Douglas Milburn Genesis 11: 1 Now the entire earth was of one language and uniform words. 2 And it came to pass when they traveled from the east, that they found a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there. 3 And they said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks and fire them thoroughly"; so the bricks were to them for stones, and the clay was to them for mortar. 4 And they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make ourselves a name, lest we be scattered upon the face of the entire earth". 5 And the Lord descended to see the city and the tower that the sons of man had built. 6 And The Lord said, "Lo! [they are] one people, and they all have one language, and this is what they have commenced to do. Now, will it not be withheld from them, all that they have planned to do? 7 Come, let us descend and confuse their language, so that one will not understand the language of his companion". 8 And the Lord scattered them from there upon the face of the entire earth, and they ceased building the city. 9 Therefore, He named it Babel, for there the Lord confused the language of the entire earth, and from there the Lord scattered them upon the face of the entire earth. A tower of Babel grows daily in my house. Several, in fact. First, there are the books. What a delightful structure of thought and feeling, accomplishments and failings, ancient and modern, the tower of books makes! I love it dearly, climb it often, delight in the views from its many soaring ramparts. Then there is the less-solid tower, the one made of electromagnetic waves and pixels. This one is also tall and omnipresent but requires that I turn something on in order to see it. Turn on I do, daily, often, to great delight in this tower’s airy, diaphanous, gossamer wings of ideas and music and pictures. But the tallest, oldest, most elaborate tower is the one whose foundation was installed in my head starting at age one second and which has been abuilding and abuilding ever since: the tower of language itself. The tower that I inhabit from morning till night, the tower that defines me, maybe the tower that I am. Against this tri-tower backdrop, the folkloric charms of the well-known biblical story quoted above lose much of their seductive, pseudo-explanatory power. The old tale-teller, faced with a polyglot world, came up with a narrative to account for the confounding reality of incomprehension when one earthly neighbor encountered and spoke to a distant earthly neighbor. A childish, simplistic tale that might for a while entrance but that in this longer run where we now breathe is wholly irrelevant. Why? Because that prosaic he or she huddled and scribbling around some ancient hearth missed the point completely. Very early, in some other parts of the world, a few people figured out that the problem was not languages, but language itself. ("Those who speak, do not know, and those who know, do not speak," etc.) But how long it took us in the West, beguiled as we have been by our very linguistic cleverness, to reach that conclusion. In the mid-20th century, Wittgenstein thought his way through to a place where he coined a metaphor of language as a fly-bottle in which, its stopper firmly in place, we are doomed to flit about forever, either wholly unaware of our entrapment, or now and then beating our flimsy wings against the glass with total incomprehension. With admirable persistence (though a couple of millennia late) he thought himself to the place Chinese and Indian sages had reached long ago: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Thus spake Ludwig. Build your tower as high as you want, but you will come at last to a place where no more building is possible and you will find a quite unambiguous sign there at the edge of what you, word-thinker that you are, will perceive as Abyss. Always it is the same sign that says simply: "Shut up." But. But, but, but, you say, word-wings all aflutter, if I shut up will I not cease to exist? Well. We certainly can’t have that, can we? May I direct your attention for a moment to a shoal, a shingle, a dim beach oh, say, a hundred million (or maybe five hundred million—I don’t have a chart of datings in front of me) years ago. Note some wee (or maybe not so wee, who knows?) creature plashing about in the shallows, poking its wee head and gills above the water’s surface. Again. And again. Into the air which it neither knows nor loves and which for its previous purposes was wholly useless. This goes on for quite some time, for generations, in fact. Stuff happens, mitochondrial stuff, DNA stuff, etc. The once-unbreathable air begins to become a little breathable. Then a lot breathable. And one day some great-great-great-grand-offspring of that first fearful head-poker, inches upward and outward. Then again. And again. And finally to stay. To survive: breathing unguessed-at air. What lies outside the fly-bottle? We can no more say than that ancient fish could say what lay above its precious, cradling briny deep. Our selfsame sages, trying to be as helpful as possible, have across human eons erected additional signs next to that big, terrifying "Shut Up!" there at the edge of the seeming abyss. They say things like "Void", or "Tao", or "Nirvana," or "Samadhi," or "Faith", or "Outer Darkness," or (a lot less helpfully) "Heaven." The sign of course is not the thing, is it? Just as the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon but only a finger pointing moonward. Thus these many signs are only signs pointing abyssward (O, abysmal abyss!). Which pretty well leaves us here, in the shallows, plashing about primitively. With, judging by the best available wisdom of old smart fishes, just one thing left to do: to practice shutting up and then learning, with paradoxical patience, as Vonnegut the Great often advised, to wait and see what happens next. Could the head-poking fish imagine a world without water? Can you imagine a world without language? No, alas. Babble on, dear Earth! Aye, the trek out of the fly-bottle has hardly begun.
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