‘If I’m You, Who Are You?’: Music, Intimacy, and the Paradoxical Use of Language in Ciaran Carson's <i>For All We Know</i> (2008)

Ciaran Carson's work constantly navigates an apparently unbridgeable gap between what can be experienced and what can be explained. His definition of what ‘constitutes the instantly recognisable real thing’ within the traditional music community, for example, showcases instead how language is only equipped to handle such a question through tautology: ‘it is the real thing, or the thing itself’. This answer illustrates a significant element of Carson's approach to writing about music as it discards sequential representation through a circular understanding of syntax, implying a relationship with time removed from linear regulation where language appears as an inherently limited tool for expression. I use his 2008 collection For All We Know to illustrate this intersection between music, time, and language in terms of a triple failure that is not resolved but embraced. Essential to this analysis is French philosopher Henri Bergson's understanding of time as duration and intuition. By erasing the boundaries between past, present, and future, I offer a new perspective on intimacy in Carson's work as identity is constructed in the collection through the deletion of borders across multiple subjectivities and selves. Rather than analysing its literal musical elements, I argue language here has been destabilised in order to portray ineffability, creating a depiction of music via its absence, or silence. Words used to signify clear identitarian elements, like names and pronouns, are thus favoured in terms of character over content. Accordingly, I contend that Carson uses time's resistance to linguistic expression, music's rejection of extra-musical reality, and language's inability to capture, to suggest, rather than signify, the experience of music and time as a paradoxically unmeasurable yet concrete encounter.