Imagining Community
Viola Di Grado
Community. A concept we like to imagine as opposite to loneliness. Because loneliness is our basis for cultural comparison to everything: it’s every city’s interior topography, it’s the existential gulf to which we add the sum of our emotional goals. We look out the windows, at night, and spy on the lit up windows in which human beings like us come and go, and those windows are just like cells: lives closed up in their specific and unreachable meanings. It is interesting how the gathering of people in cities does not bring us a feeling of union but of isolation. It is interesting how, the more that human mass increases in a given space, the more you get to be alone with yourself: lonely. The Japanese invented olographic wives, small virtual women to which exhausted business men could communicate after a busy working day. As if language alone could soothe this excruciating sense of being alone in the world amidst multitudes. I myself, in my third book, “children of steel”, imagined “artificial mothers”, robot mothers who took care of children- because parents’ love wasn’t considered to be sufficent to warm up the psychic frost of kids- and turned them into happy functional adults. Functionality, that is a concept very dear to our perfect, frantic city lives. But to be functional in society you need to be functional in the society of your soul: because we are multitudes, and sequences of lit up windows that do not communicate to one another enough. So the sense of community we so much desire, a desire so typical of our nature, is an almost religious need: so high yet common to the whole universe, or what the Chinese called the “ten thousand beings”. But where do we look for the harmony that would make us less alone, more harmonized to the world outside and inside us?
I was 18 years old when I encountered the Chinese characters for the first time. I was in a university room, that was my first Chinese lesson, and I felt so moved. What moved me was that a writing system- a means of human communication- could be based on ideas, images, concepts instead of the obtuseness of a set of sounds. My language is alphabetical, therefore it is structured according to schemes only related to sound, which therefore postpone the concept, they put it aside, as if reducing reality to an immediate surface tied to sound. And in fact, historically speaking, we know western alphabet was born for commercial purposes, out of the need to exchange material goods. Chinese language, on the other hand, was born for spiritual purposes, out of the need to transcribe the divin response in divination practices. This kind of origins places the Chinese writing in a different communication area, pertaining to the listening of the invisible and the acquiring of a celestial meaning, instead of- as in the case of Latin alphabet- to the possession of the visible and the acquiring of a material object. The hanzi entrust themselves to the sign, in a animistic sense: to its capacity to enclose the mistery without obliterating it (as the alphabetical sign does). The Taoist school Shangqing took this mystical trust in writing to its extreme, this idea of bringing the whole ineffable range of unwritten mistery to coincide with writing. While western religions talk about logos- a spoken, abstract word- as the force who created the world, Taoism says it was written characters who created it. And the adepts of Shanqing even literally swallowed Chinese characters: talismans of writing. Swallowing the signs means reconciling with the latent aspect of mystery, recognizing and following our human instinct to bind ourselves to the invisible, thanks to its correspondence to the visible: the universe reflects itself into writing as the human community reflects itself into it. Because we are just the fragile mirror of bigger realities: a mirror blurred by our imperfections and limitations, in which “we see darkly”, as St Paul once wrote. And that is what community means to me: to get together because of the mystery that does not coincide with us but that language can help us get close to. Zhuangzi, a great Taoist philosopher, talked about language as “fishtraps”: an instrument that has to be used to grasp meanings and then is to be let go. Words are, in spite of themselves, containers of a whole series of images and associations, of traps and solutions. They’re the unwilling collective heritage of a nation, and more so the Chinese characters, which preserve- inside every single sign-an intimacy to the world, its past and future images: they’re a reservoir of feeling and thought that surpasses the barren means of the word. What is knowledge of the world, after all, if not the acquisition of a group of signs we ourselves decided, culturally, to coincide with the concept of “reality”? Cicero wrote in the De Inventione: “Signs are what falls under some sense and means a certain thing, which seems to derive from it, or that was earlier or is now or will later and in spite of that needs a proof or a more reliable confirmation, like blood, or leak, or pallor, dust, or similar things”. Which was, or is now: the chinese sign, in fact, does not just point to a contingency which in expressing itself gets to materialize, but a latency of future meaning (and it is a elusive language, that prefers intuition to grammar) and at the same time has an awareness of ancient meanings: every hanzi can be “peeled” like a fruit, dismembered in its radicals, its keys, its meaning seeds: it is a perpetual germination, a graft of tradition and intention. In fact from the word “sign” comes the word “design”, and the Chinese sign is an artistic one, which needs to be written in a certain order and is made precious by calligraphy. If we draw while we write, how much bigger will the portion of the universe we get to grasp, communicate, to bond to others be? Knowledge is not split from the language that expresses it and propagates it, just like an idea of community cannot be split from the language that keeps it together. Chinese language united a huge nation that, if it wasn’t for its signs, would have likely disgregated. The character that stands for the written word, wen, originally indicated birds figures. And like a storm, united to resemble a bigger bird, the ideal community is nothing but this: many persons that unite in the awareness of a common feeling, which is not cultural but human: our only language, even in these tough times that favour difference and subjugation, is humanity.