On Mar 30, 2008, at 3:06 PM, Michael Brady wrote:
When you attend carefully to things in motion or in flux, like spoken language, you'll observe that at any discrete moment, the image or sound or feeling is indistinct, lacks a precise edge or boundary, is seemingly incomplete. But when it's taken in the greater flow, the flux, the motion, you organize and coalesce the whole stream of perceptions and impose an organization so that it seems distinct and precise. Listen to the way people speak: slurred consonants, mushy vowels, missing syllables, warbling pitch, but it seems complete and coherent to you. Likewise, the fuzzy brushmarks in the painting, the brutal chip marks in the stone, the peripatetic vowels in the song.
Another thought: Words are spoken in long strings of sounds that aggregate and blend together. But because we can move small sections of the sounds around--what we call words--we disaggregate the whole stream. Orthography has followed suit: word spaces were introduced long after entire sentences and thoughts were inscribed in an unbroken parade of marks. Nowadays, we hear separate words with the reinforcement of having seen the words written as separate entities.
