These are not recollections. They are words written, published, spoken, recounted, recorded during the period from early January 1933 to May 1945. They all have an unintentionally familar ring. Each image of those years, whatever its origin, has something hypnotic about it. This was the peak of black and white, in cinema and in life. When Technicolor appeared it seemed a hallucination. Time seemed to have been shaped into an ever narrower spiral, which ended in a bottleneck.

— Roberto Calasso, a preface

There is no viewpoint from which the box has the appearance of a cube: one always sees only a few sides, the corners do not seem right angles, the sides do not seem equal. No one has ever seen, no one will ever see a cube. For like reasons, no one has ever touched nor will ever touch a cube. If one moves around the box, an infinite variety of apparent forms is generated. None of these is the cubic form.

— Simone Weil, “The Iliad or the Poem of Force”

1

Yoko Tawada’s “Barcelona: Stage Animals” . . . the meaning of the text depends on how it is read. Halting readings make the text seem ambiguous; opening the gaps leaves more space for making meaning. Repetition read for sound makes language 3D rather than simply reading it for meaning. “There are multiple voices inside each person,” to quote Kierkegaard, king of ‘autofiction.’

2

In a conversation with Edward Said, Daniel Barenboim said the primary difference between a Shakespearean sonnet and a symphony by Beethoven is that the text serves a realization for one but not the other. The words are “a notation of Shakespeare's thoughts —in the same way that the score is nothing but a notation of what Beethoven imagined”, and so the words are “the thoughts existed in Shakespeare's mind and in the reader's mind.” He argues that this is different from Beethoven’s symphonies, where one is faced with the “added element of actually bringing these sounds into the world: in other words, the sounds of the Fifth Symphony do not exist in the score.” Although I’m not sure I agree entirely (since the performance of the play, or the sonnet, is also central to its existence and relies on performance for this aspect, which is to say, our minds make sound for the textual languages we can read, and the presence of this sound is not that dissimilar from the saying of a text …), I love Barenboim’s phenomenological description of sound’s relation to silence. Thus do I excerpt a chunk of it below:

That is the phenomenology of sound—the fact that sound is ephemeral, that sound has a very concrete relation to silence. I often compare it to the law of gravity; in the same way that objects are drawn to the ground, so are sounds drawn to silence, and vice versa. And if you accept that, then you have a whole dimension of physical inevitabilities, which as a musician you try to defy. This is why courage is an integral part of making music. Beethoven was courageous not only because he was deaf but also because he had to overcome superhuman challenges. The sheer act of making music is an act of courage since you are trying to defy many of the physical laws of nature. The first one is a question of silence. If you want to maintain the sound and if you want to create the tension that comes from sustained sound, the first moment of relationship is between the first sound and the silence that precedes it, and the next one is between the first and the second note, and so on ad infinitum. In order to achieve this, you are defying the law of nature; you're not letting the sound die as it naturally would tend to. And therefore, in the performance, besides knowing the music and understanding it, the first important thing for a musician to understand is how does sound operate when you bring it into this world, when you bring it into this room. In other words, what is the reverberation? What is the prolongation of the sound? And the art of making music through sound is, for me, the art of illusion. You create, on the through sound is, for me, the art of illusion. You create, on the piano, the illusion of being able to let the sound grow on one note, which the piano is totally incapable of doing, physically. You defy that. You create the illusion through the phrasing, through the use of the pedal, through many ways. You create the illusion of growth of a tone, which doesn't exist, and you can also create the illusion of slowing down the process of decreasing volume. And I think, with the orchestra, it's different because some of the instruments can sustain it. But the art of illusion, and the art of defying physical laws, is the first element that strikes me in a performance. And this is what one has to prepare and rehearse—not, however, to arrive at a formula for performance, which is, unfortunately, in my opinion very often the case.

Phrasing, tone, and other “illusions” you create. Two questions that continue buzzing through my notebooks: “In other words, what is the reverberation? What is the prolongation of the sound?”

3

Intonation in epistolary punctuation and titles of address: the combustible exhalation of an official appellation. As in perhaps this passage from a book by Roberto Calasso:

. . . which made me think of Augustine’s statement: “You’ve put off the day of reckoning a bit, but not canceled the debt.”

4

Intonation as a facet of the footstep, or the pace. The breath between steps.

I blame George Bataille’s “Big Toe" for expressing his view of feet and the foot fetish. As Bataille tells it, the foot is what treads on the ground and connects us to base reality it is despised, whereas the head, which is nearest to the sky and clouds is venerated. Of course some people will take the contrary view and worship what is generally held in contempt. Hence the thrill of the profanation. Notably, there is nothing akin to the “halo” for feet.

5

Of course I blame Luis Bunuel’s tracking shot of Catherine Deneuve’s black pumps as she climbs the stairways to Madame Anais brothel for the first time in Belle Du Jour, which makes us hyperaware of the relationship between her thoughts and her steps.

6

I also blame Meret Oppenheim’s My Nurse (as well as the traditional Turkeyfication of the present) for this train of thought with no endpoint or destination.

As for My Nurse, with its white leather heels gussied up and tied together like a turkey on a silver platter, Oppenheim said “it evokes for me the association of thighs squeezed together in pleasure. In fact, almost a 'proposition. When I was a little girl, four of five, we had a young nursemaid. She was dressed in white. Maybe she was in love, maybe that’s why she exuded a sensual atmosphere of which I was unconsciously aware.”

It’s the wear of the sole that fascinates me: the particular shape that indicates the tread. We never see each others’ soles; it is an expected part of being in relation to others, this underside that marks our own particular movement through the world.

7

I lined up the shoes in the house and stared at their soles.

None of the kids “walks like me,” if I read the markings on our shoes as a vague score for the music of made by our feet. But these intonations of wear — of wearing and tearing and where-ing — strike me as a sort of portrait. A series of secret portraits that involve reading a part we rarely see in each other. A sonnet series. . .

Augustine, Book 3, 15.1
Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim, Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society
George Bataille, “Big Toe” (Documents)
Jeanne Balibar, Rodolphe Burger, and Pierre Alferi, “Le tour de monde”
Luis Bunuel, Belle Du Jour (1967)
Simone Weil, The Iliad or the Poem of Force
Yoko Tawada, Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue, t. by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda (New Directions)