Homo sapiens has no evidence for the terrestrial origin of his self-conscious mind. The human mind possesses no half-way points of biological evolution. There are no intermediate links connecting animal instinct to human self- consciousness. We are just now placing Homo sapiens in his proper context. There are only whispers about what happened during the early moments of Homo sapiens.
Why do we suspect that our mind does not originate from Earth? Place Homo sapiens on a stranded island – and he would make masterful symbols and pictures within two generations. In ten generations he would tell masterful, enchanted stories of his origins and recite epic poems. Place a primate on an island and in a thousand generations he will only eat and defecate. For the purpose of a theory of poetry, I conclude that the mind of Homo sapiens is alien to Earth ecosystems.
Modern academics avoid the subject of the alien human mind. Unexplained and unexplainable by secularist idiom, the self-conscious mind of Homo sapiens has no antecedent in Earth’s zoology. Neither materialists nor scientists know anything of the foundation of human consciousness – they may only discuss the arbitrary products of consciousness. Modern man is, thus, in effect, a nomad in his own mind. He cannot explain himself, and he has no home outside the conscious precinct of his mind.
Therefore, the poet, as the story maker, is the preeminent agent in the human condition. The poet thinks he knows something. He observes that the mind is activated with memorable speech. More outrageous, the strong poet obtains prophetic voice from beyond the cosmos – so far still an alien locus. Let us begin our discussion with unassailable facts.
A self-conscious mind is more rare, more mysterious, more multiple in dimension than any church, any temple, or any cunning text previously conceived by man. Any religion may only be a poor copy of self-consciousness. Self-consciousness is the only church Homo sapiens possesses. It is the only human church that ever will exist. We can test this. In Story Theory, every man always believes his own mind – but rarely the mind of another man. In another example, when we perform evil – we feel it deeply. The truth? We are ashamed of most of our actions in life. Self-consciousness is our only church – and we each carry this moral and ethical leviathan with us wherever we travel – even into remote space.
Let us state the case for the alien element of poetry. Only a self-conscious mind detects a poem. No other living creature of Earth, only man, has a self-conscious mind. There was no writing, and no poetry, until the Fifth millennium B.C. (I do not insist too much on time-lines. Nothing is more arbitrary, more illusionary than the actuality of time.) If Homo sapiens originated 50 thousand years ago and always had the gene for sophisticated symbology – why does writing appear so late? I will suggest that either man has the gene for abstract symbols – or not. A gene does not have the necessity of development. A gene is either on or off – it is either present or not present. Some beekeeper could have woken the hive – could have turned this gene on. So let us see ourselves clearly. In Story Theory, man was only man when he used symbols of self-consciousness – not before this moment. A primate walking on two feet is not a man.
A symbol is an alien artifact. A symbol is necessary because we only may perceive forms within consciousness. There is nothing “outside” of our consciousness – thus we need to possess abstract data points – symbols.
We may perceive nothing in the “universe” except images modified within our own self-consciousness. That will be problematic for the modern to visualize. He will have to use symbols to communicate his inability to understand. Either way, we may make our case for the preeminence of poetry in human societies.
Why? Because any human speech using symbols is an interpretation, a poem. The necessity of the faculty of the poet is therefore paramount. There is nothing more emotive than the power of symbols. There is no world, no human information, without symbols. The poet is the maker, the master of symbols. Language is the only house of a self-conscious mind. This is the strong argument for poetry.
There is an uncanny quality – an alien quality – about high poetic texts. Who can plot the boundaries of a timeless story? No one can kill or erase a story. We possess all past stories as fully operative. We still possess every human myth. A character of narrative is valid for all of time.
Our constructs of good and evil, then, as well as any narrative of deity, are outside of time, and thus extra-cosmos. As there is no “outside” separate from our self-consciousness – the only place for evolving the human idiom is inward. Not in time. Not in space. Only memorable speech, the poet’s office, can make this further inward discovery of human self-consciousness. How else may we make contact with god-like intelligence if not from prophetic speech? This is a role properly filled by the strong poet.
There is an alien characteristic of seminal human texts. We can test this. We still don’t know the names or the personalities of the poets of the Torah. Who wrote the five books of Moses? We don’t know—it was not a man called Moses. Not a single name (or bone, or body) can be discovered. We still don’t know the name or personality of the actual poets of the Gospels. It was notMatthew, Mark, Luke, or John.
Who wrote the Shakespeare canon? It was not the bag-goods salesman, “Shakspar” of Stratford-on-Avon – he was proven to be illiterate. High Western texts are, effectively, alien. We don’t know who the poets were that wrote the Iliad and Odyssey. It wasn’t a man named Homer. We don’t know who gave humans the story of Hercules – and the Greek myths. The academic is surprised to discover that it is impossible to make a count of the Greek myths – they have no beginning and no end?!
The human mind is a mystery. We have proofs. There is no originator of the mind. We never will know the person that wrote the Egyptian Book of the Dead. We don’t know who sang the epics of Gilgamesh. We don’t know who within the Egyptian priesthood scripted Amon as the Sole God. We don’t know the poet that wrote Genesis – or The Psalms of David. We don’t know who inscribed the first Sumerian cuneiform epics—or who, or what deity, dictated the first human poems or the many separate tablets of the Epic of Creation. We only know that stories appear with wild alien symbology – and with uncanny idiom. Archaeology could not give us any insight into the origins of the story-makers – even if it existed.
There is nothing human about most ancient myths. The Twelve Labors of Hercules did not discuss humans – or a human society! It is a history of the zodiac. This engenders the question why the zodiac is an important motif in all seminal myths and epic poems? Humans are seldom mentioned in ancient myths. The myths, instead, address an alien cosmology and destiny – as well as a non-human time scale. The only locus, therefore, of a mythic entity (as Orpheus, Apollo, Dionysus, or Hercules) is the alien self-conscious mind. It is as if epic narratives were given to our ancestors by an unearthly intelligence – whose home was the interior cosmos (the conscious mind) – not Earth. (The precession of the zodiac is a symbol of the reversal of the illusion of the outward cosmos!) Thus the zodiac is a clue that the path lies within the conscious mind – not outside of the mind. Perhaps this is a clue why the zodiac is embedded in ancient myths over and over again.
If the self-conscious mind is alien to the animal kingdom, then poetry is a codex of alien communication. Poetry is a mythic codex able to transcend multiple dimensions of information – outside of time – outside of the illusion of material causation.
Therefore, for the purpose of Story Theory, we deny the necessity for millions of years of human evolution, and we anticipate the myth that the use of writing appeared in a single generation. No other entity of nature has a mind able to move across multiple dimensions. Writing was established from outside of Earth, and not developed in deserts over millennia – letter by letter, decade by decade. Primates did not develop or originate the self- conscious mind. That is an unproven myth of modern science. There are no archeological links between an animal mind and a symbol-making mind.
What is my point? If the human mind is an alien entity, if the human imagination originates from outside of the cosmos, then this status will influence the poetry we write. In Story Theory, in a place yet undiscovered, we ourselves are alien gods.
This is why Kosmoautikon traces prophetic voices from our original ancestors.
