<p>There’s a hierarchy in our proprietorial instinct about things that come out of us. A North and a South as it were – over things that come out of the northern-most point of our body, the head, we claim ownership: ideas, thoughts, language, vision, even destiny; as soon as we begin moving southwards, just past the eyes, we suddenly become ready to relinquish ownership that marks the self. Snot, spit, drool from nose and mouth, burp and belch and fart lower down, and, of course, urine and faeces – over these we feel even less ownership than we do about our breath, which, too, by some invisible dialogue with oneself, we place above nasal mucus, even though both come out of the nose. There’s a bit of the comedic in this – science has allowed all of these, spit and shit, identifiability, in that they are bearers and, of course, a manifestation of the body’s news, its health bulletin and even a temporary surname. These things that have come out of us are us – medical diagnostic reports attest to this truism.</p>.<p>But we do not take any pride in our sputum and stool. That we reserve for the northern-most region of our bodies, or where we believe these things come out of. I say ‘out’ though no one has ever seen them – ideas or language or thought – come out of any part of us. For language, at least the verbal, might come out of our mouth, but we know, from instinct, that it’s not where it was formed, that it’s only the chimney of the factory or the final stage of the assembling process. These invisible things, since they cannot be traced or identified ‘scientifically’, where most of our evidential trust lies, become precious to us. Summing them up – not summarising – we call it ‘style’. Like the sputum and the sweat, style, too, comes out of us – style, though, is inexhaustible even as it comes out of us, and it can change with the changing impress of history, like, say, our LDL does, depending on our eating and sitting histories.</p>.<p>Perhaps because it is invisible – a bit like air or gravity – our need to claim ownership of style or what we, in shorthand, can identify as allegiance to a school of thought, is far greater than our possessiveness over, say, our sweat. At the risk of being scatological, I’d like to repeat the obvious – no one would want to see Shakespeare’s stool as theirs even though many would like to imagine that they wrote ‘Life is a tale/ told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/ signifying nothing’. I mean, no diagnostic clinic has, as far as I can imagine, needed to use a plagiarism software to test urine samples.</p>.Create with languages, not conflict over them.<p>Since I’ve been predicating on what comes ‘out’ of us, it might also be useful to wonder – since we can’t do very much more – on what goes inside to produce these ‘results’. We are educated about the consequences of what we put inside our mouths even before we have entered the languages of our neighbourhood – what will heal and what will hurt, what will cause girth and what growth. About the mind we have far less control. Most often we’re not even aware if anything is being fed to it at all. And there’s the most confusing and even annoying truth – even if the same experiences were to enter everyone’s mind, the results would be different. This is, of course, completely different from food poisoning – every reader of the Bhagavad Gita or Fifty Shades of Grey is not affected in the same way.</p>.<p>Is it this awareness of difference that has made us privilege the north over the southern parts of ourselves? There’s a difference in the way we view public urinals from an auditorium or toilet paper from a research paper, after all. Spit and stool and sweat and semen are not allowed the courtesy of visibility in public spaces. Style, that we imagine or uphold to be as unique as our fingerprint, is meant to be seen, heard, understood and thus acknowledged by a world outside us, even though we ourselves might not be aware of what our ‘style’ is. It holds our history, our tics and our temperament, our storms and our whistling, weather and weathering. It still feels like a mystery, when I’m led to think about it, that something that comes out of us so as to define us to the human world should be only a sense, outside the five senses.</p>
<p>There’s a hierarchy in our proprietorial instinct about things that come out of us. A North and a South as it were – over things that come out of the northern-most point of our body, the head, we claim ownership: ideas, thoughts, language, vision, even destiny; as soon as we begin moving southwards, just past the eyes, we suddenly become ready to relinquish ownership that marks the self. Snot, spit, drool from nose and mouth, burp and belch and fart lower down, and, of course, urine and faeces – over these we feel even less ownership than we do about our breath, which, too, by some invisible dialogue with oneself, we place above nasal mucus, even though both come out of the nose. There’s a bit of the comedic in this – science has allowed all of these, spit and shit, identifiability, in that they are bearers and, of course, a manifestation of the body’s news, its health bulletin and even a temporary surname. These things that have come out of us are us – medical diagnostic reports attest to this truism.</p>.<p>But we do not take any pride in our sputum and stool. That we reserve for the northern-most region of our bodies, or where we believe these things come out of. I say ‘out’ though no one has ever seen them – ideas or language or thought – come out of any part of us. For language, at least the verbal, might come out of our mouth, but we know, from instinct, that it’s not where it was formed, that it’s only the chimney of the factory or the final stage of the assembling process. These invisible things, since they cannot be traced or identified ‘scientifically’, where most of our evidential trust lies, become precious to us. Summing them up – not summarising – we call it ‘style’. Like the sputum and the sweat, style, too, comes out of us – style, though, is inexhaustible even as it comes out of us, and it can change with the changing impress of history, like, say, our LDL does, depending on our eating and sitting histories.</p>.<p>Perhaps because it is invisible – a bit like air or gravity – our need to claim ownership of style or what we, in shorthand, can identify as allegiance to a school of thought, is far greater than our possessiveness over, say, our sweat. At the risk of being scatological, I’d like to repeat the obvious – no one would want to see Shakespeare’s stool as theirs even though many would like to imagine that they wrote ‘Life is a tale/ told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/ signifying nothing’. I mean, no diagnostic clinic has, as far as I can imagine, needed to use a plagiarism software to test urine samples.</p>.Create with languages, not conflict over them.<p>Since I’ve been predicating on what comes ‘out’ of us, it might also be useful to wonder – since we can’t do very much more – on what goes inside to produce these ‘results’. We are educated about the consequences of what we put inside our mouths even before we have entered the languages of our neighbourhood – what will heal and what will hurt, what will cause girth and what growth. About the mind we have far less control. Most often we’re not even aware if anything is being fed to it at all. And there’s the most confusing and even annoying truth – even if the same experiences were to enter everyone’s mind, the results would be different. This is, of course, completely different from food poisoning – every reader of the Bhagavad Gita or Fifty Shades of Grey is not affected in the same way.</p>.<p>Is it this awareness of difference that has made us privilege the north over the southern parts of ourselves? There’s a difference in the way we view public urinals from an auditorium or toilet paper from a research paper, after all. Spit and stool and sweat and semen are not allowed the courtesy of visibility in public spaces. Style, that we imagine or uphold to be as unique as our fingerprint, is meant to be seen, heard, understood and thus acknowledged by a world outside us, even though we ourselves might not be aware of what our ‘style’ is. It holds our history, our tics and our temperament, our storms and our whistling, weather and weathering. It still feels like a mystery, when I’m led to think about it, that something that comes out of us so as to define us to the human world should be only a sense, outside the five senses.</p>
