Poetry for Southern California

 

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Welcome to Poetix 7/2010

 

COVER STORY

By Richard Modiano

 

 

The Birth of Language was the Birth of Humanity

 

The birth of language was the birth of humanity. Each word was the sound-equivalent of an experience, connected with an internal or external stimulus. A tremendous creative effort was involved in this process, which must have extended over a vast period of time; and it is due to this effort that human beings were able to distinguish themselves from their animal brethren.

If art can be called the re-creation and formal expression of reality through the medium of human experience, then the creation of language may be called the greatest achievement of art. Each word originally was a focus of energies, in which the transformation of reality into the vibrations of the human voice - the vital expression of the human essence - took place. Through these vocal creations humanity took possession of the world - and more than that: humans discovered a new dimension, a world within themselves opening upon the vista of a subtler form of life.

The essential nature of words is therefore neither exhausted by their present meaning, nor is their importance confined to their usefulness as transmitters of thoughts and ideas, but they express at the same time qualities which are not translatable into concepts - just as a melody which, though it may be associated with a conceptual meaning, cannot be described by words or by any other medium of expression. And it is just that irrational quality which stirs up our deepest feelings, elevates our innermost being, and makes it vibrate with others.

The magic which poetry exerts upon us, is due to this quality and the rhythm combined within it. It is stronger than what the words convey objectively - stronger even than reason with all its logic, in which we believe so firmly. The success of great speakers is not only due to what they say, but how they say it. If people could be convinced by logic and scientific proofs, the philosophers would long since have succeeded in winning over the greater part of humanity to their views.

On the other hand, the great poetry of the world would never have been able to exert such an enormous influence, because what it conveys in form of thoughts is little, compared to the works of great scholars and philosophers. We are therefore justified in saying that the power of those enduring poems was due to the magic of the word, i.e., due to its sacred power, which was known to those poets who were still near to the sources of language. Thus, words are seals of the mind, results - or, more correctly, stations - of an infinite series of experiences, which reach from an unimaginably distant past into the present, and which feel their way into an equally unimaginable distant future, They are the audible that clings to the inaudible, the forms and potentialities of thought, which grow from that which is beyond thought.

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