“…how strange is it to be anything at all?”
This quote is a line from the 1998 album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by the indie rock band Neutral Milk Hotel. Aeroplane is a concept album that draws heavily from The Diary of Anne Frank as well as lead singer Jeff Mangum’s lucid dreams. The album uses extensive surrealist imagery as well as bizarre, eclectic instrumentation, making for a jarring but deeply fascinating experience. When I first listened to this album, I was taken aback as I had never heard anything quite like it and for the next few days, I scoured the internet, trying to learn all I could about this iconic recording.
However, this search stopped after I listened to a recording of a man who had spoken to Jeff Mangum. The man said that he ran into Jeff Mangum a few years ago and eagerly asked him about what the album is about, bringing up all the common interpretations that I mentioned earlier. According to the speaker, Mangum told him that the album is whatever the listener wants it to be and they are free to interpret it as they please.
I found this incident to be highly interesting. Aeroplane appears to have an extremely dense subtext that seemed obvious to me. But what if someone was unfamiliar with the mythology behind the album? What if someone had never read The Diary of Anne Frank? What would their interpretation of the album be? Some people might even detest it and think it to be pretentious, nonsensical noise. While my opinion leans towards the generally accepted interpretations of this album, there are bound to be people who interpret it in different ways.
That brings me to Everett, whose work reflects similar ideas. Re:f (gesture), features a number of poems written by Everett, such as Logic, Zulus and Body. In our past few classes, we all had numerous ideas about why Everett made the decisions that he did as well as the deeper subtext of these poems. However, I have reason to believe that Everett would find our interpretations very far from his original intent.
Everett has written that “It is incredible that a sentence is ever understood.” While this might sound ludicrous, we as readers can never know exactly what Everett was thinking when we wrote this. We can only guess and extrapolate from what he wrote but we can never be entirely sure. As far as we know, Everett could have just written down whatever fleeting thoughts were on his mind at the moment and had nothing else other than that.
That brings me back to the Neutral Milk Hotel line from earlier in my post. In a purely literal sense, Everett’s works are simply words on a page. It is absurd that we are creating meaning out of them, searching for things that might not be there. Here is where Magnum’s writing applies more than ever. It is both strange and beautiful that we as a class have been able to create these interpretations of Everett’s work. Yes, Everett might not always have thought of the ideas brought up in our class, but I think the ability to find things an author might not have intended is a wonderful, valuable thing that makes the study of literature as enduring as it is.