The symphony is a musical epic. We might compare it to a journey
leading through the boundless reaches of the external world, on and on,
farther and farther. Variations also constitute a journey, but not
through the external world. You recall Pascal's pensée
about how man lives between the abyss of the infinitely large and the
infinitely small. The journey of the variation form leads to that second infinity, the infinity of internal variety concealed in all things.
What
Beethoven discovered in the variations was another space and another
direction. In that sense they are a challenge to undertake the journey,
another invitation au voyage.
The variation
form is a form of maximum concentration. It enables the composer to
limit himself to the matter at hand, to go straight to the heart of it.
The subject matter is a theme, which often consists of no more that
sixteen measures. Beethoven goes as deeply into those sixteen measures
as if he had gone down a mine to the bowels of the earth.
The
journey to the second infinity is no less adventurous than the journey
of the epic, and closely parallels the physicist's descent into the
wondrous innards of the atom. With every variation Beethoven moves
farther and farther from the original theme, which bears no more
resemblance to the final variation than a flower to its image under the
microscope.
Man knows he cannot embrace the universe
with all its suns and stars. But he finds it unbearable to be condemned
to lose the second infinity as well, the one so close, so nearly within
reach.. if it is perfection we are after, we must go to the heart of the
matter, and we can never quite reach it.
That the
eternal infinity escapes us we accept with equanimity, the guilt over
letting the second infinity escape follows us to the grave.
(Kniha smíchu a zapomnění, 1979, tr. Michael Henry Heim)
Before I saw the white supremacist crosses, I'd concluded the Cervantes vandals were trolling Kundera
Refroidis ça t'va bien quand tu dors- Lautréamont les chants d'Maldoror Tu n'aimes pas moi j'adore- et quand bien même Tout se voile dehors Je me guiderais sur l'étoile du nord- rompre les chaînes Sans souci de son sort S'eloigner des regrets et remords - Lautréamont les chants d'Maldoror
Out on the balcony, the wind will wake me up, the cool wind blowing straight in my face.. Everything has disappeared now; this distance, this ever-receding mass of stars, in that absolute void, in the cold, is no more. No shape; no direction, no center, as when I feel without ceasing to see what I see, the imperceptible, blind movement of what awaits and threatens, quite near, on the other side.. So it is useless to continue the experiment. For his own presence, when he directs his vision on to his hand, the earth, the vague outline of the mountains, seems to him to be surprising enough; the proximity in which he finds himself so improbable - exactly his own reflection enlarged - that he regrets his earlier doubts; quite unafraid, reassured even, since he must now go to sleep; since what he sees must not the seen and, after all, he is resting there, not here, in this unsuitable situation, walking carefully along the rocky mountain path, where occasionally a stone starts rolling down; where he stops, followed by these men, to listen.
Celestial vault endlessly observed, where he will no longer have the time, will no longer be the age to go out walking; nocturnal vault where they will navigate noiselessly and without collisions, as he has done so many times from his bed near the open window (and the lime tree in the garden moved in the wind); as he wished to live, too, plunged in this element, this substance, too heavy, too thick, that has not succeeded, and will not succeed in holding him back. How many voyages by instantaneous trajectory, how many places already occupied, reserved in the same way, and the immediate return, without anybody or anything - not even himself perhaps - suspecting anything ... Motionless, without leaving his chair ... Precise and secret repertory of attitudes; circumstances altered by a trivial thought: his arm lying in the sun, his face in the shade; his hand placed one evening on the edge of a well ... Details that he projects in his mind as violently as possible; details that held him back and which now call him on... Anyway, do they not tend to come together, in this place that eludes and overtakes him; an illusory construction that despite itself he can only vaguely substantiate? Is he not walking among them now, without seeing them? Is he not, at each step, an obstacle to their existence? Himself a false collection of their hidden multitude? Observing in the dark, starry sky, he recomposes the following fictional elements: carnivorous flowers, multicolored canals of the planets; interstellar silences; giant rainbows; fabulous animals doomed in advance; strange diseases that can always be cured (like those explorers lost in ice-bound territory who, without food, gradually waste away, but can be saved a the last moment by fruit). And if some fellow-traveler came to a sudden end (blown up, submerged), one communicated with his new form by means of a system of individually controlled screens: the position of the stars; all points of view; the enumeration of universal thought in terms of concrete elements (numerical fragmentations provided by an arithmetical table) and, in a general way, any imaginable spectacle whatsoever. Then ever onwards, without interruption or going back, the voyage continued.
There stood on its farther rim a spire of smoke attended and crowned by a plutonic light where the waters have broke open. Erupting hot gouts of lava and great upended slabs of earth and a rain of small stones that hissed for miles in the sea. As we watched there reared out of the smoking brine a city of old bone coughed up from the sea's floor, pale attic bone delicate as a shell and half melting, a chalken shambles coralgrown that slewed into shape of temple, column, plinth and cornice, and across the whole a frieze of archer and warrior and marblebreasted mail all listing west and moving slowly their stone limbs. As these figures began to cool and take on life Suttree among the watchers said that this time there are witnesses, for life does not come slowly. It rises in one massive mutation and all its changed utterly and forever. We have witnessed this thing today which prefigures for all time the way in which historic orders proceed. And some said that the girl who bathed her swollen belly in the stone pool in the garden last evening was the author of the wonder they attended. And a maid bearing water in a marble jar came down from the living frieze toward the dreamer with eyes restored black of core and iris brightly painted attic blue and she moved toward him with a smile.
"He used to write me from Africa. He contrasted African time to
European time, and also to Asian time. He said that in the 19th century
mankind had come to terms with space, and that the great question of
the 20th was the coexistence of different concepts of time. By the way,
did you know that there are emus in the Île de France?...
Social media images suggest that 3 lions may have been released from the Paris Zoo during tonight's riots in France pic.twitter.com/UpvZdzbesM
— Insane Reality Leaks (@InsaneRealitys) June 30, 2023
"Hayao Yamaneko invents video games with his machine. To please
me he puts in my best beloved animals: the cat and the owl. He claims
that electronic texture is the only one that can deal with sentiment,
memory, and imagination...
"I'm writing you all this from another world, a world of
appearances. In a way the two worlds communicate with each other.
Memory is to one what history is to the other: an impossibility.
"Legends are born out of the need to decipher the
indecipherable. Memories must make do with their delirium, with their
drift. A moment stopped would burn like a frame of film blocked before
the furnace of the projector. Madness protects, as fever does.
"I envy Hayao in his 'zone,' he plays with the signs of his
memory. He pins them down and decorates them like insects that would
have flown beyond time, and which he could contemplate from a point
outside of time: the only eternity we have left. I look at his
machines. I think of a world where each memory could create its own
legend..
Tigers, tigers, zebras, gorillas, etc. are also participating in the protests.
"He wrote me: I've understood the visions. Suddenly you're in
the desert the way you are in the night; whatever is not desert no
longer exists. You don't want to believe the images that crop up.
"Did I write you that there are emus in the Ile de France? This
name—Island of France—sounds strangely on the island of Sal...
"So, it sufficed to wait and the planet itself staged the
working of time. I saw what had been my window again. I saw emerge
familiar roofs and balconies, the landmarks of the walks I took through
town every day, down to the cliff where I had met the children. The cat
with white socks that Haroun had been considerate enough to film for me
naturally found its place. And I thought, of all the prayers to time
that had studded this trip the kindest was the one spoken by the woman
of Gotokuji, who said simply to her cat Tora, “Cat, wherever you are,
peace be with you.”
"And then in its turn the journey entered the 'zone,' and Hayao
showed me my images already affected by the moss of time, freed of the
lie that had prolonged the existence of those moments swallowed by the
spiral.
The Paris Zoo has said this is a hoax.
And the picture on the right is not even a real gorilla.
"Then I went down into the basement where my friend—the
maniac—busies himself with his electronic graffiti. Finally his
language touches me, because he talks to that part of us which insists
on drawing profiles on prison walls. A piece of chalk to follow the
contours of what is not, or is no longer, or is not yet; the
handwriting each one of us will use to compose his own list of 'things
that quicken the heart,' to offer, or to erase. In that moment poetry
will be made by everyone, and there will be emus in the 'zone.'"
