The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (25 page)

Beauty is small, shapely, shiny things, like silver buttons, which you can carry home and keep in your nest/box.

That’s certainly not a complete answer, but it’s an answer I can accept completely—as far as it goes. It’s a beginning.

And I think it interesting, puzzling, important that my appreciation of small, hard, shapely, shiny things is something I share with bizcachas, pack rats, crows, and magpies, of both sexes.

R
HYMESTERS

Humpback whales sing. The males sing mostly in breeding season, which implies that their songs play a role in courtship. But both sexes sing; and each humpback population or nation has its distinctive song, shared by all citizens. A humpback song, which may last as much as half an hour, has a complex musical organisation, structured by phrases (groups of notes that are the same or nearly the same in each repetition) and themes (groups of repeated similar phrases).

While the humpbacks are in northern waters they don’t sing very much, and the song remains the same. When they regroup in the south, they all sing more, and the national anthem begins changing. Both the song and the changes in it may well serve to confirm community (like street slang, or any group jargon, or dialect). Every member of the community learns the current version, even when it is changing rapidly. After several years the whole tune has been radically altered. “We will sing to you a new song.”

Writing in
Natural History
, in March 1991, Kary B. Payne asks two questions of the whales: How do you remember your song, and why do you change it? She suggests that rhyme may help in remembering. Whale songs with a complex set of themes include “rhymes”—phrases that end similarly—and these rhymes link one theme to the next. As for the second question, why they keep changing and transforming their communal song, she says, “Can we speculate about this, and about whales’ use of rhymes, without thinking of human beings and wondering about the ancient roots in nature of even our aesthetic behavior?”

Payne’s article reminded me irresistibly of the poet/linguist Dell Hymes’s work on oral narratives in his book
In Vain I Tried to Tell You
and other books and articles. One such observation (summarised very crudely) is of the value of the repetitive locutions that mark divisions in Native American oral narratives. Such locutions often begin a sentence, and if translated appear as something like “So, then . . .” or “Now, next it happened . . .” or just “And.” Often discarded as meaningless, as
noise, by translators intent on getting the story and its “meaning,” these locutions serve a purpose analogous to rhyme in English poetry: they signal the
line
, which, when there is no regular meter, is a fundamental rhythmic element; and they may also cue the larger, structural rhythmic units that shape the composition.

Following such cues, what was heard, translated, and presented as a “primitive,” purely didactic, moralising story, given what shape it has merely by the events it relates, now can be appreciated as subtly formal art, in which the form shapes the material, and in which the seemingly utilitarian narrative may actually be the means towards an essentially aesthetic end.

In oral performance, repetition does not serve only to help the performer remember the text. It is a, perhaps the, fundamental structuring element of the piece: whether it takes the form of the repetitive beat of meter, or the regular sound-echo of rhyme, or the use of refrain and other repeated structures, or the long and subtle rhythm of the lines in unmetered poetry and formal oral narrative. (To these latter are related the even longer and more elusive rhythms of written prose.)

All these uses of repetition do seem to be akin to the whales’ rhymes.

As for why the whales sing, it is certainly significant that they sing most, or the males sing most, in mating season. But if you can say a song lasting half an hour performed by a hundred individuals in chorus is a mating call, then you can say a Beethoven symphony is a mating call.

Sometimes Freud sounds as if that’s what he thought. If (as he said) the artist is motivated to make art by the desire for “fame, money, and the love of beautiful women,” then indeed Beethoven wrote the Ninth because it was mating season. Beethoven was marking his territory.

There is plenty of sexuality in Beethoven’s music, which as a woman one may sometimes be rather edgily aware of—thump, thump, thump, BANG!—but testosterone goes only so far. The Ninth Symphony reaches way, way beyond it.

The male song sparrow sings when his little gonads swell as the light grows in the spring. He sings useful information, didactically and purposefully: I am a song sparrow, this is my territory, I rule this roost, my loud sweet voice indicates my youth and health and wonderful capacity to breed, come live with me and be my love, teediddle
wee
too, iddle iddle iddle! And we hear his song as very pretty. But for the crow in the next tree, “caw,” said in several different tones, serves exactly the same function. Yet to us, “caw” has negative aesthetic value. “Caw” is ugly. The erotic is not the beautiful, nor vice versa. The beauty of birdsong is incidental to its sexual or informational function.

So why do songbirds go to such elaborate, formalised, repetitive trouble, learning and passing songs down from generation to generation as they do, when they could say “caw” and be done with it?

I propose an anti-utilitarian, nonreductionist, and of course incomplete answer. The bowerbird builds his bower to court his lady, but also, in Darwin’s lovely phrase, “for playing in.” The song sparrow sings information, but plays with it as he does so. The functional message becomes complicated with a lot of “useless noise” because the pleasure of it—the beauty of it, as we say—is the noise: the trouble taken, the elaboration and repetition, the play. The selfish gene may be using the individual to perpetuate itself, and the sparrow obeys; but, being an individual not a germ cell, he values individual experience, individual pleasure, and to duty adds delight. He plays.

After all, sex, mere sex, may or may not be pleasurable. There’s no way to check with slugs or squids, and judging by the hangdog expression on the faces of dogs having sex, and the awful things cats say while having sex, and the experience of the male black widow spider, I should say that if sex is bliss sometimes it doesn’t much look like it. But sex is inarguably our duty to our genes or our species. So maybe, to make the duty more enjoyable, you play with it. You fancy it up, you add bells and whistles, tails and bowers, pleasurable complications and formalities. And if these become an end in themselves, as pleasures
are likely to do, you end up singing for the joy of singing. Any useful, dutifully sexual purpose of the song has become secondary.

We don’t know why the great whales sing. We don’t know why pack rats hoard bottlecaps. We do know that young children love to sing and to be sung to, and love to see and possess pretty, shiny things. Their pleasure in such things precedes sexual maturation and seems to be quite unconnected to courtship, sexual stimulation, or mating.

And while song may affirm and confirm community, stealing silver watches certainly does not. We cannot assume that beauty is in the service of either sexuality or solidarity.

I wonder if complication and uselessness are not key words in this meditation. The pack rat seems like a little museum curator, because she has complicated her nest-building instinct with “meaningless noise”—collecting perfectly useless objects for the pleasure of it. The humpback whales can be mentioned along with Beethoven because by adding “meaningless noise” to simple mating calls and statements of community, they elaborated them into symphonies.

My husband’s Aunt Pearle employed a useful craft, crochet, with the useful purpose of making a bedspread. By making useless, highly rhythmic variations on plain crochet stitch, she complicated the whole act enormously, because she enjoyed doing so. After months of pleasurable work, she completed a beautiful thing: a “Spiderweb” coverlet, which she gave us. Although it does indeed cover a bed, it isn’t, as we women say, for everyday. It is useful, but not simply useful. It is
much more than
useful. It was made to put on the bed when guests are coming, to give them the pleasure of seeing its complex elegance, and the compliment of being given more than is strictly necessary—a surplus, a treat. We take what’s useful and play with it—for the beauty of it.

S
ILENT
D
RUMMERS

When people are talking about beauty in art they usually take their examples from music, the fine arts, dance, and poetry. They seldom mention prose.

When prose is what’s being talked about, the word
beauty
is seldom used, or it’s used as mathematicians use it, to mean the satisfying, elegant resolution of a problem: an intellectual beauty, having to do with ideas.

But words, whether in poetry or in prose, are as physical as paint and stone, as much a matter of voice and ear as music, as bodily as dancing.

I think it is a major error in criticism ever to ignore the words. Literally, the words: the sound of the words—the movement and pace of sentences—the rhythmic structures that the words establish and are controlled by.

A pedagogy that relies on the “Cliff Notes” sort of thing travesties the study of literature. To reduce the aesthetic value of a narrative to the ideas it expresses, to its “meaning,” is a drastic impoverishment. The map is not the landscape.

In poetry, the auditory and rhythmic reality of language has stayed alive all through the centuries of the Gutenberg Hegemony. Poetry has always been said or read aloud. Even in the inaudible depths of modernism, T. S. Eliot was persuaded to mumble into a microphone. And ever since Dylan Thomas wowed ’em in New York, poetry has reclaimed its proper nature as an audible art.

But prose narrative has been silent for centuries. Printing made it so.

Book-circuit readings by novelists and memoirists are popular now, and recorded readings of books have gone some way towards restoring aurality to prose; but it is still generally assumed, by writer and by critic, that prose is read in silence.

Reading is performance. The reader—the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library
desk—
performs
the work. The performance is silent. The readers hear the sounds of the words and the beat of the sentences only in their inner ear. Silent drummers on noiseless drums. An amazing performance in an amazing theater.

What is the rhythm the silent reader hears? What is the rhythm the prose writer follows?

While she was writing her last novel,
Pointz Hall
, which she refers to below as PH, and which when it was published became
Between the Acts
, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary:

It is the rhythm of a book that, by running in the head, winds one into a ball: and so jades one. The rhythm of PH (the last chapter) became so obsessive that I heard it, perhaps used it, in every sentence I spoke. By reading the notes for memoirs I broke this up. The rhythm of the notes is far freer and looser. Two days of writing in that rhythm has completely refreshed me. So I go back to PH tomorrow. This I think is rather profound. (Virginia Woolf,
Diary
, 17 November 1940)

Fourteen years before this diary notation made near the end of her life, Woolf wrote the passage I used to open this book and for its title, where she speaks of prose rhythm and the wave that “breaks and tumbles in the mind.” In it she also, lightly, called her remarks on the rhythm of narrative “profound.” In both these passing notes on the rhythm of narrative, she knew, I think, that she was onto something big. I only wish she’d gone on with it.

In a letter in 1926, Woolf said that what you start with, in writing a novel, “is a world. Then, when one has imagined this world, suddenly people come in.” (Letter 1618) First comes the place, the situation, then the characters arrive with the plot. . . . But
telling
the story is a matter of getting the beat—of becoming the rhythm, as the dancer becomes the dance.

And reading is the same process, only far easier, not jading: because
instead of having to discover the rhythm beat by beat, you can let yourself follow it, be taken over by it, you can let the dance dance you.

What is this rhythm Woolf talks about? Prose scrupulously avoids any clear regular beat or recurrent cadence. Are there, then, deeply syncopated patterns of stress? Or does the rhythm occur in and among the sentences—in the syntax, linkage, paragraphing? Is that why punctuation is so important to prose (whereas it often matters little in poetry, where the line replaces it)? Or is prose narrative rhythm established as well in even longer phrases and larger structures, in the occurrence of events and recurrence of themes in the story, the linkage and counterpoint of plot and chapter?

All these, I think. There are a whole lot of rhythms going in a well-written novel. Together, in their counterpoint and syncopation and union, they make the rhythm of that novel, which is unlike any other, as the rhythms of a human body in their interplay make up a rhythm unique to that body, that person.