Tennyson also said, to this man, that he didn't want any biography of him written: "I don't want to be ripped up like a hog when I'm dead."
I DECIDED TO TAKE the white plastic chair down to the creek. There's a creek at the bottom of the hill of sand on which my house sits. I had the chair in my hand, and I had my gear and my Sharpies and my presentation easel for practicing, and I looked as if I was prepared for an expedition up the Orinoco. I was about to turn down the hill when I heard tires on my driveway. It was my neighbor Nan's yellow Subaru. I peered toward her car and thought I could see her face and through the branchy reflection a wave, maybe a nervous wave, I don't know, and then her window came down. She said, "Are you off somewhere with your white chair?"
I said that I was going down to the creek to think over the origins of rhyme.
"Would you be interested in a chicken leg?" Nan asked. She said that she did Meals on Wheels once a week, and she had an extra meal because someone had been away at a doctor's appointment. She got it out of the box in the back seat and showed it to me. It was an orange piece of chicken in a segmented tray with a sheet of plastic glued over it. There were secondary pockets, each shaped like lungs, one of which had yellow pieces of corn pointing in all directions, and one of which had beans pointing in all directions.
"Mmmm," I said. "Don't you want it?"
Nan said she didn't want it. "Would you care for the slice of bread and the carton of milk, too?"
I said yes indeed I would.
She got in her car and began backing away. "Enjoy yourself!"
I waved and stuck the Meals on Wheels meal into my equipment bag, at an angle, and tucked the bag of milk and a roll in another place. Then I carried my white plastic chair down through the patch of skunk cabbage to the creek and put it right in the water and sat down on it. Immediately the rear chair legs worked their way down through the mud, and I sank an inch.
The spring floods have changed everything, as they generally do, and so I'm sitting now at the base of carved-away banks that are about five feet high, looking up at the under-sides of ferns. There are innumerable ferns.
Why is rhyme so important to speech?
I think I'm going to give this chicken a try.
Wow, it's fantastic. Meals on Wheels chicken. Fantastically good. Fleshy as hell, though. The flight muscles of a bird. Think of it. Wash it down with a little milk, strange as that may seem. Mmm. Excuse me.
And there's a piece of bread in waxed paper, with a pat of margarine, dyed very yellow. Not bad. Honestly, the chicken and the bread are so good that I wonder how the corn and the beans can top them. But maybe they will.
Beans are good. Corn is good. My first Meals on Wheels meal. What does that mean? Is Nan worried about me? Does she feel sorry for me? Does she think I'm an old guy?
There's an incredible amount of pollen blowing sideways past my face. I can see it sometimes. Hundreds of thousands of little grains on their way somewhere.
QUITE QUICKLY after you're born you begin to suck. The sucking teaches you some lessons. First, that if you pull your tongue back a certain way, a warm delicious liquid that is not your own saliva flows into your mouth. And second, that your tongue is an unusually important muscle.
So you exercise your tongue, and it gets stronger and more aware of what it can do. That's the first order of business. And then when you plop off the nipple, you look up, and what's waiting for you there? Two huge amazing wonderful shiny things. Your mother's eyes. And below that is a strange item with two nostril holes, and then there's a single large flexible opening at the bottom, which moves around a lot in an interesting way, and out of it issues all this marvelous taffylike goopy stuff that you can't see but that goes into your ears. It's impossible to make sense of it, but it's nice, and you like it. Something deep in you tells you to listen to it. It's speech. And when your mom's mouth smiles you learn the color white.
The mouth says, "A boo boo boo! Yes, my little fumble nuggets! A noo noo noo!" Aiming the sound at you. Talking to you, in other words, in a particular tone of voice. And thoughtful people have studied this tone of voice, and they understand that this is not something to be lightly dismissed. This talk is the crucial ingredient. This is the way that the genetic memory of speech is being imprinted on a new practitioner.
Baby talk, which is full of rhyme, is really the way you learn to figure out what's like and what's not like, and what is a discrete word, or an utterance, and what is just a transition between two words.
How does it happen? Well, it happens gradually, and it happens by matching. Matching within and matching without. First you have to learn that a certain feeling in one part of your body, your tongue, matches with a certain feeling in your brain, which is a sound. A slightly different feeling in your tongue matches with a different sound coming out of your mouth and a different sensation of muscular control registering in your brain. Each subtle difference of sound feels different. And this is all very difficult and takes lots of trial and error and babbling and drooling and lip popping and laughing.
Of course, you're doing a lot of random sudden things at that point. Your eyes dart left. Your fist suddenly goes boing! Sticks out. Head swivels. Whoa. Back arch. Leg. Sudden diaper squirt. Things are happening everywhere. And each one of the things that happen, the random little twitchy things, sends a message to central control that feels a certain way. So you begin to correlate. And your mouth turns out to be probably the most important piece of the pie. When you cry you get results, and when you suck you get milk, and when you go "Nnnnnng!" the face above you smiles and goes " 'Nnnnng,' what do you mean 'Nnng,' you funny little baby?" Reflecting it back.
And you start to see that all these sounds that you can make-ngo, merk, plort-that you begin to hear, can be classified in certain ways. You're a newborn brain, you've only recently come out of solitary confinement in the uterus, and you're already a cryptanalyst in Bletchley Park. You're already parsing through, looking for similarities and differences, looking for patterns, looking for beginnings and endings and hints of meaning.
ESPECIALLY BEGINNINGS. The beginning of a sound is usually a moment where you forbid the sound to be produced. With your lips. Puh, buh, bluh. Or you attempt to dissuade it gently: nnn, mmmm. You put some sort of barrier or seawall there, and then you remove it to allow the sound to unfold itself briskly into a vowel. Unfold the vowel towel and floom it out and let it settle on the sand. Flume, broom, room, spume, gloom, doom.
So you've got the beginning, which is generally a consonant, and then you've got the middle of the sound, which is often a vowelly region. And then you've got the end of the sound. And all these things are difficult to make out. We know from speech-recognition software how hard it is for a computer to figure out where things begin and end. It's like looking at the horizon and thinking, Is that lump Mount Monadnock or is Mount Monadnock that lump there? Actually Mount Monadnock is pretty distinctive. But sometimes when you look at a mountain range it's very difficult to know what's what.
Do you care how things are spelled? Obviously not. Spelling? What's that? That's absurdity. That's a whole different layer of opacity-the layer of squirming black shapes on a page. That's years in the future. What you're doing, inside your head, is classing things by sound shape. And by detachable head. And that's where rhyme comes in.
Think of what happens when you say the word "moon." What does the speech part of your brain do? It says, Okay, assignment: moon. Jaw down a bit, lips together. And flatten. Good. Then commence huffing out some sound. Constrict the vocal cords. Mm. Now open and flute the lips into an O shape. Ooo. Moo. And then terminate by flipping up the bottom of the tongue and lightly caressing the roof of the mouth. Airtight seal. And out the nose. Moon-ah. And you're done.