The written word as the abstraction of meaning and the beginning of history.

In the most ancient cultures there are almost always a holy man, maybe someone that was a bit of a crazy. Someone who could see past the boundary of the thinking of the culture to the horizon. They always did this in the terms and context of their culture, but always motioning at the possibilities beyond the actualities of their culture. With writing the dynamic openness of the holy man becomes closed. His interaction with the tribe is codified and written down. The idea my be preservative, but what is valuable about the holy man isn't what he says, it is the fact that he speaks beyond the context of the life of the culture. Yet once written down the words can only be a part of the settled culture, no longer do these words open us up to the limitless horizon, instead they show us the walls in which we already dwell.

Going over many details, this is the beginning of decay for life. Life needs constant newness to stay vital. As the letter takes over out lives, no longer do we live in nature, constantly mystifying and refreshing, we live in the stagnation of settled and explained history. Insofar as we live in a history we live in a construction, a jail of our own words. The natural use of metaphors to point beyond falls into a dogma or a world view that is no longer beyond pointing at all.

Without writing language is personal, we try so hard to preserve it now in text, but it is already fallen.