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Sitaram
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Joined: 14 Sep 2005
Posts: 1079
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 Posted: Sat Sep 17, 2005 1:26 pm Post subject: Swann Song |
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| Sitaram wrote: | Why does that
Just-invented melody
Of yours
Become now mine
So suddenly,
Repeating incessantly
In mind
From thin air
Acting now
Like it was always there,
A moment grown momentous?
Why does my
Just-imagined question
Become their question for eternity?
(Nods toward posterity,
Meekly waiting.)
So few words and notes
Compose these countless
Songs and quotes;
Infinity entrapped
Within memento mori.
Both seek arcadian escape
From grave eternity:
Tom's love in Texas,
Ended yesterday,
The unstruck bell of swans,
A theme song from
The Crown Affair,
A song of Solomon,
Time's moving image of eternity,
Locked within my breast.
Yet I shall never see
The start or end.
We say Amen
But seek a way to mend
That right which seems so wrong.
Diapsalmata:
A Proust humming
Phalaris' Inventions.
- Sitaram
6-24-05
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Some explanation:
Something like a melody or a philosophical question springs into being at some moment in time, but then becomes timeless, perennial, and also very familiar and commonplace, as if we could not imagine existence without it.
There are such a small number of musical tones in the scales, and a finite number of words in the dictionary of any language, yet the potential for new compositions seems limitless.
A “memento mori” is often a skull. Infinity is trapped in our skulls, in our consciousness. The mention of “arcadia” alludes to “Et in Arcadia ego” which is Death saying “I am even in this place”, a phrase used by Evelyn Waugh to name the first part of “Brideshead Revisited.”
I make reference to the first page of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel where he writes
The unstruck bell is a term which denotes our internalized concept of the sound of a struck bell. The term is used in describing the result of years of mantra practice or prayer repetition, where the prayer becomes “prayer of the heart,” internalized, automatic, like some melody which we can no longer escape, now become a pattern in our metabolism.
I mention “Tom’s love” and “The Crown Affair” which is really “The Thomas Crown Affair.”
The theme song from “The Thomas Crown Affair”.
(start of lyrics, with repeated stanzas omitted)
Plato, in the dialogue “Timaeus”, describes time as “the moving image of eternity.”
Many, of course, will be familiar with the “Song of Solomon.”
We read, elsewhere in the writings attributed to Solomon,
So, there is something infinite enclosed in something finite (the skull or heart) trying to get out, in fact, constantly getting out, escaping, in the form of artistic expression, mathematical discovery and scientific invention. Since we are “created” in this fashion, it is “right” (i.e. correct) and it is also our “right” or privilege to participate in this intellectual activity, yet, because we suffer in the process, it “seems wrong”, a wrong which we try to “mend”, since a part of us does not want to be the way we are, tormented if we do not succeed in creating something immortal, and also, tormented when we do succeed. Our task is sisyphean. We are, as Robert Frost once said, “immortally wounded.”
Diapsalmatta is the word Kierkegaard uses just before he likens the “music” of an artist to the bull of Phalaris, mentioned in Dante’s Inferno.
The Diapsalmata (meaning refrains or repetition) is a collection of short sayings or aphorisms
The phrase “Phalaris Inventions” reminds us of “Bach’s Inventions”. |
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