The Distributive Passions

The Tower of Babel—”Gate of God”—Site of the Confusion of Tongues. Babelites identify the Confusion of Tongues with the expulsion from Eden. The Original Tongue, it is said, was one of presentation, and not representation, a language not separable from its subjects and objects. Before the Fall–as Babelites also refer to it—the world spoke, spoke in its unfolding, and that general unfolding was the common heritage of All—a not yet divided All. The world was the universal tongue. Babel the Tower was simply a representation to fallen humanity of the original tongue, its conventional spiral form indicative, some say, of an unfurling. Moses Solly, an adherent of a minor Babelite sub-sect, believed on the contrary, that the spiral represented circling, searching—the attempts of human being to regain the Original Tongue, despite the changes wrought in them by the Fall. Eden Babelites, as this faction is known, read the Genesis account back from Babel to the Garden, if one can put it this way, seeing the Tree as prefiguring the Tower, and emphasizing the Original Tongue over questions of Knowledge. Knowledge, they say, comes later, after the Fall. But it is the quest for the conditions of knowledge—of separate being—for which human beings have been punished—and punished with separate being. For Eden Babelites like Moses Solly, human being itself is punishment and speech is the Mark of Cain. This belief has naturally bred a somewhat taciturn sect, earning them the name of “Mute Babelites” (or, less kindly, “Mule Babelites”). Moses took his beliefs seriously, and they led him out into the wilderness of the Oregon Territory, where, for some time at least, he labored at his “town” with no neighbors to tempt him to speech. Moses scorned the fringe of a fringe known as Radical Babelites, who followed the Eden Babelite dogma to a point, but regarded the Fall as fortunate and the discovery of a Second Universal Tongue a spiritual mission of the first importance. To Solly’s “Add not to the confusion of Voices,” their most articulate prophet countered: One Voice and Separate Being is Humanity COME OF AGE.