- lyric reading;
- useful reading; and
- faux reading.
Lyric reading, like singing, entangles the whole person in its meaning. Useful reading is informational and a requirement for specific tasks and accomplishments. Faux reading is the recognition of words used in an isolated and semantically meaningless way as indicators or symbols, seen in ads, commercials, some art, and traffic signs. All require word-recognition, useful and lyric reading require knowing how to decode the text, but only with lyric reading is the reader fully immersed in the text.
(BTW I am using the term "text" to refer to letter symbols combined into words on paper or a screen. Although many use the term "text" to refer to any kind of recorded material, visual image(s) or aural works, I am using it in the traditional meaning of written words formed into a meaningful whole.)
I love what I call lyric reading, where an author has written a beautifully, organically flowing text where I can ride on the text through the story or thoughts. It's a rich intellectual and emotional experience. At the end of such a read, usually in a book, I am left exhilarated, thrilled, and excited. Or sometimes with an almost frightening addictive hunger for more of the same. And, occasionally, violently angry or devastated.
The dark side of lyric reading is the emotional impact it can have. I remember reading, years ago, a text about the psychology of women. At first I agreed with what the author was saying, so I relaxed and simply let the information flow into my mind (and emotions). I let down my guard down because I trusted the author. Then the author wrote, and I read, something that violated my sense of myself as a woman. What the author said contradicted my very experience, and I (in a term we used back then) freaked out and threw the book at the wall. Which rather startled my friend reading nearby. I didn’t have an intellectual response to an intellectual statement; I had a personal response that was highly emotional in nature. In fact, I can remember the room this happened in. It’s as though the intensity of my reaction took a snapshot of the moment and slotted it into the permanent area of my memory.
I have read other books that I had a similar response to, in fact one sent me into a week of depression. It, too, was a book of ideas, not fiction, and it, too, drew me in and then, as it felt to me, violated my trust. I remember hearing a professor of philosophy (and have a memory “snapshot” of her, our classroom, and other class members) describing a similar response to reading some contemporary literary criticism. She told of reading it and finding it delightfully rich and insightful, until the author made a general statement about women which abjected her, by assuming that she and any other woman could not participate in his understanding. She had accepted his use of the term “man” as meaning “human” but his context made it clear he meant men only. (That’s why I have never trusted the use of that term which so easily slides from the general inclusive to the particular exclusive. But that’s another argument;->)
I have had a similar dark experience with fiction that I was reading in a lyrical fashion. Usually I can tell by page 40 if I am interested in a novel, and if I find it’s author’s ‘world view’ compatible with my own. This has some overlap with my liking for happy endings, but is not the whole story. There are novels, stories, that have tough and/or sad endings that I have “enjoyed” reading. The endings made sense to me; I could see they were logical outcomes of character and circumstance. However, there are authors I have learned to be cautious with, even to avoid.
I won’t mention which one or even the author’s name of this particular book because I don’t want to discuss literary merit (which it had) but I want to look at the phenomenological aspect of reading. I was reading this novel, finding it fascinating, seeing how it described aspects of life that I had experienced, at one with the flow of the story. There were three main characters, and I was “riding” through the story on one of them, partially a gender choice as I am very sensitive to gender. The one I was riding was interesting, accomplished, and, I thought, deserving (whatever I meant by that.) In one paragraph she was revealed as “undeserving” for behavior that was not that different from what the others were doing. With no indication of compassion, she was extruded from the otherwise positive ending. I was shocked and kind of unbalanced. I felt depressed for quite a while, and didn’t read that author again for years, and when I did, I read her with my defenses carefully in place. I could no longer read her in a lyrical fashion, though I could still read her in, I will explain later, a useful fashion.
The real joy of reading, for me, is in positive lyrical reading. Reading where, at the same time as the text flows through me, my whole being is immersed in the text and I am riding the story or the ideas in a thrillingly engaged way. I am enjoying reading as it flows, bringing light and understanding into the waiting crevices of my being and I embrace it. The text has disappeared, has become more than transparent, just the energy playing me. Both novels and treatises can affect me that way, if I’m reading them at some magical point in time where I need the story or the thought patterns that they give me. Unlike the reflective (and emotional) slow reading of poetry, lyrical reading is fast, a grasping of the whole while the spotlight of my mind travels over the particulars of the text of that precise moment. It’s a rich, exciting, intellectual, and emotional experience, and I love it.
Sometimes I do become the “readaholic” that my mother accused me of being. Sometimes, especially with an author who can write dense, multi-stranded plots in rich evocative language with accurate facts and details, I become so engaged that even the end of the book doesn’t release me. Especially with a series with ongoing plots and characters, I find myself moving from one book to the next, without taking needed breaks, Or reading the author’s next treatise to see where their thought is going to take me.
Lyric reading is rich, can be addictive, and has a dark side. It is, I believe, an experience that fewer and fewer people will have, as the web, games, tv, music and movies drain that kind of rich emotional/intellectual experience away from reading. Do you experience reading the way I’ve described? Do you believe that it is declining in popularity? What do you think is the the impact of new ways of recording on the older way of recording words on a surface?
Comments
useless!