Macfarlane is a control-freak about meaning. As a teacher at Cambridge, as a prose writer, I'm I'm basically a control freak. I'm like, I have to make meaning mean exactly what I want it to mean. And so you work with syntax in all of these really naughty and complex ways to carry meaning.1
Then for ten years he wrote song lyrics, libretti for choral works, full-length requiem, jazz opera at a former nuclear weapons testing site, an album called The World Tree about the felled sycamore-gap tree. The collaborative musical work taught him something his prose-writing discipline had prevented him from learning:
One of the things that has taught me most clearly is to let images lapse into looseness with one another. Let me put it like that.1
The lesson runs counter to almost everything prose-craft pedagogy says. Prose-craft pedagogy teaches you to control your imagery — pick the right metaphor, sustain it through the passage, don't let cross-images muddy the field. Macfarlane spent twenty-plus years getting good at this. Then song-writing taught him to do the opposite.
The clearest case: Macfarlane co-wrote a song called Uncanny Valley with Johnny Flynn:
So we all got lost in the uncanny valley. Took a wrong turn at the end of the alley. No one had a map and no one kept a tally in the uncanny valley, in the uncanny valley.1
Read flat for the page, it sounds like a nursery rhyme. I'd be embarrassed if I'd written that flat for the page, Macfarlane says. But when Flynn set the lyric to off-beat guitar — placing the language and the rhythm in slight friction with one another — the song produces this uncanny offkilter slightly strange and from the beginning everything is off balance.1
The looseness between valley, alley, tally is not sloppy rhyme. It is images that don't quite fit, refusing to lock into the controlled-meaning a prose writer would impose. Feature, not a bug. The looseness produces the uncanniness the song is for. A song called Uncanny Valley that had crisp controlled images would be a song about the uncanny rather than a song that is uncanny.
Perell offers a word: glitch. Macfarlane: It's such a cool word. It's where everything starts to vibrate and the hologram flickers and reality is doing strange things and rationalism's limits start to be met. And the biggest glitch in the matrix I've ever known was the encounter with this river being. And so there you have to start to find ways that language can glitch itself.1
Language can glitch itself. This is the operational instruction. The writer who can produce glitch in the language (images lapsing into looseness; syntax doing weird things; meaning vibrating rather than settling) gives the reader access to states the controlled-meaning prose cannot reach.
Macfarlane carried the lesson from song-writing back into his prose. The river-being encounter at the end of Is a River Alive? is rendered with prose that glitches — letting meaning destabilize the way the experience destabilized him. A prose writer who had not gone through ten years of song-writing might not know how to glitch the language at the moment the experience requires.
A children's poem Macfarlane wrote demonstrates the technique at small scale:
When wren was. From stone to furze, the welder around her blurs. For wren is quick, so quick she blurs the air through which she flows.1
She blurs the air through which she flows. The wren is so fast that the air around her blurs. The image is at first impossible to picture — air doesn't blur — and then suddenly legible as the visual experience of a wren in motion. The looseness produces the perceptual accuracy the controlled image would miss.
Prose-craft pedagogy enforces control because most prose serves communication-purposes that punish ambiguity (legal writing, technical writing, journalism, academic writing). The writer is taught to mean exactly what they mean. Cross-images that refuse to lock are treated as failures of revision.
Song-writing operates in a different communication-economy. The listener is not parsing for argument; the listener is being moved by the rhythm-plus-meaning composition. Cross-images that produce productive ambiguity are part of the song's power. The prose writer who absorbs this lesson gains access to a register their prose-pedagogy had foreclosed.
The lesson is hard to teach because it requires the writer to have first mastered control. A writer who lets images lapse into looseness without first being able to control them produces only sloppy prose. Macfarlane's looseness is post-control looseness — the controlled meaning is available; he is deliberately choosing not to deploy it.
Macfarlane converges with Karlsson's body-state-transmission essayism on the principle that the writing should do something other than transmit controlled meaning. Both writers insist the body-level transmission carries information the cognitive-level transmission misses. The split is in technique: Karlsson uses essay-clusters that emerge from body-incubation; Macfarlane uses image-looseness borrowed from song-craft. Different operationalizations of the same underlying claim.
Macfarlane diverges from the ten guṇas style diagnostic (Bharata) on the principle that prosaic excellence is uniformly defined. Bharata's ten guṇas catalogue specific stylistic excellences (clarity, smoothness, etc.). Macfarlane's let-images-lapse explicitly cultivates qualities Bharata would not have named as excellences. The split reveals two genuinely different aesthetic traditions, both internally coherent.
Let-images-lapse maps onto two adjacent domains where the same productive-ambiguity principle appears: Eastern-spirituality (the Zen and Tantric traditions' use of paradox and crazy-wisdom to defeat conceptual closure) and creative-practice (the Sanskrit dhvani tradition's privileging of suggestion over denotation).
Eastern-Spirituality: Crazy Wisdom as Conceptual Disruption — the Tibetan crazy-wisdom tradition (and the Zen tradition of nonsensical responses to serious questions) deploys statements that refuse rational closure as instruments for breaking through the conceptual mind. The student cannot make sense of the master's response and must let the response operate at a level the conceptual mind cannot reach. Macfarlane's let-images-lapse is structurally identical in literary form: the looseness refuses rational closure, and the reader's conceptual mind has to release control. The structural identity: both traditions cultivate productive-ambiguity as the instrument for reaching what cognitive control suppresses. The insight neither domain generates alone: Macfarlane's song-craft-derived literary technique is operating in the same conceptual territory as crazy-wisdom — and the writer who has encountered crazy-wisdom understands viscerally what the looseness is for. The technique is not sloppy; it is anti-conceptual-closure, which is a precise discipline.
Creative-Practice (Sanskrit Aesthetics): Dhvani — Suggestion as Soul of Content — Ānandavardhana's dhvani doctrine privileges suggestion (vyañjanā) over direct denotation (abhidhā) as the highest mode of poetic language. Suggestion works by leaving meaning underdetermined so the reader's imagination completes it. Macfarlane's let-images-lapse is structurally identical: the loose images leave meaning underdetermined; the reader (or listener) completes them in their own imagination. The structural identity: both traditions identify underdetermined-meaning as the higher mode of language because it engages the receiver's generative capacity rather than the receiver's parsing capacity. The insight neither domain generates alone: Macfarlane's song-craft lesson is the secular British rediscovery of what Kashmir Shaiva aesthetic theory systematized 1,100 years ago. The writer trained in dhvani theory has a vocabulary for what let-images-lapse achieves; the dhvani-theorist who reads Macfarlane sees contemporary instantiation.
A third connection worth marking: let-images-lapse has structural similarity to abandon correspondence — both refuse the writer's impulse to make language match the thing exactly.
The Sharpest Implication
If post-control looseness is the higher mode that controlled meaning cannot reach, then the entire prose-craft pedagogy that culminates in control as the mark of mastery is teaching a sub-mastery. The uncomfortable implication: most writing-class instruction treats image-control as the destination, when image-control is actually the intermediate step before deliberate looseness. Writers who stop at control reach competent but ceiling-bound prose; writers who proceed through control to deliberate looseness reach the prose that lasts. Macfarlane's twenty-two years of prose-mastery were necessary precondition to his song-craft loosening, and the loosening reorganized everything his prose-mastery had established. Most prose writers never make the move because the move requires capacity (the song-craft years) most prose writers don't have.
Generative Questions