The English language has entered the twenty-first century at its usual meditative pace, reluctant to sacrifice its dignity and majesty to the impulses of progress, and yet, perhaps with a languid and regretful sigh, forced to admit that advances in technology have left large swaths of vocabulary obsolete almost overnight. We now live in the age of email and text messages, where nouns are used as verbs; where punctuation is a tangled web of slashes, dots, arrows, and angle brackets; where complete sentences have been sent into exile and mysterious abbreviations reveal hidden doors to knowledge with a simple touch.
And yet, one has to admire the ability of the English language to adapt to the pressing demands of technology and science. These are constantly changing realities that cannot be ignored, and any language must have the ability to communicate as its primary goal if it is to remain relevant.
What then of the immutable realities, inner experiences and realizations that remain essentially the same for humanity generation after generation? Here we cannot affirm that new circumstances have arisen that would validate the expansion of the language; the wise have always been like that. “High thoughts must have high language,” said Aristophanes in the fourth century B.C.
And yet it is undeniably true that writers throughout the centuries have grappled with what can only be called the limitations of the English language in the realm of emotional and spiritual experience. “Words form the thread on which we thread our experiences,” wrote Aldous Huxley, but unfortunately, one is forced to admit that along with some of the other languages of the world, particularly those of the East, the English language is singularly impoverished in this field.
What words we have we owe in large measure to Shakespeare, who is said to have coined over 1,000 new words to meet the needs of his dramatic dialogue. Barbara Wallraff, in her book Word Fugitives, attributes verbs like “stain,” “impede,” and “rant” to the bard. In the second half of the 19th century, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins coined compounds such as “wind-walks”, “silk-sack”, “dapple-dawn-drawn”, and “fathers-forth”.
“Surely my poetry errs on the side of oddity,” Hopkins confessed to Robert Bridges in a letter dated February 15, 1879. The fact that Hopkins’s innovations have not passed into general language does not diminish the exquisite beauty of his poems, the urgency of a soul that tries to find the most perfect means to express the divine.
Renowned Indian poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore said: “When old words die on the tongue, new melodies spring from the heart.”
The truth of his statement is reflected in a small group of English-language writers who have spontaneously improvised their own words for certain insights, experiences, and inner realities. One of the most prolific is the contemporary Indian poet Sri Chinmoy, who has made compound nouns his lingua franca.
Although born in Bengal, Sri Chinmoy has been writing in English for more than half a century. He is no longer considered a newcomer to the language, but in many ways his ease with innovation reflects the joy of discovering the language anew. He imagines being the first person to say something, invites Barbara Wallraff. And Virginia Woolf vividly portrays “the word-minting genius, as though thought plunged into a sea of words and came out.”
drip.”
Here are some samples of Sri Chinmoy’s unique style. They come from a small selection of her poems entitled The caged bird and the cageless bird:
My heart is loaded with many things,
But one thing haunts me
In every silence
And that’s the mountain-burden
From the sadness of the world.
————–
browse
Beyond the dawn sky.
reach
the pinnacle goal
Before sunset cry.
————-
The day is fast approaching
When the caravan of hope seekers
It will be successfully and gloriously
Go through the frustration-desert.
————-
my soul-fire,
Where can I find you, where?
My ignorance-swamp,
When can I transform you, when?
—————
The mind
It’s a world-peace-strange
AND
A strangler of world peace.
Clearly, the poet has developed these variant compound names in order to concentrate their expression in as few words as possible. It is therefore a technique of brevity and power. He has eliminated all connecting words that, in a poetic context, can be perceived as weakening the impact of a sentence. “The burden of the mountain/of the world’s pain” carries a much greater force, for example, than “The mountainous burden of the world’s pain.”
While it is not common to use compound nouns in such abundance, Sri Chinmoy’s approach is definitely acceptable within the confines of the English language. Furthermore, compound nouns from it have the advantage of being familiar. The words themselves are not new; it is their mixture that is impressed on the reader’s imagination with singular novelty and freshness. We know, for example, what “silence” and “gap” mean separately; it is the new portmanteau “hush-gap” that evokes a different kind of energy in the poem. He fuses an auditory and spatial image to create something intensely alive. Here then surely is what Virginia Woolf called thought that “dunk into a sea of words and came dripping out.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, speaking from his vast experience as a writer and philosopher, stated: “There is no choice of words for one who clearly sees the truth.” It is this imperative feeling that pervades Sri Chinmoy’s writings and compels him to describe the mind, for example, as “a stranger to world peace” and “a strangler of world peace.” Both are extremely strong images, made more so by the precise parallelism of the triple compounds. There is nothing cryptic or obscure in these references. In fact, the word order of each compound and its proximity in the
The poem allows us to follow the poet in his creative process, trace his formation. In fact, the composites enhance and illuminate his thought process to an unusual degree.
Sri Chinmoy is very fond of these comparative compounds to provide the key to understanding his poems. Thus, the “caravan of hope” passes through the “desert of frustration.” The intangible quality of hope is allied with a tangible image (“caravan”) that advances, albeit slowly, through the arid wastelands. In the same way, the intangible quality of “frustration” is linked to the desert, a powerful image of endless and hopeless dryness and emptiness. Together the two compounds compose a remarkably vibrant portrait of spiritual despair infused with a glimmer of hope.
A permanent feature of Sri Chinmoy compound nouns is that they are not witty in a purely intellectual sense. He doesn’t turn his two words into a pastiche (like “ignoramire” for “ignorancemire”). Rather, he chooses to build pictures and images out of ancient words while allowing these words to retain their integrity. His technique is more like that of the Chinese calligrapher who combines the characters for (1) tree, (2) big, and (3) sighing in admiration into a pictogram denoting a chair. Working with a similar type of craft, Sri Chinmoy breathes new life into some of the oldest words in our language: soul, sky, fire, weeping, tree, flower.
Writing in the late 19th century, Alexander Smith said, “Memorable sentences are memorable because of a single word that radiates.” Sri Chinmoy’s poems are often memorable because of some single compound noun they radiate and I would not be surprised if many of these compounds entered the English language as a matter of course and endowed it with a whole new spiritual dimension.
Dr Vidagdha Bennett
References
- Chinmoy, Sri. The caged bird and the cageless bird. New York: Aum Publications, 1998.
- Jacobs, Alan, ed. Mystic Verse. Massachusetts: Element Books, 1997.
- Wallraff, Barbara. Fugitives from the word. New York: HarperCollins, 2006.