'Loose Talk'
By Benjamin Benedict
Flow
Rhythm is physical and has its place in a story the same as in a speech or a poem. It gives it what I call ‘Flow’.
Sophocles maintained that an oral delivery was infinitely preferable to a written one. Within his context, he was probably right, but writing became the thing that we all, err for want of a better word, ‘listen to’. Writing became regarded as the crucible of thought, but now the wheel has turned full circle and we are back to audio again. It’s back to the teller my friends. Listen to learn. Read to know.
In have spent a lifetime reading and I continue to read, but very subtly over perhaps the last forty years the primary source of my information has changed from books and newspapers to the television and the internet. For many, this would also include the radio which is mainly listened to whilst driving and during breakfast. Radio and television are ‘Sophoclean’ media if you like because they all share the immediacy of a personal, audible delivery. The Internet is a sort of halfway house, where you can read but you can also listen and see. Nevertheless, the dynamism and rhythm of the spoken word is gaining ground on the written and it is because of this that my stories are all available on the internet as audio books, but only three of them can be read.
I have no idea how Sophocles would have felt about the recorded word as opposed to a live event. My suspicion is that he would not have liked it, but his dislike would still be less than that of something written. He of course would also not have accepted the technique of reading aloud. He believed that stories had to be learnt orally and lived with in order to be delivered properly. How he would have reacted to actors who learn their lines from a written text or to a fable such as ‘Fahrenheit 451’ in which people learn books by heart so that the stories can continue to live, we can only guess. It is funny to think that the villains of the ‘Fahrenheit’ story; the ‘firemen’ who burnt the books, would have won his approval, as also would the heroes who learnt the stories by heart.
Perhaps what Sophocles did not envisage was the extent of a reader’s possible perception. In his day, reading was such a new thing that it is reasonable to suppose it would have been quite a wooden process, much the same as a young person reading something today. They would have been primarily concerned with the content of a sentence and linking it to the next one. However, many of us read enough for this process to have become virtually automatic, opening us up to the dynamics of the piece as in our mind’s eye we ‘hear’ the cadence of the writers delivery. It is this that makes the King James Bible such a wonderful read, as is the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and also more modern stylists such as Raymond Chandler and Ernest Hemmingway. If you like, you can disregard the content and just let your mind run with the wonderful flow of words that these books contain.
There are of course many writers whose work is simply structural and is all about the content. This suggests to me that either the content, however important is essentially boring or that the writer is. I have also occasionally come across a writer who has such a perfect command of the English language (Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham and Christopher Robbins for example) that it is a pleasure to read his or her prose, simply for the sake of the language – not that the three gentlemen mentioned didn’t have some stories worth telling.
The impact of a thought has a lot to do with the cadence of the words that express it. This is generally labelled ‘poetry’ but in fact has a lot to do with the way Barack Obama speaks for instance. I can see Sophocles nodding his head in approval at Barracks lack of speech notes. ‘Go with the flow,’ he would say, and we should all try to. Whether you hear what you read or what someone says, it’s the flow that counts.
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