QC

There is a magic to song. It can take you over. You can be thrillingly in relationship to it. It can bring you closer to the divine - a vessel for spiritual growth and awakening.

Written poetry captures some but not all of the magic of song. There is an infinite loss in the inability to hear intonation, see gesture, etc. (which rap and spoken word reclaim!) but poetry written well has its own music.

And then there's prose. Fuck. Just look at it. All those words that, if sung, might have actually meant something - might have actually carried some divine spark - casually flung onto paper or a screen. A torrent of little corpses.

There are important things that are profoundly beyond the capacity of words to express. I am trying, and necessarily failing, to express one now. What do we do about this? Short of abandoning words for something else (tempting!), it seems to me that we can do this:

Write prose that sounds like poetry. Write poetry that sounds like song. And write song that sounds like...?

We can use words to point to the way out of words, into everything else. Rumi remix: out beyond ideas, there is a field. I'll meet you there?

Are you pessimistic about neuroscience being able to do this definitively in some eventual future? i.e., it giving us a recipe for guaranteeing that when I “say” “Concept”, we can both know that you’re grokking the same thing I am?