From: rhinoceros (rhinoceros@freemail.gr)
Date: Tue Jun 10 2003 - 16:42:46 MDT
By the way, the origins of the meme concept, although not the term itself, can be traced back to William S. Burroughs when he said:
"Language is a virus from outer space"
You can read a related text by W. S. Burroughs here, at your own peril :P
http://www.syntac.net/dl/elerev.html
http://www.syntac.net/dl/elerev2.html
<begin quote>
It is doubtful if the spoken word would have ever evolved beyond the animal stage without the written word. The written word is inferential in human speech. It would not occur to our wise old rat to assemble the young rats and pass his knowledge along in an aural tradition because the whole concept of time binding could not occur without the written word.
In the beginning of what exactly was this beginning word?
The written word is of course a symbol for something and in the case of hieroglyphic language writing like Egyptian it may be a symbol for itself that is a picture of what it represents. This is not true of an alphabet language like English. The word leg has no pictorial resemblance to a leg. It refers to the spoken word leg. So we may forget that a written word is an image and that written words are images in sequence that is to say moving pictures. So any hieroglyphic sequence gives us an immediate working definition for spoken words. Spoken words are verbal units that refer to this pictorial sequence.
And what then is the written word? My basic theory is that the written word was literally a virus that made spoken word possible. The word has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host... (This symbiotic relationship is now breaking down for reasons I will suggest later.)
I quote from Mechanisms of Virus Infection edited by Mr. Wilson Smith, a scientist who really thinks about his subject instead of merely correlating data. He thinks, that is, about the ultimate intentions of the virus organism. In an article entitled "Virus Adaptibility and Host Resistance" by G. Belyavin, speculations as to the biologic goal of the virus species are enlarged: "Viruses are obligatory cellular parasites and are thus wholly dependant upon the integrity of the cellular systems they parasitize for their survival in an active state. It is something of a paradox that many viruses ultimately destroy the cells in which they are living..."
And I may add the environment necessary for any cellular structure they could parasitize to survive. Is the virus then simply a time bomb left on this planet to be activated by remote control? An extermination program in fact? In its path from full virulence to its ultimate goal of symbiosis will any human creature survive?
<end quote>
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