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MUSICAL PLATONISM & “WRITING” AS METAPHOR

For a while the 2-year-old has been asking questions such as, “Daddoo, do you know the ‘I Can’t Drink Juice Until After I Wash My Hands” song?” And I would answer yes and make up a 15-second song on the spot, and say, “Is that it?” And the 2-year-old would answer yes, as if the song always existed, and he, being closer to the pre-birth experience, would already know the song from his time in the Ideal world.

Today he told me, “I wrote a new song and I’m going to sing it.” He doesn’t know how to write! He’s only 2-and-a-half! But he sang a song while I played rhythm guitar. I didn’t catch a lot of the words, but the song went on for quite a while.

I think the late French philosopher Jacques Derrida said something once about the hierarchies and confusions between speech and writing, and something about the metafictions of presence, but I wasn’t there when he said it and I got the story second-hand.