Essaying Like a Thinker

This editorial note was predetermined, or at least its title and subject were, when I, Pat, noticed Joey's editorial note titled “Thinking Like an Essayist” in Fourth Genre 26.1.It almost doesn't matter what I write about “essaying like a thinker” or whether this phrase suggests some “opposite” to “thinking like an essayist” or whether the phrases are more circularly complementary, or constructive, like the enigmatic 1985 R.E.M. album Fables of the Reconstruction; or is it Reconstruction of the Fables? Or Fables of the Reconstruction of the Fables . . . and on and on. The album design, with sibling orange-tinged collages front and back, features, on the burning-book side, a swath saying “fables of the,” and on the ear-box pendant side, “reconstruction of the,” so that you could flip the cardboard on its vertical axis and never resolve the phrase into a particular finite arrangement of words, let alone a particular finite meaning.This is possible because of the medium. The album cover genre (despite the fact that it's slit only on one side, which we tend to take as the “right” side) permits an unending circularity of phrasing. So does a vinyl record, which the Beatles took advantage of at the end of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, after “A Day in the Life”’s final E chord fades and the needle slides into a fully circular groove of almost two seconds of unmusical gibberish from which we can discern the phrasenever to see any other wayrepeated ad nauseam, ending only when we decide to end it by getting up and lifting the needle and removing the record back to its sleeve.Such infinite repetitions are impossible, or at least impractical, in the medium of prose (aside from the gimmicky recirculation of Finnegans Wake's opening “riverrun past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay,” but you've got to trudge through 600-plus pages of gibberish before the last sentence fragment—“a way a lone a last a loved a long the”—loops back into the first), though perhaps even in the pattern of text marching letter by letter, word by word, sentence by sentence from top left to bottom right, turn the page, begin the scan again, our ideas resolve (variably, idiosyncratically) only when we give up and stop the turning.R.E.M. didn't really have a hit single from Fables of the/Reconstruction of the, but across the years, “Driver 8” has emerged as the people's favorite. Though I'd not listened to it in many years, perhaps since my youth, I've recently heard it again, in a cover version by Toad the Wet Sprocket (and special guests from the Gin Blossoms and Vertical Horizon), and thus, for me, the song has performed a meaning shift that feels similar to the unresolvable album title. Given R.E.M.’s well-known refusal to print their lyrics on the sleeve, and Michael Stipe's well-known mumble, as well as his non-sequiturish lyrical style, I'd recorded a line in the second verse as The children look up all they hearThe sky-blue bells ringingWhich I understood forever as children going to the dictionary to learn the meanings of the words they heard, but which I now hear more clearly, with punctuation, as “the children look up; all they hear is sky-blue bells ringing.” This recent interpretation feels like the justifiably “right” one, especially given the line just prior about bells ringing through the town, and maybe the kids are in the “treehouse on the outskirts of a farm” that the song's speaker spies. But I don't know. I can't shake the image I've carried with me for nearly four decades, and so, even if I'm “wrong,” I subconsciously defiantly imagine those proactive curious kids turning pages at the library trying to figure out what their parents or teachers said.I guess what I'm saying, or one thing I'm saying, is that meaning is always subjective, always a function of where we arrive at when we hear or read these marvelous wordy vehicles of transference and transcendence. And maybe the best, the coolest, meanings are the unresolved ones, the ones that expand beyond any one thing, that refuse to reduce or pin things down, that resist or reject the notion that a particular finite meaning is even desirable, let alone attainable. This idea is nothing new, really. But maybe this essay has not only stated it but enacted and exemplified it as well. And if I were to make an overt connection to my stated objective, about essaying as a thinker, I'd point out that my method has been to chase the ideas that call to one another, that seem energized, or magnetized, that seem to want to hang out together, primarily because they cannot be corralled into service of some simplistic, exact notion. Essaying as a thinker is to navigate this hazy space without bedrock and not even desire it; it is to understand that the worst mindset is “never to see any other way,” and that, even from an unchanged and unchangeable arrangement of letters into words dancing across pages, meaning is expansive and malleable, circumstantial, by design, even thoughPatrick Madden & Joey Franklin