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Part I Chapter Three:
Four Sins of Genesis: The Shame of Natural Discourse
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On the Christian (Jewish) Pentateuch: “...a clear and notably meticulous record of an extensive breakdown and reordering of discursive parameters in ancient human community... the residue of events which had shaken Eurasian culture much earlier, perhaps as early as the closing millennia of the Pleistocene... [It is] so much the reflection of a difficult cultural moment of the past that it pays... to pick this much discussed text up once again... Though the written presentation is clumsy, awkward, and frequently contradictory -- the culmination of a priestly tradition (itself an indication of ‘late times’ and a fragmented collective awareness) -- the material is nonetheless spooky in its metaphoric precision. It has left us with a basis for useful insights about community in crisis. ”

On the shame of nakedness which is the “...surface manifestation of the ‘shame of natural discourse’. The principal moral objective of the First Book of Moses was to hide this shame and to rationalize the objectification of nature. After the so-called ‘Fall’, discursive boundaries are firmly in place... the structures which, in mythological traditions world-wide, serve to join one living creature to another, disappear from the screen of human awareness. From Eve’s disobedience forward, the very creatures upon which the well-being of the community of the faithful depend are de-animated, dispossessed of ‘soul’ and the capacity to express feeling. From this point on, the living works of creation assume a character which better corresponds to the sterile vision of their Creator. Mute and ultimately tractable, they comprise a massive ‘objective structure’ over which those, whom the Lord has legitimately empowered, can assert ‘dominion’ (Genesis 1:26)... Truly astonishing is the fact that the domesticated creature’s own discursive nature was effectively disabled. No calf cried for its mother. No lamb bleated, or gave audible protest, when weaned or shorn; and there was, incredibly, no lowing of cattle in this community of agriculturists. Meanwhile, wild life appears to have been similarly restrained. Birds did not sing of their own volition, nor were the songs of the locusts and grasshoppers to be heard. Even dogs, a ubiquitous adjunct to human community world-wide, failed to disturb the night air with their distinctive vocalizations.”

On the first couple’s ‘lapse’: [It] prefigured a continuous struggle... between ‘original nature’ and the artifactual reality of the patriarchal family. Condemned was First Woman, strongly allied with nature in her procreative capacity and thus prone to backslide... the gravest of threats to the exercise of patriarchal power. The pre-lapsarian female, on the occasions when she dared to raise her head, found herself castigated as ‘whore’, as ‘harlot’, sometimes as ‘Jezebel’ (the inspired if intensely hated wife of King Ahab) who sought to put nature back into religion and back into the structure of the Near Eastern imagination.”

Chapter Three: Epilogue
English Discourse and the Suppression of Domestic Process

On the English leveling of the objective plural form of address: “...the second person singular thou/thee, the form of address still used in seventeenth (17th) century domestic discourse, long enjoyed a special stability, not just in English but in the evolution of Indoeuropean generally. For thousands of years, the second person singular of Indoeuropean managed to survive the displacements and substitutions which have plagued... the other positions in the paradigm. The thou of English up to the seventeenth century, the du of the other dialects and languages of Western Germanic, the du of Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Swedish, the tu of French and its phonological variants in Italian, Spanish, and Portugese (to mention only a few of the great language families of Europe in which this stubborn pronoun has survived to this day), all testify to the persistence of the form in the face of social and political turmoil of notable scope and intensity. The modern distribution, over a wide geographical area, of this portion of the paradigm, plus its presumed presence, virtually unchanged, over the vast time-scale encompassed by the historical record, clearly demonstrates the tenacity of the socio-cultural unit which preserved it... It becomes a matter of some interest... to discover why English, alone in its family of languages (and in a brief century or two), was able fully to dislodge a grammatical structure which had exhibited such endurance and long-term stability... [It] has managed to accomplish a feat which may, indeed, be unique in the annals of linguistic change. It has presided over the complete elimination, from the social domain of domestic interaction, of the second person singular form of address.”