, but which all parents wait for with palpitating expectation, the round shaped, rubbery "thing" their little baby held in its hands and played with, and the word "Ball" they have uttered innumerable times to describe it, becomes categorically and irrevocably wired in the child's brain. From that moment on, the word ball, articulation of it, and the thing itself become one, and the baby all of sudden stumbles upon what we call "meaning". Until then it was all babble, one word could have been easily substituted for another. But with that miraculous first word-thing connection made, the rest of the connections seamlessly synchronize, and speech comes out in torrential flow. Children impatiently look, touch, taste and describe everything they sense. Words and things words represent suddenly becomes easy and effortless. It is as if a new world has suddenly opened up, become more intelligible and tangible, and a sense of rudimentary, but necessary human independence has asserted itself. Cognitive science and psychologists are wonderstruck at this happening, and the evolving study of linguistics is still grappling with what happens in the human brain to make these symbols real. Noam Chomsky, a pioneer in this field, and Steven Pinker, his active propagandist believe, based on experiments conducted over decades, that roots of language and cognitive rules are inbuilt, and depending upon how those inbuilt rules are awakened, language proceeds along that path. Of course, none of us really think about all this. As we grow, we take our symbols, our ability to speak our language for granted. We rarely pause to think that words are only symbols acquired by common consent, and not the thing. None expressed this idea better than Shakespeare, the greatest wordsmith in English literature and one of the keenest observers of Human nature. In his classic play Romeo and Juliet, Juliet expresses her unconditional love to Romeo when he expresses doubt about family name and status as potential barriers to their relationship. She replies "What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet...".
In one masterly stroke, the bard manages not only to express what true love means, but also convey that words are only agreed conventions, and not fixed truisms. Juliet's hyperbolic question "what's in a name" points to the temporality and arbitrariness of language itself. Shakespeare understood that to irrevocably tie a particular symbol to a specific thing is the cause of so much confusion and misunderstanding. Words are only symbols to which we assign meanings, not vice versa. No object ever leaps up to our face and begs to be named. A rose will still smell as fragrant even if it is understood and communicated through signs, or guttural growls, or any other form of symbolized communication. The key for human communication is for the brain to connect a commonly agreed symbol with the thing symbolized. Once that is wired, in whatever form that wiring happens, language stops being a barrier to learning, understanding and communication. Over the last hundred years, the evolution of sign language as a viable alternative to spoken words clearly indicates that symbols, grammar, meaning and the thing itself are separate entities, and the way they come together determine the modality of understanding and communication.
Nothing illustrates this miracle better than the incredible story of Helen Keller and her redoubtable teacher Anne Sullivan. It still remains an astonishing saga of accomplishment, and testimony to what human spirit can achieve. That understanding the world outside can be non-auditory, and the sense of touch and gestures can more than adequately compensate for lack of verbal articulation is amply proven in Helen's remarkable awakening to signs, symbols and meaning under the trained and tenacious tutelage of her tutor Anne. Helen was not born deaf and blind. She became one when she was sixteen months old. At an age when most children awaken to meaning and connection behind sounds and things, Helen lost that ability. However, it was fortunate she was born into an affluent family, who could afford to arrange a tutor for her. And it was doubly fortunate that her special tutor happened to be Anne Sullivan, whose own eyesight was affected badly in her younger years, who lived in cheap orphanages, saw death, illness and depravation at close quarters, managed by firm tenacity of purpose to break free of the choking shackles of her oppressive environment, joined Perkins - an institution that taught the blind, graduated from it as valedictorian of her class , and was ready to take on challenging teaching assignments to prove that blindness was not a handicap, and learning is possible in many ways, despite handicaps. She possessed an indomitable spirit. And she needed every ounce of it to face young Helen Keller who was as undisciplined, pampered and angry, as any young child is likely to be in her predicament. The relationship between Anne and Helen needs no elaboration. In her marvelous book "The story of my life", Helen recounts how she struggled to comprehend the world using Anne's method of recognizing letters and words through signs? How it was impossible for her to make that leap between letters shaped through her fingers, the word it presented, and the thing itself, until one day, in one moment of divine epiphany, a tired Helen all of a sudden stumbled upon the connection between water as it flowed through her fingers from a pump, and the word "Water" itself. In a flash, her brain rewired itself to connect the sign, word and the object. That was all that was needed.
In 1962, the movie "The miracle worker" featuring Anne Bancroft as Anne Sullivan (tutor) and Patty Duke as young Helen, bought to life the remarkable story of Helen's awakening. The intensity of the struggle between the tutor and taught, as the teacher attempts to treat her student as normal and capable of understanding, but the stubborn student unyielding, and her overbearing parents ever present to sympathize and shield the child from the rigors of Anne's methods, found its highest artistic expression in Bancroft and Patty, probably unparalleled in the history of cinema. Even a hardcore cynic would break into tears watching the young helpless girl desperately seeking meaning, and the tough but loving tutor relentless in her methods to make her protégé learn. Both actors won academy awards and international acclaim for sensitive portrayal of their characters. In 2005, Sanjay Leela Bansali, the man under the lot of unnecessary spotlight these days, directed "Black" with Amitabh Bachan and Rani Mukherjee as protagonists. It was loosely based on Helen Keller's story. Nevertheless, it was extremely well made, and beautifully enacted by its lead actors.
Over the last few months, I have been studying language, its origins and forms. The cryptic works of Noam Chomsky, and the breezy popular expositions of Steven Pinker and other linguists have given me new insights into what language means to man, and how wonderfully nature has adapted the human brain to reach this degree of perfection. The more I study the more humbled I become, and more profound my admiration for this intelligent design of life. The innate rudiments of grammar, the morphology of words, the stems of sentences, the reinvention of language each time it is challenged, its rewiring in the human brain, the constant expansion of words for more inclusive and expansive understanding of the Cosmos - all this and more, convinces me beyond doubt that there is more to ourselves than we assume.
For all of us who love the sound and texture of words and sentences, here is one from Noam Chomsky (the only entry from him that figures in the heavy tome of Bartlet book of familiar quotations). This is a grammatically and semantically valid English sentence.
"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously"
No linguist can find fault with it, but this sentence has no meaning in human sense. Chomsky manufactured this to prove that words can be strung together in syntactically correct manner yet can point or mean nothing. Words by themselves are empty symbols unless they are correlated with meaning and objectivity. This is precisely the problem in modern times. There is too much empty rhetoric without meaning.
Perhaps it's time for all of us to take a closer look at language.
God bless...
Yours in mortality,
Bala
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