.png)
 |
| Phillip Lentsch Class of 2018 |
I read somewhere that writing is the mathematics of music and realized that maybe calculus isn’t so bad.
People tell me I talk like I write. That the overlap is evident, the resemblance is uncanny. If I had to guess, it probably has something to do with my obsessive journaling of the world around me, the cacophony of short story symphonies that I scribble away in composition notebooks never to be seen. Maybe it’s the hipster aesthetic and my love of chai tea. Maybe it’s the poetry. My words are whirlwinds but I am the tsunami; I am the wonderer left wandering, the artist of the loose-leaf canvas, the spastic reggae beat that building to the 1-2-3.
Lately I’ve been thinking about writing and musicality. Like writing a blog post riddled with metaphors and similes. You don’t know what I’m talking about but you still read. The words flow like grammatical streams. Linguistic linguini with just enough parmesan cheese.
Let me personify it for you folks that would rather take things more literally. I have a friend named Jared Thomas who puts it just beautifully.
“Everything has a rhythm Phil.” Truth-speaking Jared, about to hit me with some verity.
He told me, under the blue light strobes, filling the in-between gaps of the synth, the philosophy of the pen I have always lived by. We spoke of it in almost reverential tones, a hush-hush of a whisper, acting as if we’d just discovered the first batch of Sacramento serendipity in gold rush heaven.
“You wanna know why writing is important? Because it’s all about the cadence. It’s all about the rhyme scheme that matches the very core of our being, the fact that we operate to the sound of a drumbeat beneath our chests, how Ralph Waldo once said to always trust thyself, every heart vibrates to that iron string. We are musical just by existing, by living.”
That’s what I loved about music – the social fabric I’d sewn for my college years revolved around it. Music brings us together more than church, more than language, more than race, more than skin tone, more than money, more than our undergraduate majors, more than pheromones, more than testosterone. We drive with music on, talk with it on in the background, play it before we sleep and when we wake up, step to it when we cook, dance to it at the club, bop to it when we rhyme, slouch to it when we read, feel it when we write, cry to it in bad times, jam to the downright frostbite of the spotlight when we grip the mic tight and shine bright in the moonlight. Music is therapy. Music is a way of life to me. Language is music but music isn’t necessarily language. It’s so much more – it’s when the scales of our goosebumps chill our skin when the bass drops, when the guitar strums, when Aretha reaches those high notes, when we feel the tempo bounce and pulse to the thunder in our bones. I’d take being blind over being deaf every day of the week – the world starts to look the same after a while. But we always hear it differently.
Wherever I end up, I will always bleed ink. I don’t care about the ego I construct or some fancy degree. I am a journalist in every sense of the word, in search of life on the horizon. I have the gift of gab twitching at my fingertips, and I will make music on the page smooth as House on the Rising Sun.
Phillip Lentsch, of Louisville, Ky., is a senior McConnell Scholar studying political science, communications, and psychology.