Veritas est Adaequatio intellectus et rei, is a grievous but gravid truth- it imposes a heavy labor but it may gestate something novel and uniquely invaluable- at least when it comes to hermeneutics. The intellect of the knower must be adequate to the thing known. But how are things known? One answer is that they are known through sense perception which directly establishes truth or falsity. What of things which are knowable but which are, as Aquinas puts it, 'deficient in truth' (propter defectum veritatis)? Perhaps, this is a poetic type of knowledge, too connotatively concrete to be captured by a manifold of intuition. Alternatively, it may be that, as Shelley said, 'Poetry subdues under its light yoke all irreconcilable things.' In other words, Poetry is deficient of either denotative or analytical truth. Why then should we bother with it? C.S Pierce coined two terms- Tychism (the notion that Chance rules everything) and Synechism (the illusion of continuity and mirage of analytical truths in a discrete, quantized, world governed by Chance)- which explain why, for Pragmatics, the aleatory magic of metre and rhyme assume a mantic aspect. Yet, learned, lucubrated, 'ritigranth' poetry- baroque variations on classical themes- though far from mantic, nevertheless possess a romantic appeal. Why is this? For my generation, Umberto Eco's 'Name of the Rose', wonderfully translated by William Weaver and paperbacked in 1984- when I was 21 and honeymooning in Piedmont- answered the question canonically. Love is Tyche as Syneche in a manner which beggars all adolescent silliness and semiotics and sehnsucht for a sexless Eden. True, I resented my wife's ostentatious slimness and athletic prowess. But, soon enough, her belly swelled to my own TamBrahminical proportions and she suddenly turned into a good cook and splendid stretcher of my exiguous pay-packet such that I'd never been better off. Then, for some reason, the good lady returned from a visit to the hospital with a little fellow who- truth be told- took some quite scandalous liberties with her person. Still, I tolerated the intruder- he was born within earshot of the bells of St. Mary-le-Bow, and thus was the sort of Cockney destined to be a Chimney Sweep or something utile of that sort. It does no good for a Westernized Oriental Gentleman, or WOG for short, to get into a slanging match with a sooty faced prole- and, anyway, I'm sure we could have peacefully co-existed till the fellow was big enough to crawl up chimneys, or trawl the shores of the Thames as a 'mudlark', or attend Westminster & turn into some sort of shill for a crooked Hedge Fund; what I mean is, I bore the little fellow no real ill will.
Then his Mother left me alone with him so she could 'pop down to the shops' and that miscreant, pretending to sleep peacefully in his crib, suddenly leapt upon me and tried to bite off my nose! I used ancient Kung Fu techniques to protect myself. Bastard! He responded with sneaky Ninja maneuvers which everybody knows can lay even Shao Lin Masters like myself low. What was I to do? Obviously, I had to use Mr. Spock's 'Vulcan neck pinch' to incapacitate my assailant. Sadly, he used it too. That is why when his Mum came back she cooed 'Daddy sleeping the Baby! How cute!' I tried to explain to her that there had been an epic Martial Arts battle in the course of which I could have been very badly injured. It was highly irresponsible of her to leave me alone with such a savage creature! Since all noises made by the Baby Daddy are pleas for food, she swiftly fed both her Men without any further Semiotic investigation. This was because, at the time, the lady was innocent of Eco's Semiotics, Barthes's idiotics, Kristeva's Chora etc. Indeed, given that every new wife/mother immediately learns, Baby and Daddy mirror each other long before Lacan's plagiarized 'mirror stage'.
C.S Pierce, sadly, had no baby to instruct him. Eco- a brawny, brainy, philoprogenitive, Piedmontese- could move from the sad stupidity of his primer on Semiotics to penning the most perfect novel Borges couldn't- well summarizes the sterility that, around the same time Lyotard (this is French for Jane Fonda's leotard after it got real stinky from all that aerobics Barberella had to do on Planet Reagan) spoke of a deeply anachronistic 'Post Modernism'.
What drove Eco to write a good novel? It was the abysmal stupidity of his own textbook. Himself his own Cavour, he'd lose the plot of Romance's Risorgimento to some formless Trasformismo that could be anything at all, save, in flashes, Piedmontese.
In his 'Theory of Semiotics' (1974) Eco takes the example of a cave man picking up a stone and using it for some purpose. He says, a single use of that stone is not culture. Culture begins when information regarding the function performed by the stone, and which could also be performed by a similar stone, is passed on- if only by Robinson Crusoe to his future self. Eco quote Pierce 'even ideas are signs' but forgets that signs don't matter. Ideas are dime a dozen. Only successful, of otherwise reinforced, Mimetics matters even if the Mimetic target is occluded or fictional. Evolution is essentially a process by which mimetic effects get 'canalized' without any signs or consciousnesses to interpret those signs. C.S Pierce's 'Boscovichian' atoms, yet constitute a 'Field Theory' like that of the Vimalakriti- and whether one calls it 'Magnetism' or 'Mimetics' matters not a jot.
Consider the manner in which aposematic traits are subject to Mullerian Mimicry. C.S Pierce may be forgiven for not knowing Muller's work- one of the earliest instances of the application of mathematics to biology- and it is tempting to speculate on what Tardean twist it might have given to Pierce's 'Tychism' (viz. the notion that natural laws evolve out of mere chance). The problem here is that the fitness landscape for our species- which is a mere speck in our galaxy, which is itself but a speck in the knowable Universe- imposes itself upon us as grim necessity and such fractal scarcity as forces our signals, if not our signs, to 'pay for themselves', or else cancel each other out as noise. Thus 'pragmatics' must be parsimonious, multiply realizable (i.e. 'robust'), and feature evolutionary capacitance. Creodes- developmental pathways- exist. This may create the illusion of 'Synechism'- i.e. analytical continuity though all that exists is discrete and quantized- but that illusion can't really pay for itself. It is merely noise, not signal. Names may denote a function- Eco's stone may be named 'head-breaker' to instruct some other as to how it can be used- but only if there is already a 'culture' of pedagogy. Otherwise, mimetics suffices. It is only if we don't want the function to be performed that we deign to name it.
Obviously, this is the solution to that most Catholic paradox, and hence beyond Chesterton's facile paranoia's pen, which we name for Bertrand Russell, who won a Nobel Prize for Literature, and was, perhaps, the first of the genus naturaliter irritabile to see why the 'axiom of abstraction' (or 'unrestricted comprehension) could not always 'lay hold of' a class- i.e. there must be some 'extension' which escapes intensional denotation.
At a later point, with the work of Godel, Tarski & Turing, it became clear that the language of Reason itself would always be deficient of truth in that its 'adequate definition' would be relegated to its meta-language. However, Type structure can be seen as a 'syntactical discipline for enforcing levels of abstraction'. This reconciles Truth's lemma of extensionality with Reason's dilemma regarding its own impredicative intensionality. Alternatively, we could say, with Grothendieck, that a 'Yoga' exists such that seeming 'irreconcilables' are united at a higher level of generality. That which is heteroclite and purely extensional may, submit to a 'light yoke' that is essentially poetic precisely because Mathematics is not akrebia, it is an economia- and several may coexist.
I may mention that Ghalib- whose nom de plume, and passion for gambling suggests the search for the Victor of its own necessary Randomness- Ibn Arabi's Brownian motion as the Alhambra's motto- wa la ghalib illa Allah- is, so to speak, on one side of the isthmus between the sweet waters of Martin Lof's test for that quality and the bitter brine of what is but unknowably pseudo-random. I shall return to this theme, with rebarbative unctuousness, towards the end of this post.
My own, ignorant, impression is that it currently seems that though the 'univalent foundations' project is feasible and highly utile, it will remain the case that there will be different mathematics, as there are different poetics, and though inter-translatability will be maintained, truth will always be deficient not because the intellect is inadequate but because the spirit seeks surfeit by but a method of forfeit. Thus, contra Russell, Logic is merely the long shadow of Mathematics mounting to the sunlit Parnassus of the Poets, but doing so in second childhood.
In Islam, the Akbhari notion of 'barzakh' as a limit which unites rather than divides, has not, to my knowledge, found a logical or mathematical expression. Yet, though deficient in truth, it is certainly 'poetic' to read a ghazal as if this were actually the case.
Of course, instead of maths one could substitute any other protocol bound ratiocinative system- for example that of the Law- in order to glean 'apoorvata', novelty, or 'taza gui'- freshness of speech- and thus arrive at a new hermeneutic merging of horizons.
Is this what Satyanarayana Hegde- a professional lawyer, but passionate amateur philologist- does in his paper titled The Semiotics of nāyikābheda in Ghālib Urdu dīwān 39.1?
The couplet in question is
shab kih vuh majlis-furoz-e ḳhalvat-e nāmūs thāI read in Rajeev Kinra's 'Writing Self, Writing Empire', the following couplet of Abu Talib, who flourished in the Seventeenth Century- majlis-furoz-i gabr-o-musalmān yak ātish ast / dar sang-i dair-o-ka‘ba ba-juz yak sharār nīst which equates the 'radiant one' of the congregation as univocal despite difference in creed. The same spark is in the Ka'ba as in the idol of stone. It is easy to extend this to a profane context of 'mimetic desire'. The lover is the 'korban' or 'pharmakos' such that Helen's face launches no ships, bequeathing but texts for scholarship.
rishtah-e har shamʿa ḳhār-e kisvat-e fānūs thā
Like Abu Talib, Ghalib was writing in a courtly tradition with Sufi overtones. A Semiotic analysis of this ghazal is either another ghazal or it is an exercise in hermeneutics of some more or less theological or historicist type. The first step in making such an analysis is to identify the 'sign system' which contains this ghazal. This is not something internal to the ghazal or deducible from what we know of the author or his geographical location. Why? An Urdu ghazal is itself a sign that something lyrically Persian is being foreshadowed, just as a Persian ghazal is a sign that something lyrical in Arabic is being foreshadowed, while a Ghazal in the Arabic may or may not be a foreshadowing of something in the Holy Quran, though God alone knows best. Sadly, this means the secular project of assimilating Ghalib to a 'Hindu' context has limited scope.
Taking the first line, what, if not 'majlis-furoz' is the Arabic 'mot theme'? The answer is 'khalwa'- which denotes either the 40 day Sufi spiritual retreat, or else, by metonymy, for jurisprudence, an illicit tryst or even an accidental 'close proximity' without benefit of chaperone, which violates Islamic rules re. modesty.
One may also mention the correspondence between 'khalwa'- where a Sufi Master is still consulted- and ''uzla' (like that of Ghazzali Snr) which more sharply contrasts with majlis (assembly).
Semiotic analysis, unlike pure hermeneutics, must concern itself with subsequent couplets. The next of which is
kis qadar yā rab halāk-e ḥasrat-e pā-būs thā
Here we have mention of Love's, 'Udhri', 'martyr' or 'shaheed'- both terms mean 'witness'. The tomb of the doomed lover- or Monist Pir- is itself a field of battle for Girardian mimetic desire which itself requires its 'korban' sacrifice. This is martyrdom piling up upon martyrdom like Ossa upon Pelion till Olympian re-ligio is overtopped and cast into shade.
I've translated this couplet as
'Whom has not, Lord, the longing to kiss bridal feet, with a martyr’s zeal fired?
'For miles, the Lover’s tomb, by not rolling wheat but green henna is gyred
Since nobody but a fetishist wants to kiss any type of feet, the meaning is- which piece of ground is hostile to hosting the tomb of a Pir, or Martyr in Love? I provide the image of devotees doing 'tawaf' circumambulation around the Lover's tomb and that their own soles become marked by henna.
Apart from the sign system of 'Udhri' Monistic Sufism, Ghalib's abstraction has a philosophical valency which has a universal expression. This militates for increased degrees of freedom in ascribing a sign system to it. My translation of the ghazal, made some ten years ago, is as follows-
Apart from the sign system of 'Udhri' Monistic Sufism, Ghalib's abstraction has a philosophical valency which has a universal expression. This militates for increased degrees of freedom in ascribing a sign system to it. My translation of the ghazal, made some ten years ago, is as follows-
Last night, when the radiance of our assembly to her abashed chamber retired
Each candle wick, became a thorny prick at its shade from the desired
Whom has not, Lord, the longing to kiss bridal feet, with a martyr’s zeal fired?
For miles, the Lover’s tomb, by not rolling wheat but green henna is gyred
Against Sorrow's sorites, the Brain, this Stoic armor, in vain, thus acquired
Trysts, hearts crush hearts to gain, are the thin lips of pain- it required.
Knew I respite from this wretchedness- I'd recite much to be admired
But, Oh!- eating my own heart out- my very bile has grown tired!
My version of the first couplet is a bit naughty. But then, Ghalib was 19 when he wrote it. However, there is a possible Islamic meaning of a pious kind. The Prophet Muhammad's body shone by its own light. The simple and innocent people of Medina would wish to follow him even into his own chamber where his modest and virtuous spouses slept. We can imagine the devotees waiting anxiously, burning the candle through the mid-night hours, yearning to be reunited with their Prophet at the, pre-dawn, Fajr prayer. In this reading, Eros has been completely sublimated.
By contrast, Prof Pritchett, following S.R Faruqi considers this line to mean- last night {when / since / while} she was a gathering-illuminator of the seclusion of honor/dignity / the wick of every candle was a thorn in the clothing of the glass-shade
This makes no sense. Either there is a gathering or there isn't. Seclusion may be attended by honor. Dignity too may turn up. But that still is not a 'majlis'- a gathering. If this person has never been seen, why would every candle 'have a thorn in its clothing'? Who would know of her? Why work yourself up over some unknown person getting cozy with seclusion while Honor and Dignity stand around uselessly?
'Majlis', at that time, meant male assembly- it related to the 'biruni' not the 'andaroon'- i.e. the male part of the house, as distinct from the gynaeceum. The Sufi Pir- or the Prophet Himself (s.a.w)- must seclude himself just as women are secluded. This enables a reversal of gender roles whereby the devotee from being the female 'Viyogini' or simply a deflowered and abandoned lass, takes the male- but merely adolescent, or impotent- part. The essentially romantic and optimistic aspect of this arises out of the Sufi practice of 'rabita'- a 'heart connection' to the preceptor- whose 'talqin' inculcation can continue to occur from behind the veil of occultation or, vulgarly, beyond the grave in the limbo of 'barzakh'. The note of unbearable Grief, in this context, is struck by reason of the nature of Monism which bereaves Love of its idol so what is perishable hold no place in it.
Professor Pritchett, Post Master General Faruqi & this Hon'ble Hegde- exalted savants all- choosing to remain ignorant of the Theistic, Indic, context, have written nonsense. They are 'sexing up' their dossier. Why? What is wrong with them? The answer is they won't admit that Ghalib was Muslim. The Ghazal derives it grace from that much greater Grace promised by that Prophet whose hadith are as a river in Paradise which yet can spring from the lips of one's darban or khidmatgar, thus opening a door, kindling a thirst, for what is unseen, yet certain Good.
By contrast, for even the wretchedest poetaster, grasping the truth of Ghalib's couplet presents no difficulty at all. The light of the assembly has the virtue of modesty which enhances her beauty but also sequesters it in purity. The sentiment is familiar to, not just the Faith community, but those whose values arise out of Families, and if its expression varies it is only because such variance is the soul of Art.
'Majlis', at that time, meant male assembly- it related to the 'biruni' not the 'andaroon'- i.e. the male part of the house, as distinct from the gynaeceum. The Sufi Pir- or the Prophet Himself (s.a.w)- must seclude himself just as women are secluded. This enables a reversal of gender roles whereby the devotee from being the female 'Viyogini' or simply a deflowered and abandoned lass, takes the male- but merely adolescent, or impotent- part. The essentially romantic and optimistic aspect of this arises out of the Sufi practice of 'rabita'- a 'heart connection' to the preceptor- whose 'talqin' inculcation can continue to occur from behind the veil of occultation or, vulgarly, beyond the grave in the limbo of 'barzakh'. The note of unbearable Grief, in this context, is struck by reason of the nature of Monism which bereaves Love of its idol so what is perishable hold no place in it.
Professor Pritchett, Post Master General Faruqi & this Hon'ble Hegde- exalted savants all- choosing to remain ignorant of the Theistic, Indic, context, have written nonsense. They are 'sexing up' their dossier. Why? What is wrong with them? The answer is they won't admit that Ghalib was Muslim. The Ghazal derives it grace from that much greater Grace promised by that Prophet whose hadith are as a river in Paradise which yet can spring from the lips of one's darban or khidmatgar, thus opening a door, kindling a thirst, for what is unseen, yet certain Good.
By contrast, for even the wretchedest poetaster, grasping the truth of Ghalib's couplet presents no difficulty at all. The light of the assembly has the virtue of modesty which enhances her beauty but also sequesters it in purity. The sentiment is familiar to, not just the Faith community, but those whose values arise out of Families, and if its expression varies it is only because such variance is the soul of Art.
Let us now see what Hegde makes of 39.1. Before doing so, I should explain that Nayikabheda, which taxonomizes women in their abjectness as predestined sex objects, is a development of an erotic genre in Indic poetry in which the charms of different types of samanya, common hussies, are dwelt upon. I don't know what this has to do with Ghalib- who did once run a gambling den but wasn't a pimp- or how 'Semiotics' might figure, but perhaps things will become clearer by and by.
Hegde's translation is-
At night when the beloved
was resplendent
in privacy’s seclusion
Every candle’s wick
was a thorn in
the lantern's robe.
Hegde omits mention of the fact that the fair one in question was 'majlis-furoz'- i.e. one who illuminates an assembly. That is why every candle's wick was horny. Otherwise only the lover would have this problem with his lantern.
Hegde immediately quotes S.R Faruqi, and thus must be aware of his own error-
'The real reason of the candle's agitation is hidden in the second distich's phrase 'assembly-illuminer...which is also the candle's function. The candle, seeing its brightness and sparkle dimmed and its power of illumining the assembly reduced, was burning in envy and was therefore agitated... The candle wanted to throw off its dress which was pricking its body like a thorn, so as to divest itself of its dress and be nude in front of the beloved, so that the beauty of the unveiled beloved and the lantern-less candle could confront each other... the candle detested this obstruction, and was eager to throw off the lantern so as to be able to freely visit the radiant beloved.'All this is quite mad. The Assembly has dispersed and everybody has returned to their own bedchamber. Those who can't sleep- being troubled by the thoughts of her (actually his- because the beloved is conventionally male in this sort of poetry) beauty- have lit a candle which leaps up restlessly. But this candle was not present at the Assembly. It couldn't have got naked and challenged the beloved to a dance off or mud wrestling or a twerking competition. Also the notion of fire wanting to visit the fair one and get it on with her is not poetic. It is the fantasy of pyromaniac.
Hegde, by profession a lawyer', finds great profundity in the following-
The arguments as to why the candle’s wick pricks the lantern’s robe like a thorn are as follows: the candle’s flame spills out of the lantern and reddens it. The lantern becomes hot and dry due to the candle’s heat. Redness, heat and dryness are symbols of agitation. The lantern in which redness and acrimony are radiating is in this state due to the candle’s wick and hence, it’s proved that the candle’s wick is pricking like a thorn in the lantern’s robe and because the lantern is the candle’s robe, the candle has “a thorn in its robe” (that is, it’s agitated)This is sheer nonsense. It is the opposite of 'husn-e-talil'- beauty in poetic aetiology. This is a case of straightforward 'transference'- the distrait lover imagines an inanimate object as being in the same plight as himself. This 'pathetic fallacy' is poetic because there is pathos in the poet's plight. Verbose lawyerese like the above is utterly Philistine. It is to take a spade to a souffle.
Hegde next shows why he earns big bucks as a lawyer. He has uncovered new evidence-
The second hemistich was originally sham‘a sey yak khār dar pairāhan-e fānūs thā. 7 The Persian hypotext8 for 39.1 (not noted by any commentator) is Mūṣawī Khān “Fit̤rat’s” 9 distich: The candle-wick’s a thorn in the lantern’s robe in every assembly illumined by his fiery radiance.Hegde then employs his extraordinary erudition to prove that the ugliest possible interpretation of the image of a lantern with a thorn in its robe- viz. that women should be secluded not just from the Sun's virile gaze but also denied even a teeny tiny night light- is what is canonical for Urdu. This fits well with the notion that a Muslim man's idea of showing his gal a good time is to lock her up in some dark shed where not even a lantern can gaze at her.
But Urdu isn't English, thank Goodness, where candles have a quite different size and shape- so much so that by the Seventeenth Century, everyone knew the story of the 'Apothecary's wife, who never loved her husband all of her life, and being averse to his handle, availed herself of a candle.'
The word 'fanus'- lantern- could also mean 'tattle-tale' and Hegde latches on to it. The problem is that we understand why a man may want to put out the lantern so as to be in the dark with a woman. We also understand why he may claim that it is only to protect her reputation that he does this. Someone seeing them together by its light might suspect they weren't actually stock-taking or filling out tax returns or completing whatever task it is the lecher required her to stay behind after work for. Thus the safer thing would be to proceed with these needful chores entirely in the dark. Who knows? Perhaps some fair one has been taken in by such claims. In my case, all I've received is a swift knee to the groin.
My point is that Semiotics, unlike Philology, is context bound. Signs arising in one situation- lots of people (at least in the imagination of the lover) feeling horny for one particular person who is secluded and beyond reach- have no connection at all with the same signs arising in another situation- viz. a guy who wants to turn the lights off so as to get jiggy with a lady. For Philology, however, the fact that the same signs may be used in both situations is a matter of great interest. The Philologist will want to know about how semantics and pragmatics and syntax change when the situation changes. This may make a great deal of difference to hermeneutic reception of fragmentary texts from cultures remote in time or manners from our own.
Suppose a blushing virgin like myself is invited to dinner by Beyonce. She dims the lights while snuggling up to me on the sofa. This is a sign that she wants to deflower me. On the other hand, when Mum- annoyed by my tapping away at the keyboard- barges into my room and turns off the lights, the meaning is quite different. She wants me to go to sleep coz tomorrow's a School Day.
Semiotics is about stuff like dimming or turning off the lights. It has a logic. But that logic is context bound. Thus what Hegde is doing is not Semiotic analysis. He is not looking at the context of Ghalib's couplet. He is relying on some nonsense which he terms 'Semiotics' to turn what Ghalib said into something Ghalib didn't say, would never say, because it is stupid, ugly and false.
Thus he writes- ' The candle-wicks are a thorn in the fānūs’ robes;
But fānūs is tattler
Therefore, the candle-wicks are a thorn in the tattler’s robes;
But tattler semiotically signifies candle
Therefore, the candle-wicks are a thorn in the candle’s robes;
But the candle’s robe semiotically signifies its own wax body
Therefore, the candle-wicks are a thorn in the candle
After resignifying 39.1’s key lexemes, I’ll translate it anew:
At night when the beloved made love bashfully
Every candle’s wick pricked the candle like a thorn
Using Hegde's own method, let us see what we can come up with-
Tattler, semoticially, signifies someone who communicates things which perhaps ought not to be communicated.
Hegde is a tattler.
Therefore candle-wicks are a thorn in Hedge's robes
But candle-wicks are crowned by flame
Therefore Hegde's robes are getting burned
But, semiotically, robes could mean pants
Thus Hegde's pants are on fire.
After resignifying 39.1's key lexemes, let us translate it anew
At night when the beloved made love bashfully
Every Hegde's pants were on fire causing his prick to shrivel up like a thorn
Hegde draws on Faruqi. Is Faruqi an imbecile? Does he not get that context is everything?
No. Hegde quotes Faruqi as saying-
'We know that meaning’s impossible without context. The context of any text’s the genre that it’s a part of (for example, lyric, encomium, story, novel etc.), and then the rules and regulations (conventions and poetics) that determine the genre-identity that we placed it in.True enough. Ghalib was writing in the Hubb al Udhri tradition where love is not consummated. The beloved may be the Sufi Pir. Not just Eros, Thanatos itself, is sublimated though Monism seems a doomed project save for Madness.
Finally, a text’s context is other similar texts…the best commentary on any poetic text is another poetic text, i.e., the meaning and valuation of a particular text is determined in comparison with another text. As far as the lyric’s concerned, this principle is: How has the topos of the particular distich under consideration been used in some other distich? For example, the discussion on Ghalib’s distich under consideration becomes deeper and sharper when we’re aware of the poetry of his precursors, contemporaries and successors, and when we can look for this topos in other poets as well.This is perfectly reasonable. Poems relate to poems and only a poem can translate a poem. But this does not mean you can throw away whatever the poem itself says. After all, that is what determines its context. If a collocation used in one context is also used in another, this does not mean the context is the same.
Hegde writes- ' I’ll read codes in the sense of the Barthesian semic and cultural codes.
Sadly, Barthes was a nitwit. He misread Sarassine as I have shown. To deploy a 'semic code' you actually have to know how connotation works in the discipline you are appealing to. Barthes didn't know Econ. I do. So I am able to understand why he wrote utter bollocks.
These codes are the context that translate texts and render them meaningful.
Nonsense! Meaning is 'artha'- use value- nothing more. Codes don't matter unless you are a lawyer paid to pretend otherwise. But sensible people jurisdiction shop so at the margin, legal codes are economic.
Though texts are linked to definite contexts, context’s indefinite, and “we do not have an agreed normative principle for deciding what a context is.”
Rubbish! If the thing matters, then there is a Schelling focal solution to the underlying coordination or discoordination game.
I’ll posit context as polysemic, heterogenous, and fluid.
In which case your pants are on fire. Fuck are you positing shite for? Your dick is literally being roasted right at this moment! Pour a lota of water on your undercarriage my dear Hegde!
Inferring which literary-socio-cultural context to blow up/narcotize for a given text is a paradigmatic macro-abduction,
What does that mean? The answer is that the cognitively simplest theory is Schelling focal provided the cost of getting things wrong aint too high. It's the reason we still have Arrow-Debreu securities though we know this means there's a bigger crash heading our way.
If I were teaching Ghalib to gormless meatheads for a pittance, sure, I'd just use Pritchett & Conway's drivel. But, to get something out of reading him for myself, I've got to mathematize him. Fuck! I sound like the idiot Badiou saying 'Mathematics is Ontology'! Still, for what it is worth, this couplet could be represented as a description of a 'strongly inaccessible cardinal number', whose existence is equivalent to being inside a Grothendieck Universe- i.e. a 'topos' where all Maths can be done. Obviously this has to do with the continuum hypothesis, which however we could 'bracket' as 'barzakh'. In other words, this couplet of Ghalib's is an epitome of Akhbari Islam. No doubt, a smart guy who knew from Math, or Islam for that matter, would consider me to be babbling nonsense. But if so, it is nonsense of this order-
just like inferring which semantic property of a polysemic lexeme to blow up/narcotize is a syntagmatic micro-abduction.
No it isn't- unless you are Alexa or the predictive software which helps you compose texts on your smartphone. Anyway, this isn't how you approach poetry. Why not use a sword to trim your nose-hair?
Recoding a text is decoding it anew by recontextualizing it.
In other words, abandoning the text to talk about anything that takes your fancy.
For some reason, Hegde- whom I imagine to be an upright and decent man- has a liking for a particular genre of courtly poetry which, truth be told, better befits the pimp's profession- viz. tabulating the different types of sex object which human beings can be reduced to, by shitheads.
How does he manage to link that sort of dehumanizing shite to Ghalib?
He writes- I’ve seen as a Model Reader the semiotic strategy of 39.1, its mens operis by focussing “on the things themselves,” i.e., the lexemes khalwat (lovemaking),
But khalwat does not mean lovemaking. In this context, it refers to the Saint withdrawing into seclusion in a monastic cell or else a lady retiring to her chamber.
embarrassment (nāmūs)
Namus means honor and dignity. It does not mean embarrassment.
and candle (sham‘a).
that is correct.
I’ve inferred by modus ponendo ponens a Law/Rule that can explain this text’s Result: If lovemaking, embarassment and a candle (oil-lamp) are present,
But they aren't. Nobody is getting jiggy here.
the topos is the lajjāprāyarati mugdhā nāyikā (Rule/Major Premise); lovemaking, embarassment and a candle are present here (Minor Premise), hence, (Conclusion) the topos is the lajjāprāyarati mugdhā.
Let us try this modus ponens stuff ourselves. If Hegde's pants are on fire then the topos is Sati Mahima.
39.1’s recoded genre is thus nāyikābheda, its sub-genre poems about love-in-union (sambhoga śṛṅgāra) and its sub-sub genre the topos of the ingénue embarrassed about lovemaking (lajjāprāyarati mugdhā).
We are now in a position to translate Ghalib's 39.1 into Indglish.
Last night only Hon'ble Hegde is retiring due to his farts are so firing
His lungi burning up! It is true, I'm telling you, not gupshup.
Hegde ends- after an astonishing display of erudition in a number of classical languages- by asking-
Haven’t I indulged in hermeneutic nihilism and violated the habitus and literary field of Ghalib studies by aberrantly decoding 39.1 in the context of nāyikābheda?No. The erotic genre among courtier poets is a semiotic field because the context is the same- more especially where polygamy prevails, or slavery obtains, and primogeniture is not firmly established. Now, from the time of Amir Khusrau, the eroticization of the Pir/Avatar has had its subgenres. Ghalib's is in the Udhri/Viyogini tradition. I can think of one or two instances of apparently 'nayikabheda' verses which asymptotically approach that barzakh. It is certainly not impossible to populate it felicitously. But it is that quality this lucubration of Hegde's lacks. I believe it has been published in a book.
But of books and candles and 'nayikabheda', and amor adaequat intellectūs suī, early Seventeenth Century English had made an Orient discovery- viz. a two leav'd book is best to handle; all's as daylight there to who spare the candle.
N.B- I feel I've been a trifle harsh on Hegde. Perhaps the reason his paper is so bad is because of the editorial intervention of 'Brill Publishers' based in Leiden who it may be, demand submissions to be written predominantly in double Dutch.
Hegde invokes Borges's Pierre Menard, whose signal virtue consisted of leaving texts alone, not subjecting them to supposedly 'Semiotic' vandalism. But, I feel, he is a good man and I want to look again at his patchwork of quotations which, sadly, he has failed to stitch together.
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