An Exercise In Auto-narration.

By Mark Daniell

11/06/2010

Have you ever found yourself reading an innocent looking sentence in an ordinary looking magazine in the quiet of the afternoon when a strange but inescapable feeling of dread creeps over you as if you were the victim of some cleverly-disguised modern day weapon of stealth assassination that leaves no trace since it kills through the technique of unintentional suicide by making its victim suffocate themselves to death?

On the whole we try to avoid suffocating ourselves since most of us are only too aware of the essential role that oxygen plays in maintaining our wellbeing and so usually take great pains to ensure that we regularly find ourselves in environments where our next life-giving lungful is only one nice long intake of breath around the corner.

(Deep breath this time). And yet it’s amazing how this primitive mechanism of self-preservation can be manipulated and to all intents and purposes overridden by the simple technique of forcing a person to follow a sentence in their head that is far too long to be read aloud with only one breath while simultaneously not providing the appropriate punctuation marks and hence misleading the reader to what looks like the natural conclusion before suddenly starting a new subclause that has them bending their head and torso forward to squeeze the last cushion of air from their lungs before reaching the not unanticipated finish.

But why should we behave in this strange unprovoked way if common sense clearly points out that it makes no difference where we decide to place our breaths when reading in our heads since there are no vocal chords or larynx muscles to be disrupted by the funnelling either in or out of air at inopportune moments to trigger involuntary spasms or audible gasps that embarrass us and distract our audience from the salient point that we had been trying to convey?

One argument would have it that when we silently follow the words on the page or screen in our heads we are in fact imagining that we are a narrator speaking aloud to an imaginary audience who are patiently waiting for the closure that increasingly seems destined never to occur and so evokes concern for our safety and sanity in the now genuinely concerned audience which is of course also ourself.

Which brings us to the crux of this exercise designed to teach us to recognise that deep inside our minds there is a basic propensity towards schizophrenia where our thoughts are given the natural format of a conversation in which both speaker and listener are consciously played by ourselves while simultaneously professing autonomous validity and if you are still holding your breath as you read this you need to take a good long think about who’s in charge up there.

So next time you find yourself, in public, talking out loud, to no one but yourself. Relax. Take a breath. And recognise that it’s nothing to be concerned with: it’s just the audible manifestation of what’s continuously going on up there anyway.