The English Language Must Be Accelerated

The English language must be accelerated, this much we know. The English language: it’s is chock full of divergent consonants with their respective accelerative clicks and clacks, even when we hear it in our heads, even when it’s telepathically transmitting into our brains via a page; there’s almost nothing melismatic for us here. Also, let’s leave commercial concerns to the side for a second. In this country it’s almost like no one can comprehend anything unless there’s a fiat currency attached to it? Or, even worse, every endeavor is incomprehensible unless there’s some sort of a “social” counting stat to define it by. It’s utterly grotesque! People I know who, at one time, at least to the best of my recollection, seemed to be pretty cool people, reasonably decent people to be around, have now been reduced to counting things that large technology companies put in front of their faces. It’s tyranny of the first order; I’d rather spend six hours locked in a cage with seven chimpanzees with rabies than be forced to listen to a person attempt to discuss the commercial concerns of an artistic endeavor at another social function. I can only imagine it’s how Moses felt about iconography. Counting clicks and putting together budgets have nothing to do with the writing of words in my opinion. The English language is certainly a machine to some extent, but it’s a machine like a lyre’s a machine, not like bottle capping contraption in an industrial parkway. 

Yet, leaving that aside, English prose is the non-line(ar) non-point acceleration of conscious experience itself. It’s the classical music of our era. But you can’t sprint long distances. This something it took me some time to realize. (No but really. I’ve had enough of these cynical pedants who think nothing exists outside of industry. They’re literal infections on my spirit. I can’t be around them anymore. I think I may actually need to get a flip phone again.) In any case, even poems rely on lines, which are defined by points, which are syllables. When we write a poem we’re dealing with lines and syllables as points that invariably comprise those lines. Lines are being defined by a set series of points (syllables). But I would argue that we shouldn’t be concerned with points or lines, or with any notion of measurement at all. Instead I’d like to focus on waves frozen in time. ‘If you’ve done it though you know the feeling.’ Only prose forms waves where all of its units have lost their metrical meanings (subject, predicate, sentence, paragraph). This is true acceleration. But in the context of long-form prose this acceleration loses its sense of self in the midst of too much of itself. You can certainly have too much of yourself! 

There’s absolutely nothing metrical about prose; it’s a smooth space par excellence. You can’t quantify these waves which is the point. I’ve tried via various >.667 and other ratio-based prose. No. That’s folly! You can’t know these waves in any intimate fashion, or get on a first name basis with their essence. They wash over you. You download them all at once in a purely instaneous fashion. This is what prose is to me. Lightning was never intended be a novel’s length. (But seriously. Not to harp on this but . . . Maybe it’s just me, but this bourgeois obsession with salary and monetization and the counting of things, whether it be dollars, clicks, likes, followers. It’s just grotesque? There’s no choice but to rescind from it. To avoid conversing with that train of thought, and to avoid wherever it appears. I feel like we have an incomplete notion of infection. People’s moronic thoughts are infectious in the worst ways. ‘Don’t let anyone who does not believe in it and follows his own desires distract you from it, and so bring you to ruin.’ They’re actually dangerous, these text threads that show up at our front door every morning, and the so-called ‘advancement’ of technology that’s unlocked our collective doors to these moronic thoughts and rebranded itself as some sort of ‘progress’.)

In summary, the second you start to capitulate to integer you’ve succumb to artistic falsification. ‘The world is computational.’ That’s not my call to make. I’ve never respected mathematicians (artistically speaking). What they explain is at best a dilution of what’s already occurring, or maybe nothing at all! ‘But you don’t have a PhD in Physics.’ I don’t have a lot of things! All perishes save for His face. We know that the Cosmos is under the rule of a Divine Name. The whole truth? It’s a conjunction. 

Subtitled: Can A Tempo Be A Modal Space?

In mathematics—based on my limited understanding—Set Theory attempts to identify some structure by the composition of, say, the points that comprise it, whereas Category Theory instead momentarily ignores the specific points of composition and instead views the structure as a single unit (i.e. a human as an individual operating in a social milieu and not solely a compilation of red blood cells, organs, and tissue, etc), and then measures said units by its relation to other local units. 

Set Theory, to my mind, is how you would compose music if using something like a piano, where each musical line is broken down into precise notes that have static individual values themselves (12 tones, equally tempered, etc), while Category Theory would probably be useful for composing using a structure like language, where the words are comprising a melodic line, but at the same time the words themselves lack a static individual musical value. 

This is basically, at a high level, macrotonality to me—where complex vocalization is viewed as a single wave (or line), and is then in turn measured by its relation to other structures in its orbit. In the macrotonal case, the wave is defined by its time value, which is in this case syllables per minute. That value has a relationship with the normal tempo of speech (which is latent), and it also has a relation with the time values of the other active components (“beats,” “percussion,” “drum loops,” “guitar solos,” etc etc.)

The wave’s relation to time integrates it relationally into the rest of the composition, as opposed to its internal line structure or rhyme scheme. So the wave itself is operating by its own internal logics (it contains line structure and rhyme schemes, human beings have kidneys and skin cells) but within the composition itself it’s identified by its categorical time quotient, which is, again, in this case expressed in syllables per minute, and is relational to other components (as well as latent normalized speech).

In other words—we’ve considered groups of tones as modes, but can’t a range of tempo be a mode as well? 

‘We come down from Truckee surfing against that sun / As if off a great wave but in the / Wrong direction certainly the wave is frozen / Or just moving so slowly that no one can know / If you've done it though you know the feeling’  Robert Ashley, Foreign Experiences

‘There are no points or positions in a rhizome . . . there are only lines . . . when Glenn Gould speeds up the performance of a piece . . . he’s transforming the musical points into lines.’ Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

What’s the fulcrum of modernity, the fulcrum of the so-called Western world, the fulcrum of the scientific method, the fulcrum of ostensible rationalism, the fulcrum of sanity as we generally understand it if not this notion that ‘things’ can be broken down?—and not just broken down but disassembled into a more or less infinite regression? 

To us every atom is a little explanation, every subatomic particle is a tiny special meaning for us to gossip about—to us every building block of nature is a dead frog to be dissected by high school sophomores, every single conversation is something to be recalled and divided into little apple pies of intent and cause and effect, to place on our window sills overlooking our white picket fences. Musically, this trend expresses itself, at first, through musical notes—being quote-unquote ‘noted out’—notes functioning as tone-spaces, and then, eventually, the trend graduates to a concept of microtonality, where said tone-spaces regress to infinite spectrums, infinite spectrums that still contain infinite points. 

But listen. I don't want to, you know, like, get into a whole philosophical discussion behind all of this?—other people have explained it better than I could—I don’t even understand it.  But compositionally—there’s an idea that, rather than component parts, we could compose via irreducible waves, waves frozen in time, that, yeah, maybe exhibit some attributes that we can notionally attribute to them, but these attributes, they’re attributes that don’t negate the fact that the waves themselves can’t be disassembled—that they don’t actually contain infinite points. That to disassemble them is to change their essence essentially. They contain no points at all.