PEN International is an organization that promotes literature and freedom of expression. Every year on March 3rd, PEN promotes a free word and a free thought and celebrates World Press Freedom Day.
Founded in London in 1921, a non-political organization and the global community of writers from around 100 countries unites writers and journalists – all those using the written word and believing in its right power to promote ideas and fighting against all suppression of freedom of expression.
What an obvious right to have, you might think. And, yet, not so obvious in some places on earth. The recent cases that instantly call to mind without delving deeper are the egregious ones of the killings of journalists in Malta, Slovakia, and prosecutions of writers in China and Turkey. Half of the listed countries are members of the European Union. As a member state of this power machine one has no self-evident guarantee of freedoms, protection, and immunity to injustice as a result due to being bold and expressing what needs to be expressed.
At the same time, it seems that the need to read acclaimed authors of books and articles becomes smaller and smaller. You yourself can act as a writer, writing a blog just like this one, or posting your views on Twitter. Social media has become (a new) alternative source of news that occasionally gets posted by.., well, alternative sources. No matter what format the written word takes, it is not a rumor which spreads, changes its content several times until no one can remember the initial version, and eventually forgets it existed altogether. The written word is there to be perpetuated. The knowledge about things we know today or we think we know and believe to be true were once written down and thus perpetuated. The Ancient Greek philosophers (Aristotle) wrote about woman’s roles and slave origin that we easily recognize and are still grappling with today. Many thoughts, interpretations, and beliefs could have stayed around for a while and then vanished without a trace, but once written down, they’ve become evidence. And then, they serve as a reference. VERBA VOLANT, SCRIPTA MANENT, says a Latin proverb and can be translated as “spoken words fly away, written words remain”.
So, the writing was invented by Sumerians in southern Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq and Kuwait), c. 3500-3000 BCE, which were specific marks made on wet clay tablets – cuneiforms. This was the first written language if we do not count the Lascaux cave paintings by Cro-Magnon people in around 30,000 BCE – as language expressed through art. If we look at the early Sumerian texts, we will too see drawings – carved pictographs that later became phonograms and represented spoken sounds to express more complex written language. The other early writings we know of are Egyptian hieroglyphs (ca. 3150 BCE), the writings of Maya (ca. 500 BCE-250 CE), and China (ca. 1200 BCE). The latter two are believed to have developed independently as there is no evidence of a cultural connection with those distant worlds and Europe at the time.
The first written language was mainly used for trade purposes and to record events, religious beliefs, and rituals. The oldest Mesopotamian documents with inscribed laws in them are the Cones of Entemena and Urukagina (ca. 2400 BCE) and the Babylonian Code of Law of Hammurabi (ca. 1780-1750 BCE). The need grew, as all human needs do, to express oneself through language, and thus, literature was born. 42 hymns written by the Mesopotamian priestess Enheduanna (2285-2250 BCE) make it the first literary piece and her the first literary writer. The epic tale of Gilgamesh of ca. 2000 BCE had several versions as it was passed on orally until the tale we read today was written down in around 1300-1000 BCE. The first printed book appeared in 1455 CE after the printing press had been invented by a German engraver Johannes Gutenberg. That book was the Bible.
“Writing is dangerous piety. It imprisons knowledge” was allegedly said by Socrates (469-399 BCE). He famously disregarded the written word and did not leave any of his writings. What was the real reason behind Socrates’ refusal to write things down? Was it because as he knew nothing, the written word would have seemed hypocritical? Today, we have no choice but believe Plato’s word and his interpretations of Socrates’ thoughts. Plato had the courage to write the dialogues with Socrates. And I am glad he did, even though this way he shapes our minds and opinion about Socrates’ genius.
It is courageous to write. A written word does have power. Think about the religious texts, constitutions, human rights laws, etc. These scripts, no matter how imaginative and somewhat odd, some even absurd, become real, tangible, and often unquestionable once written down in stone, clay, paper, software, and soon glass memory discs.
It, too, means freedom. To a certain extent. It may be the freedom to write a complete fantasy where no fact-checking is required, and no suspicion of plagiarism is insight. It also may seem to be harder and harder to be unique and original in writing. Here I would like to emphasize the importance of education in creative writing. It is a good challenge to learn how to express oneself in the craziest possible way and yet stick to certain rules and stay within the framework. Humans have created millions of words and keep on creating new ones. There are infinite possibilities of combining them. My hope is that the restrictions, whether personal inhibitions and within, or external impositions from outside, will not stifle the need, whether personal or external, to think, then speak up and write to perpetuate new, different, bold thoughts, ideas, and stories. And let the readers be the critics questioning, accepting, or rejecting them.
Ventral Striatum 