If You Are What I Left Out, and Other Types of Paradoxical Crossword Puzzles

    2012 produced a fairly strange and mostly obscure anime series called K. Its reception was generally mixed, and although I like it quite a bit most of its value rests on its aesthetics -- stylish art, likable-if-flat characters, and (most importantly) a truly phenomenal score. Endo Mikio is not exactly a well-known composer -- K is basically the only notable thing he's done -- but the sound of K's score is super distinct and remains a go-to playlist when I need inspiration to think creatively. It's good "writing" music.
    Most of K's score is instrumental, using primarily strings, piano, and light percussion, but there's one track within it that stands out as particularly unique. The piece, called "Yata MisaKi," would probably be classified as a rap, although I feel that genre to be somewhat of a poor descriptor. It's almost more like a spoken word poem, or perhaps a beat poem. It lacks the structure and driving rhythm rap tends to have, and the music serves as more of a tonal background for the words than as a true foundation for the piece. The poetry of the work comes out even written down on the page, though, and it's quite evocative if nothing else. I've provided the lyrics here for you to read:

Yata MisaKi
Endo Mikio

A long day's night training
Shou toll plumber pasta bowl
Incognito shimedgy fortinero, shibby da
Sword genkai gamera brain
Wielding trucks, decks
Switching and grinding

The tourists with the digi and a camera flash
Higashi
Crisp roasted garlic bread breath
Slaw limmer bomb hills

Riding the sneaks, he sneakers
The ramps and empty pools
This looks like a blunt wielding,
Speedy and chest bamboo
Café smoking papers

Bunker buster buster bonk headbutt
Stone, silly, stupid, brown and cupid
I'll rush in kitchen stadium puppets
Human daisha michibata shimagaki wax
Makita whack chasers.

Conscientious deserter
Chocolatey smooth grip
Java street script
With sunny side banana split
Your best necks like guitars that use
Diffuse, stro molotov cocktails
Against the agnostic atheists, we are trying to save the whales.

AHABS, that mitt, black dragon
Emerald Lieutenant, predator vests
Fashion, liquid mercury
Surf on concrete

Terminating Monday hangovers with rice spirits and ceramic bearings
For all your Mabus
The wild fang pitching the two seamless
MARS VENUS
NINJA SPACE
Judo brats leaving a strange look in your face

Don't break me, that's years of bad luck
Stuffed porcelain pork
That's what hammers are for
5-6, 360 back to dog's town
The dragon's dungeon, plungin'
If you are what I left out

And other types of paradoxical crossword puzzles
Scramble the backsides of the one God's fee I trust
Cross-eyed, tongue bow-tied, moth balls for raw kiss
Skid marks all over the walls
Street paper maché
Ash trays made from college degrees trying to be free

Don't get me wrong I bong bost the foot clan too
That's emperor's English

Street dodger, dunking dog-catcher nets
Knowledge distiller du vais villa
Season, fabulous Idaho
How she can see lazy boy forget chips

Chapelle Snickers
Crown Athlete Manuel Chuck Wagons
Chuckles and Sniggers
Always playin' it close
Not one to boast
Rocking to make sure my hammerhead stays afloat

Cowboy boy soil
Cheetos, mosquitoes
Round up, grip tank
Sandy beach sunsets to sunrise, Vay-Cay
Caramel and peanuts
Slip-ons
Blue cows ski, skates souls

Grinding, flip tricks
Kicks and pay day
Fondle
Kick, push, play
Err'day

Linked Verse

    Before the nonsense English leads you to write this off as an April Fool's joke (the timing is coincidental, I swear), take a moment to appreciate how crazy impressive this piece is from a craft standpoint. Setting aside the meaning issue, the actual technical elements of this work are highly impressive. Let's just start with this one stanza:

"Conscientious deserter
Chocolatey smooth grip
Java street script
With sunny side banana split
Your best necks like guitars that use
Diffuse, stro molotov cocktails
Against the agnostic atheists, we are trying to save the whales."

    The stanza builds up a complex series of aural and semantic associations even without creating a clear or comprehensible meaning. Conscientious leads aurally into Chocolatey, while Chocolatey provides a color association with Java, which is semantically related to sunny and banana. Smooth, after Chocolatey, sets up the alliteration found in later lines with "street script" and "sunny side banana split." Sunny and banana split are themselves associated terms. The blue Java banana is also called the ice cream banana, which again ties the terms together semantically. The word split prepares us for the harsh enjambment of use with diffuse, which itself dissolves all of the associations that have been built throughout the stanza in order to allow for the next set of ideas to build.
    The work also makes frequent use of paradox, starting with its first line: "A long day's night training." The confusion of day and night is not original to this piece, of course, but it immediately establishes the semantic impossibility that flows throughout the whole work. Paradox as a concept returns again and again, with lines like "Surf on concrete" -- presumably a reference to skating but a literal impossibility nonetheless -- and "rocking to make sure my hammerhead stays afloat," which has two paradoxes: the first is that rocking a boat would usually sink it rather than keep it floating, while the second is that a hammerhead should either sink (if it's a literal hammer's head) or swim (if it's a hammerhead shark). The work isn't just nonsensical, it's deliberately nonsensical -- which is to say, it isn't random words thrown together, it's words put together in ways that should be completely impossible by conventional semantic measures. It's as if someone expanded the classic meaningless phrase "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" into a full-length poem.
    It has shades of Lewis Carroll, I think, and of Literary Nonsense more broadly. Literary Nonsense is not nonsense because it is meaningless but rather because it has so much inbuilt meaning no overarching thread emerges. Yata MisaKi operates similarly in that it toys with language and association in really interesting ways, but it's extraordinarily difficult -- if not impossible -- to determine what the piece is about.
    There are certain concepts and ideas that do jump out as perhaps being more significant, though. A few ideas are repeated or referenced multiple times. The first stanza ends with "Switching and grinding" while the last begins with "Ginding, flip-tricks," for example. Similarly, the lines "Café smoking papers" and "Ash trays made from college degrees trying to be free" convey nearly the same idea. The work also draws attention to certain lines -- such as the ash trays one -- by inserting longer, comprehensible thoughts in the middle of the apparent word salad that makes up most of the work. These longer phrases often follow patches of short, isolated nouns and adjectives, which means lines like "And other types of paradoxical crossword puzzles" immediately seem more important if only because they're less obviously nonsense.
    Unfortunately, these emphasis points don't themselves create any clear or obvious meaning, and any guess I could make as to the message of the work would, I think, be reading too deeply into certain lines without accounting for others. For all the care that went into crafting this poem, its meaning remains frustratingly opaque (which is why most people write it off as nonsense). I don't claim to know what the purpose of this work is, although I'm fairly confident there's supposed to be something behind it.
    The one thing I will say, though, is that it reminds me of a certain style of classical Japanese poetry: specifically, renga, or linked verse. Renga is a style of poetry where poems are written in halves, with each new section of poem forming a "complete" five-line poem when added to the section before. Imagine a poem that goes ABCDE, where each letter represents a stanza. AB would form a complete poem. BC would also form a complete poem, with a distinct meaning from AB. CD would be a distinct poem, and DE would be yet another, and so on. The "point" of Renga is to add a new ending such that the prior stanza takes on a different meaning from what it meant in context of the poem prior.
    An example of this may be helpful, so here are a few sections from "A Hundred Stanzas by Three Poets at Minase" (translated by Earl Miner).

Despite some snow
the base of the hills spreads with haze
the twilight scene
 
where the waters flow afar
the village glows with sweet plumb flowers
 
In the river wind
a single stand of willow trees
show spring color
 
day break comes on distinctly
with sounds of punted boat
Earl Miner. Japanese Linked Poetry. 1st Princeton Paperback ed. Princeton, NJ. 1980. Print paperback.

    So, for clarity, this would be a complete poem:

"Despite some snow
the base of the hills spreads with haze
the twilight scene
where the waters flow afar
the village glows with sweet plumb flowers"

    As would this:

"where the waters flow afar
the village glows with sweet plumb flowers
In the river wind
a single stand of willow trees
show spring color"

    And as would this:

"In the river wind
a single stand of willow trees
show spring color
day break comes on distinctly
with sounds of punted boat"

    "Yata MisaKi" has somewhat similar in the way it operates, although it does it in even smaller pieces. Most words or phrases in the piece have two meanings: one in context of what precedes it, and one in context of what follows. In this respect it resembles Renga, more a combination of micro-poems than one complete work.

Reflections on Obscurity

    The issue "Yata MisaKi" and works similar to it run into is this: if your work is so strange almost no one can understand it, is it still good? There are certainly examples of mostly-inscrutable works that are nonetheless excellent -- look to Tom Stoppard for some great examples of this -- but at what point have you pushed too far? I really like "Yata MisaKi" but it probably falls into the "too far" category, unless it's just meant to be an exercise in form and nothing else. Perhaps by divorcing itself from meaning it forces a renewed attention on sound and style, or perhaps it's meant as a commentary on meaninglessness... but whatever it's trying to do, it's not clear.
    Experimental works can be really cool when they work well. I have no problem with an author or composer asking me to work to understand something, but there comes a point where a work passes beyond "intriguing" and drops firmly into "confusing" territory. The line is fuzzy, and something can be too obscure well still having elements of value, but even in a work where the meaning is intentionally unclear there should be at least an identifiable purpose or concept behind the work. "Yata Misaki" is brilliantly constructed, but I have no idea what it's trying to do, and in that respect, at least, it does not succeed.