Stringing Forward: Driven by Confusing Desire

 

“In the beginning was the Word.”  It’s plausible, but it doesn’t sit right with me.  Still I return to this phrase with remarkable regularity, as if it were gospel, as if my life revolved on it.

Yet I think there must be something beyond it.  Perhaps breathing, or wriggling, some pulse or shimmer?  Of course we wouldn’t have a word for it or be able to address it in any way before the coming of language…but watch a baby in its crib.

It squirms, breathes, flails, even instinctually utters interjective noises – perhaps of pain or hunger, fear or glee – can’t know for sure until its incorporated into our codes and systems, but I’ve no doubt they’re there before they speak.

Take reptiles or cockroaches.  I buy the idea that they predate us, and their communicative activity (if there is any) certainly isn’t verbal, or “logocentric.”

Perhaps Scripture would have been more accurate to say “In the beginning was movement” or “In the beginning was act.”  I don’t know.  Whatever it would state would be a word, now.  There’s a conundrum for me:  once language, is there anything prior except it’s name or description?  Maybe “beginning” means source, and word-acquisition is totalizing to human experience?  We can’t go beyond our alphabets (Alpha, Omega) – and even if we feel a beyond to be there (verbal or no) we logo-lize it?  Our “non-verbals” “immaterial” “void” “absence” “infinite” “time” “space” “god” “love” language and so forth?

We do have a word for it, after all: pre-verbal.

It does seem that (for humans anyway) awareness begins with communication, interaction.  And any system of recognition and difference must qualify as “language.”  Maybe “Language is constitutive to our experience” might have been a truer statement, though the original does have quite a ring to it.

Why do I fiddle with it anyway, what this compulsion to know?  “Beginnings” (a word) or “words” (a word)?  That I can’t verbalize.  Which is perhaps the origin of my desperate and agitating quest: desire and confusion?  And how come having words for it doesn’t help me understand?

“In the beginning was the Word.”

Well it certainly was the beginning of something! (a word)

“He who knows not language serves idols…

he who could see his language would see his god”

-Philippe Sollers-