Well of course we can. What do you think reading is? How can it be anything but? Blind people must hear with their eyes too, when they read Braille at least. Or are they hearing with their fingertips? Yet the deaf can read. If reading is predicted on hearing with your eyes, that is, when you see the words on the page, you must say them in your head subvocally or they are not understood, how is that that the deaf can read?
So the deaf from birth read in a way that is completely different from all of us. They have no hearing so they have heard no language. Since they have heard no language, they can’t possibly sound out words in their head subvocally as if reading aloud. If one becomes deaf later in life, it’s no problem. I become deaf tomorrow and I can read for the rest of my life until my eyes give out. This is because I already know what words sound like and how to sound out words on the page subvocally in my mind from back when I could hear. I’ll be able to hear myself subvocally for the rest of my life because of this learning experience.
This brings us to the matter of the rhythm, the beat, the music of good writing. Poetry does this best of all, but the best prose has silver words that sing right off the page. I go about all day, particularly when I am out, writing in my head. I get a nice sentence and then I try it different ways. I rearrange words. I take words out or put new words in or substitute words for other words.
What I am looking for this not just Flaubert’s mot juste (the perfect word or really the perfect sentence), but I am looking for sentences that play the best music when you hear them. It’s not an easy process. There are a lot of things I want to say that cut out of sentences because they make the sentence too long and mess up the rhythm. Shorter and more spare sentences tend to have better music. In longer sentences, whatever music was there tends to drown out by the sheer weight of the words. There are too many words and they douse whatever music was there.
The fact that the best writing has a rhythm, beat or sound akin to good music is further evidence that we hear with our eyes. Our eyes can’t see rhythms, they don’t perceive beats, and there’s no melody we can make out in the distance.
The most perfect example of this is a musician reading music. Here the symbols are really nothing more than sound encoded onto a page to be heard with our eyes. Each note plays a sound in the musician’s head. In another sense the aural nature of the music has been displaced to the written page, and in that sense, you are seeing sound as you read the notes.
It;s a bit limiting to see that our eyes are only for seeing, that our eyes are just for hearing, that our noses are only for smelling, our mouths are only for tasting, and that our touch is only for feeling. We already know how much of a role smell plays in taste. To taste is the same as to touch, but when you taste, you get more than just a tactile sensation. There’s more to sensory experience than that, and if you’ve even taken LSD and heard colors of seen sounds, you know exactly what I mean.
Here we leave the realm of empiricism and enter the realm of poetry, where a cherry explodes in our mouths like the crash and the end of a Beethoven sonata, the sun tastes like strawberries in the spring, a tragic scene is a punch in the gut, babies’ wails wince our eyes.
The counterfactual nature of poetry is not meant to be precise or logical. If it was it wouldn’t be poetry. But it’s as valid as empirical perception. As long as we can imagine, dream and hallucinate, sensation, no matter how distorted, is as valid as any sterile measuring device in a cold lab.
But once again. How in the Hell do the deaf read?
