According to A.L. Kroeber, at the time the first Spanish colonial missions were built in California, in the mid-18th Century, there were 21 linguistic families that spawned 135 languages. Visionary or practical, sober or shamanic, even to me personally they seem more made than given and serve as extensions of that part of the self which I determine. My infantile ego glories in this great consuming I-am. Everything in sight belongs to me in the same sense as the art was made by people whose gifts were projected from their language's capabilities.

      Everyone around it named,
      an anonymous flower
                    refuses to bloom.

Since the discovery of Paleolithic caves, it seems as if our Pleistocene ancestors were capable of symbolic thought, and thus had a language, at least in the form of their art. (But what if to them a horse was just a horse, a bull just a bull?) Although anatomically capable of articulating words, we don't know how far their vocalizing went. Could their art have been revised as it was over thousands of years without the hove of oral instruction?

We cannot understand the past before reframing the ideal that it can be understood, and compose of the hermeneutic circle of stones "the work of the mystery and the work on the mystery," which is "in the most tangible form the spiritual energy of

dreams and visions manifesting themselves in the physical world, transcending chronological time and physical space."

No matter where we are or when, "a whole mythology is deposited in our language," recalling our past as present in the depths of a collective imagination.