Thursday, October 23, 2008

Thoughts on the Primal Word

The primal word arrests our attention when it arrives in our conscious mind unbidden and unexpected. It appears first as glyphs or images that one may understand through emotion.

The primal word once risen exists for a brief moment-like the may fly-in a world similar to Babel, a mythical city where all spoke the language of the one.

The primal word appears as an emotional hieroglyph that the one translates; just as the ancient Egyptian priests translated the hieroglyph into demotic.

The primal word is soaked in emotion and meaning, which the one must distill in order to imbibe and then understand the message intellectually.

The primal word over time and through translation loses its emotional power; however, it may carry an intellectual power thereafter.

Sometimes the primal word is adopted by the one and concretized into a religion or an ideology.

In order to remain authentic the one must avoid the concrete image and seek new appearances of the primal word.

The story of the Babel Tower is an object lesson on the concretization of the primal word. Its destruction is a metaphor for a methodology to revive the emotion and meaning of the word. Sometimes neologisms are necessary to revive thoughts and shatter concrete ideas.

Heidegger's language and Celan's poetry are examples of a movement to make an opening for the primal word and to re-make old language.

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