full anonymity now, as if the mind alone had made them, our fingers dancing along over the keyboard as unnoticed as breathing until something breaks or the error beep sounds. As Plato feared, the written word can be stolen, counterfeited, bought, released from the responsibility of its writer, sailed into the world as unsigned as a ship unnamed or under borrowed registry. Suppose politicians were required to compose their own lies, use their own poor words, instead of having their opinions catered—how brief would be their hold on our beliefs; how soon would their souls be seen to be as soiled as their socks.
The sentence—its shape, its sound, the space it makes, its importance to consciousness, its manifestation of the mind/body problem (meaning and thing fastened to the same inscription)—is it in my obsession with the ontology of the word that I find the ground for my own practice? Is that why I emphasize the music of the language, alliterate with the passionate persistence of old poems, wallow in assonance, clutter the otherwise open space of concepts with the clatter and click of dentals and other consonants? Are these the reasons I want the reader’s mouth to move as if reading were being in that moment mastered, and the breath were full of chewable food? No. The reason is that I cannot seem to write in any other way; because sound sometimes rushes ahead of sense, and forces such sense, gasping and panting, to catch up. I often think, overhearing myself at work, that I do not write; I mumble, I whisper, I declaim, I inveigh. My study is full of static when it is full of me.
Harmonium
, Wallace Stevens called one of his books.
Harmonica
, I’d like to call mine—rude mouth music. That’s because every mark on the page, apart from its inherent visual interest, is playing its part in the construction of a verbal consciousness, and that means commas must become concepts, pauses need to be performed, even the margins have to be sung, the lips rounded as widely as the widest vowel, round as the edges of the world. O h as in “oral.”
For that’s where every good idea should be found, melting like a chocolate in the curl of the tongue, against the roof of the mouth.
If we insist that we write to be spoken (though no one shall speak us; neither time nor training nor custom incline our rare reader to it), then a concept crucial to the understanding of literature and its effects is “voice.” Even when we write in the first person and construct a voice for our invented narrator to speak in, there is always an overvoice in which our character finds a place: the author’s voice, the style which tells us, whoever is speaking—Lear or Hamlet or Juliet—that it is Shakespeare nevertheless, in whose verbal stream they are swimming; or we hear the unmistakable tones of Henry James, of Flaubert or Faulkner, in each rednecked, red-earthed farmer, in every bumbling bourgeois or bewildered American lady.
Who better to speak than Thoreau of the sound around one, for he chose the quietest of woods to inhabit.
I kept neither dog, cat, cow, pig, nor hens, so that you would have said there was a deficiency of domestic sounds; neither the churn, nor the spinning-wheel, nor even the singing of the kettle, nor the hissing of the urn, nor children crying, to comfort one. An old-fashioned man would have lost his senses or died of ennui before this. Not even rats in the wall, for they were starved out, or rather were never baited in,—only squirrels on the roof and under the floor, a whip-poor-will on the ridge-pole, a blue jay screaming beneath the window, a hare or woodchuck under the house, a screech owl or a cat owl behind it, a flock of wild geese or a laughing loon on the pond, and a fox to bark in the night. Not even a lark or an oriole, those mild plantation birds, ever visited my clearing. No cockerels to crow nor hens to cackle in the yard. No yard! but unfenced nature reaching up to your very sills. A young forest
The sentence—its shape, its sound, the space it makes, its importance to consciousness, its manifestation of the mind/body problem (meaning and thing fastened to the same inscription)—is it in my obsession with the ontology of the word that I find the ground for my own practice? Is that why I emphasize the music of the language, alliterate with the passionate persistence of old poems, wallow in assonance, clutter the otherwise open space of concepts with the clatter and click of dentals and other consonants? Are these the reasons I want the reader’s mouth to move as if reading were being in that moment mastered, and the breath were full of chewable food? No. The reason is that I cannot seem to write in any other way; because sound sometimes rushes ahead of sense, and forces such sense, gasping and panting, to catch up. I often think, overhearing myself at work, that I do not write; I mumble, I whisper, I declaim, I inveigh. My study is full of static when it is full of me.
Harmonium
, Wallace Stevens called one of his books.
Harmonica
, I’d like to call mine—rude mouth music. That’s because every mark on the page, apart from its inherent visual interest, is playing its part in the construction of a verbal consciousness, and that means commas must become concepts, pauses need to be performed, even the margins have to be sung, the lips rounded as widely as the widest vowel, round as the edges of the world. O h as in “oral.”
For that’s where every good idea should be found, melting like a chocolate in the curl of the tongue, against the roof of the mouth.
If we insist that we write to be spoken (though no one shall speak us; neither time nor training nor custom incline our rare reader to it), then a concept crucial to the understanding of literature and its effects is “voice.” Even when we write in the first person and construct a voice for our invented narrator to speak in, there is always an overvoice in which our character finds a place: the author’s voice, the style which tells us, whoever is speaking—Lear or Hamlet or Juliet—that it is Shakespeare nevertheless, in whose verbal stream they are swimming; or we hear the unmistakable tones of Henry James, of Flaubert or Faulkner, in each rednecked, red-earthed farmer, in every bumbling bourgeois or bewildered American lady.
Who better to speak than Thoreau of the sound around one, for he chose the quietest of woods to inhabit.
I kept neither dog, cat, cow, pig, nor hens, so that you would have said there was a deficiency of domestic sounds; neither the churn, nor the spinning-wheel, nor even the singing of the kettle, nor the hissing of the urn, nor children crying, to comfort one. An old-fashioned man would have lost his senses or died of ennui before this. Not even rats in the wall, for they were starved out, or rather were never baited in,—only squirrels on the roof and under the floor, a whip-poor-will on the ridge-pole, a blue jay screaming beneath the window, a hare or woodchuck under the house, a screech owl or a cat owl behind it, a flock of wild geese or a laughing loon on the pond, and a fox to bark in the night. Not even a lark or an oriole, those mild plantation birds, ever visited my clearing. No cockerels to crow nor hens to cackle in the yard. No yard! but unfenced nature reaching up to your very sills. A young forest
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