Kishi Bashi’s “The Ballad of Mr. Steak” was the song my wife and I chose for our first dance at our wedding reception. The sprightly, uptempo track was the perfect intersection between my own Indie-Rock fandom and her more Top 40 sensibilities. What’s more, having not gotten married till our 30s^[1]Positively antediluvian by LDS standards—yet also increasingly common—but that must needs be a topic for another essay., we’d both grown tired of all the slow, maudlin, self-indulgent songs we’d sat through at so many other peoples’ receptions, so we decided to go for something bright, celebratory, and fun, such that maybe folks might actually enjoy themselves at a wedding for a change (and if my memories of friends and family all joining us on the dance floor are reliable, I think we succeeded).

The track itself features on Kishi Bashi’s excellent 2014 sophomore album Lighght–whose title in turn comes from the 1965 one-word poem of the same name by the American minimalist poet Aram Saroyan.^[2]Other one-word poems by Saroyan include “eyeye”, a four-legged “m” (the Guinness Book World Record holder for shortest poem), and “blod” (which someone once opined … Continue reading Seriously, the entire poem is just the one word:

Lighght

Intentionally misspelled, “Lighght” has remained controversial ever since it won a $750 cash prize from the NEA in 1966. The award immediately made the poem a cause célèbre among Republican congressmen seeking an excuse to attack and defund the National Endowment for the Arts; Ronald Reagan was still making snide comments about it over two decades later^[3]If only I could write a word that could cause such a long-lasting furor!. Yet even beyond mere political agendas, “Lighght” has been a lightning rod for those distrustful of postmodernism generally–Exhibit A for the collective failures of an art scene that purportedly rewards mere gimmicks and flash-in-the-pan novelty over actual skill and effort, and symptomatic of our larger economy that is largely guilty of the same.

Nevertheless, I still have some affection for “Lighght,” and not just because it gives the title to the album that my wife and I danced to at our wedding. For starters, just on an English major-y level, I appreciate how the word calls attention to the inherent absurdity of the English language in general; when Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) complained that that extra “gh” is unpronounceable, well, that first “gh” isn’t pronounceable either–nor does it make any more grammatical sense! Whenever someone complains that, say, “Lite Yogurt” is misspelled, well, if English were truly phonetic, isn’t that how “light” would be spelled to begin with?

But of course English isn’t phonetic at all: the phrase “Pacific Ocean,” for example, has 3 c’s that are each pronounced completely differently; “Mercedes-Benz” has 4 e’s that are each pronounced different; the suffix “-ough” makes a totally different sound depending on whether it starts with a t, th, or thr. We could go on. At this point, English is halfway to Chinese, wherein one must simply memorize what the character means, because there is literally no way to sound it out on your own. Spelling-wise, “Lighght” may not make grammatical sense, but then, neither did “Light” to begin with.^[4]These are all especially useful reminders when I’m teaching non-native English speakers in my college classrooms, by the way. As Ferdinand Saussure taught over a century ago, all of these symbols are inherently arbitrary—because that’s all words and letters are, symbols, and we have literally no other war of communicating with each other^[5]Something to bear in mind when someone complains that LDS ritual leans too heavily on symbolism—as opposed to what?. The assignation of the phoneme “/līt/”^[6]Per the International Phonetic Alphabet–which is also purely arbitrary. to the words “Lite,” “Light” and “Lighght” are all likewise entirely arbitrary.

However, the problem is not resolved if we shift over to actual phonetic languages, like Spanish, Portuguese, or Italian; the letter “J” for example does not inherently make the English “Jay” sound–which in Spanish is equivalent to the English “H”, while the Spanish “H” is silent. For that matter, not just in English but all languages, one must still memorize what the word signifies, which is not the thing itself. The word “fire” does not actually contain any fire; nor does the word “fuego” in Spanish. We could multiply examples.

Yet here’s the peculiar twist: the word “Lighght” does contain light—or at least, is mediated by the same! At least, that’s how you are reading it right now: the actual light projects off your laptop or phone screen–or it reflects off the page–and strikes your optic nerves, transmitting the information to your brain where your neurons reconfigure the information to form the word “Lighght.” Both those “gh”s may be silent and unpronounceable, but they are both still present and visible in the light reflecting off the text itself–just like all words are! If, as the Russian Formalist Viktor Schklovsky once argued, the function of art is to defamiliarize the familiar, then “Lighght” is art indeed, for how it makes our most quotidian words appear strange again.^[7]Perhaps the fact that Saroyan is of Armenian descent is here relevant: he makes English appear as strange to modern readers as it first appeared to his immigrant forebears. Such may also be why … Continue reading

One might here protest that these are all obvious thoughts–and they are–but like most things that should be obvious, none of this is obvious at all.^[8]Another thing I have to constantly remind my students. Cause I still recall the time on my mission when I asked this evangelical woman how she knew the Bible is true, in hopes of getting her to feel in the Book of Mormon the same Holy Spirit I assumed she also felt when she read the Holy Bible–only to be greeted by a blank stare, wherein all she could do was stammer that the Bible is true cause it’s the Word of God, and is the Word of God cause it’s true. The idea that there was something outside the text–that the Bible only matters because of the Holy Spirit it points towards, not from anything intrinsic to the text itself–had honestly never occurred to her.

But I don’t want to keep dog-piling on that poor woman, because we are no better if we do the same thing; the Book of Mormon is also only valuable, not for the words in and of themselves (which merely sit silently on the page, after all), but for the light those words point us towards. “This is the light of Christ,” reads Doctrine and Covenants 88:7-13, “As also he is in the sun, and the light of the sun, and the power thereof by which it was made […] Which light proceedeth forth from the presence of God to fill the immensity of space—The light which is in all things, which giveth life to all things, which is the law by which all things are governed, even the power of God who sitteth upon his throne, who is in the bosom of eternity, who is in the midst of all things.” Just as those hidden “gh”s are only visible in the light, so are all the hidden things only visible in the light of Christ, “For nothing is secret that will not be revealed, nor anything hidden that will not be known and come to light”^[9]Luke 8:17 KJV.

My toddler loves to turn on lights, by the way; each one he can reach, he flips with delight. And as for those light-switches that he can’t reach, he pulls me over by the hand and demands that I turn them on for him. He has no interest in dwelling in darkness; he wishes to be surrounded by light–and it is in these moments that I recall how we all must be “as little children,” and desire to sit in the light as well. For when I entitle this piece “a plea for lighght,” I don’t actually care if you like the one-word poem or not–I honestly couldn’t care less if you do or not, and I suspect neither could Aram Saroyan in his old age. No, it’s not the word itself I care about, but the light that reflects and produces it, that “is in all things, which giveth life to all things, which is the law by which all things are governed.” This is the light I hope you lay a-hold of. It was the same light that made my wife and I pick Kishi Bashi for our wedding music; it’s the same light that my toddler seeks and that my toddler is possessed by; it’s the same light that makes all the hidden things visible, and gives life to all things.