SPIRALING
Sometimes, my ears ring at slightly lower frequencies than normal, usually after something funny I’ve thought or said. I don’t mean “funny” like a joke, more like “funny” as in “unexpected”. Out of the blue. Fortuitous. For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by synonyms. For about the same amount of time, I’ve had tinnitus. I used to tell people that I read thesauruses as a kid for fun. Truthfully, I can’t really remember if I did that or not. I mean, it certainly sounds like something I would do; I remember stumbling across an online index for literary devices when I was in middle school working on some English assignment, pouring over each and every entry— it was as if I could literally feel my mind expanding. I wonder if my ears were still ringing way back then. I can’t remember that, either.
I think that the literary device I’m inclined to use most often is repetition. As a songwriter, you learn that repetition is everything when it comes to music: tracing the curve of a rising and falling melodyline; spiraling deeper and deeper into the pulse of a song. But just as important as repetition is the deviation from it: you have to be willing to follow the music wherever it leads you— even if it’s unexpected or doesn't make much sense.
I saw an interview that Stephen King did a while ago about his creative process: “I had no idea that Tad was gonna die,” he said in reference to one of his characters, “and I had no idea that Danny and his mother were going to live. But I was really glad when they did.” My own creative “process”, if you can even call it that, works much the same way: as far as I’m concerned, it isn't my job to know where the story’s headed— I only need to tell it.
The thing I like most about synonyms is that they are all hinting at the same underlying translation. If you’re anything like me in that you’re prone to going down the Synonym Rabbit Hole anytime you write a paper, however, you’ll find that sometimes, you can end up with a so-called “synonym” that hardly resembles your original word at all— but that perfectly captures the desired sentiment. It isn't really even a synonym so much as it is a mutation of meaning: as you click from word to word, honing in on nuance, the definitions become sharper (focused, more pointed). Sometimes, it’s beautifully seamless, like a color gradient. Other times, you get stuck in a loop: mutation like evolution like expansion like development like expansion, and so on. Should my Synonym Rabbit Hole fail to do the trick, my next move is usually to turn to cadence.
In my head, I’m often able to audiate a word’s inflection long before I can recall the word itself. A few minutes ago, I wanted a word that meant something like “sinking”, but that had the same inflection as the word “elephant”. Because of its placement in the sentence, I knew that it had to end with the suffix -ing. Elephant. Da-dad-ing. Spiraling.
My ears ring relentlessly right around 7300 Heartz— which is pretty high, in case you don’t know much about frequency ranges. My right ear whines significantly louder than my left from all my years of listening to loud music with only one earbud in, but at any given moment, the pitch between the two is the same. I’ve come to notice, though, that a lower note will decide to chime in every so often, disrupting my train of thought in one tone or another. At first, I chalked it up to nothing more than bad biology, circumstance. Eventually, as humans are so inclined to do, I began to notice a pattern: it seemed to me that my ears would only ring at these lower frequencies whenever I thought or said something funny.
“Now I really want to kill myself,” you said from the other end of the room, listening to the same few measures of music over and over again.
“No, you don’t,” I reminded you.
“You’re right; I don’t. I was just using hyperbole.”
“Be careful what you hyperbolize,” I cautioned— and then my right ear started pealing just a tad bit lower than normal.