I should be doing many things besides blogging, like reading for Bible class, annotating sources for my thesis. But instead I want to tell you about an essay I just read. Well, no, actually I'm not going to tell you about it, I'm just going to post it for you to read, because I don't want to stumble over words when Aldous Huxley is so eloquent (and I would be doing what Huxley warns against).
I hope you enjoy this essay as much as I did, and I hope it makes you aware.
"Music at Night"
Aldous Huxley
Moonless, this June night is all the more alive with stars. Its darkness
is perfumed with faint gusts from the blossoming lime trees, with the
smell of wetted earth and the invisible greenness of the vines. There is
silence; but a silence that breathes with the soft breathing of the sea
and, in the thin shrill noise of a cricket, insistently, incessantly
harps on the fact of its own deep perfection. Far away, the passage of a
train is like a long caress, moving gently, with an inexorable
gentleness, across the warm living body of the night. Music, you say; it
would be a good night for music. But I have music here in a box, shut
up, like one of those bottled djinns in the Arabian Nights, and ready at
a touch to break out of its prison. I make the necessary mechanical
magic, and suddenly, by some miraculously appropriate coincidence (for I
had selected the record in the dark, without knowing what music the
machine would play), suddenly the introduction to the Benedictus in
Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis begins to trace its patterns on the moonless
sky. The Benedictus. Blessed and blessing, this music is in some sort
the equivalent of the night, of the deep and living darkness, into
which, now in a single jet, now in a fine interweaving of melodies, now
in pulsing and almost solid clots of harmonious sound, it pours itself,
stanchlessly pours itself, like time, like the rising and falling,
falling trajectories of a life. It is the equivalent of the night in
another mode of being, as an essence is the equivalent of the flowers,
from which it is distilled. There is, at least there sometimes seems to
be, a certain blessedness lying at the heart of things, a mysterious
blessedness, of whose existence occasional accidents or providences (for
me, this night is one of them) make us obscurely, or it may be
intensely, but always fleetingly, alas, always only for a few brief
moments aware. In the Benedictus Beethoven gives expression to this
awareness of blessedness. His music is the equivalent of this
Mediterranean night, or rather of the blessedness as it would be if it
could be sifted clear of irrelevance and accident, refined and separated
out into its quintessential purity. “Benedictus, benedictus. . .” One
after another the voices take up the theme propounded by the orchestra
and lovingly mediated through a long and exquisite solo (for the
blessedness reveals itself most often to the solitary spirit) by a
single violin. “Benedictus, benedictus. . .” And then, suddenly, the
music dies; the flying djinn has been rebottled. With a stupid
insect-like insistence, a steel point rasps and rasps the silence. At
school, when they taught us what was technically known as English, they
used to tell us to “express in our own words” some passage from whatever
play of Shakespeare was at the moment being rammed, with all its
annotations — particularly the annotations — down our reluctant throats.
So there we would sit, a row of inky urchins, laboriously translating
“now silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies” into “now smart silk clothes
lie in the wardrobe,” or “To be or not to be” into “I wonder whether I
ought to commit suicide or not.” When we had finished, we would hand in
our papers, and the presiding pedagogue would give us marks, more or
less, according to the accuracy with which “our own words” had
“expressed” the meaning of the Bard. He ought, of course, to have given
us naught all round with a hundred lines to himself for ever having set
us the silly exercise. Nobody’s “own words,” except those of Shakespeare
himself, can possibly “express” what Shakespeare meant. The substance
of a work of art is inseparable from its form; its truth and its beauty
are two and yet, mysteriously, one. The verbal expression of even a
metaphysic or a system of ethics is very nearly as much of a work of art
as a love poem. The philosophy of Plato expressed in the “own words” of
Jowett is not the philosophy of Plato; nor in the “own words” of, say,
Billy Sunday, is the teaching of St. Paul St. Paul’s teaching. “Our own
words” are inadequate even to express the meaning of other words; how
much more inadequate, when it is a matter of rendering meanings which
have their original expression in terms of music or one of the visual
arts! What, for example, does music “say”? You can buy at almost any
concert an analytical program that will tell you exactly. Much too
exactly; that is the trouble. Every analyst has his own version. Imagine
Pharaoh’s dream interpreted successively by Joseph, by the Egyptian
soothsayers, by Freud, by Rivers, by Adler, by Jung, by Wohlgemuth: it
would “say” a great many different things. Not nearly so many, however,
as the Fifth Symphony has been made to say in the verbiage of its
analysts. Not nearly so many as the Virgin of the Rocks and the Sistine
Madonna have no less lyrically said. Annoyed by the verbiage and this
absurd multiplicity of attributed “meanings,” some critics have
protested that music and painting signify nothing but themselves; that
the only things they “say” are things, for example, about modulations
and fugues, about color values and three-dimensional forms. That they
say anything about human destiny or the universe at large is a notion
which these purists dismiss as merely nonsensical. If the purists were
right, then we should have to regard painters and musicians as monsters.
For it is strictly impossible to be a human being and not to have views
of some kind about the universe at large, very difficult to be a human
being and not to express those views, at any rate by implication. Now,
it is a matter of observation that painters and musicians are not
monsters. Therefore. . . The conclusion follows, unescapably. It is not
only in program music and problem pictures that composers and painters
express their views about the universe. The purest and most abstract
artistic creations can be, in their own peculiar language, as eloquent
in this respect as the most deliberately tendencious. Compare, for
example, a Virgin by Piero della Francesca with a Virgin by Tura. Two
Madonnas — and the current symbolical conventions are observed by both
artists. The difference, the enormous difference between the two
pictures is a purely pictorial difference, a difference in the forms and
their arrangement, in the disposition of the lines and planes and
masses. To any one in the least sensitive to the eloquence of pure form,
the two Madonnas say utterly different things about the world. Piero’s
composition is a welding together of smooth and beautifully balanced
solidities. Everything in his universe is endowed with a kind of
supernatural substantiality, is much more “there” than any object of the
actual world could possibly be. And how sublimely rational, in the
noblest, the most humane acceptation of the word, how orderedly
philosophical is the landscape, are all the inhabitants of this world!
It is the creation of a god who “ever plays the geometer.” What does she
say, this Madonna from San Sepolcro? If I have not wholly mistranslated
the eloquence of Piero’s forms, she is telling us of the greatness of
the human spirit, of its power to rise above circumstance and dominate
fate. If you were to ask her, “How shall I be saved?” “By Reason,” she
would probably answer. And, anticipating Milton, “Not only, not mainly
upon the Cross,” she would say, “is Paradise regained, but in those
deserts of utter solitude where man puts forth the strength of his
reason to resist the Fiend.” This particular mother of Christ is
probably not a Christian. Turn now to Tura’s picture. It is fashioned
out of a substance that is like the living embodiment of flame —
flame-flesh, alive and sensitive and suffering. His surfaces writhe away
from the eye, as though shrinking, as though in pain. The lines flow
intricately with something of that disquieting and, you feel, magical
calligraphy, which characterizes certain Tibetan paintings. Look
closely; feel your way into the picture, into the painter’s thoughts and
intuitions and emotions. This man was naked and at the mercy of
destiny. To be able to proclaim the spirit’s stoical independence, you
must be able to raise your head above the flux of things; this man was
sunk in it, overwhelmed. He could introduce no order into his world; it
remained for him a mysterious chaos, fantastically marbled with patches,
now of purest heaven, now of the most excruciating hell. A beautiful
and terrifying world, is this Madonna’s verdict; a world like the
incarnation, the material projection, of Ophelia’s madness. There are no
certainties in it but suffering and occasional happiness. And as for
salvation, who knows the way of salvation? There may perhaps be
miracles, and there is always hope. The limits of criticism are very
quickly reached. When he has said “in his own words” as much, or rather
as little, as “own words” can say, the critic can only refer his readers
to the original work of art: let them go and see for themselves. Those
who overstep the limit are either rather stupid, vain people, who love
their “own words” and imagine that they can say in them more than “own
words” are able in the nature of things to express. Or else they are
intelligent people who happen to be philosophers or literary artists and
who find it convenient to make the criticism of other men’s work a
jumping off place for their own creativity. What is true of painting is
equally true of music. Music “says” things about the world, but in
specifically musical terms. Any attempt to reproduce these musical
statements “in our own words” is necessarily doomed to failure. We
cannot isolate the truth contained in a piece of music; for it is a
beauty-truth and inseparable from its partner. The best we can do is to
indicate in the most general terms the nature of the musical
beauty-truth under consideration and to refer curious truth-seekers to
the original. Thus, the introduction to the Benedictus in the Missa
Solemnis is a statement about the blessedness that is at the heart of
things. But this is about as far as “own words” will take us. If we were
to start describing in our “own words” exactly what Beethoven felt
about this blessedness, how he conceived it, what he thought its nature
to be, we should very soon find ourselves writing lyrical nonsense in
the style of the analytical program makers. Only music, and only
Beethoven’s music, and only this particular music of Beethoven, can tell
us with any precision what Beethoven’s conception of the blessedness at
the heart of things actually was. If we want to know, we must listen —
on a still June night, by preference, with the breathing of the
invisible sea for background to the music and the scent of lime trees
drifting through the darkness, like some exquisite soft harmony
apprehended by another sense.
