BABEL/MILKLESSNESS

From the early fourteenth century of Dante-in-exile, in translation by Stephen Botterill, glimpse of a most ancient attempt to circumvent the confusion of Babel and pain of banishment from one's mother tongue: Dodge the mother altogether: "Since human affairs are now carried on in so many different languages, so that many people are no better understood by others when they use words than when they do not, it behoves us to hunt for the language believed to have been used by the man who never had a mother nor drank her milk, the man who never saw either childhood or maturity."

Or reckon with the fact of language's animal inconsistency: "Since, therefore, all our language (except that created by God along with the first man) has been assembled, in haphazard fashion, in the aftermath of the great confusion that brought nothing else than oblivion to whatever language had existed before, and since human beings are highly unstable and variable animals, our language can be neither durable nor consistent with itself; but, like everything else that belongs to us..., it must vary according to distances of space and time." —De vulgari eloquentia

In the gangway of light cut into Bramante's Tempietto, further illumination for the hole reputedly drilled by the crucifixion of Peter/the Rock on our Montorio, time-softened holy geist and Twomblylike scrawls of some-io-here, now innocent in his illegibility against the permanent oblivion of carved Latin.