Our dominance as a species can largely be blamed on our superior future-predicting capability. This capability is both derived from and reflected in the sophistication and length of our memories. Language put us at a terrifically unfair advantage in terms of both strategising and forward planning, as it allowed us to discuss things in their absence; the biped with a few free hands and the capacity for abstract thought probably wins out on most of the viable exoplanets. To pursue the ‘roots of poetry’ through evolutionary psychology leads us quickly into wilder conjecture than even that speculative discipline can accommodate; but based on what we know of its use in less complex societies, it seems safe enough to assume that poetry was at least partly compelled into being through the need for preliterate cultures to have a mnemonic storage-and-retrieval system to supplement the information the mind could comfortably retain. Even in its most primitive form, poetry was concerned with transcending a human limitation; it was a ‘magical’ discipline – one that could conjure from thin air the location of waterholes, hunting grounds and food stores, recall the sequenced appearance of plants and flowers, the cycles and lore of weather, season and animal husbandry – as well as the stories, histories and genealogies that served the evolutionarily advantageous purpose of strengthening the sense of community and tribe. It would have immediately acquired a reputation as a mantic art, based on its ability to predict the future through its memory of the past. Long before the book, poetry was the brain’s first ‘external storage’, our first ‘mnemotechnology’.
Poetry, in its ur-form of easily memorisable speech, would have been deeply implicated in both our survival and sense of identity: little wonder that it quickly invested itself with those magical properties, and also took the form of spell, riddle, curse, blessing, incantation and prayer. For those atavistic reasons, poetry remains an invocatory form. Prose evokes; the well-chosen word describes the thing as if it were present. But poetry persists in its attempt to invoke, to call down its subject from above, as if there were no ‘as if’ at all. Of course, poetry can’t literally conjure things from thin air, but one unique condition obtains here: artist and audience collude. Poet and reader enter a bizarre cultural contract where they agree to create the poem through the investment of an excess of imaginative energy; the poem is then subject to a kind of double reification. This convergence of minds adds a holographic dimension to the poem, one denied to other modes of human speech. A poem’s elements can sometimes appear to have been summoned into existence with enough potency to engage our physical senses.
‘Magical’ practices naturally intermarry, and poetry has long been closely allied with music and song. Lyric is derived from lyre, and music from muse; for the Greeks, mousike was a general term that could cover any of the muse-ruled arts or sciences, and united dance, song and poem.1 In Rome, ars musica described and conflated both instrumental music and poetry. While the experience of those songs was supposed to be sensuously pleasurable, and their practical object the acquisition of knowledge (we can reasonably infer Homer’s poetics from his portrayal of Odysseus and the Sirens – ‘an erotic encounter which nonetheless promises the gaining of wisdom’ summarises his position tolerably well), a premium was always placed on Art’s memorability: Mnemosyne, the muse of memory, was the mother of all the other muses. According to Hesiod, both kings and poets arrogated authority to their speech through seeking her inspiration; they still do.
Unlike poetry, the raw material of music occurs without humans, and needs only to be actively perceived by them to come into being. The wind will whistle up octaves, tonics, dominants and harmonic overtones; the birds, complex melody. Rainwater dripping from a leaf-tip into a pool will supply a rhythmic series of random intervals around a mean pitch-centre. Elsewhere, music seems waiting to be made: a cut reed or bamboo stem just needs us to breathe across it to propose a vertical flute; in some versions of the Greek myth, Hermes discovers the lyre – the very emblem of our guild – when he finds a rotten tortoise-shell, still strung with a few muscle tendons, which he idly twangs. A few years ago I stood in a cave system in Andalusia where stalactites had formed a massive floor-length stone drape, each fold of which gave a different gong-like tone when struck. Music has long supplied us with the paradoxical sense of a language that is humanly manipulable and emotionally articulate – and yet of non-human origin, and beyond human words.
Music seems somehow precise in its emotional meaning, yet, quite unlike our object-taking word-sense, also feels wholly intransitive and ‘unparaphrasable’. When we seek to infuse our speech with a mood or emotion it cannot easily express, it’s to music, to the patterning of sounds, that we instinctively reach. This happens long before we’re moved to make a song or poem: in our spoken conversation, variations in rhythm, pitch and timbre are responsible for most of what we convey of our emotional tone, and much nuance and emphasis the mere word-sense of our speech cannot carry. This is why the Daleks have trouble conveying irony, but also why – as Frost pointed out – a great deal of sense can still be made of a conversation heard through a wall.2 (Many of us will have had the experience of overhearing an argument through the party wall of a hotel room. Walls act as low-pass filters and remove the high frequencies of most consonants; consonants provide us with the means to differentiate one word from another, so we’re essentially listening to folk talk with their mouths closed. But we can follow the emotional shape of the whole conversation though its intonational contour alone, without having actually heard a word of it.)
While musical signs are often culture-specific – minor keys, for example, will connote different very moods in different cultures3 – we have still managed to map the infinitely complex landscape of human emotion to music’s rather weirdly discarnate medium. Even more strangely, music seems able to conjure the presence of emotions we had not felt before, which suggests that the emotional referents of its various signs can become well enough agreed and understood to allow the creation of entirely new feelings through their original blending and combination, much as we blend and combine concepts in language. (I believe poetry also exercises this extraordinary facility, albeit at a secondary and backgrounded level. In Part II, I’ll mention my own ‘candidate particle of musical sense’, something I call a ‘patheme’.)
Song, though, is a uniquely human business. As beautiful as they are – or rather ‘as we find them’ – whale-song and bird-song are largely concerned with territory and sexual selection, and are barely analogous to the signature twitter of our speech, never mind Winterreise or ‘Woodstock’. Human song is double: it binds an exclusively human system that we have carefully developed to a universal one, based on physical law, that we have merely learned to manipulate. Fused with music, our speech becomes self-transcending, immediately part of a primal and universal realm in which it can symbolically and literally participate.4 Perhaps for that reason, its ability to unite our choppy and fragmented perception by singing across the gaps, song has long been our aspirational archetype.
A rather larger ‘gap’ also haunts us. As mammals with foreknowledge of our own deaths, we are in an unusual position. Knowing we will die means that, in a sense, we already have. Dying is something we do very well; it’s an imaginative exercise we conduct so often, our own future deaths are generally inscribed in us by five or six years old. Compared with the squid’s, the sparrow’s and the squirrel’s, our existential condition is closer to one of ghosthood. Given this predicament, it’s understandable that we take our comfort where we can. What Piaget identified as ‘object permanence’ – the child’s realisation that an object persists in its being, even when it disappears from their immediate sight – is a darned useful thing to learn: when you understand that your mother hasn’t evaporated every time she leaves the room, you needn’t always feel orphaned by the experience. Unfortunately, when your mother does leave the room for good, a part of the brain now regards her vanishing as a logical impossibility. Religion allows us to read the sleight-of-hand by which our loved ones are conjured to another place, albeit one inaccessible to us; these necessary myths allow us to be reconciled to what we experience as the paradox of their absence.5 I would claim that music, too, offers a kind of spiritual solace, but one more physically direct in its rejection of our sequential, quantised sense of time that, in the end, serves only to divide us from one another. Musical time is rhythmic, cyclical, non-linear; song takes the vowels of our language and lengthens them, in defiance of its categorising, sequencing engine. Orpheus used song to cross the ultimate dividing border, and defy death itself. Rilke saw the Orphic project as one that allows us to enter a ‘double realm’, unifying the domain of the temporal, the passing and the living with that of the atemporal, the eternal and the shade – and in doing so, reconciling us to the paradox of our twin citizenship.
Poetry introduces music into language through a simple procedure. Like the musical note, the word is an event in time; but despite this, words (to adapt an old formula of Hugh Kenner’s) can be recalled into one another’s presence and have their meanings yoked together by the careful repetition and arrangement of their sounds. The effect of this is twofold. Our long-term memory encodes information semantically, our short-term memory acoustically, and these rhythmic, parallel and repetitive sound-tricks simply give the line a better chance of ‘hooking’ on a single hearing; this way they can be later recalled, and their meaning more carefully dwelt upon. But these patterns also introduce a perceptual distortion: they offer a small stay against the passage of time and, in their Orphic way, cheat death a little too.
1 My definition of ‘lyric’ in this chapter stays close to its etymological root: I mean by it simply ‘that aspect of poetry which concerns itself with musical property’, and would ask the reader to put from their mind the other uses to which the word ‘lyric’ is commonly put in a poetic context – i.e. to denote first-person, ‘emotional’, non-narrative or non-dramatic poetry, and so on.
2 Robert Frost to John T. Bartlett, 4 July 1913, Selected Letters of Robert Frost, ed. Lawrence Thompson (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), 79–80.
3 Consider, say, the delightful musical coincidence between the Western blues scale, and raga jog in classical Indian music – the first full of sadness, anger and dissatisfaction; the second, a late-evening raga of contemplative yearning, and no little romance. I often think of this example when I see poetic translations which have echoed the sound and prosodic effects of the original poem. The cultural gestures then created in the target language are often drastically or even calamitously different, just as the blues played on the sitar isn’t the blues.
4 I feel I should declare – if for no other reason than allowing the reader the opportunity to compensate for my own predilections – that I subscribe to a materialist definition of the aesthetic sublime: those moments we think of as ‘transcendent’ are bringing us close not to God but to the earth, to which we now have a rather distant relationship, and with which our moments of reunion are so infrequent that they strike us with the force of revelation.
5 We never quite get that we are not nouns but verbs, not things but ‘beings’, i.e. complex sites of fairly stable processes; it’s the external consistency of those processes that forms the souls that we fall in love with, look to for protection, or feel instinctively protective towards. Only death renders us mere objects. The shock of that phase shift and change of word class, I am assured, is better dealt with by sitting at home awhile with the bodies of our dead, not spiriting them away.