The Legend of "Form"

Minding my Tongue
(Exemplar: a search for a word’s meaning)

“Form”?! Maybe you, like me, have never given the word “form” much thought. It seems such an ordinary little word that is what it is: it is plain and very simple. Its meaning is patently obvious. So I assumed it would only take me a few minutes to write a short essay defining its meaning. Three weeks on and my journey of exploration is stuck.

My search for the meaning of words typically involves traveling with a word to antiquity and seeing how its meaning changes with societal behaviour over millennia. One milestone in that journey through the ages is particularly important: the advent of the English Combustion Revolution – an unprecedented radical change of culture that has generated an Anthropocene this past three centuries.

My constant companions and guides are the Online Etymology Dictionary and the Conservation of Energy Principle. The former provides the known meaning of a word in any period while the latter provides a universal benchmark to evaluate the sustainability of a society and its language.

My journey tracking the meaning of “form” is stuck about 1200AD. Track signs say little is known of the word’s meaning prior to this point. This was a period when churches and monastries flourished, the Norman kings instituted large “Royal Forests” and English began to replace Norman French as the dominant language, a process supercharged by the Black Death plague decimating the upper class Latin and French speakers.

My growing intuition is the humble word “form” plays a much more profound role in our lives than we know. I am stuck and feeling overwhelmed. What to do? What to ask?
It occurs to me to check thewordfinder.com. It’s only a very rough guide but it reinforces my sense that “form” has immense meaning, perhaps as vast as involving the essential meaning of the universe (s).

Wordfinder discovers 746 words containing the word FORM. Amazing. By comparison it only discovers 93 words containing the word POWER, 123 words containing the word GOD and 51 words containing the word SHAPE. On a hunch and to my delight, my check discovers 1680 words containing the word ACT and 212 words containing the word ACTION.

A Millennia Long Leap to Profound Meaning

OnlineEtymology informs us, “morphē “shape, form,” a word of uncertain etymology.” It says the same of the word “form” too. However it traces the word “shape” to its PIE root *(s)kep-, forming words meaning “to cut, scrape, hack”, which give rise to German schaffen “shape, create, produce”.
It also mentions, “One theory holds that it is from or cognate with Greek morphe “form, beauty, outward appearance” (see Morpheus).”

Many of us are familiar from poems, paintings, books, films, our biology teachers etc with the word “metamorphosis” ( Greek meaning “a transforming, a transformation”) . Perhaps it is worth following the link to Morpheus and taking the leap.

Wow! Fantastic. What to see? One click and an amazing, vibrant world opens up. The word “Morpheus” evokes the great, vivid legends of the interactions of the Greek-Roman pantheon of gods with us mortal men, especially the legends portrayed by the Roman poet Ovid in his most famous narrative poem about 8 CE: “Metamorphoses”.

Divinity. Grief. Deceit. Sleep. Death. Night. Dreams. Reality. All our deepest experiences are played out. We can feel why the words “form”, “morph” and “shape” are all both nouns and verbs – as are the words “act” and “action”. They are transcendent words enabling us to live the paradox: to create is to be created. This all augers deep meaning.

Hypnos was the Greco-Roman god of sleep. Hypnos was the son of Nyx (Night) and the twin brother of Thanatos (Death). Some say Hypnos had thousands of sons.

Britannica.com says this of Morpheus, “in Greco-Roman mythology, one of the sons of Hypnos (Somnus), the god of sleep. Morpheus sends human shapes (Greek morphai) of all kinds to the dreamer, while his brothers Phobetor (or Icelus) and Phantasus send the forms of animals and inanimate things, respectively.”

Ovid’s telling of the legend of Morpheus visiting Alcyone in the form of her dead husband can be read in English at the Theoi Project.

There is also a character in the movie The Matrix called Morpheus and a synopsis of script suggest its legend is a variation on the ancient Greco-Roman legends, playing on our contemporary struggles to divine delusion from reality, delusional hope from true hope of physics.

These ancient Greco-Roman legends expressed the tragicomedy of our human condition: our state of uncertainty and ingenious capacity for self-deceit; the constant fluctuation in the balances of the dynamic forces of the ego and compassion in our psyche; and our continuous attempts and frequent failure to enjoy the continuous universal transformation.

The Rivers of Sleep, Forgetfulness and Death

These legends are so evocative of physics, the ways of the universe. My childhood was a blessed one of countless, timeless hours playing in “The creek” – the Waiorongomai River near our home. I often played in it all day, experimenting with its balances and flows. I went to sleep at night with its continuous chuckling, chattering, murmuring and occasional roar in flood informing and infusing my dreams.

In retrospect, the river was my greatest teacher, its sensations informing and grounding me in the truths of physics and imbuing me in the courage to question the ego-driven nonsense of our self-styled “physicists” and “science teachers”. The river is me. It is alive in my breath, my blood, my dreams, my being and it sustains my compassion, my connection with all.

Seven decades on my being is a river alive with childhood memories intertwined with dreams in which the stones, trees, oceans, stars and even my language all form rivers in and of each other. The Greco-Roman stories of the rivers of sleep, forgetfulness (oblivion), memory, death, fire, hatred and continuous transformation resonate in me.
Every river is a paradoxical story flowing with meaning and these ancient legends speak of societies living in relative harmony with the ways of universe compared to our Anglosphere culture.

The psychopathy of our modern Anglo corporate culture means many of us now demean sleep and live sleep-deprived existences. This dystopian culture deems “Time is money!” rather than time being a way of synchronizing our body’s rhythms with those of the stars. For instance, sleep is deemed “downtime” (inactive) while waking is deemed “uptime” (active). Perversely, even the word “woke” is now a term of abuse.

Ancient cultures and many contemporary indigenous cultures put high value on “dreamtime” and thus enjoy a more holistic experience of existence. Both “holy” and “health” arise from the PIE word *kailo- “whole, uninjured, of good omen” and sleep was a sacred time for healing.

Many of us have forgotten and forsaken this precious state of being even though our modern technology -computers, body scanners and other monitoring devices – provide powerful reminders that our experience of sleep and nightly dreams, far from being a time of inactivity as many of us have been taught to believe, is a time of our greatest activity.

In other words, sleep is a time of our life in which our experiences of the day are collated, divined (learned from) and processed in fantastic, incomprehensible ways. This profound process involves employing the ancient wisdom of our cells that has enabled them to sustain life for over 3 billion years through aeonic transformations of Earth so we and future generations can be sustained.

It is such a fantastic process that only in certain phases of sleep do our brains open to the rivers of sustaining information.
Deprived of those phases, we soon poison ourselves with accumulated neural waste and perish amidst delusions. We lose touch, lose sight, lose connection with the ways of the universe and our stories, lacking compassion, become ego-derived, deceptive and ultimately self-destructive.

(F)act is Fantasy.

‘Clearly “form” is a fantastic word.’ This was the first sentence I initially wrote when starting this story. Its beyond me why I jotted it down. Indeed it soon became obvious to me that this statement is not clear at all. So I decided it wise to remove the sentence until I knew the story of the word “fantastic”. Only now is it apparent to me that this seeming diversionary story is actually a vital tributary to the river of “form”.

The story tells us that the word’s origins reside in the Greek word phantastikos “able to imagine,” from phantazein “make visible” (middle voice phantazesthai “picture to oneself”), which in turn arose from the stem of phainein “to bring to light, make appear; come to light, be seen, appear; explain, expound, inform against; appear to be so”, which in turn arose from” from PIE root bha- (1) “to shine”, which is also the PIE root of many of our words associated with “to speak, tell, say.“

This story is fascinating because “bha” was such a transcendent word, giving rise to a dizzying array of words associated with seeing and speaking. This array is dizzying because these words describe so many of our interactions during our life-long search to discover a greater reality, to manifest the universal potential in sustaining ways.

The question arises: why did “fantastic” lose so much of this ancient transcendent meaning through the Middle Ages and become associated with insanity, delusions and acting ridiculously? Was it because of climate change and associated war, famine and pandemic? Was it because of the arrogant use of new technology?

And now it is mainly used in a dismissive or derisory way as well.
Listen to our opinion makers – especially our most influential merchants, politicians and corporate media people. They commonly condemn ideas and proposals they do not like by saying these are “unreal” “not believable” and “the stuff of fantasy”.

Similarly they now associate the wonderful, life-celebrating word “conspire” with malignancy and use it to condemn personally inconvenient ideas as “conspiracies”. They even speak of “Cults, Conspiracies, and Fantasies of Knowledge” in the same breath. See exemplar at this Cambridge abstract

This psychopathic use of the English language is characteristic of the ego, indicating a lack of compassion. Without compassion, the ego can easily have us become alienated from reality, arrogant, self-hating and ultimately self-destructive as individuals, institutions and societies. As we have seen, our ancestors used language in more compassionate ways with, for instance, PIE root bha meaning both “to shine” and “to speak, tell, say.” All existence involves paradox and this use of “bha” transcends the paradox of information: all things exist amidst the universal transformation, simultaneously informing all and being informed by all.

So it is important to note that the word “fantastic” has been associated since 1938 with creations and feelings “wonderful, marvelous”. Some English dictionaries describe this as a “trivial” use of the word. However it could actually be very profound, reflecting a healthy balance of compassion existing in parts of our English culture still.

Takeaway

Our lives are more fulfilling when we care to conserve the most transcendent meaning of words. We are more able to enjoy greater true hope of physics because the universal potential can be manifest in more marvelous and wonderful ways.
Observe how the word “marvelous” arises from the Latin words mirus “wonderful” and mirari “to wonder”. These arise from the PIE root *smei- “to laugh, smile” – as does the word “miracle”.
Old English noun “wundor”meant a “marvelous thing, miracle, object of astonishment,” while its verb “wundrian” meant to “be astonished,” also “admire; make wonderful, magnify,”

We experience this state when we enjoy compassion with its connective qualities of inclusiveness, sharing, generosity and humility. We human formations are opened in greater way to the universal transformation and are able to call forth and see the life force in forms around us even as these forms shine at us. We see reality more truthfully and are sustained more fully.