The Fall into Language

 More and more I'm coming to think of the "fall" as a fall into language, the medium whose structure structures all our thoughts and our ego and out of which we construct our whole world. Language is the medium in and through which we perceive. And that perception has to be presented to us in metaphor and by metaphor. I can say (as poetry does) "look at this." But when I ask "what does it mean?" I am asking in the context of distance, or illumination, or of holding: I'm getting closer to the meaning, which is becoming clearer (aurally, visually); I can feel and hold it (tactilely). 

But meanings don't work like that. To get closer is also to get farther away. Clarity dims. Holding firmly is like squeezing a handful of sand. It's like oxygen and water that destroy the life they are preserving, perpetuating. It's like the poison of a tomato. 

The knowledge of "good" and "evil" as though they were distinct in reality as they are in thought, this is the fall, the fall into two which once was one. Adam divided in two. (Adam was not male until Eve was created, which Plato knew. The myth erred in not changing that name at her making. He was not even a hermaphrodite. He was what "man" meant before it too was coopted in our bifurcating mind into a false dualism: just a person, like God). 

Blake had a sense of this.