Hand and mouth
I just had an enquiry about doing an interview on the C-Realm Podcast site. A current wave of research - my enthusiasm for the ideas finding each other before me and transforming as I simmer them - overcame my initial trepidation about doing a spoken interview.
And then I stopped. I realized that this is exactly the wrong time to let that enthusiasm loose; it needs to be held close, protected, gestated, cooked. I’m hoping to get some writing out of it. So, no interview. Hopefully someone will be interested in interviewing me when I’ve got all these churning thoughts pinned down with words, and before I get bored with the whole thing!
This all got me thinking about the discrepancy I find between my writing and my speech. Most people have it, I suppose. Some people don’t have it much, and some carefully craft their writing to follow their speech patterns; some (usually academics and scientists) allow their speech to get taken over by the formalities of the written word, and others accept or even encourage the split.
Is it a split? Allen Ginsberg used to say that the voice is the link between the body and the spirit; the neck is the bridge between torso and head, channeling the breath, the living spirit, to work with material vibrations in a sonic union. (I’m not even paraphrasing here, just my words spinning off from his idea…) It’s certainly a view I’ve a lot of time for, and one that’s fruitful to keep close by when studying the use of voice in spiritual traditions.
But what about the hands? When writing and speech are placed in opposition, it seems intuitive that speech is more of the body, more spontaneous and connected to our physical animality. Whereas writing is more intellectual, more minded, reflective and “civilized”. And yet the mouth sits right up there in our head; while the hands, the vehicles of writing, are way away from the brain, that organ which conventionally carries “mind” in our culture.
Writing has its isolation, allowing a retraction from the world into psychic reflection. But perhaps there’s something in this bodily symbolism which helps turn our conventional conceptions upside-down, to break down this oppositional “split” idea. We can begin to see in speech less groundedness, more flighty airiness, perhaps a little vulnerable to being seized by passing breezes of thought. And in writing we can see the tool-wielding craft of handiwork, sentences wrought on the keyboard or pressed in thick dark ink onto the pulped remains of trees.
Each mode has its own blend of elemental forces, and discerning these starts to break down those tired oppositional perceptions.
Hmmmm… to be honest it’s not something (surprisingly enough) that I’ve given much thought to. But, now that I do think about it, I think that may be because — and I speak only for myself — that I don’t feel speech and writing are all that different.
When I write (and again, this is purely personal experience here; others may be very different) it’s as though I’m dictating my own internal voice. I hear the words, as if spoken, before I write them down.
Then again; I’ll often do some minor editing to try and iron out clumsy phrasing. So maybe I need to think about it a bit more….
Jim Bliss - 13th March 2007 @ 3:27
My thoughts on it probably stem from having written loads and never having accepted any speaking invitations - partly out of “stage fright”, despite having enjoyed stage acting at college (another “contrast” to look into, between “acting” and doing a “talk”).
Others may well have different experiences of it, but I think the perspective shift from the bodily relationships is useful if anyone’s stuck in the “writing = intellect / speech = body” opposition.
Another angle I thought of last night: writing earths the intellect, down from the brain through the hands, and speech spiritualizes the body, up from the chest through the mouth.
Gyrus - 13th March 2007 @ 12:12
I always make a point of reading aloud everything I write, so the rhythm is there. If you get the rhythm you fuse writing and speech.
Actually, I think the intellect/body divide is more about the distribution of Latin-derived words and Anglo-Saxon-derived words in the kind of English you speak and write. ‘Truth’ is Anglo-Saxon, ‘veracity’ is Latin. Right there, the whole of the problem. Good writing in English (and also speech, should you class the quality of speech) has a higher than average distribution of Anglo-Saxon.
I first became aware of this when a very learned friend many years ago observed my dinner-table argument with a cigar-puffing professor. He pointed out later that I was winning the argument consistently mostly with Anglo-Saxon words, whereas the professor was rooted in Latin words. Until then, he’d had the idea that if you wanted to sound intelligent you used Latin, but this was merely because that was what you most often saw. He’d never seen Anglo-Saxon used to demolish an argument before. This gave me food for thought, and since then I have been far more conscious of the kind of language I am using in terms of where it comes from.
Joel - 14th March 2007 @ 20:14
I don’t know too much about Tibetan Buddhism except for 7 years of listening to monks. What I have learned is that the mind is a continuum that is not located in the physical brain necessarily. There is intelligence in ever cell of my body. Michael Talbot wrote a stunning book called The Holographic Universe which points to the understandin of “emptiness”. It’s as if our individual DNA signature resides in every cell. This undercuts the Western mind/body split.
Vocal efforts of my writing extend the work to another dimension, and yet I find if I use my voice too much, I get agitated because I’ve given myself what the Tibetans call “a wind imbalance.”
I believe that I create my own reality: if I rise in the morning with anger, each person I meet seems to conspire in my afflicted emotion. If I rise in the morning with happiness; each person I meet becomes beautiful.
Therefore, I can choose to view the world from a dualistic perspective of positive vs. negative, or male and female, or love and hate, or black and white . . . all is separated, divided, either or . . . the source of conflicts. You wrote “When writing and speech are placed in opposition,” I was reminded of how much anguish I created in myself by this very same perspective I’ve engaged in the past.
Therefore, I can choose to view the world from a non-dual perspective, which takes a lot of practice and discipline and endurance that I am only feebly beginning. This is free will. I am One. I am whole. My hand, my speech, my calligraphic imprinting on the page, my breath . . . all the same essence.
Thanks for the great insights and provocative thoughts.
mickey morgan - 20th March 2007 @ 2:04
Mickey: Yeah, those mystical insights of the diffusion of consciousness or intelligence through all matter can be good at eroding dualistic distinctions, or act as a good backdrop for reconsidering them. But I personally find those perceptions too amorphous to hang onto, and end up working more “in the thick of it” - complexifying, reversing or rejigging dualisms rather than all-out transcending or obliterating them.
Gyrus - 20th March 2007 @ 12:40