A Few Words About Words

The stories, songs and tales which are such rich and poignant expressions of human culture are exquisite when we view them in their entirety, but there are other, greater revelations to be experienced when we begin to look closely at their elements, the individual words of which they are composed, and even the spaces between the words.

The words which form our language are little works of art or theater, tiny plays or compositions, each descriptive of a feeling or perception, a physical sensation, an encounter, an interaction with other beings or with existence itself.

To say the word "rose" is to conjure up a remembered bloom and experience everything about it again, its shape, its silky texture, its vibrant color, and its exquisite fragrance. Each and every word in our language is a moment of kensho, a memory, a microcosm, an entire world or history which is complete within itself.

Words have tremendous power, something which the ancient mages understood very well. To utter the true name of something aloud, to speak the right word at the right time and in the right place is to summon a power vast beyond our imagining.

The word mythology has its roots in the Greek mythos, meaning to speak or to relate something, and not just in the written or spoken sense. The etymological roots of the word mythology are shared with other words connoting silence, wordlessness and the inability to speak. In other words, what we are not hearing or saying is just as important as what we are hearing or saying. Silence is as meaningful and expressive as speech, and often much more so - there are times when the spaces among or between the words are as eloquent as the words themselves can ever be. There is a profound causal relationship between what we communicate in words and what we do not (or cannot) communicate in words. Language is the most ancient and fundamental raiment worn by mythology.

When we think about language at all, we tend to think only of speaking and writing, but there is much more to language than that. Think about it - before communicating in words, there must be a degree of consensus about what words and sounds mean, a shared vision or perception of who and what we are and what the world around us is all about. Without such commonality of perception, words and sentences are meaningless gibberish.

We can call this consensus (or commonality of perception) the image of intelligibility, or in the words of mythic scholar, James Hillman, mythic certitude. Language is a mythological form because of its shared cultural associations and structure, or in Hillman's words again, animal certainty. Look into the heart of a language, any language, and you will find there something I call native intelligence, something intuitive, instinctive, wild and very ancient.

The idea of language as a collective or communal form of perception and shared experience is not a new one, and during the last few years there have been a number of studies in this area, notably in the fields of cognitive perception and analytical psychology. It has been theorized recently that language had its genesis in those areas of the brain concerned with vision and seeing, the areas which are utilized in processing our visual surroundings. We assign meaning to individual words and sounds and construct sentences in much the same way we process the things we see around us, by examining individual elements and assembling them into a cognitive whole.

The underlying unspoken or silent element of language, the "putting together" process, arises out of perception and sensation, and it is something we take for granted. Behind the scenes, language is processing, analyzing, coding, describing and recording our experiences and assembling them into spoken or written structures which we can use to communicate with other beings. Each and every element of a sentence is a small motif which allows us to "see" and describe the world around us and to construct larger motifs and themes. Each motif is a cairn or a signpost in the bosky landscape of mythology - while it is true that our entire mythology lies within our language, it is also true that language lies within the realms of mythology and the archetypal. We are travelers on a journey, participants in a creative process, actors in a great drama.

Perception, language, art and the archetypal are inextricably linked, and the roots of human expression lie somewhere in the beginning time. Each and every form of expression has its roots in that which is ancient and primordial, and those roots probably stretch back even further than humanity. Language is so much more than words - it is the distilled essence of sound, color, fragrance, texture and many other things, and such things possess resonance, intrinsic meaning and significance predating anything which could be regarded as being even remotely human. If one thinks about it, that makes sense, for ancient humanity would have needed a inherited intimate relationship with the world in which they lived in order to process information about that world around them, in order for them to survive and to evolve in a harsh and dangerous environment.

C. S. Forester's "man in the forest" is very much with us in a sense. Everything which we once were, which we are now, and which we are in the process of becoming, exists in response to, and once existed in harmony with the world around us. We are very much a part of this world, but we are shape shifters too, and as we shift, our words, our language, our songs and our art are shifting right along with us.

Sadly, as this world becomes an increasingly complex and technological proposition, our shapeshifting is taking us away from our roots and the natural world which has been our home for so long. Unless we change our ways, we are in danger of becoming strangers in our own land. What will become of us then? When we no longer remember the beginning time, when we no longer hear the music of wind and water, when we no longer feel any connection with the earth on which we abide, then we will be rootless, morally bankrupt and ultimately doomed.