Would that I could explain why I got obsessed with the idea of “instrumental writing” the other week, but alas, it defies logical description. The idea appeared in my head as a question — literally, “what does the writing version of instrumental music look like?” — and then just… stayed.
My first thought was that the answer wasn’t writing at all, but abstract visual art; that there’s no such thing as instrumental writing, because the joy of instrumental music was that it was something you felt but couldn’t fully explain, even if you understood it. By virtue of the way writing works, I figured, anything you read automatically has some level of explanation and specificity that instrumental music manages to avoid. Just the use of language at all surely presents some context that is otherwise entirely absent in music with no lyrics, right…?
Then, of course, my brain went to a place of, “Well, what if there was writing that was nonsensical and entirely context-free? Could that work?” Admittedly, I don’t have the clearest idea of what this would actually look like in practice — I imagined mash-ups of purple prose that looked like something we imagined robots would do in the ’90s if exposed to too much Bill Mantlo or Don McGregor, but that wasn’t it — so obviously that clearly wasn’t the answer, either.
Perhaps the true answer that isn’t simply, it doesn’t and cannot exist, lame-o, is that instrumental writing is something that doesn’t start or end. A stream of consciousness that the reader can drop into and back out, and exist inside that space for as long as they want. Writing that doesn’t exist for the reader, but instead for the author, and just exists to be interacted with or not, as the case may be.
But where would someone find something like that?