The text and the lyric: the static and the fluid

When we write and when what we write is read there is a subtle shift. When the reading happens, what we have written comes across as a stated truth. Texts, just by the means of ink on paper or pixels on screen, have a ring of the absolute about them. The hooks that we have in our speech, the hooks that allow the questions to seem as if they are not complete without at least a tentative response, appear via sound through our reading of the question. The process that operates is something like this: things are written, they are read, in the reading the exposed hooks are recovered, the responses are then formulated and they are posted. This might suggest that texts get completed only when they are read. Unread texts are like undetonated bombs.

But there is a middle path, there is a form of text that is the lyric which is written the way it is read. The written word is no longer just the written word but is the word read aloud as well. For us, the post is the lyric. The post is the sound and text intertwined. When the sound and text get intertwined, the text jumps from its designated place (either on screen or on paper) and gets animated. Reading in this environment becomes a skill that is able to track this animation. In the midst of the text's curved motion, the reader is able to constantly track its motion.

The reader can read the melody that accompanies the text's coming into the world. When this melody is read, the space within which sound is imagined is used. Sound is first an abstract and then a material. Our mathematical brains simulate and complete melodies before they are actually completed. These predictive scores are, more often than not, wrong. The predictive scores just become a parallel track to the actual melody and because it is produced by us and not by the author, it has a higher degree of proximity and trust for us.

We experience fluidity with the lyric because of the predictive score which we feel is our own creation. We feel stasis when we lost in the actual melody, struggling to find the pattern of harmony within it. So the lyric allows us to feel the static and the fluid at the same time. But the lyric is not easy to evoke. For the lyric’s reality depends equally on the ability of being read. And so no lyric is realised at birth, it is realised only on being read. While it lies unread, it lies in wait. And there is no formula for a lyric that is lying in wait to be found. There are lyrics lying unread under each rock in the landscape. This takes away from the rarified pleasure and exotica that lyrics are traditionally presented with.

Solving the processes of production is all well and good, but till the process through which new lyrics can actually be found spontaneously, till then the cycle cannot be deemed complete. The output has to feed the input in a naturalistic way that does not require the prevalence of gatekeepers and filter mechanisms for the perspective and the provenance of these can neither be known or configured. As long as these are variables configured by the environment, we cannot (with any degree of certainty) claim to be responsible for seeking answers to our own questions.