alias: where meaning lives
Soma - I touch
Mimetic - I gesture
Oral - I sing
You gesture with your dance. Culture begins here.
Oral - I say
Unlike singing which is expansive and open, saying begins to be much more directional. I want to say something — this thing, not that thing.
Narrative - I tell
they withdraw the invitation to respond, but as a result, open themselves up to questions of interpretation.
Unlike saying which is an invitation to participate with, telling creates a thing that can be commented on.
Even before text was invented, meaning becomes more fixed— more thing-like.
Axial - I name
Cue the axial age “naming game”, and we begin to think with thing-thoughts.
Along with the axial age consciousness, most specifically with the Socratic philosophers, people started isolating the terms that pointed to things or properties of things (box, red) and relating to the terms as if they were themselves real things. These were called “Ideas” by Plato. In contrast to the particulars of the world, which were like shadows on the wall or a cave, the Ideas were more real, more clear and distinct. The Ideas represented the language of the gods — how the gods stored and shared meaning.
Lyric - I disclose
Lyric culture does not say, tell or name reality. It discloses reality.
It is said by those who study such things, that Lyric Philosophy begins in wordlessness. There is a joke in here, similar to the Daoist joke that begins with “the Dao that can be spoken of is not the true Dao” — which is the opening of one of the most profound texts of the ages. Jan Zwickey — the major figure in Lyric Philosophy, is a big fan of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who, in writing the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which is basically a collection of aphorisms, whose own statement of aim for the work was:
What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
Whereas saying, telling and naming represent reality, disclosure is a direct experience of touching reality.
Something is wanting to be seen perfectly, and so to be loved.