At first, the sea, the earth, and the heaven, which covers all things, were the only face of nature throughout the whole universe, which men have named Chaos; a rude and undigested mass, and nothing more than an inert weight, and the discordant atoms of things not harmonizing, heaped together in the same spot. No Sun as yet gave light to the world; nor did the Moon, by increasing, recover her horns anew. The Earth did not as yet hang in the surrounding air, balanced by its own weight, nor had Amphitrite stretched out her arms along the lengthened margin of the coasts. Wherever, too, was the land, there also was the sea and the air; and thus was the earth without firmness, the sea unnavigable, the air void of light; in no one of them did its present form exist. And one was ever obstructing the other; because in the same body the cold was striving with the hot, the moist with the dry, the soft with the hard, things having weight with those devoid of weight.

Ovid, Metamorphoses (transl. Henry T. Riley)

REGINA
Are you really not superstitious? Don’t you believe
in the secret forces hidden within a person?

MISS MERTENS
How exactly do you imagine that?

REGINA

I don’t. Not in any way. As a child, and later as a girl,
I had a voice that, whenever I spoke a little louder,
sounded dreadful, but I was convinced that one day
I would astonish everyone with miraculous singing.

MISS MERTENS
And were you granted such a voice?

REGINA
No.

MISS MERTENS
So then?

REGINA
I don’t know what to tell you.
Have you never experienced an inexplicable sense
of yourself? So mysterious that one is compelled to take off one’s shoes
and sail through the rooms like a cloud?

Robert Musil, The Dreamers

Waking — the tamer of dreams,
forcing the eyes open
onto a void more eloquent than a thousand words.

Urszula Kozioł, Znikopis

And yet it is difficult to resist language and its promises: that it means, that it can transfer meanings, and perhaps above all that it explains — lifts the veil behind which there lies true, truly and actually true reality. To insist that none of this is valid would be like insisting that objects and their tangible surfaces do not really exist because, at the elementary level, matter is empty. That, for instance, a window on the tenth floor and the concrete pavement beneath it are pure illusion. Such insistence would be as honest as it is self-destructive. It is one of the more glaring examples of the fact that honesty, when treated as an absolute and the sky-high summit of one’s life aspirations, requires a straightforwardness bordering on stupidity. I therefore accept this paradox: that although neither understanding nor mutual understanding are, in essence, possible, language nevertheless means and communicates, just as a glass stands on a table. Despite knowing that both the table and the glass exist only by virtue of a certain kind of agreement, I drink from that glass, trying not to let it show that I do not believe in it. And what can I try to grasp and say — what reveals itself to me through the illusion of language?

For example, the conviction that reality arranges itself hierarchically. It gradually becomes more complex, forming increasingly intricate arrangements of elements. Or perhaps it does not change at all, and only its successive degrees of complexity reveal themselves to the tirelessly inquiring mind. Who knows; there is probably no way for me, being myself part of this puzzle, to decide the matter. Either way, it may seem that developmental hierarchy applies to virtually every aspect of the world: space, time, inorganic and organic energy-matter, then life, and so on, and finally also so-called culture. Language itself germinates together with life and blossoms in culture, and is likewise subject to the hierarchical principle. Its concrete manifestation appears when, in some place and time, the appropriate conditions for the articulation of words come into being. And in close coupling with the progressive nuancing of the locally developing capacity for perception and expression, words multiply, die off, fluctuate in various ways, and form ever more numerous constellations, until eventually, with the emergence of societies, they give rise to higher forms of organization: sign, symbol, metaphor, narration, and, as the culmination of this process, drama.

To justify this sequence, and especially its perhaps surprising culmination, it is worth having a closer look at its stages. At first, for a long time, nothing has meaning. Then there appear processes and modes of organization that are purposeful, striving toward something, and for which these goals begin to be associated with proto-meanings. Meaning becomes a mechanism of goal-directedness, and in this way, it develops slowly, and for a very long time. Until finally, from the half-light of less and more developed meanings, the symbol emerges, like life from the primordial ocean. That is: nobody knows how. One can roughly imagine aquatic organisms, having somehow miraculously arisen in the depths, venturing out on excursions onto land — cautiously at first, then more and more boldly, until eventually they forget that they once lived in water. One can guess which organ, indispensable for life in a fluid environment, through changes in some of its functions and features, gradually transformed into an organ enabling life in a gaseous atmosphere. But the details remain, and probably will remain, a mystery. Our tools of perception and deduction have too low a resolution to fully comprehend this qualitative leap in relation to every single link of the process. I, in any case, cannot imagine an intermediate stage — a quarter-fish that neither suffocates on the shore nor drowns in the water, nor, even less so, dies in both places, yet nevertheless has descendants. And yet the leap evidently occurred. In the case of amphibians, and in the case of symbols. Somehow the sign — an intentional indication of something, and the encoding of that something’s features in a way that allows for compression and purposeful data transfer, which is itself an astonishing achievement — transformed into a mode of encoding based not so much on compression as, in fact, on the opposite: on multiplying data, thickening it, endowing it with depth, while at the same time allowing for something more than transfer: translation between even the most distant domains. Through the symbol, information becomes content, which is subject to translation and can be shaped further in increasingly refined ways: through metaphor and narration.

If the sign indicates and enables transfer, and the symbol condenses meaning and enables translation, then metaphor establishes concrete forms of transferring tension between different orders, while narration creates from these forms a temporal structure — it gives them meaning in time. If the sign is the first spark of life in matter, and the symbol is life’s emergence from the primordial ocean, then metaphor is the mechanism of continuity and interspecies analogy — the mechanism thanks to which all of us here, earthly creatures, share cellular structure, symmetrical-segmental morphology, and, broadly speaking, polarized sex, while also articulating words on the basis of the acoustic properties of liquids and/or gases — whereas narration is the force that binds both of these within the process of evolution. Or, put otherwise and most broadly: in everything, in the entire thinkable reality, in all its manifestations and at various degrees of organization and complexity, there reveals itself a fundamental potential of similarity and difference; and every movement resulting from the tension between points of this potential is realized through recognition — the giving and reading of meanings — through transference, that is, the transfer and translation of meanings, and then through conflict and distinction as the dynamics of change, or through commonality as the dynamics of stability. This is how it must have looked, I tell myself, from the beginning of the world as we know it, judging at least from those not-so-many things we have so far managed to establish and confirm: at the beginning of time everything was so dense and condensed that it was, in essence, one — a unity that nevertheless proved unstable, and so dispersed and differentiated; and since then its innumerable parts have entered into interactions with one another, and if they are similar — an echo of primordial unity — they tend toward one another, while if they are not — an echo of primordial instability — they do not. And these echoes resound in everything, more loudly or more softly. From mechanics and dynamics to morality and aesthetics. And so it goes.

And what about drama? I see — hear — it this way: in the beginning, the world was silent. There was no word, only a great silence, and within it the construction of a stage and an auditorium. The word was hanging, so to speak, in the air. Until finally it could come into being, sound out, and be heard — and then it began. The word emerged from silence as its reverse: a labile point of deviation, uncertain of itself and always tending to sink back into non-being. But in time it gained momentum, autonomy, and diversity. And with them, the capacity to create sets, constellations, and so on, as already mentioned. Drama, then, is the concretization, realized through the word, of that basic mechanism driving the world: the tension arising from antagonisms between its elements. Silence, with all its generative potential, and the word, with its impossible-to-fulfil promise of mutual understanding and all its derivatives — symbol, metaphor, and narration — meet in drama, become body, come alive in characters, and acquire a form enclosed in time. Silence and the word have a common end — in the sense of telos — and that end is drama. Reality looks at itself in drama as in a mirror.

I will add, at the end, for consideration, a few sequences which, however debatable they may be, show and explain something to me in the context of all the above.

Multiplicity → Sum → Integral
Shell → Membrane → Skin
Command → Norm → Law
Ritual → Myth → Tragedy
Wound → Sacrifice → Mass
Anecdote → Fairy Tale → Novel
Question → Dispute → Academy
Gesture → Dance → Ballet
Lament → Song → Opera

Some of the maps I have looked into:

eds. Antonio Cimino, Cees Leijenhorst, Phenomenology and Experience
Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols
Jan Faye, The Biological and Social Dimensions of Human Knowledge
Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse
Raymond W. Gibbs, Intentions in the Experience of Meaning
Zoltán Kövecses, Where Metaphors Come From
George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By
Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being
Humberto R. Maturana, Francisco J. Varela, The Tree of Knowledge