The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (28 page)

As for the audience of secondary orality—aside from that factitious entity the “studio audience,” which is actually part of the performance—many people watch certain TV programs not because they particularly like them but because they can talk about them with other people at work next day: they use these programs as social bonding material. But the media audience is for the most part a tenuous, widely
scattered semicommunity or pseudocommunity, which can be estimated and gauged only by market research and opinion polls, and becomes actual only in political situations such as a polling place on election day, or in the response to a terrible event.

The community created by printing and by secondary orality is not immediate; it is virtual. It can be enormous—the size of America. Indeed it may be literacy more than any other factor that has enabled or coerced us to live in huge nation-states instead of tribes and city-states. Possibly the Internet will allow us to outgrow the nation-state. Although the Global Village McLuhan dreamed of is at present a City of Night, a monstrous force for cultural reductionism and internationally institutionalised greed, who knows? Perhaps we shall soar electronically to some arrangement that works better than capitalism.

But so vast a community must remain more concept than tangible fact. Written word, printed word, reproduced speech, filmed speech, the telephone, e-mail: each medium links people, but it does not link them physically, and whatever community it creates is essentially a mental one.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment. It is marvelous that we can talk to living people ten thousand miles away and hear them speak. It is marvelous that by reading their words, or seeing a film of them, we may feel communion even with the dead. It is a marvelous thought that all knowledge might be accessible to all minds.

But marriage is not of minds only; and the living human community that language creates involves living human bodies. We need to talk
together
, speaker and hearer here, now. We know that. We feel it. We feel the absence of it.

Speech connects us so immediately and vitally because it is a physical, bodily process, to begin with. Not a mental or spiritual one, wherever it may end.

If you mount two clock pendulums side by side on the wall, they will gradually begin to swing together. They synchronise each other by picking up tiny vibrations they each transmit through the wall.

Any two things that oscillate at about the same interval, if they’re physically near each other, will gradually tend to lock in and pulse at exactly the same interval. Things are lazy. It takes less energy to pulse cooperatively than to pulse in opposition. Physicists call this beautiful, economical laziness mutual phase locking, or entrainment.

All living beings are oscillators. We vibrate. Amoeba or human, we pulse, move rhythmically, change rhythmically; we keep time. You can see it in the amoeba under the microscope, vibrating in frequencies on the atomic, the molecular, the subcellular, and the cellular levels. That constant, delicate, complex throbbing is the process of life itself made visible.

We huge many-celled creatures have to coordinate millions of different oscillation frequencies, and interactions among frequencies, in our bodies and our environment. Most of the coordination is effected by synchronising the pulses, by getting the beats into a master rhythm, by entrainment.

Internally, a sterling example is the muscle cells of the heart, every single one of them going
lub-dub, lub-dub
, together with all the others, for a lifetime.

Then there are the longer body rhythms, circadian cycles, that take a day to happen: hunger, eating, digesting, excreting; sleeping and waking. Such rhythms entrain all the organs and functions of body and mind.

And the really long bodily rhythms, which we may not even recognise, are connected with our environment, length of daylight, season, the moon.

Being in sync—internally and with your environment—makes life easy. Getting out of sync is always uncomfortable or disastrous.

Then there are the rhythms of other human beings. Like the two pendulums, though through more complex processes, two people
together can mutually phase-lock. Successful human relationship involves entrainment—getting in sync. If it doesn’t, the relationship is either uncomfortable or disastrous.

Consider deliberately sychronised actions like singing, chanting, rowing, marching, dancing, playing music; consider sexual rhythms (courtship and foreplay are devices for getting into sync). Consider how the infant and the mother are linked: the milk comes before the baby cries. Consider the fact that women who live together tend to get onto the same menstrual cycle. We entrain one another all the time.

How does entrainment function in speech? William Condon did some lovely experiments which show, on film, that when we talk our whole body is involved in many tiny movements, establishing a master rhythm that coordinates our body movements with the speech rhythms. Without this beat, the speech becomes incomprehensible. “Rhythm,” he says, is “a fundamental aspect of the organisation of behavior.” To act, we have to have the beat.

Condon went on to photograph people listening to a speaker. His films show listeners making almost the same micromovements of lips and face as the speaker is making, almost simultaneously—a fiftieth of a second behind. They are locked into the same beat. “Communication,” he says, “is like a dance, with everyone engaged in intricate, shared movements across many subtle dimensions.”

Listening is not a reaction, it is a connection. Listening to a conversation or a story, we don’t so much respond as join in—become part of the action.

We can entrain without seeing the speaker; we entrain with each other when talking on the telephone. Most people feel that telephoning is less satisfactory than being with one another, that communication through hearing alone is less fully mutual, but we do it quite well; teenagers, and people with cell phones in BMWs in heavy traffic, can keep it up indefinitely.

Researchers believe that some autism may be connected with difficulty in entraining—a delayed response, a failure to catch the rhythm.
We listen to ourselves as we speak, of course, and it’s very hard to speak if we can’t find the beat: this might help explain autistic silence. We can’t understand other people if we can’t get in sync with the rhythm of their speaking: this might explain autistic rage and loneliness.

Rhythm differences between dialects lead to failures in understanding. You need practice, you need training to entrain with a way of speech you aren’t familiar with.

But when you can and do entrain, you are synchronising with the people you’re talking with, physically getting in time and tune with them. No wonder speech is so strong a bond, so powerful in forming community.

I do not know to what extent people watching movies and TV entrain with speakers; since no mutual response is possible, it seems likely that the intense involvement characteristic of conversation would be much weakened.

O
RAL
S
PACE AND
O
RAL
T
IME

Seeing is analytical, not integrative. The eye wants to distinguish objects. The eye selects. Seeing is active, outgoing. We look
at
. We focus
on
. We make distinctions easily so long as the field is clear. The visual ideal is clarity. That’s why glasses are so satisfactory. Seeing is yang.

Hearing is integrative; it unifies. Being on opposite sides of the head, ears are pretty good at telling where a sound comes from, but though the mind, the attention, can focus hearing, can listen
to
, the ear essentially hears
from:
it can’t focus narrowly and can select only with effort. The ear can’t stop hearing; we have no earlids; only sleep can shut off our reception. While we are awake our ears accept what comes. As this is likely to be noise, the auditory ideal is harmony. That’s why hearing aids, which increase noise, are so often unsatisfactory. Hearing is yin.

Light may come from vast distances, but sound, which is only vibrations in air, doesn’t travel far. Starlight carries a thousand lightyears; a human voice can carry a mile or so at most. What we hear is
almost always quite local, quite nearby. Hearing is an immediate, intimate sense, not quite as close as touch, smell, taste, proprioception, but much more intimate than sight.

Sound signifies event. A noise means something is happening. Let’s say there’s a mountain out your window. You see the mountain. Your eyes report changes, snowy in winter, brown in summer, but mainly just report that it’s there. It’s scenery. But if you
hear
that mountain, then you know it’s doing something. I see Mount St. Helens out my study window, about eighty miles north. I did not hear it explode in 1980: the sound wave was so huge that it skipped Portland entirely and touched down in Eugene, a hundred miles to the south. Those who did hear that noise knew that something had happened. That was a word worth hearing. Sound is event.

Speech, the most specifically
human
sound, and the most significant
kind
of sound, is never just scenery, it’s always event.

Walter Ong says, “Sound exists only when it is going out of existence.” This is a very complicated simple statement. You could say it also about life. Life exists only as it is going out of existence.

Consider the word
existence
, printed on a page of a book. There it sits, all of it at once, nine letters, black on white, maybe for years, for centuries, maybe in thousands of copies all over the world.

Now consider the word as you speak it: “existence.” As soon as you say “tence,” “exis” is already gone, and now the whole thing’s gone. You can say it again, but that is a new event.

When you speak a word to a listener, the speaking is an act. And it is a mutual act: the listener’s listening enables the speaker’s speaking. It is a shared event, intersubjective: the listener and speaker entrain with each other. Both the amoebas are equally responsible, equally physically, immediately involved in sharing bits of themselves. The act of speaking happens NOW. And then is irrevocably, unrepeatably OVER.

Because speaking is an auditory event, not a visual one, it uses space and time differently from anything visual, including words read on paper or on a monitor.

“Auditory space has no point of favored focus. It is a sphere without fixed boundaries, space made by the thing itself, not space containing the thing.” (Ong)

Sound, speech, creates its own, immediate, instantaneous space. If we shut our eyes and listen, we are contained within that sphere.

We read printed on a page, “She shouted.” The page is durable, visible space containing the words. It is a thing not an act. But an actor shouts, and the shout is an act. It makes its own, local, momentary space.

The voice creates a sphere around it, which includes all its hearers: an intimate sphere or area, limited in both space and time.

Creation is an act. Action takes energy.

Sound is dynamic. Speech is dynamic—it is action.

To act is to take power, to have power, to be powerful.

Mutual communication between speakers and listeners is a powerful act. The power of each speaker is amplified, augmented, by the entrainment of the listeners. The strength of a community is amplified, augmented by its mutual entrainment in speech.

This is why utterance is magic. Words do have power. Names have power. Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.

O
RAL
P
ERFORMANCE

Oral performance is a particular kind of human speech. It is to an oral culture what reading is to a literate culture.

Reading is not superior to orality, and orality is not superior to reading. The two behaviors are different and have extremely different social effects. Silent reading is an implacably private activity, which while it is occurring separates the reader bodily and psychically from the people nearby. Oral performance is a powerful bonding force, which while it is occurring bonds people physically and psychically.

In our literate culture oral performance is seen as secondary, marginal. Only readings by poets of their own works and theatrical performance by actors may be perceived as having literary power comparable to written work read in silence. But oral performance in an oral culture is recognised as a powerful act, and for that reason it is always formal.

The formality is on both sides. The orator or storyteller tries to meet and fulfill certain definite expectations in the audience, gives formal cues to the audience, and may respond to formal cues from the audience. The audience will show attentiveness by certain expected behaviors: by keeping a posture of attention; in some cases, by total silence; more often, by formulaic responses—Yes, Lord! Hallelujah!—or formulaic words or affirmations: ah—hai—hah—enh. . . . In poetry readings, little quiet gasps. In comic performances, laughter.