If a Cosmos Bangs in the Void and Nobody Hears it, Does it Make a Sound?

How is music even possible?

What?

I said, HOW IS MUSIC EVEN POSSIBLE?! What, are you deaf?

"What must the world be like, what must I be like, if between me and the world the phenomenon of music can occur? How must I consider the world, how must I consider myself, if I am to understand the reality of music?"

Good questions. They were asked by Victor Zuckerkandl in his cult classic, Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World. Unfortunately, the cult consists only of me, so it seems that no one took Zuckerkandl's ideas and riffed with them. I briefly touched on them in my book of the sane gnome (see page 44-45), but this is another one of those motifs that could have been a symphony in itself. I needed to change keys and move on.

But with my new found slack, I've been revisiting the book. Referring back to the previous post, what if the ears provide a better account of the nature of reality than do the eyes? This would certainly be consistent with Judeo-Christian metaphysics: in the beginning was the Word, not the brightly colored object.

But the Word is only heard by those with ears to hear. Seeing is different. In order to see, all you have to do is open your eyes, and the image forces itself upon you. Remember what happened in the Garden: eating from the tree of good and evil results in the eyes being opened. What were they before?

I would say that before that, the ears were dominant over the eyes. This is how it was possible to have such an intimate relationship with the Creator. Again, the ears do not divide the world in a dualistic sense, as that which we hear is not exactly outside, nor is it inside; rather, as we shall explain in more detail in a subsequent post -- hearing -- or, more specifically, music -- uniquely occurs in the mysterious transitional space between matter and neurology. It can by no means be located in just one or the other (for example, a tune-deaf person hears the identical notes, but not the melody).

Zuckerkandl discusses the interesting differences between the blind and the deaf. Upon superficial consideration, one would think that the blind person would feel more cut off from the world, and have more reason to be irritable, paranoid, and distrustful. "Yet it is not the blind man who shows the typical reaction of the prisoner, the man spied upon, who must always be on his guard; it is the deaf man, whose most important organ of connection with the world has remained unimpaired" (Zuckerkandl).

During my internship at Camarillo State Mental Hospital, my supervisor was a blind man. He was the sweetest and most gentle, not to mention, perceptive, soul you could imagine. But you may have noticed that when people start to lose their hearing, they often become sullen or cranky. Often they deny that it's happening, and blame the world. How come movies these days are so damn quiet! Why does everyone mumble!

For the blind man, "other modes of connection with the world are revealed to him, modes that are otherwise overshadowed by the dominance of the eye -- as if, in the realms with which he thus comes into contact, man were less alone, better provided for, more at home, than in the world of visible things to which the deaf man is directed and to which an element of foreignness always clings."

Now interestingly, there was a time, not so very long ago, that man was blind half the time. It was called night. I don't think we appreciate -- in fact, I'm sure we don't -- the psychological effects of having light at night; not just a little candle, mind you, but the complete conquest of darkness. The total blackness of night is almost inconceivable to us today, and with it, a host of mysteries to which we only gain entrance by facing and living with the darkness. No wonder early humans worshiped the sun, and readily "saw" the connection between light and thought (likewise the feminine moon, which is to unconscious as the male sun is to conscious).

What did human beings do back then in the dark of the night? Well, for one thing, they huddled around the campfire and told stories. As I have mentioned before, there are many things that only make sense at 2:00 AM, in total silence and darkness. Just because they don't make sense at 2:00 PM hardly means that they don't make sense. Think of some of the epic stories of the Bible -- floods, giants, talking serpents, etc. If these aren't engaged with the imagination -- which only comes out at night, or by somehow suppressing and "endarkening" the dominant, light-filled left brain -- then they won't reveal their secrets.

Furthermore, there are some stories we tell by day that make no sense whatsoever in the darkness of night -- for example, Darwinian fairy tales, or silly myths about whole universes suddenly banging into being out of nothing and for no reason. Such things are easy to believe for someone who doesn't know that reality extends beyond the firmament of egoic consciousness. It's like imagining that the world is encircled by the sky, just because we see it by day. At night, the comforting sky recedes into the infinite darkness, and we are confronted by the billions of things concealed by daylight and tenure.

Could it be that "man attains the inwardness of life by hearing and its outwardness by seeing?" (Zuckerkandl). Hmm, let me listen to that question for awhile...

*****

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The Cosmic Symphony

This post has been sitting around unfinished on my desk. It's part of a much larger project that investigates the possibility that we love and need music because it discloses important insights (or insounds) into the nature of reality. Dedicated to the memory of Ximese.

To what point must we enlarge our thought so that it shall be in proportion to the phenomenon? --Schelling

The problem with the various -isms ,-ologies, and ismologies of our day is that they are simply not in proportion to the phenomena they seek to explain. Rather, in every case, they make the phenomena go away by subsuming it into a system out of which it could never have arisen to begin with. As a result, man has a total explanation of the cosmos, but at the price of eliminating himself from it. It seems that no one asks what kind of cosmos must this be in order for truth -- and a being capable of knowing it -- to exist in it.

In other words, let us say that Darwinism as commonly understood by tenured vulgarians is "true." This immediately creates a host of problems for the theory, for now one has to explain how it is possible for truth to be known, given the impossibly narrow constraints of natural selection. For to know truth is to adapt oneself to the timeless, so to speak, whereas natural selection is strictly an ephemeral adequation to a changing environment. How can that which only changes know that which never does?

Traditionally, we have a word for "the thing that never changes." We call it God. Unfortunately, this word has become detached from what was once extremely experience-bound, so that it is often an empty abstraction (or alternatively, a saturated concretion) -- especially for those who "do not believe" in God. In the end, it is not a matter of belief or disbelief; rather, it is -- and must be -- a matter of experience, to which we only subsequently give the name "God" (even those who wrote the scriptures had to simultaneously have the experience; I don't think they were just glorified stenographers).

The experience must be of something that is "other"; and yet, there must be a part of us that is capable of conforming itself to this object. In other words, humans can only know what they are capable of knowing, and they either can or cannot know this transcendental object.

If they cannot know it, then this hardly resolves the problem. Rather, then you have to explain what all those people were experiencing when they thought they were experiencing God, including many of the most brilliant and accomplished minds in human history. It will not do to simply say it was "nothing." At the very least, you would have to concede that it was something, just not "God." It's like saying, "I thought I was in love, but it turned out I wasn't." Just because things turned out that way, it doesn't mean that the object of your affections didn't really exist. You just thought that she was something she wasn't.

Let's think about this transcendental Object. For human beings, since vision is our dominant sense, when we consider the word "object" we probably imagine something material, like a pen, or a cup, or a hat. But this can be misleading, for there are also "aural objects," most notably, musical objects consisting of melody, harmony, and rhythm.

Note the first difference between a visual and an aural object; the former exists all at once in space, while the latter unfolds serially in time. Specifically, a melody is a kind of "musical object" that is "nothing" at any instant. That is, to hear just the note in isolation is to kill the melody -- like looking at a letter in isolation from the word, or a word in isolation from the sentence. An individual note is not just "nothing" -- i.e., neutral -- but a kind of lie if it was really meant to be part of a melody or harmony.

Now, human beings exist in time. I think we can all agree on that. But this is not just the physical time of pure duration, as it is for a stone or an aerosmith. Rather, we live in developmental time, in which we constantly change and grow, and yet, retain our "selves." A helpless infant who stayed a helpless infant would not be an occasion for hope and joy, but a tragedy and a nuisance.

As time passes and the infant reaches various developmental milestones, he unfolds like a flower. The adult could hardly be more different than the infant if looked at in isolation, like an object in space. But we are always, from infancy to adulthood, an arrow aimed beyond our present state to a future self we cannot know until we arrive there. To grow is to coherently unfold in time, not merely expand in space.

Along these lines, please note that it may be as artificial an exercise to separate the first living thing from the last man as it would be to separate the fetus from the baby. Who said that things are really as separate as they appear to our eyes? Who said that the future doesn't disclose the meaning of the past? Indeed, how could it not?

The critical point to bear in mind for those with ears to hear, is that man is not an object but a melody -- or rather, a complex musical object with a deep continuity extending back to the womb and before (and above). In the absence of this deep continuity, we could never have become the melody. Every man was once a helpless baby, and if he hadn't been, he could never have become a man. What this means is that man is not just melody -- which exists in time -- but harmony -- which exists in space.

Think, for example, of a chord, which consists of two or more notes played simultaneously. It is a truism that the childhood experience that we do not consciously remember is stored away in the "unconscious." But the unconscious is not "past." Rather, it is very much present, as one of its principle characteristics is timelessness.

Thus, if you want to understand the proper relationship between the conscious and unconscious minds, it is very much like two notes that must be harmonized. To the extent that they become "dissonant," this will result in what we call "symptoms," which are unconscious emotions or behaviors that clash with our conscious will, and cause pain or dysfunction.

Please note that symptoms are not unambiguously negative, as they can and do carry vital messages about ourselves which we need to understand and integrate. Not only that, but they can serve as important reminders that we are not yet "complete," and that we are ignoring something to which we need to pay attention. To cite one example, the atheist's obsession with God is a kind of painful reminder that God is absent in his life -- or present in an inverted manner.

But when the conscious and unconscious minds are harmonized, this leads to a new depth of experience that could never occur with just one or the other. In fact, it is very much analogous to one of those "magic eye" pictures which leap out of the page, or even like our two eyes which create the perception of depth owing to their having slightly different vertices.

Or, it's like a chord that is much more interesting to the ear than the bare note. I've always loved vocal harmony, e.g., the Beach Boys. I guess they remind me of the celestial harmelody of the Song Supreme. No wonder Brian Wilson called one of his greatest works, Smile, a "teenage symphony to God."

Our Prayer, from the original Smile:



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Up to Bismarck

Yesterday I received the sad news that a member of our lodge has suddenly and unexpectedly died. We knew her as Ximese, but her real name was Kathy, age 53. I don't want to speculate, but from the description of her friend, Todd, it sure sounds like swine flu, although I suppose thousands of people die from the regular flu as well every year. Todd says there will be an autopsy.

I'm sure Todd -- or Kathy -- wouldn't mind my passing along the following: "She really loved your book, that you had a website, and fell in love with the regulars. It was always what was going on at OC every day, she would always tell me about what happened, what was said, if Van had done something amusing, if Ben was ok, etc. You were her family in a way, as she found you when God took away her alcoholism -- literally took it. I was there.

"She had heard a sermon by (the sometimes infamous) Dr. Gene Scott about Abraham, 'Lift up now thine eyes, from the place where you are...' He was using this to say that God deals with you where you stand, not where you or anyone thinks you should be. She told me, she was in her bedroom (around 10 pm) and had the DTs, and looked up at her ceiling and asked God to help her.

"He did. She never touched it again, never wanted to, and had no desire. Period. She has been dry ever since. So, she found your book about then, and then the site, and helped out at a local Church's 'Celebrate Recovery' program, to help people realize there was more to 'recovery' than just the old rehab stuff from reworked AA."

Todd passed along this photo:


That would be her owner, Beaky, on the right. Todd says Kathy is radiating her take the f*#%ing picture look. You know, her usual look (she did not suffer trolls gladly).

Here is some more biographical info from Todd: "Her family was in the diplomatic service, and she grew up in Argentina and Paraguay. She spoke fluent Argentine Spanish, and also Japanese. She was an international student at University of the Pacific in Stockton CA, and did a home stay in Japan.

"She was a black belt in Aikido, and had worked her way from being receptionist to VP in charge of operations for a large debt management organization.

"She loved to cook, was a voracious reader, and also an online researcher. Although she read many sites -- Ace of Spades, The People's Cube, Big Fur Hat, etc. -- One Cosmos was her home."

I don't remember when Ximese found home, but it was a case of instant re-cognition. She is the archetypal person for whom I'm always writing, and without whom I could not write -- the one who whacks their furhead in d'light and exclaims, finally! Where has this been all my life!

But the feeling is always mutual -- where have you been all my life! -- since the teaching is just what goes on in the space between two people who recognize it and resonate at the same frequency. It's a vibrating triad, not a static monad or dyad, since it's two people in love with a common third that comes into view between them. It's how we can (implicitly) know each other without having to undergo the formality of (explicitly) knowing each other. Just innocent spirits at play in the fields of the word, like children learning to speak, only of higher things.

Kathy's comments are part of the permanent arkive, so that in a hundred years, unborn Coons will speak with reverence and awe of her legendary troll-bashing. Sure, she liked soccer, but nobody's perfect.

Tonight at Be'er O'clock, let us raise a glass and remurmur our bright Ximese twinkle, Kathy, and give her a proper zendoff to Bismarck, secure in the knowledge that she is slackfully kicking it with Toots and the boys.

.... a drop embraced by the sea held within the drop....

Loose Thread

The Endless Thread, part II. Please sign our geistbook.


And don't forget to nominate One Cosmos for Best Religious Blog starting November 3. We need to extend our streak to three years for not Best Religious Blog. Keep the joke alive!

... the endless thread...

(∞ ↓ 10.10.05 → 10.23.09 ↑ ∞)

Here and Now: Local Branches of the Infinite & Eternal

Just as eternity seen from within time becomes everlastingness (all of time), placelessness or infinity seen from a perspective within space becomes ubiquity or omnipresence (all of space). Just as the very old suggests the everlasting, so the very large suggests the infinite. Just as the very new is timeless (for it has almost no duration), so the infinitesimal too suggests infinity (for it has almost no extension). This relates to the sense of wonder often felt by one from looking through a microscope at the infinitesimal -- or through a telescope at the near infinite distances of space. --The Symmetry of God

I'm still slowly working my way through the implications of some of Bomford's ideas. Now it's time to contemplate placelessness, which is another one of the modalities of the unconscious mind. It is also said to be one of the characteristics of the Divine, Who Am simultaneously everywhere (immanent) because nowhere (transcendent).

In other words, as Schuon has written, the first principle of metaphysics is that the Supreme Reality is Absolute; that being the case, it is necessarily Infinite as a kind of first consequence: "The Infinite is, so to speak, the intrinsic dimension of plenitude proper to the Absolute; to say Absolute is to say Infinite, the one being inconceivable without the other." Therefore, with regard to space, "the absolute is the point, and the infinite is extension," i.e., little and big mon.

Just last night, while walking the dog, it occurred to me that perhaps we're asking the wrong questions about the wrong problems. That is, if you turn the cosmos back right side up, the difficulty isn't explaining eternity; rather, the problem is how to explain time, and most especially, the now. The existence of the now was something that also puzzled Einstein, who didn't see how any of the laws of physics could account for it. But it makes much more sense if we think of the now as just a dimple on the aseity of eternity. It's like the last vestige of eternity, and yet, the only way "in" to it.

Likewise, how is it possible for there to be a "here" instead of just "everywhere"? In fact, it's the identical problem, only looked at from the standpoint of the Absolute instead of the Eternal. Before the appearance of Life, there was no "here" here, nor any there there. But once the cosmos has a here! in the form of life, it has a pathway back into the Absolute, just as the now is the gateway back to eternity. This is just one more reflection of the idea that man is the image and likeness of the Creator, for we surely partake of his Infinity and Absoluteness. Even the staunchest atheist must acknowledge this on pain of forsaking his very humanness.

Anyway, with our briefs aside, the Absolute is masculine, or "essentiality," while the Infinite is feminine, or "potentiality"; and their baby is the phenomenal world of middling relativities. I don't mean to give away the whole game to those who prefer Petey's dreamy mystagoguery to my wideawackery, but if I am not mistaken, this is what we were trying to convey on p. 16 of the Coonifesto:

A little metyaphysical diddling
between a cabbala opposites, and
Mamamaya!
baby makes Trinity,
so all the world's an allusion.
Viveka la revelation!

Or, in more mythematical terms:

The Tao gives birth to One.
One gives birth to Two.
Two gives birth to Three.
Three gives birth to all things. (Tao te Ching, Lao Tzu)

A Christian whistling the same Laosy tzune would sound something like this:

♬ The One enters into movement because of his fullness. The Two is transcended because the godhead [i.e., Absolute] is beyond all opposition. Perfection is achieved in the Three, who is the first to overcome the compositeness of the Two. Thus the godhead does not remain confined, nor does it spread out indefinitely. ♬ Therefore, in themthree therebe undivided division and differentiated unity (Gregory Nanziazen).

Olivier elaborates, which I'll bet you can't say fast three times at Beer O'Clock: "Thus the Trinity constitutes the inexhaustible fruitfulness of the Unity. From the Trinity comes all unification and all differentiation.... The Father is God beyond all, the origin of all that is. The incarnate Son is God with us.... The Spirit is God in us, the Breath, the Pneuma, who gives life to all...."

Which is what Petey no doubt meant by

And his name & number shall be Immanulent,
which, trancelighted, means "Godwithinus." (see Matt: 1:23)

One more relevant quote from Olivier: "A solitary God would not be 'Love without limits.' A God who made himself twofold... would make himself the root of an evil multiplicity to which he could only put a stop by re-absorbing it into himself. The Three-in-One denotes the perfection of Unity -- of 'Super-unity,' according to Dionysius the Areopagite.... It suggests the perpetual surmounting of contradiction, and of solitude as well, in the bosom of an infinite Unity."

Now, one of the reasons I rejected religion for much of my life was because it was presented to me as if it made unambigious sense to the conscious mind, i.e., the rationalinear ego. For example, if you simply say that "God is omnipresent," there's really no way for the ego to get its little mind around the word "omnipresent," which is both bigger than big and smaller than small -- you know, ♬ It's far, beyond the stars / it's near, beyond the moon ♬ (Professor Darin). It doesn't compute, because there's nothing in our rational or sensory experience to match it. It's just an empty concept, like "infinity" or "nothingness" or "Cubs win the Series."

Again, the trick is to use language in such a way as to provoke and suggest -- as a sort of probe to reach into the supraconscious mind, where eternity and omnipresence are not at all problematic, but the norm. As I mentioned in the Vandalized title of a previous post, this is The Secret Sign of Artists Who Have Known True Gods of Sound and Time, or where Poetic Champions Compose.

But it is also where noetic champions compose, i.e., prophets, seers, visionaries, extreme seekers, pneumagraphers, encentrics, and various adopted sons & daughters of the Creator. They are able to speak in this way because of the simple fact that our souls are proportioned to the Divine Nature. You two can become a three-time noetic champion by embracing the idea that "the life of spirit is the fountain from which our scriptures have come to us, and to take seriously that we too can become explorers, trace the scriptures upstream, drink from the same waters and understand their meaning firsthand through the very source that inspired" them (Hanson [forward]). Woo hoo!

I'm pretty sure this is what Petey was driving at in a careening vehicle such as

Here, prior to thought,
by the headwaters of the eternal,
the fountain of innocence,
the mind shoreless vast and still,
absolved & absorbed in what is always the case,
face to face in a sacred space.

Into the blisstic mystic,
no you or I, nor reason wise,
a boundless sea of flaming light,
bright blazing fire and ecstatic cinder,
Shiva, me tinders,
count the stars in your eyes!

So, what have we learned today? I guess that God, Eternity, and Spacelessness account for Man, the Now, and the Here, but that the converse could never be true.

Dilating Time while Remurmuring Eternity

Continuing with yesterday's post, we were discussing how language may be deployed to convey the eternity that is beyond it, including the technique of "repetition with variation." The following would be one example, as it piles layer upon steaming layer of the identical nonsense:

nothing,
pure emptiness,
a formless void without mind or life,
a shadow spinning before the beginning
over a silent static sea,
unlit altar of eternity,
fathomless vortex of the Infinite Zero.

Some readers will no doubt call this omschooled doggerel "repetition with tedium," or "artlessness with sincerity." But if I had any time at all this morning, it wouldn't be difficult to provide additional examples of this technique from genuine licensed poets such as Blake, Yeats, Donne, or Suzanne Sommers.

Another interesting way to express the symmetry of eternity, according to Bomford, is through what is called antithetic parallelism. This is a literary device in which a statement is made and then repeated with the terms in reverse order. He cites the spontaneous utterance of a person on trial whose case was close to reaching a verdict: "I was about to lose my liberty.... My freedom was about to go."

Interestingly, Bomford points out that "the richest source of such antithetic parallelism familiar to the English-speaking reader is in the Book of Common Prayer," for example,

O God, thou knowest my folly:
the wrongs I have done are not hidden from thee.

or

I am the talk of those who sit in the gate,
and the drunkards make songs about me.

The following examples may not be exact antithetic parallelisms, but at least I can now see what Petey was driving at:

Nothing is real.
NOTHING is realized.
That's it in a knotshall.
The nature of reality,
the rapture of nihility....

A drop embraced by the sea
held within the drop.

Know you're nought
you naughty boy.

In fact, I can also see that the Cosmobliteration section of the Coonifesto has a number of examples of the "unchanging cry," i.e., exclamations used to express eternity, such as

Om, now I remurmur!

Finn again, we rejoyce: salvolution, evelation, ululu-woo-hoo-aluation!

Whoops, where'd ego?!

So long. So short! Whoosh! there went your life.

Holy creation, shabbatman, time to rejewvenate (oy!).

Wu, full frontal nullity!

I am? That! O me ga!

You know, I feel a little self-conscious analyzing Petey's text, but I realize that no one else is ever going to ever do it, so it might as well be me.

Anyway, Bomford then cites the excellent example of Eliot's Four Quartets, which reflects upon how words may be used in the struggle to express the still silence of eternity:

Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach....
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place...

I actually cited this very passage on page 5, as a preface to the cracked and broken punnish antics of Cosmogenesis. How to reach up into the silence with blustering and unruly words? Hell, I don't know. Ask Petey, who, like Eliot, is not above occasionally lifting a line from elsewhom. Here this literary kleptomaniac holographically playgiarizes with John Lennon, Leonard Cohen, Neil Finn, James Joyce, Van Morrison, Miles Davis, and Joe Strummer, all at once:

Get out.
Get in.
Relax and float downstream.
A hole in the river.
Only drowning men can see it.
Slipping away, softly now.
Beneath the waves, ocean of being.
Shhh, peaceful.
So quiet in here.
Don't touch that dial!

In reference to Eliot, Bomford notes that "A reversal of beginning and end is needed to make the expression of eternity more complete: the combination of two penultimate forms together more strongly points to the ultimate."

The combination of two penultimate forms together. Hmm, once again I can see what Petey was up to with many of his puzzling paradoxables, since he was attempting to convey an unbleatable state of mind that is technically unglishable to our wordly whys:

Darkest night.
Dreamless sleep.
Outside in.
Spacetimematterenergy.
No beforeafter,
nobodaddy, no mamafestation,
nothing but neti.

Or

Darkness visible the boundless all....
unborn thus undying,
beginning and end of all impossibility,
empty plenum and inexhaustible void.
Who is? I AM.
A wake. Alone.
Hallow, noumena!

Likewise, there are numinous examples of the conjunction of contrasting penultimates in Cosmobliteration:

Luminous presence,
all-negating Void Supreme

Unfearing, allahpeering
darkness within darkness,
benighting the way brightly.

The body, an ephemeral harmelody of adams
forged from within stars,
our life, a fugitive dream
within the deathless, sleeping
what's-His-G-d-name.

Too old, older than Abraham,
too young, young as a babe's I AM.

We'll meet again.
Up ahead, 'round the bend.
The circle unbroken, by and by.
A Divine Child,
a godsend,
a touch of infanity,
a bloomin' yes.

In this last passage, the ultimate purpose of the cosmos (the ancient God's-end) is conjoined with the boundless joy of the brand new infant (godsend) -- that most precious and fleeting of flowers, which, like all flowers, always says Yes! to the gift of existence. What do they not know that we do, and how can we forget it?

To be continued....