I once read a book called The Garden and the Tower. It is an obscure literature, written by a priest-cum-linguist Jew by the name of Peter Stillman. Rumor has it that the book is now out of print, and no attempts have been made to reprint the book. I am lucky enough to find a copy in a used book store near my house.
In his one and only book, Stillman argued that the Fall of Man is the turning point for the development of human language. The Fall of Man is the event when Adam and Eve is discharged and forbidden to set their feet ever again on the blessed soil of Eden. His examination relied heavily on John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It is an 17th-century epic poem that is divided into ten books. The poem chronicles the journey of Adam and Eve from their birth to their dismissal from the Eden. In his analysis, Stillman focused on the line it was out of the rind of one apple tasted that good and evil leapts forth into the world, like two twins cleaving together.
What fascinated Stillman was the word cleave. In linguistic terms, the word cleave is inherently paradox. It has two contradictory meanings: to join together and to break apart. For Stillman, this paradox reveals the contradictory nature of the whole book. Each key word in Paradise Lost has two meanings: one before and one after the fall. The former is characterized by its freedom from moral connotations, while the latter is distinct by its awareness of knowledge of evil. Therefore, it was only after the Fall that mankind as we know it came into being. For if there was no evil in the Garden, neither was there any good. Language before the Fall, as claimed by Stillman, is the purest thing human ever invented.
Based on his findings, Stillman concluded that Adam’s real task in the garden had been to invent language. Born into a world of purely divine creation, Adam was basically an innocent being. His mind is nothing but a blank sheet of paper. In that state of innocence, his words had revealed the essences of things. In naming things, Adam was not troubled by knowledge and moral consciousness, because he knew nothing. He spoke only what he desired. The first sensation he felt became the name of things that gave him the sensation. In short: before the Fall, one word was only good for one thing. There were no such things as double meanings.
The purity however did not last long. Devil came into play and through his intervention, the first humans evolved into knowing beings. Knowledge bred suspicion, and suspicion bred shame and disgust. Adam and Eve began to rationalize things around them, and failed to see things as they used to do before the Fall. Their body sans clothes became their first source of shame. Before the Fall, nakedness was fine because human had not been plagued by morality. After the Fall, this was no longer true.
The story therefore records not only the Fall of Man, but the Fall of Language. Knowledge became the knife humans use to detach names from things. A word now could easily lead to different layer of meanings, according to its uses and gratification. For Stillman, this brokenness of language is most apparent during the Tower of Babel episode. The tale is the last prehistoric incident in the Bible. The tower was built by a united mankind of one language and speech. Men at that time desired to be the equal of God by building a tower high enough to poke the heavens. This desire enraged God. As divine punishment, one third of the tower sank into the ground and another third ravaged by fire. The survivors were cursed by the spell of forgetting. Whoever looked back upon the ruins of the tower would forget everything. Many looked back and lost their language.
Stillman claimed that the damage is irreversible. For a long time people have been creating new words, words that never belong to the vocabulary of the first humans. The only way to undo the fall is to undo the Fall of Language. Stillman assumed that one must recover the state of innocence within, either through divine interventions or metaphysical means, then one could learn to speak the original language of innocence again. However, until the end of his life, Stillman never really found out how such state could be reached.
For his failed attempt in finding the wayback to the state of innocence, Stillman left a gloomy note for us: Our freedom is a joke. We will be free once we have died from the shackles of language and measurable time.
—A shaggy dog tale, that I wrote after watching PERSONA (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
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