How Temporal is Time? (It was a defense of freewriting? really?)

First off: There are flying ants. They’re quite annoying and they bite. They are not quite wasps, but still ants. They might have little Art History education, but I’m sure they appreciate color.

Second: To quote Fish, as Elbow does, let’s just dismiss it right off as nonsense:

“Everything depends on the temporal dimension” (Fish 159).

We must assume that the truth of this statement then does as well; that it is possible that not everything depends on the temporal dimension. Defining said dimension is tough stuff. Also, Architecture, taken as text, is spatial. There is a whole poetics of space. If we accept  Fish’s ideas then so much for interpreting architecture, land art, visual poetry, and other “spatial texts.”

The music analogy is well noted. It doesn’t really fit into modern and contemporary art music though, let alone writing, let more alone African-American and Jazz forms, non-western forms which do not depend on the tension-release relations we find in diatonic harmony (which is specifically Western). Try graphing an Indian Raga. Try even a Bachian fugue and it still won’t work. I just feel it is a bad analogy (conceit) if there is no bolstering of the argument by an actual music theorist or actual acoustical research (which Elbow cursorily includes: and this cursorily aspect itself doesn't help his piece's outline).

Elbow admits:

“(I don’t know whether the music of all cultures builds on this pattern of expectation and resolution)” (624).

He then makes this claim:

“Writing centers on a semantic dimension (verbal meaning) that we don’t usually find in the abstract, nonsemantic medium of music” (628). 

A few dead European guys (Wagner and Hanslick) had a few spats about this a century and a half ago. Turns out some music is semantic (though I side with Hanslick). In fact it is a type of listening for Michel Chion (Film-Sound Theorist). 

It doesn’t at all. But Burke is well noted:

[M]usic, of all the arts, is by its nature least suited to the psychology of information,

and has remained closer to the psychology of form. Here form cannot atrophy.

Every dissonant chord cries for its solution, and whether the musician resolves

or refuses to resolve this dissonance into the chord which the body cries

for, he is dealing in human appetites. (Counter-Statement 34).

But dissonance is a form of harmony, in fact the more interesting form f harmony it is. As a guy who listens to Elliott Carter or Pierre Boulez every weekend, this is hard to accept. I am literally (I mean literally) nauseated by music that is too “cadential” or “harmonic” (using “harmony in Elbow’s terms) because pop music, to me, sounds like an alarm going off in its repetitions. This isn’t rhythm, to me, which is subverted in “harmonic rhythm” (in jazz for example).

I’m not saying I disagree with his comp-rhet. statements. I TOTALLY AGREE!!! But... I just didn’t find the article interesting or the analogy helpful, as a writer or musician. I get that reading/writing is temporal. I’ve known this for a while. But a text isn’t always temporal. And I didn’t need to be the choir preached to for 48 pages. I have to use my time for other things like writing (and getting over a fever).

“My goal is to persuade readers to enter an experience in time, not just an

out-of-time grasping of concepts” (639).

But if you are writing about something abstract, say mathematics or any concept really, how can you experience it? I certainly didn’t experience anything in Elbow’s paper, but I got a few concepts from it (Do I want to experience his anecdote of him and his wife in Bed?). This is a tough goal. Dante, for example, may’ve wanted me to “experience” Hell, but a 3.00$ Dover Thrift Edition is as far as I wanted to go there. It seems the drive to experience to what a text refers is often a fallacious one.

In spite of all this, Elbow is right. I AGREE: Temporality is often ignored. This goes back to Kairos and those discussions. But let’s not think that we must “bash” spatial-oriented modes. After all, text is spatial otherwise how could we spell? Where would we begin a sentence if not to the left of a period? In all non-Western writing I’m aware of, the principle of space still holds. You can’t escape space and enter the 4^th dimension… at least without a Delorean. Bottom line is, if you borrow conceits from other “disciplines” make sure you understand them.