after prufrock

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Reading Gary Lutz’s thoughts on linguistic theory and consummated language, I was struck deeply by how much his theories of deconstruction resonated with my own creative writing tendencies and methodologies. His opening reflections on his development as both a reader and writer immediately tapped into my own desires and expectations of language:

As a reader, I finally knew what I wanted to read, and as someone now yearning to become a writer, I knew exactly what I wanted to try to write: narratives of steep verbal topography, narratives in which the sentence is a complete, portable solitude, a minute immediacy of consummated language—the sort of sentence that, even when liberated from its receiving context, impresses itself upon the eye and the ear as a totality, an omnitude, unto itself. I once later tried to define this kind of sentence as “an outcry combining the acoustical elegance of the aphorism with the force and utility of the load-bearing, tractional sentence of more or less conventional narrative.”

What Lutz goes on to describe in detail is essentially the concept of language as a sonic landscape – where words and sentences cease to be solitary, independent structures, and begin to function as interdependent units: a community of linguistic vibrations. This occurs through the writer’s mastery of the language and ability to to pair his words whilst keeping the palpable beat of phonetics in mind. The words are no longer meaningful simply by virtue of their content or function, but rather they take on a deeper relevance and responsibility as the visible and acoustic links to the narrative. Lutz expounds:

The words in the sentence must bear some physical and sonic resemblance to each other—the way people and their dogs are said to come to resemble each other, the way children take after their parents, the way pairs and groups of friends evolve their own manner of dress and gesture and speech. A pausing, enraptured reader should be able to look deeply into the sentence and discern among the words all of the traits and characteristics they share. The impression to be given is that the words in the sentence have lived with each other for quite some time, decisive time, and have deepened and grown and matured in each other’s company—and that they cannot live without each other.

Pretty soon in the writer’s eyes the words in the sentence are all vibrating and destabilizing themselves: no longer solid and immutable, they start to flutter this way and that in playful receptivity, taking into themselves parts of neighboring words, or shedding parts of themselves into the gutter of the page or screen; and in this process of intimate mutation and transformation, the words swap alphabetary vitals and viscera, tiny bits and dabs of their languagey inner and outer natures; the words intermingle and blend and smear and recompose themselves. They begin to take on a similar typographical physique. The phrasing now feels literally all of a piece. The lonely space of the sentence feels colonized.

For myself, this piquant affinity which Lutz assigns to such ideal prose was attained at a somewhat bittersweet cost. Learning English at the age of 7 unleashed an insatiable curiosity in me, and in books I found both a refuge and a infinite source of schooling. The vocabulary I slowly amassed, however, was often concise only to the ear, sonically, and often the true meaning of words flew under the radar or were designated a backseat importance. Later, when I found myself structuring essays in high school and even university, this haphazard method of learning irrefutably underscored my struggles for comprehension. And whilst this doltish idiosyncrasy certainly caused me its share of growing pains as a writer, it did allow my ear to develop in tune to the sonic properties of the language and perfect my handling of synaptic impulses; crafting compulsions of words into acoustically gratifying combinations. These days, I try to find a happy medium between surrendering unequivocally to the brushfire of words that roll off my mind and my proclivity for servicing the true hard meaning of the language. An infusion of the two, hopefully, will eventuate the consummation Lutz remains so rightfully enamoured with.
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Farrington-Seear Wedding at the Melbourne Botanical Gardens
(full set here)

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but you.
stole the sun from my heart.

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.see the band: more images here.

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