"By that, I meant work that doesn't seek to explain itself, not out of a pretentious desire to keep people out but more out of an inner intensity, a desire to enmesh you within its concept-world by experience rather than sitting and pointing and lecturing about any given thing in the book. Music, it turns out, is the best way to make this clear; songs, especially truly great ones, don't explain their emotional character to you but instead make you feel it."
"A song that opened with someone deadpanning saying "I am trying to make you sad" would be laughable; hopefully, it would be done tongue-in-cheek, rather than a lot of what passes for current literary fiction, which begs you to feel something the writer isn't skilled enough to elicit on their own. It turns out, as I sat and thought this off-handed comment of mine over, that this is the same mechanism through which I prefer works that overwhelm and engross me."
Works that write from within themselves immerse audiences through inner intensity and experiential enmeshment rather than explicit explanation. Such works prioritize showing emotional and conceptual worlds by experience instead of pointing them out. Music exemplifies this dynamic by conveying emotional character directly through sound and vocal charisma without relying on literal explanation. Listeners can derive meaning and imagery from songs even without understanding lyrics or language. Experimental, progressive, and avant-garde practices frequently generate overwhelming, engrossing experiences by emphasizing sensory, structural, and conceptual immersion. Music also carries longstanding connections to mysticism, ritual, and communal emotional practice.
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