「The Ones You Cannot Cite」

[Intro] [sustained, airy] Beneath the lecture halls there is a second floor where the lights are left on for economics and the door is never locked [Instrumental] [Half Time] [Verse 1] [Rap] [rapid-fire, breathless] (Uh) That food strip, school kids, off the Akamon the backstreets keep cooking, true grit, food's rich, no chains no signage just family soup's thick, they say Todai bodies grow out that soup dish, each plate that we split turned the table to school, and the arguing over the noodles just bled into the school week, new term, full tilt, the S-plus chase through Core Micro and Core Macro till the curve's foolish, both cores brutish and we lose it. [Rap] (Hoooold up) then roots split, Watch, some flew out for a doctorate and copped a new gig, the prestige track calling out their names, the rest of them lost in a season of endless recruiting, internships closed the search out early, me I stayed off-duty cruising, the History of Thought lab all day, just stacking up slow scholarly days getting bookish. (Yessir) [Pre-Chorus] [melodic, opening up] They read « Das Kapital » at four lines an hour and called the year a seminar You learned to take a sentence apart the way you take apart a watch To lay the pieces on the table and find the one that kept the time They call it close reading. No one has ever called it fast [Chorus] [soaring sustained vocal] What holds is the hours, the flesh and blood hours, the ones you cannot cite A line read slowly enough will change the person reading it There is a way of hearing what a word has not said And no degree confers it. You learn it from people, or you never learn it [Instrumental] [Half Time] [Verse 2] [Rap] [rapid-fire, clipped] (Shhh) Small office, off-grid, heterodox wing the senior kept talking, long sleeves, sharp kid, the wave grown out and the fashion stayed arty. [Rap] (Mmm, go on) felt it all too bright and anger turned logic, took it to the quiet of the lab corner, and the best part of the week was her venting over hand-dripped coffee, long pause, raw wit, and we'd dig through a single line till the two of us owned the topic, that corner was the whole college. [Rap] (Ayy, listen) one long list, Wait, self-governed the department no faculty calling, from mailing lists to the moving day, students ran it all and we learned to run our own body, not one professor ever stepped in, the whole floor became a lobby, and nobody ever told us to, built the whole thing alone and by the end we got it. (That's it) [Bridge] [Spoken Word] [hushed, measured] The one who held the table at the coffee shop on Hongo, an associate professor, every Wednesday for someone who came in after work and asked to be taught The one who sent the family money back and covered the year alone The one, an undergraduate, whose English embarrassed the tenured The one who listened without envy The one who was kind on purpose, and slowly These are the ones. The days did not hold themselves up [Instrumental] [Half Time] [Verse 3] [Rap] [rapid-fire, driving] (Woo) The room's mixed, new kids, insiders outsiders and China moved in, who's in, roots deep, languages in and the room is unruly, and the drive coming off them ran right through me, quit counting credits and started to move slow, and it all came down to the slow read line after line till you knew it, new mood, who reads, thinking got sharper in the doing not the knowing of it truly, and that process was the schooling. [Rap] (Line by line) the truth is, Here, the place never gave knowledge it gave me the doing, not answers but the way you get in, I carry that method into every room I move in, no degree ever handed me that, just the slow read and the proving, line by line by line by line again, that's the whole of what the place put into the new kid. (Say it) [Chorus 2] [soaring sustained vocal] What holds is the hours, the flesh and blood hours, the ones you cannot cite A line read slowly enough will change the person reading it There is a way of hearing what a word has not said And no degree confers it. You learn it from people, or you never learn it [Outro] [Spoken Word] [bare, unhurried] People will ask you what the place was like, and you will want to say the buildings Say the table instead. Say the four lines an hour Say the one who came in every Wednesday after work Then go and find a table of your own, wherever you are Whatever you keep of it, keep the reading. The letters change. The reading stays [End]