6 Doesn’t that mean that X doesn’t really ‘exist’?
It depends on how you define “existence.” For the writer, the X exists in relation to the desire to imagine them further. In A Whaler’s Dictionary, Dan Beachy-Quick leaned into the lexical aspects of the dictionary form in order to write a book about craft, or how writers think about writing. But this form did not prevent his book from exploring the phenomenology of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, which is a novel about what it means to be human.
We still don’t know what it means to be human—we still cannot help feeling lost (and sometimes found) in the quest for our own humanity.
“One speaks out of a desire to communicate the world within oneself,” writes Dan Beachy-Quick, and this world within oneself includes things that aren’t usually available in language or everyday conversation. Because the X exists in that space between the possible and the unthinkable, writing the X requires engaging the unsayable.
To quote Beachy-Quick at length:
Desire disrupts the silence that denies a shared world. Desire is that force within us by which we learn to betray the boundary of our selves, that border guarded by the sentinel “I.” Desire finds those words that cross the limit between private thought and public communication. Expression is desire’s work. That work is the trespass in which I betray myself. The “I” that speaks and the “I” that thinks are, potentially, quite different versions of “me.” The I that speaks puts forth– into the void that desire alone makes habitable—a world I no longer possess. For as Levinas explains, “The generality of the word institutes the common world.” This common world provides the tools for a book that hovers between a speaking-I and a listening-Other. The expressed world is not a logic but a question, a consideration; the expressed world creates the grounds from which meaning may finally occur.
We meet each other in what he calls “the expressed world.” When expressed as a text, this world assumes the presence of the page and the existence of language. The writer encounters a stranger on the page and for a moment, all the strangeness between us disappears in this risk that the poem takes by speaking to the invisible Other. You, the reader, meet my X. Both of us, for the instant that is the duration of the poem, are looking in the same direction. It is uncomfortable to think about how close we are in that moment when anything can be said.
Music, like literature, also brings humans together in time by implicating us in a shared emotional resonance. Do we imagine this feeling collaboratively, alongside other listening strangers? Or do we exist in a moment where something overwhelming is communicated and the sublimity is shared?
Comparisons between music and math abound, but written music distinguishes itself from written math by existing in relation to the expectation of sound. A musical score organizes sound for the purpose of repeating this particular organization and performing it.
While driving to my daughters’ school, I listen to a pop song on an old playlist. Immersed in the surround sound of images and associations, the mind opens thought towards reverie. The poet urges the mother to pull over at the next stop sign and copy the song lyrics into her notebook. The mother resists but the poet wins by arguing that the lines will be helpful later, when the poet seeks a way to move into a poem. The lines can be taken as an open gap, a space that wants filling, a possibility. The mother parks along the side of the road and debates whether to turn on her hazard lines as the poet babbles on about lyrics and lines and using the lines in the notebook as statements that require response in an imaginary dialogue with the lyric.
The mother is annoyed by the poet’s conception of dialogue as a collaborative energy that evokes, builds, or undoes. The poet annoys the mother constantly. Yet the dialogue with the lyric unbolts a thing that felt closed (i.e. the song). The unlocked lyric permits the poet to leap over the gate that says “It couldn’t happen because it didn’t happen.”
The poet must take any available permission to leap over gates and imagine an Elsewhere or an Otherwise. The problem with this leaping is physical: the gate appears quite solid. The gate announces itself as property, a thing owned by others. The gate declares, “You can think but you can’t touch this.” It insists that boundaries and borders serve to protect what belongs to one person, and what belongs to one person cannot technically belong to another.
But the poet knows the gate cannot jump. Unlike the poet, the gate is glued to the ground. The gate is stuck in the hard soil of reality which almost distracts the poet from her interest in the song, that relationship between the music and lyrics of Angus & Julius Stone’s “Crash and Burn” that she copied into her notebook. Upon review, the song lyrics are unremarkable.
The poet ogles the words and hears music. The mother waves at another mother in the carpool line.
The gate says: “There is nothing for you to do here except watch the show that is owned by others.”
The head says: “That’s great but it’s just a song.”
The chord says: “Ignore the gate and the heart and the voices that tell you the solid is settled. I, chord, am taken as solid by those who listen—but those who create me know that every solidity waits to be ruined and unsettled by the composer.”
The poet wonders why the chord decided to address her. What could be more absurd than being personally addressed by a chord while waiting in a carpool line to retrieve her kids?
The mother wishes everything would move faster.
The daughters linger, chatting with friends on a bench near a raised flower bed. Their hands move through the air as they speak. Their palms form small moon-shapes around their mouths.
The sun does its duty and blazes across the asphalt.
The poet watches the children moving between clusters and clumps of gym shorts. She notices dismay on small faces along the edges of friendships, the blinding bright yellow of daffodils. The world is too loud, too difficult —
She listens to the song again to distract herself. The song is doing something curious with repetition. Although the lyrics repeat themselves, the melody changes in the spaces where lyrics remain the same. The lyrics gain a sort of glimmer at the edges, a shiny patch marked by friction, a sheen of alteration where words are touched by what rubs against them. This is an ordinary school parking lot on a sweltering afternoon in August. Yet the poet’s legs are covered in goosebumps, thousands of tiny raised bumps that resemble the skin swelling after being pricked by a needle. Just as suddenly as they appeared, the prick-marks vanish.
Because the poet cannot ignore the intersecting textures of strangeness, she registers the face of another mother waving to her a moment too late, a moment after the other mother has turned away. The poet’s response is delayed: she watches herself waving to no one across the parking lot, at a strange remove from the laughter of children. If there is a sound grid, the poet is simultaneously overwritten and instantiated by it. The poet’s inability to ignore the intersecting textures of strangeness, and the relationships invoked by these overlaps, are part of her “process,” which is a technical term for outlining the part of existence that leads to the writing of the poem.
The daughters slump into the car, dragging the events of the day behind them like a clattering parade of things they need, things they want, things they must do, etc. The mother listens.
But later, much later, the poet abandons the mother and returns to the gate on the page: the lyrics she copied from a song. The X appears near the gate. No one can see inside the notebook, so the poet uses it to recklessly imagine the X. Leaping over the gate, she commits herself to rigorous notation and relentless attention before writing a reply to each of the song lyrics. Then, to guise her tracks, she erases the original lyrics and leaves only the replies, the poem, standing alone in the world. She cuts its ties and sets it free to see if it can exist without the scaffold.
Is she erasing the original X given to her by the song?[1]
The poet’s process is simply the game she plays and the constraints she sets in order to discover the most impossible question.
- The X recognizes a sliver of himself in it. Maybe that is the condition for saying a poem has reached its final draft form? ↵