Alif Wahid

I am not Me

T. S. Eliot begins his seminal poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), with a dialogue between Prufrock and someone else, as follows.

LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question….
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

Who is this other “you” that Prufrock is talking to? We’re not told overtly but are led to figure out for ourselves, in the remainder of the poem, that he’s talking to himself; an other version of himself; perhaps, a different personified manifestation of himself in his imagination. So it is technically referred to as a dramatic monologue in terms of poetic devices.

The poem traces Prufrock’s thoughts and doubts in the stream of consciousness style that began emerging around the turn of the 20th century (probably even earlier, during the late 19th century, judging by the posthumously published poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, which I will discuss in a future post). I do not have any new commentary to add above and beyond what people have said for over 90 years regarding this poem. However, this quarrel between Prufrock and himself intrigues me endlessly, and that is what I wish to examine in this post.

Putting aside the inapplicable plot of this poem, I tried to imagine myself having a quarrel with myself. That’s because I find it impossible to understand Eliot’s writing without an overdose of empathy - that imaginative ability to put oneself in someone else’s body and literally go for a walk wearing their shoes. Therefore, if I am Prufrock then I am not Me. I am I, Me is Me, and never the twain shall meet (as Rudyard Kipling might say).

Unfortunately, I got stuck very quickly at the early stage of this endeavour, whereas Me seemed to thoroughly enjoy this detached state of existence! I kept on reading the remainder of the poem while imagining an inner quarrel with Me, but Me was not reciprocating. He was simply not interested in a Socratic dialect. He was measuring out, with coffee spoons, the vastness of the sea chambers that Eliot depicted. The music of fluid rhymes and rhythm levitated his soul. The scattering of words down the page entranced him. He even mused of being serenaded by mermaids!

And all I could imagine was that I am not Me!

Rediscovering Rabindranath

Rabindranath Tagore was a legendary Bengali polymath. I have distant memories of reading his poems as a child. The national anthem of Bangladesh is one of his poems. Recently I’ve rediscovered the collection of poems/songs that made him famous during the early part of the 20th century in the western cultures, called Gitanjali (1913). It brought him the the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. W. B. Yeats wrote the introduction to that collection and speaks much about the “movements of thought” that one experiences while reading Tagore (actually in Bengali, his surname is pronounced something like “tha-koor”, where the “tha” sounds like the “Tha” in “Thailand”). Here’s one particular song from Gitanjali that lingered in my mind for some time.

The time that my journey takes is long and the way of it long.

I came out on the chariot of the first gleam of light, and pursued my voyage through the wildernesses of worlds leaving my track on many a star and planet.

It is the most distant course that comes nearest to thyself, and that training is the most intricate which leads to the utter simplicity of a tune.

The traveller has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end.

My eyes strayed far and wide before I shut them and said `Here art thou!’

The question and the cry `Oh, where?’ melt into tears of a thousand streams and deluge the world with the flood of the assurance `I am!’

The vividness of the imagery here is very uncharacteristic of English poems from that period and it’s easy to see why Yeats was so struck by these songs. I find a cosmic connection between what Eliot searched for in Burnt Norton (1935) and Tagore’s singing of one’s journey to the “outer worlds” above.

Unfortunately, so much gets lost in translation - the music of Tagore’s words, the rhythm and rhyme, the beautiful succinctness of his Bengali phrases, and more! I can say with “the flood of the assurance” that Tagore sings about, my rediscovery of his songs has been that cosmic journey to “the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end.”

Swis Chees is Swiss Cheese

I often find it quite interesting how my eyes gloss over certain letters when reading words in a piece of text, as if to suggest that the presence of those letters in that piece of text was completely unnecessary for me to grasp what was actually denoted. In other words, there is redundancy in language that allows me to comprehend written text even in the presence of omissions, substitutions and random errors. This is actually part of a fascinating field of study, called Information Theory, whose key concept is entropy. A bit too much mathematics is required to explain what entropy actually is on this Sunday morning, but the manifest effects of the underlying notions like redundancy and uncertainty are quite stunning. Allow me to demonstrate.

At a glance, did the title of this post make sense to you? Or did you have to read it couple of times (perhaps more) before realising that the last letter from each of the two words is omitted in the left-hand side of this identity assertion? Regardless of how fast your train of thought was travelling as you were reading that title, what is key is the question of the minimal number of letters necessary to convey a sufficiently unique inscription of a word. Don’t care about utterances, pronunciations and accents right now; just the raw visual portrayal of an inscription as a sequence of glyphs flowing in one direction (ignore languages that are bidirectional for the moment as well, I’m not even sure whether such a language actually exists?).

In that context, “Swis” is basically all you need for conveying “Swiss”. Similarly, “Chees” is an adequate proxy for “Cheese”, just as real Swiss Cheese has little actual cheese due to all the holes (or “eyes”) but it still tastes like cheese! This effect is particularly stunning once you start to construct whole sentences and paragraphs with deliberately shortened inscriptions of various words. Here’s an example that I prepared earlier using the first sentence of the concluding paragraph in Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species” (1859).

“It is intresting to contempate an entangled bank, clothd with many plants of many kinds, with birds singng on the bushs, with various insects fliting about, and wth worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that thes elaborately constructd forms, so difrent from each other, and dependent on each other in so complx a maner, have al been produced by laws acting around us.”

I removed 14 letters from various words but the inscriptions are still comprehensible with almost no extra mental effort necessary, especially if read quickly. As I selected the removed letters at random from the original sentence that is 398 characters long (including spaces and punctuation, since they are a necessary part of the language for conveying sufficient meaning), you can say that the amount of redundancy in this sentence is at least 14 divided by 398, or roughly 3.5%. Naturally enough, the question is how many more letters (not characters like spaces) can I remove before the sentence becomes incomprehensible? So, here it is with every other letter removed, which corresponds to a 50% omission, roughly.

“I i itrsig o otmlt a etnld bn, cohd wt mn pat o mn kns, wt brs snig o te bse, wt vros iscs fitn aot, ad ih om caln thog te dm er, ad t relc ta ths elbrtl cosrce fom, s dfeet frm ech ote, ad deedn o ec ohr i s cmlx a mne, hv al be pouc b lw atn aon u.”

Well, that’s plain gibberish! Obviously the inherent redundancy of this sentence is a lot less than 50%, but possibly more than 3.5%. You can go through this iterative process in order to narrow down a more precise estimate of the redundant content in this famous sentence. This is a universal feature of natural languages spoken by humans. Our brains have evolved to function using a cognitive mechanism that enforces linguistic rules with inherent redundancy such that we can communicate in spite of the presence of a noisy channel, as in this example. The down side is that we have what Steven Pinker calls a “Language Instinct”, which restricts our mental faculty responsible for language from being far more creative and richly diverse.

So what is the relationship between this redundancy in language and entropy? In short, entropy is logarithmically monotonic to uncertainty (which is inversely proportional to the probability of an event occurring), and that in turn is inversely proportional to redundancy (that is, the comparatively higher probability of some events occurring over others). Therefore, the more redundancy you have, the lower the corresponding entropy. If you have absolutely no redundancy in a piece of text (or, in fact, in an entire language comprising syntactical and semantic rules for combining letters into words, and words into sentences), then the corresponding entropy would be the highest possible. So adding redundancy to a language always lowers its entropy from this maximal point.

In English, a rule like the presence of at least one vowel in every word provides redundancy. Another rule like the consonant ‘q’ must always be followed by the vowel ‘u’ is also a source of redundancy. Then there’s the redundancy that has crept in organically as English words have been created, destroyed and evolved over the centuries. Interestingly enough, one way to measure the evolution of a language based on its ancestral inscriptions is to measure the change in entropy over time.

There are two quite profound implications of this manifest effect corresponding to the entropy of a language (more generally, the actual information content). First, if you know the distribution of redundancy for a language over a large sample of its words (or, for that matter, the entire set of words in its dictionary), then you can store any of its inscribed texts in a compressed form very efficiently. That’s the essence of tools like Winzip that you’re probably familiar with, which compresses files by removing as much redundancy as possible.

The second implication is artistic in nature. Imagine all of the creative modes of communication and evocation that you could employ if you are a writer/poet and you are armed with this beautiful truth of entropy. I came across the poem “Two L tt s fo Lo d uth fo d” by Cliff Fell in the online anthology Best New Zealand Poems 2008. The poem is a tribute to the monumental NZ physicist Lord Ernest Rutherford, and it intersperses fully intact words with words where some of the ‘e’ and ‘r’ have been replaced with empty spaces (these letters being the initials of Ernest Rutherford). The effect on the reader is one of literal appreciation of a reality discovered by Rutherford (that of alpha decay) as it could apply to our written mode of communication and our abstract thoughts involving imagination. A very clever poem indeed!

I find that there’s an excess of grandeur in the modern ways of communicating a message. Every marketing campaign, every commercial in TV and radio, every speech by anyone remotely important, and countless other messages that bombard us during every minute of our existence is so redundant that I can’t help but ponder what is actually real? Well, Information Theory provides an elegant formalism of the essence of a message in its simplest irreducible form that can be communicated from one mind to another. It is apparent to me that the world of philosophy is rather unaware of Information Theory and its pervasiveness. Perhaps the fact that entropy is a very recent discovery, less than 200 years old, has something to do with it?

Rudolf Clausius, a German physicist, was the first to coin this term “entropy” in 1865 based on the Greek word “trope” (meaning “transformation”), while working on the laws of thermodynamics. Then a famous Austrian physicist, Ludwig Boltzmann, redefined entropy as a statistical law in 1877 by taking into account the possibility of a thermodynamic system existing in various microstates, something he referred to as its “disorder” (crude translation from German). In 1948, an American engineer, Claude Shannon single-handedly generalised entropy to what is now Information Theory. The vast advances made in various Information and Communication Technology (ICT) fields during the latter part of the 20th century were a direct consequence of the ideas and developments in Information Theory.

In my endeavour to understand words, I find it mesmerising that such incredible connections exist between such seemingly disconnected fields as Linguistics, Physics, Poetry, Statistics and Biology. I have only been scratching at the surface so far, but it is a start nonetheless. With the laws of Information Theory on my side, I am unafraid of darkness and disorder! Entropy will light the way, wherever that may lead.

I connote what I denote

I was watching “The Last Emperor”, a biopic film about China’s final emperor from the Manchurian Qing Dynasty - Puyi, when an insignificant line from a supporting character early on in the film latched onto my mentalese like a leech sucking blood out of its host. From that point onward, the film is a misty fog in my memory lane. The line in question was uttered by Peter O’Toole’s character, Reginald Johnston, who was appointed as Puyi’s tutor in 1919. He says to Puyi in the film that “a man must mean what he says, and say what he means”. Ever since that utterance, I have been quietly examining what is so profound about it such that it could cause me to forget the remainder of the film even though I remember, lucidly well actually, getting up and out of my chair at the end of the film to lookup Bernardo Bertolucci (who directed the film, and whose earlier credits include “Last Tango in Paris” from 1972).

What resonates with me is the implied disconnection between saying something and meaning the said thing. Although billions have pondered this question before, I will ask it again nonetheless, when does saying and meaning become one and the same, that is, an utterance becomes indistinguishable from its inscription under the scrutiny of the human mind? Perhaps, in the context of this epic film, why such a cliche saying would be the very meaning of the film in my mind?

So, in pursuit of an answer, let me begin with the assertive title of this post - I connote what I denote. What is the first impression that forms in your mind after reading that assertion? Do you sense that I’m a straight talker? Maybe, I’m a politically incorrect person who likes to offend people for the fun of it? Perhaps, you sense that I’m inherently autistic, and unable to appreciate the subtle nuances of human communication that might create a disconnection between the connotation of a word and its denotation? In truth, I am none of the above. I am, in fact, a scientist who is merely stating a hypothesis that can be falsified. It is the only way that I know how to answer a question that enters the cavity enclosed in my skull (as seldom as that occurrence might be due to the shear thickness of my skull).

In a literal sense, if I inscribe the assertion as this - I connote what I denote, then how is it different from merely inscribing it without the italicised I? Is it, in fact, different at all? It seems to me that there is a difference between two inscriptions when their typefaces are different even though they are identical in every other literal sense. Emphasising the subjectiveness of this hypothesis changes the way one can falsify it. Strangely enough, it becomes much easier to do so, since the notion of falsification is inherently relative as Karl Popper defined it. For example, would it be the same hypothesis if the ‘I’ was replaced with ‘You’? I don’t think so - certainly not in the Cartesian sense of Cogito Ergo Sum, meaning “I think, therefore I am”. It does not relativistically mean the same as “You think, therefore you are”. Hence, my point is that a simple typographic change in the inscription of an assertion changes the way it ought to be uttered even though it is still the same inscription. In other words, a denotation is so literal that it is ambiguous, and consequently, different connotations can arise from a mere scrutiny of the simplest order.

But what about a more cultured scrutiny of higher order, that is, in the manner carried out by elite philosophers over the millennia? Well, I exclude myself from that group and do not wish to partake in anything other than streetwise philosophy, the kind of philosophy championed by that great cynic - Diogenes of Sinope, who used to roam the streets of Athens with a lantern in broad daylight and approach strangers to thoroughly examine if they were just. However, I would say that it is well worth reading the essay “Words” by David Kaplan (1990), in which he tackles the fundamental question: what are words?

Quantum Mechanical Meaning of Words

T. S. Eliot wrote the following words for the final part of his poem “Burnt Norton” in 1935 (which was the first of his famous Four Quartets).

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

Like much of Eliot’s words, it is hard to pinpoint exactly what he means. The ironic thing here is that he is literally illustrating the meaning of words by using words. This circular logic is clearly not lost on Eliot as he says “that the end precedes the beginning, / And the end and the beginning were always there / Before the beginning and after the end. / And all is always now”. However, what strikes me most is his remarkable assertion that “Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, / Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, / Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, / Will not stay still”.

I interpret Eliot’s words here as elementary particles in a quantum mechanical sense: they are uncertain entities that cannot be pinned down exactly in time and in space. Trying to measure the exact meaning of words puts the kind of “burden” and “tension” that leads to uncertainty of the very meaning. Hence, words “Decay with imprecision” and refuse to “stay still” in much the same way as a photon of light is impossible to pin down.

Eliot is searching for a mystical exactness that he repeatedly refers to in Burnt Norton as something akin to being “still”. I find much to ponder in his illustration of words being restless. Given his assertion of their fundamental uncertainty, perhaps there exists a quantum mechanical meaning of words?

Transcending Into That Realm Beyond Our Senses

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

W. B. Yeats wrote the above untitled poem in the late nineteenth century (unfortunately I can’t find the exact date). It is characteristic of that period’s poetry; namely, the rhyming quattrains (ABBA pattern here) and the adherence to a steady meter (iambic in this case). However, the imagery is mythical by way of being fuzzy and ambigous (which is one of Yeats’s hallmarks). Hidden among the instructions to read, to dream and to murmur, are evocations of youth transitioning into old age accompanied by regret. That being old equates to being grey and sleepy and nodding is not so much a figurative use of these images but a literal transition in time, emphasising the inevitability and isolation of old age. The rhetorical discussion of a missed opportunity to love and be loved is not so metaphorical as it is melodramatic to the point of being hypnotic in the final quatrain. The images traverse from something earthly like fire at the start of the poem to something heavenly like stars by the end of the poem. It’s an invitation to reflect and to travel from a tangible place to one that’s beyond our senses. Arguably, the subject of this poem is Maud Gonne (Yeats’s unrequited love) but that’s something to be discussed another time.

The most brilliant aspect of this poem for me is Yeats’s decision to structure it as one imperative sentence. The first two quatrains end on a semi-colon and contain images from different stages of the subject’s lifetime. It seems to me that Yeats is reinforcing the temporal imagery with a syntactical structure that forces the reader to suspend disbelief for at least the duration of the sentence. The melodramatic rhythm and rhyme of the poem provide a lingering music to one’s ears as much as the images excite a steady movement of thoughts in one’s mind by carefully punctuating that sensual flow and chaining it into an instructive sentence. It certainly works to entice the reader to reflect on regret and grief as might be experienced at the end of one’s life (in this case, literally at the end of the sentence). Perhaps this imperative narration is overly presumptious but it is a humble poem that punches above its weight. Much later in his life, in fact in 1928, Yeats published the famous poem “Sailing to Byzantium”, as reproduced below in its entirety.

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Much has been said about this poem and I certainly can’t add anything new but it is remarkable to notice how much Yeats’s poetic voice had changed during the intervening period between these two poems. Sailing to Byzantium still has a traditional structure (four stanzas in ottava rima) but there is a tangible difference in its narrative mood compared to When You Are Old. Admittedly there is also a tangible difference in the subject matter of these two poems but they are still thematic cousins, if not thematic siblings, descending from the same thematic grandfather. I suppose being older and surer (but by no means wiser), Yeats decided to adopt a forceful first person narrative in Sailing to Byzantium as opposed to his younger self taking the indirect second person approach in When You Are Old. There’s an overt obsession with immortality in Sailing to Byzantium that he has chosen to evoke by mythical imagery once again, but the imagery now is unambiguous. We are left in no doubt regarding his desire for a transcendence into that realm beyond our senses. In fact, he leads us on that journey and illustrates what that realm looks like, whereas earlier it was merely an imperative to imagine for ourselves.

There is grandeur in Yeats’s vision of immortality and no doubt an unhealthy dose of narcissism. In so far as a poem ought to connect the poet, his audience and “reality” via a triangle of equal tensions (as so beautifully articulated by C. K. Stead in his book “The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot”), Sailing to Byzantium is certainly a success while When You Are Old is a failure. However, if poetry is a recursive experience that takes us deeper into our minds and ultimately transcends our senses, then both of these poems are equally successful in reaching that end (albeit via complementary means).