Ursula Le Guin - The Wave in the Mind

Following such cues, what was heard, translated, and presented as a “primitive,” purely didactic, moralising story, given what shape it has merely by the events it relates, now can be appreciated as subtly formal art, in which the form shapes the material, and in which the seemingly utilitarian narrative may actually be the means towards an essentially aesthetic end.

In oral performance, repetition does not serve only to help the performer remember the text. It is a, perhaps the, fundamental structuring element of the piece: whether it takes the form of the repetitive beat of meter, or the regular sound-echo of rhyme, or the use of refrain and other repeated structures, or the long and subtle rhythm of the lines in unmetered poetry and formal oral narrative. (To these latter are related the even longer and more elusive rhythms of written prose.)

All these uses of repetition do seem to be akin to the whales’ rhymes.

As for why the whales sing, it is certainly significant that they sing most, or the males sing most, in mating season. But if you can say a song lasting half an hour performed by a hundred individuals in chorus is a mating call, then you can say a Beethoven symphony is a mating call.

Sometimes Freud sounds as if that’s what he thought. If (as he said) the artist is motivated to make art by the desire for “fame, money, and the love of beautiful women,” then indeed Beethoven wrote the Ninth because it was mating season. Beethoven was marking his territory.

There is plenty of sexuality in Beethoven’s music, which as a woman one may sometimes be rather edgily aware of—thump, thump, thump, BANG!—but testosterone goes only so far. The Ninth Symphony reaches way, way beyond it.

The male song sparrow sings when his little gonads swell as the light grows in the spring. He sings useful information, didactically and purposefully: I am a song sparrow, this is my territory, I rule this roost, my loud sweet voice indicates my youth and health and wonderful capacity to breed, come live with me and be my love, teediddle wee too, iddle iddle iddle! And we hear his song as very pretty. But for the crow in the next tree, “caw,” said in several different tones, serves exactly the same function. Yet to us, “caw” has negative aesthetic value. “Caw” is ugly. The erotic is not the beautiful, nor vice versa. The beauty of birdsong is incidental to its sexual or informational function.

So why do songbirds go to such elaborate, formalised, repetitive trouble, learning and passing songs down from generation to generation as they do, when they could say “caw” and be done with it?

I propose an anti-utilitarian, nonreductionist, and of course incomplete answer. The bowerbird builds his bower to court his lady, but also, in Darwin’s lovely phrase, “for playing in.” The song sparrow sings information, but plays with it as he does so. The functional message becomes complicated with a lot of “useless noise” because the pleasure of it—the beauty of it, as we say—is the noise: the trouble taken, the elaboration and repetition, the play. The selfish gene may be using the individual to perpetuate itself, and the sparrow obeys; but, being an individual not a germ cell, he values individual experience, individual pleasure, and to duty adds delight. He plays.

After all, sex, mere sex, may or may not be pleasurable. There’s no way to check with slugs or squids, and judging by the hangdog expression on the faces of dogs having sex, and the awful things cats say while having sex, and the experience of the male black widow spider, I should say that if sex is bliss sometimes it doesn’t much look like it. But sex is inarguably our duty to our genes or our species. So maybe, to make the duty more enjoyable, you play with it. You fancy it up, you add bells and whistles, tails and bowers, pleasurable complications and formalities. And if these become an end in themselves, as pleasures are likely to do, you end up singing for the joy of singing. Any useful, dutifully sexual purpose of the song has become secondary.

We don’t know why the great whales sing. We don’t know why pack rats hoard bottlecaps. We do know that young children love to sing and to be sung to, and love to see and possess pretty, shiny things. Their pleasure in such things precedes sexual maturation and seems to be quite unconnected to courtship, sexual stimulation, or mating.

And while song may affirm and confirm community, stealing silver watches certainly does not. We cannot assume that beauty is in the service of either sexuality or solidarity.

I wonder if complication and uselessness are not key words in this meditation. The pack rat seems like a little museum curator, because she has complicated her nest-building instinct with “meaningless noise”—collecting perfectly useless objects for the pleasure of it. The humpback whales can be mentioned along with Beethoven because by adding “meaningless noise” to simple mating calls and statements of community, they elaborated them into symphonies.

My husband’s Aunt Pearle employed a useful craft, crochet, with the useful purpose of making a bedspread. By making useless, highly rhythmic variations on plain crochet stitch, she complicated the whole act enormously, because she enjoyed doing so. After months of pleasurable work, she completed a beautiful thing: a “Spiderweb” coverlet, which she gave us. Although it does indeed cover a bed, it isn’t, as we women say, for everyday. It is useful, but not simply useful. It is much more than useful. It was made to put on the bed when guests are coming, to give them the pleasure of seeing its complex elegance, and the compliment of being given more than is strictly necessary—a surplus, a treat. We take what’s useful and play with it—for the beauty of it.

When people are talking about beauty in art they usually take their examples from music, the fine arts, dance, and poetry. They seldom mention prose.

When prose is what’s being talked about, the word beauty is seldom used, or it’s used as mathematicians use it, to mean the satisfying, elegant resolution of a problem: an intellectual beauty, having to do with ideas.

But words, whether in poetry or in prose, are as physical as paint and stone, as much a matter of voice and ear as music, as bodily as dancing.

I think it is a major error in criticism ever to ignore the words. Literally, the words: the sound of the words—the movement and pace of sentences—the rhythmic structures that the words establish and are controlled by.

A pedagogy that relies on the “Cliff Notes” sort of thing travesties the study of literature. To reduce the aesthetic value of a narrative to the ideas it expresses, to its “meaning,” is a drastic impoverishment. The map is not the landscape.

In poetry, the auditory and rhythmic reality of language has stayed alive all through the centuries of the Gutenberg Hegemony. Poetry has always been said or read aloud. Even in the inaudible depths of modernism, T. S. Eliot was persuaded to mumble into a microphone. And ever since Dylan Thomas wowed ’em in New York, poetry has reclaimed its proper nature as an audible art.

But prose narrative has been silent for centuries. Printing made it so.

Book-circuit readings by novelists and memoirists are popular now, and recorded readings of books have gone some way towards restoring aurality to prose; but it is still generally assumed, by writer and by critic, that prose is read in silence.

Reading is performance. The reader—the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library desk— performs the work. The performance is silent. The readers hear the sounds of the words and the beat of the sentences only in their inner ear. Silent drummers on noiseless drums. An amazing performance in an amazing theater.