Learning the Ursonate: the mind-clearing benefits of non-conceptual sound poetry

In the last two weeks of a 4-month Tibetan Buddhist retreat, we were instructed to engage in “non-conceptual silence.”

I already knew how to engage in silence, as I had worn my “In Silence” badge many times earlier in the retreat. Non-conceptual silence was new to me. It meant no reading of the many Buddhist books I’d amassed or even my Kurt Vonnegut short stories collection. It meant no dance parties to pop songs. Literature and lyrics are chock full of concepts, and the challenge was to avoid engaging the mind in concepts unless absolutely necessary.

I still wanted a way to spend my breaks, some way to engage my mind. That’s when I remembered a 3-minute long animation called Primiti Too Taa, which illustrates a “sound poem” of made-up syllables. That animation had stuck with me since first watching it in college; I’d find myself looking it up once a year to watch again or share with a friend. There was something about the rhythmic nonsense sounds that resonated with me.

This time after re-watching the animation, I researched its source. The original poem is The Ursonate by German Dadist artist Kurt Schwitters, and it is an entire hour of made-up syllables spoken with rhythmic intonation.

And thus, I spent my breaks reciting that poem in my room. I listened to mp3 recordings while I followed along with a PDF of the text.

I loved how it engaged my mind fully while not miring it in concepts and judgments of how things are or should be in the world. I found myself reciting my favorite verses while doing other activities, and that allowed my body to enjoy those activities more. My mind is one that likes to fill itself with thoughts, and as those thoughts tend toward the critical/anxious side, they can take away from my bodily enjoyment of activities. By engaging it with the Ursonate, I make it harder for the negative thoughts to pop up.

Because I benefited so much from the Ursonate, I want to make it easier for other people to recite it. Using a text-audio sync-up tool, I’ve made video recordings of the entire Ursonate with each line bolded as Kurt recites it, and uploaded them to Youtube. You can watch the entire Ursonate, the 4 parts separately, or if you're short on time, my favorite progression of verses.

If you try it out, do let me know how it works for you. Everyone’s mind is different, and I’m curious if there are other minds out there that benefit from sound poetry.
(And hey, maybe one day, we’ll all get together and recite the Ursonate together in a room. Mind-clearing, engage!)