The language of our self-conversation

It is not very easy to familiarise ourselves with the language of our self-conversation. To distance ourselves from our internal mechanisms so that we can hear ourselves think is not something that we can do everyday.

Generally we operate only with the outcomes of what such a self-conversation might be leading to. This leads to a situation where we do not know the thought processes behind our own decisions and actions. Being unaware of how we ourselves operate does not help; it is similar to being lost in a city, neither do we know where to go, nor do we know how to get there.

Learning to listen to ourselves and beginning to be engaged in the conversation that is going on within us is possible. The first step in doing so is understanding that the language of this self-conversation is not the same language that we speak in. We can even call it a language only because we hope that it has some coherence and that it reflects some pattern.

The self-conversation that goes on inside us consists of a series of impulses and a rush of sensations. There is no literal way of somehow receive a transcription of this flow. We can be sensitive to this flow and thereby be aware of it. Going further, we have to interpret this flow and our interpretation has to be non-reductive and expansive, else we will scuttle our own generative process.

What does being non-reductive and expansive mean? Spoken and written language is reductive, for instance. There is a cloud of meaning that we fix to the usage of specific words and thereby reduce it. So we cannot record our self-conversation in the form of the ordinary language that we use. We need to devise a different method of interpretation.

And that is where we come to the varied formats of artistic practice that we know of. Music, visual art, dance, food, poetry and many other formats essential play an interpretive role in our lives. They give us a way to translate our series of impulses and rush of emotions into a form that is expansive and not reductive. Each of these formats have an expansive quality. This means that every incident of experiencing these can be potentially rewarded with a new meaning.

So, the language of our self-conversation is in a form that requires us to develop an interpretive faculty. Whereas most languages that we deal with in our common experience are stated languages, the language using which we speak to ourselves in an interpretive language.

And using this interpretive language requires us to familiarise ourselves to one or many of the artistic formats we introduced earlier. Expressing in an artistic format is considered a talent or at least a special skill. But this is not necessarily true. If the relationship between the nature of our self-conversation and an interpretive language exists naturally, then surely our capacity to work with such an interpretive language could also exist naturally.

We suggest that this capacity exists. It is shrouded by the appropriation of the artistic instinct and all the multiple formats it takes by those who want to capitalise on it and those who want to create an aura of distinction around themselves and their abilities. This is not a conspiracy.

This is about our inability to counter confident and assertive but misleading and misplaced actions. Somehow only evaluate events and actions around us on the basis of how confidently and assertively they are performed and we do not investigate whether the underlying assumptions behind them are true. Political parties, the stock market, celebrities, entrepreneurs and con-men all know this and make this their operating principle. Also artists of course.

Once we are aware of this appropriation, we do not need to unravel it and unwind it in order to fulfil our agenda. We can easily work on a parallel basis to this community. We just acknowledge it as a kind of appropriation and stop considering it to be the same as what it claims to be.

But then, we immediately face some questions in relation to this position that we have assumed. If artistic practice is not a personal talent, skill or special attribute then why is it that we don’t see a wider participation in the formats we listed above? Why do we see only a small set of people engaged in this activities?

There is a lot of reconditioning that has to be done to undo the roughly five hundred year history of the professional art world. This means that instead of excellence in artistic output being our focus, art eduction needs to be our focus. There has been a specific series of accidents, catastrophes and circumstantial events in the lives of those who are able to read and express using interpretive languages. This specific history performs the reconditioning process for them. Others, in whose case the sequence of the events in their life did not happen in a fashion that they could develop an ability to understand or express through an interpretive language need some facilitation and orientation.

This facilitation and orientation does not need to come from a space of privilege or a space of compassion. It needs to come from a space of responsibility. We cannot personally take credit for having a particular capacity through some involuntary process which hasn’t been put in place as a fruit of our labour. We have to acknowledge the randomness and serendipity of the accidental process and not consider others for whom things did not happen in a similar way any lesser in any way.

This line of thought demands that we change our focus from celebrating the fruits of practice to creating peer-educational processes for re-awakening the capacity to interpret and express amongst those who have such a desire.

With this renewed focus, we are tasked with discovering and scripting new processes and experimenting with new methods that are effective for people with different backgrounds. We need to not just be motivated by inspiring awe in others through what we can do but also document how we are able to do it in the first place.

Being artistic needs to be understood not as a personality type but as a coincidental outcome that we need to be able to replicate and narrate in some way for everyone to be able to access.