Precedence

 Precedence


I believe

we spoke poetically

before we became prosaic


Epic poems

were written on stone

and depicted on cave walls

for tens of thousands of years


Primordial language

must have been embellished 

in order to convey meaning

within the availability 

of relatively few words

the maximization of language

at the core of poetry


Poetry and song

are the sky and the sea 

the savannah and the woods

the mountains and waterfalls

lakes and rivers

the fragrance of flowers

sounds of birds

crickets and frogs

the beauty that is sunrise

the serenity of dusk 

the feel of warm rain

of a cooling breeze

of the exuberance of the fire

around which we are gathered

to eat and drink

to stay warm in the night

to talk and laugh and sing


I believe that

this is why we tell stories so well

and receive them with such alacrity 

and do so potentially uncritically 


We are alive

within our primordial language 

and only do business without 


Aubrey Lieberman

2/14/24 



Footnote: based upon the principle that if I think of something, lots of people already have, I discovered that there is an arena of study called Paleopoetics, which justifies my musing.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Music and mind

  Music and Mind Created by Aubrey Lieberman in collaboration with ChatGPT 5.1 turbo — December 2025 Music enters the mind long before thought does. Before language, before memory, before the ability to name the world, there is rhythm. There is tone. There is the human body learning to sway, breathe, and respond to patterned sound. Music is not an ornament added to consciousness; it is one of the structural beams that holds consciousness up. The mind does not merely listen to music. It organizes itself through music. Some pieces awaken us. A line like “There’s something happening here…” can expand awareness faster than any lecture. Others invite us to begin again, to feel the world reopening with the quiet certainty of “It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day.” Music becomes the annunciation of renewal, a reminder that consciousness can be rewritten. Other pieces turn inward, spiraling through the recursive spaces of thought. “Like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel…” descri...
Read more

The foundation of awe, and the fog of reality

  The Foundation of Awe and the Fog of Reality Produced by Aubrey Lieberman with ChatGPT 5.0 turbo — September 2025 Wavicle is a word coined by quantum physicists a century ago. Wavicles don’t have simple properties like position and speed. When speed is determined, position cannot be, and vice versa. That’s what uncertainty means: reality itself is built upon probabilities that result in stable atoms and molecules. Without that, there’d be no matter, no life, no us. In the early 20th century, scientists learned that light (not only visible, but the entire electromagnetic spectrum) possesses both particle and wave like properties. To capture this duality, some began using the word wavicle. It emphasizes that the division into “wave” or “particle” is artificial; the true quantum entities are neither, but rather both. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle follows naturally: wavicles don’t carry precisely defined values of position and momentum simultaneously. This isn’t about limits of ...
Read more

Sticky Mittens

  Sticky Mittens   Developmental psychologists have put sticky mittens on baby hands, with which the tiny humans were able to grasp much more effectively, enabling them to do things they were previously thought to be incapable of. The researchers concluded that neural connectivity during early life exceeded the physical constraints imposed by the little hands. A human adult given sticky mittens, might climb a skyscraper, given wings, fly like a bird, given scuba gear, swim like a fish, given a telescope, explore the galaxies, given a microscope, enter the earths microbiome, given vibrating strings, makes celestial music, given a board and chalk, write the equations which govern life and the universe. Human general intelligence is the sticky mitten which enables us to grasp almost anything, even to make tools to enhance our intelligence beyond the limits we can imagine now. Perhaps we will collectively become smart enough to escape our evolutionary constraints, enabling kindnes...
Read more