Working Backwards

I tried a little experiment

Here's the experiment:

What I learned from my retrograde rumination is that writing backwards isn’t too hard, but speaking backwards is more difficult, at least for me.

The process for speaking backwards was to record the line, flip it forward-to-backward digitally, listen to it, and then try to replicate it with my own voice. You can sort of hear the phonemes, but the intonation has to be perfect for it to make sense.

Amazingly there have been people who have mastered the ability to speak backwards.

Writing backwards is fairly common among early correspondents and journal writers, even including Leonardo da Vinci

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“That’s my Jim,” Jeanette commented as she buttered the toast. “You do have a way of making everything more complex.”

The lettering trick was just the bait. The real catch was underneath: start with the solution and work your way back.

That’s a method, not a paradox. George Polya laid it out in How to Solve It—working backward from the goal.

Painters do it too, mostly without naming it. Before I open the paint box, I picture the finished panel and reason back to the first steps. What value lays down first? What edges stay soft for later? The painting in my head sets up for the painting on the page. Start at the blank surface with no destination and I wander into mud.

Same on location. I want the elm dark against the sky, so the sky has to read lighter than the elm, so I block the sky in first while the values are still easy to compare. Reversal disguised as common sense.

The aphorism folds in on itself. To write a word backwards you need the word forwards first. To say it backwards you have to know how it sounds the right way around. No inversion without an original—which is why the sketchbook experiment needed two passes: first the sentence as I meant it, then the sentence as a mirror would see it.