Clumsily Data Mining For The Origins Of Speech

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I read all 114 sayings in the Gospel of Thomas twice this morning. Earlier, I could have sworn there was at least one saying that specifically mentions suffering. I was wrong. It isn't mentioned in the Davies translation. My wastrel's search for the origins of human speech is speculative arrogance. Why would I not? Keeping to my weird habits I've used the Davies version of the saying exclusively since I subscribed to the GoT e-mail discussion group.

Choosing one translated version of any holy book works for me. I used and studied the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching for a long time. I read the James Legge classical Sinologist's translation previously, but it didn't seem to have a path with heart for me. I never used any other I Ching translations although many more became available over the next thirty-odd years. Too much information confuses my goals for studying such devices.

Besides, I believe in magic and fate and kismet and myths and fairy tales. I hate being confused by facts. Facticities (cities built from presumed facts/paradise/heaven/utopia/nuclear bombs) are for sissies who have no imagination or creativity.

Acquiring a horde of pertinent facts don't make anybody immortal. Facts' priesthood don't enter their abstractly constructed paradise, and they don't let anyone else in there either. It's spiritual extortion plain and simple. "Hell no, I won't go! Hell no, I won't go! Hell no..."

Sayings #68 and #69 in the Gospel of Thomas address persecution, but the term "suffering" is not specifically mentioned. I am finds itself thinking about physical suffering of the kind that would cause people to moan in distress. To utter stuff to indicate pain or perhaps even ecstasy. Perhaps both, Ecstagony! What's not to like about puling in hard-earned joy over finding food or water after a drought. "We're saved! Thank God Almighty, we're saved!"

It has crossed my mind several times recently that human speech uttered in pain or happiness might be involuntarily shared during a special empathetical moment like what might transpire between a new mother and her midwife cooing over the sight of a newborn. Deliberately re-member-ing such a share event by uttering the same sounds that happened in the past might be considered a primal form of human speech.

Perhaps later they could recall the shared feelings of their rapport by repeating the coos they both expressed during their mutual experience. They might evoke the past situation like an inside joke no one else shared. Situations that employed mutually recognized sounds to re-member a literal, shared experience may have arrived as the first abstract constructions of human speech.

Searching for examples of this in my own experiential database has somehow brought my brother's dogs next door to mind, and what I remember them howling in agony over. The only incidents that come to mind are their reaction to sirens. Sometime, confusingly, distant sirens I can't hear yet. Occasionally the security alarms go off at the Moose club building about three hundred yards away and all the dogs in the rural neighborhood go nuts.

When the dogs get old and go off to be alone and die by themselves, they don't make any noise. My brother has to go out into the woods and find them. He calls to them to get a clue about where they may be hiding. Sometime I help him look for them, because they might have gone deaf or have lost other of their senses in their canine dotage, and can't find their way back to his house because they've lost their sense of smell or hearing. That's how dogs navigate. They can't think things through using reason or logic of any order. I invoke the fifth on whether that's true or no.

At first, when I began to contemplate the saying "Speech is mind. Mind is speech.", females giving birth came to mind. They might have uttered noises other women who have experienced giving birth could identify with. I watched a TV documentary about an American Indian "birthing place".

This purported birthing place was a location the paleontologists claim was a remote nook away from the main camp where pregnant women went to give birth. There were lots of supporting petroglyphs in this area. More interestingly, there were special grooves and recesses in the sandstone cliff walls that appeared to serve as handles or gripping places on the rock walls for the women to grab hold of while they were trying to push the baby out.

I was there when my second wife delivered our two daughters. She was determined to have the girls by natural childbirth without taking any drugs to help with the pain (which the LaMaze Method resists calling it). She was "toughing it out" until the baby started crowning and she was wheeled into the delivery room.

The hospital had several delivery rooms and a couple of them had young black women in them. They didn't be waiting for the crowning to be put there. They were screaming their ass off when the contractions came. Not my lady. She didn't have permission. Screeching in pain just didn't run in her family. Aries mother.

When I heard the totally acceptable screaming from the other delivery rooms I realized somehow that my wife merely needed permission to do it, and she could experience the relief such a rude racket might bring.

As soon as I told her in no uncertain terms that I had such authority over her mother's disciplined upbringing to give her permission to act un-lady-like, she started muttering in with a low rumbling noise at first. Her rude muttering soon exploded into a raunchy, uncool primal screaming of the most invigorating kind.

She didn't hold back until she heard her baby girl's first screams of undignified indignation. Then, hearing her, she followed the sound to it's source and laid eyes on her for the first time. These memories are all I have left of any of them. Claiming that I was there for them then is all I'm allowed.

Many people seem to conclude that my life means nothing beyond that of being a crude provocateur, and they're right, as far as they can "see" it. My authority to give people permission to do what they don't have a framework for invoking on their own forces a compassion that hurts people when both of us realize it ain't my doing.

The truth for me only ex-is-t in the specious present, but maybe empathy for shared experiences ushered in the me-and-thee-ing that eventually came around to have meaning. YMMV.

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