The Glory of Communication A humorous literary article |
Let's begin with Unkh and Thwald, two clueless, anthropological stalwarts from the Cro Magnon past, blissfully ignorant of nearly everything except females. Our heroes blithely pursue potential lunch on a new path when Unkh inadvertently stumbles on a rock and cracks his head against a fallen tree. THWACK "Forsooth," sayeth Thwald. "Methinks thy head serveth well to calleth brethren to attention from a great distance." Unkh's lone eyebrow furls with mystified preponderance. Further investigation, caused by their not being able to reproduce the sound by smacking Unkh's head repeatedly with heavy implements, produces naught but frustration. Later, after explaining the marvel to their cave chippies, one bright cleave runs to the spot with a prized thighbone and smashes it into the hollow log, the whole tribe having followed. THWACK "Yayeth," spake all. "The possibilities abound." "One thwack could signal approaching danger," sayeth Thwald, conceiving the firtht alarm system. "Two mayeth indicate dinner," suggested Unkh, forecasting the microwave oven. Whereby the tribe commenced to postulate hundreds of other uses, ending only when the volcano exploded and caught them all in a fortunate lava flow. Then there was ancient Sumer, the first known society to have experimented with rudimentary writing, eliminating stuttered speech. Living as they did along the Euphrates, they invented many singularly useless crafts, some of which have since become widely adopted, among them the manufacture of textiles for simple garments, thereby being the first to experience the wedgie. Naturally, being surrounded by so much stimulation, it occurred to one intrepid observer to record his views, thus inventing cuneiform. Not to be outdone, the oldest civilization of the Nile developed a system of their own called glyphs, lining up hundreds of naked people along the river to form unique symbols with their bodies to spell out messages for those living far away. Some of the figures were pure genius, especially the perpendicular ones. Unfortunately, many of the participants got extremely tired running all those hundreds of miles to deliver things like birthday cards. Also, some of letter people had very strange heads. Ergo, the first artists were commissioned to carve the messages in stone, later to paint them on papyrus, the first storage, retrieval system and the most useful way to lie to posterity. Of course, the Chinese felt neglected and responded with their system. Rather than go for letters, they chose unique symbols, each of which was a message by itself; thousands of them, making the alphabet rather tricky for elementary school. To simplify things, they invented queue stacking, whereby the letters were piled above and below each other in vertical trees. These were imported to the Pacific Islands, where roundish arrangements were tried (boustrapoedic) thereby inventing circular logic for politicians. That was where things stood for many years until the Aramaens entered the picture and came up with our modern alphabet. From that point, fabrication, which had been a temporary thing, grew enormously. It reached a high point with the Gutenberg brothers who realized the enormous profit available if the most confusing book ever written could be produced for the masses. Forthwith, everyone got in on the act and added illustrations, covers, jacket blurbs, quotations, reviews, testaments, acknowledgments, dedications, prologues, epilogues, addendums, indexes, tables, footnotes, errata and images in such a unique array of confusing false information that no one has any idea what they are reading. Obviously, to exploit this new and better way of communicating balderdash to innocents, we had to have agents, publicists, distributors, warehouses, promos, advertising, billboards, salesmen, over-the-counter scenarios, bookstores, black markets, slush piles, waste baskets, shredders and a whole bunch of trees, not to mention octopuses. Again, everything changed with the information super-rut, the web. Whole novels and encyclopedias travel phone lines to reach computer servers where they are stored until the next major power outage, unless they have a UPS; or simply by having one's motherboard or power supply explode; or until they are invaded by viruses and worms invented by people communicating their postal proclivities for attention. Which is what it's all about in the first place, isn't it, getting someone's attention? Maybe we should try something else. W. A. Rieser |
