Quintessential

It’s a modern day heresy to accept other people’s words and thoughts, ’sayings’ , or proverbs as our own since to do so only indicates the presence of a feeble, lazy mind, a dangerous falling back into heteronomy;authenticity demands that we think for ourselves, by ourselves, and that thought be independent of the world, tradition, or anything ‘given’. Conscience, a ‘knowing together’,is hardly possible any more as thought becomes more isolated, more abstract. Weisen has almost completely displaced Kenen. We, in so far as we are modern, have lost the ground beneath our feet, and our instinctive feel for things peters out, replaced by the ever more wild and fantastical flights of imagination of an inner-worldly sensibility.

It is not surprising, then, that our attention spans are so short and that the great storytellers are so rare. For in truth, we have lost the ability to listen and are less inclined to incorporate a truth that is not our own-in all senses of the word-into our lives.

The auditory imagination penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, fusing the most ancient and the most civilised mentality.

—-T.S. Eliot

The eye is the organ of temptation; the ear of instruction.

—-Aristotle.

The ear sets into motion creative thought, helps us re-call, re-collect. It is “the eye that listens”, something that prepares us for the whole drama of life, that ‘oceanic feeling’ which is a sense of oneness. The first thing a child hears is the call to prayer that is whispered in his ear. Sight, our ability to make distinctions,is something on which our survival depends, and comes much later.

The essence of music is conflict, subversion and the capacity to bring even dissonance and different voices into a whole. The mechanical pattern that it establishes through repetition brings a certain sense of security-a music that comes ‘home’- but in such cases it is only a pattern of life, not a way of life.

Sound: the pressure of the vertical on the horizontal.

A note makes us take stock of the past and think about the future; neither one nor the other will ever be the same after the emergence of that note. In the same way, each person is unique and throws some light on the mystery of all those who have gone before him and all those who will follow him. Neither the past nor the future are inevitable. But the note, the music, always remains elusive: ” music does not become something, but something becomes music.”

(citations from Daniel Banenboim’s Reith lectures )