ONCE UPON A TIME

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there existed a city whose citizens took great pride in having produced a virtually unreadable and unpronounceable language. Although the language possessed an alphabet, it obeyed no conventional rules. The pronunciation of each noun had be learned separately, and every verb took a minimum of 24 forms. Even the inhabitants of the city found their language truly alarming – according to both reliable and unreliable sources, only three foreigners had ever been able to master it, and these three were put to death for gross infringements of the cultural mores of the city, which were even more complex and nerve-wracking than the language.

Legend has it that when one believed one had learned the correct phrase for ‘thank you’ or ‘good-bye’ or ‘I love you’, only the linguistic foothills had been reached, for the particularities of the situation always dictated only one appropriate usage from two dozen variants. Equally disconcerting for foreigners trying to understand the basics of the language was that it was never clear who was doing what to whom in any sentence. The subjects and objects seemed to float around in an unstructured way, with verbs acting first in one direction, then, on further reflection, perhaps doing just the reverse. It was jokingly referred to as a quicksand language: the more you struggled the more quickly you went under.

An art at which the writers of this language excelled was an exceptional verse form known as the Reedsyana, in which, within the space of 11 syllables – divided into three lines of 3, 5, and 3 syllables each – linguistic resonances were set in motion of an exceptionally complex and nuanced nature. Each poem could be thought of as a pebble cast into the universal sea of language, the ripples from which might reach the shore of a distant continent.

As part of the city code, every citizen wore a beret indicating their social status. By noting the colour and markings on the beret (each had a different series of coloured chevrons) one was instructed as to the manner in which the wearer should be addressed. Minor errors on the part of very young children were looked at with amusement and indulgence, but by age eight each child was expected to have mastered the forms of address for every other citizen faultlessly. If an adult should choose to employ the wrong form it was assumed that it had been done with intent and could be the basis of a duel.

The rigours of a life spent wrestling with such a language had enabled its citizens to develop a mode of thinking which meant that, for many centuries, the city had produced some of the finest politicians in the world, able to negotiate every tariff, trade deal and international agreement to its own advantage. Understandably, due to the unparalleled negotiation skills of its diplomats, the city quickly acquired many enemies, who felt at a distinct disadvantage and were determined to destroy this wholly unfair linguistic sleight-of-hand. Thus it was that, in the 666th year of its existence, the city’s walls were breached by barbarians who were proficient only in the end game of violence and didn’t give a toss about the niceties of verbal expression. Day after day the barbarians looted, raped, murdered and made unseemly bonfires of the written contents of all the city’s libraries, businesses and government buildings. Not even love letters escaped their vengeance. During the course of a month of such relentless savagery, every bit of the city was destroyed, its citizens killed and its soil sown with salt, so that not a trace of it remained.

But, as is the way of the world and the word, a few fragments did survive – either buried deep in tunnels, or blown by all-consuming fires across the surrounding landscape, or hidden in secret archives by foreign scholars who had been in correspondence with the city’s notables. Thus it is that although the city is lost in history and its exact location remains unknown, its tantalizing script still exists in fragmentary form and has proved a rich source of nourishment for academics ever since. Because its study is so addictive and its legacy so partial and ambiguous, it has enabled hundreds of linguistic researchers, hard at work on their doctorates, to each cry aloud in their moment of epiphany: ‘Eureka!’ And thus has ensued yet another scholarly paper purporting to have found the key for unlocking this maddening language and all its implications. In fact many a scholar has made a profitable life-time career of such a study.

As you may surmise, I am one of those scholars, and my description of the city is what I have unearthed over four decades of careful study. Others may – and of course do – disagree with me, but it makes not a jot of difference, for what we moderns have come to realize, in these enlightened times, is that every person is entitled to their own truth, irrespective of the falsity encouraged by so-called ‘facts’. Only in this way is progress assured. As Augusto Boal has commented, with reference to the value of revolutionary theatrical principles, ‘no matter that the action is fictional, what matters is the action!’ A more scholarly description of this process has been called ‘differential oppositional consciousness’, a term coined by Chela Sandoval and which I have taken to mean, essentially: anything goes, as long as you enter into it wholeheartedly.

In the firm belief that I have constructed a self-consistent framework of how the language of this remarkable city works and the implications thereof, then it is certainly as valid as any wholly different and opposite interpretation arrived at by any other serious scholar. And even if this legendary city never really existed on the physical plane, it makes no difference. Scholars will continue to drink from its linguistic fountains for centuries to come. The only acknowledgement we choose to make to the old and fusty forms of scholarship is that each and every one of us who puts forward his, her, or their unique interpretation is obliged to begin with the words: Once upon a time, in a land far, far away …