This.
Over break I took a trip to misery. and, all in all, it was a grand time -- I could not have hoped for better. Amongst the curious number of curious sensations I felt was a reification of a dream that had slept more than dreamed in my head for many years, which conveniently occurred durng a meeting of The NC Club : I love to play music. I love to sculp it. I love to sing it. I love to suggest it. I love to hear it. I would rather spend all day and night making music than doing anything else; of course, in my daydream world, I take breaks to read, and converse, but they would always be simply a step away from my main concern.
And it was neat to remember this in a physical way.
At a few different points it's like the camera is asking, "Where is this wondrous sound coming from?" and nosing around it like a dog. Ah, the Smiths.
I was enjoying The Life of Henry Brulard, by Stendhal, the other evening, and I came across a passage that seemed to me to be a curious synthesis of Aristotle's & Kant's notions of happiness (mentioned in the footnote of the Nicomachean post). In an aside, Stendhal remarks, "I call a man's character his habitual way of going in pursuit of happiness," (italics mean the English word rather than French was used in the original). They both hint at this, but Stendhal distills the concepts into something that can have meaning.
I spent my evening finishing Walter Pater's Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, instead of working on my final essay for the semester -- an expansion of my as of yet unveiled ;) Jacob's Room essay, and I think it was the wiser choice. I'd like to share the entire book with you, but since that's not really possible I'll say this about Pater's book -- mainly, that though it might be dismissed as nothing more than art criticism, it is a little book pulsing with passion and soul and wisdom on how art meets life, and may verily be the finest book I've read all year and is easily one of the finest I've ever read -- and share this tiny quote with you (forgive me, i don't feel like typing more):
Art, then, is thus always striving to be independent of the mere intelligence, to become a matter of pure perception, to get rid of its responsibilities to its subject or material.
I blew my speakers a few weeks ago. I still use 'em. they crackle, they groan, and sometimes they sound okay.
I discovered that one record was completely unaffected by the crushed cones, no matter how far past 12 o'clock I went. It was this record:
Dispatches me as though I dropped down the knell
Of a spent day - to wander the cathedral lawn
From pit to crucifix, feet chill on steps from hell.
Have you not heard, have you not seen that corps
Of shadows in the tower, whose shoulders sway
Antiphonal carillons launched before
The stars are caught and hived in the sun's ray?
The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;
And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave
Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score
Of broken intervals… And I, their sexton slave!
Oval encyclicals in canyons heaping
The impasse high with choir. Banked voices slain!
Pagodas campaniles with reveilles out leaping-
O terraced echoes prostrate on the plain!…
And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.
My word I poured. But was it cognate, scored
Of that tribunal monarch of the air
Whose thighs embronzes earth, strikes crystal Word
In wounds pledged once to hope - cleft to despair?
The steep encroachments of my blood left me
No answer (could blood hold such a lofty tower
As flings the question true?) -or is it she
Whose sweet mortality stirs latent power?-
And through whose pulse I hear, counting the strokes
My veins recall and add, revived and sure
The angelus of wars my chest evokes:
What I hold healed, original now, and pure…
And builds, within, a tower that is not stone
(Not stone can jacket heaven) - but slip
Of pebbles, - visible wings of silence sown
In azure circles, widening as they dip
The matrix of the heart, lift down the eyes
That shrines the quiet lake and swells a tower…
The commodious, tall decorum of that sky
Unseals her earth, and lifts love in its shower.
--
This poem shatters me. There is no daemon near enough to allow me to delve into these words in any meaningful way. I turn to poetry, especially this piece, for an anguished sublime -- anguished because it is an art that, when I attempt to face the fiercer, perhaps more esoteric, poets, I am overwhelmed by. Oh, but to only read and reread this aloud is a thing of great beauty. I must always pause and repeat what is one of my most favorite groupings of symbols (letters, words) in the English language:
Often it makes my eyes go dry.And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.
Edit: on a whim i quickly recorded the poem for you fine folks. ;)
And thus declared the Frenchman,
All unreflective passions push one to great, fleeting efforts rather than to continuity of efforts.
