Join me in the pleasure of observing conversation, particularly times when people report the speech of others. They can do this using direct speech, indirect speech or narrative reports of speech events. Here are examples of all three:
Mrs Jenkins told the class shat she was cancelling the field trip (indirect)
There was a roar of protest (narrative report of a speech event)
'It's just not fair,' said Jenny. 'We've been so looking forward to this trip.' (direct)
In fiction, you could try free indirect discourse, which is mostly indirect with some touches of direct. Here's an example:
Mrs. Jenkins told the class she was cancelling the field trip. There was a roar of protest. It just wasn't fair. They'd been so looking forward to the trip.
To convert direct speech into indirect speech requires a little grammatical finagling. The point of view shifts from the person speaking to the person talking about the person speaking, so pronouns, tense and other deictics might change.
Indirect speech, I say in this episode, requires a certain grammatical distancing.
And then, after all that logical discussion of the linguistics and stylistics of speech reporting, I go a little mystical.
What if all human language keeps us at a grammatical distance from the here, the now, the magical mystery tour of multidimensional consciousness that is the Earth? What if 'mundane reality' were the astronomical opposite of mundane? What if what keeps us from seeing this mysterious reality is the shroud of language?
Key takeaways:
- We're not the only conscious beings on the planet
- The Earth is teeming with multidimensional consciousness—of the kind some folks have ascribed to 'God', 'the Divine', 'the universe'
- If you get the feeling that it's hard to be on this planet—don't blame the planet
