In How Forests Think, the anthropologist Eduardo Kohn suggests that ‘forms’—by which he means much more than shapes or visual metaphors—are one of the means that enable our surroundings to think through us. But how, we might ask, can any question of thought arise in the absence of language? Kohn’s answer is that to imagine these possibilities we need to move beyond language. But to what? Merely to ask that question is to become aware of the multiple ways in which we are constantly engaged in patterns of communication that are not linguistic: as, for example, when we try to interpret the nuances of a dog’s bark; or when we listen to patterns of birdcalls; or when we try to figure out what exactly is portended by a sudden change in the sound of the wind as it blows through trees. None of this is any less demanding, or any less informative, than, say, listening to the news on the radio. We do these things all the time—we could not stop doing them if we tried—yet we don’t think of them as communicative acts. Why? Is it perhaps because the shadow of language interposes itself, preventing us from doing so?
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In my garden, there is a vigorously growing vine that regularly attempts to attach itself to a tree, several metres away, by ‘reaching’ out to it with a tendril. This is not done randomly, for the tendrils are always well-aimed and they appear at exactly those points where the vine does actually stand a chance of bridging the gap: if this were a human, we would say that she was taking her best shot. This suggests to me that the vine is, in a sense, ‘interpreting’ the stimuli around it, perhaps the shadows that pass over it or the flow of air in its surroundings. Whatever those stimuli might be, the vine’s ‘reading’ of them is clearly accurate enough to allow it to develop an ‘image’ of what it is ‘reaching’ for; something not unlike ‘heat-imaging’ in weapons and robots. To think like a forest then is, as Kohn says, to think in images. And the astonishing profusion of images in Mrauk-U, most of which are of the Buddha in the bhumisparshamudra, with the tip of the middle finger of his right hand resting on the earth, serves precisely to direct the viewer away from language towards all that cannot be ‘thought’ through words.
Amitav Ghosh
