Reading stuff

Sep 1 '10
catherinewillis: mhsteger: Vladimir Jankélévitch (born 31 August, 1903; died 6 June, 1985), pictured above in a photograph made late in life ‘The mask, the inexpressive face that music assumes voluntarily these days, conceals a purpose: to express infinitely that which cannot be explained.  Music, said Debussy, is made for that which cannot be expressed.  I will be more precise: the mystery transmitted to us by music is not death’s sterilizing inexplicability but the fertile inexplicability of life, freedom, or love.  In brief, the musical mystery is not “what cannot be spoken of,” the untellable, but the ineffable. Death, the black night, is untellable because it is impenetrable shadow and despairing nonbeing, and because a wall that cannot be breached bars us from its mystery: unable to be spoken of, then, because there is absolutely nothing to say, rendering us mute, overwhelming reason, transfixing human discourse on the point of its Medusa stare.  And the ineffable, in complete contrast, cannot be explained because there are infinite and interminable things to be said of it: such is the mystery of God, whose depths cannot be sounded, the inexhaustible mystery of love, both Eros and Caritas, the poetic mystery par excellence. If the untellable, petrifying, all-poetic impulse induces something similar to a hypnotic trance, then the ineffable, thanks to its properties of fecundity and inspiration, acts like a form of enchantment: it differs from the untellable as much as enchantment differs from bewitchment. Ineffability provokes bewilderment, which, like Socrates’s quandary, is a fertile aporia.  ”At a loss for words,” writes Janáček for his part:  where speech fails, music begins; when words are arrested, one has no choice but to sing.  Heine said it, too.*  The ineffable unleashes a state of verve.’        —from Music and  the Ineffable (1961; translated from the French by Carolyn Abbate) *’When words leave off, music begins.’  —Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), quoted by Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in an 1878 letter to Madame von Meek  

catherinewillis:

mhsteger:

Vladimir Jankélévitch (born 31 August, 1903; died 6 June, 1985), pictured above in a photograph made late in life

‘The mask, the inexpressive face that music assumes voluntarily these days, conceals a purpose: to express infinitely that which cannot be explained.  Music, said Debussy, is made for that which cannot be expressed.  I will be more precise: the mystery transmitted to us by music is not death’s sterilizing inexplicability but the fertile inexplicability of life, freedom, or love.  In brief, the musical mystery is not “what cannot be spoken of,” the untellable, but the ineffable. Death, the black night, is untellable because it is impenetrable shadow and despairing nonbeing, and because a wall that cannot be breached bars us from its mystery: unable to be spoken of, then, because there is absolutely nothing to say, rendering us mute, overwhelming reason, transfixing human discourse on the point of its Medusa stare.  And the ineffable, in complete contrast, cannot be explained because there are infinite and interminable things to be said of it: such is the mystery of God, whose depths cannot be sounded, the inexhaustible mystery of love, both Eros and Caritas, the poetic mystery par excellence.

If the untellable, petrifying, all-poetic impulse induces something similar to a hypnotic trance, then the ineffable, thanks to its properties of fecundity and inspiration, acts like a form of enchantment: it differs from the untellable as much as enchantment differs from bewitchment. Ineffability provokes bewilderment, which, like Socrates’s quandary, is a fertile aporia.  ”At a loss for words,” writes Janáček for his part:  where speech fails, music begins; when words are arrested, one has no choice but to sing.  Heine said it, too.*  The ineffable unleashes a state of verve.’

       —from Music and  the Ineffable (1961; translated from the French by Carolyn Abbate)

*’When words leave off, music begins.’  —Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), quoted by Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in an 1878 letter to Madame von Meek  

(via catherinewillis & mhsteger)