Something I'm starting to digest for the upcoming Computers and Writing presentation next week. I need to layer over some discussion of motivation in education--moving sounds, and then add another layer with some of the Your Brain on Music book I've been looking at. Then I need to tweak on the opacity of the various layers. How's that for visualizing composing something about sound. Here are my thoughts on Elbow's latest article:

Peter Elbow goes with the flow in his recent essay “The Music of Form: Rethinking Organization in Writing.” Citing Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, he points to “the concept of flow [to describe] the experience of complete absorption in a task where time passes almost without awareness” (640). It’s the same flow Greg Ulmer discovers in electracy, the sting of recognition that brings with it an awareness of something more, an experiential magic that occurs “when you are being productive (at anything) and enter into the state of “flow” (298). Not coincidentally, Ulmer attaches an “emotional tone” to the experience. Where Elbow finds music in flowing language, Ulmer finds attunement with the obtuse. Good stuff. Stuff to be sought after, the suspension of time through the creative process. And pitched through sound.

But such pronouncements only take us so far. Or, rather, they take us too far. Like right-clicking the magnifying tool on an image editor, our conceptions expand from words and sounds up through logics and compositional epistemologies and on toward spiritual charge sfelt ineffably in creational flows. We zoom out and away from the tangible surfaces of writing with every mouseup.

So let’s go back down to the compositional surface. Left click. Zoom in. Magnification 300%. Aha. What’s that I see? Even zoomed in, there’s energy flowing through words and sounds. Forget the spatial-bias in the big picture. Elbow asks us to be “open to experiencing a different kind of organization . . . an energy-based organization derived from the kinds of time-binding qualities [found] in music” (631). Forget outlines, Elbow tells us; “they promote a visual ‘perspective’ on organization—they try for the bird’s eye view rather than the ant’s eye view” (634). Zoom in instead to the sounds of the words and their “energy-based organization” which flows just as “melodies, melodic motifs, and rhythmic motifs” (635) flow through music.

Elbow calls for the verb, the energy term that escapes the “spatial trap” of the static concepts, the quiet things that sit unmoving, nounlike, embedded within the conventional outline—Art, Music, Language. With verbs, “sentences contain energy and give dynamic movement (like melodies or harmonic progressions that pull us through to the end)” (636). Zoomed in this closely, we can hear the movements of discovery as Elbow “start[s] by writing out crude little sentences . . . ‘germ’ or ‘telegram’ sentences—but always with a verb” (637). Music the thing becomes the sentence, “Music shows how events in time are held together.”

But wait. We’ve gone too fast here. Too much energy and not enough thing. Elbow’s moving sentence does not deny the noun. It moves it with the verb. Music shows, sounds move, rhythms pulse. Only in the combination of spatial thing and temporal action do we find the flow, the noun and verb. When Elbow finds the combinations, he slips, casting his moving sentences in visual terms: “When I see these tiny germ sentences laid out, I am finally in a good position to figure out what I am groping to say[. . . .]” (637 emphasis mine). Elbow zooms back out on the moving combinations, turning them again into objects concrete enough to be laid out and looked at.

When Elbow offers his delayed thesis some few pages later, the confusion remains: “Our concept of organization is confused because it conflates two ideas that are quite different: how objects are organized in space, and how events are organized in time” (639). But it soon becomes clear that for Elbow, the confusion between the visual/spatial and the aural/temporal is deliberate. He acknowledges that, “even though we apply spatial criteria most naturally to spatial entities like pictures, and dynamic criteria most naturally to temporal entities such as music and speeches, the two styles of organization apply to both space and time” (647).

Elbow deliberately pulls apart the spatial and temporal to highlight what he sees as “the visual bias in our understanding of organization” (651), a bias that Elbow believes

leads to problems. The most obvious is simply the neglect of other dimensions-our "inattentiveness to the global fullness of experience" (Ihde). [. . .] Hearing-the modality that works in time-reaches an older, deeper, and more instinctual part of the brain than sight. Rhythm and movement reach inside us. Eyes tell us about the surface of things, but sound tells us about the insides of things. (651-2)

At the risk of essentializing and privileging a primal, internal mode, Elbow turns toward music and the sounds of words so that we might “experience the inherent temporal and even aural dimension of any text” (656). It’s a helpful corrective because it forms a foundation in language, a zoomed-in perspective through which noun and verb react to create flow; a ground where we can work the surface even as we zoom back out toward the fullness of experience

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