For many years now, Tom/Cheerskep has been harnaguing us with his tandem notions of (1) the unbearable lightness of onticness, and (2) the misnomer 'meaning' and what's inside one's head. After a while, some of his notions penetrate and seem to affect my own thinking.
The other day, I was musing about words. I was watching a TV show as the credits for the actors scrolled by. The name Kathryn Erbe appeared. I immediately said /er-bee/ silently to myself, i.e., I "read" it that way. I happened to reflect on how I knew to pronounce it /er-bee/ rather than /erb/, because I have heard it pronounced that way. That led me to ponder how spelling (writing) is related to spoken language, especially when spelling can be ambiguous or some letter sequences can be pronounced different ways. Well, that is the problem: the letters aren't pronounced a certain way, but rather different sounds are written with the same letter combinations. How did I pick out (know) the correct pronunciation of /er-bee/, rather than /erb/ or /er-bG /? I suppose the underlying explanation is that I know a lot of words and their spellings, but when it comes down to reading, I realized (with a Cheerskepian >Eureka< reaction) that the letters **reminded** me of the pronunciation, more exactly, of my memory of the pronunciation. I'm beginning to delve into this farther. On a related matter, I was watching Lawrence of Arabia yesterday, and I was impressed in particular with the famous Officers' Bar scene. I reran it several times, watching how Peter O'Toole delvered one bit of dialogue. I am a big fan of Robert Bolt, the screen writer of LoA, A Man for All Seasons, Vivat, Vivat Regina, and other plays. His dialogue is exquisite and marvelous. In this speech, Lawrence tells Brighton that he has taken Aquaba. "Taken Aquaba? Who has?" Brighton asks. Then comes a wonderful speech by O'Toole. "We have. Our side in this war has. The wogs have. We have." Brighton: "You mean the Turks have gone?" Lawrence: "No, they're still there, but they have no boots. They're prisoners. We took them prisoners, the entire garrison. No, that's not true. We killed some, too many, really. I'll manage it better next time. There's been a lot of killing, one way or another. Cross my heart and hope to die, it's all perfectly true." O'Toole plays the scene and delivers the lines flawlessly. I don't know how much stage direction Bolt wrote for this scene, and how much was developed by O'Toole and Lean as the scene was rehearsed. There's not a lot of stage direction in Man for All Seasons, and damned little in Shakespeare's plays. My point? I would read it in a monotone and without the important pauses, breaks, and inflections. On the other hand, an actor trained and sensitive to saying the lines would be able to grasp probable ways to say the lines, which would be entirely lost on me. By contrast, a person practiced and exposed to art would be able to grasp how to look at a painting in a way analogous to the actor's grasp of saying the lines, while an unskilled person would read the images in the painting in a rather monotonous and unpaced way, like I do when I read a play or transcript of a news interview. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
