A serious and inescapable magic is perpetrated by words. Strange, this. Lifetimes of physical labor produce cathedrals, monuments, paintings in which apocalypses and creations are recapitulated endlessly and eternally, clever and immortal devices: none of these possess even a fraction of the power over death, time, and the infinite distance between souls (if one may use that word to mean humans as they know themselves to be) that words regularly and violently exercise.

There are of course several schools of thought as to their origin. Evolutionary speculation concludes that they arose from primitive indicators of fear, disgust, terror, surprise, and interest, their adaptive value consisting of the way in which they can smooth and regulate interactions between intelligent, adaptive, and undeniably dangerous Others. The more metaphyically minded, which is to say the vast majority of humankind—with whom we retain the contact of written historical record—viewed speech as a divine faculty ultimately essential to the teleos of humanity as individuals and members of the polis. Even among the mystics there is considerable disagreement, however, as to whether words are primarily analytical or creative; there is a substantially critical difference between the more modern position (deriving from Hobbes, among others) that treats words as normative signifiers of ultimately physical realities, and the ancient and difficult proposition that words themselves possess reality, indeed, a reality less contingent than the physical world.

A simple example suffices: Hobbes held that language was first exercised by Adam (or his evolved equivalent) when he named the animals. That is, Adam created categories, more or less formal, which permitted him to know the shape and structure of the world around him by grouping animals with similar features into classes which could then be examined in the absense of the animals themselves. Typical Enlightenment hubris, and the manifesto of a “geometrical” science that thankfully has been tempered by the triumphs of experimental science. As anyone who has read Genesis will realize, the counter-example is the fiat lux which, by temporal as well as logical necessity, had to precede any such naming. In this case the name for the thing precedes the thing, and though modern thought tends to dwell upon the fact that humans wrote the creation account with the same words that are used to name the animals, the Hebraic position is nonetheless clear from the text, and survives in the legend of the golem: the word creates.

An even stranger magic results when the word is written down. Follow the story of Genesis to the Ten Commandments to find the first point at which the word must be written. Tiger creates, in the mind, the image and form of the tiger. The word is appropriate to the creature, which is to say that it partakes in its nature. One imagines that anyone who observed the creature long and carefully enough would pick the word tiger for it, or tigre, and as such, the word never needs to be written down in order to obtain. But the law is very much a new creation, and its action depends upon the specific words used to construct it. Consequently it has to be permanent. If words have power over nature, writing has power over human affairs: it can construct relationships of ownership, obligation, and identity. All by virtue of its physicality.

One wonders, then, if the use of electronic media for almost every purpose once commanded entirely by writing, does not represent a new stage in the history of the word, consonant with the unshakeable suspicion of the last couple of centuries that communication of any kind is an utter vapor, endlessly fungible, and at best a commodity.