Exploring the Crack in the Cosmic Egg by Joseph Chilton Pearce

Author:Joseph Chilton Pearce
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spirituality/Consciousness Studies
Publisher: Inner Traditions / Bear & Company
Published: 2014-01-30T16:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

INTERLUDE

Susanne Langer believed that language arose from singing—from out-bursts of ecstasy. Language, she insisted, was not an economic invention; it did not arise from “adaptation,” it was not a survival maneuver.

In Thailand, the biologist C. R. Carpenter studied a species of gibbons that sang.1 Carpenter found a cave in a cliffside overlooking one of the huge trees in which a tribe of these long-armed, manlike apes lived. There he set up recording and photography equipment, often only thirty feet from the creatures.

These strong-voiced gibbons have numerous musical calls heard throughout the day, but their morning “unison chorus,” beginning each day, fills the whole forest. At daybreak the gibbons climb from their nesting places in the lower branches and gather in the topmost parts of the tree. There they begin singing on the same pitch, an E on our scale. Periodically and with precision they shift up one half-step at a time, each half-step rise preceded by the original E as a grace note.

As they grow higher on the scale so does the rising sun, and the song increases in a steady crescendo. Finally the tribe reaches the octave above their starting note, and there they enter into a full-throated trill, at which point their bodies quiver in what appears an ecstasy. Then the trill subsides, a hush falls over the forest, and the tribe remains silent before quietly descending from the tree and going about their other rituals of the day.

Let me repeat a little quatrain from William Blake, which I used in Crack:

How do you know but every bird

that wings the airy way,

Is an enormous world of delight,

Closed to your senses five?

Cassirer, one of Susanne Langer’s teachers, considered language to be bound with mythmaking—spontaneous expressions of the great dramas of life, the earth, the sky, the succession of day and night, the seasons, storms, the tides. According to Cassirer, language grew from responses called forth by numinous participation in cosmic acts. Ecstatic outbursts were called forth by overwhelming events and were later recalled as denotative of that event. Symbol formation is always stimulus substitution for concrete events, and mythic symbols grew as expressions standing for divine manifestations. Language ensued.

Orpingalik, the Eskimo, said: “Songs are thoughts, sung out with the breath when people are moved by great forces and ordinary speech no longer suffices. Man is moved just like the ice floe sailing here and there out in the current. His thoughts are driven by a flowing force when he feels joy, when he feels sorrow. Thoughts can wash over him like a flood, making his blood come in gasps and his heart throb . . . it will happen that the words we need will come of themselves. When the words we want to use shoot up of themselves—we get a new song.”2

The Zen Master speaks of “It” breathing one. Inhalation, pneuma, inspiration, prana, the taking in of life, of the god, the participation with the divine—even the words “animal” and “spirit” grow from the word “breath.”

“Let me

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