There’s an Egyptian myth that Thoth was bragging to Ra that he was teaching humans to write. Ra just laughed and told him he would be destroying human memory in the process. Since Thoth was, among other things, the Moon God and Ra was the Sun God, it could have partly been a power struggle. You know how those deities are.
Writing didn’t completely destroy human memory, but it’s true that there aren’t a whole lot of folks these days who can recite the story of the Trojan War without missing a beat, let alone memorize the Gettysburg address.
Other creation myths about memory and writing make Ra look like a buzz kill. In those cultures, writing was as much a helpful add-on to memory as a destroyer. In Mesopotamia, two kings were trying to send messages back and forth but the messenger kept forgetting them, so one of the kings figured out how to use pictures (cuneiform) to write in clay.
Early writing was also developed as a tool for divination. The Chinese emperor Fuxi—who was depicted as half man half snake—was inspired by markings on the back of a tortoise to create the I Ching.
The Norse god Odin was so determined to create his own divination language that he hanged himself upside down from a tree for nine days and nights. At some point, the runes were revealed to him and, after he got over a wicked case of vertigo, he wrote them down.
The Roman two-faced God Janus gets credit in ancient Rome for helping create writing because he looks in both directions past and future. I like that idea. Unless there’s nothing happening in either your frontal or occipital lobes. Which is commonly known as writer’s block.
I always figured if you had writer’s block, you just didn’t have anything to say. Better to go for a walk, work out, have a cup of coffee with a friend, or learn how to say “writer’s block” in different languages. Like French: le syndrôme de la page blanche; or Spanish: bloqueo de escritor; maybe Italian: blocco dello scrittore; or, as Hans Christian Anderson would say: schrijversblok. And it’s not simply a Western experience. Even pictographic languages like Arabic, Chinese, and Sanscrit have elegant ways of expressing writer’s block. Thoth must have occasionally gotten محل إقامة الكتاب when he couldn’t figure out how to talk back to Ra. I’m sure Confucius experienced 作家块 when he couldn’t figure out what he wanted to say. And Patanjali undoubtedly got tied up in knots, or, as he would put it, लेखकखण्ड, when trying to figure out how best to describe the tripod handstand with lotus legs in his yoga sutras. (You know you have writer’s block when you start looking up how to say it in Sanscrit…)
In a pinch, you can always make offerings to the Greek muses to get past writer’s block—particularly Calliope, whose voice alone was said to be ecstatic.
I don’t think there’s anything particularly ecstatic about the crazed smile on an emoji. I don’t like emojis. I don’t use them except in extreme situations, and then only sarcastically. The fact that I don’t use them makes me feel old-fashioned. And, occasionally just old—since it’s hard to see the facial expressions on my iPhone when I don’t have my glasses.
But actually, emojis are a giant leap backward. Sure, a hundred or so facial expressions have now evolved from the original smiley face (who I always think is laughing at me.) But, since there’s no way that 8 billion earthlings could cram their feelings into just 100 symbols, people are starting to combine multiple emojis to express their emotions. Before you know it, they’ll be using strings of emojis to write whole phrases and then sentences and then paragraphs, and, eventually, they may have to develop more sophisticated representational pictograms or even, uh, letters.
I’ve been working on this piece for about a week, not sure what I’m really trying to say. So I went out to find my allegedly homeless friend Kenny. Not to be elitist or anything, but since Kenny graduated from one of the most elite high schools in Boston and elite colleges in Massachusetts, he not only has admirable street smarts, but he’s also overflowing with intriguing facts and theories.
Kenny is not homeless. He sleeps in abandoned buildings by choice. He has also been diagnosed with Complex PTSD, Substance Use Disorder, psychosis, and other gems from the DSM-V. All of which are pretty irrelevant since he enjoys his days, helps take care of truly homeless people and doesn’t hurt himself or anyone else (except for the occasional misdemeanor). In my book, that is the very definition of sanity.
Admittedly, during some of his more manic monologues, Kenny has trouble staying on topic. But, I figure this is to be expected from someone who, while getting a traditional academic education, was doing peyote, hanging out with the Dalai Lama, and babysitting Uma Thurman. (I’m pretty sure that’s true.)
Kenny writes a lot. So I asked him if he ever has writer’s block. He looked at me with a kind of manic quizzicalness (show me an emoji that conveys that!) and said he has to write. Otherwise, he told me, he’d explode.
I wonder what Ra would say to Kenny. And, more importantly, what Kenny would say to him.
Note: I played a little fast and loose with my mythology and linguistics here. Don’t hesitate to correct anything I got wrong.
I'll tell Kenny you said that. He would definitely agree. In fact he's told me exactly that many times and thrown in some Tibetan phrases with appropriate guttural intonation to prove it.
Took me a week to get to this one, but I'm so glad I left it in my inbox to come back to. Great imagery as always, and what I'm taking as an admonishment to think before tagging an emoji at the end of every message. Thank you for that, it's an appropriate practice to undertake.