On poetry and weeping

This paper is an attempt to think about the language of poetry and its relation to loss and weeping. For the language of the poem, as I understand it, is the language of the body-self and of dreaming. It is the oldest language. In every race and culture, before the advent of the written word, stories were passed on not in linear prose narratives but in rhythmical forms that were chanted rather than spoken. Considering the time that has passed since our species evolved, the alphabet is a very recent invention. Prose as a developed form of communication is even more recent, in European and Semitic cultures perhaps 2500-3000 years old. Julian Jaynes has argued that consciousness itself (the awareness that there is an ‘I’ that is separate from ‘you’, that lies at the centre of one's narrative) is a recent development in human history, appearing only during the first millennium BC.

Prior to this, he theorizes, people heard the voices of their gods, their rulers and their dead ancestors as hallucinations that guided their actions. He draws an example of this from the characters of Homer's Iliad who

do not sit down and think out what they do. They have no conscious minds such as we say we have, and certainly no introspections. It is impossible for us with our subjectivity to appreciate what it was like. When Agamemnon, king of men, robs Achilles of his mistress, it is a god that grasps Achilles by

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his yellow hair and warns him not to strike Agamemnon. It is a god who then rises out of the grey sea and consoles him in his tears of wrath on the beach by his black ships, a god who whispers low to Helen to sweep her heart with homesick longing, a god who hides Paris in a mist in front of the attacking Menelaus, a god who tells Glaucus to take bronze for gold, a god who leads the armies into battle, who speaks to each soldier at the turning points, who debates and teaches Hector what he must do, who urges the soldiers on or defeats them by casting them in spells or drawing mist