“Language was born all at once. . . After a transformation . . . a change has taken place, from a stage where nothing had meaning to a stage where everything had.”
Claude Lévi-Strauss
I wrote this long mock-epic poem in 1979-80, after reading the sentences (above) from Claude Levi-Strauss that serve as its epigraph. I started to imagine what it must have felt like to have language erupt in its totality that way inside an individual head and then followed that head through history in its chronically failed attempts to either tame language or get it to do something durable for the human spirit.
Here is a PDF of that series, which is also available in paperback and Kindle versions via my amazon author’s page.