অধ্যায়-- পঞ্চাশ
Chapter 50
Words and Ideas
An exercise I have found very useful draws from improvisation drama: “The one-word story”. If you have 10 or 20 individuals then ask them to sit in a circle facing each other. You then feed them an initial line of a story (e.g. “The girl went into the forest”). Then tap someone on the shoulder and ask them to add a word to the story. And so this continues round the circle with each person adding a word to the emerging story. I found this to be a good experiential exercise since during the de-brief participants say that no one individual was in control but a story structure clearly emerged. They also reach the point where the emerging story is influencing what is said next. Some talk of the futility of trying to control the story and how frustrated they were when the person next to them uttered a word they had not predicted and so had to respond differently.
Boyd Rodger,
It was a class trek again this time in the jungles of Buxa and Jainti in the Duars region of Bengal. There were 33 tigers counted in these forests in the last census under the tiger project. It was not however the tigers that intimidated them. It was the leeches in the rain. The professor started off, “Words are leeches quivering on leaf tops in a rain forest dying to attach on to any passing idea however unsuspecting. Ideas sucked dry to the bone make words fall off burping to their hearts content. Ideas are but poor innocent souls, roaming in the forest looking for a cozy shelter before night falls suddenly in a dense jungle.
Eventually they do find one, after losing the way umpteen times, inside a forsaken forest bungalow. They share words in the light of a candle, words like fishes, succulent and juicy leaving an after effect long after sleep engulfs our ideas.
Ideas sleep…. only to wake up at dawn, greet another sunrise of words and sentences amidst raging mountain torrents. Ideas are washed away into far off river valleys and flood plains where they slow a little. Children bathe in them with gaiety, sprinkling soft sands. Words are children looking for their long lost parents, homeless and yet full of vigor, determined to find their genetic donors, who exist in ivory towers, reach up to them for comfort, joy, satisfaction, security… what not. From time to time they run after these conventionally important things, which peculiarly hide in ideas, so vast and spread out that words are just a speck. A tiny grain of sand in comparison and yet these grains are like huge atoms, with their own solar systems and electron clouds. Space cities built into their infinite elementary particles are but one gigantic idea that sprang from an astonished contemplation, accidental and yet profound. It dwells in our minds, which long for a theory, a solution to everything, in its every day nothingness.
Words like genomic imprints, building blocks of complex molecules, keep changing rearranging themselves, generating more and more ideas, different cells performing different functions, diverse set of ideas, which like disease, manifest themselves on integrated complex molecules of life that we fancy ourselves, more often than not leading to death, obliteration of one complex molecule, any one amongst us perhaps, in the vast shores of time, another re arrangement of on-off signals. The network continues to function as if it knew no time.”
That night they had roasted pork with beer lying, in a forsaken forest bungalow, singing songs and sharing poems under the light of a full moon.
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