The Text Is the Reader’s Fate

Last time I described the use of the first person in a monument to Phrasikleia. The first-person narration adds yet a further dimension to the life force of the statue. The ancient Greek visitor would have read the inscription aloud because silent reading had not been invented yet. (Silent reading became widespread only in the early Christian centuries as a means of private devotion.) Throughout classical antiquity, people voiced the text in order to read it, and they often did so in the company of others. We can imagine a visitor standing in front of Phrasikleia’s monument as though meeting her for the first time. He sounds out the syllables to discover what they mean. The speech would seem spontaneous, of the moment.

The reader would thus voice the role of the statue, re-enacting its words as though he were an actor in a kind of miniature play who steps forward and delivers his line. In this way, the first-person inscription offers a mechanism for reviving Phrasikleia temporarily in the reader. The reader lends her a mouth, a tongue, a throat, lungs. Indeed, a whole body belongs once again to Phrasikleia. The reader becomes Phrasikleia. “I” is not a character who happens to narrate the story. We ourselves become the character and inhabit the story. It becomes our self at least for the moment.

The self of the statue and inscription does not substitute for Phrasikleia’s identity. It’s not a matter of resemblance even if we may assume that the statue looks like the human Phrasikleia did. Most visitors would never have seen the living Phrasikleia, so the soul or force of the monument that they feel consists of something else beside the echo of the living girl it might have evoked for her family and friends.

Indeed, they too never really knew Phrasikleia either, except as a self, that is, through the image or images she projected of herself. As in a dream, all selves exist on the plane of image, regardless of whether they are “real” (the girl) or “fake” (the statue). The viewer or reader experiences them the same way, and only subsequently do we attribute the self to life or art and assign different values to it.

The self comes from an act of linguistic creation. The Greeks and Romans imagined fate as an utterance. The gods observe humans and their actions dispassionately. At the critical moment, when the future of an individual hangs in the balance, the gods announce what will happen to him. The decree marks his character eternally. Hector will forever be known as the Trojan hero who was slain by Achilles and dragged around the walls of Troy behind a chariot. The gods made Hector’s fate manifest by pronouncing it. The act of speaking this fate equals the fate itself.

The word “fate” originally meant simply “that which has been said.” What had seemed unclear and indeterminate to humans one moment becomes clear and fixed the next, after the gods speak. We readers fashion our own fates through a similar act of pronunciation. An undifferentiated stream of words flows swiftly before our eyes and through our minds. At some point, like Creeley’s student, we cease to be passive observers and become the protagonist of our own dreams. We pick out a passage that strikes us. We start to hear rhythms in the text. We create something new out of them. That is who we are. That is our fate.

What an Ancient Greek Monument Can Teach Us About the Self

My last post proposed that the unconscious is not a separate space “inside” us but a psychological way of looking at the world. Anything we encounter can become our unconscious if we look at it soulfully. Words are objects in the world, too, and can therefore become the unconscious. The reader’s self extends from out of the words just as it extends from out of the dream in Hillman’s example.

We would grasp this possibility if we stopped thinking of the text as a medium of communications for conveying a message that is separate from the words themselves. Let’s go to ancient Greece and look at the earliest instance of the first-person narrator, dating from 700-650 B.C. As tombstones do today, the first Greek monuments employed the third person—“Here lies….” The text serves as a label. It draws our attention to something without altering it. The text points to the contents of the grave, which we cannot see. We learn whose remains are buried in that spot through the mediation of the text. Our thought passes through the text, as through a window, to the corpse in the ground and the life that used to be attached to it. We don’t fuss about how fully the inscription portrays the contents of the grave because we care about the grave, not the words. We only need them as a matter of convenience to say, “Here it is.”

Then monument carvers started using the first person. Writing from the perspective of “I” does alter the contents that the inscription supposedly describes. Consider this epigram attached to the statue of someone who died in childhood:

As Phrasikleia’s memorial, I will always be called girl since I received this lot from the gods instead of marriage.[i]

Certainly, the inscription locates the deceased and conveys information about her if that’s what we want. However, the simple trick of writing in the first person performs the much more remarkable feat of animating the monument. The monument addresses us like any interlocutor. We face a three-dimensional personality. Although the inscription disarmingly acknowledges the difference between the statue and the actual Phrasikleia, the statue takes on Phrasikleia’s characteristics. It is a girl just as she was, and it too once had, but lost, the potential for being married. The gods concern themselves with the fate of the statue in parallel with the fate of Phrasikleia. The statue even has as great a capacity for change and growth as Phrasikleia once had. The statue will “be called girl,” a phrasing that implies it could in fact be other things if the gods so wished. “Girl” was not the statue’s inevitable state and sole essence. It is merely a provisional identity, which could have changed if the gods had not decreed otherwise and frozen it in place.

“The gods” form the ground from which Phrasikleia’s self springs. The inscription uses the indefinite plural deliberately, not specifying which particular gods determined Phrasikleia’s lot. The text ascribes her self to the gods as a way of acknowledging its divine origin without being able to define it precisely just as we never know where our own linguistic creativity springs from. The self exhibits an articulate structure as though fashioned by a god. It’s expressive. It conveys thought and feeling. But where that structure originates remains a mystery. Phrasikleia did not will it. The Greeks spoke of the gods the way we might speak of the imagination. The plurality of the gods leads inevitably to the many possibilities for Phrasikleia’s self, of which “girl” forms one instance. One set of gods bestowed that identity. A different set would have given her another identity.

[i] Jesper Svenbro, Phrasikleia: An Anthopology of Reading in Ancient Greece, tr. Janet Lloyd (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 17.

A Reader Is a Self Composed of Words

We readers consist of the words we experience in a text and the echoes they provoke in us. Words combine consciousness and the unconscious. Words do not point to or symbolize an unconscious that lies “inside” us out of direct reach. Words themselves are the unconscious in all its potency.

Let me dwell on the nature of the unconscious for a bit. Psychologists started off by imagining the unconscious as a kind of basement, with solid floor and walls, that contains leftovers from our life we don’t want anymore but somehow can’t discard. Sigmund Freud believed that our basement consists of experiences from our personal past that we forgot or suppressed because they were traumatic. Since the very young tend to have the same experiences, such as closeness to their mother and the discovery of mother and father having sex, people accumulate similar old furniture in their basements, most famously the Oedipus complex.

These psychological patterns manifest themselves in the form of wish-fulfillment dreams or neuroses, such as compulsive hand-washing. When a neurosis disrupts our lives, the psychoanalyst helps us to revive the memory of the trauma at the root of the problem. Since our conscious mind knows how to distract us when we come near this memory, the psychoanalyst asks questions and listens for the tell-tale gaps in our testimony that indicate places where the trauma hides. Once we recognize the trauma, it ceases to control our life.

C.G. Jung went from Zurich to Vienna in 1907 to study under Freud and entered psychoanalysis with him. Jung had to discuss his dreams—“the highway to the unconscious” as Freud said. Jung reports telling Freud about the following dream:

I was in a house I did not know, which had two stories.  It was “my house.”  I found myself in the upper story where there was a kind of salon furnished in rococo style.  On the walls hung a number of precious paintings.  I wondered that this should be my house, and thought, “Not bad.”  But then it occurred to me that I did not know what the lower floor looked like.  Descending the stairs, I reached the ground floor.  There everything was much older, and I realized that this part of the house must date from about the fifteenth or sixteenth century….I came upon a heavy door, and opened it.  Beyond it, I discovered a stone stairway that led down into the cellar.  Descending again, I found myself in a beautifully vaulted room which looked exceedingly ancient….I knew that the walls dated from Roman times.  My interest was by now intense.  I looked more closely at the floor.  It was one of stone slabs, and in one of these I discovered a ring.  When I pulled it, the stone slab lifted, and again I saw a stairway of narrow stone steps leading down into the depths.  These, too, I descended, and entered a low cave cut into the rock.  Thick dust lay on the floor, and in the dust were scattered bones and broken pottery, like remains of a primitive culture.[i]

To explore the meaning of the dream, Jung turned to books: “The dream of the house had a curious effect upon me: it revived my old interest in archaeology. After I had returned to Zurich I took up a book on Babylonian excavations, and read various works on myths. In the course of this reading I came across Friedrich Creuzer’s The Symbolism and Mythology of Ancient Peoples—and that fired me!”[ii] Freud had wanted to interpret the dream according to his own theory about the personal unconscious, but Jung thought it led more naturally to this interpretation:

            It was plain to me that the house represented a kind of image of the psyche — that is to say, of my then state of consciousness, with hitherto unconscious additions.  Consciousness was represented by the salon.  It had an inhabited atmosphere, in spite of its antiquated style.

            The ground floor stood for the first level of the unconscious.  The deeper I went, the more alien and the darker the scene became.  In the cave, I discovered remains of a primitive culture, that is, the world of the primitive man within myself — a world which can scarcely be reached or illuminated by consciousness.  The primitive psyche of man borders on the life of the animal soul, just as the caves of prehistoric times were usually inhabited by animals before men laid claim to them.[iii]

This dream helped Jung to formulate his theory of the collective unconscious. He envisioned the collective unconscious as a layer below the personal unconscious that functions by generating symbols of universal significance, including art and myths. We all share in these basic symbols, not because we have gone through similar experiences but because we have inherited them with our genetic make-up. They are an innate part of being human, regardless of personal history or culture just as Roman and prehistoric civilizations form the heritage of all Western cultures.

Jung defined a small collection of archetypes that act as lenses through which we make sense of the world: the shadow, the anima, and the Self. We encounter the archetypes through projection. If we hate or fear someone, it’s because we project onto others feelings about the aspects of our own character we hate and fear yet don’t want to acknowledge. They become symbols of our shadow personality.

Likewise, when we fall in love, we project that part of our unconscious, the soul or anima, onto others as well. Jung used the term libido to describe this power of attraction. Libido does not necessarily require sexual attraction. It encompasses intense friendships, devotion to celebrities, and other passionate attachments. Soul or libido connects us meaningfully to others. It binds individuals into societies. Its force drives us to pay attention to those who are different from ourselves. Their personalities, needs, and desires fascinate us. They become important to us. We convert the energy of libido into the creativity and activities necessary to build relationships with them.

We all participate in these symbols, and they convey a similar meaning to all of us. Hence, Jung referred to the “collective” unconscious. Nevertheless, we experience these archetypes as individuals. Indeed, they help us to become a more individual Self by granting each of us access to capabilities we were unaware that we possessed.

With Jung, we still have discrete basements with solid walls, but the floor now has a trap door leading to a network of catacombs that connect all basements. The analytical psychologist guides us down into the catacombs to help us find the pieces we need to become a complete self. Archetypes may erupt into our consciousness in the form of psychoses, their power sheering through the veneer of our waking personality. In that case, the psychologist helps us to convert the pathological relationship between our ego and the dangerous archetype into a stable, useful one. In other cases, our waking self may lack a connection to the archetypes so that our life seems gray and unfulfilling. The psychologist shows us how to tap the creative power of the archetypes.

[i] C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffe, trs. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), pp. 158-159.

[ii] Jung, p. 162.

[iii] Jung, p. 160.

How to Dream in Words and Syllables

When we read, strings of syllables fuse into an organic whole with a tempo and a sound contour. Say these words to yourself, pausing for a couple of seconds between each one to give it its individual weight: “our”—“age”—“is”—“retrospective.” The first three monosyllabic words carry a primary stress while the fourth word has a primary stress on the first syllable and a secondary stress on the third.

Now, put them together in a sentence: “Our age is retrospective.” The stresses have changed. “Age” still carries a primary stress; but “our” now has a secondary stress, and “is” has lost its stress. The first and third syllables of “retrospective” have swapped their stresses—the third syllable carries the primary stress, with the first syllable becoming secondary. The shift in stresses turns these four individual words into one integral phase (a “duration block” as James put it). Instead of the staccato monotone of speaking one discrete word after another, the four words recognize each other, so to speak, and modify their voices to become a unit. “Our” reduces its stress to emphasize the stress on its noun “age.” “Is” drops its stress altogether to join the two elements on either side. The primary stress shifts to the penultimate syllable of “retrospective” in acknowledgement that it rounds off a sentence and needs to place the emphasis nearer its end. In ordinary speech, the modified stress contour indicates that these words go together and should be interpreted this way.

The colloquial way of pronouncing a phrase isn’t the only possible way, however. Composing phrases creates intonations that form a rhythm, and rhythm expresses emotion. These rhythms draw us along, enfold us in an aural world implying many possible meanings as we found with the passages from Brooks and Emerson. Instead of this standard pronunciation:

Our age is retrospective.

We could also try putting the stress on the first word:

OUR age is retrospective.

Or the third word:

Our age IS retrospective.

Or we could try turning it into anapests:

Our age IS retroSPECtive.

Or:

Our age IS retrospecTIVE.

We can play with the intonations of this sentence endlessly as we might in a dream, circling back and back in search of some significance that lies hidden there we can’t quite grasp. Each of these intonations suggests some different shade of meaning. Do we emphasize our generation, distinct from other generations? Do we assert that it is retrospective against people who call it forward-looking? Do we try some quirky pronunciation to mock the idea or to shake loose some unexpected insight from it? With the last version, we realize that “is” and “-tive” rhyme. Throwing this attention on the least remarkable syllables highlights their grammatical function. Is our entire age epitomized in this one, present moment of “is?” Is “retrospective” not just a quality of our age but the defining characteristic? Or is “retrospective” a noun? We wander into all sorts of plausible and implausible suppositions, which contain the seeds of ideas.

The potential we sense in this not-just-sound/not-fully-meaning phenomenon of rhythm invites our creativity. What do we hear in the text? It could come from our own unconscious, or it could echo something we heard someone else say in another context entirely. We do not have to aim at what the author meant or hunt for a predetermined meaning. Freed from the burden of having to interpret, we can now explore the full linguistic potential of the text.

We seek new rhythms in the words on the page, new emphases. We twist sentences out of shape just as Brooks did with the sing-song lines of her poems. Perhaps we even rearrange, change, and add to the words themselves. We decompose the words in order to recompose them into new forms. We become actors, who prepare roles by repeating their lines, trying various intonations in order to find odd riches in the script. If we listen to the syllables and play with the rhythm, the bare text suggests many directions the words could go in.

On this level, reading is a primal activity, not merely a rational derivative of writing. Reading occurs off center from our purposeful waking consciousness, then obtrudes into it. The text makes us aware of the stream of thoughts racing through us below the surface of our minds just as water flows silently through a creek bed until it strikes a boulder in the channel and starts to gurgle and splash. The text interferes with our stream of consciousness in such a way that it draws our attention.

The text alters our consciousness fundamentally. We do not go back to being the same people we were before we read it. All the properties of the text, including the purely physical and the phonological as well as the intellectual, shape who we are. Ideas eddy through our mind in queer ways. They acquire life force from the momentum of the stream. We could revolutionize our thinking about the world if we chose to follow the impetus of one of these ideas. We could change our whole life. In any case, our life does change, perhaps imperceptibly. The vectored ideas we pick up from the act of reading become who we are. I don’t mean the ideas intentionally conveyed via the text, which we grasp intellectually. I mean the ideas that the friction of the text spurred us to dream as we read it.

Think of Reading as an Experience

When we read, we experience a text as vividly as we do dreams, where images tantalize the senses. Readers experience words first as physical objects. They convey sensory impressions. Like any tangible object, they possess a specific shape and size, based on the font, ink, and vagaries of printing. They have color—even black comes in a range of shades if you look closely. The quality of the paper or screen they appear on gives them texture. Every book exhibits its own particular contrast between the ink—how dark? how thick? sharp characters or curvy?—and the paper—white or beige? matte or glossy? coarse-grained or fine? Paper and ink also produce a scent. I like to stick my nose in the middle of an open book, close my eyes, and slowly inhale to savor the smell. I suppose you can even put the words in your mouth to taste if you want.

We respond to the physical properties of words just as we would to any landscape we enter. We don’t just see the green wavelengths of light reflected from the leaves on a tree or the geometric shapes of a building. These characteristics carry an emotional tonus inextricable from the empirical sensations. The physical properties of words help set the mood in which we read and therefore color our experience of the text, the way we perceive it, and ultimately the meaning we derive from it.

These physical properties shimmer before our sight like dream images. Words engage our senses, but they do not allow us to reach out and enfold them with our arms. They elude us when we try to address them in the direct, tactile way in which we deal with the waking world. Dreams move us more by the sequencing of images and by the emotions that accompany them. In reading, that level of experience emerges from the phonology of words, blending the physical with meaning. Words consist of syllables, or articulate sounds. Some individual syllables coincide with distinct ideas, such as “I,” “run,” and “here.” Most exhibit greater potential for meaning if they combine (kǝm BĪŃ) to form words.

Next time I’ll walk through an example of how readers can convert the experience of a text into meaning.

Readers Are Just as Gifted as Writers

Writers don’t deserve the reverence we give to their creativity. The subconscious flow of language feeds writers no more than it does readers. They enjoy no special access to language that readers lack. Where did Emerson get his language? Like Gwendolyn Brooks or me or anyone else, he heard the speech of ordinary people. He listened to other Unitarian preachers of his day. He read Emanuel Swedenborg, and so on and so forth. Creativity with language starts from absorbing the rhythms of the sentences we hear or read, transmuting them in the uniqueness of our minds (often without us realizing it), and uttering words in a new form. Those words in turn become the raw material for others’ creativity.

I liken this process to chain mail. Chain mail consists of a network of small metal loops. Each loop links with, say, six other loops, so that, link by link, row by row, the chain mail grows into a continuous fabric in the shape of a vest, pants, or some other garment that a soldier can wear for protection. Each loop supports and is supported by the loops it is attached to. Similarly, each reader or writer linguistically influences, and receives influences from, many other people, and each of them in turn exerts influences on several further individuals, and so on until a continuous fabric of language weaves across society and over time.

Ultimately, only a few writers occupy positions in this mesh of language. Readers contribute many more links, and those who seldom write or read account for still more of the chain mail. Authors are not fundamentally more important in this fabric than readers or non-readers. We all influence and are influenced by others. We all alternate between “odd” and “normal” forms of language such as I described with Brooks and Emerson. We all dream, and we all wake. The particular medium of these influences, whether print or speech, counts less than the network of influences as a whole. We violate the integrity of the fabric of language when we pick out one category of practitioner, the authors, and value their influence more than the other links. Writing is not a more important function than reading, speaking, and listening.

I set the metaphor of chain mail in contrast with Plato’s famous image in the Ion of inspiration as the magnetism that travels in one direction from a lodestone through a series of metal links attached to it. We usually explain literary tradition in this unidirectional fashion. We start with a great author, say, John Milton, and we trace his influence on a series of lesser writers over time. When we study literature, we focus on the most influential writers, that is, the writers from whom we can trace the longest chains. Plato’s image of the chain awards most of the honor to the originating lodestone or authorial genius and reserves little for the links. When we do so, though, we are just being selective in our attention. We isolate one loop or row in what is in fact a fabric of mail and accord it undue importance. Some of the loops may shine more brightly than others; nevertheless, they function only when connected all together in a mesh. That mesh is a collective unconscious to which we all, readers and writers alike, stake an equal claim. The dreams that blossom from it for readers matter as much as the dreams of authors.

This equivalence contrasts with the subordinate relationship that reader has traditionally had to writer. It seems almost too obvious to state that writers are cultural authorities. I went to see Gwendolyn Brooks; she didn’t come to see me. I expected to learn from her. I respected the fact that she had published many books of poetry. I thought her poems good—a safe judgment, considering that she had won a reputation among critics of contemporary verse. I knew it would be “good for me” to go. In short, I fell naturally into the typical role of the reader or student. I did not reflect that this transaction required me to set aside my own linguistic dreams in order to focus on hers.

Lines of Poetry Appear in My Sleep

Language flows dream-like into and out of all of us. Language rolls through our minds like a mighty subterranean river that rises to the surface of our consciousness here and there. The Emersonian rhetorical periods that I heard or composed in my sleep arose in some primal level of awareness where creation, imitation, and consumption have not become distinct. From this perspective, the division between reader and writer seems arbitrary. I described my experience of reading Emerson in my sleep. If I had written down the phantom Emersonian lines I had heard or composed in my head, I could have called myself a writer.

My subconscious has come up with more original work if you want it. Here’s a snatch of language that I dreamed one morning when I had emerged from deep slumber but had not fully awoken. I surfed in delicious half-sleep for as long as I wished. During this time, I kept repeating these words in my head because I liked the way they sounded:

All things are beautiful…in its own time. Even the word of the poet are sufficient for a lover.

The words don’t make sense for readers trained in correct English. The meaning is not obvious, and both sentences miss on subject/verb agreement. Nevertheless, the passage is suggestive. First, it had a definite tonal contour. The first part sounded sententious, elevated, followed by a pause for emphasis and then a shorter passage with the stress on “own.” The second sentence has a rising cadence that peaks at the word “poet,” followed by a descending cadence that resolves the sentiment. As I headed toward consciousness, the sentences crystallized into a stanza:

All things are beautiful

        …in its own time;

        even the word of the poet

Are sufficient for a lover.

You can believe that the lines belong in a stanza because they have just about the same size if you count the pause at the start of line two as a beat. The passage has a plural-singular/singular-plural shape. The shape alludes to a common conceit about the nature of the cosmos—is it one or many? The second line implies that the things which make up the cosmos (which comes from a Greek word meaning orderly or beautiful) move or develop according to an inherent rhythm.

The heightened rhetoric carries over into the second half with “the word.” The singular suggests a cosmic significance (“In the beginning was the word…”) or some other grand meaning (“a man’s word is his bond”). The passage also ties these big themes to human experience. The word “even” points to a connection between the cosmos in the first two lines and the world of poetry in lines three and four. The implied rhythms of the poet echo the rhythm of the cosmos. We can glimpse the cosmic “word” in the actual words (the implied subject of “are sufficient”) of a poet. These words reassure the “lover,” a universal role we have all played at some time. Finally, the passage is reflexive. We ourselves experience the words and rhythms that these four lines talk about, including both their human and their cosmic meanings, by virtue of reading them.

In this episode, was I a reader or a writer? On the one hand, I wrote the words down and present them to you now on the page. As far as you know, I am their author. On the other hand, the passage came to me from I don’t know where (although it contains hints about possible antecedents such as the Gospel of John). I didn’t consciously compose it the way I compose this sentence right now. I absorbed it passively just as readers passively absorb the text that they find on the page.

The passage played over and over in my head much as when we come across a striking line in a book and repeat it to ourselves, mulling its significance. In my head, the words originally formed a mere rhythmic line or sequence that I heard, but I then wanted to visualize the way they would appear if they were printed and I were the reader. The four-line stanza seemed the natural, inevitable form the passage should take, not a deliberate artistic choice of my own. I performed the role of writer simply by anticipatory reading. If I had never written the words down, which could easily have been the case, I would never have thought of myself as the passage’s “author.”

Emerson Hypnotized Me

I’ve talked about poetry up to this point. Now let me turn to prose. Prose with a strong personality induces a trance in the reader. Sentence after sentence rolls by. The rhythm of the words lulls our critical faculties to sleep until we have delivered ourselves over to the ups and downs of the language. Reading thereby changes the very rhythm of our own thoughts. I have had these dreamlike experiences from reading Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not a history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.[i]

Reading alters our consciousness because it fuses the conceptual and the physical. The rhythm of a well-written piece makes us feel that we can move in time to it. This sense of rhythm permits us to enter into the frame of mind out of which the writer’s thoughts sprang. The idea a writer wants to convey becomes as persuasive as any experience. For this reason, Emerson does not expound his thought in straightforward, clinical prose. If he had, he could have expressed himself more succinctly since there’s really only one idea here: “Don’t let tradition keep you from original discoveries about the world.” Any such attempt to paraphrase his text sounds flat; it misses the essential ingredient.

Emerson’s language gives us a chance to practice his philosophy. Emerson maintained that we don’t have to go anywhere or flee from the world to find significance; the here and now will do. The objects of life point toward meanings that transcend the mundane. We need to reflect on these signs, to keep circling back over them in our minds, until they yield the insight we need.

The rhythm of Emerson’s prose re-enacts this process as he circles back over his idea sentence by sentence, clause by clause. The passage starts with simple declarative sentences of gradually increasing length, the first with one adjective in the predicate (“retrospective”), the second with two nouns (“sepulchers,” “fathers’), the third with three (“biographies,” “histories,” “criticism”). Then follow a series of “why” questions whose length increases through a similar addition of elements in each succeeding sentence. Finally, the passage recurs to simple declarative sentences, the first with one element in the predicate, the second with two elements, the third with three elements (“new lands, new men, new thoughts”). And Emerson caps the passage with an exhortation whose three predicate elements (“our own works and law and worship”) repeat the rhythm of the penultimate sentence.

The one-two-three repeating rhythm draws the reader without realizing it into Emerson’s way of viewing the world. Emerson starts with assertions so obvious, or at any rate so simple, that we don’t dispute them. Then the gradual building of elements and complexity invisibly crosses the boundary from fact to meaning, from description to urging—join me in demanding new structures to match our new lives in this new world. The three-element rhyme of the last two sentences makes Emerson’s polite command seem perfectly reasonable, even unavoidable.

The effect of Emerson’s rhetoric builds lick by lick so that by the end of the paragraph we have participated in the subtlety and depth of Emerson’s philosophy. Read a few pages of Emerson with some attention, and his incantatory phrasing convinces you utterly because you have not simply listened to his ideas, you have entered into the experience of thinking them.

On one or two occasions, I have drifted into sleep while reading Emerson, induced by the hypnotic succession of his sentences. Not the sleep of boredom, but the sleep in which inner eyes open when outer eyes close. I still held the book in my hands and directed my gaze at it. I did not realize my eyelids had shut, so I continued “reading” Emerson in my head. In my sleep, I seemed to follow with my eyes the black lines of his text on the white page. My mind, as active as if I were awake, picked up and carried forward the stream of Emerson’s thoughts, adding inference after inference, example after example, analogy after analogy. And I expressed those ideas in Emersonian sentences, which just flowed in my mind like prophecy. I seemed to “read” Emerson and create original thoughts indistinguishably. I felt as though I had caught the secret of oratory from Emerson’s words and could, at least for a short time, prophesy in the same vein. I know people who have had the same experience with this author.

[i] Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature” in Essays and Lectures (New York: The Library of America, 1983), p. 7.

Reading Is a Dream

In my previous post, I described how Gwendolyn Brooks heard an odd, sing-song voice in her own poems. We all distort the sounds of words in our head, especially when we read silently. In silent reading, time speeds up. The text becomes detached from clock time and instead rushes along like the syncopated images in a dream. The mind can move faster than the tongue, vocal chords, and breath in articulating the words. Most people can read 250 to 300 words a minute silently at a comfortable pace, but we can speak or read aloud comfortably at only about 120-150 words a minute.

Silent reading also exaggerates, almost idealizes the mannerisms of speech. The orator’s intonations become more colorful, more deeply felt. The emphatic parts attain a ringing power, the quiet parts a delicate purity. The lover pleads more ardently. The criminal exculpates himself with sweeter reason. The sentences we voice in our heads follow speech contours we could never use aloud without sounding stilted, pompous, unnatural. The usual pattern of stresses shifts around to accentuate different syllables, and odd rhythms form.

Yet all of this strange soundscape seems perfectly natural when we have immersed ourselves in silent reading. Our internal reading voice differs from a speaking voice much as the action of our dreams differs from the action of people in the physical world. In our dreams, the harder we run the slower we move. We fly. We talk but no one hears us. We switch locations instantly. Emotion suffuses the dreamscape; our experience is bathed in love, beauty, anger, and terror. All of these actions seem normal or at least inevitable while we’re dreaming. Only after we wake and return to the expectations of the physical world does the dream action, already fading from consciousness, seem distorted and funny.

Similarly, when we are reading silently, the voices of the text running through our head sound perfectly normal and inevitable. From habit, as soon as we pick up a book, we instantly drop into a full, self-consistent world which encloses our attention so thoroughly that the world of physical sound never touches it. The contrast between the sound of language in our head and the sound of spoken language never emerges into our consciousness. Either we concentrate on our book and block out ambient noise, or the noise and voices around us distract us from our reading. Without any obvious juxtaposition, we don’t realize silent reading has different rules and behaviors from the physical world. Only those who listen closely, like poets, hear the strange rhythms of a text unfolding in their head. Even then they may not realize how differently the internal and external voices sound.