Mis(s)-Hearing

Q. Hey Tula: More and more often now technology is offering to complete sentences and “fix” my words for me. I sometimes like the convenience but other times resent being tempted to switch my style to some average one…. And sometimes the changes are made without me noticing. I love how language is a dynamic thing — But I’m tempted to say I am uneasy about this new force… Could you riff on this topic?   (condensed some)

I love this topic! It immediately branches into many categories, but I’ll say first that I feel your discontent. I am also annoyed when my weird syntax gets streamlined into something ordinary. In my poems I fight against it — for what is my poetry if not odd sentence structure and twisted imagery? — but in some basic communication I might give in and let it be.

Obviously this “force” you mention isn’t going anywhere. So here’s what we can do, while we’re still human: When it comes to writing that you care about – artist statement, political diatribe, love poem, etc – always, always start by hand. I have been preaching this dirty-finger-nailed sermon for a long time, but here’s another reason why. No one is going to twist your words for you except you. The lead or ink is coming straight out of your body, and through these amazing, intelligent things called fingers. (Unless you write with a different body part. As an aside, I recently experimented writing with my MOUTH, after I learned about someone who had broken both her wrists and could not use her hands AT ALL. I was so disturbed I had to find a different way.)

Writing by body means that the stream of energy is coming directly through you and is not ‘transmogrified’ by a machine. It might feel harder to write by hand at first, but this is not a bad thing. It means you’re less likely to write the glib or mechanized sentence. You have to grapple with the material of what you want to say. It also means you can’t cut-and-paste – another one of my pet peeves. Cut-and-paste should only be done when you’re well into a piece, and the writing has ‘grown out’, like a little plant, and is tougher in its new soil.

So this is the main part of my homily. Later on, when your writing is in the machine (computer etc), you have to pay attention. Read what you have written! This always applies. It’s like looking backward at a bench you have just been sitting on; did you leave anything behind? If you read your writing out loud, that is even better. Print out your work, and bring the hand back to it. (I find this part of the writing process very erotic – seeing my words in print but scratching over them with ink.)

But – there’s another important, redemptive branch off the main trunk of your question. And that is the gift of humor. The machine is going to mis-hear you, and sometimes you can grab onto that inadvertent brilliance and make something of it. Like in voice texts and audio messages. I communicate with these a lot. And my phone is constantly ‘mis-hearing’ me. Very often the results are hilariously funny, and even poetically genius. The machine did not mean this genius — it was just trying to find the obvious route with my mumbled syllables. But I can claim these transformations.

For example: my sister and I were in Mexico City last year. Walking on separate streets one day, we texted back and forth about a place to meet for lunch. I voice-texted something about “juices and teas” which my phone heard as “Jesus in tears.” Oh! How wonderful! This poetic mishearing, full of sound-rhymes and fluids, made my week.

There is so much else I could say, but I’ll stop here.
Except this: If I were a beauty queen, I would definitely be Miss-Hearing.

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