Prosody - Mar 10 2021

 

Prosody

Mar 10 2021

When you say a word over and over

the meaning drains out.

It becomes pure sound,

the abstract jazz of English

as it must fall on others' ears.

Not Italian

where the hands also speak

like a manic Latin maestro,

nor well-accented French

with its soft seductive purr.

Not hard guttural German

nor a Swede's sing-song tones.

And never Portuguese

which simply confuses us,

sounding too much like its cousins

to put your finger on.

I find it disturbing, this emptiness.

A hollowed out word

the fragility of thought.

Because if language makes us human

then imagining its loss

is to contemplate oblivion.

But I am also reassured

that as long as music's in the soul

feeling will persist.

Even the frail old man

whose mind has slipped

and can no longer feed himself

remembers the songs of his youth,

the lyrics

he didn't know he memorized

the poetry he drilled.

The muffled sound of words

first heard in the womb,

the gentle coo of nursery rhymes

imbibed with mother's milk.

An interesting thing is that Chinese children – who are exposed in the womb to a tonal language – emerge with an ear for subtle variations in pitch that babies with English speaking mothers are incapable of. Even the sounds we're exposed to before birth shape our brain's ability to attend to sound. One reason why Mandarin is hard for us Westerners to learn!

The poem also addresses the simple notion that thinking and feeling are mutually exclusive mental processes. Or, to put it another way, the head vs heart dichotomy. . . .Although actually, I think emotion is an essential heuristic that helps us in decision-making. If we were pure logical automatons like Star Trek's Spock, I suspect we'd find ourselves paralyzed: repeatedly stuck for what to do. So we aren't the rational coldly calculating individuals we sometimes imagine ourselves. There is no such thing as pure thought uncontaminated by emotion. But music, in its purest sense, really does evade thought: unlike language, it enters the mind directly, without processing. It activates emotion and memory without reflection. It remains with us, even without the conscious effort of remembering.

As for the title, here's a simple definition of "prosody": the rhythmic and intonational aspect of language. So it's really the music of poetry: the way it lands on the ear, the way it feels in the mouth.

I began this poem with a simple urge to write –anything – and a couple of minutes of time. I originally intended to take advantage of that constraint and finally keep it SHORT: I was determined to make it a 5 to 10 line poem. And that's all I started with – a constraint, but not even the germ of an idea. Somehow, my mind went into this unstructured receptive sort of flow state, and this thing appeared on the page like automatic writing. So that this came out not only coherent but actually pretty good is surprising, as well as sobering: if it's really that easy, why do I usually sweat it so much?!! The alchemy of creativity still baffles me. Too bad my creativity is so one-dimensional: just language; nothing else.