Music and words

CS Lewis says that language cannot do what music and gesture do, that is, “do more than one thing at once.” He admits that “the words in a great poet’s phrase interinanimate one another and strike the mind as a quasi-instantaneous chord, yet, strictly speaking, each word must be read or heard before the next. That way, language is as unilinear as time.”

Of course, music and words are not phenomenologically identical, yet I think the analogy much closer than Lewis suggests. You can sustain a note on the piano while you play another; you can play several notes at the very same time. Language is unilinear in comparison, but still words “sustain” over the course of a phrase or sentence and create an experience very like music.

The comparison of language and time belies Lewis’s argument, because time is certainly not simply unilinear. Our present moment does not simply follow in succession on the past moment; the past moment “sustains” itself into the present at least in the form of memory. Without that sustain, we would experience time as a series of absolutely discrete presents and could not distinguish the present from the past. Without that sustain, a sentence could not make sense, because the previous word would be left behind as soon as a new word took its place.