It has long been my feeling that the universe operates on a musical principle — that it is, in fact, a song. Consider the following excerpt from the fourth chapter of Walden:
Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton, Bedford, or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness. At a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it. There came to me in this case a melody which the air had strained, and which had conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of the sound which the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from vale to vale. The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood — the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph.
You can find William Michaelian's two books of poetry at cosmopsis.com/michaelian.
2 comments:
If there is a harmony to the universe and it's structure is ordered by music, or it operates on a musical principle, it follows that to maintain a balance there must be an equal amount of silence itself. A sonorously anticeptic yin to the physically more formal raging yang of music. In orchestral composition, John Cage suggests the balance with 4:33; in painting, Robert Rauschenberg expresses it with his all white canvases from 1951; and in poetry, e e cummings embodies it with some of his 'cubist break-up' poetry, including this piece:
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I think it is just as musical if the leaf in Thoreau's piece chooses not to converse with the air but goes on, if one combines the 'action' in the two pieces, about it's mysterious, lonely journey, or "clandestination" if you will
Yes. And it's also possible that this musical universe exists within, and depends upon, a much larger silence. Or that it's a small part of a larger melody, or the final breath of a dying god — or the first breath of one newly born and just as mystified about it as we are.
Piano
Master, what of the keys
that go untouched?
For the sake of these,
we must conceive of silence.
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