Rant.

So it's like this, right? There's reality, no one's disputing that, well except maybe the Solipsists, but pay them no mind. Then we've got our sensorum which apprehends small hints at what's out there based on a very limited band of the electromagnetic spectrum and interaction of nerve tissue with matter. Once that's picked up then it goes through our brains own interpretation processes and we understand what we are perceiving. Then, over and above that, we pin symbols to everything we can find. I mean, take a look at the room you're in right now, besides all the text on the screen, how many words can you see just with a quick scan? How many words have you collected in your house? How many out in the street, on buses, cars, billboards, clothing, street signs, traffic signs, store signs, graffiti, posters, adverts, adverts, adverts!

Right?

Listen, I was out in Borneo once, half a lifetime ago. We drove for hours through this empty countryside and then we had to trek for three goddamn days. In all that time the only words I saw were those on the clothes of the group that traveled with me. That's why we like to get away, you know? From the city, back to nature, it's not the buildings or the pollution, it's the words. They bear down on us always, forcing their way into our subconscious like jingles from old adverts. We have to constantly navigate these booming signals everywhere we go. Outside of all of that, peace. The silence of the jungles are not just audible silences, they are bereft of symbol bombardment. That's what made it so wild that we came across that old temple. It just stood there, old white marble, sorely out of place and time. As soon as we were there, symbols, words, on walls statues, everywhere.

It wasn't always like this. Once, not long ago, knowledge was retained only in memory and passed along by voice, then it began to be written down. This was a slow process at first and gave rise to what peasants thought of as magic. Think of it, learned monks, with their robes and big flowing beards, speaking in strange tongues and reading chants aloud from an large unintelligible grimoire, stories about talking snakes and men coming back to life. Might as well be Gandalf, or that other one, Dumblebum or something.

Our guide, an archaeologist from Manila, reminded me of Tolkein's wizard, due to his advanced age and long white beard. He told us that the temple dated to about 9000 B.C. and was built over older ruins. We entered, it was the site of ongoing research, but what was glaringly obvious was the words. As we entered the wall inside, at the doorway was almost black with writing, a palmlipsest of white marble scrawled over and over until it would have still been, if anyone knew what those ancient symbols meant, illegible. The walls near the entrance were equally covered but the texts thinned out the further we got in. Eventually we reached an antechamber, about 30 ft below ground, it was hot, humid and it stank of damp rot but in the centre of it, was a large clay urn. There were a few symbols around the ring, more on the floor, which seemed to be like trails of ants, haphazard lines which spread from the urn, and headed to the walls, which were festooned with these symbols.  One of the group, a linguistic expert from Dublin, joked that it looked like the language had escaped from the urn. We all laughed at that, but I was puzzled. He was careful to point out that the symbols were probably added at a later date, since they were too sophisticated to be proto-writing or hieroglyphs. He was of the opinion that the temple was discovered by a tribe who defaced it.

I had difficulty with that hypothesis. See, for most of our history everyone was illiterate so reading was like looking at symbols and suddenly being aware of something you weren't before. Books becme a thing but they were rare; all having being manufactured by hand, but as soon as printing got underway, well, the whole thing exploded.

Soon the books were no longer magical objects maintained by cautious and strange wizards, but their were copies everywhere and people got to read those magical books for themselves. Many found them wanting which rapidly usurped the order that had been around for a good millennium and a half.
Before too long words began to be incorporated into common use. As more and more people began to read, the more they detached from their world. The spells were broken, so to speak. This wasn't negative, in the main. Sure there were wars of words that spilled over into violence, but there was also poetry and mathematics and philosophy and fiction, all of which pushed us forward to where we are all today. In a world filled with words, most of us spending all day, writing words, manipulating symbols, feeding it all into a great global network with billions of connections.

What am I getting at? We examined the ink that was used to write those symbols in that temple. It wasn't actually ink, or charcoal, or any other normal substance one would write with. In fact it was make of long strings of complex proteins. I could go on and explain about phylogenetic lineages and how the base pairs of symbols around the urn were much more primitive than the ones by the door, but put simply, it was as if our Irish colleague was right, as if the symbols were some kind of organism, once contained within an ancient urn that developed and spread. From that moment we were hosts, symbol system bearing creatures, manipulated by a parasitical symbolic language that mutated in us and allowed us to develop to the point where we are now, spending all our time spewing words, all our facts, lies, scandals, madness, knowledge, all of it, into a global electronic host, which processes information much faster than we do. Remember back at the beginning when I said we apprehend very little of reality? Perhaps we are past our usefulness.

But what if it goes? What if that parasitical language leaves us? Do we go back to being apes? Savages? I don't know. I really don't, but I think we are replacing ourselves, with something more efficient. Perhaps after all the highest form of life isn't us, but some sticky, tarry proteins evolving its way to a single global consciousness with us, just one step on the ladder to it's apotheosis.

Maybe.