Fertilization

“Many a page of prose and many a narrative have been devoted to expressing what was, in effect, a sob, a moan, a laugh, or a piercing scream. The written word spells out in sequence what is quick and implicit in the spoken word.” — Marshall McLuhan

In the beginning there was sound cascading through plasma (with peaks that were 400,000 light years apart.) As it cooled it became man, and our ancestors moaned and grunted. A shadow appeared overhead, made the hair on the back of our necks stand up and we used our lungs to pump air past tracheas to vibrate the larynx, creating echoes through the throat, mouth and nose. We did this automatically, without conscious control — and then, eventually, because exercising and governing this muscle to make reconfigurable sounds was advantageous for teaching and learning. We increasingly specialized our soundmaking, developing dictions of what we needed and wanted. And we shouted it in song. What can be shown and sung cannot be said.¹

“I can’t say it like I sing it, I can’t sing it like I think it and I can’t think it like I feel it.”²

The first stories were lullabies, evolving from a primitive hum. We calmed our children and sung to our sick while their lives drained into early graves. There was variation — as we spread from one valley to another; but the oratorios came and adapted with us. We drank with our hands, painted our bodies with earth, strung shells around our necks, carved wood with chipped stone, developed clays, smithed metal and manipulated fibers to increasingly dense soundtracks. We made drums before swords.

The technology of speech divided us from our intuition, augmenting our conscious minds while slightly dulling the reactions in our subconscious spines.

But this was all made from hydrogen and carbon; our mutation into a verbal and then a literate species was organic. We are not capable of the unnatural. But that lassez-faire summary subverts the words we expended so much energy to develop, things we committed to marble. Our gouged characters, morphing from chaos into standardized alphabets, stole nuanced melody and replaced it with precise notes. By the time we were transforming sand into glass we had ablated what had been our sole means of abstract communication — we were able to see through speech into the past and to project ideas into the future without building. Our temples were “mathematics in stone.”³

When I first read McLuhan, some eighteen years after his death, I had trouble. His waves were so strong that they kept pushing me back to shore. I finally got the hang of him in a chapter called The Written Word, and specifically his suggestion that we:

“Suppose that, instead of displaying the Stars and Stripes, we were to write the words “American flag” across a piece of cloth and to display that. While the symbols would convey the same meaning, the effect would be quite different. To translate the rich visual mosaic of the Stars and Stripes into written form would be to deprive it of most of its qualities of corporate image and of experience, yet the abstract literal bond would remain much the same.”⁴

McLuhan uses this to illustrate a change from ‘tribal to literate;’ a change that allows individuals to live without close social groups due to the portability of the written word. I was struggling with more than his vocabulary and grammar when I first read this passage; with various tensions between knowledge and living, hypothesis and synthesis, ideas and objects.⁵ McLuhan took considerable scholastic liberties with his theories — but it wasn’t the truth in a global sense that made them true, it was the way they lined up with the world I experienced.

I cried, heard, watched, sang, talked, walked, read, rode in pretty much the same order as everyone else. But I didn’t crawl. My mother isn’t sure why, and nothing much was ever made of it — because I never had a diagnosed condition where this could be a cause. But my guess is that it has to do with what we can reach in each of these positions. What I wanted most was too high to reach from the floor — so I think I learned to walk because that got me closer to the pacifier and the sugar bowl. I don’t remember the first book I read, but I remember the yellow latex nipple that was in my mouth in the few moments I wasn’t eating or speaking. And because it had been dipped in granulated sucrose, bursts of mania would often grip me within moments after putting it into my mouth in a cycle of suckling, spitting, speaking, screaming, suckling… Sugar is made from beets and cane, sliced and chopped to squeeze out juices, which get boiled down to crystals and molasses in a syrup. As they settle they are spun apart — the white from the brown — with the aid of char from the burned bones of slaughtered animals. The white crystals are dried, some pressed into cubes and packed into boxes that are poured into packets, into baking pans and mixed with almost every modern food. But some is left for the table, with metal spouts, ready to sweeten the already saccharine.

Kaolinite, feldspar, quartz (or other silica bearing materials,) bones, alabaster, mullites and/or other minerals are blunged with water to make a porcelain mud. This slip is poured into a two or more part plaster mold. The excess is dumped out, to be poured in again when the gypsum in the mold draws out the water from the last pour. After the mold is opened, the hollow vessel is removed and fettled with a special knife, allowed to dry and fired into a glass through vitrification. My grandmother’s china sugar bowl was screen printed with blue butterflies.

A worker incises the outer layers of the hevea brasiliensis in a diagonal line (with a curved knife) in the early morning, letting loose a white milk from its laticifers. These common, largely defensive aqueous polymers, flow down the helical score in the bark of the tree into a tapping cup in darkness. These cups fill buckets, buckets fill barrels and barrels fill tanks. Tanks empty into vats, are creamed and made into liquid concentrates that are shipped to become sheets and slabs, to be lakes that ceramic hands and phalluses are dipped into. All this flows into ovens or molds that vulcanize the latex into final forms — most importantly: proxy nipples.

I was her favorite grandchild; something that chafes cousins to this day. I sat in her living room, in an antique school chair, for much of my childhood — reading or drawing. Listening to her husband watch The Price is Right, watching beer cans (clad with latex neoprene insulators) empty. I whined every time my book was boring, my paper was full, or my pacifier was cleaned of its simple carbohydrate. My skinny brother got no such treatment. He wasn’t ignored, he just wasn’t hovered over. Which meant he spent more time outside, practicing hitting balls that he had to run after in the yard. Whenever I ventured out to play with him, I spent more time wondering how a hollow plastic bat was formed with a wood texture, or eventually, how an aluminum bat was extruded with such an odd taper. And how were the graphics applied on a curved surface? And the handle felt solid — it couldn’t be made out of the same blank of material as the bat itself, right? “I’m sick of playing, I’ll be inside” (sucking on sugar.)

Five years after my grandmother died I sat in a dark room, watching an animated college professor point to figurines that were projected from color reverse slides onto a large, white screen in Ford Hall. These handheld stone and ceramic figures transfixed me; not only were they among the first objects to be made that we’ve found, they utterly transformed the materials for purposes that we can only speculate on. Larger pieces of jet, hematite, bone and ivory were reduced to smaller forms. Clay bodies were permanently changed from mud to neostone through heating. And women were turned, through observation and reconstruction, into stupid mutant gods with tiny heads and legs with huge bellys, breasts and vulvas. While some show evidence of having been tied as if made into pendants, or hung on the left sides of huts, many ended up being rubbed with red and yellow earth and destroyed in pits of fire.

The Venus of Dolní Věstonice is the oldest known ceramic object that has been found, and nearly a century after being broken out of its shallow grave in Moravia it was tomographically scanned. As the penetrating waves that bounced off this hard protogod were reconstructed, researchers saw the reverse impressions of human fingers — made by an eleven year old child, who handled it before it was fired about twenty-five thousand years ago.⁶ While the maker’s name and biographical data is unknown, I am fairly sure we had different pre-adolescent experiences of very different worlds. While I was mouthing rubber sugar tits and watching Magnum PI’s Ferrari 308GTS tear up Hawaii, they were practicing magic — making or tending to steroid breasted objects that would bring their people health, abundance and fertility.

We search. But not knowing, taking the risk of finding fault, is the point. Discovering laws that aren’t and investing them into the wrong forms is far likelier than crafting the right. And this keeps our economy of errors constantly expanding. “It’s wanting to know that makes us matter.⁷ ”