Desire could possibly be the whole thing. I think that's what I've got so far. If evolution is the system from which languages develop, desire is the only starting place. Nothing happens in evolution without desire. From this vantage point, when "music" and "language" have yet to disambiguate, the entire phenomenon seems essentially poetic, if our model for talking about poetry is epiphanic. There is a welling up inside of desire, and an invention of utterance to enact it socially. It's worth asking here, of course, what reason I have for pushing a model so focused on the expressions of individuals. I could just as easily be talking about collective forms arising in unique social relations, in the spirit of the Grand Piano experiment. I'm even told, though I can't trace this down to any source (as always, informed readers should chime in), that there is a trend in evolutionary biology to look at group as opposed to individual changes or mutations (I want to use the word 'co-evolution', but in fact that refers to concomitant changes in more than one species, whereas it is the incipience of language use and ability in our species that I want to explore).
Probably the picture is more complicated than either version. But I don't want to get trapped trying to armchair philoophize the dawn of language. What's interesting to my purposes is the hypothesis that the first utterances in the social and evolutionary process which got us to where we are were both musical, in the sense of relying on the response of the human being (or the being becoming human) to sound, and poetic, in the sense of uncovering desire. To get to the point where the three things diverge, we have to do some tricky taxonomy. Poetry, it is assumed, is a smaller subset of language, though just what defines the perimeters of this set is hard to say. Today we think it's obvious that music is a species apart from speech, but in the earliest example, it's not so clear. We could just as easily call speaking a subset of singing as singing a subset of speaking. We might imagine that we can say a bit of language or sing it, meaning that speech supervenes on singing: you can change whatever you like about the melody and it's still language, whereas you can omit the words entirely and it is still song. Tonal changes are significant in a great many languages (Mandarin, Yoruban, Thai, etc), and we can certainly imagine they were in the earliest languages, given the limited number of shapes of the tongue and throat physical anthropologists believe we had at our disposal. The idea that one could dispatch of either the melody or the words and leave one or the other intact likely comes from the advent of musical instruments. Can we really imagine, though, that these weren't invented to say something with as well?
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I think of the course Walter taught, wherein he handed out diagrams of the Korean alphabet, illustrating its formation by way of attempting to replicate the shape of the tongue in the mouth at the moment of a certain sounds audibility.
Also, I imagine various 'origins' of poetry, demarcated by various achievements: the ability to say something well/ articulate, specify and associate (Aristotle), the ability to say some thing that sounds pleasant, pleases mind and ear/ makes them synonymous (early western and certainly eastern theater(s)). I'm making huge sweeping generalizations, but I mean well.
I remember some of my early poetry professors reminding me that the early (Western) poetry was actually more akin to song (i.e. scop & such). This was before I'd had any exposure to sound (ZAUM) poetics, or and other sound/text tradition, except for SLAM poetry, which, at the time, I dismissed (which I still tend to do, though I'm told to give it another chance).
Would it even be possible to begin forming a poetics wherein Language is a subset of Poetry?
Why do this? I can't say, really. But the implications seem to point toward L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E or even better, Billy. Especially his more recent cave drawings (see recent Bucky Monkey).
I was almost going to try and unpack some kind of hypothesis in response to my own question, but now I've thought better of it.
Feel like I'm slipping deeper and deeper into a meta-linguistic problem thinking about your points here. If we are redefining 'language' and 'poetry', in hwat langauge are we doing so? Maybe, though, Kurt Schwitters or Henri Chopin answers the idea of a poetics of which language is merely a subset- both for showing how making recognizable phonemes and fitting them into recognized schemes for "making sense" is by far the smaller set of what our apparati can do.
Leaning so heavily on sound in this investigation, I am of course doing no justice to prospects posed by visual poetics. Not only Billy, but look at JD's chap- how beholden to language as medium are those prints?
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