Renewing a Living Beat

19 Apr, 2026

When back in the fifties, Louse Bogan “asked a group of students, recently, to name some definite bodily rhythm which might illustrate mankind’s sense of time, and with which a definite pleasure might be said to be connected, they could think only of dance.” That response, she said, “shows how many rhythmic habits and rhythmic effects have become rare either as observed phenomena, or as direct experience, with the advent of the machine.” Bogan wagers that, had she asked her question to nineteenth-century students, she would have been offered examples of rhythm-suffused human activities such as walking and rowing, the beat that accompanies housework or harvesting, a march or “a religious procession,” a number of daily or occasional activities that would highlight “the pleasure to be found in bodily rhythm as such.”¹

I had to pause at that point in her essay: it was one of those instances where, yes, you’ve realized on a subconscious level that what she’s saying is obvious; it’s just that no one’s said it out loud before, or in a way that’s brought the issue clearly to the fore. After all, so much skilled labor these days has been shipped off to impoverished corners of the globe (and at best replaced by warehousing and delivery jobs whose pace seems so frenetic and determined by data calculations, even rhythm gets lost) and the introduction of gadgetry meant to do the housework for us (think Roomba). For so many of us, much of the rhythm of manual work has vanished—especially since so much of what counts as work today involves planting your butt in a chair and staring at a screen all day.

So there’s that—but then I recalled a fearful vision that’s become an everyday experience over the past, what, fifteen years, whenever it was that the smartphone finally became ubiquitous. A vision that’s even more painful when I’m on campus, and youth who should be kicking up their heels and mouthing off and horsing around present little more than hallway obstacles, barely moving as they make their deadened way from point A to B, so absorbed with the phones in their hands that they cease moving every now and then, maybe shuffle a foot forward, make some small shift to the left or right, stop once again, never looking up the whole time. It’s not a situation of total stasis—but there’s no rhythm here; even the beat of walking has been removed, something less than the slow collective slog of film zombies, who at least keep trudging to a heavy, slow cadence determined by the imperative to find fresh brains.

The essay that followed Bogan’s came from Robert Hass, who touts rhythm’s ability to let us sit with different possibilities of meaning. Did Wordsworth want us to feel “reconciled” after reading a particular poem, as Hass thought he did, or, as his friend countered, fearful of a potential post-death nothing? Hass realized that there wasn’t a right answer to this question; instead, he says, “the poem is so memorable and haunting because the two readings and feelings are equally present, married there, and it is the expressive power of rhythm that makes this possible.”²

The expressive power of rhythm. Hass’s observations joined Bogan’s to speak to the situation of the torpid phone-hordes I encounter on a regular basis. In their stupor, there’s no expression anywhere; whatever it is they’re reading, or just looking at, the same blank face prevails as they barely blunder over the carpet. The situation is undoubtedly fed by the infinite scroll; there’s no reason for viewers to look up, because there’s always more to come, and no stopping point provided that would bring to an end the gushing torrent of images and clickbait.³ On much social media, there’s no rhythm, only flow; only unceasing addition to a stream already overrun, a stream to which these phone addicts have surrendered, it seems, their very selves.

Here, too, Hass is illuminating—because it’s rhythm, he argues, combined with human ability to participate in and shape it, that allows for “a sense of closure.” “Many things in the world,” says Hass, “have rhythms and many kinds of creatures seem to be moved by them but only human beings complete them…. the bringing of rhythmic interplay to a resolution, is the particular provenance of man as maker.” In contrast to metrical poetic forms, blank verse “suggests no natural stopping place of itself,” and like “daydream and hypnotic rhythm” (or the nonrhythm of data streams), its “natural form is exhaustion.” To bring that exhaustion to “resolution,” though, “the articulation of what ending feels like, is active making.”⁴ Articulating an end, actively making something in the process: these things are missing from the young walking braindead I see in the halls every day. Their arhythmic shuffling feels like the embodiment of addiction: that which seeks to keep an ending, a resolution, far away. A sense of closure is exactly what addiction rails against; you will never not need this thing to keep you feeling alive, much less good; there will never be a day or time when you won’t be in need of the next hit. There’s nothing you can do or make to achieve what the preferred substance can; there’s no reason to act against it, and no reason to try to make anything of your own that could provide you even comparable fulfillment. And because there’s no reason even to attempt making anything, there’s also no reason to aim for anything other than what will allow you to keep flowing along with the stream. Let the stream make your choices for you, release you from the need to make or do anything at all.

If they actually notice you in their path, these kids quickly look away, won’t meet your eye. And if anyone does speak to them, they either can’t or won’t articulate much of anything in response. Their flow has been disrupted, and it’s demanding they return their attention to it. I rant all the time against AI, with its charge to do our thinking, our active making, to craft our endings for us—but that particular tech demon is only speeding up a form of destruction that had already begun taking place years ago: of attention and focus, yes, but along with it, what Charles Olson called “one of [humankind’s] proudest acts”: language, and its skillful use.⁵

I’ve long asserted that I couldn’t go back to teaching even if I wanted to—but if it were possible, maybe I’d be willing to lead a tech-free class. We’d go out and walk together, and listen to the beat of our shoes hitting pavement or soil. We’d attend to the rise and fall of insect song in the trees, the rhythm of seasons as they move through their course; the throbbing even of the machines: the rotational cycles of cooling towers and fans, the thunk of wheels crossing ridges on long stretches of road or trains moving along their tracks. And then we would stop our movement, or remove ourselves from the source of cyclic sound, and sit or stand with the absence of the rhythm we’d been attending to. We’d talk about it as our words came to us from our own brains, formed clearly by our own mouths, the words taking on nuance as we learned to work with them. What were the cicadas roaring about; why their collective crescendo every now and then? Why the repetition of the bird’s song, always three peeps followed by two—and what does it mean if there’s no answer, or the answer entails a different cadence? We’d wonder together whether our thoughts or feelings had been influenced by the rhythms to which we’d submitted ourselves, and what it might (or might not) mean, why it might be significant in itself, to be asking these questions in the first place. As we pondered the presence, even role, of rhythm, we might learn again to use and shape language, to actively make ourselves into something newly human. We might find resolution in bringing an end to our drooling addictions, and learning to talk to each other again.

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