Laws of media 359 1 R.H.Trotter, “The Other Hemisphere,” 218. The chart above is taken from this article, and is reproduced courtesy of R.H.Trotter. To the Inuit, nature’s forms “lie hidden” until man reveals them one by one. Their language makes little distinction between “nouns” and “verbs”; rather, all words are forms of the verb “to be,” which is itself lacking in Eskimo. “Eskimo isn’t a nominal language; it doesn’t name things which already exist, but brings things/action (nouns/verbs) into being as it goes along…when the mother is in labor, an old woman stands around and says as many different eligible names as she can think of. The child comes out of the womb when its name is called” (Edmund Carpenter, Eskimo Realities, 39). In the beginning was the word. The primitive is a phenomenologist who equates reading aloud the Book of Nature with the making process. As a man speaks, his language is in a state of birth, as is also the thing about which he is talking. Such parentage confers responsibilities. In this sense, every man is artist. Primitives have no need, as we have, of a special and unique group (artists) that uses special processes and perceptions. Carvings are often discarded after being made, just as “words fade away.” “When Orpingalic says, ‘And we will fear to use words,’ he doesn’t mean he’s afraid of the words themselves. He means he’s in awe of their power to bring the universe into existence. Words must ‘shoot up of themselves.’ They must arise naturally out of experience. To impose words of his own would be sacrilegious. ‘Many are the words that rush over me, like the wings of birds out of darkness’” (Eskimo Realities, 52). Prior to writing and to print, words and utterances were still endowed with the magical power to form and transform existence. The difference between the two states is clearly reflected in the hemispheric differences in the brain. Trotter’s chart of the characteristics of the left and right hemispheres presents a pattern of basic contrasts.2 Because the dominant feature of the left hemisphere is linearity and sequentiality, there are good reasons for calling it the “visual” (quantitative) side of the brain; and because the dominant features of the right hemisphere are 2 The chart reflects the scientific understanding of the cortical hemispheres, gained mainly in the last twenty years. The cortex of the ordinary human brain has two hemispheres, joined by a massive bundle of fibres called the corpus callosum, which seems to be the agency of dialogue between the hemispheres. It was only in the 1950s that these forebrain commissures in man were first deliberately severed, allowing the hemispheres to be studied independently. “The first important finding was that the interhemispheric exchange of information was totally disrupted following commissurotomy. The effect was such that visual, tactual, proprioceptive, auditory, and olfactory information presented to one hemisphere could be processed and dealt with in that half-brain, but each of these activities went on outside the realm of awareness of the other half-cerebrum. This observation confirmed the animal work done earlier by Myers and Sperry, except that in a sense the results were more dramatic. Since it is the left hemisphere that normally possesses the natural language and speech mechanisms, all processes