Monday, March 11, 2019

The Hatred of Music by Pascal Quignard

 Pascal Quignard's The Hatred of Music is more than a book, it's a codex, a Rosetta stone, a spell from zoe, an elixir that may induce shamanic trances, an archetypology of sound and music


    Here's a dropbox link to a free pdf of the English translation:
 https://www.dropbox.com/s/3xmglj7t37yzbog/pascal-quignard-the-hatred-of-music.pdf?dl=0

    Up until the moment I began to read these treatises, published first in 1996, I was under the impression I had no guide (among literati), no comrade even, for or by, or among the perplexed, to the poetics of music, not one that was thoroughgoing, actually poetic, tough and profound, unafraid of much of the implicit fascism in the concept of audience itself, although I honored various attempts by ethno-musicologists and encyclopedicists, anthropologists & social critics to get close to the truth of the matter, while in my heart knowing that they were either not really aware of how close they were getting to the core, or self-censoring themselves on the brink of the "problem" -- and in the post-modern era one begins to get bullied, mocked, considered a sentimentalist or fool for seeking any general field theory or profundity.

 Theophrastus asserted on the contrary that the sense that
opens most widely the door to passion is acoustical perception.
He said that sight, touch, smell, and taste subject the soul to a
less violent distress than that caused, through the ears, 

by “thunder and moans.”
  
Visible scenes stupefy me and expose me to silence which 
itself is a song by privation. I have suffered from mutism: a deprived
song. A dance: one sways back and forth. Or one’s head
turns from one ear to the other. Silence is rhythmic.
But most piercing screams, certain crashes overwhelm me
beyond measure, to the point of arrhythmia.
Sounds plunge us into a silence of hearing more torn asunder
than the silence of sight which Horace claims however to be
the first esthetic tearer...   Music alone tears asunder.


    For each researcher on the origins or music or each scribe who proposed one useful approach that still missed the essential another would arrive missing all the points in superficial estimation of the others. It had become almost impossible for me to read the words of so-called music "critics" -- whose sense of history derived from liner notes of albums and fanzines, where music is fixed inside recorded commodities. Further add to this the horrendously selfish competition among academicians and the deflective and evasive discourses hemmed by self-victimizing political correctitude that tries to divide sound and music into special categories of willful practitioners, Cartesian egos, who all seem equally not to know why or how they make music or how the music creates us. How it is drawn from our own bodies (heart-beat, pulmonation, growth-spurts, infantile gasps) just as it is drawn from mimesis of external sounds, the animals in the forest or seas

The shaman is a specialist in animal roars. The master of spirits
can metamorphose into anyone or anything—although birds
move the fastest and allow him to cross the sea or soar above the
mountains. Birds are the most nomadic of nomads. The shaman
is an accelerator of transport, of time, that is to say of metaphor,
of metamorphosis. Finally he is the most acoustic of the acousticals.
His territory is the air delimited by songs...


    The missing link in most cases, the place where the bridge is out, concerns the primordial scenes of what Quignard calls the Acousticals, totemic ancestor sounds -- the sacrifices (the skins of the drums), the noise of sex, the hunt, tribal violence, the resonance of caves, the essence of shamanism, which he recasts in re-verbarium of the antique French tarabust, a noise everyone knows the meaning of without having to discuss -- the very thing the burka of the quotidian bourgeois science of culture covers and pretends is not there but which every animal researcher knows to be the quintessential, perhaps the only important sounds that animals make, relying as it does upon their reproduction. We are at the service of the sounds. And we don't really hear most of the artists we have, let alone hear them in order to hear the sounds that are necessary. But the noise of music will distract us ad nauseam. Since the emergence of the new scientisms and ideological discourses the depth was left to individuals and surfaced only in flashes of the truth in some composers works -- Stravinsky's Rite before and Jani Christou (listen to Mysterion, for example)  notably, after -- but only very obliquely in the works of other post-war composers (where the violence is social, referent to Enlightenment ideology) and alluded to with great pretension by industrial occultists -- and occasionally among poets sincerely whose ears didn't get sucked into the vortex of their gaping and vainly gesturing mouths. Pascal Quignard, a writer, musicologist, a musician -- who knows that a muse is an affliction and that "amusement" means to be distracted -- and as a former editor for Gallimard, who read almost everything, classically educated (meaning that he reads/knows the Greek and Latin he cites), trying to fathom the Western traditions from the inside, turns out to be the one who emerges bearing the lantern.

 Ulysses, all of a sudden, effortlessly
arched his formidable bow. To test the string he opens his right
hand. When released, the string sang beautifully (kalon aeise),
with a voice (audèn) like a swallow.”
Once again the lyre comes first. The bow comes second.
Ulysses’ bow is like a kithara. The archer is like a citharede. The
vibration of the bowstring sings a song of death. If Apollo is the
quintessential archer, his bow is musical.


The bow is death from afar: inexplicable death.
More precisely: death as invisible as voice. Vocal cords, lyre
string, bowstring are a single string: entrails or nerves of a dead
animal that emit the invisible sound that kills from afar. The bowstring is the first song: the song which Homer says is “like the voice of a swallow.” Strings of stringed instruments are strings-of-the-death-lyre. The lyre and the cithara are ancient bows that fire songs at the god (arrows at the animal)


    Perhaps one of the most stunning and resonant of the themes one finds in the book is the recognition of the rites of passage accorded to males who undergo transformation from child into man, from the circle of siblings and mothers, into the cults of hunters, when the boy must take up with an animal spirit, paint the walls of the cave, prove mastery in animal murder, or emerge from the cave metamorphosed, when their voices change and the character of the man, as a being whose life breaks into pieces: one, before, where his range in smooth, soprano, like a woman's and the other side where he has forever lost his voice, croaks, must develop a new voice, or lose organs in order to keep his voice intact. The theme of the castrati, those sent under the knife in order to remain pure of voice, deprived of further masculine functions, those marked men, marked within and without.

   The following review (link below) may also be a helpful introduction, covering many of the most important points dealt with in Quignard's treatises. Although I am not sure who wrote this review, I find little to disagreeable and the author informs you that the book is arcane (I would say, hermetic) neither magniloquent nor verbose. In fact, the sentences of Quignard, however tricky, are in fact also pithy, economical, as if Quignard wished not to prolong the affair longer and burden the mind of the reader with excessive noise and redundancy.

http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/2017/03/24/the-hatred-of-music/



Sunday, March 10, 2019

THE BRIDE OF QUEITNESS, NOISE & WHATEVER MERRIES THEM


Bride of Queitness/ Organ Airs, on the Electone Organ

 https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/bride-of-queitness-organ-airs-on-electone?fbclid=IwAR2OKwWwJKp3GJMdT7hEc85TYUJVYXY39I1A0i9t7XsbfzkZwWvda1H_y64

Kottbusserdamm, Berlin, 2019
  Recorded in late August 2018 at the home of Angelika Witkowska in Krakow, using her Yamaha Electone Organ. It was very difficult at first to find a way to play and record without literally bumping into the mic or getting too close. The sound of the fan was terrific and so I decided it deserved to be featured in the prelude and in the coda.This is an album for connoisseurs lo-fi, just like the last one recorded cassette to cassette.The title, Bride of Quietness, comes from the Keats' Ode and refers more to the silence than the music and the haven itself. The photo comes from Berlin, Kottbusser Damm, wedding apparel shop, very esoteric. Thanks to Angelika Angelika E. Witkowska for hosting us yet again on our travels through Eastern Europe. Download is free/pay what you like.

Download album free or pay as you like
= click on them purple words and listen

Yamaha Electone Organ, Krakow, 2019
   from the notebooks of recent moments:

fear itself is that the social structure will be revealed and this has already been transmitted into artificial intelligence as the tendency to back-up and prevent the absolute consequences of deletion of any data. universal background radiation indicates stored dark matters evolves valves (values) that release things considered unconscious and render them as news quite often. freud. the prophets reich and jung and lacan. she sings, she plays theremin, violin too, plays with her eye-brows, an extended technique, we don't know what she wants, she's not there she insists we cannot disagree. everything in us wants to make sure she is there but she isn't & she nevertheless disagrees. we want to ensure ourselves she is not there but she is & nevertheless disagrees.  we learn maps thusly, 
we generate dendrology, the structure of our brains, in our own "hands" -- we open them -- cup them, we cup the hands, two hands join in the womb, feral geometry, the geometries we make them us, gathering formulae for song, sings where you can find the big tree where daddy buried your mom, rose up until she buried him anyway, meanwhile, everything burns, even ash

everything will be in the torus, of chorus

meeting you in everything twilight and dawn 



Friday, March 8, 2019

Bob Kaufman's Golden Sardine, Prince Albert Out of the Can


 read at risk of your own enjoyment
online, in it's entirety, the greatest
and most  golden sardine
offered by poetshouse
link below...
I will not tell you why
not really
but will share
certain atomic
excitements
at syllabic lettriste
levels seamlessly


http://digitalcollections.poetshouse.org/digital-collection/chapbook-collection/Golden-Sardine

 everything is happening at the gate of experience in this piece in pieces. it's exciting from start to finish because it really seems to have had no plan when it was planned not to have one and then makes us unsure we haven't yet forgotten it or if we have any plans of our own while it confidently moves, station to station, flipping itself out, crisply, page by page. a kind of surreal helical circulatory system shadowed by the mayan calendar effect, where the suns ceases to seem "quadrate" any longer because the earth itself is no longer pressurized to resist space entering the subduction. lands and spaces are perpetually renewed. high spirit rules. les yeux e oreilles  the birds are an ear in this language, the space is exquisite, aimless, the song brings contagious laughter. and it seemed to me, seems still to be, hailing from the blackfoot mountains everywhere aboriginal...
 even after so many years, a kind of South and Meso and North america's ta'wil --

what is Ta'wil?  

 تأويل

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esoteric_interpretation_of_the_Quran
  
Ta'wil, is the allegorical interpretation of the Quran or the quest for its hidden, inner meanings. but why do I apply this word to a book by an African poet of the America and sometimes Parisian realms, a man who I knew to have been 86'd from every bar in North Beach, that legendary hang-out haven of  the Beatniks in San Francisco? I say this book itself alone can tell you why through it's secret hilarity, based as it is upon various archetypal games being played out inside it like in an exhaustive serialism, a logic so coherent and unnerving, leaving nothing untouched, nothing and everything therefore remaining sacred, bubbling over, runnethinge overeth withe, all the patterns and paradigms of lost paradises, atlantean calderae. To read and attempt to explicate the soul it is required to undergo an initiation and this book opens the door, being perfect dadaism and designed to both construct and inspire involvement: as if every line depending on your contribution and why the America's of course because of the rebellions and the drift and the mixtures of musics, foods, peoples, languages and that Kaufman represents this all within the Western twist of spaghetti --

if that does not explain yet Ta'wil, I leave it dangling for now, for the next post, with the promise that I shall return -- for the return and the turning of the eternal return, continues the very substance of the creation and hand... read Kaufman, and about him... until next time...

ACCESS INTERIOR KNOWLEDGE SCROLL. CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN



when I meet Carolee Schneemann -- it's as if lines were running through everything some kind of Leibniz or Blakean loom, a mesh of ruptured enrapturing threads trickling through intersections of forming all things in the grapevine perhaps negative monsoon. from this every fabric moving around what it could not be not the films flickered like frogs cricketing or logs spiffling with geese afire the sky with flaming swallows. then the image was suddenly gone...

 ....involved in writing a long letter a few days ago explaining to a friend, who has since deleted me from the contacts, that I was not writing to him in my FB update some hyopthetical letter-idea that I wouldn't send to him and instead just wanted to let other people read but that --instead --

there are times I write updates that are about speaking to everyone simultaneously about everything ---- in a new old genre of supra-personal sub post-fictive dream journal wherein, whoever I am at that moment, becomes free to say things that were new even to all of us and there is/ was/never/ no longer can be any grounding in various truth-lie functions, so why the hell not just do that, as long as it's not abusive and if it was not personalized, not pointing any fingers...

thusly I had and perhaps still endeavor to unfold writing which evolves from stated purpose to eventually being lost in pointless but hopefully amusing digressions to arrive only at the next pause...

....if I could not put together the world in various sentences that cohered by following a vital pull of energy entangling medusal body-brain circuit pan mentalisms, then I should just put aside writing and study biology or chemistry, which I was pretty good at don't ask me why I found it boring because of my family of course. I tried to explain to my friend that I wasn't writing to him in absentia but that even denying I was doing so felt like a cop-out anyway, one that would reduce me to dialoging about his own issues which he has to solve without me anyway and I am not wise enough to assist him because...
            we need to renew the pacts with the earth, or configure this matrix again...

... what art needs to do is to help us all access interior knowledge. this phrase interior knowledge bounced back to me today when I heard that Carolee Schneemann  http://www.caroleeschneemann.com/  died and when I remembered the time I met her in California at Small Press book shop where she had come to do a book-signing

and she looked like a cat so terrifically feline to me and I also mean she looked with the eyes of a cat that open wide enough to include their ears in a buggy radar so that they, these ears, seem to see even with their eyes closed and if Carolee is now hearing this then she knows what I am hearing and also senses what I am reading & writing my inner ears torus ventricular turned inside out to pulse body images and flash on the nuerological web while pineal gland flickers precisely between those eyes lost in equilibrium.
     and it's even clear here and now that when I met Carolee Schneemann this place where I write about meeting her was already here, now and there, in this moment, unscrolling itself  -- there was this moment back in California when I saw this enlightened iridium dial look, mingle in the air, an owl-eye, a fan-quill, spread itself about and my eyes... 
    ...entered this atmosphere I couldn't really see... yet later would find: it's as if lines were running through everything some kind of Leibniz or Blakean loom, a mesh of ruptured enrapturing threads trickling through intersections of forming all things in the grapevine perhaps negative monsoon. from this every fabric moving around what it could not be not the films flickered like frogs cricketing or logs spiffling with geese afire the sky with flaming swallows. then the image was suddenly gone in a fluke spiral. cars up and down San Pablo Avenue late afternoon sun the simple scene of this circle of people of whom I remember only one other personally exactly, a poet now also removed from the direct access world, the poet Stephen Rodefer who introduced us there in that cloud somewhere ceaseless with heat lightening just this disjunctive place gapped over time wondering does someone remember me when I remember them until we close some eyes all of the eyes in the nerve of nets until who knows what stirs the cinders in the fire one last time passing the electron down the line