We’ll now return to more technical matters. The alternate stress rule (ASR) arises from two phenomena. The first is isochrony, whose nature I will quickly recap. Through its manifestation in pulse, breath, brain-wave, ambulation, sleep-cycles and so on, isochrony is intrinsic to the condition of physical being. To a consciousness inclined to sense, project or measure them, isochrony can conjure weak interstitial spaces between its salient events. These can be perceived as ‘ghost placeholders’ which ‘negatively’ reinforce the even distribution of ‘positive’ icti. Governed by whatever resistance and tension there is in the system – whether it’s a pair of lungs taking a few seconds to reinflate before the next exhalation, or the sun and moon slowly swinging into alignment between spring tides – these gaps effectively repel the events on either side to maintain their regular recurrence. The second phenomenon is the ‘tick-tock’ effect, the tendency to hear close, isochronically distributed sound events as differentiated in value, with the first beat stronger. This effect works hierarchically: we soon hear TICKtock ticktock, and then TICKtock ticktock TICKtock ticktock – with two, and then four, alternating, gradated strengths of strong ‘tick’. Hierarchical alternation forms a literal ‘measure’, a way of experiencing parcels of time through applying an asymmetrical value to a symmetrical system.1 And if measurement creates ‘the passage of time’, then its child is rhythm, the very patterns of recurrence themselves.
It seems probable that there will be material explanations for the existence of the ASR: our intrauterine experience of the heartbeat and our slightly lopsided bilateral body-symmetry may account for it. But since no other animals seem to respond to rhythmic series, other human-specific reasons for the ASR have been advanced: for example, rhythmic ‘hypnosis’ may have been important for social or team-building reasons, such as battle-trance and courtship ritual. AS seems to lie behind what biomusicology calls ‘beat induction’, the active perception of a pulse (this can then lead to ‘entrainment’, the collective synchronisation of humans to a perceived rhythm that allows them to dance, sway or foot-tap together; only humans dance2).
It has always struck me, though, that ASR must also be derived from the transient-silence-transient-silence pattern of isochrony itself. A ghost-event is projected into the interstitial gap, so a ghost off-beat is ‘heard’ in the space. We often count a slow beat not by going one … two … three … four, but by projecting an offbeat: one and two and three and four and … This strong-weak-strong-weak asymmetric series (as opposed to an ictus-nothing-ictus-nothing symmetric series) is an important cognitive shift. It can then be projected into higher groups of beats. In other words, the ASR may emerge directly from slower pulses via a kind of human reflex which simply ‘abhors a vacuum’, and will project an imaginary event to fill the miniature, abyssal horrors of the gaps. I suppose I’m claiming that AS really arises through an inbuilt condition of existential crisis, and that its roots may lie in a kind of ingrained ‘fear of nothingness’ more generally; other more existentially secure animals seem not to make this projection. It may also be a product of our exceptionally strong awareness of our own impending annihilation: this indeed causes us to ‘structure time’, as the anticipated death of the self creates a life that is a ‘rhythmic unit’, which can then subdivide into year, season, week, minute, ‘the seven ages of man’, and so on (whether we intend to close our life-poem with a deictic shift to the heavenly sphere or not). A deep-seated, inner ‘drive to measure’ would be consistent with the rejection of ‘meaningless’ isochrony in favour of ‘meaningful’ rhythmic measurement, which would have to begin with the projection of AS. (It is possibly the most primal, meaning-creating supra-domain reframing of them all.) To say that it arises from isochrony itself, and not the projection of an alternate pattern into a series of events, is to say we that we are instinctively driven to reject the existence of empty, meaningless space, and will instead actively interpolate the role of function in its place. But perhaps the more interesting question is why we then project AS recursively, into self-similar, higher metrical units.3
1 The reader may recall endnote 2 on Matte Blanco: without asymmetrical sequence there can be nothing but symmetry, and therefore nothing but ‘timelessness’.
2 A lie. So, confusingly, do some breeds of parrot.
3 Generative metrics is a form of prosodic analysis derived from the principles of generative grammar, and has AS at its heart. I think it’s broadly unsuccessful, but in idle moments I have wondered, ignorantly, if the cart is before the horse – and whether generative grammar’s rules, which recursively generate the structures of well-formed expressions, are themselves the product of recursion in AS.