Shadow Language

Extract

It would be interesting to trace to its origin that hidden language which is familiar to every adult male, and to a large proportion of women, but which is hardly ever written down, except on walls: and to know whether it arose because it is natural to man to use a special set of terms to indicate strange forces more powerful than himself; whether it is a consequence of the psychological disintegration of the Fall, which made human beings afraid of God and ashamed of their bodies; how it has been affected by the immense change in Western human ecology which began about 1750 and is still in progress; why it has flowed more deeply underground at one time than at another; and what significance lies in the fact that its terms, and the knowledge of its existence, have during the last fifty years come far nearer the surface of communal life.

An immense learning would be necessary fully to discuss all these points; and many of their implications have to be left aside by a writer without experience of the organic cultures of the East or of the mechanized economy of the U.S.S.R. It should be possible without this, however, very briefly to sketch the nature, function, and recent history of submerged language, at any rate in this country; and to suggest possible reasons for its slow invasion of ordinary speech.

The language deals mainly with three subjects: with God; with sexual life; and with digestion. God, mystery beyond all thought, all argument, all imagination, “to whom all angels cry aloud’’ and Whom all non-reasoning things worship by being alive; sexual life, through which humans consciously, as other creatures unknowingly, share in the almost incredible Divine activity of creating new selves, each sentient and unique, where before there was nothing; digestion, the unconscious process of transmuting into human bodies pieces of the outside world upon which their continued life depends.