Wittgenstein's Son and U. G. Krishnamurti - Ducks or Rabbits

6.

1974 – London

My mother explained to me how Ludwig and she indulged in a great deal of playful joking, often quite like children, speaking absurdly and at cross-purposes, or pretending not to understand one another with their mix of accents, my mother with her broad though refined Scots/Irish brogue mix (though now more Oxbridge-London after much of her life spent in the south) and Ludwig’s English spoken with an occasional slight stammer in somewhat aristocratic and refined Austro/German, or sometimes with hardly an accent at all. She described how his voice fluctuated a good deal and could sometimes sound harsh and not particularly attractive, especially when excited or cross, and then his speech tended to grow rather high-pitched.

Ludwig liked their play with vocabulary and meaning confusion with my mother, telling her, “English is one of the most important languages, yet it is often a most illogical and stupidly evolved language. What you are saying is exactly what I am saying; only your words, they come from you as if they are back to front or even upside down.”

“Well, your words,” she replied, “come out front to back, upside own, and are often a complete mishmash.”

“A mishmash of words... Yes, that is good.” Ludwig thought for a moment. “Rather like a Mishnah of words. Hebrew, is it not?”

“Yes, it is,” my mother stated confidently. “When one of the lost tribes of Israel settled in Scotland many thousands of years ago you know, they often borrowed words from our Gaelic. Partly what we Celts refer to now as a Scotsbrew of words, a fine mixture of Gaelic and Hebrew.”

“Oh, that is most interesting,” Ludwig stated enthusiastically. He looked at my mother who tried to hide her smile. “Is this completely true?”

“True, though not of course completely true, silly. But then, not wholly untrue either.” And so on...

He asked her one day if she had ever visited the moon.

She thought that she had, as far as she could remember, but perhaps only the one time. “I think then, I did not particularly care for that hard kind of moon cheese.” Ludwig replied, saying the moon’s surface described as cheese something of a cliché, and he thought better of her than to use a common platitude. She told him she was just a common girl, if he had not noticed, and if he did not like it, he could just put his pipe under his hat and lump it, and go blow it too, if he pleased, and for all she cared.

He asked what it was like on the moon, and she mentioned there was a peculiar odour on the moon she did not care for either.

“What?” he asked. “Could you identify the smell?”

“Well, yes, of course it was the smell of hard moon cheese, like a particularly ripe Romano; there was also a swampy area nearby. It was shown on the local moon map, and called Lake Limburger, but there wasn’t much else there.”

To me, as a young boy, this was no great side-splitting repartee, but it seemed to amuse my prospective parents a good deal. Perhaps back in those days this weird and old-fashioned talk they considered a daring form of flirtation.

My mother explained how they quickly developed their own ingenuous way of speaking, though if any third party had heard them, they would probably have thought them full halfwits or mad. This I could well understand.

They were the only two real characters in their made-up world, and they seemed to think a great deal of themselves, otherwise my mother thought they were very straightforward and quite sensible with one another.

Ludwig asked if she agreed how the use of language a fascinating game. She did agree, saying language was like a card game, though most people never learned to play properly and were always laying down the wrong cards, or if they did know the game, they often did not follow the rules, and even cheated. Most did not progress much beyond “Patience” or playing “Snap!” whereas she considered herself, despite her purported commonness, more of a Bridge sort of a girl.

Ludwig admitted to enjoying games such as Ludo and Snakes and Ladders in the spring and summer months, and Monopoly and Dominos in autumn and winter. Chess, checkers, and card games he did not care for so much.

On one of their walks by the sea, my mother told Ludwig she would show him a game she used to play with her girlfriends; a variation of Blind Man’s Buff, but with less of the buffing and no men allowed; a game of Blind Girl’s Bluff.

Ludwig, she explained, must promise to keep his eyes shut, and no peeking, for about ten minutes or until she told him, he might open them, while she took his arm and led him along the bluff above the sea, and all he had to do behind his closed eyes was to forget about everything and simply look and exist in the world as she described it to him.

She described for him the enormous horizontally striped red and white lighthouse just ahead, with lots of fashionable men and women in Victorian evening dress, standing at the railings at the top of the lighthouse and waving white handkerchiefs in alarm at a large paddle steamer drawing dangerously close to jagged rocks. The people on the paddle steamer were likewise waving their handkerchiefs, thinking the lighthouse people were simply being friendly...

She exclaimed and told him a large hedgehog just crossed their path with brilliant red tips to its quills. On the path, she warned him there were now four steps up, and he was delighted as he stepped up the stairs that were not there. She described a gigantic beautiful moon just appearing over the horizon but then saw as it ascended it was the planet earth. A lady approached wearing a chic powder blue dress and leading an oversize matching powder blue French poodle. My mother called good morning, to which the woman replied in a Scotts-French accent, “Good morning... a lovely day, is it not?” Then the dog barked with a Scottish accent as though agreeing, and Ludwig laughed and asked if he could open his eyes so he too could see this wonderful lady and her dog.

“But you do see her and the dog,” my mother told him. “In the only way you are able to see them.”

“Ah yes, yes,” Ludwig exclaimed, “of course, of course.”

Ludwig adored my mother’s game and the next day enthusiastically produced a scarf to tie about his eyes in case he was tempted to open them as he did the day before to see the hedgehog and the lady, but feared if he did so he would be disappointed and cross if they were not there.

On this day, she took his arm and they walked along the edge of a vast rice-paddy on a path lined with bamboo and with trees of coconut, pineapple, and banana and on the horizon a silently erupting volcano, bellowing clouds of white smoke miles high and spewing forth flames and molten liver.

“You mean of course, molten lava,” Ludwig suggested.

“No,” she corrected sternly, “did you not hear me say molten, liver. You are not watching properly, or listening correctly.”

She stopped and brushed his arm, saying there was a big black beetle crawling on him. He flinched and stopped, saying, “Where is it now, where is it?” He apparently had a fear of insects, and even the thought of seeing this invisible insect upset him.

“Oh, it fell to the ground,” my mother stated quickly, “and a big cobra snapped it up and ate it.” This made him even more nervous, for he had a fear of invisible snakes too.

“Please,” he suggested testily, “let us have no more crawling crawly creatures in this world today, if you do not mind.”

My mother told him equally testily he could not dictate to her what she saw or how she saw it, and if he did, well there was no point in playing the game anymore, and she would take him blindfolded straight to hell if she wished to do so. He laughed and apologised, acknowledging she was quite right.

At the end of half an hour, he still did not want to take the blindfold off, saying he loved to live in this world devised for him only by my mother, and this one of the most interesting walks he had ever taken, with a woman.

“Yes,” my mother quipped, “walking with a woman, it is quite an eye-opener isn’t it.”

“Yes, a great closed eye-opener, and quite a mind-opener for the closed mind. Your game, it may throw all meanings of ‘Gestalt’ on their heads.”

“Oh yes, I thought it might,” my mother commented, making a mental note to look up the exact meaning of Gestalt when she had the chance.

“In this game, this language-game,” Ludwig stated, “using nothing but your own senses and someone else’s imagination, no matter what you say, because you see it too, it is entirely impossible to tell a lie, yet it is all completely a lie, a true lie. In this game of yours you are pointing the way to the introduction of a new meaning to the word “seeing” and this thrilling... This game could also indicate how...