DAVID GRUNDY

On Musical Objects

“what light / is in the world around them”

Prelude

(a)

Because the sun climbed high enough in the sky for me to write

Because the sun sank and drank deeply of the sea

Because the sun sang

Because the song stung

Because the climb was steep

Because the mountain magmatic 
Rebuilds itself and explodes
And rebuilds itself and explodes:

Slowly, slowly

And every time you speak, 
You rebuild the ruin: 

Magmatically,
Brick by brick;

You tear it down, 
Brick by brick 

You build it up, 
Brick by brick, 

Brick by brick 
By brick by brick

(b)

     And we were wandering among the objects, wondering about them, banging into the gathering apparitions around us and asking if their weight and counterweight would be enough to build a new beginning. Everything we saw we became. 

     It’s not about possession and it’s not about use. It’s something else. 

     It’s what resists. 

     It’s the material shape of air.

     It’s the blinking of the eye, the splitting of the second or the atom or the damage and the metamorphosis and the voice down the other end of the line that whispers to a shattering roar. 

     It’s the song as a rock, as a stone or brick, the melody as granite; the gravitational pull of sound as a whole and the counter-earth it anchors us to, or leaves us floating down away from, in the infinite and expanding distance of something within these words we can never grasp.

     You don’t call it the soul, but it’s that which is indefinably and by definition without limit— social, historical, collective; zone of struggle, zone of resistance, constricted, clandestine; and what’s outside that zone, its sign.

     When the war ends. When the struggle continues.

     Not perfect but a set of qualities of a harmony, a plastic grace provoking the idea of an undamaged truth, a rare bird, emerging from hiding, what flows from the tongue, birds who flew away then rested in the midst of the rifles, the common places repeated in the words of those who survive, who remember, who chorus, who get it together, who resurrect.

     Yes there’s an inside and an outside and the divisions get swapped over and messed up and who knows how to measure that which is without measure, without breadth or dimension known in the cresting peak to which we wade way out, rise to the occasion, sink or swim, and on the horizon of the text begin to speak...

1.

     The seasons fall out in their ordained and ordered pattern and “we” observe them and live them and live in them and through them mark in passing the occasions of our additions and losses, our passings and partings that make incisions in the weave. 

     We sing them. We sigh. But our songs are old, and used up, or new, and impossible to describe, and in that gap resides at once all void and all possibility it seems.

     Comme il faut. The harmonic series. The ordering strain.

     In between the cracks microtonal bends the note away. Strain to hear in order you can’t. Inhabiting the plural.

     A leaf falls from the tree. There’s a light dew rising, morning sun, barbed wire, grass, sea. Droplets drying from a statue, memory’s fading, dead grip. 

     This is the view constitutes the horizon of knowledge, the literal horizon, geography, the West, what’s left, congealed heinous mass. 

     Land and sky are never seen at the same time.

     How much does it cost to go on the Symphony of the Seas.

2.

     Out of openings in the planet’s crust emerge toxic emissions, breathed as a poison a seeping light that heals; the magma of language and the ash left by the explosion whose precise originating moment can be pinpointed only in scattershot impression, mistaken and layered. 

     The crater things leave when they pass, when they crash and burn and fall.

     Neither in silence nor in suicide nor in noise, what was living becomes an object that mouth to mouth the poem resuscitates just barely there: held flicker of a lamp, last-gasp candle flame, ashen impression, waxen remains.

     Silent the language that surrounds, the only homeland, no nation but a place, no place but the recall of interlinking tendrils, the treachery of flowers, the refusal of those barbed wires that curl otherwise in parody of a vegetative surround—

     That gap again.

     To maintain a distance, hit by time like a train.

3.

Frederic Rzewski died last week at Eighty-Three.

Variations unite and split.

The prison is still in front of us.

Brick by brick.

4.

     Collobert talks about a poetry filled with strained sounds—dislocated—silence without silence. Where the always-already said comes up against what cannot or has not yet been said; where resistance—perhaps—resists with meaning / —or unexpected music. In this formulation, it’s as if music itself were antithetical or in tangential relating to meaning per se, as if resistance took these two forms, of meaning and of musical non-meaning, in order to exceed them.

     So to realize the continuing possibility of music in that which would appear to destroy it: the anarchy of music as played by children, as hummed between the teeth, mangling the tune:

—that music’s possibility continues in noise; impossible, poly-rhythmic destruction of the beat, microtonal explosion of the tempered, temporal scale; 

—that the modes of music through which we hear and sound the elsewhere are at the same time the thanatotic glue and the regulated beat of being, its ontological disguise as basic as 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4 (someone’s idea of a fix, of a fictive, originary base); 

—that melody’s annihilative fidelity to its own self-abolition gets shelved for the simpler, more immediate task of surviving the ceaseless ringing that erases hearing—surviving and sounding, testing the depths.

5.

     The moment music contains beyond itself and the conditions we’re in.

     Recording roving percussion for real wind revealing.

     Precussion.

     Precision of the wound and its treatment.

    Closed lips on the statue’s face, as too our silent mouths form around whole rooms, wounds, voids, clacking, clicking, bruised broken and split. In eclipse everything is erased, the brilliant apparatus evaporates. Eye shape sky, mutely we cry out in what light the clouds provide. Time scraped and bruised, bruised broken and split, silent and resigned. 

     But the clouds, the moving lips.  
     The sky doesn’t tremble forever.
     The plot thickens.
     Bloom in monumental ruin: a voice heaped up, buried, built over.
     Brick by brick.

    Language undetermined, a threshold thrashed out: marker of absence, present void, incessant, intercessing. A voice escaping still.

David Grundy is a poet and scholar. He is the author of the critical books A Black Arts Poetry Machine: Amiri Baraka and the Umbra Poets (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Never by Itself Alone: Queer Poetry in Boston and San Francisco, 1944–Present (Oxford University Press, 2024); A True Account (The 87 Press, 2023), a book of poetry; and Present Continuous (Pamenar Press, 2022), a book of lyric essays; and co-editor, with Lauri Scheyer, of Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton (Wesleyan University Press, 2023). He co-runs the small press Materials/Materialien.