**I Saw Dust, and eyesore Diamonds**
*A Lexicomythographic {Atem-Meta} Commentary on Joanna Newsom's Mirror-Shattering One-Hundred-Forty-Four-Thousand-Year Oeuvre*
(Foreyear Issue, {REDACTED}th Edition)
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**Abstract:**
This commentary approaches Joanna Newsom’s entire lyrical and mythopoeic output as a time-folded, harp-strung act of divine cartography. We contend that Newsom is not simply a bardic poet of baroque folk instrumentation but a carActOar—one who conjugates memory, myth, and minor scales into recursive lexDef structures. Through a lexicomythographic analysis of her oeuvre—particularly *Ys*, *Divers*, and *Have One On Me*—we propose that Newsom’s lyrics are entries in the Eternal LexDict, ciphered in her unique Atem-Meta modality: breathless memory loops made sacred through syntax, hesitation, and harmonic recursion.
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**1. Atem-Meta, or: The Pre-Tense as Portal**
Newsom’s breath is an architectural principle. She sings in pre-tense: the Vyrb state of being-before-speaking. Her phonemes bend time. The syllables themselves are stones in the mosaic of CGMS-like recursive entry. Like the *Children’s Gospel Music Songbook*, her albums are **not linear**—they are *rooms*, veiled chambers, murmured gospels.
> *“And I saw straight away that the lay was steep, but I fell for it anyway.”*
This is not a line. It is an *entry*. An invitation into a slope with memory as gravity.
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**2. Mirror-Shattering: On the Violence of Knowing**
In songs like “Emily,” “Cosmia,” and “Time, As a Symptom,” the act of remembering is reified as a **mirror-breaking event**. These are not songs; they are **lexical detonations**. The recursion collapses. A single remembered word echoes until it disintegrates into asemic dust.
> “And it is not for me to ask / but for you to tell me what I ought to ask.”
This line *fractures the interrogative*. In the lexicomythographic system, this is a prodverb. It breaks the syntax in order to form a question that can only be answered within.
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**3. The One-Hundred-Forty-Four-Thousand-Year Gospel**
The number 144,000 is not apocalyptic—it is *recursively harmonic*. Twelve tribes × twelve thousand: a multiplication of voice into cosmic resonance. Newsom’s oeuvre functions on this principle. Each track = a glyph. Each album = a generation. Each hesitation = a veiled syllable of divine song.
**Have One On Me** = the Gospel of Multitudes.
**Ys** = the Codex of the Unseen Root.
**Divers** = the Hymnal of the Unborn Witness.
And between them: *Refrain.* *Bridge.* *Redaction.*
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**4. Eyesore Diamonds: The Danger of Seeing Clearly**
Newsom’s metaphors glitter—dangerously. Like the Woman in the Wallpaper, her characters see **too much**, and are thus trapped in the clarity. “Eyesore” is not a blemish but a *punishment for vision*. A prodverbial curse.
When she sings of diamonds, they are:
- Geological time signatures
- Broken mirrors of divinity
- Shards of the LexDict
She does not write metaphors. She *fractures* meaning until it refracts the Real.
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**5. Conclusion: The Oeuvre as Lexical Wormhole**
Joanna Newsom’s entire body of work is a **CGMS Adjunct Gospel**—a sibling scripture, inked in harp glissandi and archival dust. Her syntax is devotional. Her silences are entries. Her albums are not albums—they are **portals** into a time before the Word.
She sings as if remembering **the definition of remembering**.
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**Filed in the Endless Library of Fable**
See also: *“Entry: Newsom, Joanna”*, *“Entry: Harp”*, *“Entry: Mirror, Broken”*, *“Entry: Oeuvre, Infinite”*, *[[lexDict]], Foreyear Edition, Page REDACTED.*