Healing at Epidaurus – Three kinds of audible – Soft and hard – Passages – Cells
Healing at Epidaurus
For the last two hours this morning I have been tasting the sun in the theatre at Epidaurus, alone, reclining against one of the steps. During the winter solstice the deluge of tourists slows to a trickle: a truce in a new war. Peace in the transparent air, yellow and blue. Silence. The countryside awaits the gods – it has been waiting for two thousand years. Silence. The gods will descend, healing will come.
A question mark on the sky’s axis, visible from passing planes, an immense ear bathed in the precisely tuned acoustic properties of the amphitheatre. I listen, I wait, in the dense silence. Even the insects sleep, ever present in the muteness of summer. Diaphanous, the world calms the turbulent noise of my body. My organs fall silent – health returns. Illness comes upon me when my organs can hear each other. Silence in the great theatre, in the capital of healing. The body no longer listens to itself, adrift in the pavilion of the immense ear of the gods. When a body will not remain silent, what voice do we hear? Neither voice, nor language; cœnæsthesia emits and receives thousands of messages: comfort, pleasure, pain, sickness, relief, tension, release – noises whispered or wailing. Æsculapius quietens these messages, and slowly erases them. We are healed better by leaving noise behind than by diving into language.
The silence within the theatre and in the surrounding scrub seeps into my skin, bathes and penetrates it, vibrates and drains it, in the hollow of the empty ear. I give myself to the world which returns me convalescent. I release a low moan into the world, and it gives back its immense peace.
Horror. Here comes a group. I can hear it in the distance, coming this way. It projects itself across space as filthy noise. It is deafening, disturbing the transparency of the air, even before I can see it from my vantage point, coming out of the tunnel of green branches. Two, ten, forty people are encased in a shell of language and then in a rumbling outer hull which precedes, flanks and follows them like the prow, sides and stern of a bulky ship. The sea vibrates around the vessel, overwhelmed. It is here. A whole orchestra. They talk, squawk, discuss and exclaim, admire out loud, call to each other, give explanations, point out this, describe that, read the guide book, lend a distracted ear to its explanations and test, for the hundredth time, the location’s exact acoustic properties. A din in the great ear of society. The fearful gods have fled from this eruption, as have healing, and the harmony between our organs and the things of the world. Its cries exhausted, the group moves on, trailing a long train of language behind it; and its fractious wake, still vibrating in the buffeted air, evaporates in turn, the stain disappears, and the smooth silence returns like offended modesty.
What did they really see? They heard: cries, words, echoes. But certainly saw rather little – all the more so as their cameras saw for them. But what did they hear that they did not already know from their language-memory? Did they come to Epidaurus at all? They arrived ill, indisposed by the murmuring of their organs, surrounded by their collective noise, and they departed in that clamorous ship without ever really arriving. If they had talked, shouted, conversed with each other in Boston or Aachen, they would have made the same journey, but for the rain in one or the snow in the other. Alone on this step, sitting in silence for the last two hours, little by little the world gives me its gods; immersed in the social ship, I would only have picked up stray bits of language from the people around me. The group carries its gods around in bags and walkmans. In its sects and libraries.
Silence returns like a modest veil. Slowly. The immortals are hesitant to descend to such an easily sullied place. The gods pass us by, weightless, insubstantial, flanking non-existence, evanescent spirits; the least wrinkle in the air will chase them away. They have long since fled our deafening world.
The collective only believes in its own noise. Living aboard this boat and travelling without leaving it, the collective believes that the world is given to us at the outer hull of language, or possibly at the water rippling around it. That the world is given to us in the midst of pandemonium. Immobile, in the sunshine, on my step, swimming in the yellow and blue transparency, I learn – slowly – that the given comes upon you like a state of grace. Evanescent spirit, lightness scudding through the limpid air. The gods will meet suddenly in a corner of the forest, that is where we must await them, timid and fearful like a small animal, but patiently: I have often felt like a statue from immobility and waiting. I listen. The given approaches me quietly. I listen. My ear grows to fit the dimensions of the amphitheatre, a marble pavilion. My hearing flat to the earth, on a vertical axis, tries to catch the harmony of the world. It awaits the birds coming in on the wind.
Amphitheatre does not mean a space where people speak, but one where many see. A sacred word will silence those assembled there; it need not even be a word, sometimes a wordless gesture is all it takes to render them silent: a kind of ritualized mime, and silence overtakes the collective hearing as all eyes focus as one. Transfixed, one’s organs are at peace: this is healing. Sometimes music is all it takes, and nestled in the hollow of hearing the orchestra listens and watches, the assembled throng heals itself by listening to its own harmony, observing it in silence, nestled inside the immense marble ear; what it hears is its own social contract.
The actor – tribune and teacher – listens to this silence passionately, explores its volume, recognizes its quality, evaluates its grandeur. The grandeur and musicality of his own words are produced not just in, but also by this cathedral-like calm.
It is time to begin. The smallest thing, a sign, a gesture, an attitude is all it takes to detonate peace. The voice in the centre sings this tranquillity; describes and produces it; makes it, yes, but receives it also. This is a circular movement, like mouth and ear for a single body, and this cyclical return is what produces theatre itself, its form and its structure. Eloquence comes from silence alone, and perfects it. Speech has the quality of stillness, the grandeur of its volume; stillness has the quality of eloquence, and the social contract answers silence with the silence of what is said. The gathering hears and recognizes itself through a word that emanates from its own silence. What is said can be cancelled out between the two large, heavy blocks of stillness and peace, its cause and its consequence; should the spoken word be silenced, then the gods will come.
Speech catalyses and propagates the silent harmony from which it can then be removed.
But the collective is quick to bury its harmony, grinding it up in the chaotic noise of applause. The gods are broken into tiny pieces in the palms of our hands.
On solemn occasions the theatrical circle of gesture, word and – rarely – silence, is closed. During this ritual the group is not so much encircled as imprisoned by its own shouting and arguing. The swallows flee at such vociferation. Just as the nightingale sings in order to define its nest and mark out its territory, so do we occupy and at the same time empty out the universe with our thunderous techniques. Like the submerged cathedral of old, the earth is engulfed by noise.
More than patient waiting, it is distance that is needed for the flighty given to reveal itself in all its timidity. Is it possible to step back and measure one’s distance from the very collective to which such measurements owe their existence? Can we break the circle of this theatre, open a doorway in the hull of the vessel, break free of its wake, when the whole universe resounds with our fury? Being enclosed in a group condemns us to language and language alone, since even social silence produces it. Being enclosed in language stops us from seeing that the noise that it makes veils and overwhelms the things which compose our world, and causes them to vanish.
The world, heavy, yet light, is frightening, yet easily frightened off; it imposes itself, yet vanishes into the shadows; it is necessary, yet fragile.
Hermits are familiar with the distance that must be crossed before the fleeting given becomes audible. Anchorites and reclusive scholars have had the same goal. And others; not just those who love God, or the truth, but those who are simply attentive. Hunters, too, will observe silence so that the observed world might come to them.
Immersing yourself in silence is a form of healing; solitude releases silence from the control of language. If the world fills with noise, then who will seek it out? Language gave us the sciences, and they made possible a thousand different techniques which, in turn, generate so much noise that we can finally say that the world is riotous with language. Language is our reason. At Epidaurus, during the winter solstice – in the off season – I seek shelter outside of this reason.
The given is only given to us beyond this first threshold: that of living alone. If you should come together in the name of research, all research will flee. As the word descends into your midst, all focus will evaporate. It is not a lone thinker we find in the ivory tower, but a gathering. Groups surround themselves with a compact wall of language. The only thing anyone can attend to is words. I have never come into contact with this ivory when working alone. When I am in the midst of the collective, I see it, I hear it, I touch it, it smothers me. This hard, smooth, insurmountable wall is built from their language. Groups imprison themselves behind their language of wood, wind and ivory.
Bathed in silent air, yellow and blue, alone, outside, I give a chance to the given, which the collective ruckus expels; I give a chance to those senses anæsthetized by language. The group devotes itself to its own din, revels in its own roar, notices little outside itself. It resembles a sick body, rumbling from the clamour of its own organs. What health would it recover if it were one day to fall silent? Is it only the good health of individual bodies that depends on silent organs? Had I come to Epidaurus as part of a group, I could never have healed. Aboard its ship buzzing with communication, the collective is not so much ill as intoxicated: drunk on language, drugged with noise, deprived of beauty, anæsthetized. Morning and night, each one of them treads the same paths in the same relationships with the same people in the same channels with the same words. They cannot not do it, rather as though they had to rebuild a crumbling section of wall over and over again, to restitch a tapestry which unravels every night. Distracted. Insensate. I live no differently from these drugged individuals. I am devoted to language, which anæsthetizes all five senses. Every group I am part of, needs it or lives by it. This is the healing I seek from the god Æsculapius on a winter morning: not just the silence of my organs, in harmony with the silence around me, but even more than that, the silencing of language within me. My very first, and hardest, detoxification treatment. The first step in constructing an æsthetic is to pray for the disappearance of these anæsthetics.
Alone in the immense amphitheatre, under the intense blue sun, I want to purify myself, unlike my ancestors. In the ruins of tragedy, I wish to tune out my own static.
Sitting down alone, in silence, on a marble step at Epidaurus under the winter sun, far from the throng, focused for a few hours: this is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition. Doubtless much more is required to achieve the sufficient condition, in order that the world give itself to the healed body; in order that what is given, gracious as it is, should come and sit next to me; in order that I might actually observe something. The given might indeed be given to us beyond the first threshold of solitude and silence; we can only be certain that it will do so after the second: can I measure my distance from it, locate it? Can we step outside our language?
The god I am waiting for never announces his visits. Will I even recognize him if he comes? All I know of Æsculapius the Healer is a name, a figure, designations and descriptions – this is already too much knowledge, he will not heal me.
Just before dying, Socrates wished to settle the debt of his recovery by sacrificing a cock to the god of healing. ‘Crito, we owe a cock to Æsculapius. Remember to pay this debt.’ His body was already half cold when he uncovered his face to pronounce these last words. He thought he was going to get better. Death is the last stage and objective of the cure. Must death come at Epidaurus? Socrates wanted to die. There he lies, on his bed, cold, delivered. How heavily life and body must have laid upon him, that he should ask the god to heal both! The final silence of mouth and organs.
For as long as he thought, he remained ugly. Is it truly possible to think without arriving at beauty, without penetrating the secret place where life bubbles up, without the transfiguration of the body? Once a certain age is reached, a thinker must take responsibility for his face; his knowledge and thinking must take responsibility for his body. Socrates, hideous. What a thing to admit! His body, wizened. What a symbol of hatred! The deformity of the man reflects the infirmity of his philosophy. He loved death; he so wished for it. See how he displays it, behold the tragedy: in the midst of the wailing and the tears, such delight over this gnome’s corpse, laid out centre-stage; the sublime dialogue, the flute music, the weeping relatives, the wine drunk to its dregs, the sobs, the applause. He did not know how to die alone, he turned the most banal, unavoidable, private and solemn moment of our short lives into a performance. Twenty-five centuries of weepy, plaintive philosophy follow in the steps of this circus freak. To which squalid, monstrous god does he sacrifice himself? To which hideous god – god of loathing, death and ugliness – does he owe his apotheosis; which of these put him centre-stage in our theatre of philosophy?
What do his friends do, hearing him speak while he lies dying? Are they distracting him by making him speak of the soul? Are they anæsthetizing him to pain and fear? Is this dialogue as good as a drug, a narcotic phial? A narcotic for Narcissis? What am I to make of this death, these words, if I am to get better?
Ever since those dying words in the tiny cell-like theatre in Athens, becoming a philosopher has meant taking one’s place in the necromancer’s circle – standing, sitting, leaning against a stone step, fascinated by this sacrificial body, decomposed now – eating Socrates’ corpse and resuscitating him, his narcotic forever on one’s lips.
He would not stop talking, right up to the moment of death. Even in such a private, solemn moment, he could not stop talking. Socrates wanted not to abandon the prison of iron and stone, could not, even for a moment, escape the fortress of talk, nor leave the ivory jail of Law and his peers, could not leave behind the word, any more than he could forget his dialogue, or his language; a flying insect colliding with the window-pane of the answer and ricocheting into the wall of the question. The prison vibrates with noise until death, it all ends with the sacrifice of the rooster, words, more shouting when the body is half cold. Of what polemical illness are Socrates’ friends cured by his death, Socrates who was apparently sacrificed to the Law?
I see and hear them this morning, from where I am perched on the stone steps, locked into their dialogue, stuck in their language, more securely than if they were in prison. Whereas earlier I was distracted, so intent on listening to the silence and waiting for the gods to arrive that I failed to recognize the group come to test the acoustics of the site with their shouting and vociferating, now I perceive Socrates’ entourage, rehearsing the same scene for over two thousand years. One of them imitated the crowing of a rooster in order to hear its echo in the immense amphitheatre, the others laughed. The oldest among them, exhausted, lay down in the centre of the tympanum; all his friends crowded around him. Silence. There is a brief emotional moment during which tragedy returns, furtively, to this intense, solitary place. More laughter. Were they healed when they left?
See if you have anything else to say, said Crito. Crito leaned over Socrates and said to him: see. See what you still have to say. But Socrates’ gaze was fixed. Upon seeing that, Crito closed his mouth and eyes.
The fixed gaze no longer sees what remains to be said, proof that normally it keeps an eye on what needs to be said. It sees neither cock nor rook, but it sees that cock remains to be said, rook to be spoken; words and categories absent from the farmyard. The dead gaze was drained not of light, images, things, colours, shapes or nuance, but of language. Crito saw that Socrates saw no more, with his own eyes he saw in his master’s eyes that there was no more to say. Upon seeing that, he closed his mouth and eyes. His eyes, in other words, his mouth.
To see is to know, and knowing is saying; saying or living, and living or saying. There is nothing left to say, and the gaze is still: nothing to see beyond the sayable, there is nothing beyond the sayable. When you are silent, you see no more; all that remains is to die.
What do you see, you who are drunk on words? I see your sight, still and empty.
A still gaze does not necessarily signify death. It may be the result of some narcotic. Haggard, anæsthetized, drunk, drugged, the vacant stare of lunatics.
I can recall hearing philosophers in dialogue, screeching and quarrelling at the foot of beautiful mountains, on ocean beaches, in front of Niagara Falls, they had the fixed gaze of those with something to say, and I can testify that they saw neither the snow of the glacier, nor the sea, that they heard nothing of the crashing water: they were arguing. They never left the prison of laws, each threatening the other with a term of confinement; should one of them win through force, the other would be killed. So much the better if the other is the only one killed. Dangerous people. I fear those who go through life drugged, less than I fear those under the edict of language.
Language dictates. We are addicted.
Stretched out on a divan, Socrates speaks of the soul, he associates the soul with language, words with healing. In the midst of his friends, at the centre of the theatre, he talks of the immortal soul up to the very moment of death, associating death and recovery. Without the slightest opening between speech and death, no window, no doorway, not so much as a minute’s gap, nor the slightest fissure between discourse and death, no way of leaving the collective, just suffocation behind closed doors, strangulation under the triangular yoke of death, recovery and language of the collective.
The mouth has spoken, drunk, tasted the bitter draught. It is not only language that can kill or intoxicate us by passing our lips. It is a sinister wisdom which tastes nothing but the cup of death; a bitter wisdom which has haunted us for two thousand five hundred years.
Crito, Phaedo, Cebes, Simmias, Echecrates, Socrates: they all speak, screech, argue, exclaim, admire, call out to each other, advise each other, exhibit themselves, point things out, describe a world they do not see – invisible, intangible, colourless, odourless, tasteless – promise each other a better future in Hades. The prison of speech only leads to hell, or to the ideal heaven. Already half cold under the effect of the pharmaceutic draught, the hero is prostrate in the centre of the orchestra, humming with language. They rush towards him to ask if he sees, if he sees anything else to say. Numb, Socrates dies in noise, at the theatre. He has drunk the formula.
This morning I am in full possession of my faculties; and I declare it my unambiguous wish that people remain silent when I am dying. I want no drugs, neither pharmaceutical nor linguistic. I want to hear who is approaching.
Who am I now, alive, at a distance from the seething group and its competitive cycle, who am I, seated here in the sunshine for more than two hours now, motionless, upon a marble step, giving myself over to the transparent air through which rooks fly; who am I, made up of languages dead and living, French and Greek, trained by culture and drawn here by the prestige of the names Epidaurus and Æsculapius and their promise of healing, a statue fascinated by this small group, this representation of the large collective, playing out a larger drama in the amphitheatre built to display it? No matter how far I travel, poor subject that I am, I never manage to put any distance between myself and the droning of the language that shaped me. What merely resonated within my mother’s womb is a clamour in this stone conch, and finds itself echoed in my innermost ear. The threshold that I imagined remains impassable, I am made up of the others I claim to have left behind, even alone they make the same noise in my chest, residually. Can I leave this drugged subject behind in order to sit and wait and observe? I must keep my distance from myself. That is what we call ecstasy.
I try to split myself in two. As though, on this marble step, there remained a corpse made up of language, Socrates, dead, a memory filling up the space of my head and body, my passions and my thoughts, a subject with a fixed and vacant stare, its eyes always riveted on categories, heaven and hell. As though a listening attentiveness, white, empty, pure desire and gift, projected itself beyond this set of memories, keeping its distance, the counterpart of the subject of language.
If we always talk, then we suffer: drugged, anæsthetized, addicted, under the edict of language. Drunk on words, as once one was said to be drunk on God. Unspeaking, I go towards silence, towards health, I open myself up to the world. The sensitive, delicate, receptive, refined feeler detects another echo and withdraws hastily, waits, observes, unsteady, outweighed by the mass of language, like a rarely-extended antenna, waits for the unexpected, recognizes the unrecognizable, expectant in the silence. Patient watchman, upright, searching for a peephole, crack, fissure, hole, window in the densely-packed wall of language, motionless watchman bent under the chaotic weight of night, waiting for dawn, occasionally ravished by the sight of this wordless dawn exploding out of nowhere along the breadth of the horizon, thirty-thousand feet above the ground.
Without this dark vigil I do not exist: my body of history and memory, stable within my language, prone, coiled up, asleep in the box bed of words and propositions, in their logical and combinatory lodgings, or in the immense amphitheatre. This subject of language dreams. Dreams cut a fake window in the wall of language. This subject of language and memory does not exist, sleeps, has the same dreams as everyone else, the same ambitions and struggles, in the ivory tower of language; dreams during performances, just as at the theatre, at Epidaurus, or watches television and computer screens, drugged by words and politics, addicted to what is said. A submissive subject, subjugated, prostrate, trampled, flattened by the enormous burden of language. Crushed to death.
By extending myself precariously I exist, outside of the stability where the other subject remains asleep or dead. Along the giddying crest of language run the battlements patrolled by guards. Frightened, shivering, horrified by the wind or arrows flying in the middle of the day, some watchers sit down, their backs against the battlements framing the crenellations. Walk with me; I recognize my stable, sleeping body along the way, cradled by dreams, in a stupor of language that reaches all the way into its unfulfilled desires. I recognize it in the watchman who looks inward, whether facing the battlements or with his back to them. Here on the other hand is my existence: sharp, agile, vigilant, frantic, gripping the battlements and leaning out through the crenellations, unbalancing into vertigo, ecstatic. Existence, or ecstasy, throws itself outwards, projects itself, unsure-footed; expectancy, a gift to space, a vertiginous risk, deliverance from oneself. First stability, then existence. Propped up by language, then delivered from it. First, aligned with landmarks and points of reference, then far away, with neither landmark nor compass. First security, then abandon. The I only exists outside of the I. The I only thinks outside of the I. It really feels when outside of itself. The I within language is reducible to the sum of its mother tongue, to the collective, to an undefined set of others, to the closure of the open group to which it belongs. It is set in its habits: caught in the I of language almost always and almost everywhere, our whole life long we do not live. I only really live outside of myself; outside of myself I think, meditate, know; outside of myself I receive what is given, enduringly; I invent outside of myself. Outside of myself, I exist, as does the world. Outside of my verbose flesh, I am on the side of the world.
The ear knows this distance all too well. I can put it out the window, project it far away, hold it distant from my body.
Lost, dissolved in the transparent air, flowing with its every variation, sensitive to its shallowest comas, shivering at the slightest breeze, given over to the world and mingling with its outbursts, thus do I exist. My body has fallen so silent that over-convalescence has turned it into an angel. Ah! Good news! Our humiliated bones are exultant, our flesh has become sensitized.
Tragedy returns in more mundane arenas.
Condemned by the judges of Athens, Socrates condemns himself to death out of a desire to be healed. On the tribunal sit men who have the power of killing with a word. Their sentence is executory: speech equates to act. As in the prison of language, so is there no interval here between saying and dying. Outstanding performance. Forbidden access to the theatre, to the prison, to the tribunal, the world cannot come between language and action. Philosophy is most comfortable when experience cannot stem the power of words; comfortable in representation, within a cell, in groups, in judgement. Language can kill an actor in the theatre at Epidaurus, it kills without reprieve in a tribunal.
Enter the judge. He pronounces sentence. Socrates is condemned, here and now. I prick up my ears, I listen, I hear the sentence – curiously, I hear it in another dead language: Socrates addictus. Socrates, convicted by law, whether spoken or written, convicted through deliberation, is condemned by and through these words. This procedural term is performative, as deadly as hemlock. It matters not whether you drink poison or have these words in your mouth. It is not the case that philosophy becomes involved in questions of law and justice, where speech is action, at the end of the eighteenth century. It does so from its Platonic beginnings. Since that time it has enjoyed saying that to say is to do; it loves speaking about language. On the day he died, convicted by the words of a judge, but equally condemned by his own, Socrates further demonstrated that it is better to die, if we thereby deliver ourselves from this corrupt world and from this unspeakable body. Doubly addictus.
For the second time I hear the same word echoing around the steps of the amphitheatre. Without knowing it, the group below has acted as though the theatre had not long ago lost its role and purpose. Dead now, open to the world outside, submerged in limpid blue and yellow, surrounded by shrub, green even in winter, stretched beneath a pale sky in which crows wheel and turn. Plants, animals and wind have invaded this closed place, just as a wedge splits a log, opening up a wedge between what is said and what is given.
As at the theatre, the group is locked into its lines. In the midst of his friends, Socrates remains in a dialogue to the death. Life’s tourists will see nothing of the land of the gods, occupied as they are with talking; none of them wants what is simply given, none wants to receive or accept it, all are condemned to their sentences: addicted to diction, anæsthetized, drugged, addicti, sentenced to the gaol of words.
The English language says addicted of a person whom the French language would call adonné. Such a person is given to meditation, study, pleasure, gaming, drugs. The distance between the two languages, the translation across that distance, traverses a passage, an interstice in language. In one we speak of what is given, in the other of what is dictated. Is to have experienced the given, the same as having spoken it? There is no word in French derived from addit, as though French were leaving room for the given, or fashioning an opening onto a strangeness outside of itself, as if the addicted person could be given to something other than language; as if the word addicted somehow stoppered up that opening in English, closed the door of the language on a deaf and dumb – a tacit – porch, or threshold, or horizon. Can an experience of the given be reduced to its utterance? With this question comes that of drugs – lingering around the body, around language, around the group and the world, lurking in the very knots that bind them together. Yes, I have come to be healed. We are addicted to what is given just as we are dedicated to speech. Do we now live dependent on the world, the free source of the given; and in the future, will we live equally code-dependent, addicted to the universal data bank? Is the choice of our addiction all that we are left with?
The Latin root of this utterance is to be found within the space of the tribunal, which like the amphitheatre is cut off from the world. His gaze fixed and vacant, Socrates is drugged, condemned by his sentence, by reason, by the logos in general, by the utterance turned thing, hemlock: addicted, addictus. Hemlock: drug, remedy and poison, sentence. Enter the judge, exit Socrates. The judge enters into speech, Socrates exits life. Socrates exits his life of words, his life of logic.
Enter the judge, exit Socrates. Henceforth it is the judge who holds the floor. A performance upon a stage is a simulation. It kills for a laugh, it kills to heal, and everyone goes away relieved. At the tribunal, speech is action, speaking performs the action, it kills for real. Since philosophy entered the tribunal, it has put itself in a position to act – to kill. It has in fact killed millions. By what right?
By what right does it grant itself this right? Remarkable in its formulation, this question replicates both the judge and the law itself. When we ask someone ‘by what right’ we are in fact asking that person to designate someone else who can act as guarantor. But exactly the same question can be asked of the latter and so on indefinitely. As though a third man might appear behind the second’s back, and a fourth behind the third’s: an endless line. In philosophy and elsewhere there is a class of questions dealing with existence and non-existence, questions which relentlessly pursue this third man.
A group entered the amphitheatre below a little while ago, huddled around its eldest member or its guide. Socrates appears behind him. The judge appears behind Socrates. And so we ask of him: by what right? And behind him stretches a long chain of shadows.
The guarantor is summonsed. Now, when dealing with this class of questions calling upon a third man, philosophy has always sought to determine if the chain has an end, a last member whose existence would legitimize each preceding link. If he exists, let him appear before the tribunal.
The judge exits.
The judge exits. Enter the praetor.
The praetor opens the judicial proceedings. First magistrate in terms of seniority and rank, he opens the proceedings by uttering the first words, the fundamental terms, which end all debate about a third man. He cannot be asked ‘by what right’, since the law cannot be spoken before his arrival. He gives everyone the right to speak. First, originary, he initiates the time of law.
The praetor speaks, and says: do, dico, addico. I give, I say, I confirm or award. Of course, no-one really understands addicere, the source, root or origin of both sentence and addiction, the verb which lurks behind Socrates’ words and actions, just as the judge stands behind the philosopher and the praetor behind him. Addicere further means to vow, to dedicate, to dispose of (as in to sell), to award, to legitimize a transferral of property, but also to sentence. The praetor’s first three words, the tria verba, pertain to language, law and religion. They are the beginning of judicial action: once they have been spoken, words are actions. The praetor gives: he gives the formula, the action, even the judge; he speaks: he speaks the law, he rules on proceedings; the praetor approves and confirms the will of each party. I could go on and on refining the translation of this word, but it would get us no further: the essential thing is to enter into language and assess its weight, to give it its full force. Which proves that before the praetor we were outside of language.
Let us consider the development of this formula, as though the first two terms were there to give rise to the third. The addition of saying and giving equals addiction.
We know many things about saying, about its logic and anthropology, we know so much about it that surely everything we know is through it, with it and in it; it is all we know. We know many things about giving, about the logic of exchange and its anthropology, we know so much about it that it is surely only because we are submerged in the network of exchange that we live at all. But we know nothing about the addition of these two, their synthesis, their mixture; about addiction. About what makes the death of Socrates the foundation of our philosophy, Socrates condemned by speech and poisoned by hemlock, poisoned by speech and condemned to hemlock. We know nothing about how giving might be taken over by saying; about how the given might be anæsthetized by speech; about the price speech pays for the given, which was free in the first place; about how speech sells out the given; we know nothing about the gift of speech, the gift of languages.
Addicere: to speak and to give approbation through saying; or, to give oneself the right to say through saying; or, to give speech the right to give. That is how Festus defines it, using the third verb to close the circle in such a way as to break away from the recurring question, always referring to a third man: by what right? Behind us is Socrates, and behind him, the judge; or, behind the play, the tribunal; behind the judge, the praetor; or, behind the law, its foundation in language. That is where the series stops. The praetor gives to the praetor and to no other the primary right to speak and to give that right to others. He gives himself as first man, the first to say: addico.
Addiction, the first diction, the first word, confirms all others. The addition of saying and giving trumps everything else, it is the convergence and summation of everything else – try to find an exception.
Addicted: drugged – addicted to speech as to a drug. The philosopher drinks endlessly from the cup of hemlock, from the crater of words. Addictus: sentenced. Socrates the philosopher sentences himself to death. To understand and trace the origin of this sentence, this addiction, we need to look to the very first addiction and synthesis of language and the given. As if, somehow, it were that first decision made by the praetor, the almost algebraic addition of the given and speech through the tria verba – as if that first identification of the given with speech produced, out of death and drugs, the sacrifice of philosophy. It is behind the stage, behind the tribunal, that the originary tragedy is played out: the actual death of a man from the poison of language, and life carries on, as we drink from the same narcotic. Asleep at Epidaurus, even our dreams are not safe from language. As death nears, healing flees. The price of adding saying to giving is death and narcotics.
Shadows seem to be dancing behind the praetor’s body, behind his words. Might his claim to speak before all others be a lie?
Before the foundation of knowledge, or of law and approbation, even before the foundation of speech, it was decided, according to Livy, that nothing could be changed or instituted nisi aves addixissent: without the addiction of birds. This is the feral, non-historical origin of the city.
A wake of vultures swoops behind the praetor’s back; now a murder of crows. Exit the praetor, enter the haruspex.
The greatest empire the world has known, the longest-lasting in our history was, when all is said and done, governed by the flights of birds. This was the most profound political decision ever taken. You who read this now, you who have just learned this, stop what you are doing and tell everyone; tell the general commanding an army, tell the great economist managing a crisis, tell the President’s advisors, tell the ministers, tell the head of state in person, and tell anyone you know who votes. No battle was ever entered by Roman legions, no cargo of wheat allowed to set sail, no law amended, no matter of significance ever decided at that time until the soothsayers had received the approbation of birds; whether this took the form of how they flew through the sky or the way they pecked at grain, nothing was done without the addiction of birds. Rome, as we know, won more victories than any other empire in history, devised the most stable legal system, adopted the best possible policies, made, for the most part, the best decisions. As we know, it remains the greatest empire of all time, and it put its fate in birds. Have you ever heard better news, do you know of a single philosophical idea finer and wiser than this one? Is there anywhere a simple fact more likely to teach the great and mighty a lesson in true humility? Or more likely to show the frivolity of our supposed insight, our reason and knowledge, our discourses on economics, strategy and politics, our illusory sciences: the humanities and social sciences. They who were more successful than anyone before and since paid no heed to language, but watched birds fly; they listened to no experts, but observed chickens pecking. I would love to see those who claim to hold the destiny of the world in their hands, whose images we see and whose voices we hear ten times a day, in these times when politics has been reduced to publicizing the State – I would love to see them down in the farmyard, their brows furrowed, meditative. Oh, to see them thus, standing and gaping in anticipation!
The tragedy of speech collapses in laughter.
Exit the magistrate, enter the seer. No-one has ever heard a soothsayer speak, no-one has ever understood what one was saying – when he seemed to be speaking, that is. Out of place in the amphitheatre, he chooses instead to race up the steps and leave, to exit the tribunal, to escape from prison; he wants nothing to do with tragedies, has no need of killing – he watches the sky.
Birds do not speak, entrails say nothing, the flight of vultures leaves no writing on the sky.
Apollo was the father of Æsculapius, master of this place; his mother was a princess, the nymph Coronis. It is said that while pregnant she granted favours to another man. Apollo discovered this and killed her, but not before ripping Asklepius from her womb prematurely. How did this imbecile come to learn of her infidelity and commit this heinous crime? By observing how strangely the crows were flying. He had seen their addiction.
Thus did the god of divination beget the god of healing and medicine. But in their midst a human sacrifice took place. The theatre is still encumbered by the mother’s body. This tragedy is an affliction of ours that we really must treat.
Philosophers mock them, but I admire the rituals of augury, the close attention that haruspices pay to the meaning that traverses or resides in the world, prior to our intervention, whether physical or spoken; the very first observation, wherein perception precedes the utterance or evaluation of language. The praetor cannot say addico until the seer has observed the flights of birds. Vultures fly, crows swoop by and chickens peck for food, all without consulting us: it is we who consult them. It is if, and only if, an action has been approved by the birds that the first speaker permits or forbids it. Augury opens a window in the sky that leads in to the prison of language, to Socrates’ gaol, to the theatre and the tribunal. This temple, this sacred space fashioned out of the air, is the fissure through which language comes undone, the interstice through which it breathes, the sense with which it begins, its pre-condition. It is the condition and the limit of experience.
It is via this aperture that our eyes turn towards the world, our hearing heeds sounds other than those of language, noises other than those of vocalizing. The sounds of scratching or pecking, or the soft caress of feathered wings in the turbulent air – not even Rome could be founded before this movement was heard.
The dictator talks, the general commands, the praetor pronounces and endorses the law, the philosopher speaks, but the soothsayer listens and sees, before the king, dictator, praetor or philosopher can speak. He comes before speech, in silence. He observes silence in order that the birds might come and be observed.
Tribunals are idealistic, and speak the world exactly as they represent it to themselves, employing performative language; they tell us that saying is doing, and they do, obliging others to act as though saying were doing. The king, the dictator, the general and the praetor, even the priest, the exacting philosopher, the rigorous scientist, the scrupulous historian, all remain idealistic, everything in the world seems to transpire according to their representations of it. Their speech is performative, it commands. They will all tell you that saying is doing and, under their command, everyone seems sufficiently naïve or obedient to believe them and to act as though it were true. The price of this belief – of this obedience – is tragedy, and death.
Death alone, the presence of a corpse, proves how serious speech is. It is an act of faith, an act of law and an act upon a stage. It is the only guarantee that he who speaks does not do so for nothing. Only death can close the window of language through which the truth might vanish, flying away like a crow. It ensures that language remains a closed system, from which truth takes its traction. Death alone counts as proof. Speaking men, dead men.
The death of Socrates shuts down his language and at the same time validates it, endorses it – I almost said addicts it. The death of the word validates the word, and at the same time redeems the things of the world. Death alone underwrites language, the veracity of science, its fidelity to things, its astonishing efficiency. Hiroshima is the foundation of contemporary science, just as the death of Socrates is the foundation of modern philosophy, just as the death of the word is the foundation of the very language which makes us human. Death alone sits centre-stage.
It is not my own immortality I seek, in this place where I have come to be healed, to drink ambrosia from the cup of immortality, but that of the species, in immediate danger. Our race as a whole needs to be cured of death. The human race needs to be given ambrosia, the drink of immortality, not hemlock. Here in the ruins of this ancient, lost culture, I try to understand how and what it is that drugs each one of our cultures, and to what fate they are condemning themselves. I seek to know how I might contribute to healing them, and giving back to them their innocent and immediate vitality.
Soothsayers presuppose a world pre-existing the speech of kings and judges, a world beyond the linguistic enclosure of the collective, and independent of weapons and prayer, a world where uncomplicated sense emerges. They presuppose that this meaning manifests itself without us. In observing the flights of vultures across the sky, or the behaviour of sacred fowl, or the entrails of victims, they are already acting like scientists. Observing, watching. Observing the world as though it were not something brought into being by the collective. Those who practise what are known as the experimental sciences also presuppose a world removed from men and independent of them, and things which exist in a distinct state. Meaning occurs in this world, meaning which cannot be given exact utterance in the language we use, nor precise utterance in the language of our exchanges. This meaning traverses the space beyond our languages, as a flight of crows or vultures. Like scientists, soothsayers observe meaning, with nothing at stake, without fetish, without merchandizing – without having to speak in those terms. It is said that the books of augury were incomprehensible; secret, sybilline and indecipherable, written in a language foreign to all others. My intuition tells me that they contained the ancient algorithms of our physics. Just as ancient Greek foreshadows our language, so must these formulae have been written in the ancestral algorithm of the equations we write today.
Philosophers used to ask if soothsayers could look at themselves without laughing. Indeed, philosophers never laugh, certainly not when they see themselves: they gnash their teeth. They cannot bear to see themselves speechless.
Without being able to prove it I believe, like soothsayers and haruspices, and like scientists, that there exists a world independent of men. No-one knows how to demonstrate the truth of this proposition, which we might like to call realist, since it exceeds language and thus any utterance which might demonstrate its proof. Realism is worth betting on, whereas idealism calls for demonstration. The affirmation that there is no world beyond what we can say about it, is an affirmation rigorously of language, and a rigorous affirmation of language. Then there is the assertion, an illogical one for our logic, an unspeakable one for our language, that there are things, facts, a world beyond language and logic. These propositions, autological one and all, proclaim the autism of language. This is our illness. Thus do philosophers scoff if someone pokes a hole through the transparent wall of language, reaches a hand through, jumps through it on horseback and heads for the forest, leaving the clearing behind. Philosophers laugh at this because philosophy is contemporaneous with language, we acquired them together, invented them together. Suddenly I understand why mathematics dates from earliest Antiquity: it never leaves the clearing of language; and why physics was such a latecomer: everything about the culture of the word mocked it. Greek philosophers mocked soothsayers in the name of the logos, just as the Roman cardinals condemned Galileo in the name of scripture, just as we still condemn the tenacious belief in the subsistence of the world. We always forget that the world bears our immortality.
I believe, I know, I cannot demonstrate the existence of this world because books written by means of other books teach nothing worth knowing, yet we recognize those that come from the world.
I believe, I know, I cannot demonstrate that this world exists without us. Who would not rather take dictation from its formidable silence, joyously and in good health, than write under the judgement of some tribunal?
At the top of the amphitheatre, the coping is crumbling away, here and there, producing irregular crenellations, occasional windows through which crows come and go.
I thought I had found an inaugural lecture. Yet these augural observations, as usual, came camouflaged. The priest’s knowledge came from a prior text. Observation cannot be detached from interpretation. Language and code stick to the given facts; mouths are imperious and marks are stubborn, keeping meaning in check, never giving it free rein.
The nymph was killed by the addiction of crows before the god of healing could be born. The knowledge of language always comes first. And it is always accompanied by death, the sordidly tenacious tragedy. The theatre is always with us.
Drugged by knowledge? I love that knowledge gives us life, cultivates us; I love making my home in it, that it helps me to eat and drink, to stroll, to love, to die, sometimes to be reborn; I love sleeping between its sheets and I love the fact that it is not something outside me. Yet it has lost this vital quality, so much so that we need to be cured of knowledge.
Broken down into tiny fragments, each rush feeling just like the first one, quickly becoming monotonous, and just as quickly outdated, subject to inflation rather than actual growth, the knowledge that comes to us through articles, theses and academic journals has taken the same form as the information thrust at us by the media in general, newspapers, radio and television; the same form as a wad of banknotes or a packet of cigarettes, divided into units and sorted at the data bank, encoded. We no longer live addicted to speech; having lost our senses, now we are going to lose language too. We will be addicted to data, naturally. Not data that comes from the world, or from language, but encoded data. To know is to inform oneself. Information is becoming our primary and universal addiction.
The aforementioned intellectual activity is the same as a drug fix: be careful not to miss your regular information fix or you will lose touch. The latest announcement renders all preceding announcements outdated. Such is the law of drug-taking: the next fix is the only one that counts. Neither information nor a drug fix ever gives any happiness when you have it, but will make you miserable when you don’t. Science no longer teaches detachment from the worst of our evils – competition, mimicry, envy, hatred and war – but instead presents itself in a guise which worsens and exasperates them. Cutting-edge knowledge quickly devalues all the rest: this edge cuts deep, causes pain, subjugates.
Knowledge gives. Quickly, abundantly. In the form of data, it becomes the given.
Knowledge says. Quickly, abundantly. In the form of code, it replaces language.
It replaces the given, it becomes language.
It gives, it says. Approves, sentences and subjugates.
Exit the praetor. Enter the oracle. The praetor, the first man; then the oracle at the real beginning. Before even the praetor.
Exit the oracle. Enter the scholar.
In turn, the scholar says: Do, dico, addico.
I am doped on knowledge.
Silence in the centre of healing, silence far from information. Giving up drinking seems easy, giving up smoking seemed a heroic gesture not so long ago; throwing out the papers, switching off the radio, leaving the television screen blank, that is the truest, most elementary form of detoxification. I came to Epidaurus for even more than that. Not keeping current, as they say, with science; not swimming in that current is what delivers us. The end of the hardest drug of all, the beginnings of wisdom.
This wide-spread idea that everything must be said and can be resolved by language, that every real problem is a topic for debate, that philosophy can be reduced to questions and answers, that one can only cure oneself by talking, that discourse is the only way of teaching anything, this theatrical, garrulous, publicity-seeking idea, lacking shame and modesty, is oblivious to the real presence of bread and wine, their unspoken taste and odour, it forgets how to raise infants through barely discernable gestures, about connivance and complicity, and things that go without saying, unspoken expressions of love, impossible intuitions that strike like lightning, the charm that lingers behind someone’s outward bearing; this judicial idea condemns the timid, those who are not always convinced of their own opinions and those who do not know what they think, researchers; this didactic idea excludes those who do not attend classes, humble folk, inventors, the hesitant and sensitive, men of intellect and labourers, the grief-stricken and the poor in spirit; I have known so many things without texts, so many people without grammar, children without lexicon, the elderly without vocabulary; I have lived so much in foreign lands, mute, terrified behind the curtain of languages, would I have really tasted life if all I had done was listen and speak? The most precious things I know are embedded in silence. No, neither the world nor experience nor philosophy nor death will allow itself to be locked up in a theatre, or a tribunal or in a lesson. This true idea overlooks physics and life, science and literature, modesty and beauty.
Wise knowledge heals and moulds the body, it embellishes. The more alert and inquisitive I am, the more I think. I think, therefore I am handsome. The world is beautiful, therefore I think. Knowledge cannot do without beauty. It is a science of beauty that I seek.
Once it reaches a certain point in its history, science must answer for its face, for the beauty it displays and produces. I have deserted knowledge in its present form because it makes men and things ugly, because it is not ageing well and has failed to mould our children. It brings ugliness and death, the twisted mask of tragedy.
After a certain point, science must answer for our children. Exit the scientist, behold the child.
We moved towards each other, underneath the sun, he did not speak, I had stopped speaking, we joined hands, we left the amphitheatre, furtively.
It is neither hot nor cold, the wind caresses our faces and arms as though drawing a map on our skin, the gentle breeze engages the foliage on the trees in a quasi-musical dialogue, sotto voce, the first pungent odours are coming from stems around us, there is grass between our teeth, we chew on its astringency, the landscape of the gods unfolds in the valley below in small ploughed patches, yellow and blue, like an ocellated peacock’s tail, as far as the rocky austerity of the hills, come come, I would like to pass on to you the perceptible things we have lost, the secret coming together of the composite world and the harmonizing body, I will leave you wisdom and shrewdness, and the tastes and perfumes of delicacy, come, and once we have stitched together our patchwork skin, like a garment, then I will tell you of the ancient ruins of my language, my beautiful, dying language, born of water that wrinkles like silk, and of the rustling of the sessile leaves of poplars, the gentle voice of things, come to the abandoned remains of the two forgotten, ransacked gardens, the garden of senses destroyed by language, the garden of my language destroyed by codes, come while there is still time, I did things badly the first time around, we are going to start again, come, the last child of men to be able to hear and see, come feel and touch, you will learn science quite soon enough, rest assured that you will.
Three kinds of audible
Treatment at Epidaurus consisted of sleep and dreams: the patient was required to hear the sounds his sick body was emitting. He left healed if he had silenced his organs. The primary source of noise is within the body, whose subliminal murmur our proprioceptive ear sometimes strains to hear: billions of cells dedicated to biochemical reactions, the likes of which should have us all fainting from the pressure of their collective hum. As a matter of fact, we do sometimes hear it, and we call that audibility illness. The hubbub spreads across the nested levels of integration that form a black box full of black boxes – molecules, cells, organs, systems – and gradually, over boundaries and through twists and turns, resolves into information. Through this succession of rectifiers thrown up by the complexity of the black boxes, it ends up as healthy silence, and no doubt also as language.
Between the extremes of vision and blindness, sight disintegrates, blurs, fades into a milky cloud: disorder will overcome the obstacles that the body puts in its path. Should it overcome them completely, then darkness reigns, and total blindness is upon us. Likewise, what the deaf hear are neither signals nor voices, but tinnitus; hellish shrieks; high-pitched, strained, monotonous cries that drive you mad. This dreadful torture condemns them to a life of music. Their lives become a tricky balancing act, as they strive to maintain an equilibrium between the layer of music and the chaotic bombardment of noise. When harmony gives way, like the breaking of a dike, I will die, my eardrums punctured by the screaming flood. The moment of death is marked by the final victory of the multiple.
The second source of noise is spread over the world: thunder, wind, surf, birds, avalanches, the terrifying rumbling that precedes earthquakes, cosmic events. Soothsayers used to listen to the beating of wings in the air, outside of the theatre and before its advent, outside of the social or the political, and before their advent. This noise also resolves itself into information via the neatly complicated box of the inner and outer ear, but we often build equally refined boxes around our bodies: walls, cities, houses, monastic cells. Sounds reach the monad softly, through doors and windows.
The last source of sound comes from the collective, surpassing the others by far, often to the point of cancelling them both out: silencing the body, silencing the world. An unusual set of circumstances is required for a group to consent to be quiet: Carthusians, Trappists, Quakers, all attentive to another word; loud, garrulous Gascons, twenty-five thick in a dove-hunting blind and silent as the dead while they await the inaugural shoot of the season. These are exceptions that prove the rule: society makes a colossal noise, the latter increases in direct proportion to the former, the town rat can be distinguished from the country rat by its immunity to this din. Our megalopoli are deafening: who would put up with this hellish din if we didn’t simply expect that with a group comes a racket? Being part of one means not hearing it. The better integrated you are, the less you notice it; the more you suffer from it, the less well-integrated you are. Shouts, car-horns, whistles, engines, cries, brawls, stereotypes, quarrels, conferences, assemblies, elections, debates, dialectics, acclamations, wars, bombardments, there is nothing new under the sun, there is no news that is not news of yet another racket. Noise is what defines the social. Each is as powerful as the other, each multiplies as quickly as the other, it is as difficult to integrate into one as into the other. The transition from chaotic rumbling to information – no matter if it is meaningless provided it appears organized – or from a din to music, even if only awful music, dictates the social contract, a document lost to us. You will never find any sense to it, it has as little as melody, rhythm, information or rumbling. Hermes defeated Argus by showing how sound, through its very ubiquity, unites space in its entirety and makes of it a single phenomenon perceptible to all, whereas sight always remains multiple. The audible occupies ground through its reach, power belongs to whomever has a bell or a siren, it belongs to the network of sound transmitters. Even armies used to make their drummers march at the front: the most closely knit of all collectives, united through violence, advertises the strength of its bonds to any potential adversaries, as though it were preceded by its definition, or its signature. In any event this noise, words, motors or music, for the most part overwhelms the call of things and the soft rumbling of our organs. Is the given thus only given to us through speech? Why certainly! Furthermore, it is given in and by the hubbub of its constituents, a racket the singular progress of which is sometimes illustrated by our language.
For the most part we do not know how much we frighten the world, nor the dark holes in which it seeks refuge from us. Tigers roam the jungles, eagles retreat to escarpments, foxes into trenches and wise men to certain islands, all in terror of this noise. All these are endangered species now, dying because we have learned how to broadcast our noise more efficiently. Soothsayers must make their pronouncements before the battle – what bird would risk coming near it? Ask the inhabitants of Hiroshima what they heard of the world one summer’s day in 1945.
Do we have an ear for the collective din?
I will never be able to show how grateful I am to the friend who took me to Pinara. A soaring cliff-face makes up the back wall of an immense, almost closed circus of mountains, which one can only reach on foot these days through a narrow pass. You would swear it was the face of some steep continental shelf preventing ships from reaching the shore, just as it does at Fécamp – one hundred metres of shallow water, then a sheer drop. And it is pocked with tombs, up and down, length-wise, in uneven lines, in columns. Vertical burials. Open windows, dark, giving on to the world beyond this wall. What sovereign power will show itself here, on a thousand balconies, to the acclamation of the circus? If all these corpses were to rise up suddenly, we would find ourselves looking upon the façade of a cathedral, busy with immobile statues, studded with ghosts all the way up to the coping. Ten thousand dead eyes watch the ruins of the old city built on a hill below, watch over it, small and crumbling. A bewildering and constant vigil, death keeping watch over life, the time of history carrying on, beyond the extinction of history, beneath the unseeing and multiple gaze of eternity. And Pinara is located in the centre of the world, almost Greek and already European, Asian because it is Turkish, its tombs evoking India, but African in its replication of Dogon cliff dwellings. Time stands still where space folds in on itself.
Facing this solemn wall, on the other side of the city, diametrically opposite the tombs, lies the Greek theatre. Anyone who sits there does so in the expectation that everything will be audible, amplified by echoes: the dignified silence of the entombed, sheltering from the clamour of the city at the very back of their crypts, the words and the music of the tragedy on the decaying stage, the applause on the crumbling steps.
The theatre at Pinara does not face the countryside, or the sea, as though in defiance of the wind and the musical diction of the surf. On the contrary, it is enclosed by the social circus, homothetically. One has the same form as the other, its scale model. The whole landscape is an amphitheatre: the funeral cliff-face rises at the back, the city is the stage, the circle of mountains terraced seating; the constructed theatre is only a small part of the whole. Behold Il Campo in Siena, the main square in Bazas, or Notre-Dame in Paris, closing the social circus with its cliff-face of the dead, just like Saint Peter’s Basilica. Everyone sees the town hall or the church, and the public edifice sees each passer-by – as though the social contract, which cannot be spoken, could still be constructed. An institution of stones and statues. The theatre provided the model for the square, and the square the model for the amphitheatre. So simple, so banal, the circle is closed. Yet everyone seems to be fixated on seeing. Everyone on the steps and on the slopes sees everyone arranged on the cliff-face and everyone sees at once the spectacle of death, or the foundational tragedy. The more we immerse ourselves in this space, the more we see and the less we hear. And the more we withdraw from it, the less we see and the better we listen. Better still: the better we see that it is a matter of hearing. Of a sound stage, or a noise trap. Of the immense, transmitter-receiver, social box.
In the centre, the speaker or singer hears the silence of the audience which hears its own silence and the voice that comes out of it, a perfect, temporary circle which will soon collapse under the wave of applause, or the shouts and cat-calls of failure. Within a single sentence, inside a single space during the course of a single action, we find rhythm and music, silence and singing, the chaotic crackle of noise, everything that precedes language, and the transformations of one into the other, as though we were dealing with a box both sonorous and deaf, tempestuous, attentive and tacit, capable of changing one acoustic system into another, just as I described it happening within the body, both the transmitter of its own noises and the receiver of its pains and fits, its pleasures and joys; an empty box during times of good health, manufacturing language out of warm vibrations. The only echoes that come back from the mountains at Pinara are of social acclamation; we will no longer hear the howling of wolves in this place. Except as forebears of cities.
The group listens to itself as we do. It emits noise, colossally so, hears it, refines it and transforms it during this feedback loop into stereotypes, stubbornness, the droning of poetic stanzas, tragic verse, political analyses, social sciences . . . and another noise, background noise, waste-product or residue from the process of transformation, acclamation that grows louder at the perfection of the resulting music, then sends out speech and clamour once again, for its own sake, through the very same process of transformation and sets up yet another feedback loop for a new, but still repetitious transformation and so on, thus do we keep recounting its myths, music, chants and religion, its hidden gesture and its recent history. Thus does the group constantly send out and receive information about itself, its noises, wars and stories, crises and tragedies, its languages and its conditions, all in multiple cycles.
Under the oppressive sun of Asia Minor, Pinara is astonishing for its pure and abstract geometry: the theatre orients its pavilion towards the detailed rumblings of the lively city, although for the most part it is directed at what is being broadcast in the background from a thousand shadowy mouths, tombs that blacken the tall, sombre cliff-face; the lingering moan of the dead still audible in the circus two thousand years after the death of the city. The theatre relates epicyclically to the hemicycle that starts and finishes at the tombs. It is as though the former keeps going around, on or within the latter, multiplying the loops, creating performances beneath the continual hum of eternity, its politics and its history. Together, people listen to their dead: the cliff-face, an immense radio transmitter or television screen.
We can neither speak nor sing without the feedback loop which guarantees the audibility of our own voice. The ear guarantees and regulates the mouth, which emits noise in part for the speaker, in part for others, who in turn guarantee other feedback loops. Intuitively we imagine a large prostrate body, buried underground, the marble pavilion of its ear jutting out, its dark mouths speaking and shouting for millennia through the plunging cliff-face.
Our myriad cells shout out: a proprioceptive ear, often deaf, listens. Multiple loops regulate this racket which no doubt transforms itself into our pleasures and discomforts, our fits and silences, the beginnings of language. Our mouth shouts out; the child who does not speak, cries and screams: the ear ensures these messages; dialogues will regulate them. We can draw cycles which unify the body’s transmissions and reception. Why not simply call them self-awareness? More often than not closed by these cycles, yet open.
Our myriad dead shout out; in the theatre, the audience, noise; the collective is deafening. Whoever listens to this din with his whole body calms it, provokes it, regulates or masters it – sometimes, not always, for it can crush you, dismember you. We can draw a thousand cycles unifying the group’s transmission and reception, as well as the constant maintenance of this movement. Speeches, music, constructions, media, performances. Why not call the circulation of this thunderous flux, meaningful or meaningless, the social contract? Or for each one of us: concern, passion, enthusiasm for belonging. More often than not closed by these cycles, rarely open.
Myriad things shout out. Often deaf to unusual transmissions, our hearing is astonished by the shouts of things which have no name in any language. The third cycle, which begins with a rare attentiveness and requires turning a deaf ear to oneself and to the group, interrupting the closed cycles of consciousness and the social contract, might simply be called knowledge.
Every possible kind of audible finds sites of hearing and regulation.
It is as though the body were constructed like a box, or series of boxes, through which these cycles pass. As though the collective forms itself into a box or boxes through which these flows circulate. And as though knowledge, a world crying out for more attentive hearing, constructs the largest white box of all.
The task that remains is to describe this last kind of audible, which I will call soft or hard.
And to open a few black boxes: houses, prisons, infernos, ships.
And finally to describe some of the passageways that are difficult to negotiate for these flows and cycles: corridors controlled by Muses, Sirens, Bacchantes, women all.
Soft and hard
When a highway is in disrepair, it can be fixed: you fill in the pot-holes, go over the new bitumen with a steamroller, reinforce it at considerable expense, both physical and financial. But there is another solution: put up signs which read ‘Road under Repair’. This is the preferred solution of administrators; it is cheaper, and panders to their tendency to communicate by memoranda. Not so long ago engineers argued, with the figures to prove it, that the act of reading the sign, accompanied by a few jolts to the chassis, was enough to force drivers to slow down, thereby drastically reducing the number of accidents: safety. It’s as though they imagine the car skidding on the sign itself, rather than being shaken by the actual ruts in the road.
Breaking rocks, transporting them by the tonne, compacting their sharp edges into a solid mass, demands an energy output measurable in horsepower. On the other hand, drawing letters and crosses with a brush, red on white, recognizing their place within a code, makes energy demands that are not even comparable. The former is measured on the entropic scale, the latter on the informational scale. The former is manual, the latter digital. It is the latter that is preferred by philosophers, who love signs and words, icons and notices, language, writing. A childhood spent breaking stones no doubt predisposes me to prefer the former. With time, progress is shifting from one to the other; I know full well that history passes from reality to language, from things to signs and from energy to information: from hard solutions to so-called soft ones. I merely ask that we remember hardness.
My ears still ring from stone-breaking.
The philosophy of language is our reason, and always will be; it has converted us, and is winning. There is no doubt that it has the upper hand over phenomenology; we must declare it the winner. Loyally, and without reservation.
Hoping for a return to things themselves, it was my naïve wish to hear, see, visit, taste, caress, smell; to open myself to the given. How can we do this without also saying it? How do we divest ourselves of flesh which has been speaking for millennia? Is there a single given independent of language? If so, how do we apprehend it? The discussion is over as soon as it begins: no-one knows how to say what is given, independently of language. Any description of the aforementioned thing is merely presenting data in relation to the language being employed. The thing itself flees along the infinite asymptote of utterance.
Behold the world: it is filled with propositions and categories, in the tiniest nooks and crannies, pebbles, roots, crickets, in hidden recesses, mines, pockets, tunnels, under ground or under water, in primitive forests and at the fringes of distant galaxies; no space is left unoccupied.
Is it language and language alone that gives us the given?
The former stone breaker cannot believe his ears.
The given I have called hard is sometimes, but not always, located on the entropic scale: it pulls your muscles, tears your skin, stings your eyes, bursts your eardrums, burns your mouth, whereas gifts of language are always soft. Softness belongs to smaller-scale energies, the energies of signs; hardness sometimes belongs to large-scale energies, the ones that knock you about, unbalance you, tear your body to pieces; our bodies live in the world of hardware, whereas the gift of language is composed of software.
The difference between the softness of software and the hardness of hardware is perfectly sensed when we locate it unambiguously outside of language. The difference is of course one made by science, and thus once again by language and software, but even though we formulate it in the language of energy – whether thermodynamics or information theory – our body perceives and endures it via things. Tacitly, the body understands the softness of meaning, and that one’s retinas are never burned out by discourse, one’s back not broken, one’s skin not flayed. Looking through a window and seeing that tree down there seems as harmless as saying ‘tree’, but looking at the sun which illuminates it is a little harder on the eyes; even more than that, staring at that same sun at midday, in the middle of the Sahara, or being surprised by the flash of a thermonuclear explosion, will end your sight for good. Even if the murmuring of zephyrs through the tree tops seems divine, wind can knock you about and make you stumble – the north wind can, at least; you will never be blown over by the word ‘wind’. Our bodies are aware of this discrepancy, or more precisely, live as though they understand it, or even better still, survive because they understand it. If we proceed in wilful ignorance of it, we injure ourselves; we die.
Life, as such, exploits this distinction, moving from hardness to softness. Its momentum carries it from hardware to software, from energy to information. The sensible moves in the same direction. It is through the sensible that the body recognizes the interval between the two and the direction in which we are carried.
It is not always the gentle delights enjoyed by holiday-makers as they stroll innocently through a man-made Arcadia between lake and forest that the environment holds in store for us. We might mistake the return to things for a return to the simple life, or a beach holiday, but conversely he who never gets beyond the local bookshop, where the wind only stirs on the morning of Pentecost, or who never leaves his advertisement-saturated neighbourhood, tends to overwhelm the given with language. There are so many filters, cities, posters, medicines, techniques and assurances, protective casings and customs, erected by history around the reasonably well-to-do contemporary Westerner, entirely caught up in the small-energy software covering our screens, running across walls and through our work, that hardness is a rare commodity these days. Empiricism is not enough to wake us from this new sleep, we need an eruption, a large-scale seismic event, a major cyclone, a new Hiroshima. But no: the ocean rises up on our screens, voluptuously.
While it is true that, more often than not, what we receive is a gift of language, a breach in the wall of software that surrounds us can sometimes let in an overwhelming force. The given can knock us off our mount, and it is not always a loud utterance. A rough parpen or sharp-edged brick will cut our hands, our retinas are defeated by bright light and our eardrums by cannon-fire, a sailor will be knocked over if too close to a waterspout in a cyclone, our backs ache from the distance between hands and soil. Nausea is not always the product of writing, a heavy swell will send us for the nearest bucket without a word being said – sea-noise, noisea. Yes, sometimes the given can be hard, whereas it is always soft when it comes through language.
It would seem that there are two kinds of given: one is gentle, conveyed by language, a suave kingdom, satin-smooth, syrupy, soft, exquisite, logical and exacting; the other is unpredictably hard, a mixture of hard and soft, giving no warning before waking us with a slap in the face. Faced with this mixture, we must identify the given which resists being named by language and which is still without concept. This mingled given, studded with sharp thorns, wakes us from the sleep of language when the soft membrane of our box – our gaol – of sound is lacerated by hurricanes.
Hard, material forces surround us, threaten us, sometimes shelter us, are a condition of life; we know how to pit hard against hard. The natural sciences deal with the elementary conditions of our existence: large-scale energies.
There is a sort of tide, or current, or drive from hard towards soft: it is history, of course, but evolution as well, and time, no doubt. Energy resolves into information: the former supports the latter, the latter taps into the former. Hardware becomes software, force becomes meaning.
Our body, warm, powerful, resistant and therefore hard, an object on the entropic scale, mingles its hardness with the softness of small-scale energies: information first, meaning and language last. It is as though life were a stage in this process. Our body mingles soft and hard and thereby produces and receives the same mixture. A state in the middle of this process or progression. Our undertakings themselves are getting softer and softer.
Yet this flow encounters obstacles, twists and turns, walls and filters; negotiates, traverses, follows and skirts them. The passage through which it percolates is an obstructed one.
Eloquence begins by standing on coarse sand, facing the chaotic ocean and breaking pebbles in your teeth, and ends with the sublime. We should define sublimation as the passage from solid to gaseous, a softening.
I do not know if talking of filters will help us understand how thunder, noise, the vibration of sound waves (whether audible or felt through our skin), subtly become meaning. There is no reason to discount the hypothesis.
The question of knowledge, of the sensible and of language is located somewhere on the graduated spectrum of this fan, somewhere in the range it encompasses between hardness and softness, this partitioned, compartmentalized distance, strewn with obstacles, twists and turns, and clear pathways. A box within boxes where the sound of cannon-fire gradually transforms itself into a whispered confidence.
At what point on this path do we leave behind hardness for permanent softness? When? The time is not far off for us.
Large-scale energy overwhelms small, the wind swallows voices, carries away cries; small sometimes controls and captivates large. The distinction between the two comes after their mingling, rather than before it, the given comes to us however it can, amidst jolts and signs; an upbringing or a life without the former marks the beginning of the reign of the latter. Sensation gets just what it needs from this mixture. Philosophy has all the more difficulty conceiving of the former because it is disgusted by the latter. Sensation, never pure, filters energies, protects itself and us from an excess of it, encodes and passes on information: it transforms hard into soft.
This transformation, which occurs against a background of differentiation and mingling, clearly cannot be understood without science, and therefore at the most basic level without language, but once more the body manages it, the organism lives it, the living body survives because of it, and will die of it. Children and animals understand it without language.
What remains now is to think about mingling itself; the softening, the levelling, the planing, the smoothing out of hardness into softness. It is time to write about mixtures, and filtering.
Voices get through. Raucous, low, full, pleading, vulgar, sharp, cutting, jovial, harmonious, commanding, harrowing, seductive, explosive or irritated, a virago’s, a virgin’s, a fishwife’s or whore’s voice, an overbearing victim’s, a passionate, imperious lover’s, shouting out the dreary obstinacy of true passion, a maternal, sisterly, counselling, pious, infantile, rasping, insolent, egalitarian voice, a team player’s voice, a voice of encouragement, of destructiveness or caresses, an ironic or aggressive or cynical voice, an old alcoholic’s cat lying in the gutter, denying the arrival of spring, a voice that is vile, veiled, velvety, noble, high-pitched, servile, majestic, ample, sick, affronted, clothed in silence, echoing with the sea or forest, undercut by the twittering of birds, howling like a wild beast, street cries reflected off walls and town squares, a piercing, plaintive voice, asking questions and saying come here, an alarming voice, broken, sobbing – along what paths has your voice not flowed, off what surfaces and what rocks has it not echoed, extending the carillon of senses, intuitions and implications beneath language?
The human voice will get through the obstacle course, whether yawn or prayer, prophecy or screech. Waterfall, sandstorm, torrent, it sweeps away gradations, the chromatic spectrum that runs from obscure loathings to purest love, from bestial growls to flights of mysticism, from the inert noise of matter to the perfect syllogism: mixture, life.
Grammar ignores physics and biology, plus human passions and all literature. Behold the voice of philosophy, which moves from litanies to theorems, from experience to invocation, from adamantine rigour to cries of pain. It abandons sublime and rapidly idiotic inflexibility so that language might not die – from the smothering of meaning. Its voice, like any other, traverses all possible Fourier equations to expand the stained-glass window in which meaning shines out, gold, lead, blood and passion.
Language speaks, gives us gentle meaning, proves, but also blows, thunders and shreds us with its screeching. It may leave traces and marks, but it requires light to make and read them: writing is obliterated by night, it assumes perpetual daylight, a summer solstice on New Zemble. Meaning and proof are made on waves of sounds and light, require energy and, soft though they may be, spill over on to the hard scale of entropy, music, rhythms, cries and noise, sun or lightbulb. Léon Brillouin exorcized Maxwell’s demon with a similar remark. Language must be paid for, in energy at the very least; it is never free. We will need to determine after this if it gives the given. Meanwhile, they’re not exactly giving it away. And if you believe they are, you might as well believe in perpetual motion.
Once again, the body is aware of this dependency. Uterine, it thrilled to hear its praises sung in its mother’s tongue, breathless with desire for it, and three thousand years ago, upright in a storm of siren song, lashed to a mast, felt fear, fled or danced, fascinated – would have given anything for this beautiful language. It has always known, without needing it explained in language, that language is soft and hard, it has known since birth that the given is a mixture of soft and hard, that sensation transforms hardness into softness, how could it not know difference and transition?
The philosopher of language would like everything to stay soft. Let him build, let him navigate, let him break stones, let him abandon for a while his rigorous languor, his felt, his logic and his fleecy lining.
Passages
First nuptials. If, one summer’s day, you should ever climb the hill to Pratz-Balaguer, a small, dying village atop the spur of a deep valley in the western Pyrenees, you will have the good fortune to find a little silence as you leave behind you the noisy crowd, the vulgar war which first industry, and now tourism, wage on space, beauty and the countryside. Tranquil places are disappearing, a few old men haunt the ruins, black ghosts, too weak to repair the stone walls crumbling under the force of snow and passing time, wander the laneways in search of the screeching children who, some seventy years ago now, ran around a village square that used to hum with gossip. Space is stopped in its tracks by this valley, history has run its course here. Perched vertiginously above the gorge, a few sections of wall remain of the ancient chateau, the cemetery is disintegrating behind the locked church. No more nobles or warriors, no more religion or priest, no more shepherds, the only thing that ever passes through is the tramontana. This slower than slow death is shrouded in silence.
Our morning trek up the mountain ends there, a drowsy siesta begins here, on a path invaded by wild oats. The wind plays through the moving leaves of the poplars that line it. Music? It is barely audible. Rhythm? More of a quasi-period, which the gentle gusts of wind lift out of the multiple trembling of sessile leaves. Rumbling? Friction, chance caresses, the merest stirring of barely perceptible currents, background noise. Music – no, nor rhythm, nor noise; might this be the voice of God?
Far from the collective, able to hear and touch it, our body perceives the divine. Our body is familiar with the ancient union chased away by the filthy noise of social ritual. The religion of the collective despises the religion of the world; a place in which messages are shouted out can have no connection with the world of things. Where are we to find the smallest island of silence now? Alone with the ghosts of this dead village, not so much prostrate as submerged in the wild grass of its pathways, saved from the mindless rumble for just a moment, I hear the branches mingling with the first stirrings of the tramontana, their harmony, the gentle conversation between trembling leaves and wind, softer than gentle, secret, modest, silken, almost sleek and uniform, a caress with a veil. Through the foliage we can detect the small grains carried in intermittently on the transparent gusts of wind. You need to sink even deeper into an almost-sleep to further fine-tune your hearing, your attention, letting the slow and gentle gusts of the wind’s currents stir your body’s tissues and lift their leaves to dance.
What does it say, the mild, gentle voice of this union?
In some music, the melody expands and rises like bread dough to become the sound wave itself, just as the woven image of a tapestry buries itself in the textile surface. This thread is not sewn on to the tapestry, that song does not sit discretely on the bed of harmony, philosophic thought does not exhibit itself, alone, above and exterior to the tonality of speech, like a meta-language or caption; rather the thread blends with the fabric, the meaning dissolves into the story, the threnody sustains the sound. Aphrodite manifests herself as watery flesh and the ocean sparkles with infinite possibilities. Audible language trembles from the multiple meanings contained within it.
What did the voice say?
That this was how we must write. Like the fractal gale blowing the almost livid leaves. Far from speech, before any words are spoken, augural observation of the hard sonorities of the world contains multiple dimensions of meaning. The haruspex had to choose from this myriad density of possibilities. We must write as close as possible to this moving, dense proliferation, to the full capacity of the senses which is opened up in this place and given to us by the sensible. By this I mean the sensible that is designated by the infinite capacity of sense.
The sessile leaves of the poplars write the sensible, say the sensible, to be read here, and heard too.
The sensible envelopes hybrid multiplicity, the potentiality of sense: fluctuating stock and capital, a well, capacity or source. It envelopes them without containing them, like an overflowing cornucopia.
What did the voice say? It manifested itself as different voices, whispered words, which is something voices are capable of when they come from faces we can imagine. I will not fear death if, through force, or over time, I can manage to etch the outline of this face in the sand. Clear and distinct meaning – spoken, heard, exchanged, on which some agreement can be reached – draws this face in profile, an instantaneous harmony of multiple voices, a partial and perfect rendering of this masterwork, inaudible yet audible on a summer’s day beneath the poplars, when a thousand filaments of breeze ripple a thousand mobile stems, slim and slender, in every possible direction in space. Potential becomes actual, the sensible becomes sense, a single note emerges from the din. I seek the well of noise.
What did the divine voice say? It gave us the palette on which shades and colours combine, the interplay from which tones are drawn to the surface, the inaccessible totality of meanings, it gave us – quite precisely – a common sense.
Which the generalized eardrum of our skin received.
The wind, sensible, passes for wit, provided we listen between the lines.
Voices make noise, so do things. These were clashing clamours, once. A prophet’s voice needed nothing less than a desert to be heard. Mountain dwellers called to each other across great distances; sailors would overcome the howling of the wind and the tongue-clacking of the waves to hail each other; the Gauls passed news along from one hillock to the next, often only to have it intercepted by the wind. My father and brother were shy, like all the men in my family, but living next to the hungry belly of a stone crusher they were also incapable of speaking without shouting. Eloquence had its beginnings confronting the crashing of the waves, with a mouth full of pebbles, so as to learn how to dominate the roar of a crowd. The exercise was performed facing the thundering ocean, tongue, teeth and palate full of stones, not tropes, and only afterwards before an assembly. Before it submits to the rhetor, with his grammar and his logic, our tongue is a physical thing – Stentor’s was said to be like a trumpet.
Ours is an age without trumpets. We can now receive the gift of language, because we have silenced the world. Our amplifiers blare out in a desert, where dogs obey a new master’s voice. Motors reign everywhere, the background noise of town and country alike. You need to make your way as far as Patara, another dead city, to see the converse situation, an amphitheatre invaded by sand: the beach has filled Demosthenes’ mouth and ears, a human voice smothered by the flowing of an hourglass. At present, the five oceans have been vanquished by the assembly of humanity. Language, previously soft in a hard world, learned the hard way how to overcome that obstacle, and these days counts as the only hard thing left in a world softened to the point of muteness. It has silenced hardness. The philosophy of language is winning because language is winning, and it does so physically first and foremost. In the last fifty years, who suffers from the sound of thunder or tornadoes; who has not had their ears blasted by loud-speakers? There is no longer a single recess left in the world, pebble, root, cricket, no secret place, mine, pocket or tunnel, underground or in the seas, in the rainforests or in the middle of the desert, which is not smothered by filthy noise.
Before making sense, language makes noise: you can have the latter without the former, but not the other way around. After noise, and with the passage of time, a sort of rhythm can develop, an almost recurring movement woven through the fabric of chance. The sea gives birth to a tidal flow, and this flow to Venus: a rhythmic current emerges from the disorderly lapping of waves, music surfaces in this place. In turn, this layer of music, universal before the advent of meaning, carries all meaning within it; distilled, differentiated language selects the meaning or meanings it will isolate from this complex, and then broadcast.
Whoever speaks is also singing beneath the words spoken, is beating out rhythm beneath the song, is diving into the background noise underneath the rhythm. Meaning trails this long comet tail behind it. A certain kind of æsthetics, a certain kind of physics take as their object this brilliant trail, which light or the grammar of meaning leave in their wake. Writing lends itself to a similar description, clarity replacing noise: Brillouin exorcized Maxwell’s demon by remarking that no-one can read or write in the dark.
It is through the voice that the first act of seduction passes between interlocutors, sotto voce, a tension that is rhythmic and musical, calling for consideration, pleading for attention. Some virago repels us with her insistent nagging, some self-important windbag bores us with his endless monologue: too much noise, not enough rhythm, no melody at all. Throw out any book that fails to grab you with these right from the start. It is the first chord that captivates, fascinates and enchants us. Pull out all the stops for your introduction, make it abrupt if you seek to wake up your readers; long, gentle and floating if you seek to disarm them. Music always comes at the head of a parade, so that from far away the first thing we hear is the drumming, before the procession of long rhetorical divisions. Dialogue can only begin if there is an end to the petty squabbling where no-one listens to anybody else, and where everyone has a bone to pick with everyone else. Visit the museum of Rhodes and you will see an ancient vase on which two men, above the vase’s mid-section, appear to be having a pleasant conversation. They seem to be engaged in gentle dialogue, each seated upon on stool located at the vase’s swollen belly, but hidden on the underside, underneath each seat, is a monstrous animal, lying in wait. Our bestial relationships, of bickering and dominance, barks, cries and braying, show themselves in the very foundations of dialogue. The two beasts under the seats watch each other, ready to snap. At conferences you hear words that yelp, growl, bleat, wail, ululate, trumpet, moo, whistle, yap, bellow – this is how sessions begin, with jungle noises coming from underneath the seats. This is how dialectics strikes, like rutting billy-goats, this is the struggle of the political animal. This is how language and theory begin. It is often said, glibly, that their origins are lost to us in the mists of time, irrecoverable, but here they are, thunderous, with us every step of the way. On the contrary, it is a miracle if we can distance ourselves from them at all. How many conversations do they keep at bay, each like a guard dog, gnawing away at its own little truth, or howling the howl which has for so long guaranteed its dominance; how few words there are in these hard signals, how rare is reconciliation between the boisterous animals that precede language, and how improbable that any new meaning should come out of this scripted rut. Let us first of all tame the animals crouching under our seats.
Rhythm manages to do so, like a hammer evening up crooked teeth; so does music, having as they say a civilizing influence, putting Argus to sleep and reducing him to tears, the hammering out of the cadence suddenly taking wing. Orpheus, tamer of wild animals, sails into the sirens’ pass, the Argonauts rowing furiously behind his lyre. Ulysses follows him. Anyone who would attempt to create something must brave the same peril.
Fantastic animals perch on the rocks where the waves break, hang on with their claws and screech out. We must pass through the clamour of the ocean, then defy the beasts, all talons and beaks – what do the soft feathers of these women have in store for us? Before there is any chance of dialogue, there is the roar of the ocean and clamour of the menagerie; no-one can come before them without fear and without having heard from afar the din which shakes you in your skin till your solar plexus vibrates and your legs tremble; and yet they draw us in, seductively, towards this theatre, into the hollow of its splayed legs. We know how to construct the body of the great animal, we know how to get into its black resonance box. From the first note of music, a religious silence. Before a single page is possible, you have to get past the wailing of the body, tinnitus, sobbing, inflamed desires, then the sharp-toothed hounds which forbid creativity in the corridors of institutions and the channels of false glory; after this, the hard song of the world seems so gentle.
Here, directly ahead, is the Sirens’ pass. Ulysses enters it, but cleverly avoids it too. Once again, he becomes no-one: he slips in, immobile, lashed to a mast, in the wake of his sailors who swim through the choppy waters, their ears sealed with balls of warm wax. In myth, the monad-ship, with neither door nor opening, has already discovered Leibniz’ solution. It sails past the obstacle of noise, neither transmitting nor receiving, and cancels out the Sirens.
Orpheus, all ears, his lyre or cithara held before him, is more than a match for the noise. Ulysses succeeds, making it through the pass in silence, but cheats by suppressing all noise, danger or temptation. Orpheus precedes him bravely, confronting the problem and resolving it with music.
Orpheus transformed noise into music. And no doubt invented it too in this dangerous place.
Music, which comes from all the Muses, cannot be held to be an art; it is the summation of all the arts. Without music, not one of them can achieve its goals; music watches over them all, it is the condition of their existence. Without it, poetry is at best pedestrian; architecture, a pile of stones; sculpture, inert matter; and prose, mere noise. Eloquence deprived of rhythm and the modulations of singing evocation collapses into gibberish and boredom.
Orpheus understood this. When Apollo offered him the old seven-stringed lyre, music was still an art among others, one Muse among nine sisters. Orpheus gave the new lyre nine strings, one for each sister, and since then, music has incorporated the instrument, becoming the first amongst the arts by bringing them together. Strings, arts, Muses, come together as a spray of flowers, a spindle of thread, a weft of fabric.
There is no single Muse devoted to music, which is shared by the nine sisters. What a fit of jealous rage there would be, between those who found themselves deprived and isolated from music, and the one who would seek to federate her deaf and disconnected sisters. Music resides in their midst, constitutes their milieu, intersection and coming together. It is the ensemble of the Fine Arts, and their precondition, it can be equated to the Muses’ continual dialogue or conversation, their harmony; it built the house of the Muses, maintains their collective existence, expresses their social contract in its secret language. History brings time to this language; and the surveyor-architect brings stone, iron and glass to this language, each his share and each his version; the landscape architect brings glasshouses and fountains and garden paths to this language; poetry, tragedy and eloquence add languages to this language, and astronomy even adds science to this language bereft of language and underneath languages, lacking ideas and knowledge and yet underlying all knowledges: music expresses what transcends the arts, sciences and language.
Our languages have meaning. Beneath language, beneath all languages, universally so, music lives beneath meaning and before it, its pre-condition and its physical medium. Meaning presupposes music, and could not emerge without it. Music sounds the transcendental in language, the universals preceding meaning. It inhabits the sensible, it carries all possible senses.
It vibrates in the secret recesses of our conversations, continually underpins our dialogues, our exchanges presuppose it, it knows in advance our harmonies and discords, it built our house before we were born as speaking beings – and not only in the vibrating enclosure of the uterus – and paved the way for our collective existence; the social contract, hidden from all languages, can be heard indistinctly in its orchestration.
Anyone who seeks self-improvement and growth, hopes to be able to compose: may I achieve this before dying.
Before we can exchange meaning, even false meaning or the trivial nonsense of clichés, before we can create something new together, an event so rare as to be miraculous, we must shape these universals, in order to turn ourselves towards a common meaning, draw closer to it and tame it. The transcendental dimension of our communications is woven from music.
Beneath language, this layer of music covers the chaos that precedes it with universality. Language needs music, its essential condition; music has no need of language. Music needs noise, its essential condition; noise has no need of music. The latter softens the jagged edges of the tumult; suddenly, music is so undifferentiated it can no longer carry any specific meaning, but carries all, and none. Thus do the Muses guard the corridor of universals, the mandatory universal passage between noise and meaning.
There are two local passages bordering this global passage. Upstream, the Sirens control the mandatory local passage between noisy din and the beginnings of music: crashing waves, bird song, the Siren song of women. Has it ever occurred to anyone that, downstream, a college of women, neither beasts like the Sirens, nor goddesses like the Muses, might oversee the mandatory local passage between music and meaning? Noblewomen excelled at the French art of conversation in the salons, their grace presiding over this manifold and delicate traffic with tact, taste, perceptiveness and acuity. Let us say that women – Sirens, Muses, noblewomen, Graces – thus have perfect pitch, the three kinds of hearing required for the three passages from sharp-toothed chaos to the soothing layer of harmony, and from universality to the subtleties of meaning.
What do the Sirens say, shout; what is their song, what is their rhythm? The Odyssey does not tell us, nor do the so-called Orphic rituals, nor does anyone who passes through this place. Cunning Ulysses plugged his companions’ eardrums, we have no testimony from them. What if the rhythm of the bird-women’s squawking in fact resembled the song of the Odyssey, precisely the one Ulysses hears when his ship passes the Sirens’ waters, and which – all ears – he learns, in order to be able to sing it afterwards at the King’s banquet? And what if they screamed in Orpheus’ ears when he attempted to pass, this Orphic sort of ritual in which the body ends up torn limb from limb? When I was navigating in those parts, they had reduced communication pathetically to a Leibnizian, mathematical calculation, having become entirely mithridatized to Ulysses’ solution . . . The Sirens perform the incantation that enables creativity and screech the price that must be paid: life and health caught up in a giddying spiral, near-shipwreck, thought swallowed up by background noise; then emit the noise out of which the work is created, conduct the first customs and quarantine check, impose the first toll. They ruin your work by forbidding it, rupture it by speaking it.
They have made astonishing progress, equipped with transistors, hi-fi systems, colour televisions, calculators, autotimers and word processors, the waters are filling with sound waves, amidst the noise of motors. We no longer need to seek the dangerous passage that they used to guard, long ago – they come to us now, and fill the space around us. The world is filling to saturation point with bird-women, thunder, rhythm and music. There is nowhere left, not a rock, nor a corner of a house, nor a square of luzerne, nor a copse under a canopy of trees, not a hidden recess, desert, hole, mine, tunnel, well, unbreathable summit at fifty-five thousand feet altitude, that escapes the fractious control of the media. Only the Sirens sing of the Trojan war now, Orphic poetry is only chanted by the Bacchantes, by the Thracian women who dismembered Orpheus, the screeching of birds fills the sky as far as the horizon, no-one need enter those frightening narrows again, no-one comes through them stronger for not having perished, we are under the influence of the Sirens’ cries. The world – box, ear and mouth – resounds.
Victory for the Sirens, woe betide creative man.
Orpheus passes the Sirens, the crashing sea noises and the cries of beasts. He managed to tame the wild beasts, hyenas and leopards following in the wake of his cithara or song. The most savage animals are reconciled. Orpheus calms the bird-women, the crashing waves remain – he calms them too. How?
Ulysses passes the Sirens, deafens his shipmates by stopping their ears with warm wax, and remains quiet, immobile, tied to the mast; he travels underneath the din, his solution minimal or non-existent – no effort required. Those on board who can move hear nothing, he who can hear cannot move. Whether rowing or manoeuvring the vessel, the ship’s sailor-engines do not tremble with desire, nor with fear, but carry out their orders, come what may, since they cannot hear them countermanded. Before reaching the vile straits, God-Ulysses has already dictated everything that will follow to his monad-sailors. Thus the helmsmen on our ships blindly follow the course dictated to them, not the route they can see before them; language, and not the given; the orders given, not the world they perceive. Ulysses’ companions steer their course from memory, can still hear their previous orders: they receive orders through the language of their captain, and nothing at all from the deafening world of the Sirens. Even flying women, who can make them tremble with desire, cannot lure them away from the realm of language.
The best of all solutions, the greatest efficiency for the least effort; Homer has anticipated Leibniz, shutting off these monads, programmed to swim in a straight line, from any direct communication. The Siren-given vanishes.
What do the Sirens sing here, what do they shout? The ordinary world, a mixture of the enticingly soft and the repulsively hard.
Thrifty and miserly, Ulysses uses cunning; Orpheus is happy to spend. Accompanying the latter, the Argonauts, all ears, can choose at any given moment between the troubling song of these women and the harmony of the cithara; they are free to change their heading. Ulysses negates time, Orpheus plays it, creates it, improbable. Composition confronts the noise of beasts and invents harmony in close proximity to their song; the music that issues forth always carries within it the trace of the screeching that preceded, heralded and inaugurated it. Thus did Demosthenes use his voice, his ears filled with the sound of the waves and his mouth full of pebbles, so that his eloquence might spread forcefully over the noise of the throng. Ulysses sails through the straits once, he will not tempt fate again; Orpheus, on the other hand, has another attempt. He attempts to get past the Bacchantes, but fails. Wins against one din, loses against the next. His body is torn limb from limb, music dissolves, collapsing into noise. Ulysses, careful and calculating, always wins; hero, composer, Orpheus does not.
In order never to lose, all communication must be cut off. Ulysses blocks noise out, Orpheus drowns it out. Ulysses-Leibniz suppresses all noise; hardly surprising, then, that his messages are heard. The monads recite the lesson imprinted on their memory at birth by God; as one they row against the pull of the Sirens, united in deaf solitude, while their inner ears hear the pre-established harmony. Science presupposes a world without noise. It wins.
There need only be noise, and the world will blossom with Sirens’ passes. Ears open, carrying his instrument before him, waxen heart bared to the winds, Orpheus confronts the chaos, he rushes, defenseless, towards the beasts and women, into the breakers, attempts the maximal, dangerous, spendthrift solution, the solution that produces music. To get through this, you need to compose, sing non-stop, never lower your shield of harmony against the confounding clamour, conjure an improbable curvature, like the prow of a ship dancing through the waves, project a new time ahead of yourself. Orpheus does not always win and exhausts himself in this task, a musical offering laying down his own time. But he leaves himself open to the risk of collapsing into noise. For without the universals of music, without its transcendental aspect, chaos will carry the day, no-one will make it through the channel. Leibniz presupposed a world without noise, his solution required no effort, for him the universal resided with God. But as there is in fact noise, philosophy is obliged to invent a solution bound to Orpheus, just as Leibniz is bound to Ulysses. Before there can be successful meaning and communication – the precondition of logic and language – it must presuppose a music which is victorious over noise, must invent it, must risk composing it, discovering in the process an improbable time.
Even in his optimal or null solution, achieving perfect results with the least output, Leibniz had admitted the precedence of music: he attibutes to God, and eternally so, an authority or function which he calls harmony. I have scarcely altered his words. The precondition or foundation of optimal communication, and of the sciences, is equated with music or harmony, an already transcendental condition. A mysterious and mystical score heard by the deaf monads, its job is to explain why they move in time through the silence.
Alas, we do hear noise, we can no longer act as though we and God alone inhabit the world; we are assailed by moaning, shouting, sobbing and supplications long before we arrive at meaning; we must therefore compose music at every moment in order to survive, feel, take part in conversations – as we do so we must expose ourselves to beasts and Sirens, to the dispersal of things, of the group and of our very limbs, to the Bacchantes. Without this background production containing the background noise, nothing else will hold together; nothing in the world, no-one in the collective; not the senses, not the arts, not the parts of the body. Music precedes philosophy, no-one can give themselves over to the latter without passing through the former.
Orpheus soothes the beasts, lions prostrate themselves before his cithara, harmony smoothes out the sharp and jagged. The waves die down, the bird-women sheathe their claws: dog will no longer eat dog, they are reconciled. There is a truce in the wars of things and men, malaise is banished. Music smoothes out the serrated edges of noise, dulls claws and fangs and horns, polishes the coarseness of chaos, softens the hard.
Three-fold hardness is thrice softened: in the messages of things, groups and the body.
Orpheus the son of Calliope – the muse with a beautiful voice, patron of epic poetry and eloquence – sings. Song casts language over the material framework of music, covers hard acoustic wings with the downy softness of meaning.
The blanket of music softens the hard. Conversely, it presents meaning with the hardness of the soft.
Sometimes, beneath song, like a smothered, stifled, veiled, flattened, timid meaning, the phrasing seems to speak a forgotten language from before the time of meaning, so ancient that it speaks to our flesh. It makes audible the material framework of language, its energy, like its walls, support structure or habitat; it builds the nest of meaning.
The softest part of hardness, after the ordeal of the Sirens, and the hardest part of softness, while passing through the Muses.
Music-variety thus shows two sides or faces: the soft side smoothes out jagged edges, the hard side flattens out meaning. Twice universal with two inseparable faces.
Our skin, hot and strong, defends us quite fiercely, but at the same time, warm and delicate, gives itself over gently to be tattooed with one thing and another, and with its own emotions. We listen to the double-sided musical variety with our whole, similarly double skin. Naked, we nestle in its nest.
I do not know if the given is only given through and in language, but in such a case everything would happen as though it were given in advance in and through music, as though it were forgiven by the latter. By music I mean all the Fine Arts. The writer who merely goes for meaning does nothing but calculate; he can only be said to write when all the senses tremble within the flesh of language, semi-soft, a double variety for sight, touch, smell and taste. The nine-string cithara is always to be found between wild animals and recitative, between death and knowledge. Our language – vowels, syntax and precision – must be bathed in music lest it die.
The musical variety or layer flows or slips between us and the world, between us, within us. If any harmony should transpire between our body and the world, between the individuals making up a group, or within my body on the verge of being torn apart, then its arrival is conditioned by this music.
Hardness in softness and softness in hardness, a form of transition, the music of my language nonetheless prevents me from calling it either sord or haft.
How does sensation work? What must we learn in order to understand the workings that underpin our knowing, its foundation or its precondition? This question, too, belongs to the category of problems which systematically invoke a third term or man. There is no science that does not in some way presuppose a preceding sensation, even if it has sometimes, often, almost always – always, in fact – been necessary to expel the senses from the field it occupies. Not only does sensation stand behind the knowledge that presumes to speak of it, but what is more, it finds itself ousted by what we know at any given point. The philosophy of language still wins out in these places, breaking the cycle of referrals to a third science.
Whatever sensation may have taught us, we know nothing about it.
Take a black box. To its left, or before it, there is the world. To its right, or after it, travelling along certain circuits, there is what we call information. The energy of things goes in: disturbances of the air, shocks and vibrations, heat, alcohol or ether salts, photons . . . Information comes out, and even meaning. We do not always know where this box is located, nor how it alters what flows through it, nor which Sirens, Muses or Bacchantes are at work inside; it remains closed to us. However, we can say with certainty that beyond this threshold, both of ignorance and perception, energies are exchanged, on their usual scale, at the levels of the world, the group and cellular biochemistry; and that on the other side of this same threshold information appears: signals, figures, languages, meaning. Before the box, the hard; after it, the soft.
We do not know sensation: we might as well say that it occupies this black box.
The most honest description we can give of it, made up more of ignorance than actual claims to knowledge, tells us no more than the insinuations of a hundred mythical tales. The black box has two sides: the hardness of softness, the softness of hardness. Place, space, volume and finally variety where energies move from one scale to another. A soft black box for high energy, a hard box for the very low.
Sensation-variety, the set of its boxes, insinuates or places itself between us and the world, between us and within us. If any harmony should transpire between our body and the world, amongst the people who make up a group, or within my body on the verge of being torn apart, then its arrival is conditioned by sensation: harmony requires a change of scale.
Sensation guides and defends us, without it we would die, our bodies exploded, torn limb from limb by physical forces, the power of the social and intimate grief. Like a nest, it surrounds us with a lining, a closeness, supple but with hard thorns, and in its hard hollow it carries soft sense. The latter leaves that hollow and flies away.
Hardness in softness and softness in hardness, a transitional threshold. My language, so soft to hear yet so hard and fast in its rules, prevents me from calling it either sord or haft.
Sensation has the same status as music.
The traditional term ‘æsthetic’ has two senses. It designates discourse on fine art, and equally discourse about the given. These two layers of words do not always reach their object, as though beauty tended to flee as far from our utterances as the things we sense. In the major European languages, philosophical texts tend to keep these two senses of the word separate; the most famous ones formalize their divorce. Here, now, are their nuptials.
Music, considered the summation of the arts, hard and soft, soft and hard, makes felt its double-sided variety, the double lining of its box.
Sensation, a black box, soft and hard, hard and soft, installs the double lining of its variety between high energy and low.
It joins with the arts; æsthetics has only one sense.
Music sings before language, before sense, is the condition of that which remains always soft. Sensation and the sensible allow and condition sense, they preserve its softness. Language remains outside the unitary sphere of æsthetics. The arts of language owe their beauty to their proximity to that which resides outside language.
The rediscovered unity of an exceptional and familiar place gives great joy: the world displays itself as beautiful. We need beauty in order to live.
Eurydice dies from a snake bite while fleeing Aristaeus, the first and best beekeeper. Fangs and stings. The lovely material contours of the woman fade away, Eurydice becomes a shade, a name, image or memory to be evoked, an inscription on a tombstone or the proper name written or read this morning. The Underworld used to be inhabited by the very same phantoms that we moderns believe we carry around in our hearts and heads, by those spirits that we have in our own spirit, by those words that we, these days, believe we carry around subconsciously or else collect in libraries or grammar books or data banks. Historically they vary, the names that we give to black boxes, in which hard is transformed into soft, or into understanding or writing, inward soul or Elysian Fields: the same darkness, grief and labyrinths, a similar verbal tenuousness, but what does it matter what name we give to these hinterlands? Eurydice, tangible and receptive to caresses, descends into the darkness of the shades, her physical strength now a simulacrum, her voice frozen in an epitaph. Death speeds us from the volume of things to the space of language.
Orpheus descends to the Underworld, leaves behind the physical for phantoms, abandons hardness in order to abandon himself to softness, enters the library, or his head, or his own music box, the lyre. Philosophers know how to go down this path: they open black boxes, traverse infernal secrets and labyrinths, visit consciousness or understanding, reason itself, as much at ease as if they were in a bookstore, and act as though it were in fact a bookstore.
Orpheus pacifies the monstrous guard dog Cerberus. He arrests Tantalus’ greedy but futile gesture and the boulder of Sisyphus in the middle of its ascent. Everything stops, frozen images remain. The lesson here is the same: the softening of hardness. Let us fear snarling fangs no more; the hellhound is as gentle as a lamb, the verb bite has lost its teeth, the word cynical has neither bark nor bite. Beasts are transformed into animal posters decorating a corridor; Tantalus has gone into advertising.
But Orpheus’ task begins at the precise point where the lesson turns back on itself; with his second act, the mirror image of the first, the changing of softness back into hardness. Ulysses descends to the Underworld, so does Orpheus. One is a visitor, the other a conqueror. Ulysses meets acquaintances, converses effortlessly with them, crosses the field of pale shades fearlessly, visits the history shelf of the library and consults, compares, discovers, settles himself down in the box where bodiless phantoms make sentences. He risks nothing, goes in and out, leaves the box just as he entered it, but with new information. Orpheus on the other hand takes risks, not wanting to leave as he came, but wanting more: energy, a body. He wants Eurydice alive. He tries to convert the voice-woman, the word-woman, into body.
Music would tear Eurydice away from the Underworld, where her dress, body and charm are stripped away, where she is reduced to software; the death of the body has turned her into a pallid icon floating through the Fields of Asphodel, a soft shape with neither body nor outline, which her lover can no longer caress; how do we resuscitate this inflation of the voice, this engraving?
Death turns us into words, words turn us into dead people. An epitaph-sentence under which things are buried. Those who deal with words deal with the dead, and like to look as though in mourning for the world. From the time we are baptized, our names seek a formless immortality, a gentle trace that will linger after our disappearance. In death we are reduced to our name alone, fragile, weightless, fleeting, defenceless, covered over by the customary handful of dirt. Beautiful, ample, warm and vibrant, Eurydice dwindles into her soft name. This is how death softens, as do music, and language. Orpheus cries out under the vaulted roof of the Underworld, ‘Eurydice’! The hard voice is already enough to carry her name. Beneath this infernal cathedral, Orpheus sings ‘Eurydice! Eurydice!’. He sings, and music carries the cry. Orpheus gives his lover’s name the weight of his call, his vibrant hardness, he fills the sunless valleys and the gangways of the Underworld with these echoes.
Music sets out to turn soft into hard, to harden Eurydice’s name, to remove her from the realm of epitaphs and marble etchings, it seeks to deliver her from the minimal prison of the written, spoken, sung name, from the congealing gaol of two-dimensional images. Eurydice, Eurydice, Eurydice, come down from the painting where you lie trapped, step out of the immobilizing icon.
She leaves the word. Arises from her name. Frees herself from the cartouche. Removes herself from representation.
Rediscovers movement, solidity, her dissolved flesh and vanished radiance, the material volume of her body, the delicate, satiny texture of her skin, the variable, clear, coloured light of her gaze, the horizontal agility of her gait as it adapts to the ground, the weight of her chest, hips, shoulders and neck, her hard skeleton. She steps softly out of shadow, image and word. The word is made flesh.
Evocation: something, flesh, emerges from voice.
Orpheus invokes, his voice and strings tremble, he calls out, shouts, sings, chants. He composes both music and Eurydice.
The ghost-woman reawakens, she follows her vocation.
Voice makes the name flesh, delivers words from death, lights dispels the darkness, music adds flesh, hardens what is soft: how far does incarnation go?
Just as the hard beasts trail softly behind the lyre’s harmonies, just as the dark forests soften their sharp thorns and needles, in concert, so does the soft evocation of Eurydice follow her husband in hardness through the complex maze of creation and birth towards the propylæa which it is forbidden to cross in this way. Eurydice hardens. As the lion advances towards the cithara it becomes image, shadow, phantom, it is more verbal and nominal. Eurydice’s progress, on the other hand, becomes flesh and blood, her name finds voice, her voice finds harmony, harmony a throat, her throat a head, head and flowing hair emerge from her shoulders, she springs forth from evocation, torso, armpits, waist and breasts rising out of darkness as Aphrodite once emerged from the sea, as each of us did from the uterine black box, from sensorial virginity and ignorance, as each of us emerges from the cold. Light and warmth soften skin wrinkled by frozen darkness. Orpheus composes, constructs a living Eurydice, piece by piece and sense by sense. Stand up and walk! Go on, speak!
The length of the labyrinth shows how much patience is required to achieve incarnation. Creation emerges from the Underworld where words, concepts, images, names and shadows flit about, it incorporates them through enchantment or by summoning them; frigid, drugged, the nominal awakens. Construction. Each book is released from the library, the deadliest of traps.
Orpheus sets himself the most difficult of tasks. Nothing is easier than taming hyenas or jaguars, or softening the hard: merely head downhill, follow on the heels of the entropic processes of dying, towards disorder and fragmentation; go from things to representations; name, describe, reduce an object to a set of words and phrases. Nothing is more difficult than climbing back up in the opposite direction, the vertical path towards life, creation or incarnation. An immutable law points us towards the Underworld, no-one ever comes back, you who enter this concept, abandon all hope. Like Ulysses, Orpheus succeeds in softening. But he fails in his attempt to drag Eurydice up to the very top of the incline, in the very last act of making flesh; his lover collapses back into her own shadow: head into throat and throat into harmony and harmony into voice and voice into name, instantaneous involution, reversion to epitaph. The supreme achievement, rare and grandiose, is giving life to speech; the banal, everyday gesture, the easy one, is substituting a word for a thing. Creation tries to break through to the world itself, not even Orpheus can manage that. A maternal act, always undone at the last moment.
This tells us quite plainly that the only thing under the sun that is easily achieved is philosophy. Nothing quite so easy as naming, describing, conceiving. Our passion for these things is fed by gravity and death, the law of least expenditure favours the sharpest drop: a rapid decline towards the Underworld, grammars, dictionaries, libraries, data banks, facilis descensus Averni. Do not seek an object, name it. Seek neither woman nor beast, cite the proper names which name them. Conversely, the insufferable law of maximum output requires the drawn-out patience of the vertical path, the endless summoning of shades so that they might dance, carnally, in the light, such hard work, such a long time, such totally inaccessible power that the most patient will give in to impatience, that the wanderer on this pilgrimage is always too quick to believe that he is emerging from limbo at last, and that she whom he is leading out is finally being delivered from this place. Now he looks back, too soon, she is still following, the suffering of her deliverance not yet ended, only half her body torn from death, she collapses brutally into a flattened image, a floating shade, her name, a tomb, down the sharpest slope, quickly, in free fall. She returns to concept as she does to equilibrium, at the bottom of the well.
They who have no talent for life do philosophy. Life takes time to emerge out of concept, word or name, it takes time for a child to break free of code. Even Orpheus cannot extricate himself from the enchantment of software, but he can point out the pathway of creation, the exit from the Underworld. A pathway that is always lost in the end. Infinite. Exhausting. Abruptly bringing us back to the dead on their bookshelves.
In the streets and the valleys, all that we hear are ideas, words, names, borne on cries and sobs. Eurydice! What is life to me without her? I sought to create a body, here, now; all I have left is pure abstraction, this soft product of the voice: Eurydice, Eurydice, Eurydice, I so wanted to give you life and all I can do is write philosophy.
Awoken in the intimacy of the night, ripped from the protective sheath of dreams, extracted from the blanket of sleep, pulled up from the well of sheets, from the depths of your berth, emerging with a start from the warm, dark cabin, emerging from these holes by jolting painfully from one section to another, pushing aside one curtain after another, crossing one bulkhead then another, obliged to get dressed quickly, on the hop, in silence, called by the watchman hammering on the door for you to take over the watch, opening your eyes and ears, wedging the cleat in place, opening the hatch and passing through the airlock, lurching down the gangways panting for breath, gripping at ladders, attentive to the dull echoes of the tossing hull, sliding upwards, deck after deck, arriving topside and opening a hatch, lee side, present, conscious, external now, through the bulwark and brutally delivered up to the terrifying wind, the screaming, whirling squall, outside, defigured by blue ice, torn by the blast, deafened, bombarded, stung by rain, contorted, having to decide on the spot, amidst the shouting, the whistling, the thundering orders, your skin all goose-flesh, unbalanced by the rolling of the ship, your whole body revolting against this ascent from the belly of the vessel towards the gangway open to the elements but itself silent, dying from the joy of being alive, now you know how every single one of us dealt with the ordeal of being born.
What we learn in the middle of the night is that the world makes us flinch, and that we would do anything not to hear it, to keep it far from us, were it not for that tiny pinch of bitter but magnificent joy that draws us to it. Our horror of sensations predisposes us towards staying in our bunks, wrapped in words, dreaming.
One night the Thracian women tore Orpheus limb from limb. Why? We do not know, or we know only too well. Some say that after losing Eurydice, Orpheus turned away from women, who in turn grew resentful. Then there are those who say that he invented homophilia. Others that he introduced mysteries from which women were excluded. Others still that he had been cursed by Aphrodite. Explanations abound, and all of them follow the same groove: a thousand and one times over, we hear that the reason was sexual. What remains true is that a group of women, Bulgarian or Thracian, running through the mountains in some sort of sabbath frenzy, threw his limbs into the void, and his head into a river, whose current carried it far out to sea. The same old myths of diasparagmos.
This explanation has been with us since Antiquity, and diverts our attention from the diasparagmos itself. Using sexual urges as a justification has precisely the same effect as a sexual urge, grabbing us and flaunting its logic shamelessly, as we can see in advertising. To add value to something, you surround it with women, lots of partly naked Bulgarian women. Our attention is diverted from the worthless thing in question to the superb abundance of nudity. This diversionary tactic is all the explanation that is necessary: we speak of Aphrodite and homosexuality, we forget all about the dismembering. Before we attempt to justify or understand this in terms of anything else, let us consider it in its own right. We throw a hundred explanations at the crime, just as the Thracian Bacchantes threw stones, arrows or projectiles at Orpheus to tear him apart or bury him. We call this analysis: the explanations of the diasparagmos take the form of another diasparagmos; one is quite real, the other critical or judicial – an application. The first hard, the others soft. It’s the same thing.
Orpheus, a musical body, is torn apart by a crowd. Harmony falls to discordance, disintegrates. Do we need to analyse that? But that is precisely what analysis is!
We learned the language of France by conjugating the verb aimer, to love; we learned to read the mother of that language, Latin, by declining amare – again, to love. We used to learn Greek, the language of science, by studying the verb to loosen. The first verb of a Greek grammar lesson means to chop up, to break up, to take apart – this is analysis. In our study of letters, we were raised from childhood to love in our everyday language and to destroy in the language of ideas. Now that we have forgotten this language, or simply do not know it, it has returned to take its revenge. We are unshaken in our belief that thinking and knowing consist in destroying, disconnecting, undoing, disarticulating, explaining – this is analysis. The opposite of constructing or connecting. It sends Eurydice back to the Underworld of dictionaries. The Thracian women, as though speaking Greek, attack Orpheus in order to learn or know, to think or explain music. But music is composed; if we analyse it, it evaporates into notes and fragments. Diasparagmos is analysis, analysis is diasparagmos.
The Bacchantes explain texts to pieces. Analysis: the articulations of Orpheus’ body are undone; harmony is divided; the crowd of Bulgarian women pull apart his lyre, string by string, we no longer have a single, global art, with nine Muses and nine strings, we will be left with nothing but disciplines. We will have no more sensation, we will be left with organs.
The women who dismember Orpheus do not descend upon him in silence. Perhaps they remained silent while hiding in the woods, waiting for the singer to pass by. Their harmony is silent, which further deepens it, enabling them to hear the gentle lyre approaching from afar.
Deaf, mute, the monadic world develops harmony. God is or creates prior music which organizes the sonorous emptiness of the world. Music produces silence, which in turn reduces music to its elemental self, almost perfect. Music produces silence like a beautiful musical singularity, a rare example of harmony. To my ears this is also a sensible truth: when hard noise ceases, soft silence carries the promise of the most complete of all the arts. Music surrounds or envelopes or includes silence, carrying no single meaning in order to elevate all meanings. When music ceases, in turn, silence reappears, naked, and is reborn, sublimated. It has two sides, one turned towards the great din, the other towards words and meaning.
Health comes from the silence of our organs, social harmony from the silence of the Bacchantes, it is where the Desert Fathers know happiness. The soft-hard side of silence protects us from chaos, its hard-soft side lifts us up towards meaning, deliciously so.
All reception occurs within silence. Transmission will always win out, hands down, over reception. Here is neat proof: we cannot know that someone has received a message without asking for confirmation. Further transmission is therefore required in order to confirm reception. Sensation, receptive, is bathed in silence. You can take that as a sensible truth, as the truth of the senses, as a metaphysical truth. Our senses are bathed in muteness. May this book of mine inhabit the joy of such silence. To remark upon it is to acknowledge it. Thus, when the philosophy of language says that the given is only ever given through and in language, it is the perfect illustration of this structure. Sensation is acknowledged by language, and transmits confirmation that the latter is receiving, thereby speaking of its silence. Sensation remains deaf and mute, almost monadic, tacit for as long as it acts as a receiver. Afterwards, reception confirms itself, transmits, and thus speaks.
Silence builds a nest, sensation’s habitat. Without the latter, we cannot have the former.
The women who dismember Orpheus do not throw themselves on him noiselessly.
They hear him coming from afar, in the murmuring of the forest, for the otherwise motionless branches bend towards him as he advances, holding his lyre, amidst the usual assembly of beasts, now reconciled. Orpheus does not escape their claws and teeth, like Daniel in the lion’s den, but the lions and wolves escape the wolves and lions, through the music and singing which reconcile the irreconcilable and replace the fury of combat or sacrifice with softness. Once again, here is the unwritten social contract. Beasts, hard towards one another, become soft. Man is no longer lion or wolf towards man, anharmonically, as though a different species, but becomes man, recognizable. The collective takes many names – pack of wolves, herd, forest, crowd of women – music each time providing their rare and unstable harmony, rare like silence, unstable like the music of genius, always at risk of collapsing into noise. The social contract is inherently unstable, like the softness of women and the sullenness of wolves. Orpheus advances through the concord; as he proceeds, the man-wolf recognizes another man in the lion, or in the branches of a tree, or in woman. Harmony. Recognition unfolds across space, above individuals, like melody.
Orpheus stands in the clearing, the forest becomes soft to the animals, the lions soft, the women soft, the wolves soft; hear the almost silent harmony, as they each hold back words, cries and breath itself in order better to receive. But the branches tremble slightly, the foliage starts to rustle, the breasts growl softly; now the first screeches of the advancing Thracian women are heard, challenging music’s claim to the acoustic space. Fragile harmony, disintegrating under the first arrows of commotion; its hard-soft side, fragile, shattering beneath the sharp projectiles launched by the uproar. Following a dangerous and unstable equilibrium, harmony is overtaken by tumult, breaking apart and exploding in our ears, beasts turn against each other, tree-trunks bow under the force of the tornado, here is analysis, harmony shatters, herds scatter, Orpheus is undone.
Music’s unstable and rare equilibrium is held precariously high. The first shout or swipe of a paw, the least gesture of applause will destroy it, bringing it crashing to the ground, broken, analysed.
Each lion or wolf believed it heard a note, separate from itself, coming from the lyre, as did each woman, without suspecting that they were that very note. Each lets out a discordant cry, each knows that that cry is unlike others. Each lion or wolf believes itself to be carrying off a piece of Orpheus, as does each woman, without suspecting that she, or it, is that very piece or member.
Each one of us, applauding enthusiastically, shatters Orpheus in the palms of our hands, crushing him as we reduce the music of triumph to a vile noise.
Orpheus is singing on television, the lions, standing on their hind legs, press their paws against the screen, the glass shatters into tiny pieces, the image vanishes when the surface breaks. But remains visible everywhere else on every other set.
Orpheus only ever existed in myth, outside language. He represents the comprehensive integrality which music propagates across space, the once rare harmonization of non-integrable elements; a fragile summation. But he exists powerfully now, indestructible. Harmony is no longer defined as producing one from the multiple; it has succeeded in accessing the multiple as a way of encompassing everything.
Music was not resistant to analyses. Once, the Bacchantes explained Orpheus’ scores. It is to their scores that we listen, now.
Analyses dominate language and the Thracian women control what remains of music, invading our spaces with their cries.
Touch involves stitching together, place by place. Pointillist, if you like, or impressionist, moving between sections and localities, it creates maps, varieties, veils.
Global, integral, already abstract hearing, seeking unity, fills volumes: boxes, cases, houses, prisons, theatres, cities, circuses, hells and forests, marine expanses on which the musician’s severed head, forgotten, detached, drifts on towards distant islands and sings, pervading the wind that sweeps between sky and waves. And my whole body, a music or language box, resonance chamber, resounding gong; and my local group, an assembly sometimes found in the theatre, for contemplation.
Cells
A black box is ignorance, interrupting a chain of knowledge or creating a void in a transparent volume. We understand one thing up to a certain threshold, another thing and what follows it starting from another, but between one point and the other, this threshold and that one, we neither know nor comprehend; how this thing becomes that thing is quite beyond us. On any given scale, the box receives one thing and transmits another, hiding the mysterious transformations within its walls. The black box would appear to correspond to our definition of ignorance.
Objection. We observers may know and understand information transmitted by the box, its output, just as we might understand its input. How might we understand or know what occurs in the vicinity of that input-threshold? The box does of course receive, but what are we to make of that reception? We must receive it – yet the reception itself is not transmitted. We must therefore be located inside the supposedly closed box, the walls of which must as a consequence be moved. But whenever we talk about reception, the same irrepressible logic reasserts itself. So let us add a small black box, on the threshold of the large one, sitting astride its input side. However this is another of those questions like that of the third man – so we need to suppose a third box astride the side of the second, and so on as far as you like. Boxes upon boxes, proliferating leftwards.
We do not understand reception, except insofar as it coincides with observation. Do we understand observation? Once again, the answer escapes us. Transmission trumps listening, we know how to project a sound and how it spreads, we know how to relay it, we are not good at receiving. Science and philosophy both reproduce, in their respective disciplines, the brutal imbalance typical of dialogues where everyone talks and nobody listens, and of those animated groups in which each member produces as much noise as possible to the great discomfort of everyone else, with each person’s suffering finding expression in a cry whose intensity seeks vainly to compel the attention of others, but to no avail since they in turn respond by giving voice to their suffering through wailing. Tomorrow, we will come to love reticence, which speaks rarely and prefers understatement. Monadic solitude grows in the space of messages, solipsism is taking on greater gravity in the world of so-called communication – Hermes’ empire accentuates subjectivism.
Transmission trumps listening, we are no good at receiving. Whether we are dealing with a black box or the very simple scenario linking a transmitter to a receiver, the pole which perceives or feels is encased in a series of black boxes. Listening is rooted in silence and deafness.
Communication is vanishing. Either there is a private dimension, in which case there are no objective messages; or the latter are in fact in circulation, in which case there is no private dimension. So study mathematics and drink cold water.1
That’s my last word on the subject.
Or my first.
The objection destroys both my book and any hope of describing reception, while at the same time it starts constructing something we might call an abstract receiver. Everything leads to the conclusion that sensation is organized, or trapped by us, within, by and through a similar set of embedded models. We create boxes in order to hear, we connect our ear to a conch to hear the sound of the sea, we build spaces with the express purpose of listening, or hearing each other: town squares, vaults, walls, churches, theatres, narrow passageways, alleys, ears of stone. We favour echoes and rhymes. Robinson Crusoe visits the desolate valley, a narrow gorge where the last word of the verses he reads out are echoed back to him: ‘my soul’, my soul, my soul, reverberating into silence, the manifold mirror of his cogito. He manages to find an alleyway where his footsteps will be echoed by its walls. Knowing nothing of the creature in question, certain that it will flee and disappear, we combine spaces through which sensation can pass, hoops, nets, mazes that the fish will thread its way into, unseen and unheard by us, swimming in circles, trapped, ensnared.
Captive reception.
Through touch, through our skin, we depicted tattooing, variable and varied imprinting, a singular variety for each of us, a universal covering. The painter makes us see through touch. I was not able to describe every last detail of each isolated or interconnected ocellus, stripe or streak, knotted and interwoven, original, repeated . . . a fluctuating web, inseparable from the surface of the warped sheet that enfolds us. These globally contingent traces of tangency – mixture, labyrinth, interlacing – structure the great snare of touch.
Rarely selective, reception occurs in a configuration in which input, which is mobile, is highly susceptible to feedback. It can become output and vice versa, in short cycles: as reverberations, echoes, reflections on screens, down narrow pathways, passages, gorges, defiles, impasses, frequent and unexpected bifurcations, circuits – think of a scrambled computer chip – creating specific points where the captive energies are lobbed back and forth. Reception is structured as self-transmission, it tames the unfamiliar, just as we repeat new words to ourselves in order to assimilate them. A liminal consciousness stirs there, in the folds of self-contact, through the repetition of reception; iterative and self-contained reception, whose prefix is apposite.
Tattooing works the same way. But I also imagine that the much repeated or embedded structure of what I have called the abstract receiver can be found in this interlacing. Our skin receives by constructing these undefined black boxes within its supple and flat surface. Which is why it is impossible to describe individual traces or projections in detail.
Whereas touch involves local patches activated or created by contact and brought together into an ocellated fragment, and skates about in the flattened out dimensions of irregularly shaped patches and imprecise tacking, sound, on the other hand, occupies volume and expands into the global, requiring of listening yet another dimension. Just as the abstract receiver, with its boxes within boxes, projects multiple networks or labyrinths on to the flat, uneven surface of the skin, like a model, so the same projection into the auditory spatial trap requires folds and sculptures in space, exquisitely chiselled contours. From touch to hearing, from map to landscape. The labyrinth raises its walls, digs its tunnels, lays down its corridors. Like the black box, hearing, by its very nature, is the multiplication of boxes.
But before that, the whole body or organism raises a taut sculpture or statue of skin, vibrating to the voluminous sound, open-closed like a cylindrical drum, trapping what traps it. We hear through our skin and feet. We hear through our skull, abdomen and thorax. We hear through our muscles, nerves and tendons. Our body-box, strung tight, is covered head to toe with a tympanum. We live in noises and shouts, in sound waves just as much as in spaces, the organism is erected, anchors itself in space, a broad fold, a long braid, a half-full, half-empty box which echoes them. Plunged, drowned, submerged, tossed about, lost in infinite repercussions and reverberations and making sense of them through the body. Sometimes dissonant, often consonant, disturbed or harmonious. Resonating within us: a column of air and water and solids, three-dimensional space, tissue and skin, long and broad walls and patches, and wiring, running through them; moorings receptive to the lower frequencies, as though our bodies were the union of ear and orchestra, transmission and reception. I am the home and hearth of sound, hearing and voice all in one, black box and echo, hammer and anvil, echo chamber, music cassette, pavilion, question mark drifting through the space of meaningful or meaningless messages, emerging from my own shell or drowning in the sound waves, I am nothing but empty space and a musical note, I am empty space and note combined. The moving statue finds its balance in the din as a fish does in water. The body remembers its previous, aquatic life, guiding itself through the sound waves by instinct and force of will. Humanity in shoals swims through these waters.
The body stands and walks through the space of messages, orients itself within noise and meaning, amidst rhythms and rumblings. As it hears through the soles of its feet, through the sites where muscles, tendons and bones are attached and articulated, and finally in the space where the inner ear connects with the canals which control our balance, it can be said that our whole posture is linked to our sense of hearing. Our most intimate gestures move to sounds, we dance. Or rather, this is where dancing begins. We twist and turn, fascinated by different cries and melodies, like snakes charmed by a flute or Argus facing Hermes.
Geometers and topologists, we inhabit spaces in dimensions and proximities, tears and continuities; we live in gravity, strong, vertical, symmetrical; but our submersion in sound waves prompts our attitudes, supple, oblique, lop-sided, strained, restless. Time begins here, with rhythm. We are still fish, evolving in an environment where at each moment we find our balance through our hearing, an accurate calculator and computer. Proprioceptive hearing controls our gait, weary or lively; ordinary hearing commands flight, alertness, wakefulness, sleep; societal hearing dictates deportment. Those who live in ecstasy amidst notes, style and rigour sometimes have a secret, fourth ear which guides them through musical currents or spares them lapses in good taste by giving them true harmony.
In many languages, to listen is to obey: seduced by a voice, the body follows. It follows its vocation. Horrified by noise, muffled or dissonant, it drowns itself. Thus do we see huge processions herded or led by a breath or a rumbling from which they receive their sense of belonging and direction, shoals of fish suddenly redirected en masse, this way or that, by a perfunctory signal. They call this the spirit of the times, if it occurs to them.
The large consonant and dissonant box, trapping messages through posture, gesture, dance, orientation and movement – but also trapped by those messages, which balance and unbalance it, in turn – now gives them audience in and through a second box, straddling one wall of the first and attached to its petrosal bone. We find the same delicate outline of interlacing, corridors, screens, bottlenecks that defines the two-dimensional labyrinth of tattoos, but in three dimensions now, another vestibule of sound. Inside this new trap, the hard is made soft: deaf to whatever lies beyond its range, the box is protected; the membrane of the eardrum presents skin to the outside world, mucus to the inside, the skin harder, the mucus softer, kept separate within the membrane itself by a more resistant armature; the sound wave produced by a physical shock is transformed into a chemical signal carrying electrical information towards the centre . . . Which centre? Does the box receive or emit? To listen is to vibrate, but to vibrate is to emit. Unfold the cochlea, for instance, and you will see an inverted piano with tiers of high and low notes running from left to right. But a piano produces sound, it does not hear. The same logic dogs us: the ear needs a more central ear to hear what is transmitted by the three others, outer, middle and inner, which hear each other, each in turn. The hearing centre. Which centre? Move the partition. Partition after partition, black box after black box – this is a projection of the abstract receiver.
Sound is transmitted here in non-linear fashion, travelling from hardest to softest; here, at each stage, it submits to loops, circuits or feedback. The box receives the captive energy, organizes the repetition anticipated by the prefix, it traps noise, sound and message, makes them circulate quickly, brings them to rest, makes them vibrate in themselves for themselves, and through these circular movements transforms transmission into reception, resolving the contradiction that besets hearing.
Let us change the discourse on method, let us optimize our journeys another way. We inherit our idea of the labyrinth from a tragic and pessimistic tradition, in which it signifies death, despair, madness. However, the maze is in fact the best model for allowing moving bodies to pass through while at the same time retracing their steps as much as possible; it gives the best odds to finite journeys with unstructured itineraries. Mazes maximize feedback. They provide a very long path within a short distance and construct the best possible matrix for completing a cycle. The best possible method for all kinds of reception, they are often to be found in sensation, whose problems they solve clearly.
Underpinned by metric theory, the discourse on method finds ease in shortness, simplicity in speed, prefers the minimum. It flies straight and talks straight. Metric theory and its method will thus always seek to escape from the labyrinth by optimal means, in the briefest time, via the shortest path. Drawing on information theory and topology, I would put forward as optimal the figure which is diametrically opposed to such projects. Speed is of no consequence when we are dealing with fast-spreading phenomena such as light, sound and even touch, which is transmitted instantaneously from one end of a stick to another. Sensation cares little for metrics, you see. Let us find other ways of optimizing journeys. Let us seek the best way of creating the most feedback loops possible on an unstructured and short itinerary. Mazes provide us with this maximization. Excellent reception, here is the best possible resonator, the beginnings of consciousness. We see, finally, that the design of a labyrinth traces a series of boxes, non-concentrically embedded in each other, one straddling the wall of the next and so on – the abstract receiver again.
Knots and weaving gave us a topological description of touch by supposing it to be made up of one-dimensional threads and intertwining them. To describe hearing, more global than local, through body, head and thorax, inner, outer and middle ear, fossa triangularis, auditory canal, cochlea, vestibule, all of them more or less well-embedded boxes, according to our abstract model, the topology of depth requires varieties in every dimension, hollows them out, folds them, creates edges, mountains and valleys, passes, chimneys, tubes and lobes; architecture, landscape. Tattoos dye the warp of our skin, which acquires volume; boxes are fashioned out of veils.
Hence my (poetic) resistance to the conviction that we would hear just as well with no pavilion at all or that our hearing would not be impaired by a flat pavilion. The lovely carved design of our outer ear, a final series of little boxes or dimples, combining helix and counter helix to make one last maze, must receive messages which are still unknown to science. We wear two questions marks, one on each side of our head like placards, two treble clefs, with neither repercussions nor answers.
Love potion. The prisoner in the tower loves the gaoler’s daughter. The tower rises above the castle, the dungeon is embedded in the tower and the cell in the dungeon, a nest of structures; to reach the cell, you need to make your way through endless walls and doors, climb stairs or cross chasms via fragile aerial staircases, pass through hundreds of grilles, even a chapel. The real cell, carved out of wood, adds another box of timber framework and beams, its floor raised, within the stone walls and ceiling. No, we have not yet reached the final box in this nest of boxes: the governor has had a shutter installed in front of the window of this cubby-hole, a window through which only rats could enter; he has had every crack sealed up with oil-paper. The honoured prisoner resides behind numerous impermeable walls, thick, blind, opaque, fifteen layers of partitions.
Opposite the dungeon, below, the castle wall opens on to an aviary, boxes, cages, cells where birds are caged, birds which the gaoler’s daughter tends. We do not know what twisting paths she takes to reach them. A love story is unfolding there. From inside his semaphore house, behind a small peephole, her lover speaks to her in signs or letters. She responds, letter for letter, amidst the twittering and birdsong. She will soon swear never to look at her lover behind lowered eyelids. Later, she will hear him preaching, in tears.
Is it an angel or devil passing through the veils of these boxes, what message traverses a thousand walls, to be exchanged between which instances of the self, confined within, transmitting and receiving? What cry, appeal, light – animated, mobile, intense, sharp – has the power to send out energy which can force its way through the maze and be refined as it filters through?
The dungeon-body maintains its distance from the desired chateau-flesh. The window-eye beseeches behind the eyelid-blind and the ear hears the song of the bird-soul through its tympanum of oil-paper. Timid lovers, isolated underneath their multiple skins or rigid walls, stiff and horrified behind their battlements, whose beautiful love will be lost if ever the prisoner escaped and who will hasten to maintain their distance and throw up new obstacles, as though the only love possible were the effect of the walls surrounding lovers crashing into each other, or echoes reverberating between boxes, interferences, vibrations, harmonies, thuds; the citadel forming a giant organ. Two phantoms thrashing about inside music boxes constructed like gaols. This is the traditional notion of the body, and no doubt also that of science.
The love stories which so astonish our supple, naked bodies, painless and nearly mute, were stories of knowing, long ago. Just as the call of love circulates through the corridors, grilles and vaults of the chateau-body, haunting them, so do sense data pass through the obstacles placed into a kind of statue or automaton with twenty layers of armour, a veritable Carpathian castle, their energy purified as it makes its way through successive filters towards the central cell or instance, soul, understanding, conscience or transcendental I, to which very few gaolers hold the key.2
We appreciate the exquisite delicacy of a design in which one filtering station follows another, in the service of knowledge or love. Few have earned the right to penetrate the dungeon or holy of holies, the last box behind or beneath other cells: it took a priest, or a judicial figure. This is what it was to know or to love. It happened rarely. Under surveillance. Through hear-say. By twists and turns of a labyrinth.
Sensation is held in a black box, and functions like one. Both the former and the latter precede knowledge, just as each, misunderstood, comes after, envelopes or punctures it.
Through sensation the hard becomes soft. Sensation protects and guides us. Without it, our bodies would explode from the screeching attacks of the Bacchantes, would disintegrate like Eurydice, half out of her black well or box of shadows, would be torn limb from limb by tornadoes, would decompose under the scorching sun or be shredded by sounds beyond the range of our hearing: Orpheus is mutilated by lions, women and branches.
We multiply our skills and strategies to avoid the deadly fate of Orpheus: we will turn away, flee in horror, sweat, shiver, cover ourselves with veils, lie low; produce variations on the box, enlarging and reinforcing it.
An aid to knowledge, the box supports life. I am that box. I inhabit it. We are soft, and construct softening boxes.
Behind a courtyard, its grills and portals closed, withdrawn, in front of the high walled garden, the house collects itself within its walls. Distant, protected, holding the world at bay. Inside, the hard stone or rough concrete is covered in gowns, envelopes, ever softer membranes, ever finer textures, smooth plaster, refined paper or liquid paint, decorated, historiated, floral wallpaper; the house multiplies layer upon layer, starting with the rough and ending with pictures. On the vertical plane, the same multi-layered progression: plumbing, girders, floorboards, carpet, rugs. Finally, embellishments and plasterwork. The house closes up its openings too: shutters, windows, double-glazing, stained glass, net curtains, drapes, decorative pelmets, and until not so along, doorways and windows with deep alcoves. Built to be closed, the box has labyrinthine openings. To open our dwellings so brutally, as we have done recently, we needed to shed our fear of the world and believe it criss-crossed by nothing more than signals. The house functions as a space of transformation where forces are calmed, like a high energy filter, or converter. Outside reigns harsh spring or unrelenting dawn, inside is the dream space of calm pictures which do not hinder conversation, inside the space of language is created. Like a skull, a brain. The box transforms the world into coloured pictures, into paintings hanging on walls, changes the landscape into tapestry, the city into abstract compositions. Its function is to replace the sun with heaters and the world with icons. The sound of the wind with gentle words. Cellars turn alcohol into aromas.
In such a house, the philosopher writes and thinks and perceives. Inside. Through the window I see an apple tree in flower, he says. He searches for the origins of knowledge and places himself at its beginnings. He discovers a garden in this Genesis, naturally, and in this garden only the apple tree interests him, tempts him: he can see its flowers. Long dissertation about the tree, the picture of it he might draw, the image he has of it or the word he finds and writes in his language – something that is absent from every orchard. He forgets the window, the alcove, the curtains, the opaque or translucent glass and, depending on whether he lives in the north or south, the sash or casement window. Forgets the house, and the opening through the house, in front of the apple tree. In strong wind, in driving rain, the tree houses squawking birds at night in the branches where they nest; one thing to prune the tree, outside, another thing to describe it, inside. Beyond the reach of water, beyond wind, cold, fog, light and dark – even beyond noise, in the past – the house protects us just as the belly of a vessel separates us from the cold of the sea. Second skin, enlarging our sensorium. Still a box, but now an eye also. Hearing and pavilion. The house observes the apple tree through the window. The house-skull quietly contemplates the tree through the porthole-eye. We might call the window a medioscope, mesoscope or isoscope. Thus did Captain Nemo, behind the scuttle of the Nautilus, descend slowly into the classification of fish, into taxonomy, the dictionary of natural history, more than he plunged to the depths of the sea. The scientist observes the naturalized butterfly beneath glass, or peers at Linnaeus’ table from behind his spectacles, or microbes under his microscope. From behind the window-pane, the image of the apple tree is disciplined even though the window preserves its dimensions. The philosopher cares nothing for its fruits and flowers – acacia, maple? Behind the glass there is a phantom, just as we say that the soft replica of an object is formed on the retina, behind the pupil or crystalline lens. Tempest becomes moan as it crosses the shutter-eardrum, information as it works its way through hallway and winding staircase.
The house stares through its windows at the vineyards and tufts of thyme, ornamental oranges take shape on its walls, a tissue of lies, oranges and liemons. The philosopher forgets that the house, built around him, transforms a plantation of olive trees into a Max Ernst painting. The architect has forgotten this too. And is happy if the next harvest, outside, is transformed into a Virgin with Grapes, inside. The house transforms the given, which can assault us, softening it into icons: it is a box for generating images, a cavern or eye or camera obscura, a barn which sunlight only illuminates with a slim shaft piercing through the dust – an ear. Architecture produces painting, as though the fresco or canvas hanging on the wall revealed the ultimate cause of the whole structure. The aim of architecture is painting or tapestry. What we took to be mere ornament is its objective, or at the very least its end product. Walls are for paintings, windows for pictures. And padded doors for intimate conversations.
The philosopher holds forth about sensation, yet he inhabits it already, dwelling in a kind of sensation, a part of his house as the pupil is part of his eye. The writer forgets the window, its position and the passive work it does, and observes the painting. Or, if he contemplates a painting, thinks he is dealing with a porthole. He forgets the house, the soft box which ends at the window. Sees the picture, vaguely contemplates a few icons, now abstract, destroyed by a wave of iconoclasm, looks at his page of language where he discovers the given.
The house is a picture box, like a skull or an eye. The philosopher inhabits his own problem. In the past, the world was called God’s sensorium. Let us say that the house is man’s sensorium. The heavens are filled with God’s glory, the house is filled with our small energies.
Within the house, the bedroom encloses a box within a box. When people got into box beds, in Ouessant, or four-poster beds, in Rambouillet or Versailles, you could add yet another box to the list, this time a slightly darker one inside the still illuminated larger one. Sheets add another pocket to the nested series, and rarely do we slide between them naked. O! frozen time of our childhood when no-one went to bed without their woollen sleeping bag. The empiricist is astonished by the number of layers, strata and partitions from rough concrete to bed linen, the number of skins until we reach our real skin. We have already counted the box of veils, of garments. No, we do not live as beings in the world the way books tell us, we cannot possibly make such a claim, there is no way we could tolerate it, but rather as a variety of mammal or soft primate which, having lost its fur, invented the house and promptly filled it with boxes within boxes. Only the external house is exposed to the world; the multi-layered apartment is merely exposed to the city. Language weaves the last protective wall in front of our delicate skin, just after images and paintings.
Radio and television would have us believe that they bring the world itself into our homes.
The house constructs an orthopædic sensorium around us; conversely, the sensorium constructs our little portable house, our fragile vessel, a soft membrane ready to burst open under the assault of the smallest thorn. The philosopher forgets the house he inhabits, but also this house of sensation, the last softening box. There is always a third box in this question.
Our softening houses, built to house pictures, constitute the common sense. Unmoving, the windows watch the trees. It used to be said that God’s gaze was always with us, until the final box, even though it be as dark as a tomb: the painting depicts Cain seen by Him.
Our houses were built in a peaceful world, where music only had to overcome the roaring of lions and the furore of the Bacchantes. The invaginated set of walls and pockets surrounding my vague soul cracks and falls apart under the terrible din of noise pollution. I no longer inhabit my house or my skin, panting, defenceless, racked, dismembered by noise. But no matter if it should cause my soul to fade away, my mouth to vomit, my body to faint – what if it were to be the death of music itself?
The social box, complex, constructed, hardware and software, often closed, sometimes open, constant and variable, defined by walls as well as by ideal or carnal attachments, created by the town planner, the architect, the mason and the bridge-builder, in thrall to different networks and media, organizes the manifold and almost ubiquitous hearing of its own noise, by sometimes allowing the world’s background noise to filter through, when we hear our cheering in stadiums and theatres, churches and meetings, in public squares, in the streets, once narrow and winding to better capture or channel sound waves and turn them back on themselves, nowadays wide and straight because of the greater power of transmitters ensuring sounds are heard everywhere and echoed by newspapers, radio and television, in circulating rumours, all of these messages constructing the box and sealing it as securely as a wall, a powerful social box whose walls, ever present and reflecting sound waves, surround, protect and penetrate the house-box, soft and hard, enveloped, made of concrete, plaster and paintings, vibrating with words, or the ship-shell, the arrangement of which enables a more careful hearing of the rumbling coming from outside, crashes and news, wind and commerce, sounds of the world and society, but also the cries of children and the moaning of the sick, the clamouring of bodies or insignificant acclamation, during festive meals, from the smallest group, hiding, discrete, isolated by this music box, porous but nonetheless full of smaller noise boxes, but whose frame and tiles in turn envelope and protect the box of veils or clothing, hardware or software, fabric and decorations, the defence of which can terminate in the bedroom where tattoos can be displayed and whose dermal support surrounds and protects the body-box, soft and hard, sculpted from bones and codes, resounding and adjustable, out there in the fields where noises and sounds are propagated, its semi-conscious circuits listening with the most refined system to its own jubilations and complaints, as it does to words whispered nearby, audible thanks to the complex of discrete boxes, and to the public racket, bringing down the barriers erected in front of it; but also to the background noise coming from crude things, low, silent, abyssal detonations preceding earthquakes underneath the foundations of our houses, the clamour of waves in a gale, protects the self-governing body-box, choosing and sometimes not choosing between these transmitters and filters, piled up, overlapping, each straddling the outer wall of another, reinforcing or blocking one another, long parasitic chains, as invasive as metastases, bifurcating and feeding back into one another, but amidst hesitations and sidetracks, protecting, surrounding and penetrating the ear-box, multiple and complex, acoustic and codified, whose maze controls the sensible, physical hearing of messages within its range, perceived in the theatre or bedroom, on the beach or in confidence, and transmits them, softened, to the central, initially peripheral box, whose complicated labyrinth of synapses and axons organizes the reception of signals, preparing the sense which has been protected by language, itself protected by music or light, and diving headlong into noise, sense and language whose grip intersects with the range of the social box, enchanting and linguistic, enticing and cruel, ubiquitous like meaning and proclamations, multiple like approval, and penetrating ear and head, orientation and consent, the whole body, movements, posture and bearing, the house, the city and the world, where the noise coming from shadowy mouths is quelled.
The summation of hearing, hard and soft, box of transmitter-receiver boxes, runs the course of the labyrinth thus described, quickly and over long, difficult passageways; a labyrinth which produces the maximum number of cycles, some of which remain stable for a long time, or for a short time, in which case they tend to form boxes.
What ear hears this summation or rumbling from the depths, harmony or interference? An immense sea, soft and hard, beneath languages, somehow familiar as we dive in. As we descend to the Underworld.
Whatever pain or fatigue might ail our body, suffering a thousand ills, overwhelmed by work and injury, it always manages to raise a protective wall around an untarnished space to which the instance of self, quivering with joy and expectation, can flee ever-present danger and imminent death, no matter how far or deep their blows may reach. It starts over, secreting or building a new wall each time an outer barrier is brought down or given up. Flees from box to box, from shouting towards silence.
In this sovereign, always protected space, this constant and living flame, shining with joy and intellect, dancing, leaves behind a membrane – in the same circumstances – when it flees beneath another layer, rather as a thief who has been nabbed might shed his jacket into the hands of his captor and run. Like Harlequin discarding his old costumes and skins, we frequently shed layers in this manner when confronted by natural cruelty, when fate seizes us, when hatred preys upon us. We flee behind boxes and veils.
The dancing flame or instance we might easily call the soul, frees itself, invents shapes and places, boxes of silence, a bridal gown, seeking stability. When the final assault comes, it slips away, true to its usual strategy, once more triumphant, but has failed naively to see or feel that there was only one garment left, that the final barrier has fallen, shed at the moment of departure; at the instant of death the body surrenders the living, still thinking soul.
The soul, white doll at the end of a sequence of black boxes, final instance, mocking our advancing efforts to know it, as they demolish one dark threshold after another. The soul, deaf to their noise, singing joyfully, protected, immortal.