The Auditory Imagination

JohnMichael McCann • Colorado College

Sometimes we find ourselves at a loss for words, yet we know what we are trying to say though the words don’t materialize before us. How can we find ourselves in this position?  How can we reject an interlocutor’s suggestion about what we might be trying to get at—that act itself indicating that we have some idea of what we are trying to say—yet not know what we want to say? This seems to be a contradiction. We only know something by what it is not and yet we cannot pin down what we are trying to say. In his brilliant essay, Thoughts Into Words, Eli Alshanetsky raises an elegant solution: there is certain knowledge that we can put into words and certain knowledge that we cannot put into words. We might not be able to describe the difference between shades of blue, but we could certainly tell them apart. I would like to offer a supplemental solution to the problem: the auditory imagination. In order to properly show how the auditory imagination resolves Alshanetsky’s quandary, I will first offer an attempt to explain what the auditory imagination is before attempting to expand the notion of what the auditory imagination could be. 

The auditory imagination is a space where listening becomes an imaginative skill. It is a type of noise that someone (traditionally a poet) hears before they have words for them. The noise is very faint and easy to lose, the noise does not contain words but contains a rhythm that one may set words to. To be clear, the auditory imagination is not an actual physical sound audible to outside observers but rather is an internal rhythm that feels like it is coming from outside of oneself. It only exists inside the head of the listener but it feels as if one is listening to rhythms born from the world. The modernist poet, T.S. Eliot first wrote this term down in his 1933 The Use of Poetry and The Use of Criticism. Shortly before him, the stunning Russian poet Osip Mandelstam spoke of being called to a “secret hearing.” The auditory imagination is about listening to what one doesn't know and trusting that the rhythms which one cannot place will lead you to the words one was searching for.

When a poet listens to the auditory imagination, they are acting like an archeologist. The auditory imagination requires an active and attentive listener to hear the rhythms. Fundamentally, the listener is not the creator of the rhythms in the same way that an archeologist is not the creator of whatever they might find. Both the poet and the archeologist have to actively learn how to understand signs which are not visible to others. Neither poets nor archeologists are certain of what they may find or when they will find what they are searching for, they can only be reasonably sure that if they keep digging they will find something of value. The poet would be unable to find words if there were no rhythm to draw from, and archeologists would be unable to uncover artifacts if there was no earth—with its pentimented surface—to dig into. Poets dig into faint rhythms and archeologists delve into the earth. An archeologist is perhaps the most physical embodiment of the way the auditory imagination resolves Alshanetsky’s quandary. The archeologist searches the ground in much the same way poets search through faint rhythms, in much the same way we all search through a background noise for the words beyond the tip of our tongue. Both poetry and archeology require activity and passivity.

The auditory imagination contains a mixture of passive and active action. A meaningful part of the active action of the poet is the translation of rhythm. Poets hear a rhythm and attempt to put rhythm into words. Poets, like any other translator, are limited by the words available to them in their quest to express inexpressible music. When a poet learns a new word, they add a new tool to their pack and can perhaps now crawl that tiny bit closer to the elusive music. Perhaps the music inspires a poet to a new turn of phrase, but even still a poet must operate within the vocabulary they have at a given moment. The vocabulary a poet knows is what they bring to the music. The music that a poet hears is what they cannot control. No matter how closely someone listens to a song, they cannot change the rhythm of the sound.

The idea of the auditory imagination would suggest that our thoughts are not entirely our own. We draw our thoughts from the world. The experimental Brazilian novelist, Clarice Lispector gets at this sentiment, writing: “The world's continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.” Our thoughts stem from the rhythm of the breathing of the world, what we can say is defined by how the world breathes and our ability to listen to every note of the music. In the pause between our words—when we can’t find a word, in those moments of thinking—perhaps we are engaging in a moment of listening to the auditory imagination. The music that T.S. Eliot heard was the breathing of the earth. Neither he nor Mandelstam could ever control how the rhythm sounded, they could only listen to their environments. The auditory imagination is a little bit like a radio with one station: you can either tune out or listen to the music that is playing.  Our imagination is not entirely private and disconnected from the world. In a very similar fashion, the auditory imagination is not disconnected from other forms of imagination that seem to come from outside of the person themselves. 

Poets, who are very attuned to the music of words hear the auditory imagination, but it is not just the poet who can experience something analogous to the rhythm that T.S. Elliot described. We all listen to silence and feel sensations. Eli Alshanetsky came up with a similar notion to the idea of the auditory imagination, but he thought of it as something more physical than auditory. He writes, “Just as we can reidentify a color by relying on a trace of our experience of it, we can recognize a thought in the words that express it by relying on its ‘signature’ the distinctive way it imprints itself on our experience” (Alshanetsky 2020, 8). The idea of the “signature” of a thought is remarkably similar to the vague sound that needs to be focused on to be heard. A signature seen at a distance will likely be indistinguishable from a great number of other signatures. Similarly, if one is only half listening to a rhythm it is very easy to miss small changes in a rhythm. The more carefully one looks or listens, the more distinct the rhythms and signatures will feel. 

The primary difference between Alshanetsky’s idea of a signature and Elliot’s auditory imagination is that a signature is visual and the auditory imagination is musical. Poets trade in music and philosophers focus more on larger shapes. One could imagine that a chef might feel a taste before they have ingredients for the flavor. The famous director Stanley Kubrick once said, “I do not always know what I want, but I do know what I don't want.” It would seem that Kubrick, like Alshanetsky, had a sense of a visual imagination. His infamously perfectionist style of directing, once demanding over 120 consecutive takes of a scene, shows us that he had an image in his head that he would stop at nothing to realize. He had a vision of a frame that he wished to shoot, and he forced his actors to keep doing the take until the shot in his head and the one that he beheld matched. Kubrick represents a bit of an anomaly: he saw what things weren’t as opposed to others who see what things are. I believe that, despite appearances, Kubrick’s sentiment doesn’t explode the foundations of the auditory imagination. Kubrick likely had an image that wasn’t as precise as he would like and so he described the image as a negative. There can be variations of process within the process of the auditory imagination, the auditory imagination is not a single process but rather a set of similar processes. 

Turning one final time to Alshentsky’s paradox: we know on some level what we wish to say, but we cannot say what we want to say. I think this paradox can be resolved through the idea of a concept like the auditory imagination, and perhaps the logic of the auditory imagination can be applied much more broadly than even T.S. Eliot imagined. I have no doubt that further exploration would reveal more analogous concepts across a vast array of fields. While I believe a master mechanic might have some intuition of how to fix a complex problem, could a novice mechanic access something like the auditory imagination? Future essays that focus on the auditory imagination would do well to explore how much further,-- beyond the field of poetry,-- similar concepts might be found. Can you experience an external imagination for tasks in which there is a correct answer? These questions, when answered, will only lead to more questions. questions that we indeed will have time for before the taking of the toast and tea.

Bibliography

Alshanetsky, Eli. “What Comes First: Ideas or Words? The Paradox of Articulation – Eli Alshanetsky: Aeon Essays.” Aeon. Aeon, September 14, 2020. https://aeon.co/essays/what-comes-first-ideas-or-words-the-paradox-of-articulation. 

Eliot, T.S. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. Osaka, 1944. 

Lispector, Clarice. Passion According to G.H. London: Penguin, 2017. 

Mandelstam, Osip. Stolen Air: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam. Edited by Ilya Kaminsky. Translated by Christian Wiman. New York: Ecco, 2012.

Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land and Other Poems. Ann Arbor, MI: Canarium Books, 2010. 

LoBrutto, Vincent. Stanley Kubrick: A Biography. Da Capo Press, 1999.