Sorry, I accidentally sent this before I finished it:
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. (I'm sure you've had the experience of not being able to figure out what the hell that song lyric says, until you read the words on the album cover. Then you can hear the words as "meaningful," rather than as a blur of unfathomable sounds.)
Somehow, our attentive faculties enable us to perceive things clearly as they blur by. But when those things are static, when the passage is halted, they are like photographs of friends that make them look odd or funny, because they face is frozen with one eye squinted and the tip of the tongue sticking out of the lips. We don't see that when they speak. Per contrast, when we are allowed to arrest the passage of experience in some way, we can figure out what those fuzzy or ambiguous or incomprehensible parts are, at least long enough to put them into the context (of the constantly moving experience).
Cheerskep is stopping the game film and pointing out how this or that word or thought or notion is hard to understand or follow, and William is saying, "For crying out loud, what the play develop and you'll know what's going on."
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady [EMAIL PROTECTED]
