There Was A Language Before We Came Poem by Mary Angela Douglas

I love this notion of a language that preceded us HOMO SAPIENS and our human languages. But unlike our language of semantics, syntax and rhetoric, this language is not so much a tool for communication as it is a series of relationships between things: gold, rain, mists, wood and other things blend mysteriously in a preconversation characterized not by words exchanged and meanings shared but rather snow, so transient, in contact with gems, so lasting, but somehow they find common ground like the 750,000 alien words which all occupy our beloved ENGLISH. But then the speaker gets frightened by the strange wonder of what came before her speech and fantasizes it as hostile, rapacious, and the poem's wonders are shut down abruptly. // But I sense something else beneath this poem, having nothing to do with the immediate subject matter.That is, we humans live within a Great Mystery and since we cannot see its contours and have no knowledge of its dimensions, we are ignorant of what contains us, and yet we p-a-r-t-i-c-i-p-a-t-e within this enclosure as a vital part of it. Hmm, it's as if I were to say, I DON'T REALLY KNOW MY BROTHER, HE'S VERY DIFFERENT FROM ME, HE ACTS STRANGELY SOMETIMES, HE CONFUSES ME... BUT I LOVE HIM DEARLY. Yes, we live in something that is partly us and partly something separate and alien. And we love it as our home.