trans. Michel Serres NOISES.docx

From his book, Musiques, trans. S. Muecke.


NOISES

Legend

First describe the musical river
that traverses the life of a composer.

The Childhood of Orpheus

As a child, Orpheus neither spoke, nor sang, nor composed music. Wanting relief from the hellish noise exploding around him, he looked for a quiet, soundless, rarefied spot where he no longer heard the vile noises of motors and sound systems which, by deafening him, had rendered him dumb.
In order to find it, he set off around the Mediterranean. On the way, at Delphi, he paid a visit to Pythia, seated in the smoke of her seismic fault; in Dodona, to the Selloi, who told what the wind was saying among the foliage of the trees; to the twelve raving Sibyls in different towns; to the Maenads, to the Bacchae, all screaming at night in secret orgies. He was amazed that the ancient soloists and choruses never ceased, like today's audiences, in the stadiums, getting excited, yelling, cheering, booing. Once again, they assault his hearing. "Why all this fracas?" he said to himself. Since it was composed of tones other than our vile backfiring, Orpheus asked of the women, with gestures, the reason for their hullabaloo.

The Clamour of the Sibyls, Pythia and the Bacchae

He thought he understood how these prophets replied to him, each in her coded language:
"If you want to learn to speak, or later, become a professional actor, advocate, professor, orator; if you want to sing, carry your voice out of the body to fill up a space right to the far wall; if you want to lift a vibrating column out of your throat like a fiery whirlwind, with intense resonances or exquisite inflexions, know that, well before the meaning carried by language or the emotion propagated by song, the voice comes from the body, from its seat, its seatedness, its hold on the earth, its launching pad, its animal grip on the ground through its planted feet, its solid anchoring to long roots through the toes; that I know not what burning spring coming from what unknown chthonian current, ascending the length of bony and muscular columns, legs, thighs, buttocks, abdomen, mediastinum, right to the pectoral girdle; that your voice will say, will signify, if it owes its profound inspiration to this foundation.
So that you will be able, tomorrow, this evening or tonight, to express yourself in language or in song, strive first to imitate us, the Bacchae, drunk on wine and screams; me, Pythia, drugged with vapours emanating from the centre of the Earth, or others too, vibrating with the trembling of the wind in the foliage. We capture these noises of the World with our organs. Our voices fly off when their wings push us by the ankles; the Word is incarnated in our bodies making our knees, hips and toes happy. Music, language, meaning, like ecstasy and science, rise slowly, later on, from these bases. The voice in flight comes from the Earth, through the volcano-body. The soul blows on level ground.
Our voices come from the wind and from its vibrating granules, from the lungs of the World and ours too; from our blood vessels and the vast murmur of the sea; from those living underground and from the birds of the air; from the desire for life, from the throbbing of the clitoris; from the hurly-burly of the Universe; but also from the noise of groups, from the bloody fracas of battles, from the violence of human interaction and the melancholy of loving; a thousand thorns, arising from these signs, traverse our painful, bleeding bodies, before changing into voices. These vapours, this breeze that vibrates, these noises come from all sides; listen to them with all your skin, which itself vibrates like a large drum.
Change your body into a trunk with deep roots, whose branches are stirred by the breeze and in which thick clouds of birds converse. Thus your voice in flight will come from the earth through your volcano-body, from the air through your tree-body, from the water through your river-body and from the fire through your furnace-body."

Attentive Orpheus

As a mute child, Orpheus knew all that without knowing it, or at least without being able to say it. And, under the tutelage of these women, he sought, bit by bit, to listen, in silence before entering into language …
…from his own body the raucous sounds of his glottis, the beating of his heart, the tempo of his pulse, that of his respiration, and also insane hummings and ringings, the tinnitus of his ears; he already knew how to listen to the sobs of desire, from the desert of love; he learned to listen, all around, to the groans of a mother in labour, and, from the new-born, the cry…


His skin also opened to the insane humming of the cities, to the massive chaos of battles; he listened piously to the ribbons fluttering, praying in the Himalayan wind; the ritual motets; the supplication of mystical litanies; religious psalms; the complaints of rejected lovers; the primitive musics of tribes from Africa … he listened, then, to people, to their bodies and their groupings; their murmurings and their upheavals, which are constantly preceding their history which is no doubt meaningless.

Paying attention to the teachings of those who interpret the clamour of wind in the trees or wings in the foliage, he also heard the music of their hosts: tits, kestrels, canaries, hummingbirds, condors, falcons and doves, buzzards; the hissing of snakes under the grasses; the piteous braying of the deer under multiple forest canopies; the far-off signals of whale-song;
the fantastic explosion of life in its specificity;
and, more subtly, the strange music of aperiodic crystals or the fine chromatics of chromosomes.
So he was listening, in the end, to the noises and songs of living things evolving and developing, ceaselessly preceding any possibility of meaning.

Pythia and the Sibyls came to teach him the moan of the breeze, the clamour of the waterfalls, the clapping of thunder, the murmur of the rising tides, the crunch of ice breaking up, groaning like a woman.
Through the incredible milky chaos of the constellations, his body opened to the noise in the depths of the World, unceasing, continuous, whose to and fro movement weaves the warp and weft of time.
At one point he even thought he heard the explosion of the big bang coming through the Planck barrier and still reverberating in space-time.
His body, like those of these inspired women, quivered to the harmony of the proclaiming Universe, with its permanent commotion that precedes the possibility of meaning.

Mother Memory puts some order into these noises

With his hearing sharpened and opened up, but still without voice, Orpheus, always wandering on the shores of the Mediterranean, met on old sorceress one evening on the slopes of Mount Parnassus. She was ill-humoured and brilliant, full of knowledge and resentment: Memory, who kept close to her chest the memories of the World, the stars and the crystals; those of the body and the living, wrinkles and fossils; those of society, lies and archives.
She had nine daughters.

Before introducing them to him, she said:
"One of those Sibyls you just left, scattered around the Interior Sea, had obtained from the Sun, who was in love with her many ages ago, that she could live as long as the number of grains of sand she could hold in the palm of her hand. No, she didn't say grains of sand, but atoms of matter! In that way she could last as long as the Universe, since the beginning, under the fire of the first stars.
So she began, at the dawn of the World, to use the alchemy [hermétisme] of her cries to reproduce the background noise, captured by her body open to earthly vapours, turbulence in the air, murmurs of the sea, volcanic eruptions. And in cryptic [sibyllin] books, she tried to transcribe a sort of story, in her own mad way, by miming these noises, before the birth of any language. I am beginning to understand these once illegible magic books thanks to the sciences of today.
Because I am older than her, and I have learned, through reading and writing, humans' small memory, recently enlarged to the size of the World, to the size of mine."

Pretending to open these books, she continued:
"In the chaos of these rumours, learn that there lies a subtle order. Your body, like the bodies of the Sibyls, resounds with three distinct background noises, but which are linked and inextricably mixed. And this is the series: first and permanent is the World's, then the more intense and rare one of the Living, then finally that of Societies, which everywhere are blindly searching for meaning.
Humans are always trying through their rumours (meaningful or not) to deaden the two others. This triple succession gives us an initial grand harmony in the magnificent disorder."

Orpheus initiated

Orpheus confirmed this linkage by beginning with the human body itself, through the pounding of feet walking, their percussion on stone, the anger of their hatreds and tears, through the brutal and incomprehensible cacophony of history…

…but, at an earlier stage, he listened piously to the woven and torn tissues of the embryo rustling like paper screwed up, the precocious beating of the heart in the paradise of the uterine enclosure, the pulse in the wrist, the tone of he balanced body, the tumult of the flesh, muscular and nervous tension, the enthusiastic explosion of vital heat, the throbbing release of coitus and the final cymbal clash of orgasm, the chiming of ten organic clocks that vibrate in chronobiological folds, and finally, the DNA which trembles in its vibrating helix strands.

Minor, major, oboe, accordion, changes in form and type, speedtwist [voluvélo], evodevo, evolution and development…now he understood the following: Since, as far back as the memory of roses goes, none had heard a gardener die, or, for the length of female or male memory, none had seen a gender disappear, our bodies slide so quickly into silent death, that they scarcely ever hear the rhythmic transformations of the quick. He was learning the other reason why he was deaf.

"That's it for the living", he said.

And this is for the World.

A rare consensus in the music of an extended particularisation, life extends itself like a miracle in the gigantic lottery of things; after its information and its transformations, after it, but in reality, before it. He started to listen to the deep trembling seismic thunder, the twisting plumes of volcanic eruptions, the swirling rivers coming out of the arches of bridges, the turbulence of the clouds and the cyclonic whirlwinds, the galaxies as spiralled as the genetic ribbons of living things.
Beyond the stationary melodies of elliptical orbits, he also heard the dispersed polyphony of radioastronomy, the aleatory noise of quantum leaps, the granular diffusion of times, the Universe's profusion of murmurs, between the big bang and the big crunch, the amazing expansion of a wave that is extraordinary in that it is universal. He heard the chaos spill from the beginning of things and of thought, its commotion striated with signals.

The grand narrative
While recalling, thanks to the old witch, the three successive tides of these waves of chance, he noticed, dumbstruck that he had just used, in a dispersed kind of way, but in some kind of order, the indefinite array of those rhythms through which the Grand Narrative of the Universe is propagated, chaotically and contingently, inert and begun with the big bang, living and begun with the first molecules, and which never stops, temporally, coming together in in the ultrafine chanterelle of the human adventure, through our terminal, briefest, almost instantaneous, history. Meaningful, meaningless? True, false?
All in all, the immense aleatory orchestration of the Universe, open time-space with branes and supercords, organs and membranes vibrating with life, their slow patient evolution seemed to him to spill their premusical waters, like a thousand rivers, into the immense sea of our symphonies and songs, our poems, our theorems, declarations and speeches—like mine, that I am holding forth with now, but in language?

And finally, listening to the array of human passions and tongues, hatreds and lovesicknesses, monotonous politics and false forces, knowledges and sciences, he also noticed that this emergent language, stuck to the body, thick, gooey, runny, endless, could stop him from hearing the antecedent cries of the living and the noise of the World. He said to himself, "Meaning hides what came before it. This is why, as a child, I couldn't get used to it. This is why language can never understand music." This is why adults, talkative and know-all, deaf to the world and the blazing river of life, don't understand children, poets, soothsayers, Bacchae, even less deaf-mutes.
"Finally I am able to read the sibylline books," he said.
Ancient Memory spoke once again:
"Clear and dark, chaotic or legal, the Grand Narrative of the Universe and of the living, a huge spiny, tangled, bush, the one that these women just taught you about, without seeing any order there, as I have, from the big bang to dwarfish human history. Sciences, today, don't tell it like those vile Sibyls with their miming and crying, signals and earthquakes, but, like me and my daughters, in languages, in a hundred scientific and technical, even vernacular, languages…read and understood with neurones in the head, the waves of passion and the truths of reason. I am keeping the memory of these languages, even the one that imprints itself on molecules, that can be deciphered at the heart of the stars, in flesh and in bones, before consulting the surface of marbles and the folds of deceptive ocean rollers.
But doesn't this Grand Narrative depend on all these languages and on language in general, and, under it, on voices that we ignore the precise origin of?

Under these knowledge-languages, what do you mean? I shall tell you. Just what the Sibyls in fact just taught you: the stochastic noises of the World, and, you don't know it yet, their Music-sum. Like Aphrodite, mother of all beauty, who was born in a splash of foam and undertow, Music emerges suddenly from the chaotic sea of noise. It smooths off its thorns and integrates its signals."
The Grand Narrative flows in a grand rhapsody.

Language-muses and Music-muses

"Your acoustic and musical body could, actually, thanks to your initiation, be freed of its dependence on these languages, whether ordinary or scholarly, whose meanings and sounds make most of your peers deaf to all the noises of the World. The languages, with me as their memory, are chattering, inexhaustible, authoritarian, exclusive, autistic, and we deafen all other sounds.
The Sibyls and the Bacchae have just opened your hearing to the random sounds that precede and condition human voices. Before speaking, calculating, reasoning and in the end narrating, they taught you to listen first to the grain of the wind's waves, to the quasi-rhythm of the tide's commotion, in short, the background noise of the world.
Their cries imitate these thorns.

Does the body hear? Yes, does it understand these contingent combinations of meaningless sounds, of vague agreements, of strident cacophony, which fall back, sometimes straight away, into the background noise?

Long before tipping towards words, sentences or laws, these billions of individual grains could bifurcate, in time, towards tones and notes, towards a primitive music, which, welcoming the noises and the signals of the World and its life, like the ocean receives a hundred rivers, transforms these scattered and quite differentiated clamourings into universals that precede all discourse. What a wonderful thing hearing is! Without meaning or under meaning, the body hears this kind of music. Well before the head turns it into meanings, voices and languages, before thinking, saying or signifying, your body vibrates to this music integrates through it on the basis of all the noises of the World. It makes a synthesis of it. Its profound life composes a score.

But how do we get from these noises to music? Who's the composer? My nine daughters! To hone such subtle, rare, useful and dangerous work, I have had to put them into several groups. First, they together install and compose a thousand rhythms and tunes; then they specialise in science and language.
Music-muses first, then language-muses.
Between the Sibyls' hullabaloo and the endless bacchanalian hubbub, overheard and imitated by young Orpheus on his childhood wanderings, and, on the other hand the more instructive speeches from Memory who delivered the Grand Narrative in his presence, whose languages cover and hide the living flesh, where Orpheus, amazed, saw the Muses intervening.

He could see that these dozens of screaming women make a thousand little babbling streams flow steadily towards the Muses, filling up a communal pond, from which the Music of the World then sprang.

Memory, prideful mother, began again:
"My daughters are called Muses because they collectively give birth to Music. This is the first human art because it recruits my nine girls: none would achieve beauty were she not to pass through Music.
Their heroic work reaches out towards Music, continually, exhaustively, comparable to the building of a dyke, always about to collapse, but resisting the spreading floods that keep swelling; they shore up the torrential waters coming downstream, smooth the thorns of chaos, soften the heavenly clashes, temper the howl of hurricanes, the screams of cyclones, the assault of tsunamis, cut back animal warfare, mediate perverse powers, arrange pacts, gather in the abandoned, comfort the spurned, heal the broken-hearted. What work could be more necessary, given the black battles and the endless hatreds that keep rising up among things, among the living and historical societies. But also what endless work!
One by one my girls make music out of these noises and the pain of their thorns."
How?

The First Two Body Muses

First, two Muses of the body step forward: Polymnia, dedicated to pantomime, and Terpsichore, a dancer.
The first, fascinated by imitation, is all silent, supple, flexible, feline and docile. She begins the work of the nine sisters by first of all inventing rhythm, in which the repetitions can but link together, the jolts begin again, the beat keep going…with the image of a double. Reflection, then doubling. Placed in relation to everything, Polymnia's body polycopies beings and others: counterfeits, or better: becomes all things in the World, tracking down signs in order to reproduce them.
Simulation in space produces simultaneity in duration. The one brings about the other, but, in a flash, displaces it. Two gestures at the same time, then the same gesture in two times. Double up, imitate; double, repeat; one foot, then two feet. Then, to mime better, begin again. Imitate then reproduce. So who is beating the tambourine repeatedly, or, less often, cymbals? Who is clicking the castanets, who is rattling the calabash, who is doing a drum solo? She who, softly, doubles, softly, accompanies, softly, imitates, softly, reproduces, replicates, and, softly, links and repeats. Make, remake, counterfeit: one two or three feet. Before Terpsichore dances, Polymnia will become redundant.
Say nothing but carry everything.
"Nothing exists without rhythm," she says with pride. Spiral galaxies, stars turning on their own axis or around other stars, living bodies with beating hearts, rhyming poems…are born, in cadence, like waltzes or polkas. She bursts out laughing.

Caught up in the rhythm, just as supple and feline, the next daughter begins to dance. She no longer reproduces anything, like her sister, but discovers and invents the body as human. Dance projects it, in fact, towards positions, movements, torsions, tensions, leaps and improbable, unexpected and new gestures, which are not required by walking, running, chasing or any other vital function. Terpsichore creates an emergent life, by freeing it from its native prison, more numerous and colourful than the courting of sparrows, the nuptial flight of bumblebees, or the whales' vagabond chase underwater, interspersed with calls.
Yes, dance is stuffed with a baggage, a repertoire, stocks of corporal behaviour that might initially be useless, but good to go in case of some extraordinary or dangerous event. Terpsichore's body knows how to adapt itself because choreography taught her an almost universal sum of a hundred figures and a thousand movements, because it gave her a new human body, blank as the sum of human gestures, white as the sum of all colours. Tomorrow or in ten years some circumstance or chance of life will demand that she react, with some act, to a strange colour, an unexpected meeting, an accident…and she will find the answer in the white treasure of her body in movement.

Dance invents the human body because it gives it adaptability. It allows it to go in every direction. Music will invent language because it too goes in all senses, in the sense of signification.

Are these two first Muses really inventing or are they interiorising the movements and emotions of the World? By creating rhythm, Polymnia imitates and follows the Grand Narrative of the Earth; as for Terpsichore, she continues, and overtakes the story of the living, which itself follows, chaotically and contingently, that of the Universe.
But how do they follow it?

Rhythm and Percussion

"If people, living things and the universe make noises and sing together, they sometime emit signals, which are sometimes broken with rhythms…
…galactic spirals, turning of neutron stars, colour vibrations in the astral spectrum, harmonic relations among planets, return of the spring and daylight, calcium's oscillations, the spin of the electron…the age-old flowering of bamboo, cyclical epidemics, the rare congress of cicadas, the migration of cranes and ducks, menstruation, the tempo of reproduction, of the heart, pulse and neurons…sing-song accents, vocal pulsation, walking cadences, the rising clamour of the crowd…measures, undulations, wavelengths and microwaves…from the beginning of time we can hear, tempos layered over: trembling, intensity, rapidity, braking and acceleration…
You just have to copy them, you just have to dance them, we might say. Our bodies, oscillating on the outside, just have to mimic the thousand, naturally rhythmed, internal vibrations. We can, in this fashion, reproduce the diverse cadences of the quick and the dead. Creations are worth nothing unless their author has interiorised, then exteriorised, the laws of the Universe. Beginning with its pulsations.
If noises fall into three classes at the highest level, there are a thousand little rhythms governing their haphazard eccentricities. Yes, rhythm can be broken, but it also links, because a broken cadence must continue the flow with the very stuff with which it breaks. We both hear and reproduce time cut into rhythmed elements, minutes and seconds, hours and days, centuries, millennia; it runs like a river, percolates and spreads. In this way rhythm smooths out the prickles of noise."
Victory! The two Muses blend measures and links: discontinuous, continuous, temporal. Even if they begin again a thousand times, they make Music emerge from chaos using signals with cadence. It gushes out on one, two, three or four feet!
Orpheus listens to the two muses holding drums, timpani, hammers. He watches them try everything on a hundred percussive instruments whose rhythmic cadences are trying to recover the Pythian cacophony.

Their fluid mimicry and their choreography melting in extension of their limbs, they whiten the thorny background noise of the things of the World and of the vital emotions.

Faced with the Grand Narrative of things, their attitudes and figures thus present a rich landscape of metamorphoses and possible evolution. Because, short of this preliminary and almost complete smoothing out, these first two Muses still hold a cornucopia coming out of, first and yet again, the initial commotion and, from the evolutionary bifurcations; two hidden, lively, quasi-infantile sources.
Their already knowledgeable and vital descriptions continue to discover, in the sumptuous disorder of a million singularities: a joyous, luxurious, overflowing laughter; an opulent abundance; a flourishing plenitude.
They take joy in all the living reality.

Two First Musicians

Euterpe: "I play the flute. Through the rules, cadences, and tempos that are inscribed in the score, I master my gasping breath."
The flute was invented by Pan, one of the primordial gods, or by Hermes, his father. Here it symbolises all possible musical instruments, made of brass, bronze, gold, inert metals, or wood, leather, skins, cat-gut taken from living beings; vibrating columns or chords producing soft sounds that come from hard materials.
Erato: "I conduct the choir that brings together thousands of disparate cries. With melodies or chants, discordant hates of individuals or peoples are pacified in the harmony of rare unifications or in complicated agreements."


Definite progress: from the flute to the collective choir, from Euterpe to Erato, the Music slides, following its rhythm. In fact, as soon as it emerges from instruments to voice, as it rises from the emission of sounds carried by hard things like cords or columns to the emission of sounds carried by living mouths, teeth and tongues, and, later, by soft words. This major ascent—or this descent in the case of density—of hard to soft passing through the living, clarifies the use of the verb to smooth, coming from the supposedly soft or hard files, that I have employed since I began. Singing solo or in choir or other formations, the two last sisters cover and smooth out the transfinite totality of the commotion, the background noise bristling with thorns.


Bursting from the vocal cords, columns and throats singing together, Music has yet to attain either meaning or speech. Yelling and ululating, rhythmed: it cries, groans, calls, whines, pleads…in emotion as well as in monotonous chant.
In the same way that a dancer hold something back in her body—useless for everyday life—in the form of gestures, figures and movements, tensions and positions…that will eventually allow her, one day, to use by way of muscular or nervous response to some unexpected, felicitous or dangerous event, the live singer also carries in his thorax and its vocal cords, or the musician gathers up in her instrument, a huge repertoire of sounds: high or low, sharp or flat, short or long, weak or strong, plucked or held…equally useless in daily life because they are meaningless, but which eventually one would allow to take them up, one day, under the necessary conditions for a discursive response, faced with an unexpected meaning, danger or happiness, illness or death, love or delight. The cry will produce the word, and the signal the sense. Senseless Music will produce meaning.
Because of the magnificent Marie, Ronsard will slip a bit of nightingale into his sonnet.

The two bodily Muses (of mime and dance), and the two Musical ones that come after (flute and choir, thing, life and voice) have thus stockpiled ready to go, in their bodies and evocations, masses of carnal and sonic responses, hard and soft, as yet and always without meaning, responding to hard or soft risks, suddenly popping up as environmental contingencies, or native and mortal ones. This apparently useless behaviour, and this apparently meaningless stockpiling are quickly going to be revealed as two definite sources for humanisation: Music as the precondition for adapted language, dance as precondition for all adaptation.
So, no: Sapiens could not have emerged, nor could humans have survived, without these four women's constant labour, without the bank of data (corporal and vocal, hard and soft) that they have amassed, through sound and body, before the emergence of signification. In this way these gestural and sonic reserves show themselves to be universal, useless and universal, That is to say, more useful than any immediate utility. There is no culture without mime, dance or music (instrumental or vocal)—four treasures of general equivalence, whiter than silver, even more vital than gold.

During their exhausting smoothing out and whitening work, the four preliminary Muses nevertheless keep for themselves the excessive wealth of primitive chaos, a source that is hidden, despised, global and quasi-infantile.
Their compositions blithely dip into it to draw out millions of variations that are landscaped, cheerful, luxuriant, powerful, overflowing, an opulent abundance; a flourishing plenitude.
They find their joy in all reality.

Proud in the memory of these beginnings, mother Memory then show Orpheus where the two primordial sources lie.
"The first rumbles in the rumour of the World; it is archaic and hidden. The human, unheard of, sleeps in the gestures of the body and musical unmeaning.
My five last daughters are working on rousing them."

The Muse Of The World

Urania composes, contemplates and calculates the landscaped harmony of the heavens.
"At one time," she explains, "the constellations brought together bears, lions, scorpions and capricorns, virgins, hunters and centaurs, crowns and saucepans, ear of corn and palm branch … in a chaotic jumble of artefacts, living things, flora and fauna, and legendary people. Today the universe brings together thousands of singularities that are even more disparate: asteroids, neutron stars, galaxies, clusters, black holes, interstellar clouds, gravitational arcs, gamma-ray bursts…just as jumbled up.
Background noise without Music?
Long before the laws of Galileo, Copernicus or Newtown came along, Plato and Kepler had harmonised the wandering planetary orbits and the World system according to scales and notes. Today the Grand Narrative smooths the chaos and unifies, albeit contingently, the colossal time of the Universe.
Music in front of the background noise?


But before all that, I, Urania, sing. I compose the music that precedes these chaotic distributions, these theoretical calculi, equations and reasons. I smooth out in advance all the noise of the World, so that underneath the Grand Narrative an immense rhapsody can be heard. Without the latter, who could ever have put this narrative into languages, equations, numerals and reasoning?
But how? In order to do it I appeal to the four preceding Muses, mime, choreography, the flautist and the singer. To imitate or dance, to learn to play or produce vocalisations, do they not follow precise instructions? How are these presented? Like recipes, methods, or rules. Corporal gestures to be reproduced in dance, then in music: how or where does one put one's fingers on the flute or the sitar? On what part can one make this column of air vibrate or after what interval one of these cords? How can the breath or voice be pitched or lifted …? These guidelines for apprenticeship, then execution, quickly fall into a few ordered procedures. If you are looking for a particular melody, place your index finger like this or that; here, then there, again there and so on; change the opening of the mouth or the position of the lips in this or that way … So then we have ten sorts of codes appearing which link one such gesture with another such sound, soon to be a note…Yes, coding, then decoding…
Deprived of any discursive meaning, Music not only comes before, and, with its huge stock of sounds, makes possible, thousands of languages, but it still posits indicators linking certain gestures with certain sounds, from which one is able to quickly practice and conceive codes and figures…which end up forming long sequences, which I then call algorithms. Which is where we are now.
Yes, Music precedes both meaning and languages, but the numerous algorithms which it uses also anticipate all the mathematics, whose number of branches and powers make up my own language—a Muse for the sciences, a private language, no doubt: discursive meaning, like Music, but just as universal as it, in order to correspond, with the most exact harmony and the highest beauty, to people and the world. Maths explains them because their birth mother, Music, expresses them. No Science without preliminary music.
If mathematical languages explain the World, they are born of this Music. That means the latter is singing the totality of things. It is born among their noises and precedes the haphazard grand narrative to be related by people, that to do with living things and the Universe.

Thus, I, Urania, the Muse of precise, rigorous and universal knowledge, claim to have two mothers: one is my body, Memory, and the other is my works, Music. So among my nine sisters, I take my place, no doubt, after mime and dance; but I also think of the following two as maternal: no, I would not exist without them. I am followed by those concerning language.

And yet, the upshot is that in my scientific works I retain extraordinary riches coming from the primitive chaos, the hidden source that is despised, worldly, and quasi-infantile. The background noise of the World never stops, and the body never stops hearing, underneath Music, the well of haphazard vibrations continually emitting jets of different combinations, and discarded cacophonies fall back into it.
My discoveries, researches, and scholarly theories continually draw up millions of singularities that are as pleasant as a the countryside, luxurious, overflowing, with an opulent abundance and a flourishing plenitude."

Proud in the memory of these beginnings, mother Memory then shows Orpheus where the three primordial sources lie: "The first is archaic and hidden, bacchanalian, noising the rumour of the World; hearing now, humanity sleeps in bodily gestures and Musical senselessness; the last is the precise and rigorous mathematician, counting, measuring, calculating, demonstrating, getting ready to experiment.
My four last daughters are working to awaken signification."

Four Youngest Muses

The last little ones, more numerous because their work becomes more continuous and difficult to the extent that the descending Grand Narrative dives into collective destiny; the four social Muses attempt, against personal anger and partisan hatreds, after them, despite them, against challenges and battles, despite them and after them, in the midst of violent human relations, massacre and blood, to arrive at, among and despite of these new thorns, other noises, discursive language and meaning.

Melpomene weeps at tragedies, accompanied by, preceded by, the chorus, because a scapegoat is always killed. Better to laugh, says Thalia the comic, while ridicule often assassinates as well. Calliope: better still is epic poetry first sung by the bards and endlessly bloody and mortal. Clio: the Moderns prefer wars, lies of history's heroes , rivals who are so rarely human.

Mother Memory: "Listen, Orpheus! Hear the Music! There was a time it filled the spaces of these theatres, occupied the time of these spectacles and representations. And today you sometimes complain that it invades streets and squares, collective media and individual ears…without it, who would speak?"

With the emergence of Music and thanks to the work of the Muses, Orpheus was able to deliver himself from the Hellfires of chaos and commotion, in the course of a long, hard voyage around the Pythic and bacchanalian sea, unchained. The rhythm and harmony of Music liberated him from these noises.
Now, with the emergence of meaning, representation and language, new background noises appear. These ones are the product of human violence and death. Why does this other rumour have to be ruffled before speech rises up? Why right after these secondary origins (pain, error, suffering, killing) just like, with the first, commotion and noise?
In the same way that each sweet Muse never stops liberating herself and us from harsh Bacchantes and furies, Orpheus, for his part, never stops leaving Hell. Begin the journey again.
Music, deliver us from Evil!

Polymnia, she of the gesture, takes a turn speaking: "How can fire be recognised without burns, a sharp point without a piercing, thunder without terror? Life is guided by sensation as it is drawn somewhat to pleasures, and, in a decisive and brutal fashion, away from pain. Attach terminals appropriate to this bipolarity to my miming skin, to my nerves and my body, where one of the attractors remains stronger than the other. To perfect my mimeticism, I need to get close to the World, but I don't go beyond the threshold defined by bearable pain."
Urania, like an echo: "I find it reassuring that an experience can confirm a theory, but nothing is learnt. Let it destroy it, then I advance, I learn. Only falsifiability makes science decisive. If, on the other hand, we always succeeded in our endeavours, we would never understand anything. The naïve son of wealth. The foolish child raised in swathes of comfort. The stupidity of the perpetual winner. Failure trains the ship's boy, the baker's boy, the apprentice, the greenhorn, me. How does Orpheus become a musician? Noise and false notes. Hell is adaptation; the apprentice comes through. The compositor, the creator slips, stumbles, falls over, but doesn't stop finding a way out. Humanity itself…
Mother Memory tries for a precis: "Long ago, a wonderful theology summed up, as a first synthesis, this series of sensitive, empirical theoretical and pedagogical experiences … with the dogma of original sin. From the very beginning of humanity, living in the paradise of the Garden of Eden, where, of course, all was going well, richness and plenitude, this is where sin arrived. And what will become of them, during and after the first paradise? Answer: Nothing but repetition, angelic, supralapsarian, monotonous, redundancy without information; no humanity, no events, no history. Sin was the first interesting circumstance. In all the redundancy of obedience, the first improbable disobedience therefore brought, by its very unpredictability, a good amount of information. This is why it took place under the tree of knowledge; even better of the knowledge of paradisiacal Good and improbable Evil. Without Eve's inclination, without the slight weight of the apple, Sapiens would not have emerged; nor its history, paradise inverted, where Evil enters into redundancy and Good, rarity.
Radical Evil designates the root of our hominization. Without it, no morals, no ethics, no knowledge…Don't look elsewhere for the origin of Evil: it lies at our origin. In the beginning, a paradise that goes wrong…a time zone, which, as it turns, brings the first information…Errare humanum est, this means: it is in man's nature to err, at least in the beginning; in fact, his universal faculty for adaptation. The best of all pedagogies—going back to origins again, for any singular living human—consists in prescribing doses of this evil by vaccination. Apprenticeship: homeopathy of Evil.

At the beginning of the World, noise; Music smooths it out. At the human beginning, Evil; Music delivers me from it; at every new beginning, an exit from hell.
Orpheus now learns to compose.

Thus, the four last Muses move from Music to language via the wounds of violence, death, pain, disenchantment, lovesickness. Tragedy, epic, theatre and history try to recover and thus smooth over (sometimes through dreams and lies, always through representation) the hateful and murderous background noises of our societies. Without the frequent and false exit from death through dream, without the rare and true exit from pain through beauty, how would we have attained language, how would we speak, how would we have invented our stories? Good literature is not made with fine sentiments. To seduce with beauty all that exists and breaths, Orpheus must battle to exit, once more and always, from the Hellfires and always by composing. Because Music always runs the risk of collapsing in shards, in hubbub and violent death, whence it makes love burst forth.


Nevertheless, what follows is that the four youngest retain the exuberant riches coming from the most diverse cultural differences and the most exacerbated individual oppositions, hidden source, despised, mundane and quasi-infantile.
Their human works continually draw millions of unique productions from it: personal, fun, luxuriant, overflowing with an opulent abundance; a flourishing plenitude.
They take their joy in creation.


Urania reappears.
"Languages," she says, "as used by my four last sisters, indicate, say and designate. The invention of the Word joins a sign with that to which it refers, thereby associating the hardness of a thing or of living flesh with the softness of something said. This event seems to be rare enough that one notices a lot of information.
Even better to associate such elements of mathematical language, just as universal as Music which is no doubt its source, to certain things in the World, or certain codes of living beings, and in addition, with such an exactitude that the sign correspo0nds to the thing and the thing itself to its sign. Such a rarity, such an incarnation such an accord, all so strong that they have something miraculous about them.
So, the event, so rare that it remains incomprehensible, of the application of universal language to the singularities of the world and of life, will conclude the initiation of Orpheus with a kind of miracle, saturated with information.


The Final Litanies of Orpheus-Musician
So in order to become, in the bosoms of these women-mothers, an orator, singer, virtuoso on the lyre, composer and scholar, Orpheus, in the course of his life, received from them an Ariadne thread (another woman); when he was a child he suspected that it existed. He ended up following it blind and mastering lucidly this string of long cord which, passing through speech and languages opened a casement for him, toward the voice, and through the voice, towards song, and through song, towards representation on a theatrical stage, and through science and history represented thus, to Music. To Music, principle, central and decisive…
…and underneath Music, to all the chaotic noises of the World and living things. Disorder and grief, whose thorns incessantly pierced his thorax, so that an ultimate and hidden source could spring, an infernal, burning fountain: unbearable, living, vital, inspiring, creative.

Pythians and Bacchantes taught him to listen first to the universality of noise, everywhere and always present, as probable as certitude, and carrying no information. As mimics, the first Muses then taught him to fight against it with rhythm, general but less universal than noise, already with some information. Without this rhythm, nothing exists; all falls back into noise. At the beginning beings could not extract themselves from the hubbub except through some kind of refrain, that of the days, for example, dawns and dusks, during a long or short week. Once all these beings have emerged from noise via rhythm, they make themselves more rare than these two signals, already bringing a fair amount of information. The more Orpheus acquired, the more he emerged from the Hells of disorder, then, being born, he arose towards Music. As he progressed step by step with the teaching of the Muses, he learned, in fact, by conjugating noises and rhythms, to make smooth sounds burst out, and finally to achieve that music that is rarer than sounds and therefore carrying even more information.
Leaving Music, and through the last duaghters, he reached meaning and language, the rarest, and because of this they are swollen with information. And finally to Urania's science, purged of all noise, saturated with meaning and rarity, almost miraculously informed.


Finally, Orpheus took his turn and announced:
"Music in the middle: isthmus, crossroads, stretch of open water between zero and total information, between the mess full of the thorns of noise, whose chaos is lost and blends in its melodic waters, and the smooth necessity of meaning, which, thus appeased, spurts forth. On the one side grains, cyclones and typhoons, screams; on the other, voice and speech, reason. A river or waterfall between disorder and order, Music opens the necessary straits through which one gets to meaning. Customs house, pay station, lodge for all the messengers, good and bad angels, airlock that everyone goes through, place where everything happens. Music: oceanic bridge between the Maenads and Urania, art that traces the arc between the hard sciences and wild hullabaloo, or even better, between the global and the human.
Intersecting Music.
Carnal and formal music, where, emitting a sort of silent speech, the body counts without knowing numbers. Sciences: the head knows it is counting, it names its numbers; Music counts by way of numbers without name. Overflowed by noise, without music we cannot enumerate the innumerable.
Via its flux one can transit from a body in motion to a soul in emotion, from the brass or the skin of instruments to the expression of feelings, from hard things to spoken softness, from earth and water to air and fire, from flesh secretly coded to the free numbers of the mind.
Incarnating Music.

Plenary Music: in reserve, a reservoir, primordial treasure, recipient of sonorous equivalences preliminary to language; senseless equivalences preliminary to all meaning, like silver of gold equivalent to anything that can be exchanged, chest and horn of abundance full of uselessness, a reserve for utility, just as dance is the thesaurus of useless figures and movements stored in the body, held there for possible uses. Origin Music.
Meeting Music.

Universal Music. Do not leave it, hold yourself in it, follow its course, swim in its flux, live, dwell and sleep in it; you will know everything, because it knows everything or understand everything: knowledge without knowing it. On the one hand myths that are not uttered; on the other, body and speech; fine arts and rigour…But one must go down into the other universal, that of hell and risky chaos, to see it emerge from its source, to see it flow, to make it be born, to compose it, according to a gushing that is ordered, rhythmed like the beings of the World and of life, leaving this deep hell with is desperate screams.
Gushing into the vastness, able to fill it with its waves, Music proclaims universals, the last universals, already almost meaningful, of the World; the first universals, still meaningless, of humans.
Music is not a knowledge, but a well whence all sorts of inventions come out. Thus philosophy.

Flowing freely in space, does Music proclaim temporal universals? Buffeted by the contingencies that it receives from noise and the laminary flow that it produces as chords and melodies, this is the permanent source from which springs a profusion of rhythms and measures, tempi and accelerations, refrains and ditties, themes and variations, fugues and counterpoints, syncopated shouts and voices ordered by grammar and syntax, continuous and discontinuous, numbers and reason…I know not if Music follows or produces time…whatever the case, without Music would we live, would we know, would we count the duration that it seems to follow like its shadow, which seems to follow it like a spell?
Music as temporal black box, the source from which duration is born.

End on a plea.
Music as consolation of the seven sufferings. Without the desperate cries that tear at his thorax, without the heroic work of the nine sisters, without the lakes of tears shed by these women, Orpheus would never have sung as an adult, nor discussed, nor composed, nor known. Art and knowledges from which relief sometimes comes.
Music, deliver us from Evil.

Thus instructed by his voyages, having become an expert in songs and scores, words and reasons, Orpheus delivered himself from the Hell of worldly noises, from the body and from the endless, thorny, painful groups, reproduced by the Bacchanantes, and, through the Music and the knowledge that he learned from the nine sisters, ended up, saved from any evil, calming the sabre-toothed wild animals, mellowing the anger and the disenchantment of humans, levelling the roses.

Da Capo: No More Hells

They say that Orpheus' lover Euridice, chased by Aristaeus the shepherd and beekeeper, running hell for leather to escape rape, was bitten on the foot by an asp slithering thereabouts, and died. From the bite of a serpent, the sting of a bee, a malignant thorn of noise…a rose?
The musician went down, full of courage but not hope, to call for her in the same hell-source which he already knew how to get out of, since he had explored the labyrinthine maze and had, thanks to the bacchanalian apprenticeship, Ariadne's musical river-thread.
Alas, despite divine interdictions, he returned to the shadow of his wife, barely emerged from the infernal commotion. Then her phantom exploded into atomic shards.
Later, the Meniades themselves tore the musician's body into tiny pieces and he was thus returned to noise in a thousand parts, as dispersed as Euridice.
Music, a fragile, perilous human work, can always fall back into the mess of scattered chaos.

So everything returns to the beginning, deep in the three noises of the deep, screamed by the drunken chorus of the Pythians, the Sibyls and the Bacchanantes who never left their spot at the very heart of Hell.
Would that an Orphic traveller, you, me, equip ourselves once again, and everything would take off again. To be reborn, relaunch, relive, recreate, compose, overflow, sing, think, calculate, weep, reach fulfillment.














1