Investigator Essay – What Is Reverse Speech?
By Richard Dillon
Investigator Essay – What Is Reverse Speech? The phenomenon of Reverse Speech is possessed of its own mystery, it has a similarity to the Parapraxis (Freudian Slip) found in Psychoanalysis, where any of us can inadvertently reveal hidden motivations, concerns, or issues by the misuse of a word when speaking. In Wikipedia we read, “A Freudian slip, is an error in speech, memory, or physical action that is interpreted as occurring due to the interference of an unconscious subdued wish or internal train of thought.” The idea of “an unconscious subdued wish or internal train of thought” provides a sense or measure of what a speech reversal does or means. How either of these modes of communication operate mechanically is a matter of conjecture.
Reverse Speech can also be compared to results of the Cut-up Writing Technique developed by William S. Burroughs, Bryan Gysin, and Surrealist artists. Taking articles from a random newspaper, magazine, book, WSB would cut the body of the text into three columns. After splicing the columnar texts spontaneously, new sentences emerged. These lines would create new analogies, metaphors, and oracular pronouncements. Burroughs worked with tape recorders, splicing and inter-cutting soundtracks, which became tracks in time. Time Future Metaphors could, thus, comment on Time Past, Time Past could comment on Time Future, and both on Time Present, which, itself, could comment on Past and Future. I believe that he was aware of Reverse Speech, certainly, he could not not have encountered the phenomenon over the decades in his experiments with film, paper and taped sound and speech.
A poet is said to be animated by his muse. The muse conveys the impulses through the poet who translates them into words. The imperfect rendering of the muse’s messages into mere words mechanically excludes commentary by the muse about what it said originally. If the oral rendition of a poem is reversed, this excluded commentary by the muse could be discovered, embedded in the original sonic matrix translated into the poet’s native language.
Within the interstices of the psychoanalytic event of parapraxis or the artistic event of the Cut-Up Technique, the principle of Synchronicity comes into play to explain how meaning discloses itself. Carl Jung coined this term, defining it as an “Acausal connecting principle.” One event can comment upon a second event but neither of them is fastened together in any serial structure that can be measured or counted. Robert Schmidt, President of Project Hindsight, a school of scholarship that re-enters lost arts and sciences to reanimate them, translator of the original texts of Hellenistic Astrology and re-developer of its animating theory, has also investigated Synchronicity. He prefers the term, “Synchronism,” to identify a particular event of this nature.
It is beyond the scope of this writing to discuss the potential relationship of Quantum Mechanical Phenomena to Reverse Speech, in particular, events at a distance which to occur must override the speed of light.
Reverse Speech events appear in the body of a verbal statement. They “comment” on the ostensible message delivered by the speaker. It is a mystery how the vocal chords can produce these hidden reports. A thesis can be proposed about the nature of communication, therefore. What we say happens on multiple levels simultaneously, and at the quotidian level, we hear what we can transcribe by a pen. At higher levels of sound, call them ultrasonic, other communications of the Spirit uncaught by the overt material transcription remain. If thoughts, per se, translate themselves into raw sound conveyed by the vocal chords, then those thoughts we term, “Reversals,” are present with overt speech but, mysteriously, are not included with it, perhaps, because they occupy the same “space” as the overt sounds but like dark matter require another means of technology to be discovered, sensed or heard. These statements report on the original communication and apparently serve the purpose of what is called, “Conscience.”
This Conscience serves the purposes of the march of truth within the flood of spoken words. If a lie is told, the truth is hidden. Somehow, what Socrates called his “Daimon, ” or his conscience, will speak inadvertently, or find its way out into consensus reality by other means. Reverse Speech technology is one of these other means without which the Truth of Conscience may remain blocked from expression. The recent example of Hillary Clinton is the most vivid example. It became ever more apparent to millions of television viewers (many of whom had only come of voting age to encounter her for the first time) that this woman was stringing together explanations for deeds of a criminal nature. These explanations were intuited to be lies. Reversals of these verbal expositions revealed that the Daimon of Conscience remarked upon her claims to the contrary, acting like confessions. Reverse Speech technology, thus, helped many to refute her claims and thus to defeat her from gaining ultimate power in the world.