[Lika_k]

Saint Luke, the scene of the denial is inevitably more Greek than the way it was treated by the other evangelists: a circle of guards and servants, all seated in the middle of the courtyard around the blaze. Peter tries to insert himself into the egalitarian ring that is reminiscent of scenes from the Iliad and tries to warm his body in the contiguous solidarity of the men rather than in the warmth rising from the brazier at daybreak, April, year 30, and death. But Saint Luke goes further: he brings together the scene of the denial and the scene of the tears. He piles one on top of the other like two sediments in the same geological layer or like a short circuit in an electrical installation: Kai parachrèma eti lalountos autou ephōnèsen alektōr. In Latin: Et continuo adhuc illo loquente cantavit gallus. In English: “And, in that instant, while he was still speaking, a cock crowed.”

Pascal Quignard, "The Hatred of Music" (1996)

@темы: bible, antiquity, 1, francaise, q, b, 20, citatus, ассоциативная гиперактивность, ancient greece, 8BC, author: quignard, pascal, author: homer

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[Citatus]

Jorge Luis Borges used to quote a “verse that Boileau translated from Virgil”: Le moment où je parle est déjà loin de moi. [The "moment in which I speak is already far from me"]
In truth, it is a verse by Horace. The verse is the one that precedes the carpe diem of Ode XI:
dum loquimur, fugerit invidia aetas:
carpe diem quam minimum credula postero.
(As we speak, time, jealous of all things in the world, has fled. Cut and hold the day in your hands like you would a flower. Never believe that tomorrow will come.)
Borges evokes the river that is reflected in Heraclitus’s eyes as he crosses it. The eyes of man have changed less than the water that passes by.

Pascal Quignard, "The Hatred of Music" (1996)

@темы: poetry, antiquity, francaise, time, q, 18, 17, 20, citatus, latinoamericano, ancient rome, author: quignard, pascal, 1BC, author: heraclitus, author: horatius, author: boileau-despreaux, nicolas, author: borges, jorge luis

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[Lika_k]

According to Cneius Mammeius, Peter confided one day to Judas Iscariot that the one regret he harbored regarding his former trade was neither the boat, nor the cove, nor the water, nor the nets, nor the strong odor, nor the light that gets caught in the scales of the fish that die in a sort of jolt: Saint Peter confided that what he missed about the fish was the silence.

The silence of fish when they die. The silence during the day. The silence at twilight. The silence during night fishing. The silence at daybreak when the boat returns to the shore and night fades little by little in the sky together with the freshness, the stars, and the fear.

Pascal Quignard, "The Hatred of Music" (1996)

@темы: 1, francaise, q, silence, 20, author: quignard, pascal, sounds/noises

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[Lika_k]

Suasio. Persuasion. What, in Latin, is suavis? The extraordinary opening of Lucretius’s second book answers three times. On three occasions Lucretius defines what is suave:
Suave, mari magno turbantibus aequora ventis
e terra magnum alterius spectare laborem …
“It is suave, when the vast sea is whipped up by the winds, to observe the distress of others from the shore. Not that one feels a pleasant voluptas at the sight of another man’s suffering: it is simply suave to contemplate the evils that we are spared.
“It is also suave to witness without risk great feats of war, to contemplate from above battles being fought down on the plains.
“But of all that is suave, the sweetest (dulcius) is to inhabit the acropolises fortified by the doctrina of wise men …”

The arguments Lucretius invokes have been commentated by tradition throughout the centuries in the driest, most moralizing fashion. They have been judged cynical or insufficient. The finale, however, reveals their secret: do you not hear “what nature barks”? Nature barks (latrare), it does not “speak” (dicere); reality is not endowed with the meaning that only the imagination and the symbolic and social institutions of humans who speak to each other create in terrified await of sound. What nature enunciates is, beyond moaning and aggressive intensity, indeed a cynical sound, a dog’s sound: a nonsemantic sound that precedes us in our very own throat. Latrant, non loquuntur: “They bark, they do not speak.” Zoological sound precedes and, before meaning, makes the heart jump. The barking of the bark is bellowing.

With this barking that closes the text, the suavis, the sweet suddenly carries a more concrete meaning than the arguments, themselves quite ideological and trifunctional, that Lucretius presents: the suavis is less the remoteness that the text describes than the acoustic consequence of distance. The text repeats the same thing three times: we are too far away to hear. The shipwrecked, we cannot hear their cries. We are on the shore. We see tiny figures gesticulating; plowmen of the sea and traders are disappearing beneath the surface of the ocean in the distance. But around us, we hear only the noise of the waves breaking on the shore. The warriors, we hear neither their cries, nor the clash of the weapons and the shields, nor the fire crackling in the barns and in the fields. We are in the thicket at the top of the hill. We see tiny figures falling to the ground. Around us, we hear only birdsong. At the top of the acropolis or at the temple, we no longer hear anything at all. Vultures are the only birds to have sacrificed the group for solitude and song for elevation. We no longer hear even the barking of dogs, or the puffing and panting of work, or the stomach that also, in Rome, like nature, “barks” its hunger (latrans stomachus), or the trampling of the herds coming home, or the fireplaces purring: only the silence of atoms raining through the nocturnal space and the silent letters of the alphabet aligned on the paginae (the furrows) of the volumen. Neither the auctor nor the lector hears the litterae screaming or barking. Litteratura is the language that distances itself from barking. This is suavitas. Suavitas is not a visual notion, but an auditory one. Distance does not, by means of panoramic vision, provide the voluptas of the Celestials: it increases our remove from the acoustic source. It is the suavitas of silence, the suavitas not of the silenced but of the silencing, the suavitas of a far-off barking in horror. A partition made up of distance in space. A suffering that has run out of cries. One of Titus Lucretius Carus’s childhood memories.

Pascal Quignard, "The Hatred of Music" (1996)

@темы: poetry, philosophy, antiquity, francaise, literature, q, silence, linguae, 20, ancient rome, author: quignard, pascal, sounds/noises, 1BC, author: lucretius, l

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[Lika_k]

Every last one of their supposed authors a sort of Job. Brightness, hope, cheerfulness, only with the arrival of revealed religions and nation-state ideologies do these enchanting silhouettes appear on the horizon: meaning of life, meaning of the earth, escalation of war, progress of history, daybreak, deportation.

Pascal Quignard, "The Hatred of Music" (1996)

@темы: bible, antiquity, francaise, literature, q, 20, author: quignard, pascal, religion

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[Lika_k]

The first texts written in the history of the world (Sumerian, Egyptian, Chinese, Sanskrit, Hittite literature) are twilit. These songs, these letters, these dialogues, and these stories are all marked by terror and by tragic, moaning reiteration. Tragic in Greek means the breaking, hoarse voice of a slaughtered goat. The despair that carries these most ancient texts is as absolute as the death in their endings and the ruin that seals their fate. Every last one of these texts is haunted by death and by the dead. Is tarabusted.

Pascal Quignard, "The Hatred of Music" (1996)

@темы: death, antiquity, francaise, literature, q, 20, ancient greece, author: quignard, pascal

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[Lika_k]

It is said of certain rains that they hammer. Of others that they drum. Of others that they crackle. These images, apart from the sense of truth they provide, are strictly speaking extraordinary — a drum, a fire, a hammer — for describing rain. Such images lead to the reversal of the comparison at their source. It was not rain that drummed. It was drumming that called for rain. It is Thor who holds the hammer.

Pascal Quignard, "The Hatred of Music" (1996)

@темы: scandinavian, francaise, q, 20, author: quignard, pascal, sounds/noises, mythology

---

[Lika_k]

Werner Jaeger (Paideia, Berlin, 1936, volume I, page 174) asserts that the oldest trace of the word rhythm in the Greek language is spatial. Jaeger, as Marsyas does with Athena’s flute on a riverbank in Phrygia, gathers the remains in a fragment by Archilochus: Dare to know what rhythmos holds man in its net. Rhythm “holds” man like a container. Rhythm is not fluid. It is neither the sea nor the pulsating song of the waves that come in, break, retreat, amass, swell. Rhythm holds man and attaches him like a skin on a drum. Aeschylus says that Prometheus is tied for eternity to his rock in a “rhythm” of steel chains.

Pascal Quignard, "The Hatred of Music" (1996)

@темы: interesting, poetry, music, antiquity, francaise, q, deutsche, j, 20, citatus, ancient greece, author: quignard, pascal, author: jaeger, werner, libri

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[Lika_k]

There is an old French verb that expresses this drumming of obsession. That denotes this group of asemic sounds that disturb rational thought inside the skull and that awaken in the process a nonlinguistic memory. Tarabust, rather than hum, is perhaps the word that should be suggested. Tarabustis is attested after Chrétien de Troyes, in the fourteenth century. “Something tarabusts me.”

Tarabust is an unstable word. Two distinct worlds meet in it, attract it, and thus divide it according to two processes of morphological derivation that are both too plausible for the philologist to decide between them. The word tarabust is itself disputed between the group of that which belabors and the group of that which drums. Between the rabasta group (the noise of quarreling, the belaboring group) and the tabustar group (hitting, talabussare, tamburare, the family of resonators, of drums). Either vociferous human coitus. Or percussions of hollow objects. Acoustic obsession is unable to distinguish in what it hears between what it ceaselessly wants to hear and what it cannot have heard. An incomprehensible noise that belabors. A noise that could either be quarreling or drumming, panting or blows. It was very rhythmic. We come from this noise. It is our seed.
Every woman, every man, every child immediately recognizes the tarabust. Salmon swim upstream and back in time in order to die at the exact spawning ground where they were conceived. And spawn, and die.

Trans. note: Tarabust is a noun that has fallen out of use in contemporary French, although its verbal form tarabuster, “to pester or bother,” is still to be heard.

Pascal Quignard, "The Hatred of Music" (1996)

@темы: c, francaise, q, 14, linguae, 20, author: quignard, pascal, author: chretien de troyes, sounds/noises

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[Lika_k]

Stupor. Falling into a faint. Faintness defines fainting. Saint Peter in Annas’s courtyard in Jerusalem. Augustine in the garden in Milan associating the crow’s caw with an old children’s song he had heard in Carthage and whose title he can no longer recall. Saint Augustine’s insomnia in Cassiciacum. The persistent murmur of the steam that disturbs him. The nibbling of the mice (and Licentius who sleeps next to Augustine and who taps with a piece of boxwood on the foot of the bed in order to scare them off). The noise of the wind in the leaves of the chestnut trees in Cassiciacum.

Pascal Quignard, "The Hatred of Music" (1996)

@темы: insomnia, memoria, francaise, q, a, 20, 4, association, ancient rome, author: quignard, pascal, author: augustine, sounds/noises, 5

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[Lika_k]

Chrétien de Troyes wrote William of England. During the reunion banquet, William of England did not even pay attention to his wife: he immediately lost himself in “thought.” He sees a stag. He pursues the sixteen-pointer. He suddenly cries out: “Hu! Hu! Bliaut!” The sequence is purely acoustic and it is so loud that the scream tears the king away from the vision from which it came. It is only after the scream to his dog and directed toward the stag that he can recognize his wife’s body and ask her about her life since they parted, more than twenty years earlier. These are otium. Empty hiding places subject to the archaic influence of the predations that formed them. Completely secular ecstasies. These are “dead intervals.” In all of Chrétien de Troyes’s romances, they are what the author profoundly refers to as “thoughts.”

Thoughts are not ideological sequences. “Thoughts” are “eclipses.” Erec’s oblivion thinks. Yvain’s amnesia thinks. Lancelot, suddenly losing his name, thinks. Perceval leans on his lance. He contemplates three drops of blood on the snow, which the whiteness and the winter cold are slowly drinking. Chrétien writes: “He thinks so much he forgets himself.”

Pascal Quignard, "The Hatred of Music" (1996)

@темы: 12, c, poetry, memoria, francaise, q, 20, middle centuries, author: quignard, pascal, author: chretien de troyes

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[Lika_k]

I know only four oeuvres in which joy was considered as the highest human quality: Epicurus, Chrétien de Troyes, Spinoza, Stendhal. At the end of their adventure, Chrétien de Troyes’s heroes receive Joy as their reward. It is still not clear what that might have been. Joy was either a magic horn that forces one to dance, or a horn that makes one drunk, or a game, or pleasure. Jocus is the game of jubilation. To be speechless with joy at the end of language, at the denouement of the adventure, opening oneself to the silence or to the music of the horn that forces the soul into silence, this is the aim of authors as it is the prey of heroes.

Pascal Quignard, "The Hatred of Music" (1996)

@темы: 12, c, s, poetry, philosophy, antiquity, francaise, literature, dutch, q, e, 17, 20, 19, middle centuries, ancient greece, author: quignard, pascal, 5BC, author: chretien de troyes, author: epicurus, author: spinoza, author: stendhal

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[Lika_k]

My life is a short recipe that I am still perfecting. If I had before me five or six millennia, a sort of feeling dawns within me that tells me that I would be afraid to finish.

Pascal Quignard, "The Hatred of Music" (1996)

@темы: francaise, q, vita, 20, author: quignard, pascal

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[Lika_k]

In the fifth century before Christ, Confucius died. He had taught in a small town in Shandong. He was buried at Kong Lin, where his relics were preserved. There are three of these relics: his hat, his guitar, his chariot. “Confucius saw life as a perpetual cultural effort, made possible by friendship and frank courtesy, pursued privately, like a prayer, but a selfless prayer” (Marcel Granet, La pensée chinoise, Paris, 1950, page 492).

Pascal Quignard, "The Hatred of Music" (1996)

@темы: c, philosophy, francaise, history, q, chinese, 20, eastern, author: quignard, pascal, 5BC, author: confucius

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[Lika_k]

Terror is in the depths of my heart. It is the depths of my heart. To restrict it I trust only those who see themselves as completely soiled at least by the sound that announces it. This sound preceded my birth, the inspiration of air and the contact of day. Our ears were pricked and terrorized by unintelligible signs under the partition of skin even before our lungs functioned and allowed us to scream.


Pascal Quignard, "The Hatred of Music" (1996)

@темы: francaise, q, 20, author: quignard, pascal, sounds/noises

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[Lika_k]

Dread. Inspiring fear. Perspiration from fear, horripilation, pallor, immobilization, shitting. Shuddering, shivering, trembling, doubling over. To terror I prefer horror. The word is hardly more precise, but it happens to emphasize disgust and show hatred. What world do we imagine when we act surprised at the sight of terror mixed with the predation of power? Can we separate love from terror in its means, in its manifestations and in its end? (Anguish, trembling, anorexia, pallor, diarrhea, arrhythmia, death rattle.) Can beauty be cleansed of terror? (Stupefying, silencing, keeping at bay.) Do we know a god free of terror?

Pascal Quignard, "The Hatred of Music" (1996)

@темы: francaise, q, god, 20, belezza, author: quignard, pascal

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[Lika_k]

In a column in volumen V, Nonius registered the word terrificatio. Nonius Marcellus is the only one to recognize this word. It is not attested in any of the ancient texts that have been preserved. He explains its meaning: scarecrow.

*

Music is an acoustic scarecrow. Such is birdsong for birds.
A terrificatio.

*

Terrification in Rome, or in Thubursicum: after the bow, a crude dummy with a human shape, dyed red and placed in grain fields.

It is an acoustic and tintinnabulating bogeyman. Scarecrow in classical Latin is formido. Whence the French formidable, which means dreadful.The formido was made out of a simple string (linea) on which tufts of feathers (pinnae) dyed in blood were fastened here and there. It is the ancient Roman hunting method par excellence: the beaters move the scarecrows covered in red feathers, the slaves raise the torches, the dogs accompany them, barking and seeking to fill the pursued monstrum with panic, forcing the wild boars deep into the forest, howling and pushing them toward the hunters holding spears, in short tunics, bare hands and faces, leaning firmly on their right foot in front of the nets.

Romans describe the terrifying flapping, the roaring of the linea pennis in the wind, forming the access corridor trapping and forcing the beasts in the direction of the nets.

The terrificatio is no longer exactly the formido. We believe that a branchy man smeared with vermilion will pass as human and hope that it will instill fear. It is no longer a question of boars and stags. We are determined to keep out curious little animals who love seeds and who, with the help of their former fins covered in feathers, are able to move about in the air and whom we call birds.

In the well of the small, dark cave that is located near Montignac, near the dead desirous man, there is a stick driven into the ground surmounted by a bird’s head.

An inao. A terrificatio.

Pascal Quignard, "The Hatred of Music" (1996)

@темы: music, n, antiquity, francaise, history, q, linguae, 20, 4, bestiarum, ancient rome, author: quignard, pascal, sounds/noises, 5

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[Lika_k]

In the Iliad, the kithara is not a cithara: it is still a bow. And the musician is still Night, that is, nocturnal panic hearing. It is the opening, the first book, verse 43: “Apollo came down from the summits of Olympus. On his shoulder were the silver bow and his tightly closed quiver. Each step he took in his heart’s fury, the arrows resounded on his back. He strode, like the Night (Nukti eoikōs). Apollo positioned himself away from the ships. He shot an arrow. The silver bow emitted a terrifying bark (deinè klaggè ). First he hit the mules, then the dogs that run so fast. Finally he pierced the warriors. The funeral pyres burned without end. For nine days the arrows of the God rained down on the army.”

At the other end of the work, at the end of the Odyssey, Ulysses solemnly enters the palace hall. He draws his bow. He prepares to shoot his first arrow, signaling the massacre of the suitors, another sacrifice once more assisted by Apollo the Archer. Book XXII: “Just as a man knowledgeable in the art of the lyre and of singing, having attached to the ends of his instrument a string made of flexible and acoustic entrails, easily tightens it by turning a peg and tunes it, Ulysses, all of a sudden, effortlessly arched his formidable bow. To test the string he opens his right hand. When released, the string sang beautifully (kalon aeise), with a voice (audèn) like a swallow.”
Once again the lyre comes first. The bow comes second. Ulysses’ bow is like a kithara. The archer is like a citharede. The vibration of the bowstring sings a song of death. If Apollo is the quintessential archer, his bow is musical.

The bow is death from afar: inexplicable death. More precisely: death as invisible as voice. Vocal cords, lyre string, bowstring are a single string: entrails or nerves of a dead animal that emit the invisible sound that kills from afar. The bowstring is the first song: the song which Homer says is “like the voice of a swallow.” Strings of stringed instruments are strings-of-the-death-lyre.

Pascal Quignard, "The Hatred of Music" (1996)

@темы: interesting, poetry, music, death, antiquity, francaise, q, 20, h, ассоциативная гиперактивность, ancient greece, 8BC, author: quignard, pascal, sounds/noises, author: homer, mythology

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[Lika_k]

The beginning of Fronto’s Principia Historiae:
Vagi palantes nullo itineris destinato fine non ad locum sed ad vesperum contenditur. (Wandering, scattered, their journeys have no goal, they walk, not toward a place, but toward the evening.)
Non ad locum:
not toward a place.
Man’s den is his Occident. The world of the dead, there lies his dwelling, where the sun leads him each day as it dies before him.

Pascal Quignard, "The Hatred of Music" (1996)

@темы: music, antiquity, 1, francaise, q, humanity, citatus, f, ancient rome, author: fronto, marcus cornelius, author: quignard, pascal

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[Lika_k]

Reading in the garden in the heat, the languor, the slowness, the drowsiness that come together in summer. A lizardling’s foot, as it moves a dead leaf, produces a crash that makes the heart jump. You are already on your feet, trembling all over, in the burning grass.

Pascal Quignard, "The Hatred of Music" (1996)

@темы: music, francaise, q, vita, 20, lectio, author: quignard, pascal