Effing The Ineffable

Another brief lecture by DeCessile, transcribed by Portia Ramos on 7.22.2004 (edited by D. Farthing)

• S:(adj) indefinable, indescribable, ineffable, unspeakable, untellable, unutterable (defying expression or description) “indefinable yearnings”; “indescribable beauty”; “ineffable ecstasy”; “inexpressible anguish”; “unspeakable happiness”; “unutterable contempt”; “a thing of untellable splendor”
• S: (adj) ineffable, unnameable, unspeakable, unutterable (too sacred to be uttered) “the ineffable name of the Deity”

http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=ineffable

What is the sound of one hand clapping? The obvious answer is: silence. But what kind of silence? The sound of angry bees sealed in a mason jar by a scientifically curious but empathetically deficient eight-year-old boy? Or the expectant hush that inevitably falls when the house lights dim at a concert hall? It is to these questions that the philosophers of the 21st century must not turn up their noses.

Unanswerable questions, repetitive menial tasks and sleep deprivation have long been the technologies of the ancient Zen master and contemporary cult leader. After a constant barrage of emotional assaults, interrogations, and impossible-to-fulfill demands, the pupil or convert suddenly snaps; the personality loses its self-defining edge and the near constant chatter of self-talk ceases.

Subjects interviewed after returning to society from a cult or behavior modification therapy weekend (such as EST in the 1970’s) reported sensations of weightlessness or floating, hallucinations, and a marked inability to make simple decisions.

Is this enlightenment? Or the cracking of an already chipped but precious vessel shaped by a cosmic designer through eons of evolution and fired by self- and value-fulfillment? How many licks does it take to get to the center of a mildly dysfunctional ego? The world may never know…

Bizarre Writing Exercise #2

The following blog post and its partner (aptly entitled Bizarre Writing Exercise #1) came about as a result of my college English class. For a more detailed explanation of why this science fiction short short even exists, please see the italicized preface to Bizarre Writing Exercise #1 below…

[The following is a fragment of an interview with world-famous travelogue diarist Saniya Sachdeva that appeared in the December 2042 issue of Rolling Stone Magazine Online. It was printed on satin finish 20lb paper by a laser printer.]

Saniya is seated on a white velvet settee, clad in a multi-hued dashiki. “Do you like it?” she asks, without a trace of coyness. “A friend of mine in South Africa made this for me when I first started This Invisible Earth.”

I nod in reply. “It’s beautiful,” I say. In spite of the many interviews I’ve done with famous musicians, artists and television personalities, there is something in Sachdeva’s quiet, unassuming personality that undoes my usual, unflappable demeanor. I flip through my notes…

“If you could do it all over again, would you change anything?” I ask.

“No, I wouldn’t, because I don’t live in regret,” she replies sincerely. She pauses, looks up and to her right, then a smile slowly crosses her face. “Oh, looking back on my college days at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, I suppose I would go back and not drink so much.” I can’t help but smile in return. “Me, too,” I add.

“What time in history would you like to have lived?”

Saniya thinks for a moment. This is Sachdeva at her most beautiful, contemplating, a sight one doesn’t often see when she is playing the role of television show host on This Invisible Earth. “I think I would have really loved to live when P.G. Wodehouse was alive. I would like to have met him and heard his opinions.”

“If you could go back in time and change one thing, what would it be?”

Saniya doesn’t even pause for a second. Either she has fielded this question before, or she has already thought about this privately many times. “If I were able to go back, I’d go back to my school days. I’d definitely pay more attention in class. There was so much that I missed the first time…”

“What do you feel is the biggest issue with modern society?”

“That’s an easy one,” she says smartly. “Religion. Definitely.”

[The fragment of text ends here where the page is torn.]

Bizarre Writing Exercise #1

The following blog post and its partner (aptly entitled Bizarre Writing Exercise #2) came about as a result of my college English class. This was a pre-writing exercise in which we wrote a series of questions on index cards without any hint as to their eventual purpose. During the next class, each student asked every other student one or two of the questions, recorded the answers on the opposite side along with the name of the interviewee. At the end of this writer’s version of speed-dating, everyone collected all the cards from the other’s with their own answers. Then we switched with another student, so that each of us had a complete set of questions and answers from another person. The professor then told us that the purpose of this madness was to use the questions and answers we had collected in a writing exercise, to wit, “pretend that these questions are the result of an interview and create a short profile of this person in an unusual way. She (the professor) also mentioned that past students had turned these question and answer sets into obituaries, but that had turned out to be really creepy because we then had to read them aloud in class with the object of our profile sitting before us. Imagine hearing your own obituary written by a freshman. Creepy doesn’t really do that scenario justice. But I digress…I chose to turn this exercise into a work of short fiction, science fiction to be exact.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

CONTACT:
David Farthing
Oxford University Press
+44.020.2598.5555
dfarthi@oxpress.com
http://oxpress.org

Saniya Sachdeva Releases New Book, My Favorite Season Is Monsoon

(London, England, November 23, 2024) Oxford University Press is pleased to announce the publication of world-famous travelogue diarist Saniya Sachdeva’s latest memoir, My Favorite Season Is Monsoon. Available for immediate download from www.gutenbergproject.org, Sachdeva’s latest free e-book chronicles her travels through rural India from 2013 – 2014 before she became known as the host of the Travel Channel’s This Invisible Earth.

As host and creator of This Invisible Earth, Sachdeva rose to fame cataloguing the byways of unknown places, from Chibma, a village of 33 people in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China to Zeniff, a ghost town in Navajo County, Arizona, USA.

“If you enjoy reading about travel to exotic locales, Sachdeva’s work is a must-read,” writes New York Review of Books critic Maureen Jackson. “I fell in love with her wit and astute observations in My Life in the Rain Shadows of Tibet and can’t wait for her promised Gathering with Ba-Mbenga, the tales of her time living with a tribal people in the Congo, due out in March of 2025.

In addition to publishing  17 new hardcover books each year, Oxford University Press is a major provider of online information to libraries, institutions, and individuals worldwide. For more information about Saniya Sachdeva’s work or the offerings of Oxford University Press, contact her editor, David Farthing at dfarthi@oxpress.org.

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