Language is a Demigod

This is not a story, except in aspects of the story of language use. It's an essay, which oddly enough is a genre subset of story here. Say what?

 

Title is from a Ken Wilber statement, in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality.

 

Ironically, he doesn’t seem to take that assertion very seriously, nor the primal, vitalistic charge of language, being hyper-rational, with a nod toward the transcendental, expressively (referring to his language use, not his existential state).

 

If 70% of humanity is at a magic-mythic living base, as has been averred, I think it's fruitful to recall Jean Gebser's magic (primal unity)-mythic (collective belief)-mental (conceptual thought)-integral (differentiated holistic clarity) calibrations of language being audio-visual-conceptual-diaphanous, respectively.

 

"My school colors were clear," japed comedian Steven Wright.

                              

The primal power of sound, rhythm, image in the poetics of expressive choice is something that impresses us all, whether our center of gravity is pre-, rational, or post-rational. When the latter, we hook up rational concept and a contemplative seeing-through to that audio-visual collective commonality.

 

Deleuze and Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus, made the interesting observation that innovation in literary praxis occurs through a "rupture" of the line.

 

I take that as rhythmic sensibility. Being a troubadour as well as a litterateur enables me to appreciate the "intertwingling," as an avant academic friend of mine, Diana Slattery might say.

 

Andrew Harvey, writing about the Koran, said much of it was about an intentional "derangement of the senses" a la Rimbaud. I'm no expert on said text, but that provocative recollection invites us to ruminate on the spirit of Islam as resonating, at the audio-imagistic level, at least, with Rimbaud, Dylan -- and okay, higher-psychic and subtle-causal jump to Rumi, that wonderful Sufi poet of whirling transcendent delirium.

 

Obviously, I'm working poetically here, but a Sufi grounding seems to me the first antidote to shadow-Muhammadan poisoning, the imbecilic violence many in the West associate with Islam, not merely the overt guerrilla terrorist acts of bin-Laden and company, and his counterpart at the level of State, Gorge War Bosh, but the textual violence in the Koran itself, that Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, in The Laughing Jesus, say is there. One section depicts Muhammad carrying out the execution of infidels, while picking out the babes among the survivors. Gangsta o’ love. And of course, the main theme is that Jesus is a Gnostic allegorical figure, rather than a literal historic teacher. If all that’s true, no wonder Christian fundamentalists seem always on the brink of hysterics. Drum! Sing! Dance!

 

Anyway, while those at rational or integral, can hardly buy into the hobgoblins of irrational beliefs, the willful confusion of literal with metaphoric, we can appreciate the power and beauty of sound, rhythm, and imagery associated with said religious bastions, since these are qualities that resonate positively all up and down the spectrum of consciousness. Music and visual artistry embrace I/We/It quite nicely. In fact it energizes just about any discipline, any line of development I can think of.

 

The psychograph of Cognitive-Emotional-Interpersonal-Psychosexual-Moral-Spiritual lines, in one of Wilber’s graphs, makes me think of equalizer levels in the recording of music, and the playing of recorded music.

 

If one thinks of language, or its leading edge praxis, poetics, as applying equally to image/music/text/virtuality, the tranformative implications grow by leaps and bounds.

 

I'm not an academic myself, I'm an outsider in the wilderness, a wild card who tends to think of said multi-applications of poetics as my religion.

 

Spontaneously, I think of how the best Talking Heads music makes me think of anthropologists "getting down" with the indigenii, the rhythmic magic power of drums, of sound. And, of course, the energizing effect of black Christian gospel music on American pop culture is enormous.

 

I suppose that's it, really. The way to connect the pre-rational with the rational and post-rational, religious and otherwise, is the interdimensional transforming power of art. Maybe the grand unifier is the beat, the voices raised on high, the dance, the visual display.

 

The following sentence has sound, rhythm, image, concept, and transparency (the transparency of integral unto transcendental, not the faux modernist transparency that postmodernity took to task):

 

Molecularly awestruck, as the old world crumbles, I surf the infinite instant.

 

It's excerpted from a book-in-progress of mine. Damn near every sentence poeticizes.

 

I’ve written a ton of songs since then, many of which are presented in a film I’m making, but these lines from “13^th Psalm,” a song from my last CD, Waking, still resonate strongly for this piece:

 

Words to live by flow through mind/born of Spirit clear unsigned/Scroll your meaning line by line/springing from your sacred spine

 

Iconic punk rocker and writer Richard Hell, of Voidoids, Blank Generation fame, wrote that an okay novelist writes books; a good novelist writes chapters; a really good novelist writes paragraphs; and a great novelist writes sentences.

 

I aspire to that last notion, in an iconoclastically scriptural mode.

 

In the much larger picture of interdisciplinary imagistic/musical/textual/virtual rhetorical power, we are just getting started on radical poetic applications that can sledgehammer ring the magic-mythic-mental-integral-higher psychic-subtle-causal-nondual bell in one mighty carnivalesque swing.

 

Consider that the entire It matrix we bring our attention to is culture-coded by language. If demigod language of image/music/text/virtuality is also code, we're in DNA, mathematical, chemical, and computer programming territory as well.

 

I don't see any reason why a more thoroughly muscular poetics can't invade the entire interdisciplinary sphere of manifest existence. Viral meme, indeed.

 

“Language is a virus from outer space,” wrote William S. Burroughs, and Laurie Anderson sang it – another fun notion to toss in the mix. Personally, I’d call it a virus from inner space.

 

I guess I can relate to the notion that marketing is the avant-garde of capitalism, and art can be the avant-garde of marketing, an at least potential poetic justice at the head of the dragon.

 

I read a cluster of leading-edge business books, that assert the notion that companies are becomingly increasingly in the business of storytelling more than products, and that neologismic artistry is a keynote of effective branding.

 

The story of language use, poetics, is the marrow inside the bones of storytelling, as it were.

 

The Deviant’s Advantage, one of the aforementioned leading-edge business books, with emphasis on wild card creative factors, contains this provocative sentence: “Language lies at the heart of culture, and if you can co-opt a language, you can effectively shanghai a society.”

 

Hmmm, maybe too many of us “conscious” types, are too effin’ polite.

 

Frankly, compassionate overview notwithstanding, I’ve always fantasized interdim alien dream invaders taking over, structurally a la the film Dreamscape, and have written narrative accordingly.

 

Methinks Blue Man Group is a vanguard trio of the daimonic takeover. Note the emphasis on wildly makeshift percussion grounding the audio-visual viral language invasion. Could crazy wisdom guru Adi Da and intimacy maven David Deida, with their recurrent blue motifs, possibly be the wizards behind the curtain of this display? Heigh-ho.

 

Do we need language police to kick a*s on such egregious euphemisms in the media as "ethnic cleansing" and "collateral damage"? Gosh, I’m sorry, sleepwalking journalists, your entire families just got ethnically cleansed, and they weren’t even dirty. Ouch. Dang, I think the countermander-in-chief just got collaterally damaged. The terrorists were aiming for his dawg, whose brain stem was implanted with a microchip encoded with gospel glyphs from Sirius, threatening the hydrophobic life style.

 

The preamble to the U.S. Constitution is grand poetry expressing the dignity of true democracy, that would-be work-in-progress wrestling with pushy capitalism’s reversal of emphasis.

 

Adi Da wrote an essay entitled "Christ = mc²" wherein he asserts that Einstein's famous equation of It values, matter-energy-light, when applied to I/We is a formula for spiritual resurrection.

 

In The Literary Mind, Mark Turner, grounded in both cognitive science and literature, avers that parable, rather than being merely a specialized literary form, is actually a useful model for how everyone’s mind works: “Parable is the root of the human mind – of thinking, knowing, acting, creating, and plausibly even of speaking.” That’s an exciting premise, for yours truly.

 

Autopoetically, this, from Between Science and Literature, by Ira Livingston:

“. . .language cannot be understood as a God-given gift or a free human creation or a tool to be bent to human will, but only as an emergent and semi-autonomous phenomenon, something more like galaxies, ecosystems, and bacteria.”

 

So it goes, as the late great Kurt Vonnegut would say.

 

"Poetry is knowledge, salvation, power, abandonment. An operation capable of changing the world, poetic activity is revolutionary by nature; a spiritual exercise, it is a means of interior liberation." The great late 1990 Nobel laureate, Octavio Paz wrote that. I met him at Cal State L.A. in '85. He said, "We are tocayos," meaning brothers-in-name.

 

Language is a demigod, is a virus, is primal expressivity, is autopoetic.

 

Use it, channel it, with enormous respect and sacral-secular nuance and differentiation. Be it. Ecstaticize performative lingo.

Author's Note

Basically, I'd be interested in knowing if you find this essay useful to your own work.

Reviews

[David W Moore III]

I agree that language is a living thing. Like all living things it needs to be nurtured. That is our sacred job: to heal it from the beating that the Jerry Springer shows and (No offense if you like it) Jersey Shores give it. We have become a four letter, four word sentence society, and The people on this site (and others like us acroos the globe) are the only bastions of hope to keep it beautiful. Fantastic write, and I love the reference to Talking Heads reminding you of anthropologists. I always had that same thought when listening to David Byrne.
Poetry is like prayer. Prayer to the divine of language. Unfortunately, it is an art that is being left behind by the masses as they move to the more base forms. It is sad to me, and one of the reasons I try not to hold back on vocabulary on a lot of my pieces. When Amazon.com asked me at what level of reading ability would I rate my book (for searches, I guess) I thought about being honest and saying post graduate, but chickened out, figuring that would limit people searching it to an extremely small group and went with high school senior (thinking as long as they have a dictionary handy!)
This essay was riviting and concisely put together. Thank you for posting.

[Bette]

see spot run!lol j/j

[Maurice]

Very well written essay, regardless of whether it fits into one of the categories provided on the site. Language is so very essential, certainly to the writer's craft, but for everyone -- although it gets mutilated all too often.

[NoneOfYourBusiness akaK..]

everything began with a word~ everything will end with a word~ our Legacy in streams of language holding such exquisite and volatile power most can't wrap their mind around it~
all the words fluttering and colliding and dashing themselves against each other are creating something unique in and of themselves~ they are saviours and destroyers~
Father once postulated everyone shut up for a day all across the globe~ no sound~ no words~ no music~ he said only then will mankind understand both the saviour and destructor aspects of language~

[Rory CJ Frankson]

It was a good read.

[Angel Bird]

Wow, quite a lot of language used here. Would I know what you wanted to tell us without all those very intellectual lines and impressive knowledgeable words? YES, of course - a few lines would have been quite enough to make us all understand your point, but still it would have needed language anyway. So language is necessary and important and makes every exchange of knowledge of whatever kind much easier.
Would I send per internet or fax only a few words around the world, billions of people would know in an instant what happened - but if language and words wouldn't exist news and other messages would take way more time and would slow things very much down in every situation through-out our lives.

[Desert Dreamer]

Music is power, words are power and the combination of the two can create new religions and beliefs...you can start a revolution with a song.

I must agree that our minds work in parables, if one can understand the symbols in our dream-myths, we have access to the powerful inner mind. The opposite is also true, if we can tell stories in parables we can speak directly to our inner mind, we can deliver messages without the average listener being aware that they have received a message. But the dreaming inner mind will know.

This essay is encouraging and inspirational for writers. Language is power...

[Billy Baphomet]

Brilliant Pax, I love this piece. It is very useful to my work, and I agree with all of your points, it was as if you were hacking into my neural net via the World Wide Deep Mind!

I like your assertion here, that Language is divine, an autonomous force that has generated without much guidance from the alleged masters of it "humanity". I like the idea that Language is a far more organic sentient "Thing" that lives, breathes and changes.

I think the Bards of the Celtic past, and the Skalds of the Teutonic antiquity would have concurred whole heartedly with your essay. These two culture's poets were also priests, sacrosanct disseminators of lore and spiritual guidance. They were also dangerous. Kings and Fuedal Lords often went out of their way to appease these cunning wordsmiths, for they feared their poetic abilities to whip them with their tongues. In the Norse Sagas there is a story of a King and Queen who fell into the bad graces of one such Skald who subsequently worked a "Nidhing" on them, which consisted of placing a severed horse's head upon a post covered in poetic scrawlings of satire and sarcasm, libel and slander. The King and Queen were forced by this act to go into exile and the kingdom prospered.

I think that a poet's sacred duty has always been to paint the world in such a way as to bring change to it.

Great essay. . .going into my favorites section.

[octane143]

Use it, channel it, with enormous respect and sacral-secular nuance and differentiation. Be it.

Be IT!! Ok that I get. I write out of a need for therapy. It's all about the emotion, fears, in the moment. I sit down with a pen in hand and once the page or several are filled I feel better. No pre-planning, no editing. Some is ok, most crappy, but who cares it's for me right? Some can relate, most can't but my whole life I hid it all so it doesn't really matter. I write about me, for me. A sort of emotional purging...

Your writings are very intellictual and hard for my limited intellect to follow, but you write with such passion, no matter what the subject and that I get. So much thought goes into it and your pour yourself in your work which makes your work so interesting to me. Now you've got me thinking...THANKS ALOT ~.^