In the beginning, there was the word
Squiggles signifying sounds hominids heard
The philological game now was on
Ergo: the cultural transmission
Oral histories retained and reified
A Gilgamesh quest for the flesh to never die
Floating on a raft of sacred trees
A Metaphor born from the Epic’s leaves
Dialogues, Dramas, and Heroic verse
Athenian probes reason coerced
Truth on trial, Meletus maligned
When Elenchus entered the stream of time
Tomes only owned by the well-to-do
A veil of ignorance soon pierced through
When a ladder of castes became a curve
With Gutenberg’s shot read ‘round the world

This and that

A new view of nature began to emerge
The expansion of minds matched the universe
From Copernicus on through to Issac Newton
Ergo, we observe and propose solutions
Their ideas all revolved around a similar thing
Like when given 12 notes Bach made them sing
Now we listen to the math as it comes to life
A truly beautiful graph of bass clef lines
All part of the enlightenment that they sought
The Century of Lights brought reasonable thought
Too bright for some among the establishment
Ergo, you burn a few rules now and then
Intellectual dawn rose on the public sphere
With autonomous capitalism brought to bear
Steam processes tailor made for filling pockets
Ergo, we gave machines control so we can profit

This and that

Ideas and phenotypes evolved
Crossed over, mutated, at times forestalled
A theory resolved that the fittest persist
Ergo, the thylacine’s light was dimmed
While Edison vied to deny the night
His incandescent vision devised a device
To get down to recorded sound
Ergo, the ragtime craze left the ground
Genres and knowledge evolved like genes
And Turing conceived of a thinking machine
To approximate a human music producer
Ergo, A.I. in the looming future
Then ARPAnet, plus an Al Gore speech
As we march to the peak, we could finally reach
Out through tubes and removed space
Ergo, three heroes could communicate

This and that

In the beginning, there was the word
The Metronomicon and Stats conferred
Determined that they required a third
For The Diane-Kruger Effect to work
The Phosphorescent Hessian brought aboard
But they missed a percussionist overlord
Rochelle was compelled to meld, and so
Ergo, thus, therefore, ipso facto