Retention is the way the past of our experience is stillpresent to consciousness. It is sometimes called the "speciouspresent."
A sound in retention is the original sound itself, but"modified." It is given in a different "mode," the mode ofpresence as absent, of present-as-past.
Retention and protention are originary, sui generis modes ofconsciousness which constitute the very essence of time. I cannottell you therefore what they are; each person must intuit their ownexperience of these phenomena and describe them as best they can.But it may help to say what retention is not.
A sound given in retention is not a reverberation, like anecho or a lingering note as on a piano while the notes fades away. It is not an actual sound in the world.
Nor is it an after-image, as when a lamp goes out and we stillsee the afterglow imprinted on our retinas for a few seconds.
Nor is it a replacement sound, that is actual, like a weakimage, as when I hum to myself under my breath.
A sound given in retention is not a representation orsymbolization, as in thinking of the name of the note, or inimagining teh black quarter-note symbol on teh printed score.
It is not the idea of the sound, not a concept or reflectionon it.
Above all, and this is the easiest mistake to make, retention is not recollection; that is, it is not the recall of a past event, being experienced "for the second time." Psychologists distinguish short and long term recall, but neither have anything to do with retention. There are a number of reasons why retention cannot be understood as any kind of recollection.
The retained past runs away in an involuntary, fixed manner, beyond our control, whereas recollection is voluntary. We can choose the order of our recall, and its speed; we can reverse its order and so on, whereas retention has a sinking away structure that is inevitable.
Experientially, the modification of consciousness we are labelling retention is a quite different modification than recollection. The retained is more real, for it is still being heard, whereas what is recalled is absent.
Retention is essential to consciousness, as Plato's Philebus points out, whereas if we were incapable of recall it would be less crucial: we could still be conscious and suffer pain, pleasure or other feelings. Some patients do have memory impairment but are still conscious.
The strongest indication that retention is not recollection is that recollection itself depends upon retention within itself. A recollected melody has the same structure as the original perceived melody. To see this, remark first that there are two ways of recollecting a melody.
We can think of the whole melody as a unit and grasp it in a "glancing ray" of consciousness, as when I think the idea "The performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony I heard the NSO play last Spring." This takes but a second and has no internal temporal structure. (Certainly retention is not based on this.)
We may also recollect the fully symphony by playing it out in our minds (if we have good memories!), unrolling it note by note, and the whole exercise will take us the better part of an hour, or at least 15 minutes if we speed it up. If taken in this second sense, recollection presupposes the very retentional structure we're trying to explain by it. In recollection we go over a recollected NOW with its recollected retentions. Hence recollection cannot explain or account for retention; rather it presupposes retention.
Of course a moment given in retention can also be recollected,but this is not essential to consciousness. For instance, inreading a novel, my grasping of what is happening in Chapter 10depends on my retention of the characters introduced in Chapter 1. I may also stop and recall what was in Chapter 1, but suchrecalling is not needed for Chapter 1 to give the context whichenables me to understand what is going on in Chapter 10.