robert miltner
AUDIO ECHO
The only known recording of Virginia Woolf reading her work aloud is from a 1937 BBC Radio broadcast. The graininess of the audio is in the recorder, not the reader. I know her by her prose, by fading images from book covers. Her monaural voice, though unfamiliar, does not seem surprising. Elegant, upper class British, carefully cadenced. Have I always heard her sound this way, in my head, as I imagined Clarissa Dalloway would speak?
Woolf’s talk as recorded is entitled “Craftsmanship.” But in actuality she is telling a story about the story of words. Their histories, preferences. About why writers ask them to dance in their sentences. How words hate making money. Or being lectured about in public. I’m not certain I agree with her when she says words hate being useful.
~
Outside the window it’s another snowy northeastern Ohio afternoon. The monochromatic scene outdoors reminds me of black and white photographs from the nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century. Flakes fall at a rate quite perfectly comparable to the pace at which Woolf speaks in the recording.
On the slanted roof of the house across the alley, four crows flap and hop around; on the thin branches of a huge maple tree in the yard, three more balance, rising and falling with the gust and pitch of the wind. These birds could be four dancers with three more waiting in the wings to join them on stage. Or puppets in an old Eastern European tradition. They could be letters at play, forming words or reconfiguring into variations on themselves. Seven crows in a snowy landscape.
~
The dark birds rise together in flight, a sporadic flocking, as they disappear from the frame of my small window. I imagine this is how lead type might tumble after use from a letterpress case in a print shop. How the window with its view becomes like the image of the type case as they mirror, echo one another. How words spill easily off a tongue and out of the mouth. This wintery afternoon has a graininess about it, a suffused texture, as if from an old album of fading photographs.
I pause for a moment, search for a useful word that might give voice to a feeling, a thought, but no words take flight from my tongue. By now the crows have flown into the distance but still I hear their raucous cawing. A raspy sound as if from an ancient time. A monaural song crafted as if of useful words echoing, evolving.
The only known recording of Virginia Woolf reading her work aloud is from a 1937 BBC Radio broadcast. The graininess of the audio is in the recorder, not the reader. I know her by her prose, by fading images from book covers. Her monaural voice, though unfamiliar, does not seem surprising. Elegant, upper class British, carefully cadenced. Have I always heard her sound this way, in my head, as I imagined Clarissa Dalloway would speak?
Woolf’s talk as recorded is entitled “Craftsmanship.” But in actuality she is telling a story about the story of words. Their histories, preferences. About why writers ask them to dance in their sentences. How words hate making money. Or being lectured about in public. I’m not certain I agree with her when she says words hate being useful.
~
Outside the window it’s another snowy northeastern Ohio afternoon. The monochromatic scene outdoors reminds me of black and white photographs from the nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century. Flakes fall at a rate quite perfectly comparable to the pace at which Woolf speaks in the recording.
On the slanted roof of the house across the alley, four crows flap and hop around; on the thin branches of a huge maple tree in the yard, three more balance, rising and falling with the gust and pitch of the wind. These birds could be four dancers with three more waiting in the wings to join them on stage. Or puppets in an old Eastern European tradition. They could be letters at play, forming words or reconfiguring into variations on themselves. Seven crows in a snowy landscape.
~
The dark birds rise together in flight, a sporadic flocking, as they disappear from the frame of my small window. I imagine this is how lead type might tumble after use from a letterpress case in a print shop. How the window with its view becomes like the image of the type case as they mirror, echo one another. How words spill easily off a tongue and out of the mouth. This wintery afternoon has a graininess about it, a suffused texture, as if from an old album of fading photographs.
I pause for a moment, search for a useful word that might give voice to a feeling, a thought, but no words take flight from my tongue. By now the crows have flown into the distance but still I hear their raucous cawing. A raspy sound as if from an ancient time. A monaural song crafted as if of useful words echoing, evolving.
~