Lest we say it, a half-million years ago, before the advent of language beyond a grunt, a shout, a scream or sigh—the artificial abomination of ghosts and gods not even considered for we had no words to invent them—we charged swift with nature across the veldts or savannahs or grasslands, emboldened by muscle and hunger and bone, to chase and hunt, spears raised high above our shaggy heads, the sun fierce against our backs, ourselves and our prey one with the world for there was no other world we might know.
If we were to travel back in time knowing what we know now, we would not see that world, experience that world, embrace or respect or celebrate that world, because we have been poisoned by language, perverted by words, profaned by the preambling definitions of things that in reality have no definition; if we were to throw off our shirts and skirts and trousers and shoes, and dip our fingers in the mud and blood, and rouge our faces with warpaint and gore, and kick up our feet and hoop and holler, we would only be re-enacting scenes from movies we saw as children, positions on a yoga mat, tableaus in museums, pretending savagery and affecting wildness for the sake of drama; if we could somehow disremember toothpaste and toilet paper, tampons and tranquilizers, little dogs in diamond-studded collars, collagen injections, condoms, iPods, and somehow overlook a world untouched by glass and steel and concrete and plastic, go on to forget chickens in coops and pigs in pens, meals prepackaged in polystyrene and polyethylene, Big Macs, Starbuck’s, and Grand Slam Breakfasts, we would wonder wearily when the world had become so bland, our environment so blasé, providing us only with rivers and mountains and oceans and trees; if we were to return to the basic of basics and cast aside all the fables chambered inside rotundas and cathedrals, libraries and repositories, and speak with but one tongue in the chittering lyric of faunae and not that of man, we could still not unfasten the disfigurements and scars impressed upon us by sermons and speeches or soothe away the strap-marks or assuage the bruises—unless we opened our eyes and came to see that all these are artificial since all words are artificial. There is nothing in nature, naught in the real world, the world of flesh and bone and matter and physics, that requires spoken words or written words in order to exist. Only words can make visible ghosts. In the absence of language we are all atheists.
It is impossible to imagine religion, any religion, existing without language. Religion is a product of words and is nowhere found in nature. Without resorting to language we will live out our entire lives without once encountering anything claimed by religion, no angels, devils, spirits, or miracles. In silence Nature is all we can know, might know, can ever know. God, you see, is only a word.
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