"The muse is the living voice, as each of us experiences it, of intuition. Intuition is a synaptic summation, our whole nervous system balancing and combining multivariate complexities in a single flash" (Free Play, pp. 39-40).
The synaptic describes the space between touches, the between that enables touch, that touch means. Touch also means the traversal of that space. How is it that touch is brought into that space, for an instant, that space just for touch?
Over and over we meet with a question of shared experience, a question of how experience could possibly surpass the bounds of self, the returning vibe, even as it reinforces them, harmonizes them, evokes the selfsame vibe. Intuitably the synaptic is musical, replete with sweet voices, musical with repletion. We desire to speak with the sweet voices.
Music for us is the loving voice of intimation, of listening wrapped into itself, repletorially, listening, completely open to the announcement to the world of the world, the world that appears instantly in its announcement, of voices on the street below, rising voices of the unsummed love. We desire to speak with the musical voice. The voice of the muse is instantly recognizable as being other than our own, though it resounds within us and without us, multifariously. We share in its vibrations. Synapsis.
Labels: daimon, improvisation, intuition, listening, multitudes, muses, music, Nachmanovitch, touch
6 Comments:
Very nice post. It calls to mind the Process Theology definition of Evil as two-fold, either discord, or needless triviality. The music between us, and thus within us, pushes the risk between these two poles, the dissonant cacaphony of screeching ascension, escape or descent, and the mindless ditty.
Did you mean cacophony?
Horrible speller, but if there is any word that should be mispelled, it is kakofany.
How indeed, like the impossible how of gravity, a touch across space that is never not happening. At the risk of sounding like a broken citation record: "But the image has touched the depths before it stirs the surface. And this is also true of a simple experience of reading. The image offered us by reading the poem now becomes really our own. It takes root in us. It has been given us by another, but we begin to have the impression that we could have created it, that we should have created it. It becomes a new being in our language, expressing us by making us what it expresses; in other words, it is at once a becoming of expression, and a becoming of our being. Here expression creates being" (Bachelard). Plus stimmung, etc. And this phenomenal dimension totally perforates, opens, decays categories of "self" and "space," right? Or requires them all the more so we can keep talking about touch?
And where is this big circus taking place? This mobile but always present cacophanic gathering of events occurring neither in space nor without it, neither between selves nor without them? Somehow I think this relates, and this, only because I happened to read them today (and today is everything). And thought is the thought of thought.
Desiring to speak with the sweet voices,
Nicola
" to help me in the description "
I appeal loudly to the Muse of History (whose name I forget and you never knew) to help me in the description of this house, for—
The Muse of Tragedy would overstrain herself on it;
The Muse of Comedy would be impertinent upon it;
The Muse of Music never heard of it;
The Muse of Fine Arts disapproved of it;
The Muse of Public Instruction … (Tut, tut! There I was nearly making a tenth Muse! I was thinking of the French Ministry.)
The Muse of Epic Poetry did not understand it;
The Muse of Lyric Poetry still less so;
The Muse of Astronomy is thinking of other things;
The Muse Polyhymnia (or Polymnia, who, according to Smith’s Dictionary of Antiquities, is commonly represented in a pensive attitude) has no attribute and does no work.
And as for little Terpsichore whose feet are like the small waves in summer time, she would laugh in a peal if I asked her to write, think of, describe, or dance in this house (and that makes eleven Muses. No matter; better more than less).
...
Hilaire Belloc - On a House
:)
Yes, better more than less than nine Muses!
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