T. Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada
Dear JJJJJerome,
Love your work, hope you’re well.
Do you think music is a universal language? Do you think it’s more important to be heard, or understood? I worry that making music from my disabled/mad experience will distance others from me, but I also feel the need to put this pain somewhere.
J.E:
Dear T,
I hope you’re well. Thank you so much for your letter, for your kind words, for your questions. I’m carrying them with me today as I bike through the swamp at First Landing State Park in Virginia Beach (I’ve enclosed a photo from the park). My friend Claire recently gifted me Boat by poet Lisa Robertson. One of the book’s three epigraphs is by the linguist Émile Benveniste: “Far before it communicates, language is for living.” Her whole book, this epigraph included, helps me think about your questions. I like thinking about music as something for living, and living as something that doesn’t always need to be understood. An arrow wrapped in salt, fulsome, reversed into sorrow. I’ve wrestled with these questions for years, lost a lot of sleep over them. I often worry about not being understood in my music. I worry about the music becoming a dead letter. But sometimes I make music and share it with others, and they understand it in ways that I hadn’t. Maybe sometimes music must wait for its audience(s). And maybe music doesn’t always even need to be heard or otherwise experienced by the body. Vessels, that speak when struck with felt mallets, claying inward, color of the palms lifting them, skying away.
I don’t know if music is a universal language. I’m curious what you think? I’ll keep thinking about this.
I love this line from Boat: “Here voice is not inst rument but topology”
I also love this line from Boat: “What can a sentence do besid es give more time to ideas?” I like thinking of music too as something that can give more time to ideas, including ideas that don’t need to be expressed with words. Music can give time.
Another Boat line I love: “I think of a sentence and it di sappears into the landscape.” That song may soar above the mountain, and stay there.
I would love to hear your music. If you’d like to send any, please do. You can find me through Instagram.
Warmest,
JJJJJerome
