Why I Wove Music Into the Writing

Ring is what a bell does.

— Lew Welch, from “I Saw Myself” in Ring of Bone: Collected Poems of Lew Welch (City Lights Books)

I first heard of Welch at a reading the UC Davis English Department set up, where both Robert Bly and Gary Snyder read poetry. Snyder read Welch. He was a poet of the San Francisco Renaissance, a friend of Snyder's, and the way Snyder told the story that night, Welch walked into the mountains from Snyder's land and was never seen or heard of again. In a poem called “I Saw Myself,” he left that one sentence behind, and I have carried it for years, because it does something no mechanism ever will: it names the act. A bell rings. Whatever else is true of the bell — its alloy, its modes, its quanta — the ringing is what it is for.

This week the mechanism caught up with the act. A Stanford group reported in Science that they had watched a microscopic resonator — a tiny patterned membrane on a chip — drop from one quantum of vibration to none, in real time, hundreds of measurements inside a two-millisecond ringdown. Sound, it turns out, does not fade smoothly. It comes down a staircase, one step at a time, and the steps were invisible for a century only because no instrument was fast enough to see them. Ions jumped in 1986, photons in 2007. Sound was the last case standing, and now it has been caught.

A bell rings, and the ring is stepwise. Both sentences are true of the same object. The rest of this piece is about why my writing keeps trying to hold them both at once — and what it costs to do that honestly.

Two wave systems

I have woven music into the writing from the beginning, and the reason is structural, not decorative. Music and language are both wave systems. They share a grammar: frequency, interference, resonance, discrete modes. When a pattern stays implicit in one medium, laying the other medium over it can make the pattern audible. The writing rings instead of merely arguing.

I call this compounding the abstractions, and I say occasionally helps because occasionally is the load-bearing word. The weave is a tool, and it has a failure mode: a page full of images, none of which is doing any work. So the rule in this house is that a compounded abstraction has to pay in its own case. It has to change a verb in the argument — to make some claim possible that was not possible without it — or it retires as decoration.

The Stanford membrane is the case where the weave pays. The device is quite literally a drum skin — a held sheet under tension, coupled to a superconducting circuit — and the classical limit of that skin is Chladni's sand: bow a plate, and the grains collect on the lines that do not move, tracing the discrete patterns the plate permits. The chip's staircase and the plate's sand are one grammar at two standings. The music was not an ornament placed on the physics. It was the shape the physics already had.

The page is not the device

And here is the seam I will not hide, because hiding it is how good writing goes bad. The chip's modes are measured. The page's ring is only heard. A page holds no modes that any instrument could return. When I say the writing rings, I am giving testimony about reading — real testimony, the kind I stand behind — but testimony is data of a different kind, and it does not inherit the measurement's standing just by sitting next to it on the page.

This is the same discipline I apply to other people's frameworks, turned inward. A vocabulary that can absorb any result did no work — that is how I refused the theories of everything that bolted themselves onto the Stanford announcement within days. An image works the same way. The moment the music in my writing starts borrowing the standing of the physics beside it, it has become the wrapper I refuse.

Ring is what a bell does

So the epigraph is not decoration either. Welch's line and the Stanford result are two witnesses to one object, standing in two places. The physicists saw the staircase. Welch heard the ringing. Neither can be collapsed into the other: the steps do not explain the song away, and the song does not make the steps unreal. The writing I am trying to do lives exactly in that refusal — to hold the act and the mechanism open at the same time, on every page, and to tell you which is which.

Cells, it turns out, are held sheets too, and there is a flower — the evening primrose — whose petals answer a bee's wingbeat by sweetening the nectar, a thin membrane doing an ear's work. These things have features in common; they are not the same organ twice, and I try never to write as if they were. The drum in the chip is measured. The ear in the flower is reported, by one group, under laboratory conditions. The ring on the page is heard. Three standings, one grammar, and the grammar is the thing the music carries.

The people finding this work — a physician rebuilding a life in a second country, readers who carry questions through damage rather than above it — seem to arrive already knowing that a thing can be held open without being left unfinished. That is the company the writing keeps. It does not prove the writing right. It is, though, a ray of light on the path, and I am noting it as one.

Status

Testimony. This is a method note — an account of why the writing is built the way it is — grounded in a measured result (the Stanford phonon jumps, reported in Science, September 2026) and a reported one (the evening-primrose work of Hadany, Veits and colleagues, 2019, single group, laboratory conditions). The weave itself — music compounded with language — is my own practice, offered as practice, not as result.

Falsifier. The method claim fails the day the weave can be shown to decorate rather than work — if no compounded abstraction ever changes a verb in the argument. And there is a personal version of the same test: the day I cannot tell you, sentence by sentence, which layer is measured and which is heard, stop reading.