Process of Writing 26: Lagniappe

The concept of a lagniappe was one I first heard many years ago from a New Orleans native. It's the extra little bit the baker puts in your bag, or the grocer, or the fishmonger, as a gift of neighborly friendship, sometimes as a reward for one's loyal custom. The baker's dozen is a kind of lagniappe. The extra piece of candy thrown in for free. One online dictionary gives the origin of the word, naturally, as typically Cajun, a blend of cultures uniquely N'Orleans:

American French, from American Spanish la ñapa, the lagniappe, from la + ñapa, yapa, from Quechua yapa, something added. First Known Use: 1844

I felt the new music commission I've been writing all year would be complete at 18 individual pieces, and it was. 18 is a number that I've always liked, for reasons I can't always articulate. (It turns out it contains some significance to Jewish custom, and mystical interpretation. Who knew I was a Jewish mystic after all? *shrug*) And I still had a small pile of unused lyrics already written or half-written, a few stories left over from the telling, and some other ideas.

One idea was a short, sensual, somewhat erotic poem I'd written during the project, a poem of my own, from the perspective of art and memory. During the week after I had completed the commission, this poem spoke up that it wanted to be set to music after all. So I did that, and the commission now contains 18-plus-1 compositions, 18-plus-1 songs in various styles and voices.

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Brushwork/Canvas

I draw runes on your skin
a labyrinth of circles
over your heart

I draw my name on your breast
an arrow pointing down
from navel to root of sex

I draw chevrons on your arms
sentinel of my self
warrior guarding my soul

I draw your name on my breast
and as we press ourselves together
ink runs from skin to skin
as we imprint ourselves on each other
ink brothers, blood brothers, one

naked self to naked soul
naked soul to naked skin
writing our names
on each others’ arms
blood brothers, ink brothers, one

my only loving brother
we are one

•

I wrote this song for two tenor voices, with piano. The music follows the arc of the poem—which by the way was originally written as a poem, rather than a pure song lyric—from two separate and different selves merging, in the end, into one. I had some fun with the musical setting.

In 1985-86 I lived in Surakarta, Central Java, Indonesia, on a Fulbright grant to study gamelan music. As I'm sure most other Fulbright alumni would agree, being on a Fulbright can be a life-changing experience, in which you learn a lot more than you originally set out to study. I received my grant as a composer rather than a scholar, and so I felt free to absorb as much music and art as possible during my year in Indonesia. One of the regional musics I became very involved with was West Javanese, or Sundanese, music; Sunda being the western third of the island of Java, with a somewhat distinctive culture and artistic expression.

In Sundanese music, there are three main tuning systems. (A tuning system in Indonesian music is not like a Western scale, and even less like a musical key. It contains fixed tones with more or less fixed intervals, but between different sets of instruments there can be variation in pitch and relative interval, within the recognized standards.) All of these are pentatonic in nature, meaning five notes per octave. One of the aspects of Sundanese music is that the scales can interlock, sharing one or two notes in common, while other intervals within the tuning system are very different.

This use of interlocking scale systems can be used to great dramatic effect. You are going along in one tuning system, when at a pivotal point, the singer will go off in a completely different tuning system, which will share a note or two with the main tuning, then return to the main tuning at another pivotal point in the music. This can create a powerful sense of tension-and-release, of stress-and-resolution.

I have been strongly influenced by this practice of departure and resolution as a composer, and also as an improvising jazz musician. I use the principle of leaving the home scale to go off in another direction, then return, both as a composer and player. This might sound dissonant to the Western ear, but that's okay: the dissonance is resolved into consonance when the scale-patterns reconverge at a point of release.

I wrote this song using these ideas from music theory that I learned from my studies of world music, especially Sunda. Each of the two voices has a completely different tuning system, which they never break away from, although there are notes in common. The piano part follows the lead of each voice when accompanying them alone, then combines elements when the voices sing together.

The first voice uses the notes G, Ab, C, Db, Eb, G, in an emulation of the minor pentatonic Sundanese tuning called degung. The second voice uses the notes Db, Eb, F, Ab, Bb, Db, in an emulation of the major pentatonic Sundanese tuning used in gamelan salendro (which is roughly the same as the Central Javanese gamelan tuning slendro.)

(Note that while in Western music it's conventional to sing a scale ascending, in Sunda, they sing a scale descending. I'm using the Western convention here, but it's worth mentioning the other. Note also that Sundanese exact pitches do not correspond to Western equal temperament, so what I've done is create scales that emulate the Sundanese scales, while using Western instruments and voices. You shouldn't take these are precise transcriptions or imitations; they're not.)

Note that there are three notes in common between the two tuning systems: Db, Eb, Ab. These are the only notes the two voices have in common. Otherwise they exist in their own musical universes.

I did this to paint with the music, as it were, the same emotional narrative arc that is in the poem: two individuals becoming one. So the voices alternate at first, each in their own tuning system. The piano follows the voice's lead, mostly, but is free to add harmonies and chords that fill out the music. By the end of the song, the two voices have begun to sing contrapuntally with each other, and at last merged into a unison on the same note. This is also reflected in the piano part, which resolves its own musical phrases by circling around the keys of Db major and Ab major—but there is no tonal sense of dominant-tonic, as the chords don't have to move in the stereotypical ways, but rather, follow the melodies in their discrete tunings.

This was a lot of fun for me to write, even though most listeners will never hear any of this. I suppose one must have the unique background of being a Western composer who has studied world musics, to get all the references. But the average listener will I hope be able to hear the emotional arc of two becoming one, and the tension-and-release that exists within the music, even though it's not done following the usual clichés of tonal music. I don't mind if hardly anyone "gets it," to be honest, because this was a bit of fun for myself. If all a listener gets is the tension-and-release and the story of two lovers merging, then I am well satisfied.

The limitations of words 2

I have a contentious relationships with some writers, who seem to have fixed ideas about what a writer is supposed to do, and how they’re supposed to do it, and how they’re supposed to be, all of which tacit rules I seem to keep breaking. Without apologizing, I might add.

The definition of a writer may be nothing more than someone whose first creative response to life, experience, and everything in it, is to put it into words. By that definition, I’m not a writer. I’m a composer and artist who occasionally writes. My first impulse in response to life is multimedia: sound, soma, images, and, yes, words. Sometimes all at once. I don’t make a distinction between artforms, usually, because all creativity is sourced from the same deep inner rivers and wells. (Or so I believe, and all my beliefs are based on experience.) And as I’ve said before, I don’t experience writer’s block, because I practice crop rotation.

Paradoxically, I’m probably better known for my poems and essays at the moment, even when they’re hated, than my music.

It’s a strange thing to me that those separate art worlds don’t overlap more often. I’ve never done only one thing. I’ve spent my whole being questioned, even attacked, for not doing only one thing. Multimedia seems natural to me; crop rotation between artforms also seems natural; so I am sometimes brought up short when I meet an artist who is inherently limited to one media. I confess I don’t totally understand it. (As a bi friend once said to some mutual friends, “You monosexuals are so limited!”)

It’s one thing to choose to focus on doing only one artform. It’s another thing to be judgmental against those who don’t. Not every artist who works in more than one medium is a dabbler, or otherwise not serious about their art.

I’ve had poets tell me that they can’t say that my poems are anything but good even though they can’t in any way approve of them. That’s because I don’t write like a writer is supposed to write, apparently, I just write. Apparently to be a writer you’re supposed to slave away at it, and suffer for it, and I don’t. Or be workmanlike about it, rather than just doing it when you feel like it.

I find myself getting into arguments again—discussion on my part, since I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything, but arguments on their part, because they are—with writers who believe in the supremacy of words. I point out that not all of life and experience can be put into words. They disagree, even as they fail to enact their belief. They do not convince, as often as they insist.

The principal fallacy that is made by those who believe in the supremacy of words is that all cogitation, all mentation, all thought, is verbal. For them, perhaps it is.

But many dancers I know and have worked with "think" in movement, in gesture, in images of the body in motion and at rest. Some dancers even think three-dimensionally. Many painters and designers I know are visual thinkers. Mentation is a series of images for at least one visual artist I know, non-verbal and usually non-narrative. I know several musicians and composers who think in sounds, not in words. Although of course words are also sounded, in jazz as in classical music the melody that is heard and played most often has no words that go with it. The human voice is one of the most beautiful instruments; yet because words don't always go with singing, we have vocalise in classical music, scat singing in jazz, and so forth.

For none of these artists do words have supremacy. For most of them, words are inadequate tools used to describe to others the processes of thinking and being involved in making their art that are essentially non-verbal. One reason dancers dance is because what they want to express can be better expressed in movement than in words; or may not be at all expressible in words. The argument that poetry is the highest artform founders on the rocks of its own assumptions. Of course, some word-supremacists might simply argue that dancers are just incompetent with words; but that is an elitist judgment that again assumes that words are the best tool with which to express absolutely everything. Yet few arts are more somatically visceral than dance. Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” written for the dance, is an experience that can only be inadequately paraphrased in words, but not replaced by them.

The logical fallacy that usually presents itself in discussion with those who believe in the supremacy of words is that, because they cogitate using words, everyone else must also. It’s the usual assumption people make: because this is how I experience life, this must be how everyone else does, too. Manifestly that’s untrue. If even one exception can be found, one person for whom cognition and mentation are not primarily verbal, then the premise is not universal, and its assumption is disproven. Such exceptions abound; I have already given several examples. Yet I find that those who argue most strenuously for the supremacy of words do so almost fundamentally, as though unable or unwilling to accept the existence of evidence that disproves their claim. "Don't confuse us with the facts, this is what we know to be true."

Of course I'm aware of the paradox of discussing this with words. The point is to find that place where words end. Some don't believe that place exists. Others have already found it, and have no need of proofs. For myself, having found the end of words numerous times, under numerous circumstances, I am no true believer in the power of the word, written or otherwise. I recall a wise Medieval bard stating that there were some moments for which even his treasured word-hoard was not full enough to express. The bards knew the provenance and gift of silence, and left some things wisely unsaid.

Words from the Wizard about Writing

If you go over to Ursula K. LeGuin's website, there's a section of quotes and thoughts about writing, surrounded by huge fields of thoughts and writings about many other things, as well as links to her published works, many of them never out of print. The Earthsea books are the least of it.

Here's something Ms. LeGuin says about writing, as though it came direct from the wizard's mouth:

A Few Words to a Young Writer:

Socrates said, "The misuse of language induces evil in the soul." He wasn't talking about grammar. To misuse language is to use it the way politicians and advertisers do, for profit, without taking responsibility for what the words mean. Language used as a means to get power or make money goes wrong: it lies. Language used as an end in itself, to sing a poem or tell a story, goes right, goes towards the truth.

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.

This is the radical honesty of poetry laid bare. Don't forget that LeGuin is also a poet; her often dreamlike, mythic way of telling a story, of describing the details of its context, of the associative turn of thought that can turn a narrative suddenly into a new creature, are all present in her shortest poems as well as in her novels. There are many sections of poetic prose in her stories, that bring the language to a higher and deeper level. One of the tenets of wizardry is truthful speech, and impeccable care with words: say nothing that is false, lest it become true. If wrods shape your world, you are responsible for what you say. Sometimes silence is your best option: say nothing, damage nothing. Be still, send nothing astray.

It's hard to get writers to shut up, though, even as wizards tend to be rather laconic unless there's something really worth saying. If you notice in the literature, even the chattiest wizards use their voluble loquaciousness to say much of nothing; a smoke screen of small talk, if you will. Much smoke, concealing the fire behind the words.

That's why misuse of language is offensive to both writer and wizard. Gandalf, when condemning Grima Wormtongue as the liar and manipulator he is, says this in so many words; and by their own words have liars been known to manifest their own punishments. Caught themselves in the web of lies that they have woven.

There are also turns of plot in many LeGuin that shock in the moment, yet seem necessary and unavoidable after the tale is seen as a whole. The shock is the same surprise that life brings to us, in all its unpredictability and terrible beauty. Trust a poet to speak truly to this; trust a wizard to live as though this were foundational truth, not words but a way of being, of living. Such shocks in stories are realistic, lies that give us the truth. What is literary realism but the illusion of the lie being what seems to be like everyday living? There are so many kinds of realism.

A writer is a person who cares what words mean. I am always astonished when I interact with writers who seems to feel that being sloppy and imprecise in their communications is acceptable. As though being impeccable in their word was necessary only for their writerly products, and dispensable for everyday chat. I find it hard to trust such writers: If they're sloppy in this area, how might they be sloppy elsewhere? If they don't take care to be truthful speakers, how can you know that they know the difference between what can be said and what cannot?

Wizardry and writing are not that far apart, it seems. Trust a writer of tales about wizardry to know.

LeGuin has published a version of the Tao Te Ching, a perhaps unique translation of that classic. It reads more like poetry than philosophy in her version, which is what it was, originally: metaphors and analogies that reveal the truth of the Tao without ever killing it by speaking of it too directly. The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao. There is a resonance in this version that gives it buoyancy and lightness: the lightest of touches on its subject, the finest brush hovering above the scroll, barely tickling it.

In Earthsea, so much depends on the power of language, on the various languages used by characters in the books, especially the original language of the Making, which is the language of wizardry, of the dragons, and in which one cannot lie. Language is a central concern in Earthsea, too, because the proper naming of a person or thing gives a wizard power to know its essence, and be able to influence it. In 1985, a one-page LeGuin story appeared in The New Yorker, titled "She Unnames Them." This is one of my favorite short stories of all time. In it, Eve, starts giving back the names of everything that Adam has named. The story begins:

Most of them accepted namelessness with the perfect indifference with which they had so long accepted and ignored their names. Whales and dolphins, seals and sea otters consented with particular alacrity, sliding into anonymity as into their element.

There is something so right and true about that: what we call those beings who have their own lives, indifferent to our own except where we might impinge on theirs, have no need for what we call them.

As the story progresses, names become less and less used: the writing style reflects the action of unnaming, both humorously and seriously. This is a bit of a writing tour de force: to speak is to do, to create and uncreate, and how rare it is to find a story that enacts what it describes, as it describes it.

As the woman once named Eve, giving her name back, says to Adam in her last conversation with him before leaving:

I resolutely put anxiety away, went to Adam, and said, "You and your father lent me this—gave it to me, actually. It's been really useful, but it doesn't exactly seem to fit very well lately. But thanks very much! It's really been very useful."

And the short story ends with:

In fact, I had only just then realized how hard it would have been to explain myself. I could not chatter away as I used to do, taking it all for granted. My words must be as slow, as new, as single, as tentative as the steps I took going down the path away from the house, between the dark-branched, tall dancers motionless against the winter shining.

This enacts how not being able to name a thing sometimes gives one the gift of being forced to observe it just as it is, without labels that preconceive or veil understanding. This is the Zen master's and the wizard's eye: seeing what's there, and having to discover its name by seeing, by knowing. And to give a new name to something so familiar, that with its new name it becomes something entirely new, undergoing a sea-change into something rich and strange.

That's what poetry does, for me, as a poet writing a poem, and being the poem's first reader: find new names that are more true to the essences of what I see then the received labels that language has given me. Too often the nouns are labels that prevent us from seeing what's really there: we look at the luggage tag, and think we've seen what's inside the suitcase. it becomes too easy to quickly assign, categorize, dismiss, and move on. A little string of mind-forged luggage-tags that are signs that stand in for the actual thing without in fact encompassing or comprehending its true nature.

Both poets and wizards know that to truly know a thing, sometimes you must unname it first, before you can see it for what it truly is. And only then will it offer you its true name, in the language of the Making.

Words & Wizardry

The past few weeks, late at night, if I've been feeling sleepless, rather than poison my dreams with inane bursts of noise from the television, I've taken to curling up on the blue couch under a single reading lamp, and delving back into beloved works of high fantasy literature. Sometimes I've had the row of lava lamps turned on across the room; one lamp in particular casts light onto the blank white wall above it as though it were the sky filled with the aurora borealis. Or perhaps the gaseous shifting fringes of the sentient planet Solaris, from Stanislaw Lem's SF novel of that name. You take your solace where you can find it.

I've been re-reading, mostly by dipping in and out, and re-reading favorite scenes, sections, and segments of each book, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings in a handy if huge single-volume paperback edition; Patricia McKillip's trilogy of The Riddle-Master (in a similar single-volume paperback), and Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea series, all six books.

Of the latter series, I have the original trilogy in a boxed set, with unified illustrations in every volume; I have the more recent books in their hardcover first editions, glittering with light and air and the coppery fire of the breath and scales of dragons. Dragons everywhere, changing back and forth in shape between human and dragon, never quite knowing which you'll meet today, always wild, fierce, and loving.

So my head is full these days of words and wizardry.

One of the tenets that all wizardry, and riddlery, appears to share is that, to name something truly is to know it, and to have power over it. To love something is to know its true name, yet let it be free and not seek to control it. Over and over again the lesson rings through that to try to control something utterly is to destroy it. Even the attempt to master death, to be immortal, causes more grief than solace. It's unnatural in the original sense of the word: to be natural in this creation is to be mortal. Even stars eventually die; some quietly, some violently and with spectacle.

But death isn't the end. R. Buckminster Fuller once said, to give solace to a friend whose beloved near-son had just died tragically, There is no death. There is only a change of state. It's a chemical, or alchemical, sort of comment to make, and it does bring comfort. It's the sort of wisdom a wizard might give at such a moment. I'm not the first to think of Bucky Fuller as a sort of modern wizard.

So death isn't the end. The story goes on, and stories do. We can make stories even for things we don't know about, which are important but which we can't understand. Some of these stories we call myth, which mythologist and scholar Joseph Campbell once defined as The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Other such stories we call fiction, especially that sub-category of fiction with fantasy, or magical realism, or science fiction, or make-believe.

These stories are lies that tell more truth than so-called truthful stories. (Let's be blunt: there's no such thing as genre fiction, because in fact even non-genre fiction, so-called mainstream literary fiction, is just another kind of genre; so it's all one or it's nothing.) In each of them truth is revealed through narrative and dialogue, which are orderly lies we use to shape time into thought, to give comprehensible structure to an otherwise lumpy flow of chaotic memory.

Yet within the tenets of wizardry, words matter a great deal. Wizards are identified, in one sense, by the care and precision they take with how they use words. There is no casual or ordinary speech. That's a truth about life that we could all learn to live by, even as the lesson arises from fiction. Some days it's hard to separate what happens in fictional worlds from the so-called real world: which is, after all, a lie bound up in Indra's Net, what the Buddhists call maya, illusion. Ask a quantum physicist how real you are: you might discover you're not really here. Are the tenets of riddlery, or wizardry, then, so foreign, so fictional, after all? Perhaps they're more real than we think. Since, after all, words do have power to change the world; if not by magic, then by persuasion, by the magic of charisma and being in the right place at the right time, holding a long lever made out of great words that express great thoughts. Martin Luther King, Jr., stood on the steps of a monumental edifice in our nation's capitol, and said, I have a dream! And the world changed. If the world is but a dream, maya, then we dream a world into being each time we think we wake to start our day in the real world, awakening from the world of dreams. Chuang Tze woke one day and said, I had a marvelous dream! In my dream, I was a butterfly flitting from place to place. Am I am man who dreamt he was a butterfly, or am I now a butterfly dreaming he is a man> Such are the tenets of riddlery: Answer the unanswered question, and the unanswerable questions. Who was Chuang Tze, and was he a butterfly indeed?

In no way is wizardry—or poetry, for that matter, that other art of words—about having all the answers. But it is very much about asking the right questions.

There are cardinals nesting in the thick pines beyond my window. Robins everywhere, more than you see in most years, building nests in the budding trees, scratching like chickens for seeds in the grass. Spring brings back to life what once had died.

The limitations of words

I read a poet chastising another group of poets for saying that words have limitations, and they were feeling at the limits of what they could say. The chastising poet was responding to a comment that words divide us as much as they join us together.

Ah, but the first person to admit to the limitations of words is the bard who uses words well, and knows from personal experience how much they leave out or cannot say. I run up against that wall continuously, and so there are times when music can express what words cannot.

I recorded an hour of new piano improvs in the studio last night, and at least two of those pieces say things, on playback, that I can't put into words, unless perhaps with the layered density of a haiku. Even then, there would be layers left out, and although I would compress as much nuance and subtlety into the poem as is humanly possible, it would still need to be completed, as haiku are, by the reader filling in the rest from his or her own experience. We touch at points of shared experience, but we also diverge where there are none.

The battle then becomes to wrest words into better expressing and evoking what one does experiece, as a human artist making human art, so that whatever can be conveyed, failings and all, is. We just know that there are some things we have to really struggle to say.

But it's also true: most poets do say it better than they think they do.