4
500 Hz
(0:10)
Encountering another human being—
(0:16)
In order to get clear about aesthetic words you have to describe ways of living. We think we have to talk about aesthetic judgments like “This is beautiful”, but we find that if we have to talk about aesthetic judgments we don’t find these words at all, but a word used something like a gesture, accompanying a complicated activity (Wittgenstein 1966, 11).
Garry Hagburg, and Edward N. Zalta, ed. "Wittgenstein's Aesthetics,” 26 Jan. 2007, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 10 Mar. 2014 <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/wittgenstein-aesthetics/>.
Hagburg’s citation refers to the following text:
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, and Cyril Barrett, ed. Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Philosophy, and Religious Belief. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966.
4a
500 + 502 Hz
(1:00)
And we sit.
(1:05)
Our aesthetic engagements are occasions and activities of just this kind; thus aesthetics, as a field of conceptual inquiry, should start not from a presumption that the central task is to analyze the determinant properties that are named by aesthetic predicates, but rather with a full-blooded consideration of the activities of aesthetic life.
Ibid.
4b
500 + 504 Hz
(1:30)
And we share time, sitting; hearing the world pass, naming its beauty, crooning, "How beautiful," we waited—
(1:40)
...but an encounter is not an experience, it is an event that remains quite opaque and only finds reality in its multiple resonances within the real world.
Alain Badiou, and Nicolas Truong, In Praise of Love, Trans. Peter Bush (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2012) 24.
b
504 Hz
(2:00)
But first, we met
(2:05)
However, love cannot be reduced to the first encounter, because it is a construction.
Alain Badiou, and Nicolas Truong, In Praise of Love, Trans. Peter Bush (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2012) 31.
4c
500 + 503 Hz
(2:35)
And having met, something is begun or heard—a lilt of a name or songs. Ears do greet, as well as hands. Though it is not always the love of which Badiou speaks, it comes close.
(2:47)
It is an existential project: to construct a world from a decentered point of view other than that of my mere impulse to survive or re-affirm my own identity.
Alain Badiou, and Nicolas Truong, In Praise of Love, Trans. Peter Bush (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2012) 25.
4d
500 + 506 Hz
(3:15)
Born starved of truth, we should feel that stopping to sit together would be nourishing.
(3:20)
I mean truth in relation to something quite precise: what kind of world does one see when one experiences it from the point of view of two and not one? What is the world like when it is experienced, developed and lived from the point of view of difference and not identity?
Alain Badiou, and Nicolas Truong, In Praise of Love, Trans. Peter Bush (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2012) 22.
d
506 Hz
(3:45)
And first, I may have to start with something like an apology for some: this initially won't seem so much like words on music.
Though, it is a difficult thing to speak about in the first place.
(3:45)
Vaporous ether...overspreads a broad dormant sheet of melody.
Franz Liszt, source and trans. unknown.
4e
500 + 505 Hz
(6:30)
So, if we have met and sat, then that should simply be enough. If we agree, then that will be enough. We could then move onto some other activity, like sauntering through the woods, late into the evening. The truth lies in the leaves, in the water, in moonlight; all these things in their muteness, can offer a perfect hospitality, an answer.
(6:55)
(“Look, Rhoda,” said Louis, “they have become nocturnal, rapt. Their eyes are like moth’s wings moving so quickly that they do not seem to move at all."
Virginia Woolf, The Waves, (Harcourt, 2006) 101.
e
505 Hz + brown noise
(4:00)
Read aloud the text below.
She would bring her mother handfuls of mud and handfuls of water, and her mother would say, ‘Now, don’t you go stepping on it. You’re just messing up all my work!’
After a while the baby cupped her hands and poured water on her mother’s arm and laughed, so her mother cupped her hands and poured water on the baby’s belly, and the baby laughed and threw water on her mother with both hands, and the little girl threw water back, enough so that the baby whimpered, and the little girl said, “Now don’t you go crying! What do you expect when you act like that.” And she put her arms around her and settled her into her lap, kneeling there in the water, and set about repairing her dam with her free hand. The baby made a conversational sound and her mother said, “That’s a leaf. A leaf off a tree. Leaf,” and gave it into the baby’s hand. And the sun was shining as well as it could onto that shadowy river, a good part of the shine being caught in the trees. And the cicadas were chanting, and the willows were straggling their tresses in the water, and the cottonwood and the ash were making that late summer hush, that susurrus.
After a while we went on back to the car and came home. Glory said, “I do not understand one thing in this world. Not one.”
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, (New York: Picador, 2004) 163-164.
e
505 Hz
(7:05)
But they say that it does not suffice. They ask for more understanding in less time than it should take. They ask for more of the thing, for it all to be at hand before the ears; more of the memories and probabilities, but none of the time and imagination graced upon them in this life alone. Is there not a more fundamental trial we face apart from those we inflict upon one another?
(7:05)
They have drawn, as they say, a bright line between an “us” and a “them.” Those on the other side of the line are assumed to be unworthy of respect or hearing, and are in fact to be regarded as a huge problem to the “us” who presume to judge “them.” This tedious pattern has repeated itself endlessly through human history and is, as I have said, the end of community and the beginning of tribalism.
Marilynne Robinson, “Imagination and Community,” When I Was a Child I Read Books, (New York: Picador, 2012) 30.
f
508 Hz
(7:45)
Each day I am less sorry that I cannot sympathize with the purpose of their trials. And each minute I am more sorry that the line has been drawn.
g
507 Hz
(8:00)
American novelist Marilynne Robinson has commented upon one modern and pervasive interpretation of human nature: that we all fundamentally behave on terms of our own self-interest, that we exist now with a “contentless decency,” characteristically true to a Freudian paradigm.
I have always felt this to be an easy notion to accept, not for its absolute sense or righteousness, but because it partially eliminates the pain of having to confront the trauma of even accidental betrayal and selfishness. To forgive, after all, can be an immensely difficult act. So, for many other reasons as well, we must draw our limits to sharing time and space with one another.
Marilynne Robinson, “Cosmology,” When I Was a Child I Read Books, (New York: Picador, 2012) 190.
g
507 Hz
(9:10)
tacet
(9:10)
I do not know how to run minute to minute and hour to hour, solving them by some natural force until they make the whole and indivisible mass that you call life. Because you have an end in view—one person, is it, to sit beside, an idea is it, your beauty is it?
…
But since I wish above all things to have lodgment, I pretend, as I go upstairs lagging behind Jinny and Susan, to have an end in view.
Virginia Woolf, The Waves, (Harcourt, 2006) 94.