None
-
What we have learned
From Vincent Moon we have learned lightness. To follow the sound rather than the sense. To follow where sense has no sense and then to see there how it sounds. We learn to feel and listen to the beat of tunnels that lead to other planes of reality, normally invisible and inaudible.
From Laura Corcuera the courage to expose herself, perhaps, to fall, always to meet. From her friend Lucía Santalices that it seems that Europeans went out in the 15th century in search of Paradise and not only of the Indies. That they really found multiple forms of life in the Garden, but because of greed or envy or centuries of Roman brutalization they did not know how to see them. Or welcome them. And with viciousness we do not cease in their destruction. "How hard it must be to have internalized all that rational order of debt, containment, production," he told me. From the outside you can feel it, you can feel it. The hollow looks, the rigid bodies. Like something whose vitality sustains a weakened sap. The drought in Europe is not only external. "In Brazil it is not like that," he told me.
From Pepino Pascual we have learned that everything sounds and sounds better as mischief.
From Alessi dell'Umbria we have learned something about popular music: that it corresponds to a collective experience of participation. And about the carnival power, expressed in the drunkenness and trance of the parties. Something that acquires a general sense when folklore is understood as a cosmovision from below and in opposition to official culture.
Pedro G. Romero says something like this: "Gypsies, if anything, are only the anachronistic users of an old form of resistance to the circulating power of money. There are always loose coins in the flows of big capital. [...] 'More a remnant than a multitude, the Flemish have hardly aspired to any emancipation or political project. And yet there they are: on the one hand, inspiring many of the forms of life that today are considered utopian -nomadism, community, the right to laziness-; on the other, contributing poiesis -ludism, camouflage, form-of-life in resistance- to the new modes of political imagination'" (Wittgenstein, the Gypsies and the Flemings).
From Jankélévitch we have learned something about music and making. About how good is made to be made and not to be said or known. As music is made to be made and not to be said or known. And about "the captivating message" that we have to understand: "Music, like the nightingale of God responds by doing and making".
From Monica Ferrando we have learned something about nomos and singing. "Nomos" was the name of the agreement or articulation or concordance between the way of inhabiting the earth, the way of tuning with it the human being, the way of arranging the animals in the space... Concordance that with the consolidation of the City-State, between the VII and IV centuries B.C., was reduced in the West to "Law of legitimate appropriation".
Monica Ferrando recalls that the key difference within the worlds is the ethical difference and not a socioeconomic difference. She recalls that Carlo Levi distinguished between Peasantry and Luigini: between those who make things, love them and take pleasure in them, and those who try to take advantage and marrulate and rule in them: the Luigini.
From the friends with whom we have talked, musicians or not, we have learned that in the sensitive presence in process beats "the enigma of what we are not yet" -of which Giorgio Cesarano spoke-, and that only an epochal rupture against power can let it unfold fully.
"In a sense, the revolutionary question is now a musical question" (Tiqqun).
Gesang ist Dasein (Singing is existence)
Poetry is to sing, to sing is to listen, to listen is to exist, to exist is to poeticise. "Is it not science that deprives the world of its own?"
To sing, to wander, to awaken; to call to the sensitive presence, to walk the pathless path of the barely lines of the body, soft volumes secret crevices, they unravel, they grow, as in the body of the earth or in the brightness of the stars.
The fantastic bodies, in their journey, re-member in the rhythm of the heart the trace they drew in the air and carry them, like the trace of their expiry on earth. - Can you find the tonality?
Every voice sings, every place sings, every rock has in its virtuality an unseparated soul waiting to be called, in its song.
We have all been awaited on earth.
To leave us without memory - in the mechanical repetition of forgetting - in the dispersion without centre, without essential rhythm - is to become mute, deaf and blind to every song that re-members.
Body-soul-spirit, he says: all terrestrial corporeality is animated in its song.
A wandering without a journey, a wandering without sleepwalking.
An awakening from the nightmare and the horror that lives in the captured "free" Communication, -where you don't look for anything, connect yourself; where everything comes to flood you; flood the emptiness created in the dispersion (of images and voices and forms and figures), for its government, in its free baseness to the manipulation ~ offered, offered a world, that we have been, that we continue to be. "Only those who do not know how to die allow themselves to be subdued".
Because all non-identified presence, all openness to giving oneself, to finding-being, all active listening comes from the depths of animation, reaching a tonality, a rhythm. And it shines,
in correspondence with the elements and the living beings and the non-things, not silent closed abstract objects, but buds of song in their potential virtuality, dozing under the earthly crust, called-listened to - singing their "vital song".
Singing, wandering, awakening... to the presence that sets fire.
Is isolation an epidemic, or a destiny locked in its Labyrinth? In the Labyrinth of understanding a formula is sought that is valid forever. But it is always death. What is already the same. The arrested. The arrested. In its prison of forged metal, in its mountains eaten and crushed and amalgamated in the fateful grey constructions of the consumable exchangeable equivalent, worm of capital without organic metamorphosis: mechanical increase, incessant combination of an endless dispersion, in the opaque interior of the techno-logos that hides in its unbreathable atmosphere the immensity of the sea of stars.
What is this mad flight forward into the void? Penetrating into the nothingness of the endlessly accreting Labyrinth itself, to get something out of it. One step further. Arguing for the scientific increase of capital as interest. "Interest, what animal is it?"
It is not the white bull of Dionysus in his acoustic labyrinth. It is the absurd mechanical bull, the golden calf that we worship without a figure, in the figure of death that is fashion. The anguish of the nothingness that escapes us. The horror of the oblivion that always forgets. Always again.
Trapped in our cavern of smoke, under the city of oppressors. Trapped under the infinite tape of images in the redundant scroll. Trapped in capsules of glass and exultant metal.
Only childhood keeps meaning. The childhood that we murder in order not to let us grow up. That's why the Gaza War is the most perfect image of this world of putrefying unsingable mute laws.
The Gaza War is a war against children. It destroys homes, wipes out all warmth and sustenance and shelter. It seeks sheer annihilation. Why? Because exclusion is the foundation of all politics. Exclusion, exclusivity, exclusivism.
Exclusion of everything that is not one's own, of everything that is seen as non-human, labelled as terrorist, uncivil.
Exclusion that annihilates even what was resonant and sung terrestrial animation in oneself. Locked in the Labyrinth of representation, of identity, of a difference that is believed to be one's own and separates, isolates, encloses. And leaves us mute and deaf and blind, without memory. Torn away from the re-memory and its song.
A recent Jewish "prince" said: "The Zionist revolution is dead (...) We are already dead, but we don't realise it".
Zionism is the mirror of the West. The place where it looks at itself without wanting to recognise itself. The nation-state of the techno-logos as salvation. Salvation as enclosure. Enclosure as isolation. Deafness. Mutability. Absurd mechanical repetition. Exploitation of a land that we are and ignore.
This time yes. This time the wall will be high enough to contain the sea of stars and their song.
This time it will. We will lock ourselves in our caves, under the city of oppressors and tied to the ribbon of blue shadows before our eyes we will not hear the pain of the world, and we will extinguish our own pain.
Not anymore. Not now.
___________
References
R.M. Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus
Eugène Minkowski, Vers une cosmologie
Gilles Deleuze, Critique and clinic
Bruce Chatwin, Le Vie dei Canti
Michel Warschawski, Programmer le desastre. La politique israelienne a l'oeuvre
L. A. Seneca, Furious Hercules
Eduardo Kohn, How forests think
Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History
