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| Writing and Voice |
| A dramatic necessity goes deep into the nature of the sentence. Sentences are not different enough to hold the attention unless they are dramatic. No ingenuity of varying structure will do. All that can save them is the speaking tone of voice somehow entangled in the words and fastened to the page for the ear of the imagination. That is all that can save poetry from sing-song, all that can save prose from itself. ROBERT FROST, Introduction, A Way OutI am writing here about resonance. I think of a fancy men's room stall with highly polished black marble walls running all the way from floor to ceiling. "They really believe in privacy here," I thought to myself, but as I was humming under my breath without thinking about it, I began to notice that some of the notes seemed too loud. Gradually I figured out -- trying different tunes and finally a chromatic scale -- that I was sitting in a box that resonated perfectly to one frequency. That polished black box is the perfect analogy for a clunky violin: a box that resonates to one note and muffles all the rest. The perfect violin, of course, would resonate to all notes richly and equally. But, in fact, no matter how good a violin is, it needs to be "played in" -- played long and vigorously -- before it resonates well to all its frequencies. It takes weeks or months. And the clunkiest violin can in fact be played in and made to expand its repertoire of resonances. So maybe if I'd sat in that marble stall and sung loudly for days and weeks I could have gotten it to give richness to one or two more notes. The underlying metaphor for this chapter is that we all have a chest cavity unique in size and shape so that each of us naturally resonates to one pitch alone. Someone is 440 vibrations per second (Concert A), you may be 375, I am perhaps 947. Most of us try to sing the note we like best or the note we've been told to sing, but the sound is usually muffled or inaudible because it's not our note. We are never heard. A few people, it is true, sing with ringing power, but no one seems to understand how they manage this, not even they. In this metaphorical world, then, even if we figure out the system, we are stuck. If we want to be heard we are limited to our single note. If we want to sing other notes, we will not be heard. And yet, if we are brave and persistent enough to sing our own note at length -- to develop our capacity for resonance -- gradually we will be able to "sing ourselves in": to get resonance first into one or two more frequencies and then more. Finally, we will be able to sing whatever note we want to sing, even to sing whatever note others want to hear, and to make every note resound with rich power. But we only manage this flowering if we are willing to start off singing our own single tiresome pitch for a long time and in that way gradually teach the stiff cells of our bodies to vibrate and be flexible. |
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