I’ve been reading Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy (rough sledding, had to dictionary my way to every page), when he drops this bombshell: human beings have been walking around for millions of years, while language is only around a hundred thousand years old. That means for untold millennia, Homo(whatever) existed without words. McCarthy even suggests, through the novel’s protagonist, that language was like a parasite that, over time, took control of large portions of the human brain.

All of which made me wonder, what would pre-language consciousness have been like? Quiet would be my initial assumption. That elusive silence we strive for in meditation &whiskey.

Perhaps it was a continuous state of grace. Nirvana. God-consciousness. Objects &individuals had no names. They simply existed. Problems were solved without conscious thought. Like when you wake up in the morning with a solution to something that’s been bothering you. Did you rationally analyse it while asleep? Of course not. Your subconscious, that enigmatic mechanism that lurks behind dreams, simply solved it – without words.

So is what we label our subconscious formerly our self consciousness? Were we, once upon a time, hard-wired into some sort of divine intelligence? Was awareness, in &of itself, a form of brilliance that was undermined by an unfortunate mutation, or language as we now call it? I could dismiss this entire idea as literary fantasy, but McCarthy wrote The Road, Blood Meridian, &No Country for Old Men, so I have to believe he considered this book thoroughly.