On Sound Before Sense
Yesterday, after Open Day, I had a fascinating conversation with a colleague from English.
He is writing short stories, and admitted to a novel in progress. He has an agent. It will happen for him, I am sure.
We were talking about the moments in first drafting — common to both of us — when you have the idea of the possibility of a sentence, but you don’t yet know what it’s going to say.
This is what I was trying to get at in my entry about rhythm vs. research.
As you do, we started to share videos of how something like this pre-language or babble sounds to us.
He showed me the song ‘Prisencolinensinainciusol’ — yes, ‘Prisencolinensinainciusol’ — that the Italian singer Adriano Celentano wrote and released in the early ’70s. Here he is, performing it with his wife Claudia Mori.
The dance moves are…
As the first of the comments says, ‘When someone is telling you something important in a dream, this is exactly what it sounds like.’
I came back with a little bit of Stanley Unwin, using his bespoke idiolect Unwinese in 1983.
These are different approaches to speech — although they both relate to gobbledygook or nonsense.
Adriano Celentano’s song approximates to a child babbling a language they are starting to learn. There are recogniseable wordforms in there (well, just, baby, yeah) but the main game of it is staying within the silly soundworld of English.
Stanley Unwin is arriving in a folderol tradition that includes Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’ and continued through James Joyce’s ‘Finnegans Wake’ and Spike Milligan’s ‘On the Ning Nang Nong’. All are comprehensible, but initially sound opaque.
With Unwinese, the English-speaking listener can easily tell what is a verb and what a noun. Unwin mainly makes his alterations at the ends of words, adding unusual, deformative suffixes. So, wel-code for wel-come and fundam-ole for fundam-ents. But he also comes up with delightful diversions cos he loved his wife-oh *kiss* kissycuddly and alternate phrasings very thrilly episode and state of play.
(As an aside, I was once on a train carriage, traveling over the roofs of Borough Market, where a child was happily singing to itself in nonsense language. In the middle of this, clear as anything, they came out with, Hey-nonny-nonny.)
What this has to do with anything is that I think it’s a stage in composition, especially for songs or rhythmical writing. And this is true even if your head only catches on to the words-to-be-recorded after the sense has been layered on or has squidged out.
In a famous essay, much taught, Donald Barthelme called this precious part of writing ‘The Not-Knowing’.
Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing…
The best example, which came up between my colleague and I, is Bob Dylan’s work-in-progress, never completed, ‘I’m Not There (1956)’ —
Here, possible phrases, come from the shared soup of folk and popular song, float into and out of verses as options but with nothing needing to be consecutive or complete.
Dylan does something similar in what is, for me, his loveliest mini-period — the Glasgow Hotel songwriting session with Robbie Robertson of 1966.
A quote, often attributed to E.M. Forster, but probably earlier is —
How do I know what I think till I see what I say.
But other variants are closer to the conclusion of our conversation.
How can I know what I think till I hear what I say.
Deep joy — especially the dancing.
Photo/Still credit: D. A. Pennebaker