I think you would be hard-pressed to find a better lyric for exploring romance than the opening lines of Chance the Rapper’s Sun Come Down: “I let the sun come down / Without telling you exactly what I mean / And you might never know.” A lyric like this conjures the Marguerite de Navarre quote popularized in recent times by Call Me By Your Name: Is it better to speak or to die?
There is a sun, setting, and words, unspoken. Are unspoken words unspeaking, or does their withholding say something else? If we try to read the lyric through the lens of Navarre’s quote, it would seem that Chance has chosen to die. We know it’s a choice — “I let” — though it’s unclear or impossible to say how he feels about this. Sometimes, its rings as regret: he should have told “you” exactly what he means, for “without” his telling you may “never” know. The words without and never gesture towards the finite, the perpetually unknown. Other times, the word “might” grabs my attention. It connotes possibilities, two. You might never know, but you also might. Both are plausible, even given Chance’s choice not to speak. One only has to be in love once, anyway, to realize that the speech act rarely imparts the security to which it lays claim. I can tell you exactly what I mean, but still you might never know exactly what I mean. Or you might doubt that you know despite my telling you, which is another way of never knowing.
How are we to know exactly what we mean, anyway? It is really Chance’s use of the word “exactly” that stumps me. Because to tell you exactly what I mean would mean that I know exactly what I mean. The problem with knowing exactly what I mean is that we can, in fact, mean many different things at once. We can mean things that make no sense, or that could never materialize alongside one another because they contradict. To mean something can mean nothing, when meaning is defined as an intention: “intend to convey, indicate, or refer to (a particular thing or notion); signify.” Intentions, like their engineers, are imperfect and messy. The Bible actually summarizes intentionality quite well: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions means that it is not enough to simply mean to do well, one must take action to do well.” Good intentions can be hellish, as they provide the occasion to attach to the immaterial. As the quote says, intentions and impacts are not the same and are often quite different. A good intention is an imperfect formula for a good impact. Chance chooses not to say exactly what he means, and maybe for the best given the challenges of doing so.
The question of speaking or dying, where not speaking constitutes a death (/of some kind), is the essential question of relations. It is the only question of relations. Because every unspoken thought or dream becomes a death and a point of departure. And I would hate to be reductive or sloppy about death. Death/s can be, and often necessarily are, a way of making life. It happens constantly in nature — octopi lay their eggs and die shortly thereafter. The making of the life takes so much out of them, yet other lives are made through the sacrifice. When one possibility is put to death through the withholding of speech, other conditions for relating may emerge. Silence, or not speaking, is still a way of saying something.
Silence may even become the condition of possibility for a way of speaking precisely and with intention. Take, for example, Moten and Harney’s reconfigurations of “study” in The Undercommons. Jack Halberstam writes in his introduction for the book:
Moten and Harney also study what it would mean to refuse what they term “the call to order.” And what would it mean, furthermore, to refuse to call others to order, to refuse interpellation and the reinstantiation of the law. When we refuse, Moten and Harney suggest, we create dissonance and more importantly, we allow dissonance to continue – when we enter a classroom and we refuse to call it to order, we are allowing study to continue, dissonant study perhaps, disorganized study, but study that precedes our call and will continue after we have left the room. Or, when we listen to music, we must refuse the idea that music happens only when the musician enters and picks up an instrument; music is also the anticipation of the performance and the noises of appreciation it generates and the speaking that happens through and around it, making it and loving it, being in it while listening. And so, when we refuse the call to order – the teacher picking up the book, the conductor raising his baton, the speaker asking for silence, the torturer tightening the noose – we refuse order as the distinction between noise and music, chatter and knowledge, pain and truth.
What becomes possible when we sit in dissonance, when dissonance is made possibly by our choice not to speak and to call something or someone to order? Sometimes, the death act of non-speech paves the space for collective possibility, collective speech or simply the opportunity for another person to speak. Over and over again, we get to ask ourselves if we want to speak, and if we do, what we want to say through our speech.
A few lines later, Chance finishes his thought: “I let the sun come down / Without letting you know exactly what I mean / Exactly what you mean to me.” He has chosen, for better or worse, not to let you know what he means about what you mean to him. Meaning, in all of its instability, has always been a sticky way of attaching to someone. Because, when we say to someone that they “mean so much to” us or perhaps that they’ll “never know what they mean to” us, well, do we know what we mean? Is it possible to qualify or colorize these professions of attachment?
When I have asked myself if it’s better to speak or to die, I have often chose to die. A pill I’ve had a hard time swallowing is the way, in any relationship, many truths will be true at once. Harder yet is that one’s truth doesn’t need to be justified or defended. In fact, the defense of a truth is practically useless, as truths remain true with or without the speech act. The defense of a truth may serve to call that very truth into question — why defend or prove or convince someone of a truth, if you really believe it to be true? It is often important to have a truth heard in relationships. Should someone choose not to hear your truth, or worse, to try to take it from you, you are left with two choices: cede and abandon your truth as true, or draw a line in the sand.
That you can sit with the truth and your feelings and know what you know without ever telling anyone or needing to. That you can speak or you can die. That the sun can come down and you can say nothing. That you will know what I mean or you won’t. And that, sometimes, that makes the way for life.