Episode 056 - More On The Operation Of The Senses
Date: 02/06/21
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/1863-episode-fifty-six-more-on-the-operation-of-the-senses-hearing-and-taste/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Book Four lines 522–632, read by Martin: Lucretius explains that sound and voice are corporeal (they scrape the throat, wear the speaker down); the mechanism of echo and reverberation in hills and valleys; why sound passes through walls and closed doors but visual images cannot; how taste works through smooth and rough seeds acting on the tongue; and the conclusion that it does not matter what food the body is nourished on, as long as it can be digested.
Discussion covers Martin’s physics correction that sound is vibration rather than emitted particles (with a sidebar on the phonon as a quasi-particle in solid bodies); the sackbut/Berecynthian pipe translation debate across Brown, Munro, Bailey, and Martin Ferguson Smith; why Lucretius waxes more poetic about sound than about images, possibly connected to the oral/hexameter tradition; COVID taste and smell loss as a modern illustration; and the unexpectedly comedic closing line about keeping a moist stomach.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 56 of Lucretius Today. I’m your host, Cassius, and together with my panelists from the EpicureanFriends.com Forum, we’ll walk you through the six books of Lucretius’ poem and discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. We encourage you to study Epicurus for yourself, and we suggest the best place to start is the book Epicurus and His Philosophy by Canadian professor Norman DeWitt. For anyone who is not familiar with our podcast, please check back to Episode 1 for a discussion of our goals and our ground rules. If you have any questions about the podcast, please be sure to contact us at EpicureanFriends.com for more information. This week we’ll be discussing Book Four, Latin lines approximately 522 through 632, and we’ll continue to discuss the operation of the senses. Now let’s join the discussion with Martin reading today’s text.
Martin: And now in what manner each of the other senses distinguishes its proper object is a subject of no great difficulty to explain. And first, sound and all voices are heard when they enter the ears and strike with their bodies upon the sense. For we must allow that sound and voice are bodies, because they have power to make impression upon the sense. For the voice often scrapes the jaws and the noise makes the windpipe rough as it passes through. When the seeds of words begin to hurry in a crowd through the narrow nerves and to rush abroad, those vessels being full, the throat is raked and made hoarse, and the voice wounds the passage through which it goes into the air. There is no question then, but voice and words consist of corporeal particles, because they affect and hurt the sense. You are likewise to observe how much a continual speaking from morning to night takes off from the body, how much it wears away from the very nerves and strength of the speaker, especially if it be delivered in the highest stretch of the voice. Of necessity, therefore, voice must be a body, because the speaker loses many parts from himself. The roughness then of the voice depends upon the roughness of the seeds, as the smoothness is produced from smooth seeds. No other seeds strike with the same figure that strikes the ears when the trumpet sounds with grave and murmuring blast, as when the sackbut rings with its hoarse voice, or swans in the cold vales of Helicon sing out with mournful notes their sweet complaint. When therefore we press out this voice from the lungs and send it abroad directly through the open mouth, the nimble tongue with curious art fashions it into words, and the motion of the lips assists likewise in the formation of them. And when the distance is not long from whence any voice proceeds, the words must of necessity be plainly heard and articulately distinguished, for in this case the voice preserves its proper frame and figure. But if the interadjacent space be more than it should be, the words must needs be confused by reason of the length of air, and the voice be disordered as it passes through. Yet it is that you may hear a sound only, but discover nothing at all of the meaning of the words — a voice becomes so broken and obstructed. Besides, one sentence delivered from the mouth of a public crier strikes the ears of all about him. For the one general voice that is pronounced instantly breaks instantly into innumerable little voices, and so reaches every particular ear, giving a proper form and a distinct sound to every word. But that part of the voice that does not reach the ear is diffused to the air to no purpose, but there dies. Some parts strike upon solid places and, being reflected, return a sound, and sometimes disappoint us with the echo or image of the word. If you well consider this, you will be able to account to yourself and others why, in solitary places, the rocks regularly return words the same with those we speak, while we seek our companions wandering over the dark mountains, or call after them aloud when they are dispersed and lose their way. I myself have seen places that return six words for one. The heights reverberate the words from one to another, that they separately repeat them and send them back. The neighboring people fondly imagine such places to be frequented by goat-footed satyrs and nymphs, and tell stories of the fawns. They say that the dead silence of the night is disturbed by their late revels and wanton sports, that they hear the sound of music and the soft notes of the harp, as the artist touches and sings to it together, that the swains all about can distinguish when Pan, shaking his garland of pine leaves upon his head, with his long hung lip, runs over the hollow reeds, and so his pipe prolongs his rural song. They speak of many other strange sights and monstrous fables of the same kind, lest perhaps there should be thought to dwell in places where the gods never come, and therefore they invent their wonderful tales — or they are induced by some reason or other, as mankind in general are mighty eager after prodigies. In short, it is nothing strange that those places through which the eye can see nothing are such that through them the voice can pass and strike the ears — we can converse together in different rooms when the doors are shut, as we frequently do, because voice can pass safely through the crooked pores of bodies, which images cannot, for they are broken if the passages are not straight. Such are the pores of glass through which all sorts of images freely find way. Besides, the voice divides itself into several little voices, and these are broken again into others as soon as the first single voice breaks into many more, like a spark of fire that leaps abroad into a thousand, so that all places about, even those behind you, are filled with voice and are moved by the sound. But all images direct their course through straight passages as soon as they are thrown off from the bodies, and therefore no one can see anything over his head. You hear words that are spoken without, yet even these, as they pass through the doors that are shut, grow weak and strike the ear in a confused manner, so that when we seem to hear a sound then to distinguish the words. Nor is the account of the tongue and palate by which we taste a subject of greater nicety or more difficult to explain. And first we perceive a taste in the mouth when we squeeze the juice from our food by chewing, as if we were to press a sponge full of water in our hands to make it dry. Then the juice we draw out is spread over the pores of the palate and through the crude passages of the spongy tongue. When the seeds of this flowing juice are smooth, they gently touch and affect all the moist and sweating surface of the tongue with sweet delight. But the seeds, the more rough and sharp they are, the more they stimulate and tear the sense. And then the pleasure of taste we feel no further than the palate. When the food is driven down through the jaws and divided among the limbs, the pleasure is gone. Nor is it of any concern with what meat or bodies are nourished, if you can but digest what you eat and separate it among the members and preserve the moist tenure of the stomach.
Cassius: Thank you, Martin, for reading that long passage for us today. The theme of this one appears to be how particles make up what we hear and taste, but that’s probably too superficial a way to look at it. Who would like to start in commenting? Even though Martin read, let’s try to get some comments from Martin first. What do you think?
Martin: So what Lucretius does quite often is come up with a very detailed explanation that appears to make sense qualitatively, but which is actually misleading from a modern science perspective. For sound, we don’t really send off particles — it’s just the vibration essentially that moves. Whatever we send out in parallel is like moisture, which is not critical for the sound. That just happens parasitically because the air from the lung comes out moist.
Elaine: From a physiology point of view too, it’s interesting — the attention to detail about the different kinds of sound, trying to come up with how that would be. If he understood about vibrations, I think that would have brought some pieces together for him because he would realize that what’s producing the sound in the body is making these vibrations. I don’t know if they knew about the vocal cords — he talks about the windpipe, so that’s interesting. But the smooth and rough seeds — that’s nothing to do with it. I learned a new word: sackbut. It’s a type of trombone. Nobody uses that word much anymore — the Italian term “trombone” took over in English. I guess at the time when this was translated, they called it a sackbut.
Cassius: So Munro uses trumpet, and Bailey says “when the trumpet bellows deep with muffled tones and when the Berecynthian pipe shrieks with shrill buzzing sound.” Let me check the other translations. Trumpet is in all three including Brown. So the sackbut would correspond to what in Munro?
Elaine: In Bailey it corresponds to “when the barbarous Berecynthian pipe”…
Cassius: So maybe that’s also an old word for a type of brass instrument. You looked up sackbut and it comes up as a trombone?
Elaine: Yes, a trombone — it’s used in a lot of Baroque music.
Charles: Berecynthian — it’s capitalized. Cybele — C-Y-B-E-L-E — goddess of nature and fertility in Asia Minor and later in Greece, whose worship was marked by ecstatic and frenzied states.
Cassius: Well, all of that’s new to me. So maybe Brown was just picking an instrument he thought would match. Did they have trombone-like things back in antiquity?
Elaine: Oh yeah, definitely. Since the Renaissance at least.
Cassius: But what about back with Lucretius?
Elaine: No. So he kind of probably picked the wrong word. And you’ve heard the word sackbut before, Charles?
Charles: Mm-hmm. Just like how Brown also uses the word “prodigy” when it doesn’t quite make much sense in the modern definition.
Cassius: Here it says the sackbut was created in the middle of the 15th century, so that’s probably not the best word to translate with. I wonder what the instrument actually was in the original.
Elaine: Because they didn’t have the sackbut back then, so that’s the wrong word. I wonder what Bailey’s “Berecynthian pipe” really was. It could be a form of bugle — something with a hoarse, not-clean sound, not like a pan pipe.
Cassius: I’ve got Martin Ferguson Smith out looking for it — “it’s when the snarling, barbarous trumpet brays loud and deep with raucous, reverberating boom.” So he describes it as just one instrument — a snarling, barbarous trumpet. He doesn’t split it into two instruments.
Elaine: Yeah, that sounds pretty close to Bailey to me.
Charles: Trumpets existed back in Egypt, but they didn’t have keys and valves — they were like a bugle, one long curved type of horn.
Cassius: One thing I think we should note is that he gets back into a more poetic mode here. There’s some scientific theory, of course, but it’s more poetic — he uses more descriptive terms than we’ve just had. I wonder why sound would make him wax poetic more than images. That section didn’t seem anywhere close to this.
Elaine: That’s a good point, Cassius. His poetic interest maybe launches him into that in discussing sound more than vision. There’s the closeness of music to poetry. And he noticed the labial and lingual components of pronunciation — labial being the lips and lingual being the tongue. That’s pretty good speech therapy observation, actually.
Cassius: The part that’s always stood out to me is the echo discussion and the reverberation through the hills. Why does he say sometimes the echo “disappoints” us? I always just thought echoes were friends.
Charles: That’s probably a word to look at in the other translations — like when somebody calls out for help and they just hear an echo, and they think it’s somebody else but it’s just you.
Cassius: Good point. Bailey says “scattered in vain through the air and mock us with the echo of a word” — so that’s “mock” rather than “disappoint.”
Elaine: Monroe and Bailey seem to be the same there. That kind of gives you the sense of what he means by “disappoint.” And I think I heard myself exclaim when Martin read the part about “mankind in general are mighty eager after listening to prodigies.”
Cassius: Brown had it better — “mankind in general are mighty eager.” That phrasing cracks me up. It has a kind of backwoods sound to it.
Elaine: “Mighty” is one of those words where you never use it but you can use it to great effect. It just didn’t really fit with the tone of the rest of the translation.
Charles: Like Beverly Hillbillies kind of thing.
Cassius: Martin, that probably gets lost on you — your English is incredibly good, but “mighty” is a word you don’t usually hear outside of a cartoon or Beverly Hillbillies-type context.
Martin: Right.
Cassius: This next part is historically interesting — how he tried to explain what was happening with sound. This actually is partly his images theory. It would make a lot more sense to him if he had understood reflection of light instead of these filmy images floating around, because of course we’re still getting light reflected from things over our head — but there’s not a film coming from them, so you’d actually have to look at it to see it. If you knew the mechanism of reflection, you would probably say “oh, now I get it.”
Elaine: It’s interesting — if he started there, maybe he would have gotten it right.
Cassius: What struck me reading this is the passage where he distinguishes what sound can do that images cannot. Munro and Bailey use the word “idols” instead of “images” in that location. To me, I filed this away as an example of him clearly distinguishing between images going through the air that you see versus sound waves — or even smell. Because sometimes I think of them as similar, at least sound waves and things you see. It seemed logical to think of sound waves preserving some kind of shape from the originator, just like visual images preserve some kind of shape. But he’s clearly distinguishing between the two things.
Elaine: I think this images idea is so incorrect that it is messing him up. But it’s still fascinating — it’s not a stupid idea. Even though it’s wrong, it’s pretty cool.
Martin: It’s clearly interesting to think about them in comparison — that you can hear through solid objects but not see through them. You’ve got to come up with some kind of explanation for what’s going on differently. If he had the vibration understanding, these pieces would just fall into place.
Cassius: And with glass — the image actually goes through the glass, whereas with sound… let me portray my science here: with glass the image goes through? Actually, no — the light goes through the glass.
Martin: Light goes through the glass, yes. But with sound, nothing goes through the solid object — it just sets up vibrations that carry through to the other side.
Cassius: So sound is only a vibration wave, and light has both particle and wave properties?
Martin: For sound you have to have a medium for it to travel through because you have to have something to vibrate. But for light that’s not necessary.
Elaine: Air is a medium…
Martin: Yes. But sound cannot go through a vacuum — it needs a material medium. That’s different from light. The photon is light’s particle. There’s no direct equivalent of a photon in sound. Well, actually — there is the phonon.
Cassius: What’s a phonon, Martin?
Martin: In the theory of how vibrations travel in a solid body, you can define an effective particle that has properties like momentum and mass and behaves just like a particle. So it’s effectively a sound particle — but you still need a material body for it to travel through. No particle comes out of the matter and travels through a vacuum. It’s called a quasi-particle, because it has some properties normally assigned to particles. It’s quite effective to describe some phenomena using these particle properties.
Elaine: I like the word phonon. I feel like I want to use that in a sentence today.
Charles: I was wondering about why Lucretius is much more poetic about sound than about images. I wonder if that’s just more about poetic tradition — antiquity being more orally based.
Cassius: That’s interesting — like Homer and Hesiod, traveling bards, people out in the parks and the theater. Charles, you’ve just raised something in my mind — I don’t think we’ve ever discussed the fact that Lucretius is written in Latin hexameter. I don’t even know what hexameter would mean to try to reproduce it, but the people who get into reading Latin poetry say it’s very sophisticated — the math of pacing and emphasis.
Charles: Do you read music? So like dactylic hexameter — the dactyl is the smaller unit with the accents, and the hexameter means there are six of them. A dactyl in poetry is a stressed syllable and then two short syllables.
Elaine: And the ends of the lines don’t rhyme — that’s the only thing I know about it.
Charles: Right, it’s not rhymey. A hexameter is a line where there are six stress syllables. However you’re dividing — whatever kind of foot you have — if you have six little rhythmic units each with a stress, that’s a hexameter line. And if you’re Lucretius and you’re working so hard to put Epicurus into hexameter, you’re really thinking about sounds and how things work.
Martin: In verbal conversation in those conversation salons of 100 or 200 years ago, people would speak with rhymes and also with rhythm — almost improvising as they go. Modern speech is less complex and musical than it used to be.
Elaine: We read more than we speak now, so we’re not passing down those poetic things as much. Although there’s a lot more interest now in spoken word poetry, which is bringing some of this rhythm back into performance.
Charles: I can’t stand slam poetry and spoken word, really. My senior year we watched a 25-minute documentary of it and I was almost asleep.
Elaine: I know — it’s not what I write, but it took me a while to get into it because it was different from what I was used to. There was a poetry reading group I went to before COVID in town and several participants would do spoken word, and it grew on me. I really kind of like it.
Cassius: So let’s see — taste. All these poor people who have lost their taste with COVID or had a taste distortion — this is probably really relevant to somebody out there listening. We don’t have these shape-based seeds affecting taste buds differently by shape. What we know now is that taste buds are actually pretty limited — more about sweet and salt — but the variety and flavor is more to do with smell.
Elaine: If you ever want to distinguish between what you’re tasting and what your smell adds to it, there’s a fun trick: just hold your nose, pinch it shut, take a bite of something, and then while you’re chewing, let go of your nose — and the flavor will come through. My food doesn’t taste like anything when I’m really congested or sick.
Cassius: Right. And he does notice we don’t have taste buds in our stomach. That last line — I’m still trying to decide what to say about it. It doesn’t sound like the motto of a dietitian: “it makes no matter what the food is by which the body is nurtured, provided you can digest what you take and transmit it into the frame and keep the stomach in an equitable condition of moistness.”
Elaine: That sounds like the anti-dietitian motto. “It doesn’t matter what you eat as long as you can digest it.” And keep your stomach moist!
Cassius: How would you make a good argument against the bread-and-water crowd?
Elaine: Well, he said “meat” — so the vegetarian crowd translates this as “food.” Bailey translated it as “diet.” Let’s see what Martin Ferguson Smith says… “food” again. So I think in the mid 18th century “meat” was a common word used for food generally, which kind of tells you the status of meat during that time. You could take it out of context and use it as “it doesn’t matter what you eat because taste doesn’t matter, as long as your body can use it and your stomach doesn’t dry out” — but that would be taking it out of context.
Cassius: People gonna be walking around going “oh my gosh, my stomach, it’s drying out!”
Elaine: This reminds me of something kind of hilarious that I saw — you have to be so careful because there’s a lot of nonsense going around about home remedies with COVID. There was this wild thing supposedly from a nurse — I hope it wasn’t — that you had to breathe in humid air or your lungs would dry out. I’m like… that would be awful and scary if we had to worry about our lungs drying out all the time. The stomach drying out, I don’t know — you’d have to be dead, I think, for your stomach to dry out. That would be extreme dehydration incompatible with life.
Cassius: I find talking about your lungs drying out a little more intuitively possible than your stomach drying out. No matter how bad my stomach feels in any particular situation, I never analogize it to drying out. Martin Ferguson Smith says: “and keep the stomach in a constantly healthy condition. It does not matter at all with what kind of food your body is nourished so long as you can digest what you take, channel it into the limbs and keep the stomach in a constantly healthy condition.” So that’s his version.
Elaine: The point in there — and I’ll make it — is that humans are omnivores evolutionarily. We can exploit a wide variety of nutritional sources, and that has been one of the key factors to our success. Some animals are limited to certain types of vegetation and won’t eat anything else. Humans have just said “well, if it won’t kill me, let me eat it.” So we can survive on a wide range of nutrients.
Cassius: That is very close to exactly the point he is going to be making in the next passage next week — about how some food is poisonous to some animals but not to others, because I was looking ahead to see what we’d be coming to next. We’ve got another week or so on food and smells — we haven’t hit the smells yet! Everybody’s got to be sure and have breakfast ready before they listen to this or lunch or whatever meal it is, because I think we might make you hungry. Anybody had any good meals, any good Epicurean pleasure meals lately?
Elaine: I had blood oranges last week and they gave me the worst food poisoning I’ve ever felt. I was sick all Thursday — it was the strangest thing because that’s the only thing I ate that day.
Cassius: Were they a little old?
Elaine: They weren’t old old, but they were the last two in the bag, so like they were maybe a little past. They were intact and still appealing before I peeled them.
Cassius: That’s weird, because if you peel fruit and leave it out it can grow… was there something on the peel you got under something?
Elaine: Yeah, possibly. For those who don’t know, blood oranges are a type of orange where the insides are dark red and purple.
Cassius: I’ve got one more comment about upcoming material — I was continuing to scan ahead. I see that we still have several weeks before the romantic love section comes up, but there is one topic that will be discussed soon: going back to the issue of whether images are always at hand or whether we’re storing them. So it looks like as we go further into Book Four, we’re going to come back to images and sleep and that kind of thing — which we’ve been talking about on some of the forums over the last couple weeks — and we’ll have another time to dive into that before we get to romantic love. Elaine, did you see anything else in the text that you wanted to comment on before we close?
Elaine: No, I don’t think so.
Cassius: Martin, any closing thoughts?
Martin: I’m fine.
Charles: No.
Cassius: I’ll save Elaine for last because she usually has the most interesting summaries.
Elaine: When we’re reading this, I think we should appreciate it as a poem and appreciate the level of observation that led to some of these models — there’s a lot of detailed observation in here. And maybe this would be a good week to pay attention to your food, really pay attention to the taste, and keep your stomach moist. We didn’t instantly arrive at all these modern and correct theories.
Cassius: Right. And I suspect that Lucretius, with all the effort he put into the poetic transmission of this section of Epicurus, probably did not expect us to focus on keeping a moist stomach as the main point. But there’s no doubt there’s lots of really good stuff to take home from this. Unless someone has something else, we’ll close for the week and come back in another week or so. What’s that, Charles?
Charles: There’s a footnote in the Archive.org version about meat.
Cassius: Is it the Brown 1743 version? Is it anything we should include today?
Charles: Let me finish reading it. No, it’s just more about the palates of humans and animals and how they differ. A little repetitive too.
Cassius: All right. Anybody have anything else before we close for the day? Okay, well, as always it’s been fun and we’ll come back in a week and talk again. Thanks everybody.
Elaine: Bye.
Martin: Bye.
Charles: Bye.