For the past few days I am struck with the idea that language is the misbehaving remnant of contact with nonordinary (i.e. nonhuman) intelligence. I suspect that such contact was common during the cognitive development of our species. What we know as language could be the badly distorted remains of something that was previously an efficient and powerful element within a nonverbal communications transport providing contact with some form of advanced intelligence.

When the transmissions from the associated intelligence began to fade, perhaps because our relation with the transport restructured us in its image, the broken remains of the transport became the baby-talk of our ancestors as they vainly attempted to recomprise the celestial intelligence they had previously experienced with it. But this was impossible. The remains were actually dangerous. In the absence of the organizing intelligence, language would become transpsygenic, carrying us with it through the chaotic abstractive devolutions that are the natural result of the loss of the originating context.

Strangely, however, language may still have the original capacity to re-establish the signal transport. For the moment, the vehicle is largely riding the passenger. We serve language. But in the presence of the originating context, language would suddenly become something extraordinary. A kind of alien intelligence that would guide our minds toward heuristic opportunities like the angel of a divine library. We have never had such experience and can barely imagine it, but language was not always dead. And, I think, it is ‘a broken radio’…