1.6 The Greek Alphabet Part Two: Mcluhan's Thoughts and the Power and Magic of Words

“I shall not recite the hardships of my toil. More than once I cried out to the vault that it was impossible to decipher that text. Gradually, the concrete enigma I labored at disturbed me less than the generic enigma of a sentence written by a god. What type of sentence (I asked myself) will an absolute mind construct? I considered that even in the human languages there is no proposition that does not imply the entire universe; to say *the tiger* is to say the tigers that begot it, the deer and turtles devoured by it, the grass on which the deer fed, the earth that was mother to the grass, the heaven that gave birth to the earth. I considered that in the language of a god every word would enunciate that infinite concatenation of facts, and not in an implicit but in an explicit manner, and not progressively but instantaneously. in time, the notion of a divine sentence seemed puerile or blasphemous. A god, I reflected, ought to utter only a single word and in that word absolute fullness. No word uttered by him can be inferior to the universe or less than the sum total of time. Shadows or simulacra of that single word equivalent to a language and to all a language can embrace are the poor and ambitious human words, *all*, *world*, *universe*.”

-Jorge Luis Borges, The God’s Script (1949)

"This notion ought to trouble you very little, since your philosophy together with ancient authors mentioned by Theophrastus, plainly holds that all sense is touch, a doctrine I most easily admit as true."

-Henry More, in a letter to Descartes (December 11, 1648)

“God: the mind that generates an utterance prolonged continually.”

-Liber XXIV Philosophorum (The Book of the 24 Philosophers) (~12th century, maybe earlier)

"By the meaningless sign linked to the meaningless sound we have built the shape and meaning of western man.”

-Marshall Mcluhan, Gutenberg Galaxy (1964)

"In Indigenous philosophies, words are not simply representational; they are causal. Language can have material(izing) force." 

– Speculative Realism, Visionary Pragmatism, and Poet-Shamanic Aesthetics in Gloria Anzaldúa—and Beyond by AnaLouise Keating

Sources and Discussion: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/ineitj/16_the_greek_alphabet_part_two_mcluhans_thoughts/?