The Karakum experiment

The First Language

This is a true story, but it's rather strange.

Most likely you won't believe it, and if so, I certainly can't blame you for that. Probably wouldn't believe it myself if I was told about it...

Anyway, here it comes.

It happened years ago in the Karakum Desert in Turkmenistan (a small country in Central Asia, North from Iran).

It was five of us, normal (meaning, a bit crazy) Art College students. It was May, our spring break and we decided this will be fun way to spend it.

Our plan was to cross the whole desert on foot, from North to South.

None of us had been in this part of the world before--or in any desert for that matter. It turned out walking in the sand is a slightly different business than walking on the solid ground. We were moving slower than expected and soon we figured out we didn't take enough food with us. So we had to ration our food and ended up hiking for two weeks half starved.

At one point we found a beautiful full grown Sand Efa (Echis carinatus, also known as the Saw-scaled Viper in India). All those serene colors, what a marvelous sight in the otherwise bland yellowness of the desert.

We knew it's extremely poisonous but we tried to get a good angle for our photos so we naturally moved closer and closer forming a half circle around it.

The snake instantly assumed an attack position, head raised (twice as high as on the picture above), body forming a shape of the letter "S" like a wound bow. It hissed loudly and aimed at one of us, only to switch over to someone else a second later. I think it couldn't decide which one of us to strike first.

We took our photos, pulled back and let it go it's merry way. And then someone remembered the strike distance of a full grown Efa is almost 2 meters. We were all closer to it than that.

When you figure out you're a moron, it's not exactly a pleasant feeling. The girl who carried our first aid kit took it out and checked the expiration date on the antidote. It was 2 years in the past. The guy with the map measured the distance to the nearest village. It was almost 200 kilometers (~124 miles) away. I still remember how we stood there and looked at each other in silence. We all knew it but nobody wanted to say it out loud...

If this Efa would have decided to strike, it would have been a certain death sentence for one of us.

Early spring in Karakum is pretty hot but it's not unbearable. Scorching sun, extremely dry air, not a wisp of cloud. The sky is unbelievably dark blue (no water vapor!). Above the horizon the sky is normal hazy light blue but if you look straight up it's almost black and you can see the brighter stars even at noon. Truly amazing sight, it can make the hair on the back of you neck rise up.

For the modern people like us it feels like standing on an alien planet. For the ancient people you can probably replace the alien planet with the impression of standing on the bottom of the infinite heavenly well.

No wonder three monotheistic religions emerged from these ruthless scorched seas of sand...

There's almost no vegetation in the central part of Karakum. Just a few haloxylon bushes here and there, bleak yellow and dead dry. And sand all around, endless sand dunes as far as the eye can see.

We saw a small herd of camels a few times, far in the distance. At night when it got very cold we could hear jackals howling. Few scorpions, snakes, and a whole lot of... nothingness.

Luckily we had enough water but we were effectively fasting for two weeks. No food combined with a lot of water and physical effort, that cleans you up pretty well.

Turns out this can have some pretty interesting side effects.

When we finally saw the thin line of the railroad on the horizon and then a small Turkmen village we knew we have completed our journey. We were really exhausted. Luckily this village had a train stop.

When we got on the train to Baku and sat down I somehow knew I can read thoughts. Just like that, out of the blue. So I decided let's make a test, let's try it out.

I remember the train was half empty, we had a lot of room. One girl and one guy from our group were sitting on the bench opposite me, I was alone on my side. The other two were somewhere further away.

-- Let's play a little game, I proposed. You think of something, some item, and I'll try to figure out what it is.

-- How? she asked.

-- I think I can read thoughts, I said.

She laughed and said OK, looked out of the window for a moment and then whispered something into the guys ear, covering her mouth with her hand.

The train was already moving at full speed. It was an old Soviet diesel train, you had to raise your voice when you spoke, otherwise people couldn't hear you in this noise. You can't hear a whisper covered with a hand from two meters away even in the normal conditions. In this racket it's simply beyond human capabilities.

-- OK, now both of you concentrate and think about this thing and nothing else.

They sat there looking at me and I tried to "hear" their thoughts.

For 10-15 seconds, nothing happened. No signal, no voice, nothing.

And then suddenly, I had a contact. I saw it.

Yep, that's right, I never heard a squeak, I saw it instead. It obviously was not normal vision. I mean, it's hard to tell if it originated in my visual cortex or somewhere else in my brain?

It's very strange how the image appeared in my mind's eye. It started like a small dot somewhere far away in the center of my vision, grew bigger, quickly became a small square. A small rectangular picture that was going round and round growing bigger, overlaid the faces of those two who were intently staring at me.

I know where I had seen this animation effect. It was commonly used on the TV news channel I used to watch. My mind had borrowed this cheap video editing effect to visually represent something it had never experienced before.

When the image stopped I recognized what's on the picture. Skis. Smart girl as she was, she understood the situation and had intentionally chosen the item that had no associations with the surrounding environment.

It wasn't like a realistic photo, more like drawing, or like frame from the anime movie for the little children.

-- Skis! I said.

Their eyes went slightly bigger when they looked at each other.

-- How the hell did you do that?

-- I saw it, I said, and explained in detail what I had just experienced.

We tried it once more, but this time I got nothing. It was like I had closed this door and didn't have a key. Or even if I had it, didn't know how to use it.

Then something else came up and we forgot all about this strange incident.

* * *

I think our first language didn't have any syllables. Maybe there was some sound along with it when people happened to be close to each other. I think the very first language was actually images, simple visual concepts of things. Like ideas or icons, of sorts. Basic stuff: prey, danger, pain, maybe some other strong emotions, that's it. As far as I can tell, you can't really "read thoughts" using telepathy, at least not how we usually imagine it.

Then again, who knows? People are different and have different abilities in all other areas.

It's possible big predators who're hunting as a herd are still using this "language"--or at least something functionally similar to it. Lions can coordinate the attack when group members are on the different sides of the antelope herd. There's no visual contact and no sound signals, antelopes have very good hearing.

Looks like you have to be hungry and alert for the telepathy to work. Last but not least, you need to have very few people and hundreds of miles of empty space all around you. Anyone who lives in the big community can't possibly have this ability switched on--you would just go crazy. I think that's why we eventually had to find another way to communicate.

Our second language, a spoken language.

It seems we didn't instantly forget the first one though. Looks like it "faded out" slowly, over many millenia. We can still find the traces of it in our oldest written messages and even languages.

* * *

Makes sense, of course. Different sounds could indeed have different meaning. Likewise, similar sounds can have different meaning depending on intonation and situation.

* * *

In our fairy tales we still have echoes from the ancient [aboriginal] myths about wizards and shamans who could understand and speak with the wild animals. Even dominate and control them.

What if there was more than just the sounds?

If there is a language that does not use words somehow directly emanating from our brain, then this language would be universal. We share the fundamental structure of the brain with all mammals, and to a smaller degree with all animals.

What if there was a time when this language was not a rare gift shared by the select few? What if there was a time when the nature all around us was indeed alive and talking to us?

Only when the population density increased, when we moved into towns and villages and lost this ability we eventually forgot about all that. It's hard to understand something completely different if you have no personal experience with it.

Eventually we became blind and deaf and started wondering about our forefathers stories. They must have imagined it, we thought. How stupid and deluded they must have been, imagining the nature is alive and can talk to them. Those fools, they thought they understood it all. So good we got smart now and don't believe in those fairy tales any more.

Early Christianity saw the Pagans worshiping the trees and springs. Worshiping the creation instead of the Creator was an obvious sacrilege for them. Solution was simple, all false idols had to be destroyed.

Apocryphal Gospels that could be interpreted as a support and (re)interpretation of Paganism was too controversial. The early Church decided it's better to not open this Pandora's box. Every reference to this was carefully wiped off from the canonical collection.

References like this one:

Jesus said, "It is I who am the light in all. It is I who am the entirety

It is from me that the entirety has come, and to me that the entirety goes.

Split a piece of wood: I am there.

Lift a stone, and you will find me there."

-- Gospel of Thomas, 77

But they couldn't remove everything. There's still God who appears to Moses as a burning bush that's on fire but somehow doesn't burn.

They didn't clean away Jesus speaking about the Creator who doesn't live in the Temple but inside every human being.

Last but not least, there's Jesus Christ Himself, a living proof that God can appear in the form of a human being and live among us.

Hinduists (and Buddhists) would have understood those references perfectly well. Of course, they would say, this is Ātman, the (true) inner self that penetrates the Universe and everything in it!

And indeed the Shamanist tradition in Japan (Shintō, 神道) peacefully coexisted with the new arrival, the highly sophisticated philosophy of Buddhism. This allowed a seamless uninterrupted transition without conflict, without cutting off the roots of the underlying more primitive culture.

Which might not have been more primitive at all. Could be it was simply different, built for different people with different abilities and sensory organs, living in a different world.

Who has ears can hear,

who has eyes to see can see.

Who's blind and deaf has to believe.