Immortal Speech

Between the earliest pictographs

And Edison’s team demonstrating

The first version of the phonograph

Lay the in-between generations

Of history in which speech could be

Noted down but not preserved as heard.

Now professors have audiobooks,

Not dictated but written, then read

Back to them by voice professionals.

Speech has become immortal, announced

The Scientific American

After Edison’s demonstration,

Nine decades before Arthur C. Clarke

Ruled any sufficiently advanced

Technology (what’s sufficiently?)

Indistinguishable from magic.

The Edison team’s first phonograph

Actually proved something rather

Different—that it’s not how advanced

The technology, but how novel.

Tech’s distinguishable from magic

But, until the tech’s sufficiently

Familiar, it does seem magical—

Just as magic, incidentally,

Even real, would seem impossible

Only until made common enough

To be a daily technology,

As misunderstood as all the rest.

It wasn’t more than a century

From the first phonograph cylinder

To golden records shot into space.

So, is speech now truly immortal?

That’s just a rhetorical question,

Of course. Speech is less evanescent

In well-recorded circumstances,

But it depends on the medium.

Everything depends on, everything

Itself is, some kind of medium.

Before bits coded for sound or print,

Before analog grooves dug through wax,

Before quill and ink blotted paper,

Before caves were splattered with ochre,

The human brain served as medium,

Speech and gestures as the transmission

Means to store more immortals in brains.

Languages invented immortals,

Each and every immortality

That technologies have pretended.