Speechwright.

I revisited the dream I had last week. I spent over two hours two days ago transcribing what I recorded onto a Word document. It took that long because I wanted to get it as close to verbatim as possible. I say "as close to verbatim" because I realized the impossibility of typing a pure transcription of what I spoke into the recorder. There was first the problem of the excess "ands" and "ums," and then the added difficulty of deciding where sentences ended (exacerbated by the superfluous ands). I did not complete sentences that I could have sworn I did. I trailed off, changed directions, and interrupted myself. I could not discern which punctuation mark to use for each pause. I also discovered that, when speaking into a mechanical device, I use the word "like" profusely. I sounded a lot like a valley girl stuck in the year 1985. I used the word like so much that it became an interjection--a major no-no in the world of grammar. This bothers me.

There is, however, an interesting point here. The spoken and written word are different things. Something spoken that needs to be converted into written form must undergo translation. Looking back, all the jobs that I had that required me to take dictation (which is about two jobs total) also required me to interpret what the speaker was thinking and make changes. I often spelled things incorrectly, especially when I was unfamiliar with the subject (for instance, I would often misspell names of people in divorce cases until I became familiar with the cases). I also inserted commas, semi-colons, and periods where I thought they were necessary, regardless of the directions of the speaker. I was translating and modifying when I transcribed the voice recording onto paper.

Likewise, something written that needs to be converted into something spoken also needs translation. All it takes is one monotone speech or presentation to realize that the written word is not the same as the spoken one. When we speak we add tone, pitch, and ungrammatical pauses wherever necessary. While there are punctuation marks that indicate tone, italics, question marks, and exclamation points are too simplistic to capture the wide range of sounds humans are capable of making. For instance, there is no punctuation mark to connote irony. It is only when we translate the written word into the spoken that we can get the precise sound that connotes irony. This is why great actors get a lot of credit: their translation of the script is convincing and moving, something that is more difficult than it appears at first.

I had to translate myself. This was easier than translating another, because I knew what I was thinking at the time and what I meant. Still, it was quite surprising to hear me utter a twenty line sentence strung together with ands and ripped to shreds with likes. The thing that was the most surprising was the realization that I do not even listen to myself say these things. I gloss over these gross grammatical and nearly incomprehensible errors. I am sure I forgive others for the same violations of the language in speech that I would reprimand them for unmercifully in their writing. It is quite amazing how we ever got a written language. It is almost as if we translate what we hear in speech to something more comprehensible, and from that comprehensible thought we developed writing.

I believe it was Nietzsche who preferred the oral to the written (though please let me know if I'm wrong), and it is generally assumed that spoken language preceded the written word. But, in order to have a written language that made sense, man would need to already have written language prefigured in some way. Take oral epics for example: Homer's Iliad, Odyssey, and the anonymous epic Beowulf. These are thought to have been oral traditions, but they are so polished and so coherent that it is hard to fathom how they ever could have been transmitted by mouth alone. These poems are far beyond my stuttering, muttering recording. But that's how I talk.

I am assuming, of course, that man's speech is constant; that in all ages people spoke with awkward pauses and ungrammatical constructions. I'm even assuming that everyone speaks as I speak, and that we collectively as humans ignore the inherent errors in speech and remember only the polished, written-like word. It very well could be that in the time Beowulf was being related, people spoke perfect epic and hesitated not. The words which they thought were without question the words that they spoke; that nothing was lost in the migration. (Thought is also an unclear subject, but one I will not get into now.) If this were so, then my entire theory is dashed, for that would mean that the spoken word is superior to the written and it would make sense that we would have a written language after the spoken; possibly the written word has deteriorated our once perfect handling of the spoken. Luckily, there is no way to definitively determine that because we are behind the cloud of the written word: when we do not have historical records (i.e. written documents) then we cannot make assumptions about the past.

Strange. Certainly something to think about.

I will be sure to post more on the progress of my experiment.

Only In Dreams.

I wonder if this has been done:

I recorded, via a digital voice recorder my sister gave me for my birthday, a dream I had this morning. I plan to make a short story out of the dream because it seemed like one of the most complete dreams I could remember.

I had a real Joycean moment when I woke up. In the foggy hazeglow of aftersleep, while the dream was still fresh, I had a conscious thought: "This would make a great story." Then, like Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I scrambled out of bed to immediately record the dream. Granted, for Stephen it was a few lines of a poem that he wrote down while for me it was a dream which I spoke into a voice recorder groggily, but it nonetheless bears a connection--albeit a loose one--to Joyce. That's all it takes to make me smile.

It's funny because I related the whole dream holding the voice recorder while it was off. I realized the error after I finished and turned it on and retold it, so the story, when I type it out, will be twice (or thrice?) removed from the dream. That should prove interesting. The biggest difficulty will be to capture the mood because so many of the details will be forgotten--even now the dream is fading although I took precautions to remember it. Much will need to be filled in.

I will not record the dream here because I want to save it for the story, so to speak. What I must do now is type up what I spoke into the recorder and rearrange it into a surrealistic story. Even if this has been done before, it would be a fun exercise to transfer a (twice removed) dream from the images of the mind to paper and make a short story of it. It probably will not sound like the other stuff I have written, and I certainly cannot say "I wrote it" in the same way I write other things. I mean, the thoughts are within me, but they are also not mine at the same time. The story will be more of me fashioning a extant plot, like a sculptor carves out of a rock a figure of a man, or, to use a better analogy, like Shakespeare made plays out stories from Plutarch. So that should be fun.

I may have to hold off on doing that until next week or so, but at least the dream is recorded. I cannot anticipate how this little experiment will turn out.

Jake's Peer

I tried to write a Shakespearean Sonnet today. I succeeded, but I do not know if it's any good. I wonder if I need to create my own form of the sonnet in order to be a "poet." I was originally just going to number it, but then I thought that would be too much like Shakespeare. Plus, I don't know if will I write any more of these. I remember trying to write a Shakespearean Sonnet a long time ago, but I don't know where it is and I have been too lazy to try and locate it. I actually read a few sonnets to remember the form, which was a terrible mistake as it only pronounced my own inferiority. Still I trudged forward and completed it. I post it now for your amusement:

Thoughts of Last Forever

In the back of my mind I am wrestling
With the thoughts of last forever and I—
Like a bird that has flown from home nestling
In some other sanctuary to die—
Find that I am losing this match against
An eternity appearing in dreams
As an awful wood in which I am fenced
As vultures peck me apart at the seams.
The contenders stand before each other:
One limited, faulty; one flawless, pure,
They interlock, brother against brother,
The battle a symptom and not the cure.
///Still, as the bell rings that sounds my defeat,
///I cannot accept the war is complete.

Small Joys

The radio in the Volvo had been "Off" for a couple of months now. My father had taken it in for repairs in June or July to his mechanic, and so when the mechanic disengaged the battery, we lost the radio. It said "Code" on it when we first turned the radio on afterward, but we had entered the wrong code three times and were banished into the land of "Off." So even when it was on it was off.

Once you are mired in Offland, the only remedy, according to the user's manual, is to leave the battery on for two hours until it resets. I kept this in mind for months but did not have the time to carry out the task. My mother had called the dealer to verify the code soon after, so we had the correct code for when we had the opportunity.

We had to drop off my brother last week after his little "vacation" due to his sprained ankle. We took two cars so he would have a car with which to get to work. My parents were in the Volvo. I remembered when we arrived at his apartment that if they had turned the radio on so it said "Off" we could have put in the code and got the radio to work (for the entire round trip takes about 2 and a half hours). We said next week. On Friday my father and I went to pick up my brother, and we thought of taking the Volvo, but my mother needed the car and so we took my father's car.

Finally, today, we were able to take the Volvo and we remembered to turn the radio on so we could reset it. We dropped off my brother while the engine was running. On the way back, with a half an hour left to go until the two hour mark, my mother reread the manual and double-checked the code to make absolutely sure what to do when the word "Code" should appear on the radio display. However, at the two hour mark, the radio did not reset. My mother had checked the manual again, and it somehow indicated that only the battery should be on (and not the engine). My father disagreed. We started to lose hope that we could get the radio working again. We would have to take it to the dealer. I was so sure at the start of the trip this would work, but this had completely baffled me.

For some reason I looked at the radio display from my position in the backseat. It said Code! I scream-stuttered to my mother that is said code, and instantly she put in the code and we waited...

The radio worked!

My mother gave me a high-five and we all laughed about how ridiculous this whole ordeal was. But it was really that small joy that made the entire trip worth it.