Letters That Outlast the Speaker

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a chisel on stone, struck four times, evenly)
Epigraphy. Writing cut into hard things by people who meant it to stay.

[Verse 1]
Nobody carves a shopping list. That is the first rule of the field.
Stone is expensive and slow and it hurts, so what gets carved
is what somebody was willing to pay a man for weeks to say:
I built this. I conquered these. Here lies my wife.
The medium selects the message, ruthlessly, in advance —
so the record we inherit in stone is a record of what people boasted.

[Chorus]
Letters that outlast the speaker. Deeper than the voice.
Cut half an inch into granite by a man being paid by the letter
so that the name would still be legible when the language wasn't.
And it worked. That's the unbearable part. It worked.
Letters that outlast the speaker. We can still read the boast.
Somebody studies this. Somebody squeezes the stone.

[Verse 2]
And the graffiti. God, the graffiti — because they carved that too.
Pompeii is covered in it, at eye height, in the ordinary voice:
Gaius was here. The bread is bad. I love a girl called Prima.
Somebody wrote "I am amazed, wall, that you have not collapsed,
who must bear the tedious stupidity of so many writers" —
in the second century, on a wall, about other people's graffiti.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
That's the field's secret. The monuments tell you what a state wanted.
The scratches tell you what a Tuesday was actually like.
And they survive by the same accident, in the same stone,
and the epigrapher records both with the same careful hand,
and gives the emperor and the man complaining about bread
exactly the same catalogue number and exactly the same care.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the chisel, once)
I am amazed, wall.
Truly. I am amazed.