Nachmanovitch advises that the creative person distinguish between constructive judgment and obstructive judgment.
This means telling the difference between two kinds of time. The feedback between constructive judgment and ongoing creative work goes back and forth at more than lightning speed: it goes on in no-time (eternity). The partners, muse and editor, are always in synchrony, like a pair of dancers who have known each other for a long time.
(Free Play, p. 134)
Does one simply pop in on eternity? Pop! Has it always been "there," or does it need to be generated through something like practice? Can we judge eternity into and out of existence? Must eternity at any moment have been inspired? Does eternity even have moments?
Like other manifestations of the Muse, the child is the voice of our inner knowing. The first language of this knowing is play. In this light, psychiatrist Donald Winnicott came to clarify the aim of psychological healing as "bringing the patient from a state of not being able to play into a state of being able to play. . . .It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self."
(p. 50)
How do we speak the first language of inner knowing? Playfully, creatively. With toys. Making toys of words and things. But if the language would have to be created isn't the knowingness then of the inner knowing thrown up in the air—don't worry, Fido will catch you. Sooner or later Fido will remember having thrown you up into the blue, inner knowing. Galumphing, in the sense anthropologist Stephen Miller attributes to the word. We galumph the whole person into discovery: "Oh, there's something I've thrown up in the air. It kind of looks like me." Now, does one really galumph though without ever letting the limbs touch the ground? Making a toy of our gait, as chimpanzees appear to do. Frequently I find myself talking with my inner chimpanzee. We like to galumph together.
"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.
"Impulse, like improvisation, is not 'just anything'; it is not without structure but is the expression of organic, immanent, self-creating structure" (Nachmanovitch, Free Play, p. 29). The Muse's voice will be heard as meaning and experience become infinitesimally divergent, that is, as they converge. That's one outlook. It's taught as part of an approach to improvisation which asks for, not uncommonly, a relinquishment of self on the part of the improvisor. Nachmanovitch says that the "mysterious factor of surrender, the creative surprise that releases us and opens us up, spontaneously allows something to arise" (p. 30). Not just anything, apparently, but the voice of the Muse. The voice of the Muse, though, represents a tiny bit less of a surprise than just anything. We are in truth being asked to surrender a tiny bit less of ourselves than we pretend. Our supplication isn't as supple as it could be, our openness not completely open. Could this be the condition on which we hear the voice of the Muse? If we wanted to, how would we go about making supplications to openness?
Montiglio interprets Pindar's poetics, supplying some broad thoughts about the materiality of sound according to the ancients. "Poetry is a sonorisation of the silent mind, and its coming to being depends on a restless movement of the vocal organ" (Silence, p. 95, her emphasis). And, worth noting in passing: "Reading out loud is a metaphor for both the execution and the composition of the poem. It is only through this reading that poetry comes to exist. Mental writing does not produce a nonrecited poem" (p. 94). Liquid sounds. Dramatic sounds. Sounds too powerful to be human. Did silence ever call to be animated? Somewhere a poem slips out of existence, into the silences that never give birth to conversation. Not even rereadings let us escape oblivion indefinitely. The poem knows that. Every poem secretly knows that. "The 'liquidity' of song, which takes us back to its oral origins, favors a thorough diffusion of the poet's voice"(p. 98). This would be a thespian voice, a persona attached to an arc ever near completion, the figure of sonorous presence, approximating total presence–cut down by skop as foretold. The voice of the ancient poet, though, is it not the voice of a rereading? "The voice of the Muses, which engages other voices in a contrapuntal response, seems to have the same capacity of spatial diffusion as the light; it is as tireless as the rays of the sun and spreads like dawn on the sea; it makes itself heard everywhere"(p. 97). Rereading is the silence of the said, or, better, it insists on the silence of the said, reads it aloud so as to put it to sleep, exactly a lullaby. The polyphonization of the unsaid, the said's remainder, rests on this sleep of the said within the rereading. What does the page symbolize amidst such tireless conversation? It too must be reread, polyphonized along with the rest of the unsaid. Symbolize?
Since the experience of poetry, in an aural culture, consists in the hic et nunc of its performance, the real or imaginary listener who wants to describe it follows the movements of its musical unfolding, just as we would describe a symphony following the succession of its resonances. Sappho seems indeed to be reproducing the many instrumental and vocal components of a true symphony, the subject matter of which is only mentioned at the end.
(p. 97)
Imagine a word too powerful to be human. Don't we do this all the time? Symphony, aural, resume, the silent mind. Imagine what it would take to voice such words, and only such words. To voice discretely, and only with the voice, the voice itself. Never happen. (Let "the vocal organ" be a metaphor for its never happening.) We call upon other voices–as if to converse? The experience of poetry has always been like hanging out with the daughters of Mnemosyne, the way we used to, when it rained. Would our aural materialism propose to explain away the touch of Terpsichore and her siblings, or her symbol? Unstring the Canon of the Nine? Step lightly, dear imaginary listener, in your interpretation of the boundlessness of musical voices, a boundlessness that coexists with the silent mind. The silent mind is a wild animal. The excursion of the poem means not to tame. Nor to bewilder. We are coming closer to saying what it means for the silent mind to stand for a material cause–the meontic efficiency of the symbol, incidentally, is nowhere near that of the ordinary sign. Do you suppose there is some balance to be struck between silence and restlessness?
Lagoon.Tortoise.Lagoon.
I threw myself at the shores of your tongue, restless you. What solace was there in sweet centuries we spoke them too. And we stole the silence of the said from the public library, its bright corners, musics, ours and Sappho's, who seemed never to have learned how to die, but fragment, fragment. . . taught us words like mythoplokos.
Some maintained that it was bad form to stay for the entire opera. The young dandy Almair in La Morlière's Angola, described as a "scrupulous observer of etiquette [bienséance]," claims that there is "nothing so indecent as staying to the end" of an opera. The practice was apparently common enough for the Mercure to mention it disapprovingly: it was a "disgrace," the paper wrote, for women to leave during the last acts of Atys and Roland. Others held a prejudice against listening too intently to the music. A traveler to Paris who was quick to grasp the dynamics of behavior at the Opéra wrote with some derision that the only spectators who listened to the music were "several clerics, several shopkeepers, several schoolboys, sucklings of the muses and soldiers just returning from or about to leave for a tour of duty." And a young nobleman explained to his guest that listening to the music with focused attention was "bourgeois." "There is nothing so damnable," he went on, "as listening to a work like a street merchant or some provincial just off the boat."
For these spectators, attentiveness was a social faux pas, as the Mercure observed: spectators who attempted to listen to a work before judging it, the paper claimed, were regarded by the rest as "creatures from another world." Circulating, conversing, arriving late, and leaving early were an accepted part of eighteenth-century musical experience, grudgingly tolerated by some and positively encouraged by others. "We listen at most to two or three pieces consecrated by fashion," as a character in Angola declares, "and at the end we excessively praise or thoroughly damn the whole work."
(James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (University of California Press, 1995), p. 31)
A peculiar effect of Johnson's brand of cultural history is that the experiences at the opera of sucklings of the muses and others on the sidelines of the business of the aristocracy don't really count as musical experiences. They have no meaning. Musical meaning, Johnson says, "resides in the particular moment of reception, one shaped by dominant aesthetic and social expectations that are themselves historically structured" (p. 2). He denies that there are as many Don Giovannis as there have been listeners. He holds that there is absolutely zero meaning outside of a horizon of expectations which is socially defined and cannot be understood as belonging to individuals (p. 3). Johnson' analysis, then, produces the curious effect that an Eighteenth-Century aristocrat who doesn't listen to an opera has a musical experience while attendees who do listen do not have meaningful musical experiences. Of course, we recieve Johnson's work amid dominant aesthetic and social expectations that are themselves historically structured. (How then should I interepret signs of conflict in his account, the possibility of other readings of the same material?) One dominant expectation greeting Johnson's work may be that sucklings of the muses have no meaningful experiences, no horizons worth exploring, no history that needs to be told. Yet if I didn't suspect Johnson of harboring a secret affection for the sucklings of the muses I would read no further–and I intent to read further. I've already decided that Listening in Paris is quite an engaging book.
Ernesto Grassi (The Primordial Metaphor, p.10, footnotes omitted) muses:
Is there a tradition which offers a foundation for a conception of knowledge rooted in the historicity of ontological experience? Does the humanist tradition offer us such a possibility? A correct understanding of Humanism has been hindered by the pre-eminence of German idealism, which denied it any philosophical value precisely because it is grounded on rhetorical and metaphorical thought; by Heidegger's antihumanistic thesis; and by the interpetation of Humanism as essentially a Christian reflection on Platonism.
With regard to the concept of knowledge, Western philosophy rejected, from the very beginning, the speculative function of rhetorical language for its being anchored to the here and now of existence; consequently, it expressed a negative judgement on metaphor, since metaphor transfers and transforms the meaning of a word and, in so doing, destroys its rational precision.
We would like to propose a different thesis: That which is–namely, individual beings, participants in and participles of being, for only as such do they exist–manifests itself in reality exclusively in a concrete historical situation, defined by the here and now of existence. All beings, in their openness to being, are expressions of a call, an appeal that must be answered in the urgency of every moment. The appeals, in whose realm we exist, are everchanging and new, and the meaning of beings is transformed according to the modality of our responses to the appeals.
We shall reformulate our question: Is there a tradition which allows us to identify a nonrational foundation of knowledge, by virtue of which metaphor and rhetorical language acquire a philosophical function? I have tried elsewhere to reconstruct this tradition and here I shall summarize it with references to De Laboribus Herculis by Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406).
Although Salutati holds that knowledge is enabled by the activity of the Muses, not just one, but all nine, Grassi considers only six of them, excluding Urania, Terpsichore, and, if I'm not mistaken, Calliope (the passage in question seems to describe Thalia, though she is not named).
So what's it to me if Grassi neglects to mention Terpsichore? So she doesn't appeal to him, so what? Does a defense of erudition–for that's what Grassi offers, its urgency unmistakable if you travel in certain circles–require anything like a Terpsichore?
Terpsichore, in any event, never seems to get any respect. If you live in the Bay Area of California, you can see a painting of Terpsichore hanging in the Fine Arts Museum of San Fransisco (which, incidentally, has claimed for itself the domain "thinker.org"). The painting, by Jean-Marc Nattier, shows Terpsichore with one breast exposed. Her cheeks appear a little rosy. her eyes glazed over. She's a little tipsy. But this isn't precisely what I mean by no respect, not the all of it. The very idea of a museum is an offense to the Muses, especially Terpsichore. Who dances in a museum? It might as well be a mausoleum for the narrowness of the inspirations it permits. And I say this as one who loves graphic arts, one who loves the feeling that comes after being in a good art museum.
I know that many fine art museums have made attempts to cultivate an appreciation of performance art, hosting poetry readings, jazz recitals (ahem) and the like. It's just not the same as permitting people to dance. The seediest discothèque provides a more fitting tribute to Terpsichore than any museum ever will. Is this perhaps at the heart of the reason why Terpsichore gets no respect? Is the company she keeps just a little too democratic for modern sensibilities?
The promise of human order, or culture, concieved without room for dance is revolting. Always, in every historical epoch, the people will revolt with their feet. Kwassa Kwassa is but one example, the greatly maligned and misunderstood Chic another. The denigration of Terpsichore is unacceptable to the masses of humanity, yet every political movement that claims to speak for the masses or to represent a perfection of humanity begins and ends with the denigration of Terpsichore. What's up with that? It doesn't speak well for intellectuals, to say the least.