Irascibility makes the world go round

We had to memorize Sanskrit verses in order to learn metres for chanting/singing various works which we were reading.  It’s fascinating because, like with other ancient cultures, the ancient Indians had a deep understanding of rhythm and metre and how those could change the way a verse was understood.  Since Sanskrit has no word order, the pauses in the chanting could (and do) give the audience a clue as to how to break up compounds and understand euphonic grammatical rules.

This is, of course, a roundabout way of saying that I still have those verses tucked away in the back of my head, and I’ve found them useful in other contexts, such as intertextual references and for vocabulary building.  It’s a similar process with English poetry; I don’t have a lot of it memorized, but the poems that I do affect the way I speak and write.  As I was reading this article, I was thinking of Frost’s “Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening” and how the ordering of the clauses in that poem is remarkably complex and helps me to write long, convoluted sentences (as in the paper I’m working on right now).  The first clause, “whose woods these are I think I know” is a fascinating reordering of an otherwise ordinary English sentence (“I know whose woods these are”, which is a passive rendering of “I know who owns these woods”). It also shifts the emphasis onto the owner of the woods, rather than the man who is gazing into the trees, and the whole first stanza focuses on that unknown owner.  Indeed, the first three stanzas all work similarly, deflecting attention from the subject to the unknown owner and then to the subject’s horse, before we finally return to what our protagonist is considering.  In doing so, the verses show how reordering clauses and developing a narrative voice can guide a reader through a text, whether that’s a poem, an academic paper, or what-have-you.

I had a friend who was slowly memorizing the entirety of Stevens’ “The Blue Guitar,” an enormous poem, and I wonder what it would be like to have that content.  It’s the same thing with the Indian students who memorize the Vedas or the bards who would have memorized the great epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.  In some sense, memorizing that material gives you a self-contained world to live in, exploring how themes and words resonate with each other.  You can play those poems on loops, going backwards and forwards through them, purely based on memory.

There was one particular scholar, Paul Griffiths, who made the argument that anthologies of religious verses, poems, aphorisms, etc. that are found in just about any religious tradition were meant to do just this thing.  Create a world of references and connections and guideposts for thinking.  My Sanskrit professor has often lamented how Western education has downplayed the importance of rote learning, as compared to the Herculean feats that Indian students engage in.  Perhaps it’s time to actually take that lesson to heart.