Contributing Blogger
Paul Melas
Hunter College, CUNY
Paul Melas
Hunter College, CUNY
9/22/16
What follows is a discussion prompted by a Radiolab podcast[1]
concerning language and words, listened to for a graduate level Linguistics
course. The podcast includes the story
of Jill Bolte Taylor, a woman who suffered a stroke
and found herself with “absolutely no language” and no memories. All references to Taylor’s narrative
are derived solely from its representation in this podcast.
For the purposes of this short
discussion, a very limited definition of what Edward W. Said designates as Orientalism—or the Orient—will be necessary.
That is that Orientalism and, by extension, the Orient “has helped to
define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality,
experience.”[2] Moreover, it is that through which “European
culture gained in strength and identity by setting it self off against the
Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self.”[3] In this discussion I hope to show the ways in
which Jill Bolte Taylor’s dramatic narrative makes use of the Orientalist
mechanisms and logics in order to delineate a very precise Orientalist
process. A process that includes
initial—and intimate—contact with the mystical Orient, an immersive process of
exposure and discovery, and an eventual rejuvenated return to the familiarity
of the Occident (the West). This blog is
an examination of this subtext.
Keeping in line with Orientalism’s
deep roots in Western European colonialism, any Orientalist endeavor ought to
be thought of in terms of a journey. The
narrative action, in other words, is very much a peripatetic one. Hence, the Orientalist narrative begins to
resemble an inherently itinerant process, regardless of the stark reality from
which the narrative derives inspiration.
Though Taylor did not physically travel great distances, her narrative
nonetheless makes use of language that evokes travel, geography, and movement
through space. She note’s quite
humorously of the morning following the burst of a blood vessel in her brain’s
left hemisphere: “So it’s like okay I got a problem, but then I immediately
drifted right back out. And I affectionately refer to this space as “La La Land”” (emphasis added). “La La
Land” as a land, is of course the narrative symbol for the Orient
(moreover, it is interesting to note the patronizing tone that this specific
name evokes, akin I believe to the opening “bar-bar”
of the Greek barbarous).
Arrival
into the Orient is something akin to a loss of one’s distinctly Occidental
character. For Taylor, the Occidental
loss came in terms of her loss of language.
Not just spoken language, but language as a mechanism for organizing thought. Commenting on the loss of her selfhood
following her accident Taylor notes that “language is an ongoing information
processing; it’s that constant reminder. I am, this is my name, this is all the
data related to me, these are my likes and my dislikes, these are my beliefs, I
am an individual, I’m a single, I am a solid. I’m separate from you. This is my
name…” The loss of the Occidental self as a result of the loss of language, in
this case, happens, rather unsurprisingly, in Cartesian terms. The self that
Taylor looses is that same self—that same “I”—which René Descartes famously
refers to in “cogito ergo sum”, “I think therefor I am.” Taylor’s experience is in fact the logical
extension of Descartes’s argument: “I think therefor I am” and so “I think not, therefor I am not.”[4]
This self that Taylor looses is her Cartesian self, the quintessentially
Western “I.”
The loss of
the Occidental self and the emergence of its Oriental counterpart, is evident
through the nature of Taylor’s experience following her lapse into “La La
Land.” This is the point in the journey
that is marked by exploration and discovery, and thus, much of what Taylor
describes—her experience in “La La Land”, in the mysterious Orient—has a
distinctly Oriental character.
Specifically, this leg of the journey is a survey of the Orient’s major
religio-philosophical epistemes. A
pedestrian understanding of the predominant Asiatic religions,—in these, the
western mind includes Hinduism, Taoism and Buddhism, and excludes, as one might
expect, Islam—will suffice for making this quite apparent.
To begin, one of the radio
commentators interviewing Taylor summarizes one interesting—and as it would
seem to them, spectacularly novel—aspect of her “La La Land” experience: “and
the other thing that she told us is that lying in that bed without words, she
says she felt connected to things, to everything, in a way she never had
before.” And Taylor her self adds: “I
lost all definition of my self in relationship to everything in the external
world.” Curiously enough, and as we
might imagine to the great surprise of the two radio hosts, little originality
actually exists here. In fact, the
experience is quite in sync with Hinduism’s ancient Vedic traditions and, more
specifically, with their treatment of supreme reality, Brahman. I present a short, yet representative, sample
from the Upanishads to illustrate this point: “This immortal Brahman is before,
this immortal Brahman is behind, this immortal Brahman extends to the right and
to the left, above and below. Verily, all is Brahman, and Brahman is
supreme.”[5] The interconnectedness that Taylor’s
narrative describes is, it would seem, this acquisition of the knowledge of
Brahman. It is in this understanding of
Brahman that the oneness of all reality becomes realized.
The
narrative then traverses from one intellectual corpus of the Asiatic world to
another. Taylor makes note of another
aspect of the experience of “La La Land” in the following way: “You know, not that little voice that you
know you wake up in the morning and the first thing your brain says is: Oh man
the sun is shining. Well, imagine you don’t hear that little voice that says
man the sun is shining, you just experience the sun and the shining.” What she points to here, is the direct
experience of reality without the mediation of language or thought. It is the experience of reality as such,
absent of the mechanisms of order and structure (primarily language) projected
onto it by the mind. Interestingly
enough, Lao Tzu, the great Taoist philosopher and theologian seems to think
along suspiciously similar lines. The
famous opening of the Tao Te Ching is quite recognizable: “TAO called TAO is
not TAO. Names can name no lasting name.”[6] Lao Tzu, like Taylor, sees the obstructive
nature of language and naming and of the human process of organizing and
differentiation. Access to the
mysterious Tao becomes inhibited by any attempt to impose language and though
upon it. Hence, reality, once free from
the mind’s impositions, can be experienced fully for what it truly is.
As to Taylor’s “La La Land” process
of “essentially [becoming] an infant,” little investigation need take place to
find its equivalent in the Asian world.
Here is a brief description of the Buddhist concept of Shoshin or beginner’s mind, by the Zen
Buddhist master Shunryu Suzuki: “The practice of Zen mind
is beginner's mind. The innocence of the first inquiry—what am I ?—is needed
throughout Zen practice. The mind of the
beginner is empty, free of the habits of the expert, ready to accept […]. It is
the kind of mind which can see things as they are, which […] can realize the
original nature of everything.”[7]
As the
Occidental self slowly begins to recede in favor of its Oriental half, there
comes a distinct point of crisis in which the self must choose between the
two. In typical Oriental narratives, a
survey of the Oriental “geography” is followed by a re-emergence of the self
into its original Occidental (Western) state.
Rarely does the self fully embrace the Oriental spirit thus severing
ties with the Occident. This traumatic
process is referred to as “going native.”
Taylor’s narrative illustrates the drama of this decision quite well. The transcript from this part of the radio discussion
is as follows:
“JILL BOLTE TAYLOR: […] So if
somebody would ask me who's the president of the United States of America, this
is a huge question. So for the next several hours I'd be pondering president.
President. President What’s a president? President. And then I would get a
picture in my mind of a president as a leader.
JAD ABUMRAD: Was it a picture of a
specific guy?
JILL BOLTE TAYLOR: It's, it
was, actually it's still flashes into my mind. It's, it's a picture of a
silhouette of a male.
ROBERT KRULWICH: A
presidential profile.
JAD ABUMRAD: Like maybe the
idea of the president, basically.
[…]
JAD ABUMRAD: So that was her
president.”
The question Taylor asks as a
means of testing the vitality of her Occidental self is telling. The correct answer to it is the
quintessentially Western human: male, white, and in a position of power. The question then, is a choice between West
and East, between the Western ideal embodied in the president, and the Orient.
Every
Orientalist endeavor, like every Colonialist endeavor, is engaged with some
sort of extraction, either it be treasure, spices or humans. In this case, Taylor’s extraction is an
intellectual one, an intellectual artifact that she brings back and integrates
within her newly invigorated Western self: “I do believe that there are times when
you need to let your brain chatter be quiet.”
Bibliogrpahy
Addiss, Stephen,
and Stanley Lombardo, trans. Tao Te
Ching: Lao-Tzu. Indianapolis, IN.: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1993.
Prabhavananda,
Swami, and Frederick Manchester, trans. The
Upanishads: Breadth of the Eternal.
Hollywood, CA.: Vedanta Press. 1975.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Random House,
Inc., 1979.
Smullyan,
Jacob. Words. Accessed September 14, 2016.http://www.radiolab.org/story/91725-words/?utm_source=sharedUrl&utm_medium=metatag&utm_campaign=sharedUrl.
Suzuki, Shunryu. Zen
Mind, Beginner’s Mind. New York: Weatherhill, Inc., 1995.
[1]
Smullyan,
Jacob. Words. Accessed September 14, 2016.http://www.radiolab.org/story/91725-words/?utm_source=sharedUrl&utm_medium=metatag&utm_campaign=sharedUrl. (The website
includes both audio and transcribed versions).
[2]
Said,
Edward W., Orientalism (New York: Random House, Inc., 1979), 1-2. Above, a 1886 map of the British Empire.
[3]
Said, Orientalism, 3.
[4]
I realize that this statement is paradoxical.
However, it expresses the intended point quite effectively.
[5]
Prabhavananda, Swami, and Frederick Manchester, trans. The Upanishads: Breadth of the Eternal (Hollywood, CA.: Vedanta
Press. 1975), 65 (emphasis added).
[6]
Addiss, Stephen, and Stanley Lombardo, trans. Tao Te Ching: Lao-Tzu (Indianapolis, IN.: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1993), 1.
[7]
Suzuki, Shunryu. Zen Mind, Beginner’s
Mind (New York: Weatherhill, Inc., 1995), 13-14.
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