
(WMSCD03):
Once upon a
time, there was no
snake, there was no
scorpion,
There was no hyena,
there was no lion,
There was no wild
dog, no wolf,
There was no fear, no
terror,
Man had no rival.
In those days, the
land Shubur-Hamazi,
Harmony-tongued
Sumer, the great land
of the me of princeship,
Uri, the land having
all that is appropriate,
The land Martu,
resting in security,
The whole universe,
the people well cared for,
To Enlil in one
tongue gave speech.
Then the lord defiant, the prince
defiant, the king defiant,
Enki, the lord of abundance, whose commands
are
trustworthy,
The lord of wisdom, who
scans the land,
The leader of the gods,
The lord of Eridu, endowed with wisdom,
Changed the speech in their mouths, put
contention into it,
Into the speech of man that had been one.
I have quoted this
from
Neal
Stephenson's _Snow Crash_ (216-7).
Stephenson obtained it from Samuel Noah Kramer and John R.
Maier's Myths of Enki, the Crafty God (New York, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1989.) In
Snow Crash, a
sinister industrialist has obtained and translated ancient
nam-shubs and is using them to wreak linguistic havoc in the
modern world.
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The nam-shubs suggest a
magical theory of
language, in which the only kind of
utterance that can cause the breakdown of language is one which
also happens to talk about the breakdown of language. In other
words, the surface meaning of the incantation is crucial to its
deep effect.
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Why? Some indication
can be found in Hofstader's discussion of the USE-MENTION
dichotomy in
information
theory.
It is interesting that
many stories about lethal texts and/or linguistic viruses
invoke ancient mythology, as if the ancients knew things about
language which have been forgotten in the modern world. _Snow
Crash_ posits that Sumerian nam-shubs are being used to wreak
linguistic havoc in the modern world. Macroscope has a
character who has the "gift of
tongues," and takes its protagonist,
Ivo Archer, back to Mesopotamian times. Julian Jaynes, in _The
Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral
Mind_, posits that new kind of "unicameral"
consciousness
swept like a virus through the ancient world, destroying what
had been a kind of Edenic innocence, and cites, as evidence,
Sumerian inscriptions which sound much like nam-shubs.
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Snow Crash by Neal
Stephenson
The object called "Snow Crash" is a computer program that, when activated, displays a pattern of dots to its user. It appears to be meaningless, but like the destroyer signal in Macroscope, it has the devastating effect of destroying the user's mind.
The Snow Crash code is
a lethal text. Snow Crash goes into the theory of lethal texts
in detail, defining them as "speech with
magical
force." Another character, the
Librarian, explains that the Sumerians developed what they
called "nam-shubs", incantations which destroyed the ability
of their hearers to understand language. These nam-shubs
existed on a curiously dual level, analogous to the
USE-MENTION dichotomy well known in molecular biology and
information theory. They were stories of the the destruction
of language which had the effect of destroying language. To
hear the story--the nam-shub--forced the listener to
experience the effect it described.
In Snow Crash, these ancient nam-shubs are
being excavated, translated, and used by L. Bob Rife, a sinister
industrialist with plans of world domination. He is using
variants of them to reduce large numbers of the population to
docility, and to kill off the computer
hackers who might be able to oppose
them.
In those it does not
kill, the Sumerian nam-shubs have an interesting effect. It
makes them prone to
glossolalia,
or speaking in tongues. Speaking in tongues is a neurological
phenomenon which is exploited by religion. Snow Crash further
posits that glossolalia recovers a now-lost ur-language, the
language which supposedly existed prior to Babel. In the world
of Snow Crash, that language is Sumerian, which is in fact the
oldest written language, and has no known descendants. Like
the Babylonian ur-language, Sumerian disappeared without a
trace. The novel suggests that it disappeared as a consequence
of the nam-shubs, which spread through the population like a
virus and destroyed its linguistic unity.
The parallels between
Snow Crash and Macroscope fascinate me. Both are about lethal
texts. Both are about informational spaces: Snow Crash takes
place in cyberspace, Macroscope revolves about a
galactic
library
that is described in terms astonishingly prescient of the
World Wide Web. Both are deeply concerned with the politics of
information. Both incorporate glossolalia and Mesopotamian
myth as plot elements. Both invoke the Babel myth and the myth
of a pre-Babelian ur-language: in Snow Crash it is Sumerian,
in Macroscope it is the galactic symbology. Both are deeply
absorbing novels about language, information, and ideas.
Articles by Mike
Chorost
How can an utterance -- a thought -- take
over the mind? Here is where Stephenson adapts a theory of
consciousness invented by Julian
Jaynes. In his book "The Origin of Consciousness in the
Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind," Jaynes argues that early man
was not conscious in the modern sense, i.e. lacked
self-awareness and could not think of oneself as an independent,
self-willed "I." Instead, the right brain formulated ideas and
plans, which were
perceived
by the left brain as literal voices emanating from outside
oneself. In effect, Jaynes says, early man hallucinated
constantly, living his life by obeying voices. This is where the
gods came from. Each person's god accompanied him constantly
through life, always telling him what to do.
What is there to
recommend such a bizarre theory? For one thing, Jaynes points
out, it explains the preponderance of living, speaking gods in
Sumerian and Assyrian texts, and in the Bible and the
Odyssey. Early man
wrote about gods because they were a factual, daily part of
his life. Jaynes also draws from studies of modern
schizophrenics,
whom he argues are simply regressions to ancient forms of
consciousness, and various neurological studies of left and
right-brainedness.
Where did the gods go? Jaynes argues that a series of catastrophes and contacts with other cultures forced human beings to integrate the left and right brains and become self-aware, self-willed beings in order to cope with the increasing complexity of the world.
Here is where Stephenson departs from Jaynes. Stephenson suggests that modern consciousness was forced into existence by Enki, the ruler of ancient Sumer. Enki understood his contemporaries' bifurcated minds so well that he was able to devise an incantation whose effect was to force them into consciousness. This, Stephenson suggests, is the historical event of Babel. Before Enki uttered his incantation, everyone spoke the primordial language of the brain, a language which is inborn and does not have to be learned. (By way of a very weak analogy, think of dog language.) Enki's incantation cut its hearers off from the primordial language, and thereafter human languages began to diverge and multiply.
L. Bob Rife has located the incantation -- the nam-shub -- of Enki on an archaeological dig, and has reversed it, using it to return people to the form of consciousness human beings had 6,000 years ago.
This is where the "babble" of Snow Crash comes in. The reason David, and the pirates, and the many other victims of "Snow Crash," speak in bizarre strings of syllables is because it is the primordial language of the brain, which they are once again able to access. Their own thoughts, once internalized, now appear to them as hallucinations -- literal voices from outside, which they obey without question. Pentecostalism, in Stephenson's interpretation, is a spiritual method of accessing the primordial language, by way of "speaking in tongues." Rife has appropriated Pentecostalism, using it as yet another route to spread the "Snow Crash" virus. Of course, L. Bob Rife's goals are entirely unspiritual. He plans to use the primordial language to give his Snow Crashed zombies their marching orders.
The actual scientific evidence for such a
"primordial" language is not very strong. The linguist Noam
Chomsky famously proposed that all human languages can be
reduced to a basic "deep structure" rooted in the physiology of
the brain, and Stephenson is clearly influenced by this idea.
Virtually all neurologists and cognitive scientists would snort
at the proposition that this "deep structure" could actually be
spoken aloud in a language that everyone would understand,
regardless of their native
tongue. Few of Stephenson's ideas are
accepted scientific theories. But Stephenson's main goal is to
engage in interesting speculation, not to adhere to scientific
doctrine. Snow Crash is
science fiction, fiction
inspired by scientific ideas.
Stephenson's synthesis
of a number of ideas and cultural concepts -- Jaynes'
bicameralism, Chomskyan deep structure, Pentecostalist
speaking in tongues, Sumerian mythology, the Babel legend, and
computer viruses, all in the context of slam-bang
cyberpunk social
satire -- can safely be called brilliant.
Consider Julian
Dibbell's assertion that life in the computer age is
increasingly ruled by "the logic of the incantation." In
cyberspace, words literally make things happen. (In a MOO one
can say, in computer code, "Create a room," and it will
happen.) In your papers on the Mr. Bungle incident, most of
you argued that words spoken in a MOO have no direct effect on
real life. But what if you had "Snow Crash"? Then you could
speak some syllables to a character you met online, and the
real-life person behind it would be frozen before the
computer, either dead or enslaved to your will.
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604 track _Mystic
Linguistic_ MP3
by
Quirk off of _Machina
Electrica & Fornax Chemica_ 12"x2
on
Matsuri Productions (1998)