6 Doesn’t that mean that X doesn’t really ‘exist’?
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 performi