Building Blocks

Stuttering at its core is prolongations and repetitions. I think such combinations might be primal – fundamentals of living. If so, stuttered sequences are a basic expression of what it means to be alive.

Consider, for example, human movement. This is, by definition, any activity involving muscles. Movements can be prolongations, such as the postures maintained in sitting or standing. Or they can be repetitions, such as walking or chewing food. Combinations of prolongation and repetition comprise much of our everyday activity. This applies whether or not we call the prolongations and repetitions stuttering.

In communication, the most basic system logically possible is expression in binary. For example, binary is the most minimal system through which a Turing machine can be created. Prolongations and repetitions can function as basic elements of a binary system. As a toy example, you might once have communicated in Morse code using a series of long and short presses on a torch. Those key sequences were prolongations and repetitions. Prolongation and repetition alone are sufficient for us to communicate anything we like.

The painting illustrating this post is by Piet Mondrian. Mondrian started out with landscapes, portraiture and still life. Here is an example:

Mondrian developed his artistic style in ways which, at the time, were unexpected and unconventional. One interpretation is that he wanted to condense his paintings down to basic elements. The effect of doing so was that he began to focus on prolongations and repetitions within the colours, movements and shadows that surrounded him. Here is an early painting in such a style.

Notice how the painting looks a bit stuttery? The repeated elements, and prolonged blocks of colour, happen at once in a somewhat haphazard pattern. It is that combination of repetition and prolongation which shares similarities with stuttering.

In the most celebrated series of paintings by Mondrian, repetitions were minimised and the emphasis was almost entirely on prolonged blocks.

It’s worth seeing Mondrian’s paintings up close. The brush work using oil paints is really impressive.

Those prolonged blocks aren’t uniform, like they might have been had Mondrian programmed them to appear on a computer screen. Rather, the prolonged blocks have an inner richness of their own. There is a kind of recursion between the form of the painting when it is viewed from a distance, and the textures which comprise the painting when it is inspected closely.

When we stutter whilst speaking, we exhibit a similar richness to our dialogue. The stuttering is not random, but is instead situationally located and tied to linguistic features. Like the basic elements which Mondrian explored in his paintings, stuttering can considered as fundamental building blocks of the world around us.