Table of Contents
FOURTH HOUR
It might not do much good, but I’d like to suggest
that you simply forget about the last hour and the whole business of your eye
assisting your ear. You know about it. You’ll use what you know to help you in
this hour - without thinking about it. So begin to “sleep on that” now. Let
your unconscious processes, your poet, take care of that. I’d like you to turn your full attention to hearing
a very different tale. I’d like you to tune your poet to yet another sort of
hearing you can bring to bear on the physically sounded and meaningful flow of
phonemes that constitute the poet’s tongue. Anyway, shake your head, let everything settle into
its appropriate corner in there, and let’s start from scratch this hour. During the hour, you’ll hear, and become able to
tell, the tale of the third lyre. And I think you’ll begin, in the hour,
to hear the lyre’s music. Ancient poets often led their composition with a
stringed instrument. The Japanese poet, for instance, used a koto. And the
Greek poet used a lyre. I can’t document this, of course, but I’m quite sure
the poet was not setting his composition, even loosely, to a musical tune as a
song lyricist might. He wasn’t doing what a composer does when setting poems to
music. I’m sure the poet was using the lyre to lead his composing process with
another process. What he was doing was a complex equivalence to pacing the
floor or tapping his stylus on a writing frame or a pen on the inkwell. He was leading
his composition by playing out some “carrying” intonations. These were, I
think, quite formal - but so were other aspects of composition. The lyre was a stringed instrument, and it was
played by the poet with his hands. We associate the hand and the head. When
talking about head activity, we use words like comprehension and apprehension.
Words like concept. Slang takes up the notion of “handling” things with
our hands to talk of “handling” a problem mentally. So perhaps that literal handling of the strings leads
to more complex handlings within. The poet, then, led his composition on his physical
lyre and played it with his hands. And this was the first lyre. The hands went before the head, stimulating other
reflex and unconscious processes, patterns of awareness and response. The second lyre is in the throat. The Greek poet
using pitch accent - leading his composition by intoning the poem. The dactylic
foot, for instance, being, say, G-C-C, and without our stress accent or a
quantitative accent. The passage was intoned. And I suspect that occurred
during composition, the act leading composition. It was still a way of leading
composition not too different, as I said, from pacing the floor or tapping your
pen against the table top or, as I do, composing on the typewriter in a
hunt-and-peck stroke, “playing the keys.” The vocal cords are the stringed instrument. And for
playing hands, the poet uses configurations of constriction in
the muscles of the throat and the base of the jaw. So … the first two lyres are used to lead
composition as are floor pacing, pen tapping, or stroking typewriter keys. But
instead of motor feedback and possibly imagined visual display feedback or
actual visual feedback, what’s used is motor feedback and auditory, even
musical, experience. This lead experience, then, is, indeed, of the Muse. But what of the third lyre, the poet’s true lyre,
the one he play’s his poet’s music on? Song lyrics are often published written out not
under the lines of music, but as poems in stanzas. If you read these as poems,
you can usually detect an “emptiness” in their sound as language. Even when the
singers are called “poets” on the record jackets, even when you think the songs
are great, you do not feel that the words before you and on your speaking voice
are like those of a first rate poet’s work. Why is this so? I think it is
because a good song lyricist is able, probably without thinking about it, to
“get rid of” that music that resides in language, particularly in the language
of the poet, and that conflicts with the other music, the music of the
tones or tune to which the words are to be matched. When a first rate poet’s
work is set to music, it’s by a composer of “classical” music. And what I think
he does, probably without knowing he is doing it, is to accommodate that verbal
music as he might “accommodate” say a flute part to an orchestra’s in a
concerto for flute and orchestra. The poem isn’t so much matched to a tune in
its part. Rather, it is verbal music; and it is interwoven with other musics
played out on instruments - including, perhaps, singing voices. The music of our third lyre, then, is in the
language. It’s “in” the flow of phonemes and “phonemic figures” we’ve begun to
be aware of. The third lyre’s box is the complex cavities of the
mouth and nasal areas. The strings are the streamings of air through these
caverns. The streamings may be writhing ropes or complex turbulences in the
multi-shaped and shape-changing vestibules along the route. The hands that play upon these streamings are
complex configurations of constriction in the muscles of tongue, jaw,
cheeks, and mouth. And it’s not the single dimension of pitch that’s
controlled, not tones played; rather, it’s a complex array of dimensions
closer to what we find in timbre, arising from the gestures of making,
and not the making of tones, but of phonemes. The “timbre” of the phoneme isn’t
to be confused with the timbre of the voice, or even that ascribed to vowels
because of pitch harmonies in the mouth cavities. The latter, of course, enters
into it. Anyway, this “timbre” separated out to act, in our verbal music, like
“pitch” does in the music of tones. The sound of a pottery shard striking a piece of
bamboo in a Zen master’s garden. Unique. Identifiable. From the sound the monk
knew the event - pictured what struck what, felt the surfaces and embodiments
and their interaction. He could, and presumably did, generate the entire
sensory experience within which that exact sound would be a constituent piece -
hence, “enlightenment”! Literally, “seeing into the dark.” So, too, the sound
of air nozzled between tongue, palate, and teeth to make the sound we mark with
the letter s is unique, identifiable. And it’s identifiable in its nature,
too, and we can contrast it to the sound of air nozzled between teeth and lower
lip to make the sound we mark with the letter v. But the two “timbres” have
common factors, as well. And so the two sounds, s and v, in a sense, rhyme. And
“rhyme” is a catch-all word, used loosely and unthinkingly by all of us. These two
sounds relate complexly. One reminds of the other, elicits it as an aura. One
suggests the potentiality of metamorphosing into the other. And there are
tensions; there are apartnesses, as well as togethernesses, in that. So, v and
s have this “rhyming” in a livelier way than s and z or v and f. On the third lyre, the poet plays not the musician’s
tones but his own, somewhat more complex, phonemes. His is a more
subtle music, Orpheus’ music, which strikes not at the ear, but at the center
of our being, the heart within the mind. I suspect musicians say their tones have no meanings
beyond their identities and that you get “meaningful” music by what you do with
them. I don’t believe this, but I won’t argue it. The tones, as identities in
systems of relationships, most certainly do gather the layers upon layers of
musical meaning that is most of the sense made. But I think that down at the
core, there is a subtle sense accrued to the individual tones in their
individual nature. If you’d like to explore one look at what musicality is that
leads to the notion that there is a sort of “will” in the tones, look up Viktor
Zuckerkandl’s THE SENSE OF MUSIC, a paperback from Princeton Press. Almost every book on language says in its first
pages that the great advantage of a phonemic alphabet - and, see, they’ve
already confused letters and phonemes - lies in the phoneme itself being
meaningless. The phonemes are arbitrarily chosen sounds to which no sense
accrues. You can put them together to form a word, and the word means what you
assign it to mean. That’s called denotation. Then, additional meaning accrues
to the word through use in contexts. That’s called connotation. It’s known,
though not often mentioned, that some rules seem to apply to word formation.
Nothing is ever said about the informality of these rules or their appearance
as virtual forces. Anyway, virtually every authoritative book on
language offers this statement about why the phonemes are useful building
blocks, that they are useful because they make no sense. The statement is
wrong! The phoneme’s identity is a character or nature
- and it has contextual relationships. In short, a phoneme is
something. And it implies or means things. This is how mantra, or the art of mantra, exists.
The rishis claimed that Sanskrit was a made language and that it was made for
their use in designing mantra. They claimed that the sounds of Sanskrit, the
phonemes, were selected and somehow “tied to” certain bodily sensations and
responses so that a sequence, a particular mantrum, would elicit particular
responses and lead to a specific altered state of consciousness or “frame of
mind” or attitude - and on to a particular revelation or realization within
that framed mind. What the rishis noticed about our Indo-European
language - Sanskrit and English are dialects of it - is what I noticed about it
in my early years as a working poet. There is no level in the structure of
language where we can “divide” it and say the structures above this level are
used to make “sense” and the structures below it are used to make “sound.”
Those writing about poetry have assumed the division fell between syllables and
words. Those dealing with language as such, apart from particular uses,
presumably make the division between phonemes and morphemes. The phonemes have “meanings” or “dynamics” in them.
The rishis assumed somebody, probably earlier rishis, did it on purpose so that
they inherited a profitably used tool. Actually, the rishis probably inherited
a “fall out” or “cargo cult imitation” of an older, more subtle, and more
flexible art: an original melopoeia. The Greeks saw melopoeia as a crafting of sound in
poetry to make an attractive verse, a carrier or even a driver of the
sense-making words and phrases. And they probably sensed the mnemonic value in
structure as structure. They may have sensed that it “stimulated” the
faculties. This melopoeia was not quite reduced to the decorative, but it was
mainly, at this point, just a driver or wedge for opening receptivity of the
poem as statement made “poetic.” But poetry wasn’t always this sort of artifact or
entertainment. Consider the Greek tale, which looks to an earlier time, of
Orpheus - whose poetry caused the trees and stones to dance. Probably most
people think the story says only that Orpheus could so move listeners
that even unmovable listeners, such as trees and stones, surrendered and moved.
I think the story gives listeners’, human listeners’, exact experience. I think
Orpheus used the poet’s experience-making power, and that we’ve handed it over
to the stage hypnotist. In his experience-making, Orpheus would, indeed, use
animated cartoon elements, such as dancing trees and all. To be sure, this
wasn’t just “animated cartoons” for Saturday matinee entertainment. And you
might want to read Graves on “tree alphabets” in THE WHITE GODDESS. But as a
stage hypnotist will get a volunteer drunk on a glass of water - or a fish and
a loaf - and induce positive and negative hallucination, transference, and all
the rest of it, I’m sure Orpheus enlisted trees and stones and animals in his
production of “miracles.” And I’m sure melopoeia was instrumental in his, any
Orpheus’, induction of a “state of receptivity” to the poem and, then, the
“working of” the poem within that state of receptivity. The entire poem, or a passage, in any case, as a
flow of phonemes containing “phonemic figures,” worked somewhat like
continuously overlapping mantra, carrying the recipient through a sequence of
experiences blended into a single, moving total experience. Usually mantra works as an essentially static and
recurrent fragment, never more than a handful of syllables, and repeated over
and over, so the larger rhythmical structures, very simple, are built up from
simple repetition of the one figure. It’s a bit like the rhythmic edifices the
child builds as he rattles a picket fence or steps among the cracks in a length
of sidewalk. A single state and revelation is the expected outcome. Orpheus’ melopoeia, I’m sure, maintained the
receptivity and continuously spun the web of experience within the listener to
the poem. Two leftovers of this art, and there may be others around, yield the
mantra of the rishis and the more or less disemboweled melopoeia of the later
Greeks. We want to dig out the poet’s power, the
cognitive system that makes sense from and of the sound in the
poem. So … let’s consider … where the phoneme, as heard, gets its nature
… to which meaning accrues. Birth
of the phoneme. The first phonemes are not formed as the child
begins to say words or the little two-part fragments that precede sentences in
his conversation with an encouraging mother. They aren’t birthed even earlier
as the child burbles and babbles, producing sounds, which eager parents reach
into to pull out and stabilize ma-ma and da-da. All through those two periods, and earlier, the
child does a miraculous job of seeing and hearing into the
behavior of adults and extracting dynamic patternings, the making and arranging
of sounds into structures according to complex rules. It’s a miraculous feat. The
child extracts and uses a complex know-how to generate and to understand
words, phrases, even rudimentary sentences. I say seeing and hearing into adult behavior
because contrary to what you might think, the child probably isn’t mastering
sound phenomena as such. The child, while learning to produce sounds and,
later, the sounds and sound patterns the adults make, is probably mastering a
behavior as physical as is crawling, creeping, standing and walking. It’s
probably no empty coincidence that our words walk and talk are so similar.
Whatever alk might “mean,” we can guess that t marks a point and w has to do
with “opening” that point into a duality. In just a bit, we’ll see how such
meanings accrue. But, for now, think of the word two, where the “opening” of
the single pointing into a double and divergent pointing-pair is “pictured” in
that t-w. Anyway, the child engaging in any making of sounds
or sound figures the adult makes intently watches the adult’s sound-making
apparatus. It’s very much as though the child is doing what the adult does
- using the sounds at the ear produced by adult and self only as a checking
device, seeing if the same thing is done by hearing if the same result is
produced. When the child has learned to do what the adult does, the internal
controlling feedback is motor feedback, sensed through the self-sensing
or kinesthetic system. What he’s learned isn’t too different than what he’d
learn in order to play a guitar … or a lyre. Later you’ll see that it’s important to keep in mind that there is just this motor memory or “felt” core “within” heard phonemes. But to find the birth of phonemes, we go earlier
than the first labor with language, earlier even than the babbling and play
with sound production. We go back, in fact, to the first months, even the first
weeks, of life. When I said this back
in 1977 in my book THE MAKINGS, it was considered a pretty wild
statement to make. I’m told now that it is no longer a wild statement at all
and that babies in their first days are focusing their eyes and doing all sorts
of things they were not, until recently, supposed to be able to do. So in a few
minutes, I’m going to take you through some very strange but very possible
“early memories” in a bit of experience-making I’ll do for you. The birth of the phoneme is probably the live
tap-root of mantra and melopoeia. The forming of the phoneme with the
mouth and the corralling of similar noises to be considered interchangeable,
identical - and the investing of this kind of sound with nature and meaning.
The making of that identity is the birthing of the phoneme. And if a few such
are born, are known in contrast to one another, a simple music begins. Then,
variants on the few occur, accruing variant meanings, and more complex music
becomes possible.
The new human, the baby, mainly sleeps and wakes, to
some degree, to eat, burp, and go back to sleep. It’s during these feeding times that the birth and
enlivening of a very few phonemes occurs. Instead of giving you this chart whole, like I did
with the first one, I’ll draw it on the board as I develop its content. And you
can draw it on brain cells or paper, giving it life and physical reality as you
“gesture” it into being. First, we’ll draw a horizontal line. Imagine this line as running from just past the glottis, just into the throat, on the right, through the mouth, to the outer edge of the lips on the left. Up here at the lips, we’ll put an m. Behind it, in
the mouth, at the ridge behind the teeth, we’ll put an n. And back near the
glottis, we’ll put a g, a hard-g, remember. When the infant feeds, it closes its lips around the
nipple - moving to an m-making position, except that the nipple prevents the
touching of the lips. The effect is the same though. The tongue drops and the
back of the tongue works in the sucking reflex. Noises are inadvertently made.
Because of the position of lips and tongue, the sounds that come out center
around what we collect as m. Several things are laid down not so much in what
we’d call memory as in a kind of urmemory. And they are keyed to one
another. The first is the sound at the ear. The second is the gesture
of lips and tongue, the making of this configuration of constrictions. And the
third is the sensations of embracing, something, drawing the nurture
from that thing, swallowing, and the passage to and into the stomach of that
weight and warmth. In view of that loading of the urmemory, is
it strange that twenty-five or fifty years later, as our now aged infant sits
in a Himalayan cave intoning om or a-oo-mmmm, a floating state is
induced in which a revelation is formed of embracing the All and receiving
nutrients or power from it? What we have growing out of this impress of sound,
motor feedback, and bodily sensations is a phoneme, the vowel - because
we can sustain the sound, it’s best to think of it as a vowel - m. And our m
has a dynamically structured kinesthetic nature that’s embodied in the motor
memory, a choreography or gesture. Always we’ll find “within” the heard phoneme
a felt core that is this motor memory, or the gist of it, and that is
its nature, a shaped thing to which meaning can accrue through analogy and
association. Our m can have a “meaning” within a situation or scenario that is
a result of its sounding. When the baby finishes eating, it could simply stop
sucking and open its mouth to release the nipple. But I suspect the tongue,
which initiates and maintains the sucking, marks the end by lifting
against the nipple as though to block the flow and push away the embraced
object as the lips are pulled back. I’ve reasons, of course, for
believing this, but I can’t give them all in full in our few minutes here. Keep
in mind, though, that Paul Eckman, in his study of universal facial expression
characteristics, found that the retracted lips is a universal “fear mouth.” And
other findings in various areas point toward something here. When the infant does this with his tongue and lips,
the sounds go from the m-range to the n-range. We have a new phoneme at the
ear. The new gesture isn’t one of embracing or enclosing but is one of “sealing
out.” Perhaps of “warding off” or even “resisting and ejecting.” Herbert Benson claimed, in his book RELAXATION
RESPONSE, that as a mantrum one would do as well as, say, aum. I
suspect it would - for inducing the floating state. But I’m sure the state
would be at a higher tonus level. And the emergent revelation would be less of
“embracing the All and receiving from it” and more of “embracing the self as an
integrity.” The gesture is less inclusive, more exclusive. I don’t think it’s coincidence that the sealing n
begins our no and closes the open know to the sealed known.
Or, for that matter, that it’s the formant of the integral implying one.
Incidentally, just as the Anglo-Saxon know closes into the sealed known,
so does the Latinate conscious close into the sealed conscience.
The n is just sunk a bit in the thicket tangle of s. If you try to force feed the baby “just a bit” to
“be sure he’s had enough,” the new human makes his “last stand” at the center
of his world” This “center” is the choice point between two “reflex paths.” The
swallow reflex or the vomit reflex. The phoneme that forms during this activity
is the g … or such variants as the g-h. We have three phonemes: m, n, and g, the latter
being in place of the perhaps expected ng, which is n pulled back toward g. The
m and n are vowels, remember, because we can sustain the sounds. The g is an
explosive shove from the center, but an embedded or fleshy one, called by the
formalists a “voiced” one. I like descriptive terms like “fleshy” because they
take up where Dante left off with “buttery” and “woolly” words - and catch at
the meanings sounds will take on through their nature. The meanings
don’t really fit neat verbal equivalents, but roughly m is an “inclusive embracing,”
n is an “exclusive sealing,” and g is a kind of “fleshed generating,”
a “gain” or “pushing into being.” I hope you have a pretty fair sense of the nature,
and the associated or analogic results, the meaning, of these three base
phonemes, because this is the basis for the entire phonemic instrument
or the poet’s “third lyre.” The phoneme’s nature is a dynamic gesture. And just
as there is a language of hand-arm gestures or of facial gestures, there is a
language of these sound-producing gestures. A language of those “felt” cores
within the “heard” sounds of our overt language. And there are “meanings” in
the relationships these gestures have to other gestures in our world. “Inside” the sound m is the sense of embrace
or inclusive gathering. Thus we use m in dome and domicile and home.
We use m to picture-point at mountain; and it’s said - wrongly - that
the glyph, the letter m, is a picture of waves, the wave, like the
mountain, a gathering, but of water, not earth. Incidentally, my poet’s vision
tells me the glyph m is a picture of the lips making the sound, while the w is
those lips opening. The n is likely the tongue making the phoneme. And damned
if I don’t see the g as a glottis. But I suppose a poet’s vision isn’t exactly
what the academics mean by “documentation.” “Inside” the sound n is the sense of that
exclusive sealing, a sealing out to form an integrity, to form a presence, or,
from the outsider’s viewpoint, a presence’s surface. “Inside” the sound g is the sense of “a welling up” and “pressing out” or the
sounding into being of something throated or voiced. Is it much wonder, at this
point, that the word for creative birthing is gen, the projecting g into
the sealing-into-presence n? Or that the “mental” parallel is called ken,
the “disembodied” or “unvoiced” g, the k, providing the presence or
representation to be sealed by n? It’s important that you truly feel the cores
in these three phonemes, have them down pat, you might say, because I’m going
to give you the other phonemes, fill in our chart, build up our phonemic
instrument, very quickly. You’ll have to “pump knowing into sensing” here -
and “at speed”! What you’ll take out of this hour is a “general
idea” or a “general sensing” of the scheme. Then, you’ll have to pump substance
into it during your reconstruction and reconsidering of the hour’s content.
That won’t be tomorrow, because you’ll be working on your “phonemic hearing”
from last hour. But over the weekend, maybe. Anyway, I think all this will sink
into your innards more slowly than the other. And it’ll enter into your
hearing. Let’s put a few more phonemes into our chart here.
They are all vowels, though two or them, the r and the l, you probably regard
as consonants. And we’ll put in that pulled-back-and-dropped-tongued n, the ng.
Where I’ve put in o-side, I mean all the o-side
vowels from last hour’s horseshoe. And where I’ve put in e-side, I mean all the
e-side vowels. All the o-side vowels involve the “gesture on the way to m” and
all the e-side vowels involve the “gesture on the way to n.” The most visible
part of that gesture is in the lips. The o-side vowels involve the lips coming
together. The e-side vowels involve that pulling back of the lips, Eckman’s
“fear mouth,” if you wish. Of course, to catch an actual sound, one of the
phonemes, you use only a segment of the gesture. The o sound we use is a “piece of gesture.” The
whole gesture, the closing together of the lips, is the gesture that ends in
the m gesture. So I’ve drawn an arrow here showing the gesture toward the m.
And I’ve labeled that o-side. To reverse that closing, actually from an
“overshoot” position, yields the w sound. The e sound is also a “piece of gesture.” The
whole gesture is the pulling back of the lips to bare the n-making going on
just behind the upper teeth. So I’ve drawn this other arrow, showing a gesture
toward the n. The reversal in the y slide isn’t so much detected in the lips as
in the tongue, but it’s the counterpart of the w, so this arrow showing a
reversal of the e-side gesture. So w is a kind of opening or widening and y is a
kind of thinning. Remember that when they show up as colorants in a-w or a-y.
The a is just “wide open” at the throat. And h is a push from farther back,
probably a twinned push from throat and diaphragm. So we have them back here
and at the center line. What about r and l? One way to look at this is as if you have an “outer mouth” just behind the lips. The o-side and e-side vowels are gestures having to do with the closing and retracting of the lips. Now, the n is a kind of sealing or closing-opening point, a kind of lips. So imagine the area behind that as an “inner mouth.” Imagine the r as a “turn” or a sort of gesturing into orbit, “putting it into orbit.” That’s a kind of “half embrace” going forward and turning in at the sealing point. This is sort of like the o-side gesture. So I put an arrow like the o-side arrow here. This is “tighter” so the arrow has a deeper curve. Then, the l, like the e-side vowels, is a kind of pulling back. Here, I think, it’s pulling what’s in orbit “on through” the orbit to circle it around the self as axis. Those are “felt” core gestures, remember, our very
subjective “putting English on the ball.” Now, let analog or metaphor or just
plain poet’s sense whirl those out into meanings. If you’re sensitive
enough yet, it won’t sound crazy when I suggest that r “turns x into
reality” and that l “turns x into completeness.” Don’t ask too soon what
x in these heuristic statements of mine is! Here’s just the briefest look at how your poet uses
these gestural meanings in working on building up a phonemic flow that “says something.”
Whether dreaming up morphemes, words, or just a piece of talk, there’s a
continuous, segmented, and overlapping gesturing going on! So … let’s do a bit
of lip-reading. And a word is about to be formed. And maybe a “wr” comes out.
This is unusual, of course. Given a word written w-r …, we today usually start
our forming at the r. But maybe the speaker we’re watching in our lip-reading
is new to the language, so tries to sound out each phoneme marked. And
remember, your eye assists your ear. So, you might get motor memory in the felt
core of a heard r, because you see the word written as w-r. So … you get that
“opening” from the overshoot of m position. Then, that far back in the inner
mouth turning. So … w-r … might be “felt” as a sort of “opening from holding to
turn into orbit.” This will be fast and virtually subliminal. Call it a
“subtlety.” Look at how the wr opening comes into our language to show that
“twist”! In the words, wrist, wrestle, wrench. Or, more
metaphorically, in wrong. Directly again in words like wring. The
w-r can spread and you get war, for instance, an art that was originally
hand-to-hand, a circling and, then, closer in, a turning. Then, there’s an old
name for man, wer, “a man,” out of wiros, presumably “the strong
one.” But, I think not strong, any more than the Aikido expert is
“strong.” I think, wer, or wiros, is “the turner” or, in a more
lively language, the language of my many translating terms, “the handler”! So …
wring, shows the act of turning. But in ring, whether of the bell
or the band you wear around a finger, the “vibrations” are evened out.
So … the w is dropped. No “opening into” the turn. Just the static turn
impress. So too in right, rite, etc., the “straightness” in the
turn static, the twist still in wrong and in wright. A crafting
viewed here, eh? Did you know that rhetor was originally wretor?
So rho, or flow, must have been wro, made undulatory by nature’s
wrighting. And I’ve not even begin to talk about the w-r. What matters is … do
you feel this core activity under your hearing or within it? Let’s look, now, at a much more sophisticated piece
of this working on phonemes with phonemes, working up a “phonemic music” that
“says something.” Again, just try for a rough idea of what is going on, a
beginning of “hearing” it. We’ll find how r and l, as gestures, are used to
work on words that already exist to create new words. These are the “inner
mouth” vowels, remember. So they’ll be used instead of o-side and e-side vowels
because as we make the new words, we pull the context of the words “in closer
to our hearts.” First, let’s take a pair of words that derive from
the same past participle of the same verb thereby suggesting that the things
they name are related. The words are sentience and sentence.
You’ve heard in classrooms that “a sentence should be a complete thought.” So
that indicates that there is, indeed a relation. What it says is that in a sentence
you get the reflection of a chunk or structure of sentience or
consciousness or experience. We talk of two sorts of experience in sentience.
One we might call a phase, a partial experience. The other, we might
call a cause, a complete experience. In fact, a cause, in human
experience, is a whole circuit or circle, though drawn best as a triangle with
three junctures at which it can “break” or come apart. These junctures, too,
divide the cause into three phases identifiably different in
subjective experience. In sequence, you begin anywhere - just to mouth a
first word. Start with result. This “causes” intent. Having
experienced or heard about some result in life, feeling a flicker of interest
or desire or whatever, thinking that result might be good to achieve, you’ve
got intent. Fine! If that result didn’t exist, or didn’t get dreamed up, no
intent! So … that’s “cause” enough. Humans don’t sit around with an intent
hovering. Humans do something. So intent “causes” behavior. And,
since if you do anything, other things follow, behavior “causes” result.
This second result might not be the first result or a close duplicate of it. In
short, at one of those “break points” you may get kicked onto another helix.
But maybe not. And, if it happens, the geometry is more complex, but the
principle is the same. You’re just into a multi-triad cause, that’s all.
Anyway, every phase “causes,” directly or indirectly, every other one.
So … where does cause reside? Not at one of the junctures. Only in the
“whole” - the system of three junctures.
That’s quite a bit of the psychology of experience
to burden you with - but I had to justify my use of cause as the label
for a whole experience as opposed to a phase of experience. Because I
want to use cause and phase as key terms with the term sentience
in order to show you a very powerful use of the gestures within phonemes to
“work on” the sounded language. Under sentience, then, we have cause
and phase for whole and partial units of experience. Since we make a sentence to reflect a chunk of
sentience, let’s see what we might call reflections of causes and phases in
sentences. The openings of the words, the c and the p-h, are,
in a sense, the heads of the words. So … let’s go for the throat. Take
the name for the partial experience, the phase, and gesturally do to it
the same sort of thing as it names. Let’s “put it into orbit” or “turn
it into reality.” That means we work on it with our r. And, by working with the
r and l, we generate names closer in to ourselves. So maybe we’ll get names
corresponding to those that have to do with objectified sentience for
our subjective or expressive sentence. If we do to phase
something of its own nature with the r, we get this.
We sort of put a phase of an orbit, of a
completion, into reality with the r. That is, we “represent” it. Or we
“reflect” it. Now, if we pull that partiality around into a completeness with
the l, but apply it to the other word, like this.
We get a parallel set of names like this.
My verbal descriptions of those pushes and pulls
aren’t exact in terms of the unconsciously utilized language of the gestures.
Maybe you noticed that I kept trying to revert to body language to “say what I
really mean.” I hope you got from the play with w-r the notion of
a felt activity or energy “within” the heard phonemic flow. I hope you sensed
to some extent the doing something occurring through the forward forming
of the sequential phonemes. And I hope that from our derivation of clause
and phrase from cause and phase, you sensed the second
order workings, sensed how we can work on a “phonemic figure” through the
application of phonemes as though from another order or level. I don’t hope for
a minute that you encounter all this, grasp it, along with its underlying
principle and its potential uses, and master it. But if you’ve a sense that
“there’s something there to look into,” then we’re progressing okay. The m and n are vowels, but there’s something of the
consonant about them. That’s because most of the consonants “grow out of” them. I’m going to quickly give you each of these
“blossomings” so you’ll have it on your chart. I’ll tell you something of the
gesture in each phoneme and give you a rough sketch of the sort of thing it
might mean. Keep in mind that these verbal meanings are very, very rough. It’s
best if you work on feeling the gesture and interpreting it as you might
through mime.
I’ll begin with the n because it’s the most
picturesque and in the center of things. Closest to the n I’ll put d and t. The t is above
the line and the d below it. But think, now, of the line as the keel of a ship,
and the two sides that have been “above” and “below” as folding up to be
parallel walls of the hull of this vehicle. One side will be, roughly, the
“voiced” and the other side, equally roughly, the “unvoiced.” Anyway, we have the n, d, and t here. They form a
metaphoneme and they will alliterate with one another subtly and powerfully. You know that n seems to seal, to put a skin on
presence as it were, to define. It’s a vowel, a nasal one. The tongue just
touches down. Now, put a bit of plosion in that touching down. We get more body
than just presence, an embodiment, and it’s fleshy, it’s got some timbre to it.
So now the presence hinted at by n is an embodiment hinted at by
d. The t is like the d, but unvoiced, unfleshed, so more objective, less
subjective, so hinting at objectification. It’s as though the three
catch “thingness.” But with varying solidity and distance.
Whatever you do, don’t list these
guesstimates and learn them like the new code book. Just try to sense what’s on
the other side of them. Write out “ten more ways” to note the general
characteristics. Okay, do you have a sense of the spirits of
the three? Good. Now, take those “hovering spirits” of d and t - and let them
become “winds.” This yields the t-h and the d-h. Nozzle those winds
and you have the s and the z. Spray those nozzled winds and you have the s-h
and the z-h. And see our diagram folding at the line so d is up by the t, and z
up by the s, and so on. Consider the “metaphors” I used to “grasp the
gestures.” And folding the diagram put the sounds “near” where they are made in
the mouth. All this to get you to feel the gesture, its shape and
energy. The meanings will accrue.
Just one quick model of how we reflect sense in
sound using the phonemic instrument. Take our word death. In the word, we find
the “phonemic figure” of the word modeling our western idea of death in which
the body falls and the spirit leaves. Look at the sounded word. In the d we get
the body falling and landing, the sound of a body falling. And in the e, the
fear mouth, remember, the “thinning” as we go on into the t-h, the wind, so the
-eth, the thin, gutted wind - leaving! The comic book word thud is the
reverse. The thuh is the wind made by the falling body or fist or whatever. And
the d is the landing.
Let’s look back over what we have so far to get the
“heft” of it over time. You have a pretty good feel for m, n, and g and the
vowels that relate to them, the o-side and the e-side vowels at the “outer
mouth” and the r and l at the “inner mouth.” And you have a general sense of
the kinds of gesture building, spreading, and changing through the “blossom” of
phonemes that grows out of the n as a kind of root. The sealed or defined
presence suggested in the n is embodied or made more solid in the d and then
objectified in the t. And that solidity, still the presence, becomes spirit or
wind in the t-h and d-h, nozzled into the s and z and sprayed in the s-h and
z-h. I can only show you the other two clusters tonight.
But you know the root phonemes, the m and g, and can feel your way as we did in
the n cluster. From the m we get b and p, for our primary
metaphoneme that alliterates so nicely. Let’s look for echoes of that
alliteration in the sense made, too, by the three. Our m, like our n, is a kind
of sealing, an embracing. And we can think of embodying that in b, objectifying
it in p. We start with our embrace. The lips lightly touch, a closing or holding.
Then, with a plosion, we make that a bit fleshy or voiced if we make a b. And
harder or unvoiced if we make a p. We make mom out of m’s. But that
front of the word closes into form in words like brow, of our head, or prow,
of a ship. Can you begin to sense that? The v and f are “faces” that b and p wear. I don’t
know a better way to put that. Again, take the spirit of my heuristic
metaphors. And when we get from the outer mouth, we’ll have another set of
faces. The f and v are just more “superficial” - hence “faces” - than the p and
b. None of this will be absolutely “clear” in actual
language. There’s lots of “noise” in the word-making activity of a speech
community, but you can “hear through” to this level sometimes by considering a
group of words that differ only in the opening or head of the word with each
word using a different member of the cluster. Here’s a set to consider when
thinking about the subtle differences in b, p, v, and f.
Look at the “solidified” m got in the b of base, the
“opening out” of that into the p of pace, the shell of it in the v of vase. And
a man’s bodily movement in a pace becomes a reflecting facial movement through
the f in face. But, after considering these, keep in mind: From any such
examinations, take only the general feeling of it, don’t get locked into any of
these whisps of possibility. You’re developing a very delicate faculty. The
heavy-handed habits of usual conscious thinking aren’t appropriate here. Our last “blossom” blooms back where the g is made. To
make the alliterative metaphoneme, we pull back the n, opening the tongue
somewhat, to get the ng. Just as we had this cluster at the “outer mouth” to
yield a metaphoneme and its two “faces.”
We have a similar arrangement back here at the
“inner mouth,” with a metaphoneme and two “faces” for the consonants that
sprang into being.
The c-h and j are “faces” to the k and g. “Shell’
versions of them in a sense. The ng is the “fighting at the center of the
world” or a “last chance” sealing out. But it “rings” with the vibrancy of this
creative, generative center - the realm of gen and ken. The g and
k mark “expansions” from the center. Note how gen, which is often
“faced” by the j, as in genesis, generator, gender, or, as
that sealing n opens out into the nozzling s, gest, as in gestation,
gesture, or even jest, and gist, shows up “unfaced” in gain,
again and, with the objectification of the n, in get. And for not
actional behavior, but mental equivalents, we have ken. And in the act
of mentally relating, the verb kin. The present participle, kinning,
condenses into king, the prototyping. The past participle, kinned,
condenses into kind, the simple typing. Collapse the key phonemes
together, and gen becomes the g-n of gnosis, revealed or
perceived knowledge, and ken becomes the k-n of our more
conscious know. The hard g is a sort of “welling into being” or
“manifestation” and the j is a softening “face” substitution. The k is a kind
of “welling into representation.” This is a difference between the g and k that
reminds of that between the d and t. We called those “embodiment” and
“objectification.” As an “inner side” to embodiment, we have behavior. And as
an “inner side” to objectification, we have mentation. We expect analogs to
proliferate. What about “kinning” and “kinned” - so important around the k? Do
we have some analog in the region of the t? Well, we’ve no words “tinning” or
“tinned” - without a little stretching! But, remember our two, the w
“opening” the point in the t? Well, just as that “kinning” and “kinned” have to
do with pairing in relationship - we have the opening up of the one into
duality in “twinning” and “twinned.” So the verbs twin and kin
parallel. Suppose we take the w back to the kin and k? Well, we get kwen,
and old form of queen, when she as a “brood mare” to the king,
fissioning like an amoeba leaving not one, herself, but two, herself and
offspring. And, as this was queen, not merely woman, it was in the realm of
prototypes. All these “gestural meanings” are, for all their
being at the core of the sounded language, non-verbal. And my verbal
equivalents are just too bulky, too gross, and therefore wrong … missings of
the point. What I want is simply to get you to thinking, or, better, feeling,
about the matter. Your poet will soak this up like the mother’s milk you
were soaking up when all this started. When you meditate or whatever on this,
you’ll be touching back to those first weeks and months of your life - when all
food was the one food, when the touchings, both ways, of the mother, by the
mother, the caressings, the sounded soothings, all of it, were giving you a
sense of physical being that’d later serve as gound for your self-finding.
When you do your reconstruction of this hour, don’t
worry about making notes of what you sense. Just put yourself into sensing the
“felt” core within the “heard” soundings of the phonemes, the phonemic figures,
the morphemes, the words, the phrases. Then let this work get taken up into the other more
deliberate practice of using your eye to assist your ear in hearing what’s
there, the surface of it, when you write out or type out your passages,
even whole poems, in our phonemic notation. You’ll need to do a lot of that,
you know. And over a long period of time. In fact, til it’s “second nature” to
do it. Until you do it semi-consciously in your head as you more or less
deliberately “listen to” a passage. That’s what you now do with the ordinary
written version of your poems. It’s why you can spell without trouble as you’re
writing and thinking only about the sounded poem. Now, you want this
ear-assisting “spelling” to be going on as the dream that pumps knowing into
your hearing. And, still more peripherally, you’ll want those “hands” that
permeate the muscles of tongue, jaw, cheeks, and mouth to “play” this deep
lyre, this third lyre, your poet’s lyre. Okay, that’s it for this evening. Last time, you got
just information, really. Tonight, you got some tools for developing the first
of your poet’s powers. Out of your practice between now and next time, you’ll
find the poet’s “ear” beginning to emerge. Have fun with it! Good night. |
