Paterson, Don. The Poem: Lyric, Sign, Metre, 2018. Walls act as low-pass filters and remove the high frequencies of most consonants, without which we can't distinguish words. Nevertheless, we are able to catch the emotional meaning of the words. We can follow the emotional contours of the conversation. Therefore, the emotional content of words is carried by a pre-linguistic patterning of sounds. Music helps us feel things we have never felt before, by blending and combining more familiar feelings. This pre-shadows language's ability to blend and combine concepts. Song fuses the qualities of music, which we share with the rest of the natural world, and speech, which is a uniquely human ability. >When we seek to infuse our speech with a mood or emotion it cannot easily express, it's to music, to the patterning of sounds, that we instinctively reach. This happens long before we're moved to make a song or poem: in our spoken conversation, variations in rhythm, pitch and timbre are responsible for most of what we convey of our emotional tone, and much nuance and emphasis the mere word-sense of our speech cannot carry. (Loc 202) >Religion allows us to read the sleight-of-hand by which our loved ones are conjured to another place, albeit one inaccessible to us; these necessary myths allow us to be reconciled to what we experience as the paradox of their absence. I would claim that music, too, offers a kind of spiritual solace, but one more physically direct in its rejection of our sequential, quantised sense of time that, in the end, serves only to divide us from one another. Musical time is rhythmic, cyclical, non-linear; song takes the vowels of our language and lengthens them, in defiance of its categorising, sequencing engine. Orpheus used song to cross the ultimate dividing border, and defy death itself. Rilke saw the Orphic project as one that allows us to enter a 'double-realm', unifying the domain of the temporal, the passing and the living with that of the atemporal, the eternal and the shade – and in doing so, reconciling us to the paradox of our twin citizenship. (Loc 228)