THE PURPOSE OF ALL EXPRESSION, COMMUNICATION, ART AND LITERATURE IS NOT TO EXPRESS FEELINGS, VENT OUT EMOTIONS, LET OFF STEAM, INCREASE AWARENESS, INFORM, PROVOKE, OUTRAGE, AROUSE, OR EVOKE A SMILE WITH INTELLIGENT WIT.
THE PURPOSE OF ALL EXPRESSION, COMMUNICATION, ART AND LITERATURE IS TO CAUSE A CHANGE.
The movie “Anonymous” is an outstanding movie that deals with the popular controversy around the “real Shakespeare”. The movie presents Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford as the man who wrote all the works that are today passed on as works of Shakespeare.
The justification of these conspiracy theories, and especially this theory about de Vere being the “real Shakespeare” is something of a matter of personal prejudice and beliefs. May be the idea of the conspiracy theory itself is unfounded, and may be it is really not so important. I am not interested in those conspiracy theories, either.
What makes the movie stand apart is the treatment of the character of Edward de Vere. Due to certain personal and political reasons, de Vere is not allowed to indulge in his most favourite passion – writing plays – so he write plays in secret and ascribes his works to a person called Shakespeare who had no real talent but an ambition to be popular.
What sets this movie apart is the way it presents the real nature of expression, communication and literature. de Vere’s pursuit is not seen as a literary pursuit – not an idle pursuit of idle metaphors and useless linguistic constructs – but a pursuit of “understanding the dynamics of human nature“. de Vere’s works (i.e. Shakespeare’s works) are not identified as works of literature, but as an expression that caused real, perceptible, tangible, instant changes in people’s thinking and behaviour in those times.
While the whole movie is full of events where the plays of Shakespeare are shown to be creating actual changes in mass behaviour, the climax shows how the play Richard III engineers an instant rebellion against Prime Minister Robert Cecil, to an extent that the mob breaks out of the theatre during a specific scene to assault Cecil.
What is astounding is that de Vere had predicted all of these in advance. He knew exactly how it would transpire, predicting the exact moment in the play when the mob would break loose. By showing the chief vile character of the play as a hunchback, which Robert Cecil too was, de Vere manages to evoke immense anger from the audience for the villain, and through the hunchback reference, channels all the anger of the mob against this villain in the play to Robert Cecil to the degree that the mobs actually barge out of the theatre to kill Cecil right at that moment.
I don’t know if there is anything in the movie that is true. May be the whole story and the underlying idea is fictionalized.
However, the central idea that the movie presents what true expression, communication and especially, what true art and literature should stand for, is something I stand by unambiguously and without a doubt.
The last few centuries has seen a deep “cerebrization” of all human faculties. Words have gained too much of prominence. All understanding is verbal – gained by perceiving words, storing the understanding as words, and expressing the understanding as words. All debates are verbal duels, pitching words against words. All communication and expression uses words solely as an exchange of information.
In the process, we have almost entirely lost the fine art of the dynamics of human behavior.
There is a famous Lateral Thinking puzzle –
“A man is attending a Mass at a Church, listening to a sermon on the Ten Commandments. When he hears the Pastor say – “Thou shalt not steal”, he gets extremely anxious. Then he hears the Pastor say – “Thou shalt not commit adultery”, he relaxes”. You need to explain this behaviour.
About a decade ago, in my Problem Solving workshops, I used to take this puzzle as a means to demonstrate several intricate aspects about the working of the human mind.
The process involved me inviting questions from the participants that I would just answer as “Yes” or “No”, and through this series of questions the participants had to extract enough clues that would help them put together a story that explained the behaviour of the person rationally and justifiably.
Given that I was always engaging with extremely intellectual sections of the society, it was a horrifying, frustrating and very sad experience for me to realize how little people even had a sense that there is a dynamics behind our thoughts and emotions. “We do not think in a linear fashion, but our thoughts, memories, feelings and emotions get “triggered” by what we see or hear” was not an idea that was either already present or very easily acceptable.
In all these workshops, people could guess the next related word, or action, but the idea of a totally unrelated lines of thoughts, emotions or actions triggered by certain words was something was too hard for the participants to imagine, or even digest.
This experience was a shocking experience for me to realize how our exposure to analytical thinking has killed off our awareness of the fundamentals of what human mental faculties are all about.
The whole idea of intellectually categorizing, classifying and boxing even the ways of thinking (of which “Lateral Thinking” is one sorry sad example of the degeneration we have reached in our understanding of human mind) has been turning us into robots and androids long before computers actually came in picture – a phenomena I discussed in my article Lateral vs Longitudinal Thinking.
The aim of language and all other forms of expression has dumbed down to conveying information. The listener, viewer, reader, audience is supposed to pick up that information, and then act on it on his own goodwill. In some cases, the writers may want to be more proactive and induce actions, which they often accomplish by being overtly provocative and suggestive.
A poet, a writer, a dramatist feels his job is done once he has presented the truths of the society to the audience. Once he has shown the mirror, it is the responsibility of the people to look into the mirror, identify the disfigurations and take corrective actions.
Ditto with all other arts. All forms of art appreciation and art criticism are jugglery of words and technicalities.
Art, literature or any form of expression was never meant to be either “I told you, my job is done” or “Wake up, go ahead, burn the world“. They do not work at conscious exchange of information and their role doesn’t end on having put the information in the conscious minds of their target audience.
Art, literature or any form of expression needs to engage the subconscious. They are intended to have multiple layers of meaning and significance, where the top layers engage our conscious minds and the deeper layers fly past our radars creating the desired change.
It should aim to the relevant audience be totally drawn into it, totally transform their consciousness and if required, get them to take necessary action.
Look at some of the ways people express themselves on the Social Media, especially those coming from the cowardly community that I belong to.
The most popular pages and handles are around “wit” and “satire” – intelligent, cute remarks on the state of affairs.
What impact do these wit and satire have?
It is extremely easy to figure that out. Just remember the last time you read a real witty post. How did you react to it?
You probably smiled. May be laughed, too. May be you shared it instantly with a dozen other people. May be you realized how much you like this handle and how much you are waiting for their next post.
What difference did the post, your smiling at it, and the thousands of hilarious likes it might have evoked make to the cause at hand?
Zilch.
I should rather say, Negative. Such posts give us an illusion of being a part of a cause or a movement and gives us sufficient pretense that we have done our bit. It is like an illusion of having moved a thousand miles while your car didn’t even start.
Not all “expression” has the same impact.
People express for different reasons, and the form of expression usually evolves from these reasons.
For some, it is like itching an itch. They got triggerred by something and cannot contain it. This has to be put out. It could be a proactive expression or a shooting down of somebody else’s expression.
Some just aim at passing the information. Making people aware. Unfortunately, a million people being extremely aware of a wrong happening is of zero value unless that translates into tangible actions.
Some people make it a very logical and rational debate. Most such posts are extremely patronizing and totally insulting to those who do not agree with it. They present one of the million relevant facts that suits them, totally hiding the ten thousand fact that are blatantly in opposition to their rationale and very patronizingly declare those people to be “idiots” who did not see THE argument that they have seen. Since our minds are not capable of handling more than two or three bits of information, each such post pretends to come out as eternal absolute truth and the final word, giving an aura that with the couple of facets that it presented, it has nailed absolute truth.
Some people make it cute, witty, humorous, satirical. They evoke a smile on and we move on to the next post that would make us smile.
And there are all shades of it. Some pretending to be deeply academic, some to be rational, some appeal to heart and humanity, some presenting facts and arguments that every other human being is incapable of understanding, some pretending they have access to some secret sources of information and logic, some trying to give us the power to scrape through our daily hardships with a small smile, some give us the ability to survive our ordeals by “humorifying our catastrophes”,some reflect human tenacity to find laughter even in the midst of severe crisis, some demonstrating how deftly they can wield the magic wand of metaphors, some trying to prick the consicence by – “where were you …” or “what about ….”, some unduly stuck at the “dignity of the language used”, some playing the “Victim Olympics” each running a race of how much they have been victimized by monsters, some boldly claiming that if you do not support, subscribe or donate to their Trust, you are against the very cause itself – each showing off in the most arrogant way that they are capable of at that moment.
Most of these are not even aimed at creating any real change. They are just out there, letting off steam or wanting to be seen as being in action.
An expression that does not even aim to cause a tangible, perceptible transformation in behaviours of either party is useless and wasteful expression. It is nothing more than a whine, a rant, an itching of the same itch, a warfare of mud-slinging, an intellectual gymnastic and anything useless you may want to compare it with.
There is no great orator or revolutionary known for his intellectual gymanstics or his ability to skin hair follicles. All great orators and revolutionaries swung people to immediate action.
If you look deeply at the communication of those who support Hindutva in any form, and if you look at the communication of all those ideologies who are highly successful in the world, you’d know what I mean.
The most unfortunate aspect of the Hindu- communication is a widespread acceptance that whining and playing victim is the most powerful weapon available. Every hindu communication comes in the form of – “where were you …” , “why is XYZ silent …”, “why is no one speaking …”, and providing statistics of how much we were wronged and still the ones who spoke THEN are not speaking NOW, backing it up with endless facts, figures, arguments, quotable quotes and you name it.
Whining never won a war, and it is definitely not going to win a civilizational war or an existential war. Nor would intelligent wit or cute sarcasm.
Till a few years ago, it was a mandatory requirement of being in public life to be as ineffective as you could be as far your ability to bring about real change was concerned. The accepted etiquette required you to raise the problems in a way so as not to hurt personal sentiments. For example, you should deride corruption, poverty, communalism, but do not name those who were propagating them. Hence, those who were most deeply into corruption, poverty, communalism would easily walk away the tag of “warriors against corruption, poverty and communalism”.
Exactly how we have the most murderous religion walk away with the tag of “Religion of Peace” and the most crooked, conniving religion gloat in the tag of “Religion of Tag”.
A lot of people who “express” in public platforms and Social Media do so in order to be seen as trying hard, fighting, championing a cause, but they are too scared to actually become successful. Any success against any of the current rots of our society and nation would create would disrupt our current status quo in such a chaotic way that no one can predict what the consequences of those will be.
Hence, the most ideal approach to being a warrior of a worthy cause is to try hard, but ensure you do not become sufficiently effective, and definitely do not come closer to any success.
Next time you read posts on the Social Media, or read/hear speeches of leaders, read it not to appreciate the intellect behind or agree or disagree with what it is trying to say – just take a step back and take moment to figure out – is it going to make ANY difference to the state of affairs?
Ask yourself – is it going to create change?
Is it powerful and worthy enough even to mobilize an opinion, let alone bring about any real change?
Intellectual gymnastics is a great skill to have. Just don’t pretend it would change anything, and don’t pretend that by bringing smiles to thousands of people, you created a massive awareness and awakening in people or just saved a civilization from dying out.
Shakespearean plays may today be just works of great literature and discussion topics for the armchair intellectuals, but 500 years ago they were much more than ingenious metaphors and brilliant language constructs. Even if what Anonymous shows is a bit hyped up, it is well known that the plays of Shakespeare were massive hits among the lay people and struck deeper chords with them than aficionados of language and literature.
That is what all authentic expression, communication, art and literature is meant to be. Art and literature are not about intellectual gymnasts and technicalities, but about a pursuit to understand the dynamics of human nature and behavior.
What we need is not cute smiles, or mindless emotional outrage, but an expression that brings about real transformation in thoughts and behaviours.
But, then, everyone feel scared of the real change.
What would happen if all the causes we are fighting for actually came to fruition?
It is far better to be in constant action, constantly fighting, struggling, crying out, whining, roaring, provoking, outraging, cutting sharp wits, winning small battles like bans, boycotts, protests, candle-marches, human chains, etc.
The very thought winning the war for good is chilling.
Behind Pretty Masks 