For the Oracle Hysterical show at St. John's College (Annapolis), 2025-03-21. ## Short Form Singing can be a very rewarding way to be a reader. Figuring out how you want to sing a text is not easy. It slows you down and forces you to consider every word. Feel it, test it, explore it in your body. See what rings true and what feels false. You have to wrestle with phrasing and rhythm, register, momentum. You practice being emotionally available and sensitive to each word, listen for how it wants to live. The characters aren't just people you read but roles you step into. You practice seeing and feeling from their point of view. It's more like being the author than being a reader. It's a very slow, rich way to experience a text, and make it a part of you. If you love a book, it's a way to get closer to it. And when you step into it, you can draw new things out of it. And because of that I propose that it's a kind of close reading, a kind of exegesis. By slowly tracing your emotional and physical experience of the text, and probing them with your own creative powers and necessities, you can find all kinds of things that you otherwise might miss. For example: You can't skip a sentence you don't understand. This happened to me in the passage of To the Lighthouse I've been working with. I know you are reading in a couple of weeks so you don't know who any of these people are. But we've got Lily Briscoe outside looking at a tree. In her mind she is comparing two men, Mr. Ramsay and Mr. Bankes. On one hand Ramsay is petty, vain, a tyrant -- on the other he loves dogs, has eight kids. And then she thinks: > Did he not come down in two coats the other night and let Mrs. Ramsay trim his hair into a pudding basin? Ok, weird detail, unsure what it's supposed to say about him. If I were just reading, I might pause a moment, scrunch my brow a little, and keep going. Maybe it was a reference I missed, or maybe it will become clear. In any case, I get the gist of the it, the detail may isn't important. We let so many sentences pass us by like this. But when I have to figure out how to sing it, I get really stuck on a sentence like this. One possibility is that it's not so important. Maybe it's just one more an item in a list, and the list is kind of long already, and so maybe I should push through to get to the point. To do it this way I would stay close to spoken rhythm and tone, like this. > Did he not come down in two coats the other night and let Mrs. Ramsay trim his hair into a pudding basin? But it doesn't feel right. It fails some kind of emotional acid test in me. It doesn't feel true. I don't know why I'm singing it. It just feels long and unmusical and unnecessary. So I have to keep digging. What does Lily feel about this image? Why this vision, now? Well, she's comparing Mr. Ramsay, with many faults but a family, with Mr. Bankes, with many fewer faults to Lily's taste, but without a family, without children, without a wife to cut his hair. By holding them up against each other, Lily becomes aware of this absence. I think in this vision of Mr. Ramsay's haircut she is feeling Mr. Bankes' aloneness acutely. And there's one word that felt odd in here. I didn't understand the word 'let'. "Did he not come down in two coats the other night and **let** Mrs. Ramsay trim his hair into a pudding basin?" As if the privilege or pleasure here was Mrs. Ramsay *getting* to cut his hair. Do you think Mrs. Ramsay actually felt it was a privilege or a pleasure to cut her husbands hair? No, that is Lily's feeling. She may not even be conscious of it herself, but in this one word she reveals to us that she would like to give a haircut. It's the first surge of her heart out to to Mr. Bankes; she feels that he is lacking someone to cut his hair, and this may be the first moment she pictures how nice cutting hair might be. But no spoilers. So a sentence I skipped over when I was reading actually turns out to be a pivotal moment in the book. So this is a moment, in my reading, where the text shifts register from prose to lyric. Prose wants come out close to spoken rhythm and text, and the tones need to be patterned so they can shift to the background and the words came come forward. For example, this passage: > All of this danced up and down, like a company of gnats, each separate but all marvellously controlled in an invisible elastic net It's more important that all those words hang together, and get to a point. If you stretched it out it would fall apart. But text with more emotional gravity dilates time. This is the musical general theory of relativity. In music, text with more emotional gravity dilates time. When feeling deepens, music expands, time slows down. So I set the words ascending, as if she's walking to the top of a mountain, and at the top she gets the full view, her vision, a beautiful pudding basin full of love. > Did he not come down in two coats the other night and let Mrs. Ramsay trim his hair into a pudding basin? And here she is picturing how nice that must be. Thank you for listening. Here's a paragraph from *To the Lighthouse.* ## Long Draft Our proposition for you is you should try singing what you read. Books are obviously for reading but reading is really just the tip of the iceberg of things you can do with a book. As you know from writing papers, you get more out of a book if you invent a task that makes you wrestle with it. You have to add friction or else it might not leave much residue behind - it might just pass through, and float away. Deleuze observed that "creation takes place in [[Bottlenecks]]... A creator’s someone who creates their own impossibilities, and thereby creates possibilities. It’s by banging your head on the wall that you find a way through." I normally read in 2d, this is 1d I want to propose that there's a special wall to bang your head on. And that's trying to figure out how you would sing a text. And I propose that it's kind of close reading. It's more than presentation, it's more than interpretation. You really learn new things when you do it, so it's a kind of exegesis. Except the hermeneutic layer we're attempting to trace and draw out isn't moral or allegorical or mystical, but something else. It's subtle, relational, limbic, it's about vibratory responsiveness of our own bodies. You draw new things out of the text, and you have a new way to experience and inhabit the text. If you love some language, it's a way to get closer. I picture us like an instrument in the scientific sense. Like a seismograph. Testing and tracing our own response to the text, slowly, word by word, in our bodies. We test out many different ways to feel each phrase - rising or falling, transitional or destinational, how does the rhythm lie across a meter, how does it motivate travel up and down through a mode. It puts you on another time scale. It slows you down closer to the speed of the author writing the text. We may not enter the author's mind, but it's like we're riding sidecar and can peek over their shoulder as they work. Because they too slowly wrestled with the music of each word. It's something like being Pierre Menard in that Borges story. You know this one? It's about an author who tries to write Don Quixote, again, word for word, but without copying, as if for the first time. So that's the first thing - the speed of the experience of the text is slowed way down, and you feel your way into it more like the author did. And when the author puts you in the mind of a character, then you're also in their consciousness, in real time. And so of course Virginia Woolf is an amazing author to do this with, because she is doing that constantly. And when you're trying to inhabit a character when you sing, there's this acid test happening continuously as you feel your way from word to word. You need it to feel right. What does that mean? Who knows. But that's not a small thing, that's a big, big, mysterious, complex thing, we just don't have much verbal access to it. But singing a text is not arbitrary. When you feel your way through the words with your voice, it's not clear what the right way to sing each one is, and everyone is going to do it differently, but it's very clear when you do it wrong. When you sing a word the wrong way, it just feels false. You can't emotionally connect with it, it feels forced or melodramatic, or just dead. There's no resonance, no responsiveness. So working out a way to sing a text forces you to test different emotional experiences of each word and phrase, and find the note that feels true. You find it, you rehearse it, and that sequence of emotions fuses with the text for you. A kind of emotional memory palace. It's hard not to memorize the text and bond with it in a deep way. We've all read a lot of books but when we look back over our library the ones that stand out like stars to us are the ones we've explored in music. If you love a book, it's a way to get closer. A third thing that happens is that you can't skip a sentence you don't understand. That's living in the bottleneck. For example, in my bit of Virginia Woolf, Lily Briscoe is listing the qualities of Mr. Ramsay. He's petty, vain, loves dogs, has eight kids. And then she thinks: > Did he not come down in two coats the other night and let Mrs. Ramsay trim his hair into a pudding basin? Ok, weird detail, unsure what it's doing here. If I were just reading, I'd maybe furrow my brow a smidge and keep going. Maybe it was a reference I missed, or maybe it will become clear. In any case, it's probably not important. We let so many sentences pass us by like this. But when I have to sing it, I get really stuck on a sentence like this. I had to come back to it a few times to get it right. One possibility is that it's not important. Maybe it's just one more an item in a list, and the list is kind of cascading and so maybe I should push through to get to the point. To do it this way I would stay close to spoken rhythm and tone, like this. > Did he not come down in two coats the other night and let Mrs. Ramsay trim his hair into a pudding basin? But it's failing the acid test in me. I don't know why I'm singing it. It just feels long and unmusical and unnecessary when I do it this way. So I have to keep digging. What does Lily feel about this image? Why this vision, now? Well, she's comparing Mr. Ramsay, with many faults but a family, with Mr. Bankes, who is an older man, with many fewer faults to Lily's taste, but without a family, without children, without a wife to cut his hair. By analogy Lily must be feeling this absence. I think in this vision of the haircut she is feeling Mr. Bankes aloneness acutely. And there's one word in here that unlocked it for me. At first I thought it was just an odd choice. The word is 'let'. "Did he not come down in two coats the other night and **let** Mrs. Ramsay trim his hair into a pudding basin?" As if the privilege here was Mrs. Ramsay *getting* to cut his hair. Do you think Mrs. Ramsay actually felt it was a privilege or a pleasure to cut her husbands hair? No, that is Lily's feeling. She may not even be conscious of it herself, but in this one word she reveals to us that she would like to give a haircut. It's the first surge of her heart out to to Mr. Bankes; she feels that he is lacking someone to cut his hair, and this may be the first moment she pictures herself as that person. No spoilers. So a sentence I skipped over when I was reading actually turns out to be full of love. Lily may not even be conscious of it, but this detail betrays it. So this is a moment, in my reading, where the text shifts register from prose to lyric. This is up and down for me when I'm setting text. That's the color spectrum. Prose on one side and lyric on the other. Prose wants come out close to spoken rhythm and text, and the tones need to be patterned so they can shift to the background and the words came come forward. For example, this passage: > All of this danced up and down, like a company of gnats, each separate but all marvellously controlled in an invisible elastic net It's more important that all those words hang together, and get to a point. If you stretched it out it would fall apart. But text with more emotional weight dilates time. The melody wants to do more work, carry more feeling. > Did he not come down in two coats the other night and let Mrs. Ramsay trim his hair into a pudding basin? And here she is picturing how nice that must be. Thank you for listening. Here's a paragraph from *To the Lighthouse.*