The Word Was

I originally presented this essay as a spoken performance at an Instantaneous Response Project. And if you don't know what an Instaneous Response Project is, well you're just not very hip, are you?

AND THE WORD WAS
(a chaotic journey in 2 parts)
I
In the beginning was the word and the word was...
tantalize
tantamount
paramount
paradise
In the beginning was the word
and the word on the street was
gospel
gossamer
tesseract
interact
intercourse
recourse
recuse
refuse
infuse
fuse.

The etymology of the word religion is deemed "doubtful" by one text, a Latin term for taboo meaning to return to bondage by another, or a Latin term meaning simply to tie or bind, according to a third.
rey - liggarey: ligament, ligature, ligate, ligand. Compare to yoke, derived from yoga, which means union, and you have a nice little theological argument brewing:
bondage?
or oneness.
Theology from Latin Theos, same as Greek Ze-uss, or Zeuss. Of Dyaus or divas from the Sanskrit, deva from the Indo-Iranian, also div from the old Teutonic, an old form is Tiv or Tiw or Tiu - origin of the word Tuesday. Tuesday?
Meaning: to give light.
Theos, the divine, the illuminating. The same sound, div, also gives us division. Coinidence? Or just a trick? Seperate origins? Or are they?
In the beginning was the word...
Where did the word begin?
Is a wolf's howl a word? Is a whale's song a word?
Is a birds call a word?
Or was our word the first word?
And if so:
where did our word begin?

Some renegade neuro-ethno-evolutionary biologists have read the dim electric traces of the brains of apes and humans and hypothesize (there's that theos again, hypo THES-ize, God as knowledge, and hypo meaning under or beneath. Or insufficient or lacking. But which is it in this case? Do we hypothesize, profess with insufficient theos, which is to say knowledge, which is to say God? Or is it that the hypothetical knowledge that lies beneath knowledge, the godlike power of intuition when we must go beyond the facts as guess. Guess. Guess. Gey-Use? Deus? Coincidence. In any event we have to guess a lot if we ask these questions, because the facts are few and far between. As we shall see.
Questions?
I'm sorry, is this hard to follow? I'll try to stay on track.
So: these very bright chaps who play with brains say: monkeys evolved a large visual cortex in the brain because it allowed them to exploit their superior adaptive advantage. With hands you can do things like use simple tools, a clear adaptive advantage...
But if you can also process a great deal of visual information very quickly, then you start to be able to do really interesting things, like swing through trees... And your species has just taken a serious lead in the evolutionary race.
The theory goes, somehow, maybe... Maybe a couple million years ago in homoerectus... evolving humans usurped part of the large visual portion of their growing cerebral cortex and it was turned to the task of symbolic communication. It's a controversial theory. Brains, unlike skulls, don't leave much behind by way of fossils. We know a considerable amount about the proportions of our brains a million years ago but very little about their compositions... Except to judge by the mondern day ancestors of ancient men and apes, the veracity of which data is a subject of debate.
But it goes along with a couple of theories of what you might call etymological evolution. What the visual monkeybrain theory suggests is that perhaps language and our first words rose out of visual processes as well as more strictly behavioral ones... Some wonder if the beginnings of language were in gestures rather than vocalizations. Evidence is seen in a commonality of gestural language around the world, the fact that even individuals born blind use common gestures to describe similar concepts, gestures they have never seen performed. This is basically a natural selection model, incidentally. Interesting word, incidentally. But never mind that right now. So, natural selection: gestures arising from naturally visual processes adapted to abstract cognitive ones turn into reinforced behaviors driven by the adaptive advantage of better communication. But where do the gestures become spoken words? And how? No answer for that yet, at least no convincing one. Another branch of the same etymological school takes the more traditional view of a behavioral natural selection which slowly refined the animal calls of apes into the first protolanguages. The problem with this theory is that there is little similarity between what apes and humans do when they vocalize. Different physiological exercises that use different parts of the brain, alike only in using the same aparatus for generating the basic sounds.
Until we crack the code of DNA in a much more profound fashion than we have thus far, there is no definitive answer. Just about anything can happen in two million years. And the brains, and the languages they spawned, are gone forever and cannot be recreated.
So, a lot of people ignore the whole origon of speech ability question and attempt to understand the origins of our many tongues (language, the root is lingua, or simply tongue, so language really just means tonguage) yes, attempt to understand the origins of our many tongues in the paths we can trace back through the words we use now. Classic etymology: Div begat diva and Diva begat Devas and Devas begat Dyaus and Dyaus begat Deus, begat Zeuss, begat Theos, hence: Theology.
One school of two holds that language and its basis in symbolic reasoning are basically innate in our minds. A body of discernible sounds and semantic semiotics are hard wired into the brain. Babies vocalize at four months, babble strings of sounds and words in six to seven. The process of acquiring a specific language is more a matter of forgetting unused sounds than of acquiring new ones from the example of the parents. Babies seem to instinctively recognize patterns, to have "pattern recognizing brains." So according to this view the commonalities in language rest in these common neurological vocabularies and tendencies more than in any straightforward evolution between particular languages. Innate linguistics. Chomskyism.
A conflicting school of thought... And conflict is not too strong of a word the disagreement is virulent. One auther describes the methods and principles of Chomskyism as "religious warfare."
A conflicting school of thought takes the more traditional view of the natural selective development of language, seeing clear evolutions between ancient and modern tongues, language more a learned than innate behavior. Each modern language a progeny that must ultimately include the freight of every long dead tongue back to that one original, mysteriously origined protolanguage that appeared somewhere in Africa, one or maybe three hundred thousand years ago, or maybe two million, or maybe six.
The Chomskyans say they fail to explain the evidence of early language development in babies, the ubiquitous naomolies and holes in etymology, the lack of evidence for a common tongue behind the languages of the world. They in turn accuse the Chomskyans of ingnoring the ubiquitous examples of evidence for linguistic evolution that exist in etymology, of failing to demonstrate a connection between the early language acquisition process and the particular structural and semantic tendencies that define the lexicons and and grammars of human languages. A particular sound doesn't have any intrinsic meaning, outside of the context of our phonic symboligies of meaning. Does it? Is this just nature versus nurture? The basic philosophical division (philosophy, from philo, to love, sophia, wisdom). The philosophical division is common enough. In fact, the evolutionary question of of the origin of the brain structures that process language begs another version of the fundamental question: did we, or are, developing according to some plan? Evolving the structures of understanding? Or are we simply complex collisions of thermodynamic chemical events, following laws infinitely more densely interactive but no less fixed and immutable than those defining the growth of a crystal? Proceeding to no particular goal of ultimate symmetry merely reflecting the vagaries of universal laws of mass and energy on a fantastically miniscule scale for a while in an uncharacteristically quiet corner of a generally chaotic universe? Does a loving God watch over our lives with the eye of intent absolute, omnipresent, or are we the products of the stern and mirthless god of meaninglessly coinciding energetic interactions?
Consider this fact: every atom of iron in your body, the red in your blood, holds a dense core forged in the heart of an exploding sun, the only place in the universe with the necessary energy and pressure to create an atomic nucleus that heavy. Is it coincidence that the physics of cosmology yield facts of such stark clarity and unimpeachable truth? In comparison to the ephemera of spoken words... Is it significant that the stuff that makes life possible finds birth in the death of a sun, finds birth in the early life of another sun, brought forth on a small and insignificant blue planet lost in a vast void and a sea of stars, a bright light but so very far away? So very, very very far away?
How do you find your way when origins lead us into questions like these?
"Unknown, unknown, pictures of elephants and white space in the middle of old maps of Africa."
I plagiarized that last line, old English Plagiary, literary theft, of the French plagiere, plangare or plagium in the Latin, kidnapping or stealing slaves. The root is the same as plague, the basic meaning to injure or strike. A plague on both your houses. Also stolen. It's from an Adam Smith book called Powers of Mind. You quickly find when you start asking questions about words that it is all plagiarism, and really, are all the words of our dead forebearers our slaves or are we theirs?
Let's move on. II
"In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God."
"The Word. In the beginning with God.
"The Word. All things were made through and without nothing was made that was made.
"The Word. In was life and the life was the light.
"The Word. And the light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not comprehend it."
So begins one of the stranger collections of words in the collective body we think of as religion. Remember religion? Bound to ancient ritual or united with a divine light?
What's more shocking: what St. John says about God or what he says about the Word?
Around about the same time (give or take an evolutionarily insignificant thousand years or six) human language, our words, were undergoing a radical change, or evolution if you want to go that way.
Words, these sounds we make with our throats and mouths and of course brains, became pictures, or maybe pictures became words, but whicever (or both, or neither), language became writing.
...and the word was god...
It's more than just a historical coincidence, or an etymological one, that we get back to religion at this point

Like clocks and calendars, writing was invented largely to preserve religious rites... and writings. Holy writs, sayings of wise ones, the secret orders and tales of holy miracles. Tibetan stone prayer wheels, inscribed with the fluid and sumptuous ancient representations of mantra older than any scipture, turned to recreate the repetion of a chant, OM MANI PADME HUM. Behold! The jewel in the lotus!
We're on comfortably steady ground temporally speaking, none of the hazy n-millions of way-back years of evolutionary roots of language.
The earliest examples of human writing are found in the ruins of Harappa, located where we now find the troubled border of India and Pakistan, and they are about six thousand years old. Six thousand years, incidentally, about the same age you get for creation if you take a liter-minded approach to the timelines set forth in what we Christions call the Old Testament, the Judaic scriptures. Coincidence?
From early roots in India, Egypt, The Middle East we get Sanskrit, Persian, the beginnings of Syrian and Sumerian cuneiform, the first written languages of commerce. Meanwhile, a couple of thousand years later in Egypt, Semitic people leave traces of the the first real alphabet, thirty or so characters of phonetic cribs for Egyptian hieroglyphics. With characters numbering in hundreds hieroglyphics required formal education to learn and could effectively be restricted to aristocracy and priesthood: the slow development of the alphabet concept over the next two thousand years effectively democratized written language. The alphabet begins to show up as a major crosscultural phenomenon about the same time as a likely descendent of the Semitic alphabet-builders, Yeshua or Jesus, born somewhere in ancient Israel two thousand years ago, possibly in Bethlehem, site of unfortunate current events. Hey-Zuess, no relation, or is He?
The appearance of archeological evidence of semites in Egypt four thousand years ago, incidentally, sheds some doubt on the reliability of tales of this peoples' presence in Egyptian lands beginning with the Pharonic enslavement of the Patriarch Joseph, him of the many colored coat, which according to the chronologies of the Old Testament comes considerably later.
The Word that St. John refers to in his Gospel is this same Jesus, who came speaking mostly Aramaic, a language at this time with the barest beginnings of a written counterpart, a system of writing long since abandoned and which Jesus likely never learned. The gospels that appear within a few decades of Jesus' death are written in the original ABC's, the classic Greek Alpha Beta to which we owe so much of our modern alphabet. Christianity was firstborn of the alphabet age, it's tale a strange version of the death and rebirth cycle that spread in Greek and Latin in the center of human civilization. Rome. Soon to be (and still today) center of the Holy Roman Empire, religion enter of the Holy Roman Empire. Christianity and Conastantine. It is an age when in a sense very different from what St. John intended (although in what sense he did intend it I'm sure I can't say), the word in a sense did become God, or a sort of god. Consider: All of our laws and government, all of our history and the bulk of our technological knowledge is composed of text.
But not to get ahead of ourselves. We're still looking at the time between the birth of the alphabet and the end of the age it began. The life and times of Jesus, the Christ, Christ from the Greek christos, the annointed.
In Israel, Jerusalem, current hot little center of chaos in this modern world. The descendents of the alphabet-builders of Egypt, the Jews, have formalized the alphabet they carried with them to the Promised land. Official Scribes learned one hundred and fifty laws for correctly writing its letters, effectively eliminating the efficiency gained by transliterating Egyptian hieroglyphics in the first place. the letters of the Alef BetWriting is once again the domain of the theocratic rulers of the tribe. If I commented before that writing was created to peserve the names we call God, this time and place is certainly an interesting example, or counterexample. The TETRAGRAMMATON, a name for God unspoken for thousands of years. Its utterance was prohibitted, the only sure preventative for breaking the third commandment, thou shalt not take the of the Lord your God in vain. We no longer know how it sounded to those that first spoke its words, but we do know the origin of the four letters it is named for, Yot He Vav He or possibly Yud Hay Vav Hay:
Why-Aitch-Vee-Aitch,
Yaweh, Jah Jehovah, God's Acronymn.
It is derived from the story of the Exodus, a story we might call "How the Alphabet Left Egypt," you know the one, Burning Bush. Moses asks God his name and God replies I AM WHAT I AM. Lost pronunciations aside, even that common translation is infinetely debatable.
It is as easily found translated I AM THAT I AM, I AM WHO I AM, I AM THE ONE WHO IS and even I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BECOME: which would be an interesting thing, you must agree, for an up and coming God to declare from the midst of a burning bush.
As the scribes learned to forget the sounds that formed the dangerous Word that was the Name of God, one was born that was later named the Word that was God, born lived and died. As he died, it is written, he cried out to God in a more familiar name, an everyday name of God. Eloi. Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachtani. Elohim, El Elyon, Lord, God most high. Jesus quotes a psalm of King David
Eloi, Eloi:
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
Why art thou so far from helping me?
I am a worm and no man, a reproach of men and despised of the people.
Jean Paul remarked that the chief proof of humankind's greatness lied in its perception of its smallness.
And a New Age began.
And now another two thousand years are passed, the stone wheels still turn and scribes still learn the one hundred fifty laws. Coincidence, that we now cast our words into magnetic ephemra a thousand times more frail than ink and paper? Coincidence that now, with the same tools we read the book of DNA? DNA magic molecule that contains no iron, nothing heavier than phosphorus at a mere half the weight of the nova-forged ferrous nucleus, but sufficient to form a sturdy spine that twists double helical wrapping around the Information, the base pairs, G A T C, the new Tetragrammaton. The more that things change...
In the beginning was the word...
And the word was...
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

this is what is up with this.