The Poetic Mind

"Words can be used to obscure meaning just as often as they reveal it, and the key to knowing the difference is remembering their original relationship to the natural world. "

This essay was also published at Another World, the Gods&Radicals Press Supporters’ journal. All essays I write which are behind paywalls elsewhere are also available here to paid supporters of From The Forests of Arduinna.

Perhaps one of the greatest shifts in collective human consciousness which has affected our social, moral, and political development as a species more than any other moment was the transition from oral to written language.

This may sound mythic, perhaps incomprehensible. And anyway you are reading—as I am writing—all these words through that latter sort of language, so already we start with a terrible disability. Every word I write, and every word you read, is immediately and historically limited in its meaning, caged into a static form from which it cannot easily escape.

All words began as sounds in the throat of a human. The earliest ones are thought to have been attempts at mimicry, a kind of childlike play between our ancestors and the world around them. Consider how the rush of wind through trees makes a sound we can hear and recognise. That sound, which we humans can approximate by funneling directed breath through our lips and shape into undulation with our tongues, may have formed the precursors of the sounds we in English signify with the letters ‘h’ and ‘sh.’ The staccato chirp of birds, heard everywhere by our ancestors whether in forest or field, is still approximated in languages with what phoneticians call affricates (ch in English is one such example, thus chirp.)

These sounds of nature, composing what can fairly be called a relentless symphony, were not just background noise. The crackle of fire and the rush of water, the rumble of thunder across the sky and the howl of a wolf each have meanings, both on the level of denotation (what it signifies) and connotation (the context of the sound related to the hearer). The “snap” of a twig is the denotation, meaning a twig has snapped, but the sound itself does not convey to us the connotation, whether it was a nearby deer or a wolf who caused that twig to snap.

Language likely was born of the process of humans learning to interpret the sounds around them, to draw from them relevancy and meaning, and to repeat them to others. Just as the sounds made by a mother to an infant sound first foreign and incomprehensible yet later take on clearly codified symbolism, those who came before us first encountered a world of noisy senselessness and soon found within it an endless world of meaning.

The development of language did not come just through our ears, however, since our eyes and skin are always telling us things as well. Gestures are pregnant with meaning, whether it be a hug, a hand wave, a slap, a finger pointing, or a solid stare. So too the vision of a stag standing in a forest, a mammoth or an aurochs walking away from or rushing towards us.

Our earliest attempts to make meaning static were images, paintings of animals upon the walls of caves and likely elsewhere (though these did not survive the weathering of time). Indigenous peoples with mostly interrupted oral traditions often speak of animals and plants being their ‘teachers’ or even ancestors, and it is not difficult to see the truth in this. Watching a flock of geese fly south is a thing of deep beauty and a moment of awe, but it is also a word of warning that the snows and freezes are coming. A great elk tearing furiously through bramble is quite the sight and sound, but he also speaks of the predator chasing him. The dog who deigned to live alongside humans speaks medicine and wisdom when he turns his nose up and refuses to eat an animal those humans have just killed, and they would have been best to heed him.