Old Magic

I can fly to the antipodes in a day's time, and think nothing of it. I can tap a few keys and see images from Mars, and think nothing of it. Each technological advance makes the world smaller and shrinks the bounds of the impossible, but there is still magic. Old magic. Crowded around a shrinking fire, darkness creeping in, our ancestors held the monsters at bay with their magic.

Words. Burgess's "mouthful of air" jumped from person to person around and over the flames, fortifying their souls and strengthening their resolve. Stories told over the fire amused and enthralled, frightened and emboldened the primal audience. I suspect they skipped the laugh track, but they were, after all, told before a live savanna audience. Old stories were remembered and passed down, elaborated and gilded. New stories were told of adventures real and imagined. Using nothing more than teeth and tongue, lips, larynx, and palate, the world was tamed.

The storytellers begat the shamans who begat the priests who begat the stand-up philosophers. Eventually the stand-up philosophers besat themselves down and started writing.

Words. Scratches on paper to spread the good word - for there are no bad words - far and wide. Treatises, treaties, censuses, and proclamations were written and disseminated, but it was the playwrights who inherited the magic. Holding an audience rapt with nothing more than scratches on paper (plus those pesky actors to read them), the playwrights took their fathers' magic and magnified it. Aristophanes killed at the family hour. His super-sized comedies had the Athenians rolling in the aisles. Sophocles came on a bit later - fitting his darker, edgier subject matter - and hit them with adult themes of incest, patricide, and Sphinxters.

Their descendants are currently in a frenzy trying to staff for the fall. "CSI: Thebes" needs writers.