Language Evolution: or

The Escape from Perceived Chaos.

Abstract.

Over many millennia, human beings and many other species have been trying to develop means of communicating with others of their kind and – more recently - with some other species, ranging from dogs, horses, chimpanzees and dolphins, to SETI. Much research has attempted to trace backwards the development of language towards a ‘proto-language’, which some linguists believe to be the earliest form of human communication. It seems that before that time, perhaps 100,000 years ago, we merely communicated by inarticulate grunts, growls and inevitably by the use of the fist and club. So perhaps it may construed that at earliest times language was an attempt of sorts, for people to move from lingual chaos towards some rational way to recognize, describe and manipulate the world around them. Eventually, languages became more distinct and separate — so much so that there are some 6000 or more separate tongues in the world today.

We proudly think that our language is rational, logical and that it can be used to delineate almost anything. Similarly, mathematicians might think the same — perhaps with greater reason. But mathematics is only able to describe things, real and virtual in a way that is emotionally detached, cold — and sometimes almost inhuman. Human beings are far, far more complex than any mathematical formula - indeed, since such formulae have to have been created by humans, they necessarily are less complex than their creator. Humans involve feelings and emotion — mental states that psychologists and psychiatrists attempt to understand. But there are many areas of human behavior, beliefs and drives that have yet to be addressed in any methodical way. And perhaps there are some areas of the mind that will never be reduced to any form of simplistic understanding.

Which is the point at which we often turn to art — painting, sculpture, music and poetry. Poems are considered by some to be the most charged of all forms of written communication and they are used in every language of which I am aware – except perhaps, mathematics, although there is at least one song written about the adoption of New Math in schools. But poetry, which covers many different areas of life, includes most emotional conditions. Much of the simpler forms end up as popular songs — and even some of the most serious work has been set to music. It has been said that when prose fails, poetry begins. Paintings also on occasion have exerted a tremendous effect; for example, consider Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica”.

But the most difficult and often the most complex verse (although by no means the longest) seems to occur with the major transitions in life – birth and death.

Birth, I know little about. Any mother will automatically know more. That said however, one could consider that the growth of a child, from silence (before delivery – even though it may kick from time to time) to incoherence to eventual coherence and sensibility — or for that matter, sensitivity — mirrors in some small way the development of the human race over the last half million years.

Poetry about a birth would seem almost nonsensical — except of course in the hands of Handel, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven and their lyric writers; as well as many others. But still their work is about a single babe, whose history — if such it be — is believed to be known; and whose terminus is also believed to be known. But when it comes to the birth of a child in the present day, we are unable to predict or project in other than the vaguest of terms how that child will grow and how he or she will then face life; which direction will it take?

Death on the other hand is more approachable, recognized by all. And in different societies across the globe, many rituals have grown up — ostensibly to honor the dead, to mitigate the grief of relatives and friends — but for other purposes as well. And when we construct something to say about the dead, we are able to mix information about their lives, achievements, failures with other built-in messages of things we would like to see done or changed. And perhaps most of all, to reinforce our place, our involvement with society and, where needed the commitment to continue life, regardless of these unfortunate circumstances.

I include some examples of poems that seem to me to explore these points, together with some short annotations relates to their meaning and implications.

Language and Chaos – General.

Quantum mechanics attempts to describe some of the properties of the smallest particles that we have, so far, been able to predict. At the lowest level, it has been described as a physics of possibilities, of the transitions between wave functions and particles, of actual presences, versus location. In this tiny world, interactions between particles consist of collisions — either direct, actual collisions, or — more likely — near-misses — which, nevertheless, each particle is influenced, perhaps by a change in its own course, perhaps by a small increase or decrease in energy level; in other words, anything which induces a change in the state of being or existence of those particles. And there can be accretions of particles into groups, into individual atoms, into groups of atoms, into the formations of compounds, complex molecules, and eventually, into Life.

In recent years awareness has grown of a new field that eminently needs to be studied, Chaos Theory. With respect to this quantum domain, chaos theory, and its fractal component, might be described as an attempt to analyze, describe and bring some form of order to our understanding of those smallest groups of interactions, those which cause an event to occur, which otherwise — because of their general unpredictability, both of nature and effect — become a form of the chaos underlying everything in life — the building blocks of the universe — of both inanimate and animate matter, ranging from a piece of dirt, to galaxies, from a star to intelligent life.

In life, however, we find that chaos exists everywhere around us and even within us — our bodies, brains and minds. And perhaps most of all in our minds. Our methods of increasing our knowledge of the world around us leads us into specialization, where we tend to ignore and/or remain ignorant of the many other fields of study and awareness that surround us. Those areas which we ignore may well be addressable by a number of names or keywords, but the actual content and detail remains a fog, a mist or miasma. This too is a form of Chaos – and certainly is chaos within our understanding. Add to this the unspoken-of or unknown minor traumas of earliest life, which may have far-reaching effects in later life, and you create a larger area of unknowns — of perhaps unpredictable responses and behaviors which in themselves constitute a form of Chaos in the mind, which in turn may well affect one's work, research, analysis, one's friends both in and out of the workplace and one's family.

The PowerPoint presentation includes three replicas of Monotypes made by Mrs. Oi Fortin and the poems that they spawned. The first is called “Door to Temple of the Dawn” – whose real name is the Wat Arun. (in Bangkok, Thailand) This painting seems almost formless and could easily be construed as a limited form of chaos – until Oi gave it a name. Once I saw it, this sonnet came to mind within an hour or less.

Fortín, O, Ms. Monotype Paintings, 2002-2004, Unpublished. New Haven, CT.

A DOOR TO TEMPLE OF THE DAWN

For a painting by Oi Fortin.

Reds and yellows form this strange, formless scene

Bringing light to some — their outer darkness

Softened to mere shadow in this bright dawn

Chill pallor warmed, glowing, by what they see.

Across the klong is everyday — this dream

Ignored, no heed taken for that lightness,

That ennobling brightness; that faces spawn

Hope and life, kindness and care for all they see.

For every soul that sees, ten thousand can’t —

That blaze of light, washing all seeing clean

Those that won‘t, or couldn’t care, those that shan’t

Lose light, hope, self — lose what they might have been

Awareness is what sets these folk apart —

To live the dream itself is purest art.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++

And a day or two later, a second poem came to mind:

WAT ARUN

This door is old; a thousand years of wear

Have bent and worn its shape, so now the light

Shines through the cracks — hints at what lives within

These walls, that calm, that awe, serenity.

Tourists come to see and gape not to share —

Punctuate with cameras’ clicking blight

Those who came to learn, escaping prisons’

Soul-less lives, new roads to eternity,

At least new, for them. For some these ‘new’ roads

Are one well-trodden, well-worn, timeless way

To timelessness, space, nirvana, a code

Of seeing light, living for the new day.

If the door should bend and break, no matter,

If its light fails, the whole world might shatter.

The second monotype has had several names, but eventually Oi called it Vision and Chant. One close look at the painting may well cause the viewer to think that it is pure chaos, but this particular chaos is made up of many different components, only two of which have been used in the sonnet. The rest of these components still need to be looked at and recognized.

Fortín, O, Ms. Monotype Paintings, 2002-2004, Unpublished. New Haven, CT.

AN EXHIBIT OF VISION AND CHANT

Listen to this painting with samisen

In your mind; picture this blue kimono

Swirling as he kneels for that final cut -

Bushido’s last exponent takes the stage.

Listen to the painting, with guitar, again –

Andalucian tones; a bull’s the foe

This time; his death – or a horn in the gut —

Veronicas fail to dull the bull’s rage.

Whether you see Mishima at his peak —

Or much-loved Manolete at his death

Matters not, but whatever you see, Speak

Out! Let others see through your eyes, your breath.

Recuerdos mourn a lost time in one place,

Flower and Chant of a different space.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

VERONICA

The cape’s slashing swirls, shimmering softly

On the sands, in the sun, reflect our work —

Oi and Neill. Formless shapes apparently

Take form, move within the mind, shadows lurk,

Unexplained, unclaimed, till the see-ers see

Then own the picture in their minds and there

Build from understanding some self-made frieze —

Scenes based on it and their dreams — if they dare.

Each scene portrays a story, more than one

Sometimes — a life, a death, myriad skies

Heaven’s blue, cold-blood-red, the tale’s begun

That of scene and seer, and how the mind flies.

Bushido and Mithras contend for space,

For light; but neither suffers loss of face.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Earliest Beginnings - Verbal Poetry

It seems poetry may have actually preceded prose. Of course, prose was used for everyday things, but when it came to anything that was really important in a person’s life, it would seem that some form of poem or chant would be created, to help listeners to remember it. Poetry had become really important even before the invention of writing — for example, consider Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey – these were created several hundreds of years before being written down for the first time. So the bards of the day must have had phenomenal memories. One stylistic device can plainly be found in these poems — that of repetition — which helps the learner to remember whole sections of the work (consider the phrase “the Wine-dark sea” from the Odyssey). And in many societies there is still evidence of such early beginnings. In Iran, a Tabrizi poet named Hossein even now uses multiple repetitions, sometimes of a single sound, or word, sometimes of a short phrase, to help fix it into listeners’ consciousnesses.

Nevertheless, for many, poetry seems to be merely a superficial way of addressing life and its problems — it often fails to offer a concrete description of things – of a situation involving people — and especially of any form of technical development. Even so, it seems that people often remember lines, maybe stanzas, even verses — to which they had been exposed during early life, when perhaps they were more impressionable. This paper attempts to show that there may be more and that many things, even up to a philosophy of life, can be described and possibly could be described best in poetic terms.

As time goes by, writing commences — western writing in Byblos, in northern Lebanon — the area which was then home to the Phoenicians. And writing spread rapidly — or was invented simultaneously in many other areas of the world. And there are many examples of poems written in these countries from that time onwards.

It appears, over time, that people needed to use words to reduce the chaos of interpersonal relations to some sort of rudimentary order; and that once this had progressed far enough, where enough words had been invented, it became an unstoppable force. And that when prose seemed to have less and less effect, poems were created.

Religion also obviously plays a great part and as priests and shamans grew in strength and reputation, they began to organize things in their domains to have greater impact, greater order, and maybe most of all, greater control over their people. So begins the saga of Church and State — long before Christianity and Islam came along. Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, Zoroastrians and many other faiths all had their own traditions, cultures, rituals, chants of worship – poems set to music? And these must have begun much earlier than writing.

The roles of poetry in life

The first known writer of poems was Enheduanna, a daughter of the Lord Sargon, who ruled the Middle East from the Mediterranean to Persia from 2334 BC to 2279BC. She was born in 2300BC; became the priestess of the moon and lived in a vast temple complex in the city of Ur of the Chaldees, in Mesopotamia. Research on her work is ongoing, but tablets for over 40 of her poems are extant — most seem to be paeans of praise for the gods and for the ruler of her ‘country’.

At much the same time, give or take a few hundred years, the Epic of Gilgamesh was also set into writing, in Cuneiform tablets and contains one of the first descriptions of the Flood.

While there are many examples of poems from many different cultures ever since that time, possibly the next writer of importance is Sappho of Lesbos – of whom Plato is reputed to have likened her to the tenth muse (despite, of course, her lack of rhyme or rhythm!). Sappho is also credited with the invention of the plectrum, so as to increase the loudness of her lyre, thus reaching out to larger audiences at her recitals.

But these really are only the beginning of poetry, as far as we can tell. In these latter years — i.e. the last two thousand years or so, writers have proliferated, to the point that their work, combined as it were, becomes a bedlam of creation, criticisms and complaints, that might be likened to a narrow form of Chaos in itself. And the role of the poet seems also, from being a paid retainer or skald, bard, jongleur, minstrel etc., that is, servant of some wealthy person or member of whichever local aristocracy, seems to have changed slowly towards that of being a social critic — perhaps bewailing the steady denigration and eventual death of assumed social structure, values and behavior, or perhaps assuming an undefined responsibility to make society aware of its own needs, to survive, to progress — and sometimes merely to have fun! (Catullus, Ogden Nash). It is often said that some one or some group has destroyed the fabric of society, but the fact that such a fabric is so badly woven that it can be destroyed is what makes society so weak. There seems to be a need to build anew some form of social structure – and that this job is one in which poets could make a contribution.

The Mind

We seem to make assumptions about the people we meet, judging them, on the flimsiest of evidence, to be “normal” or abnormal, where abnormal seems to include anyone who does not speak the right language, or has difficulty in speech, or other strange bodily behavior. Where abnormalities of physical appearance or overt behaviorisms are concerned, this instant judgment may be, for all day-to-day purposes, perfectly acceptable and correct. When we see a child obviously afflicted with Down’s Syndrome, being accompanied by an adult — or being dragged by an adult — do we not – unless we actually know the adult involved — do we not, almost instinctively, steer a course of avoidance? Cross to the other side of the road? And similarly, whenever we encounter individuals who seem not to fit the mold of our particular (individual) “requirements” — for example, beggars in the street — do we not disengage ourselves as rapidly as possible? When we see a child being physically punished in public, do we forcibly intervene, in order to stop it, or do we try to avoid involvement, so as to avoid embarrassment?

Of course there are a myriad of poets who are or were apparently of sound body and mind, but who still needed some form of connection to other people, to the world, to a belief system of some kind. Since some societies, still, to this day, practice the exposure to the elements, of newborn children — if they happen to be born female — viz. China; or, if they are born visibly deformed in any way, this would also lead us to infer that at least some of these poets had neither seen nor heard of handicapped people, so they would scarcely be able to simply write about them.

The first piece is intended to illustrate the progression from simple sounds, assigning meaning to them and then melding the sounds together, to form a word, however incongruous, which is now in use worldwide. It is A-U-M.

A-U-M

In Memory of the late Joseph Campbell

A -Aaaah – opening of the world, of the mouth, breath, the mind and the soul

U-Ooooooooh – continuance of life, the growing of the mind and the soul

M - Mmmmmmm closing of the mouth, completion of the word, the phrase, completion of the mind, the soul; phrase of comfort, appreciation, liking, loving, sharing, caring.

Two vowels, one consonant, make a noise

that is not a word at all, just a sound;

sonorous, resounding, maybe around

the world — rests on it being said — gives poise,

Balance to our being. But this small sound

Contains all others, all conscious belief

Holds all thoughts, hopes, desires, loves; fears, woes; — grief

And its cure — holds all life, the world around.

The word is used by all, unknowing use

By some; still its use transcends the stillness,

Silences of nonbelief. Willfulness

Leads nowhere — only to cruel abuse.

AUM is indescribable: the best bit -

Next sonnet, tries, fails, to encompass it.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

A we-ful beauty, sun, but superb rain days ?

A fter food comes hunger ? Will eating more

A vail us ? — Or will our stomachs feel sore ?

A bsolute directions close other ways ?

U biquitous teaching: single mode — tree ?

U nbendable method : creation killed ?

U nchanging worlds: clear thought still-born — fear-filled;

U n-make fixed learning — let souls run — learn — free.

M y way is your way, is all the world’s path

M indful, I walk this way, this long, dark road,

M aking belief - all walk – but this abode

M ind-made, made concrete, is the world’s warm hearth.

A cry for freedom, first breath starts the quest;

U ndoing convention, teaching’s behest

M mmmm gives closure, faith, comfort, warmth; so rest.

Preparation for Culmination

As a natural part of life, we all must eventually face death. Or not, but even so, it will come — that cessation of ability to move, to create, to do, to be. It would seem a sensible thing to do would be to prepare — in a miniscule way at least — for that event. For the participants of this conference, this would seem to have less to do with term life insurance than the transmission of learning and ideas to others, who might continue with the work.

Recently, I was reading Emerson and it came to me that just as we must doff material things to prepare for the inevitable, so we ought to prepare our minds and try to clear them of non-essentials.

THANKS TO EMERSON

Over years I learned, took this and that and these and those,

Valued little things until I saw them littler, unnecessary

In that greater scheme of things — that beckons to us all —

Where in the fullness of time we all must go, all must abide.

Why do we content ourselves with trash? Lie comatose,

Surrounded by material goods and catalogues that vary

With our various tastes? Whatever they are, all must fall

In wayside tatters, as people must themselves, despite their pride.

In all we do, make, dream, be, the only lasting value is the idea:

Make a sculpture or a sword — it is broken, or rusts; build structures —

They crumble, over time — though time be such a fleeting thing;

Paint a painting — now there’s a thought — but if the painting’s

Lost, stolen, strayed, broken, still these ideas remain, never fear —

They’ll be seen again by others, more raw, itching to add new features

To the edifices already made, some just decoration, some bringing

New light to the world — to people — new thoughts, new understandings.

As time goes by, we seem to learn this more slowly — delay, hold off

The onset of time, by whatever means, so we need not see —

Scared by time’s endlessness when we’re not here — when we must doff

Material things, go naked, defenseless into that new world, that infinity.

Neill Edwards

Similarly, Walter de la Mare – often known in England as the ‘Children’s Poet’ enjoins us all to try to take in fully the events, scenes and relationships of each day.

FAREWELL

When I lie where shades of darkness

Shall no more assail mine eyes;

Nor the trees make lamentation

When the wind sighs

How will fare this world, whose wonder

Was the very proof of me?

Memory fades: must the remembered

Perishing be?

Oh! When this my dust surrenders,

Hand, foot, lip, to dust again

May these loved and loving faces

Please other men!

May the rusting harvest hedgerow

Still the travellers’ joy entwine

And as happy children gather

Posies, once mine.

Look thy last on all things lovely

every hour. Let no night

Seal thy senses in deathly slumber

Till to delight

Thou has paid thy utmost blessing:

Since that all things thou would’st praise

Beauty took, from those that loved them

In other days.

Walter de la Mare

Violetta Parra is famous throughout Latin and South America, Parra wrote this shortly before she died. It is best known and heard as a song

GRACIAS A LA VIDA

Gracias a la vida, que me ha dado tanto.

Me dio dos luceros, y cuando los abro,

Perfecto distingo lo negro del blanco,

Y en el alto cielo su fondo estrellado,

Y en las multitudes al hombre que yo amo.

Gracias a la vida, que me ha dado tanto.

Me ha dado el oído que, en todo su ancho,

Graba noche y día grillos y canarios

Martillos, turbinas, ladridos, chubascos,

Y la voz tan tierna de mi bien amado.

Gracias a la vida, que me ha dado tanto,

Me ha dado el sonido y abecedario.

Con él las palabras que pienso y declaro,

"madre, amigo hermano" y luz alumbrando

la ruta del alma del que estoy amando

Gracias a la vida, que me ha dado tanto.

Me ha dado la marcha de mis pies cansados.

Con ellos anduve ciudades y charcos,

Playas y desiertos, montañas y llanos,

Y la casa tuya, tu calle y tu patio.

Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto

Me dio el corazón, que agita su marco.

Cuando miro el fruto del cerebro humano,

Cuando miro al bueno tan lejos del malo.

Cuando miro el fondo de tus ojos claros.

Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto.

Me ha dado la risa, me ha dado el llanto.

Así yo distingo dicha de quebranto,

Todos materiales que forman mi canto,

Y el canto de ustedes que es es mismo canto.

And an English translation:

THANKS TO LIFE