Language, perception and 'The Cool Web'

I first read 'The Cool Web' more than a decade ago and, even though I found its meaning elusive, the words have stayed with me since. I have often wondered - since I deal with language pretty much on a daily basis - whether language is really as Graves proposes: a cool web that shields us from feeling too excruciatingly, but that we might also drown eventually in our own insipid, vapid volubility.

Then today I read an interview with Oliver Sacks, and it threw new light on the poem:

"Savants are people with extraordinary capacities of calculation or music or drawing, mixed with generally low intelligence - a very startling anomaly...

Some neurologists think that what may go on in the savant may be a relative preservation and heightening of primitive perceptual and computational powers in the right hemisphere - powers of a sort that are normally inhibited with the development of abstract intelligence and language. If abstract intelligence and language don't develop, it could be possible that they may be, in a word, freer. Something which might support this idea may be the late appearance of savant-like powers in people, say, with frontal temporal dementia; it is precisely with the decline of verbal and abstract intelligence that we sometimes see this emergence of artistic powers...

...certainly, there's a tantalizing notion that such savant abilities may be universal or latent in all of us, and could be released in certain circumstances. But if the release entails a loss of enunciation - of our higher powers - it may not be such a good bargain."