A few months ago a friend was breaking up with his girlfriend. The saddest thing about breaking up, he said, is having to take apart this world that you've built together. The private language you've invented based on shared experiences. She's gone and you're now the sole witness that this thing ever even existed. It's like being the last surviving native of some dying culture.
This came to mind yesterday. These private languages.
I was cycling into the city centre after the rain had stopped, cycling westbound, towards and into the afternoon sun. On the glittering tarmac. They've laid down this tarmac on Leadenhall Street, between the junctions with Fenchurch Street at one end and Bishopsgate, that glitters after a rain like water. It was like gliding into the death scene from a movie, when the screen goes all bright and the hero wakes up in heaven. It reminded me of a frame from The Story of Film by Mark Cousins, when he talks about innovative use of light in the Scandinavian cinema of 1910. Benjamin Christensen and Victor Sjöström. The frame looked like this:
I really enjoyed the connection. I'd misremembered that the frame had come from a film by Benjamin Christensen and further confabulated that it was a recurring motif throughout film history. (It isn't.) I thought it would be cool to recreate that image, but using instead the glittering tarmac and the canyon of buildings as stand-ins for trees. I rather liked that idea and dwelt on it. It would go into my Love of London exhibition: the artist's comment on natural beauty in the man-made world. Tarmac for lake, the canyon of buildings for forest. I was pleased too with the philosophy of it, I saw it as a visual expression of the ideas of Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I was reading. The Buddha is everywhere etc.
So my pleasure was manyfold. It was the physical pleasure of cycling into the afternoon light, the memory of that documentary, the idea of Buddha is everywhere and so on. Which further reminded me of Howard Woodhouse and his introduction to Bertrand Russell's collection of essays In Praise of Idleness. Woodhouse comments on the essay called Useless Knowledge (1935) in which Bertrand Russell enthuses on how knowledge of the etymology of the word 'apricot' made eating the fruit more enjoyable:
Curious learning, says Russell, not only makes unpleasant things less unpleasant, but also makes pleasant things more pleasant. I have enjoyed peaches and apricots more since I have known that they were first cultivated in China in the early days of the Han dynasty; that Chinese hostages held by the great King Kanisha introduced them into India, whence they spread to Persia, reaching the Roman Empire in the first century of our era; that the word 'apricot' is derived from the same Latin source as the word 'precocious', because the apricot ripens early; and that the A at the beginning was added by mistake, owing to a false etymology. All this makes the fruit taste much sweeter.This further amused me, because it's at once pretentious and unavoidably funny. And I do enjoy apricots more since knowing that. The way I also enjoy more the word "enthusiasm", since I learned, from Pirsig, that it literally means ‘possessed by a god, inspired’ (from theos - ‘god’), from the Greek enthousiasmos. Which enjoyment is further increased because Pirsig's idea that when you feel enthusiasm for your work you are experiencing something close to a religious experience, is the same as what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called "flow". Two independent minds reaching the same conclusion. A nice idea made more real by its being accounted for by two uncorrelated sources. This makes me happy. And from there I remembered, from Daniel Kahneman, that Csikszentmihalyi used to explain that his name was pronounced Chicks-sent-me-high. Which is funnier still, you see?
The point being that these private languages don't just develop between lovers. They develop also in your own head. The little private jokes you have with yourself that make you smile but you'd be at a loss to explain to anyone Other. That is, you are the last surviving native of a dying culture. The culture of You.
