This thing about the O

At first it seems natural that the word ‘outside’ should begin with the letter ‘O’. It’s in the form, of course, that we sense the outside only if we are inside the circle, the ‘O’. It’s as much a position of privilege as it is of precarity. We take it as a given that the shape of the planet and most celestial bodies, and the pupils through which we see them, should have the same shape as the letter from which ‘out’ begins. There’s also ‘orange’, shaped like the world, or ‘oblate spheroid’, two other words that emerge from ‘O’.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who, while drawing a circle with the help of a compass, has marvelled at how simultaneously effortless and difficult creating a circle is. And whether the person drawing the circle is inside the circle or outside it. This came to me recently when my six-year-old niece, who’s been discovering the Ramayana, asked me whether Lakshman was inside or outside the circle when he drew the lakshman rekha. In my hand was an orange, its sweetness circumscribed by its circle of skin – to be able to characterise its sweetness would require someone from outside the orange to taste and comment on it. I imagine that those inside the circle are as tempted by the outside as those inside it – for that is how life has always emerged, seeds breaking out of temporary skins of fruits, so many of them O-shaped.

“It has an emptiness he suddenly cannot think how to fill.” James Salter’s words about the afternoon in A Sport and A Pastime give it the shape of an ‘O’ – and, allowing oneself to flow in that direction, wonder why that time of the day should begin with the first letter of the alphabet and not this one that forces our lips to round into a circle. The answer to that unnecessary question might be in the name of the time of day that precedes it – ‘noon’. A pair of Os, as if emphasising the character of what Salter calls ‘emptiness’ of that time of the day; but there’s also the two negating Ns on either side, as if cancelling that emptiness. To see time as cyclical, as variations of ‘O’, seems natural to a culture where the word for the past and the future is the same – kal. But Salter is thinking of something else – he is giving a time of the day a particular shape. In doing so, he turns the day into something like a night sky, where the ‘O’ of the moon changes form every night, so that we see it grow and die, from arc to roundness, to fullness (or ‘emptiness’). By importing an analogical optic to the day, he compels us to see a word such as ‘NOON’ as if it were a pair of glasses (or binoculars), the straps of ‘N’ attached to the twin Os.

Where is the outside from such a space? We are so conditioned to a spatial understanding of aesthetics and politics that such a formulation is bound to confuse us. What is the inner circle in a noon or afternoon? What is being kept out, or what is being kept in? The O is a trap, as Abhimanyu realised, after entering the chakravyuh. As is a moat, though we are trained to see it as protection. As is zero, which holds everything and nothing at the same time.

When I ferry this temporary – and self-indulgent – understanding of the ways of ‘O’, of its habitat and behaviour, to literature, I find myself orbiting (‘orbit’ must begin with ‘O’ of course!) around one particular word. CANON. We know that the word derives from the Greek kanon, which meant a measuring rod. I imagine the measuring rod to be straight, not O-shaped. But here it is, stuck between two Ns, not very different from the shape of ‘noon’.

Salter’s understanding of such a period as ‘emptiness’ might be useful in thinking of the ‘canon’ as well – “It has an emptiness he suddenly cannot think how to fill.” How does the emptiness of a canon come to be filled? The ready-made annoyance we now feel for the canon perhaps comes from our imagining it to be as insulated a space as the musical gharana. Both the canon – and the gharana – were created as arguments against what would have seemed to the early creators as an incestuous group, a kind of inbreeding by insiders, an inner circle. Notice the ‘I’ words there? In this tussle between ‘I’ and ‘O’, the outsiders have always managed to sneak in, make a place, as they do, figuratively, in the ‘O’ in canOn.

It is perhaps time that we see the history of the ‘O’, the outside and the outsiders, as one of agency and joy instead of mere victimhood.