I woke up Monday from a disturbing dream: I was chanting some Hebrew that I knew well, and came to a letter that looked familiar but which I could suddenly no longer read. Oh, the fear that some day the marks on a page will have no meaning for me, and I will have to watch endless reruns of medical TV dramas to pass the time!

Often, I wonder about writing, including musical notation. Last week, I asked the noted ethnomusicologist, Marty Herman, how ancient are systems of musical notation–and what people thought they were doing when first they developed them. He thought it was probably a mnemonic device.

Is this the nature of writing and notation? To take what is inside the head and place it somewhere outside–to project our feeble fantasies on to the external world? The ancient artists who painted stirring scenes in the Caves of Lascaux long before recorded history, were they motivated by nothing nobler than fear that memory would fail and their deeds pass from the earth? Those first humans who scratched messages on rocks, were they inspired by fear of oblivion?

Surely, as we rely on external symbols to remedy the shortcomings of our brain, we can dispense with our ability to remember. Hamlet heard a speech just once and memorized it–“the mobled queen”; how many of us can do that today? And so long as Wikipedia holds answers to all our questions, do we need memory at all? Let all be forgotten, for the cyber-universe has become the humanity’s memory, threatened only by hackers or power outages.

The more we paint our symbols on the world (even our ribbons of concrete snaking across the landscape are a kind of writing, aren’t they?) the less we need to know.

Yet there is another side to this exposure of our inner thoughts. In addition to leaving a mark to assist memory, it lets us share our secrets; and perhaps early systems of notation were for that purpose. Perhaps they were designed to share our inner life with people who had the training to understand.

Those French cavemen and -women painted their vibrant pictures in dark caves where natural light would never penetrate. Few could see them; few could know they were there. But some few people with the capacity to understand could grasp whatever hidden knowledge and feeling those images conveyed.

Reading (even reading pictures and icons) lets me see into the mind of another; it’s a mysterious ability that humans possessed even before the invention of writing, and it’s something I hope never to lose as long as I breathe.