If I say “I’ve been thinking about lately a lot,” what does the word ‘lately’ mean in that sentence, exactly?
Essentially, ‘lately’ is a term that signifies a difference between a recent time and a less recent time. I’ve been thinking about lately a lot lately; I’ve been thinking about ‘lately’ a lot lately.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a bit about the origins of religion, war, language, and I suppose human relations in general. That’s what I’ve been doing lately. That’s what I’ve been doing, lately and also early.
So language is about building connections of representations, right? You can start with a simple sound for some object, then a sound for another object, soon a sound for the relationship between the two objects, and so on and so on.
This keeps building and building and building in complexity, folding in upon itself, occasionally collapsing from its own weight, a mass of sounds expressing relationships of things, and relationships of relationships, and relationships of relationships of relationships, until the pile is a mountain of sound and impossible in its complexity to understand.
So a relationship that encompasses all others becomes necessary to keep all the loose ends tied nicely together; let’s call this relationship ‘God.’
The birth of God. Language, as it increases in complexity, seems to have some kind of function whereby it self-negates its own complexity and demands totalizing generalities. It needs to be all neat and tidy.
The link between resources, and God, becomes central to an understanding of a codified reality. Food, water, and other good fortunes, before they are understandable or explainable through the limitations of language, can be explained as all part of ‘God’ as it’s essentially a word that means ‘that which we don’t know.’
Resources, given to us from God, are now in danger of being stolen from us by others, and we know God did not provide those resources to them. War is generally boilable down to a conflict over resources.
Sounds for things, sounds for relationships between things, God, War.
