The human community within a settlement represents
the neural centre which
controls the whole, including the lives of
all the plants and animals within the
symbiotic unit. The centre of the nervous
system, of tradition, law, religion, ritual
and authority often lay within a protected
inner citadel, where the community
leaders were specially cared for and protected.
Language functions as nerve, maintaining
a physical link between the free moving
and seperate individuals. For language is
a physical link, depending upon the
vibrations of air molecules leaving a throat
and entering an ear. Throat touching
ear. Minute differences of frequency and pressure
can convey so much, as though
mind were touching mind, though they may be
far apart in space, and through the
written word, far apart in time also.
Moreover each person is acutely sensitive,
having organs of sight, smell, touch,
taste and hearing. They are each a point of
sensitivity, like a nerve ending,
providing the community with another pair
of eyes, ears, hands, another nose and
tongue.
Leviathan is a very noisy place. Wherever
we observe people working or meeting
together we can hear them talking, each one
speaking and listening-to thousands of
words a day. If we listen to the noise within
a room, a family dwelling for example,
it is full of mumblings, exclamations, streams
and rhythems of complicated noises
that are halfway to music, punctuated by expletions
of breath that are much more
primitive. The sound of laughter or dismay
may resemble the characteristic noises
of our arborial ancestors.
Much of the talk is no more important than
the firing of nerves to maintain a
certain 'tone' in the organism. Even cliches
are a sign of life, and much of the
exchanges between people function as a confirmation
of order and normality. Some
of the exchanges convey personal experience
and the contents will be passed
onwards only if they appear significant to
the listeners. Conversation acts as a
filter, in the way synapses function within
the nervous system of multicellular
systems, with a strong bias towards established
practices. Thus we can observe a
system by which the whole organism is kept
at a certain level of awareness, with
direct experience and observation being continuously
fed into a general pool of
awareness, some of which survives, often in
a synthesised form, as an addition to
the wisdom of the whole organism.
In the course of a day, language and thoughts
flow around a community like a
viscous fluid, filled with little bursts of
ideas which gradually fade into the tide.
Rumour may gain credence or die out, moods
may develop and change, excitement
may grow and then die down and occasionally
new ideas may be passed around like
fertile seeds.
Language limits not only what we can express,
but probably what we can
experience. It is principally through language
that culture, the codes of the
organism, are passed on. Language links individual
to individual, and also the
living with the dead.
