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.

The Rhythm of Consciousness

Consciousness follows a kind of rhythm, and when we read with any attention, this mental rhythm aligns itself to the rhythm of the text. A text looks like a series of discrete words. We often think about reading as decoding first one element and then another and another until we understand the message. But the reader’s mind doesn’t experience a text that way. We read a text just as we experience anything that unfolds over time. William James describes it this way:

The unit of composition of our perception of time is a duration, with a bow and a stern, as it were—a rearward- and a forward-looking end. It is only as parts of this duration-block that the relation of succession of one end to the other is perceived. We do not first feel one end and then feel the other after it, and from the perception of the succession infer an interval of time between, but we seem to feel the interval of time as a whole, with the two ends embedded in it.[i]

In other words, our perception of the world does not unfold in a series of discrete elements; rather, the sense of flow inheres in each element of consciousness. Think of the sentences from Emerson’s “Nature,” which I quoted in my last post, as duration-blocks. Their brevity occupies a single moment of our attention. Their simple syntax and parallelism contain a beginning and an end. We feel the heave at the start of a sentence, and we feel the point rounded off at its end. Thus, each sentence is an integral whole whose rhythm measures out a unit of time. Not the identical units ticked off mechanically by a clock but units whose variable lengths and relationships with each other we feel intuitively.

We mark time with our minds. We measure the duration of the sentence we are reading at this moment in comparison to the length of the preceding sentences. And so we move along, with each new sentence occupying the center of our attention while sentences we have recently read gradually fade from our memory. The contour that these durations form stays in our consciousness longer than the sentences’ meaning:

A simple sensation, as we shall hereafter see, is an abstraction, and all our concrete states of mind are representations of objects with some amount of complexity. Part of the complexity is the echo of the objects just past, and, in a less degree, perhaps the foretaste of those just to arrive. Objects fade out of consciousness slowly. If the present thought is of ABCDEFG, the next one with be of BCDEFGH, and the one after that of CDEFGHI—the lingerings of the past dropping successively away, and the incomings of the future making up the loss. These lingerings of old objects, these incomings of new, are the germs of memory and expectation, the retrospective and prospective sense of time. They give that continuity to consciousness without which it could not be called a stream.[ii]

The rhythms of a text like Emerson’s mimic the stream of consciousness that any of us experience. Our own stream of consciousness adapts to its environment. It turns the myriad stimuli that our senses receive into a regular tempo that our mind can make sense of. This is how we negotiate with the world at large. The stream of consciousness moves slowly when we are relaxed or tired, fast when something exciting goes on around us and the adrenaline pumps. It adjusts to the cadence of what we read, too, especially if the passage exhibits moderate regularity as Emerson’s does. A perfectly regular text repeating, say, a one- or two-element sentence pattern would be monotonous and cause us to slumber. A text with sentence patterns that vary too widely would keep us awake but won’t enchant us. Emerson’s 1-2-3, 1-2-3 pattern hypnotizes us. Our mind stays awake even as we drift into sleep.

[i] William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1890), pp. 609-10.

[ii] Ibid., pp. 606-7.