How abstract is abstract…

Some time or the other, i look at the paintings of Picasso, and try to figure out what the guy meant to convey through these paintings. They depict nothing to me. All I can gather out of those strokes of brushes is touch of a genius, a signature which profoundly shows itself beyond all the extravaganza of colors and strokes of brush.

I have a friend. He keeps on cracking some jokes and laughs himself. Sometimes people around him keep on guessing what the joke was about. We often scratch our heads and then in a fit of jealousy, accuse him of uttering some nonsense and absurd.

I was reading History an essay by Emerson. He was quoting examples after examples and all of a sudden without any link; he jumped to a new idea entirely. I was shocked. Reading his flowery and unconventional language is a daunting task in itself and it becomes even more cumbersome when he begins switching between those ideas absurdly. And such thing keeps on happening. Though his thoughts have a sequence of their own, you have to literally follow his steps that too with his strides to keep up the pace. Such an absurd way of presenting a topic it is.

Before the ones reading this article- of whom a fair proportion would have dropped the idea of continuing with this article already- start accusing me of the same thing I am trying to talk about today , let me come to the topic. All examples above despite any lack of a common thread have one thing in common; share a common feature, “together they look absurd”. Yes, the topic I wish to talk about is absurdity.

Me and few of my friends went for dinner some time ago. Few friends from college, namely Dnyaneshwar, Vineet, Omkar, Harshad and Madura are the ones I can currently recall. The topic (which obviously diminished once the food was served) was relating to some spiritual beliefs. We were talking and I tried to convey some points which I had recently came across from some books and suddenly Dnyaneshwar stopped me and said, “Don’t you feel you are talking like mystics?” “How?” questioned I. “An easy thing to guess. You are not talking to the point. You are talking absurd.” His point was a little bit right perhaps. People, let their occupation be that of writer, painter, saints, or more usually mystics speak a language which is difficult to fathom and many a times we find the concepts they are trying to put forward similar to roads of Incas, leading to ‘nowhere’. But are they really that absurd? Are they really intended to be this way so as to divert the reader? As some management principle puts it, “to confuse them if u can’t convince”?

I am not trying here to explain what the abstract means or what it is. I feel doing that in writing will be even more abstract than the original content. What I am trying to point at is a possible reason(s) behind the abstract nature of some artifacts, manuscripts, religious concepts.

Is abstractness really intentional? Do people try to inject it into their work out of some desire to keep their readers away from the actual concept they are trying to elaborate or some desire to make their work look more scholarly? The answer i feel is NO. How? Lets turn to some abstractness in literature before we move on to the religious concepts. The reason of absurdity in literature is that sometimes the manifestation of the ideas is not possible through the media of words. Words have their own limitations. You cannot express all you desire or you feel in words. Sometimes people sob despite feeling happy. Sometimes they just smile and let it go. I recollect a tale which my grandfather narrated to me. The tale was about a man who was living alone. The man had lost all his relatives in a calamity. People from surrounding town came to console him. They asked him to express his grief by calling out the dead, by crying, even by beating off his chest with his hands. He did nothing. He just turned his head and said, “some grieves are beyond words. They cannot be expressed.” This is not just a feeling we come across in grief. In happiest moments, the mind cannot comprehend how to express his thoughts. There is no representation of your state that can come match the feeling you are fully immersed in. To bind these feelings in words and that too the words which are not honest to your feelings but are trying to match someone’s understanding is a crime; not only against yourself but your feelings.

When Emerson writes, he writes in a flow natural to himself, his thoughts. For him a jump from one idea to the other is not a thing that follows slowly. Ideas sometimes come rapidly, one after the other like a torrent. And they come and go in a flash, just like a meteor in the sky. Catching their glimpse is the only thing one can do. To put them down into words is quite difficult. We cannot fully comprehend what Emerson felt when he wrote something so difficult to understand, something so abstract.

We never will be able to feel why Saint Dnyaneshwar wrote in his Pasayadana -the concluding part of Dnyaneshwari -his commentary on Bhagvadgeeta- that everyone should get what he desires. For us, the men of logic as we prefer to call ourselves, it’s an absurd thing. The thief will always want a sleepy, sluggish and sloppy policeman whereas the common man will ask for an efficient one. How these contradicting wishes someone ask the god to grant, someone who is as recognized and revered as Saint Dnyaneshwar? The problem is that we try to seek our viewpoint in it. We will never fully comprehend what these ‘absurd’ men had in their mind until we experience these things ourselves. And when we will, we will try to express it in our own words which the coming generations will call absurd.

While writing his devotional songs called Nirguni Bhajan, Kabir often describes the five elements, the attributes of human nature and the entity beyond words. He refers to this entity as Nirakar, Nirgun or sometimes even Shunya. What will a devotee worship if his lord is Nirakar (without shape), Nirgun (Without attributes) or shunya (literally zero)? The crux of the idea is that you don’t actually have to worship the god in way of some devotional acts. When you try to worship him, you try to give it a shape, a temple, an idol and finally with the establishment of idol; your feelings begin to center themselves about the idol and not the entity it represents. When sentiments are concentrated on idols, then worship of the idol becomes important rather than the god. It’s like a situation in which the mask becomes more important than the one who wears it. And such a situation turns particularly harmful because then the worshiper feels the way is more important rather than the goal. Such an attitude leads to comparison of different ways of looking towards the same aspect and in turn leads to ego which is a thirst unquenchable. So Kabir often finds it an easy thing to express the entire idea not as an incarnate entity but as something haphazard, something abstract, something irrational, something which simply is beyond words.

Just to quote another example and finish it for today, I would like to share a new thing I came across. Recently I was reading Geeta Pravachane (Talks on Geeta) –a collection of speeches delivered in Dhule Jail by Vinoba Bhave. In it Vinoba gives a fascinating reference from the Upanishads. While describing what Brahman or That as Upanishads prefer to call it is, the Upanishads describe what it isn’t in spite of what it is. It’s like saying that ‘a lion is not a goat, a lion is not an elephant, a lion is not a man’ and so on while describing lion. Vinoba says, the idea of Brahman is so vast that it’s better to describe what it isn’t in spite of what it is. To many, it’s the return of the abstract virus. But you can’t help it unless you experience it by yourself.

So what is take home from the Abstract? Well the answer I feel should be this. Never detest it because you cannot comprehend it, and do not preach it because you find others amused when you speak something so difficult, but leave it to your own senses till the point you experience it. If you do, then the abstract will no more be as abstract as it was. And then try and put it down in words and some other day you’ll share the same fate which people anoint these timeless and genius  minds with.