The Life of Lines by Ingold Tim

Author:Ingold, Tim
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

18 Under the sky

Let me return to those aspects or manifestations of the atmospheric that I introduced, under the heading of ‘meteorology’ in Chapter 11 (see Table 11.1). To recapitulate: these were breath, time, mood, sound, memory, colour and sky. Which have been covered, and which have still to be accounted for? I have already dwelt at length on breath, on inhalation and exhalation, and we should need no further reminding that while the lines of speech and song issue forth on the exhalation, the speaker or singer must periodically pause to inhale. In their notations, respectively verbal and musical, punctuation and rests would advise the performer on where to pause for breath.1 There is, however, a strong inclination, at least in the verbal and musical arts of the western tradition, to denigrate the pause. Orators are taught to speak, vocalists to sing and flautists to play in such a way that any intake of breath and resulting interruption in the line is as imperceptible as possible. Just as action has always been prioritised over passion, doing over undergoing, so to pause is seen as a sign of hesitation, weakness or indecision. This will be my theme in the third part of this book, and I will not pursue it further here. That we habitually place the word ‘articulate’ before ‘speech’ or ‘writing’, as if every utterance or script were syntactically joined up from elements chained end to end, is ample proof of where conventional priorities lie. We tend to think of punctuation as the poor relation of writing, and of rests as the poor relation of melody, as though both were mere breaks and gap-fillers. Yet in truth it is the pause that lends both speech and song its atmospheric affect, without which it would be lifeless. Only a machine can speak or play without pause, in an articulation that is devoid of feeling.

From breath we moved on to time, in showing how the alternation of inhalation and exhalation marks a time that is both irreversible and kairologically attuned to the rhythms of the environment, enacted in the weather-wising of its inhabitants. Moreover, in the respiratory mingling of air with bodily tissues, human beings and other creatures that are wise to their surroundings are constitutionally not only temporal but temperate. And temperament is just another word for mood – that is, for the way the atmosphere pervades every pore of a living being and lends affect to its actions. What, then, of sound, memory, colour and sky? Sound, as I shall argue presently, is the way we experience the reverberations of the atmospheric medium, just as skylight is the way we experience its illuminations. In its resounding, the body functions rather like an echo-chamber. In singing, or in playing a musical instrument, the melodic line is drawn out from the chamber, and given a particular inflection by the bodily gesture that enacts it. Likewise, the storyteller draws out the line of narrative from the echoes of memory. As sound is to melody, so memory is to story: the one gathers or recollects, the other feels its way forward.

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