Ursula Le Guin - The Wave in the Mind

My model of printed public writing and of secondary orality is a box A shooting information out into a putative spacetime that may or may not contain many box Bs to receive it—maybe nobody—possibly an Audience of Millions (see figure 3).

Conversation is a mutual exchange or interchange of acts. Transmission via print and the media is one-way; its mutuality is merely virtual or hopeful.

Yet local, immediate community can be built upon both literacy and secondary orality. Schools and colleges are centers of the printed word, whether on paper or electronic, and are genuine if limited communities. Bible-study groups, reading clubs, fan clubs, are small printed-word-centered subcommunities, where, as in colleges, people talk about what they read. Newspapers and magazines create and foster opinion groups and facilitate communities based on information, such as sports fans comparing scores.

As for the audience of secondary orality—aside from that factitious entity the “studio audience,” which is actually part of the performance—many people watch certain TV programs not because they particularly like them but because they can talk about them with other people at work next day: they use these programs as social bonding material. But the media audience is for the most part a tenuous, widely scattered semicommunity or pseudocommunity, which can be estimated and gauged only by market research and opinion polls, and becomes actual only in political situations such as a polling place on election day, or in the response to a terrible event.

The community created by printing and by secondary orality is not immediate; it is virtual. It can be enormous—the size of America. Indeed it may be literacy more than any other factor that has enabled or coerced us to live in huge nation-states instead of tribes and city-states. Possibly the Internet will allow us to outgrow the nation-state. Although the Global Village McLuhan dreamed of is at present a City of Night, a monstrous force for cultural reductionism and internationally institutionalised greed, who knows? Perhaps we shall soar electronically to some arrangement that works better than capitalism.

But so vast a community must remain more concept than tangible fact. Written word, printed word, reproduced speech, filmed speech, the telephone, e-mail: each medium links people, but it does not link them physically, and whatever community it creates is essentially a mental one.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment. It is marvelous that we can talk to living people ten thousand miles away and hear them speak. It is marvelous that by reading their words, or seeing a film of them, we may feel communion even with the dead. It is a marvelous thought that all knowledge might be accessible to all minds.

But marriage is not of minds only; and the living human community that language creates involves living human bodies. We need to talk together , speaker and hearer here, now. We know that. We feel it. We feel the absence of it.

Speech connects us so immediately and vitally because it is a physical, bodily process, to begin with. Not a mental or spiritual one, wherever it may end.

If you mount two clock pendulums side by side on the wall, they will gradually begin to swing together. They synchronise each other by picking up tiny vibrations they each transmit through the wall.

Any two things that oscillate at about the same interval, if they’re physically near each other, will gradually tend to lock in and pulse at exactly the same interval. Things are lazy. It takes less energy to pulse cooperatively than to pulse in opposition. Physicists call this beautiful, economical laziness mutual phase locking, or entrainment.

All living beings are oscillators. We vibrate. Amoeba or human, we pulse, move rhythmically, change rhythmically; we keep time. You can see it in the amoeba under the microscope, vibrating in frequencies on the atomic, the molecular, the subcellular, and the cellular levels. That constant, delicate, complex throbbing is the process of life itself made visible.

We huge many-celled creatures have to coordinate millions of different oscillation frequencies, and interactions among frequencies, in our bodies and our environment. Most of the coordination is effected by synchronising the pulses, by getting the beats into a master rhythm, by entrainment.

Internally, a sterling example is the muscle cells of the heart, every single one of them going lub-dub, lub-dub , together with all the others, for a lifetime.

Then there are the longer body rhythms, circadian cycles, that take a day to happen: hunger, eating, digesting, excreting; sleeping and waking. Such rhythms entrain all the organs and functions of body and mind.

And the really long bodily rhythms, which we may not even recognise, are connected with our environment, length of daylight, season, the moon.

Being in sync—internally and with your environment—makes life easy. Getting out of sync is always uncomfortable or disastrous.

Then there are the rhythms of other human beings. Like the two pendulums, though through more complex processes, two people together can mutually phase-lock. Successful human relationship involves entrainment—getting in sync. If it doesn’t, the relationship is either uncomfortable or disastrous.

Consider deliberately sychronised actions like singing, chanting, rowing, marching, dancing, playing music; consider sexual rhythms (courtship and foreplay are devices for getting into sync). Consider how the infant and the mother are linked: the milk comes before the baby cries. Consider the fact that women who live together tend to get onto the same menstrual cycle. We entrain one another all the time.

How does entrainment function in speech? William Condon did some lovely experiments which show, on film, that when we talk our whole body is involved in many tiny movements, establishing a master rhythm that coordinates our body movements with the speech rhythms. Without this beat, the speech becomes incomprehensible. “Rhythm,” he says, is “a fundamental aspect of the organisation of behavior.” To act, we have to have the beat.

Condon went on to photograph people listening to a speaker. His films show listeners making almost the same micromovements of lips and face as the speaker is making, almost simultaneously—a fiftieth of a second behind. They are locked into the same beat. “Communication,” he says, “is like a dance, with everyone engaged in intricate, shared movements across many subtle dimensions.”

Listening is not a reaction, it is a connection. Listening to a conversation or a story, we don’t so much respond as join in—become part of the action.

We can entrain without seeing the speaker; we entrain with each other when talking on the telephone. Most people feel that telephoning is less satisfactory than being with one another, that communication through hearing alone is less fully mutual, but we do it quite well; teenagers, and people with cell phones in BMWs in heavy traffic, can keep it up indefinitely.

Researchers believe that some autism may be connected with difficulty in entraining—a delayed response, a failure to catch the rhythm. We listen to ourselves as we speak, of course, and it’s very hard to speak if we can’t find the beat: this might help explain autistic silence. We can’t understand other people if we can’t get in sync with the rhythm of their speaking: this might explain autistic rage and loneliness.

Rhythm differences between dialects lead to failures in understanding. You need practice, you need training to entrain with a way of speech you aren’t familiar with.