Diabolus in Musica
Sprechstimme. The body cannot be a church like an architecture cannot be a grove or saturation cannot be this entire painting. Here is a chord. From here to there to there.
Or the body is a meeting place but what is its business? I’m writing you with my voice. These letters rise and fall as a method of intent and failure.
It is the organ growing itself wrongly, growing bulk. A stranger’s fugue of the body. It sounds like the world melting. Humming.
A thousand years ago I called you in just the same way. You said I was rotting from the inside and I said no, the note is flat. And you said, as I said. And I left weeping.
The instrument is an example of hands pressing ecstatically into the world. Glenn Gould sings back to its singing. So does Charles Mingus and everyone.
What does it mean to have a necessary relation to the world? Simply to be in it, entering like a juggler of wild cats, a performer of alternating consequence and inconsequence.
If an act extends beyond its termination (Hazlitt!), do we suffer its ecstasy forever? Do we gather its strings and blow into its mouthpiece? Do we spend ourselves in unanswerable questions?
Ti mi dadum. When the left hand rests, it is either patience or desperation. Outside, where everything receives, birds make their own noise. Oh Colliding Parts! Oh Polyphony!
This is what we learn in any given moment—the difference between unity and coherence (hear, here), what breaks apart as we stand at the window, in our bathrobes, pulling music
from instrument to the ear pressed to a hollow infant we shrink to when quiet. If it shrieks, we are shrieking. And if it murmurs, we are writing a poem.
About the Author
Christina Mengert’s first book of poems, As We Are Sung, is forthcoming. She is co-editor of 12x12: Conversations in 21st Century Poetry and Poetics.
Related Articles
BR Footnote:
Boston Review’s intern blog