The following is an experiment in writing a long sentence, delving into many different realms of thought and literature.
I am looking at the face of my generation.
When we look around the wood-walled room, and in brick, and carpet that is red and blue and gold, standing beneath gold flowers on the mantelpiece that give off their scent, as of honeysuckle, although we do not know if they are so, and that, as we sit here, watching the time go by on the watch that is on my left wrist, while there is talk of artists in the room, we see lights that match the gold color of the honeysuckle-like flowers on the mantelpiece, that, while we see the potential that lies in each and every one of us, who are, each one of us, one, and who began to talk about the food that they were eating for dinner, that their parents gave them, before they started to talk about the shapes of spheres with triangles on their sides, that inhabit, thus, a single plane, just like the triangles that they would draw on straight, flat, we mean, sheets of white unlined paper that they crinkled between their fingers in math class in the sixth grade, without knowing entirely what they were doing, or at all, and not even realizing how wondrous were their ideas, and some of whom, having never believed that “April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain,” although two great poets tell us not only this, but something like it, and that pilgrims sometimes wended their way through England, to where they knew they could find themselves and their
salvation
through healing, through the power of the one that had healed them before, at whose altar, stone, perhaps, in Canterbury, they say, where there is not only the great cathedral, but also the wheel of Arthur in a great hall on top of the hill, beside a walled-in medieval garden with a seat in the corner, and many paths to follow, they went to find what each one of them had sought, and what they thought or believed or knew they needed in this world,
each one speaking her or his, or his or her, own language
, the language that no one else had ever spoken in this world, because not at that time or in that way, or in that tone of voice, or with that expression of face,
, knew other things instead that were equally true, being written, also, in languages that their minds could better understand and that their minds knew better how to interpret, the corpuses of information that were in their minds and before their eyes, we mean, such as that the words that they had read all throughout the great courses of their lives were the corpuses of information that consisted of N number of irreducible elements,
such that, with N = 1 (one) or greater, so schreiben wir jetzt, meinen wir, a corpus had been born to them at some point during their lives, which corpus, being a set of information that fit into a larger language in which they could participate, by which we mean, interpret it, with Hwæt! as the word that was spoken once, long ago, by a people who knew what it meant to travel throughout the world gathering knowledge, like
Widsith, the great scop,
and to leave the beloved mead hall for lands and for tribes far away, amongst whom there would be space and time on flat planes, which lie parallel to one another, perhaps, or even intersecting one another, being planes that are part of our experience and the universe that we inhabit, and which we sense every day that we are living, for, if we allow our bodies to traverse all the space that is this world, then the surface of the world would be for us a plane on which we travel from Point A to Point B, and which space we travel over during the course of time in which we are traveling from Time Point A to Time Point B,
and, not only interpret, but understand that language that they were interpreting, but with “interpreting”, I think, always meaning “to understand”, and “to understand” meaning possessing the ability to not only remember the vocabulary that one is to use in speaking a language, by which I mean, writing it, but also knowing the grammatical rules that govern how that language is put together, and what you can do with the subsidiary elements that make up the corpus,
being always one, a unified system, miraculous in its modern-day wonder, a creation of creations, being always hopeful that a new and a better day would be in store for tomorrow,
while sitting with the book Life in a Medieval Village to the side, which has a blue border on the cover, and a picture with people in red and blue and green clothing (dresses and tunics), albeit always residing within the confines of the border that forms the picture, with one man chopping wood while another woman picks up the boards, who are both peasants, we believe, and with another woman, holding a baby, and another man inside of a house, being nobles, we believe,
and thus fitting into a system called “feudal” at one point in time,
that supported Gregorian chant
( – – _ – _ , etc.)
in some manuscripts, which, perhaps, were created in Italy, and that are in MAJUSCULE, perhaps, and of a size so large that everyone in the monastery who had to look upon them for the singing of the Psalms,
which monks memorized starting from the beginning of the set of 150,
sometimes attaching numbers to the beginning of each Psalm, the poems, every one of them, that begin as
“Blessid is the man, that yede not in the councel of wickid men; and stood not in the weie of synneris, and sat not in the chaier of pestilence”
if we take the Wycliffite Bible version of them, that was of the group started by John Wycliffe, the Lollards, who tried to translate the Bible into the English that they thought and knew the best,
believing that to know the Bible was the right even of the laity, who, we are told, could not, often, read Latin,
and in which Chaucer was born, who gave us that tale about pilgrimage to Canterbury, and who knew something of the lastingness of words in this world that float up to the
House of Fame
, being the place to which a great eagle swoops loftily carrying poets, or a poet, to the heights, and in which words, like people, are sometimes at chaos, but which eventually come to even out and form long sentences of words, being that which we others of this world can interpret, which we read then, or next, and find in them
eternal truth
, the eternal truth of ourselves, we mean,
because in those words we find
order
,
symmetry
,
balance
, and come to believe thereby that everything, truly, is relative in this life, and also equal, being of value
only through its relation to a thinking observer
and also equal, or equivalent, to everything else that is, and also that was,
which we can take to mean that everything in this world is something circular, and also, therefore, something miraculous, like we ourselves who read these words and who pen them, having read other words before during our time and having heard them and taken them in, processing the grammar as we go and thus participating in what we believe to be called
“Universal Grammar”
, as Chomsky has taught us, although the idea was one that Roger Bacon, the great empiricist, noted many centuries ago,
back in the Middle Ages, whence, like classical thinking, many of our modern notions are derived,
hearing and learning and learning and hearing with every word that passes itself to our line of understanding,
to the line of understanding of we who are miraculous people in this life, since we, without the ability to fear, sometimes, or to know what the definition of fear is and where it lies,
like the “noble hero and ‘fool’ Siegfried” of the operas by Wagner, the ones that show both the beginning and the end of the world, and everything that happens in between that we need to know in order to understand why this happens to us on the stage every time we hear the cycle performed,
and, not knowing fear or how to fear, go on living in this our world,
take it that our minds are finite, rule-governed systems that, largely, we create ourselves and for ourselves, and that we live in a world of infinite or near-infinite regression, the language of which is like the language that is any human tongue
that could create, and has the ability to create,
a sentence that is infinitely long,
just so long as we do not truncate the number (N) within each regressive group at 1, with the possibility of every second consisting of a process of reading this world and of deciding which path to take next, with each and every path consisting of a number of choices, of “switches”, we may believe, each of which is either a “yes” or a “no”,
being with the result that I either (“yes”) do or either (“no”) do not go for the choice that I have within me,
and, not truncating the number of possible selections or choices within each group at N=1 (“N” equals one, that is), but allowing the infinite to come about, as long as we can keep the human conversation, or rather, sentence, going on infinitely,
until
(Hwæt!)
we come up to the final lesson of ourselves, or also the first, for
“the first shall be last”,
and we come to realize that to see your whole life before your eyes, or what of it you remember, which is everything that you have seen and experienced through your five senses, being the convenient grouping into which all of you potentially-infinite ways of experiencing the world are laid out,
is not to be about to be at your final hour, or at the end,
but to know yourself,
who is
one
1
ekah
, and to feel yourself (“Those were pearls that were his eyes”, someone said) as communing with that great knowledge of which we are all a part,
that collective knowledge, the Collective Memory that each one of us, I think, possesses in some sense, that is encoded into the very beings of our parents and that we imbibe when we are given life in this world, who learned secrets from our parents that they did not even tell us, but that came to be unlocked in us when we were awakened to ourselves through greater commerce with the world,
in spite of all of our many, various ways of seeing this great existence of ours, whether we are sitting in that wooden room with the brown coaches and the redolent smell of flowers that look like honeysuckle on the mantelpiece, or that are pink and that stand in the middle of the table on which we are playing a board game, going for longest road, perhaps, although I think to build castles is something more pleasing in this life,
with friends around who are good companions to us always, and always have been, and who, if we ask them, and if we are bold to ask, will sit next to us at dinner, perhaps, because we have made it a priority to keep our friends in this life,
feeling that, even if we are sitting under the table, with our feet underneath, I mean, on the red and gold carpet that is under us, thinking about the mythical elements in Beowulf, in the beginning, I mean, when Scyld Scefing came to Denmark and founded the race of the Spear-Danes, having been born on the ark, and so, not precisely mythical, but also biblical, “in days gone by”,
as on the day when, many years ago, we saw the signs on the fences around Sutton Hoo to keep the gates closed in order to keep the sheep from grazing on the mounds of the barrows, the mounds that were the barrows, we mean, where, once, Redwald sat or lay with his helmet all of hammered panels, that were not joined together but as one piece, although when we see it in the British Museum, it is “them” and not “us” of whom we speak,
and
(Hwæt!)
we speak again of “them”
(“Those were pearls that were his eyes”, they said)
when we say that in that great Book of Love
, in which it is written not just of doves, but also of milk and honey, and of searching through streets that are dark with the “dart of longing”, saying
“Quia amore langueo”
, which are the words that I said “In a valley of this restles mind” some days when I set out for my true love, and when I found him “neither in the city nor in the mountains”, but sought him only as one who has a true love that she has lost can search or can find in this life, but, with a true love who is the King of all True Loves, and whom we find not only in the spaces that are above us, or all around, but also in the spaces in our hearts, as in baptismal homilies, sometimes, when we find ourselves and our souls as the receivers of the greatest peace in this world,
being in a world of infinite or near-infinite possibility, with every second presenting to us the option to pursue however many options of what to do there are possibilities of action in this world times two, which is yes or no, and times the number of places in which, at every second, we have in which to do those actions,
and being able to create ourselves as we learn to read this world, and to live in it, and to understand that what we are and what we are doing is what has always been done throughout the course of history, which, if we view it as we are existing now, on a certain plane of action in this universe, which is bounded, perhaps, by the limits of what we can see and can now understand, and in which the root of animosity is a lack of understanding of each other,
who are sisters and brothers in kindness,
and compassion,
and reason,
and all of which elements, being those that define the root of our humanity, are, like the tracks that we have laid for ourselves in the sand, across the pages of time, having already learned something of truth in this world by helping to teach others
what is in our own minds,
by showing them not just what we have done, but also how we have done something, enough so that they, too, will know how to do that thing, and to reproduce the process so that, in this life and in this world, or perhaps in another world, or in another universe, one that is parallel to ours and that we are observing as two geometric shapes that are facing one another, be they circles, triangles, squares, or other closed figures, and that are facing one another just as you face someone in order to speak to them, or to shake their hand
, and which, facing each other, with, in between them, space, which they create through their relation to one another, take something of the mystery out of life, and also add mystery to it,
because, when we read these things, we see what it means to select one out of all the various and multifarious possibilities that face us at any point in time during our lives, and which we, having so many choices before us, know when to select and when to say “no”,
unless, of course, we were never trained the proper rules, and did not have them taught to us in the proper way, so that we could understand them, and because no one asked us if we had understood them, but simply let us continue in life without our knowing, and without others knowing that we did not know, what was the proper course of action at any point in time,
or perhaps not being able to control ourselves in this fashion, but, not knowing the limits of our own existence, or not feeling them to be limits, or not knowing that the limits were there at all or that there at all should be limits,
and simply keeping going in this life, keeping going without knowing when to stop, and how to help ourselves, and feeling, also, that there is a great deal of truth in a Hawthorne novel, a novel by Hawthorne, that is, in which obsession and desire drive a great deal of the plot,
such as an artist creating a butterfly that is mechanical and that can fly about the room, about a room, that is, and that, with the slightest touch, can disintegrate into the merest speck of mechanical splendor,
and that, with the slightest touch, we can transform into the story of a man who does not like the mark upon the skin of his only beloved, his wife, who must certainly have been
“the most beautiful woman in the world”, if we take the medieval penchant for superlatives,
such as that
Iwein was the greatest of heroes
Beowulf was the greatest of heroes
Parzival was the greatest of heroes
Laudine was the most beautiful of women
The Garden of Love
and who was, perhaps, something like her creator, something self-sacrificing for that which she loved, which is, not her art, but her husband,
whose creator lived in Salem some time, in the home of the witches, the home of the Customs House eagle, that stands, golden and radiant, atop the House that is brick that stands in the harbor that is filled with boats, although perhaps not as many as in Gloucester, or in Mystic,
where rests the last wooden whaling ship in the world, in whose hull one can stand and look upon the fo’c’sle, perhaps, where the sailors used to sleep, when they embarked, sometimes, for three years or more, and hunted whales that they stripped of their blubber over the tryworks, like Ishmael had to do, or (Remember when he was lowered down into the head of the whale for the precious oil, I believe, and he and Queequeg were joined together by the “monkey rope”?) who carved scrimshaw on the teeth of whales that they hunted, and on their panbones, carving, perhaps, figures of their sweethearts, that they engraved and then inked, in ways that they knew how to do, creating thereby pieces that would come one day to stand in the museums that we now know to preserve the past,
where, as in Mystic, you can walk around the streets and – as we sometimes did with our siblings – climb over the grass in the center, bright emerald green grass that surrounds a white gazebo, where also we heard concerts that we listened to with our parents,
like the concerts, also, at the band shell on top of the great hill, overlooking a bend in the Hudson River, where the bandshell was a place that we sat next to and in front of, in the front row, because that was where our parents sat and we with them,
unembarrassed
, because we were children,
and where we watched the fireworks during the nights when they played the “1812 Overture” by Tchaikovsky
(_ _––-_-–-_-––)
, which we always thought was strange because he wasn’t American,
and so we listened also to “1776” by John Adams, that was patriotic, but not quite the same, we think,
doing always what we thought to be right and true to ourselves, to stand true to whatever was on the forefront of our conscious or unconscious thought, which we, being us, had always inside of us,
but have too often allowed to escape from our minds, or not enough,
sometimes feeling sorry that we could not always be on top
of the CN Tower, which is, frequently, lit up at night, and which we have learned to go to sometimes, when we want someplace to go from which we can see the street where we live,
singing “Now that I’m on the street where you live”,
while we watched that movie that taught us to talk better,
although the woman in that movie, Eliza Doolittle, and in the play created herself, largely, because it was she who was fashioning and refashioning her life, and because she did not always adhere to what she knew that her doctor wanted her to do and to say, to do and to say with the polish that he wanted her to have when in social situations that were not, always, of her own choosing,
but only and ever and always did what she wanted to hear herself do and say,
and, just as if to say that we are not, always, all of us, stuck with what we know or with what we think to be true in this life,
or rather, just as if to say that we are,
“Let us go and make our visit”
to another Picture in this Exhibition, one that, if we look at it the right way, perhaps, as one of an Infinity of Lists, and which the creator of that volume, by which I mean the writer, that is, would say, perhaps, is one in which the eye becomes trained to look not only at the surface of what is, but also towards what is possible when infinity becomes the norm, the painting in which paintings are scattered and placed next to paintings, inside of some Italian art gallery, whose name we cannot now remember, or I, I mean, to speak plainly and not
, like Gollum, to fall into the “royal we”, for we are not royal,
but, like everyone in this world, I think, having discovered ourselves at some point in time, and having found a direction to our lives, which we then seek to pursue in whatever way and by whatever means we possibly can, wanting always to interpret and reinterpret ourselves in this world, in a universe in which was played some days ago “The Greatest Game Ever Played”, or so someone said on the television, as I watched it while all the while writing a work that I thought I knew how to understand in this world of worlds, and which, perhaps, I also have misinterpreted and have not come to understand the way that I should,
noting only the patterns in myself and in my world that I have thought important to the understanding of myself, laying the tracks of myself in the sand,
and believing always that, someday I might meet my Nikolai Rostov, and be Princess Maria, who was, perhaps, something plain, not like Jane Bennet, of course, who, in two of the movies, has blonde hair, and through whom I,
“look[ing] in [my] heart and writ[ing]”
, and finding in there a little space that I had created for God,
which I rediscovered tonight and in this place, and which I did not realize before that I had lost, somehow, when I took away from others things that they liked or wanted or needed, like the need for ceremony and for parties, which I need, also, in this life, and which reminds me of how necessary awards are in this life, because in the end it is not even the names that matter, but merely that they are markers of time and of people,
although some people have greater chances at these awards than others, because of the inequity of the many systems within which we live, being a creation of what we ourselves are – inequitable creatures, which, we know, is a system that is one of evolution,
but which we, being rational creatures, as well as compassionate ones, as well as kind in addition to being rational, not only can overcome, but should, because every child should have the same chance at life, the same chance to overcome their difficulties, no matter what their families are like, or how much money they have, which system, we know, is a system of nature and not of compassion, and which we, being what we are, when we look into the eyes of another person in this life, and see something that we know to be fundamentally human in their eyes, which are the same eyes that we see when we look into the mirror and see our own eyes,
and which system, of nature, we can correct through the proper application of ourselves to the principles of compassion and justice in every portion of our lives, as we move through this world, and as we, striving only to be loved and not to be lonely in this world, which, truly, is the entire point of the teleology that we call ourselves, the process of self-actualization that each one of us strives for,
and also to find the meaning of it all, which is part of the point, too, that we should and want to find a way in which not to be so lonely in this life, or to think that it is not worth it, but, instead, to recognize that life is not only “a series of contingencies”, but also with a structure of meaning that equals itself, because everything in this life equals itself, being
one
1
ekah
, the root and science of all things in this life, with, everywhere, the knowledge that, like the Neo-Platonists, I have the freedom to see in the world a God that is all around me, that surrounds me, or, like Saint Augustine in The Confessions, to see a God in and through everything, thereby found in all things, by looking not just at them, but through them,
who was, by his own words, a reprobate in his early years, and who fell in, also, with the Manicheans,
while I, who am alive today, will make a case for being somewhat like the ancients, like Aristotle, perhaps, for whom to be a polymath was no shame, but rather, because, perhaps, he knew that, in a drama, one needed both the coherence of our own minds, if we bound their thought, which sometimes, I think, is wont to go off in all directions if we will let them, and rein in that thought, so that what we are left with is not linearity in short segments, but linearity in long segments,
which, “I think, therefore I” see, is what we value in this life, the ability to think in long lines, stretching from Time Point A to Time Point B, if Point B is far enough away in time to be able to call it a distinct time point, although always it will be if it is not Point A, in time, I mean, and if it comes after Time A when time is moving forwards in the brain, if it could ever move backwards, that is,
although I think that this, perhaps, is not possible, because even to encounter the past in the mind is to encounter it in the present, and to counteract or heighten whatever energy is in the present by means of the past, by means of memory, that is, and to say that,
whenever I am sitting at the dinner table and contemplating my life, it is actually my life in the present that is being illuminated, even if, when I think of the phrase “to see one’s life flash before one’s eyes”, and begin to cry when thinking of my family, who was laughing something fiercely just minutes before, having found something to be incredibly funny in this world, or perhaps, cocking my head a little bit as this happens, to have found something incredibly beautiful and in proportion to itself and to the world, or trying to move my limbs neither too quickly, nor too slowly at any moment, but to blink sometimes when I learn something new, or to laugh when I learn something new,
and always to marvel at technology that I do not understand in this life,
just as I do not understand the greatest technology of all, the human mind,
although, when we trace back through our lives and encounter our every memory that we can consciously recall, or perhaps even unlock new sectors of our memory centers that will allow us to recall things we did not know that we could recall any more, or at all,
we begin, perhaps, to understand our own selves and our own minds a bit better, and to unlock their potential through self-actualization of ourselves –
I am still sitting at the same dinner table and talking with friends, but then run out, not wanting the world to see me cry,
although I find no shame in it, and go back to my room and throw myself on my bed,
begging for forgiveness from both God and from my family, my immediate family and from my extended family, which is the world and the people whom I have hurt,
even if they live not in my own city, nor in my own country, but even halfway or all of the way across the world
and on the other side of the globe, another hemisphere,
they in the southern, while I am in the northern,
a divide that reminds me that, sometimes, brother can be made to fight brother in this world and in this life, and to hate to such an extent, although perhaps without knowing even why, that he and they face each other in regimented lines across a field that is bounded by Devil’s Den, or the stone wall of Fredericksburg, where “Stonewall” received his nickname, and lived to fight again another day, although, when, one day, in the woods, he lost his left arm, and Lee said that “he had lost his right”, he “cross[ed] over the river and rest[ed] in the shade of the trees”,
and put on a new dress, a white one, this time, and went to a party, and laughed again, wearing a golden necklace against the white fabric, and tried to forget every care,
and learned about transcription,
not of medieval manuscripts, although this is something, too, that I must do, learning paleography, and to interpret scripts, and how to interpret scripts,
and what they are, and how they were formed, and the materials used in creating them,
like sparrow feathers, sometimes, for the very delicate parts of the work, and with lapis lazuli, richly, sometimes used for creating the blue ink of pen flourishing, or rather, of illumination, and sometimes woad,
which reminds me, also, of indigo, that used to be carried in the
holds of ship
that cut across the ocean from El Salvador, which is a place I had not thought of as a producer of indigo, but imagined it to come from India, like the garnets that were sometimes placed within the filigree of
Anglo-Saxon gold
, like the Sutton Hoo purse in the British Museum, where, once, I spent almost an hour looking at the Sutton Hoo treasure, in the medieval gallery, at the back, that looked, also, something like the Frankish gold and the Merovingian, that stood in glass cases in that section of the world, surrounding and in back of the Franks casket, that whalebone wonder,
showing the siege of Jerusalem, and the Virgin Mary, we think, within an arched temple, perhaps, and with the inscription in runes around the outside of it, that is missing one panel, which is, perhaps, as it should stand in this world, that tells the secret of the casket’s material, and that it was made of whalebone, an early form of scrimshaw, I suppose,
that stands next to the Scherenschnitt in some museums, which is paper cutting, that is paper folded in half and cut into intricate designs, usually, and that reminds me of early American life (not, also, Early American Life, but, yes, something along those lines, which I think is a magazine that, also, my parents had in our house as a child, but which I never read, although the pictures of red and white and blue flags on the covers, or eighteenth-century houses, attracted my eye)
, and that taught me to simply keep going, to visit one historic house and then another, often in the same day, perhaps being a large yellow house on Brattle Street in Cambridge (Massachusetts, that is) that belonged to Longfellow, who wrote poems that few people read nowadays, and that I myself have not read, although, I think, I will always remember Evangeline, the Arcadian, who went to find her lover, I believe, or who wrote, of course, “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere”, that made Paul Revere, instead of his fellow riders, Dawes and Prescott, who also showed bravery that day, the 18th of April 1775, when they were sent to warn that
“The British are coming”
, which, I think, was actually “The Regulars are coming”, because the country still, at that time, considered itself to be British, and drank tea, although there was a boycott on this, in Boston Harbor, which, also, is where a massacre of civilians occurred, including Crispus Attucks, that also set in motion the course of events that would change the nation’s history, or rather, that would define it,
museums that also, sometimes, contain old furniture, Hadley chests, that feature three rectangular panels across, and that are sometimes painted with bright colors, being Pennsylvania Dutch, I think, in origin, although they, also, doubtless must have come from somewhere in this world,
in which nothing comes from nowhere,
but always everything from somewhere,
that is part of the intricate number of infinite or near-infinite ranges of possibilities that define the world that we inhabit,
which, like a medieval village, is sometimes bounded by the limit of the “lord of the land”,
who, being, sometimes, a Don Quixote, goes to find his Dulcinea, who, to him, is more than real, is his lady, although he is at one time tricked by Sancho into believing that a peasant girl in clothing is she, in fact, and who, having read so many books, does not, perhaps, know how to separate the reality of the world from the reality that is in his own mind,
or how to, finally, stop what he is doing at any moment and
change
direction
, and, with nothing coming from nowhere and everything from somewhere, we
(although we have been told that “Brevity is the soul of wit”),
keep going with what we are doing, and trying not to think about it so much, but only to act, in the right way and making the right choice at every second, or how to deal with ourselves and with our enthusiasms,
and with our joys,
which, we are told, were ten for the Virgin Mary,
and with our sorrows,
which are plenty in this life,
and which we can never get through by ourselves,
but must have application to an outside force greater than us, whether that force is our immediate friends, or our more extended ones, all the rest of humanity
(“The first great joy that Mary had, it was the joy of one, to see her own son Jesus Christ when he was first her son”
_—– -__–_ _ -)
, a humanity that has, at times, or always, been governed by forces that are outside of itself, and that, if they do not always compel it onwards, very frequently do, and that are like the great composers of history, because, once things are set “in motion [they] tend[s] to stay in motion”, unless the thing that is doing the moving, although perhaps compelled by something that is greater than itself, finally becomes a force that hits a wall towards which it is heading and from which it has not veered away, although, perhaps, it had seen the wall coming,
but did not think that it was master enough of itself, and had the power, to change direction in order to avoid hitting the wall,
although, we now know, we are, each one of us,
in this life together and with others, those whom we call our friends, as well as those whom we call
enemies
, who are those who, if we took steps back from ourselves and traced back through the pages of history, even to our own beginnings, we would see are no different from us, and are all, very distantly, related,
going back through the Neanderthals, who, we think, had larynxes that could have been designed for speech,
to Australopithecus, those creatures so seemingly strange to us,
but with a body much like ours,
whom we think to be some of our most distant ancestors in this world,
just as Darwin hypothesized that we are, all of us, descended from common ancestry, and are part of an ongoing process of evolution, one in which we, each of us, must make our own decisions in this life, but which decisions are, largely, governed by what we, individually, are,
such that, in any second, we will have at the back of our thought an infinite or near-infinite number of impulses in our unconscious brains, and must decide which of those unconscious (or perhaps even conscious) impulses to act on, for to say “write these words” is not the same as actually to write those words, unless the impulse and the words written perfectly correspond, because this is all, after all, a process of nomenclature, a system whereby we identify what the actions are that we must take in this life, as well as,
being that we are,
in syntax that Shakespeare has taught us to use,
which is sometimes a Hamlet, always thinking,
a system in which we learn to disassociate our actions from our own selves, and to call them, not “ourselves”, but even that which we do, that which is not, really, us, but that we carry around with us as if to define ourselves, like accolades, which, nevertheless, help us to mark what it is that we have done in this life, and what we have yet to do
, accolades that, to the tribes of Germania, were marks of greatness, marks by which dom (judgment) was decided, and that, as at the end of Widsith, or of Beowulf, the greatest princes or leaders would distinguish themselves by,
being products of self-assertion
, which, according to one scholar, is also a quality that we are beginning to see more of in this day and age, and which may or may not be a good thing for our society, because, while it can lead to loss of reverence, and with loss of reverence can arise a loss of many of the values that we hold dear in this life, like love of family and love of the god or gods that one worships,
because, he says, all “great and authentic religions” generally fall into two categories, the “Eastern and the Western”, with the eastern religions being those in which self-assertion and individuality are put aside, in favor of connection with something greater than the self,
which is, perhaps, a state of Nirvana,
or of mysticism with the “Way”, and of finding the “Way” through nature, perhaps, instead of through worldly progress,
or even through yogic practices, whereby union with God is made possible, and through which battles are won or lost, with “inadequate” forces on one side, and “adequate” forces on the other, and with the wise lamenting “Neither for the dead nor those not dead”, but believing always in a state of
reincarnation
in this world, which means losing one’s life, or passing away, and, speaking to the universe
(“This is the time of union”
_
– —– —)
in another language, a natural one, that the world can understand, and
(“From ashes to ashes, and from dust to dust”)
speaking to the heavens,
and finding in them “our comfort and our strength”,
finding in them the hope that, someday, we will be able to see all of our sisters and brothers in this world as our sisters and brothers in this world, one people united by a common hope for humanity, a common sense of self and a commonality of needs,
adequate food and water,
shelter,
education,
and love
in this world,
one people united not by a common language, but with each people preserving their own languages, which affect their cognition, just as studying an inflected language, a synthetic one, is very different than studying an analytic language,
and with each people studying not just its modern language, but with the medieval or earlier manifestation of its language,
such that the principles of linguistics that govern each language will become apparent, the sound changes, and why our grammatical rules are for languages as they are nowadays,
and such that we will finally be able to see that all languages are, truly, related, and that, if we look not just at western languages, but also at eastern languages,
including the Semitic languages
and Chinese
and Japanese
and Korean
and Hindi
and Sanskrit
and Arabic
, and all of these not just in their modern forms, but also in their historical, albeit synchronic, once we have established the earliest forms of the languages that we can derive and deduce,
being their medieval or classical forms,
we will begin to understand the roots of our relatedness in this world, and the roots and the very foundations of our cognition, how it was that we came to have a
“Universal Grammar”
in this world, or at the very least, how it has shaped us throughout history,
and what the value of
a = 1
may be in this life.
>>>print(“Finit sententia”.)
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