COMMONALITIES
I’ve now told two sweeping stories. The first set on islands, filled with unresolved enigmas and freely drawn borders, no more definite than those of the islands themselves, whose forms change according to the whims of the wind and water. A story filled not only with secret but with wonder, and the hope and excitement for all that we’ll one day discover. The potential of decipherment. Then there’s our second story, more closely tied to cities, to empires, to government and celebration. Two grand stories, whose protagonist, writing, is not always so indispensable. Though it’s a character that, once invented, becomes magically necessary, and allows the society that adopts it to make a quantum leap forward. At times it takes on its role reluctantly, as a kind of Zelig, and gains depth only as it settles into the part. It just needs a good director, someone to give it space, to let it find its voice.
With the exception of Chinese, the scripts we’ve looked at so far are done for, dead. Cuneiform lasted nearly four thousand years, Egyptian three thousand and it was gone. With Mayan it’s harder to say, somewhere around two thousand years, and the script would have certainly lasted longer had not the conquistadors arrived to wipe the slate clean. Thousands of years of usage, transmission, diffusion. For the island scripts, life was even shorter, but they wore their centuries well. And even though social complexity can live and endure without writing, the city or state’s thirst for control is a powerful catalyst in ensuring its longevity. Writing systems flourish when they’re channeled toward a common aim, when their potential appreciates over time, when they sense a reason for their existence. Invention lies in optimizing your discovery.
Which is why we must think of invention as a process of gradual, layered formation, from the spark of wordplay to the creation of a complete catalogue of signs, an agreed-upon set that can be passed down from generation to generation: in short, a multistep trajectory from discovery to invention. We shouldn’t be surprised, then, that all paths of development for new writing systems follow very similar formative trajectories. And here you have them.
1. ICONICITY: All of the earliest, foundational scripts arise from a set of figurative signs that depict “things” from the natural world, or from that particular culture. Levels of stylization vary, but iconicity is always present, and in some cases, as in Mayan and Egyptian, it endures for centuries. Art seems to function as the springboard for a script’s invention: repeated icons, a coherent narrative, storytelling—these are the first steps toward putting sound to paper, so to speak. The pathways aren’t always identical, and I don’t want to simplify things too much, but the underlying iconic structure is always there. And it’s an unwritten law that, in the early days of a script, the logograms will change from icons to symbols and they’ll never go back or move in the opposite direction. An irreversible passage—entropic, almost.
2. SYLLABLE: Syllables are the natural armor of sounds. All early writing systems operate on a syllabic structure.* For Sumerian and Chinese this is dogma, given the vast amount of monosyllabic words in their vocabularies. Syllable = word = sign. Though, as we’ve seen, this aspect may be less linguistic than it is “biological.” For evidence, just look to some of the more recently invented scripts (even if they’re secondary inventions, that is, with minor outside influences) such as Bamum in Cameroon, Cherokee in North America, Woleai in the Caroline Islands, Afaka in Suriname. All syllabic systems. The syllable is our most salient unit of sound, our most spontaneous, holistic utterance. If you don’t believe me, start reciting the alphabet out loud: a, b, c, d. Keep going, now, syllable by syllable.
3. LIMITED SYNTAX: And finally, as we know, things happen gradually. At least in the case of gradual inventions, those that we can reconstruct from their very beginnings, from the first written word, like cuneiform and Egyptian. It starts as a trickle, not as a torrent of epic poetry or scientific treatises. We see timid approaches at linguistic notation, painstaking progress, portholes into the world of spoken language, lists of words, inventories, labels. Few verbs, minimal syntax. Incompleteness, limited functionality. But herein lies the beauty: recognizing the potential of these attempts and creating strategies to expand them. To record a verb or an abstract noun requires first a rebus, then a syllable. To build a complete catalogue of sign-sounds takes adjusting, cutting, adding, repeating, starting over, defining, disambiguating. A kind of dressmaking for scripts. In other words, we aren’t born with it.
DIDEROT
What we shouldn’t do, in thinking about these three aspects, is start talking of them as universal qualities of writing. They’re three structural commonalities, nothing more. No need to go about systematizing, creating laws, paving over the unique characteristics. Instead, we must remain faithful to the idea expressed a few pages back and resist the taxonomic temptation to classify everything, to generalize every tendency. There’s a reason we went about busting the myth of the all-imposing Leviathan state and reconsidering the concept of necessity, which is often, and misguidedly, linked to the invention of writing. We must continue to view invention as something intrinsically free, spontaneous, and natural, something born from the drive for novelty, not from necessity.
Without novelty, in fact, without the hunt for the new, we wouldn’t be human beings. This is what our brains are programmed for, that feeling of freshness that new things give us. It’s the same feeling you get when you see a glittering dress in the shop window, or a book that’s just come out, or a shiny new car. You want it not because you need it, but because the hunt alone sets your blood beating. (Well, maybe we do need the book.)
The part of your brain that’s involved in this process is called the substantia nigra, located in the midbrain, near the hippocampus and the amygdala, which play an important role in learning and memory. When we’re exposed to something new, something never before seen, this region lights up and we even get a hit of dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with new stimuli and the perception of gratification (and with drugs like cocaine).
Dopamine, however, does not provide us with gratification; it merely gives us the motivation to seek it out. It stimulates us, pushes us, but it doesn’t provide any instant payoff. It urges us to explore, in the anticipation of a reward. Each new stimulus gives us a reason to search, to discover more, to learn more. Indeed, the entire process is linked to learning: the more new information we expose our brains to, the more flexible the hippocampus grows. The more data we amass, the better adapted we are to the world. In evolutionary terms, this ability is essential to our survival.
And not only. It helps with a few bonus things, too, like writing, or the wheel, or TV. Without new experiences, we could never create anything new. We would lack creativity. With no impulse toward novelty there would be no discovery. It seems obvious, but it isn’t. It’s biological. A chemical trap with its ups and downs, to which we are humble servants. As Diderot’s famous dressing gown taught us.* And yet without this trap, without this servitude, there would be no inventions.