A mondegreen is the name for a particular kind of misinterpretation through the ear. We all have “misheard” lyrics, often producing hilarious results. One I remember from childhood arises from the Lord’s Prayer, “Our Father, who art in heaven/hallowed be thy name”, became, “Our Father who art in heaven/hollow be thy wave.” I was an avid surfer and could faintly hear the waves breaking in the background as we prayed.
A mondegreen is a spontaneous interference with the normal course of events. It could be compared to Freud’s parapraxes, or slips of the tongue—one being an auditory and the other an oral slip. In both cases, an intrusion happens and Freud paid attention to the intrusion rather than to what was intended by the ego. And so he became an pioneering investigator of the unconscious.
We can prepare to receive a mondegreen by relaxing our need to understand only the conscious content of speech as information, ignoring everything else as noise. A mondegreen occurs as an auditory experience. It’s what you actually hear! This is quite different from “reading between the lines”, or “getting the unspoken agenda etc.” These practices are forms of hermeneutics. A mondegreen simply happens! As such it carries a surprise (“surely the speaker is not saying that!”)
Anita and I often play a game. We are getting to an age where the lower registers of speech are not so easy to hear. Instead of shouting, “what did you say”, we simply say what we heard and the results are, as I said, hilarious. Sometimes she will speak in Danish and I do the same thing— simply say what I heard. In fact, just a few minutes ago I remarked across to Anita, “its time for a banana,” as I got up to find one. She said, “it’s time for Claire and Steiner?” No doubt it is their time, now!
A mondegreen is one readily available way to ever so slightly alter our course towards the precipice. Just a nudge! It’s powerful because the practice of mondegreening can shake us loose from the iron grip of “needing to get it”, needing to be certain of everything, terrified of not-knowing. It’s a readily available way to open up to the speech of the other—to psychic otherness. Try listening to politics this way. Remember, though, a mondegreen is an actual given auditory experience. You can’t make it happen.
A mondegreen is a way of hearing the psychic other in real time. When the psyche emerges into materiality it is always felt as an intrusion and can have an impish quality. In past times, folks tended to regard imps with caution and enacted rituals of propitiation such as leaving a saucer of milk out at night for the gnomes so that the cow will not kick the bucket over the next day. C. G. Jung would talk to his pots and pans at Bollingen if accidents happened in the kitchen. He was aware that he had not yet synchronized with Bollingen time. As a result, “the dish jumped over the table/to see the pot with the ladle”.
What impish wisdom do our modern mondegreens have to teach us? Do we care enough to pay attention? And note that the word “mondegreen”—itself a nonsense word heard and coined eponymously by Sylvia Wright—evokes a green world.
Does the greening of the world depend in some way on mondegreens having more say in our lives?
