Let's begin with a radical proposition: what if everything was subject to one of Wittgenstein's language games? When I say 'language games,' I mean the notion that words gain meaning because of how they're used and the unspoken rules that inform a situation.
When I say 'language games,' I'm not just talking about code switching. I'm not just talking about sociolects, dialects, or jargon. I'm talking about the 'language' of a job interview, the 'rules of the road,' the strangeness of a Waffle House, the 'unspoken rules' of baseball, typing 'lol' when you didn't actually laugh out loud. I'm talking about the spaces whose meaning hasn't been tied down by consensus — that are still 'contested,' and are still therefore vectors of freedom.
So what happens when we take this view of language games and cross it with Rimbaud's visionary poetics?
By Rimbaud's visionary poetics, I'm referring to the idea from his Lettre du voyant — the Letter of the Seer — in which he claims the poet must undergo a "long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses." The poet becomes a criminal, an invalid, a mystic, even a scientist — not to capture truth but to attain the unknown. Even if the poet burns out mid-flight, others can begin where they left off. The point is not to stabilize meaning but to stretch its horizon.
Thus emerges something of a cycle: Rimbaud systematically disorganizes language while Wittgenstein — this version of Wittgenstein, at least — seeks to turn it into something of a game. Something explodes, and within, new rules emerge. "Literature is like that," the great Argentine writer Julio Cortázar told The Paris Review. "It's a game, but it's a game one can put one's life into."
It's hard not to think of all this when listening to Bob Dylan. "As the 1960s rolled on," Timothy Hampton wrote in Bob Dylan: How The Songs Work, "Dylan's singing would begin to hover about the musical accompaniment, as if he were singing, not a melody, but some abstracted version of a melody that the listener could seek to reconstruct through the interplay of instrument and voice."
(Think of how Dylan's singing is characterized here and how Al Pacino would later go on to deliver some of his lines in Heat.)
A garrulous, Rimbaud-like intuition pushes Dylan towards a new world of emergent patterns and language games. Put another way: Dylan doesn't just seek a predictable melody when he sings; he seeks 'a complete unknown.'
The rhythm and performance structure come first, and the language fills in the spaces. Those who perceive specific symbolic references in Dylan's songs (this stands for that) are almost always barking up the wrong tree — they assume that discovered meaning must necessarily have been encoded by conscious intellect.
— Paul Williams
And this is how we start to read sound like a writer. When we hear the opening, rolling sounds of John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, we 'hear' a sunrise. When we hear the opening notes of Hot Chip's cover of "Dancing in the Dark," we can see a modern metropolis skyline start to rotate and tilt. When we hear John Fahey, we hear cicadas and Christmas. When we hear Leo Kottke or Doc Watson, we hear the earth.