It's like a hallucination--

said Russel, about the way we can reproduce music in our minds so well sometimes. I thought this gives too much credit to hallucination, too little to what our minds are -for-. Anyway, we go on about this observation, special thing about sounds as opposed to sights, and the next day I produce a typical one of my rants, for your delectation or patience, below:

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I thought about it a little more--what we see, we interpret too much, and keep in our minds the abstraction rather than the thing itself. Maybe that's why singing the words of a song ruins it. I think the vocal part of songs I don't reproduce as clearly in my mind if I try to hear the words too much.

You don't need to see the hallway; you remember it is a hallway. I don't need to remember the timbre of someone's voice when they shout "hurry up and cross the street"; I remember they told me to hurry up and cross the street.

In contrast I think when something is viscerally understood we can keep closer to the thing itself rather than our re-packagings and processings of it. You remember the main line, the melody of a song, the theme, and this is already processed, abstracted. But sometimes you can hear the whole thing or a lot more of it; you keep closer to the thing itself. Or you know you -want- to hear the whole thing and the melody (the moral of the story, the fact that it's a hallway) isn't
enough.

People try to make this happen with poetry these days. When someone asked my non-favorite Robert Frost "what does your poem -mean-?" he simply re-read the poem. If some set of words is all content, like an instruction manual, you don't need the words themselves, they could be many other words, you just need the message, the moral of the story. So the art is to have the words viscerally understood, and one way is to force the reader to not take for granted the relation between words
and their meaning. Of course the obvious way is to just make the pattern of the words very musical. Both happen, both have pitfalls, like ranging from too much a dull ditty to too much cacophany. Marianne Moore whom I do like called for "memorable prose." Towards this, various advocate immediacy, things not ideas. Making the familiar strange and vice versa can become too much of a gimmick, others observe.

I guess now I'm drawing an analogy between effects and intents of music & writing (the only arts besides food I've any feel for). In both one listens for jokes and surprises, assurances, lostness and foundness. Interpretive machinery's all scaffolding and accessory; the pleasure's in the thing itself.

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for better or worse i am all GUESSES & VAGUE SENSATIONS
ha ha i am always already so. ha ha. some people tolerate me! :) :) :)