Per Caritatem

Below is a continuation of my transcription of Turner’s lecture. 

*** 

Step three:  poetry.  Herbert McCabe [sp?] once said, “poetry is language trying to become bodily experience.” That seems right except for the “trying to be.” Poetic meanings work through a complex set of transactions between what is conveyed by the meaning of the words considered as formal speech and what is conveyed by the signifier in its physical, material character as shape on the page or sound uttered.  Think of the difference that inflection makes when saying “Emma Kirkby [?] is not just a pretty voice,” and “Emma Kirkby is not just a pretty voice.”  Here it is the word’s music-the difference in inflection that delivers the difference in meaning-not the words as verbal sound which in either case are identical.  Poetry is the meal made of such material, terminal devices made of a sort of contrapuntal interweaving of verbal and terminal meanings.  As Oliver Davies puts it, “in poetry the signifier itself is foregrounded, so that the work of meaning is carried not alone by the formal meanings of the words, but also that meaning which is conveyed by the work of the material, aural qualities of the speech acts themselves-the rhythmic speech patterns, assonance, inflections and so forth-these two in their contrapuntal interplay.  That is poetry being a body-it doesn’t have to try to be a body.  In fact, it might have been better if Herbert had said that it is music that poetry is trying to be.  Which is to be point, for then McCabe added, “then music is bodily experience trying to be language.”  This again seems right except for that “trying to be”.  For if in poetry there is a contrapuntal weaving of the verbally signified with the signifier itself, in loose materiality being uttered there is also utterance.  In music the signifier in its materiality is so absolutely foregrounded that all is reduced to it-with nothing left to it in the character of verbal language at all.  The music is all rhythm and pitch and melody and harmony and dissonance.  To see the difference between the verbal and the musical, therefore, think of this.  When I say, “the cat is on the mat.”  You can attend to the meaning exclusively so that the materiality of the sounds disappear, absorbed entirely into that meaning. You hear the sounds of something said as semantic episodes.  Or you can if you try hard enough, attend to the mere noise of the utterance-the meaning disappearing into it, so that you hear the words simply as sounds minus their meanings.  But either way, there is a distinction between the meaning of the words as words and the performance of the words as sounds.  There is a surplus of physicality of sound which you can identify separately from that meaning.  And even in poetry, the most nearly musical of all the verbal arts, the musicality of the effect can work only in conjunction with formal, verbal meaning.  But in certain kinds of pure music, you cannot make any such distinction nor ought you to try.  A string quartet has no verbal meaning at all. What you hear is what you get-meaning as sound, sound as meaning.  In such music there is no surplus, either of physicality over and above the signifying sounds themselves, or of signification over and above those sounds and their structuring of rhythm and pitch and melody and harmony.  So you could say that music is like the Cheshire Cat-all smile and no cat because the matter has disappeared is in the meaning and the meaning that has disappeared is the matter.  Music is matter entirely alive with meaning.  The most bodily therefore and at the same time the most formal of human communications.  Now this is why that I suggested that if you were Thomas, you might say-and of course he didn’t-that music is the most rational of human activities.  For in music, physicality and meaning, body and meaning, have become perfectly identified.  Music is nothing but sound and fury signifying nothing but the sounds and the fury themselves that signify.  Music is all body but precisely as language-this animality, this most transparent form, as rationality. 

Step four.  Now that I have gotten Thomas to take us about as far as possible in what we might have thought that he meant when I first used the word “rational” in this lecture, I can begin to explain what might truly be at stake when he talks about a rational knowledge of God. 

There is fifth important step to be taken yet, but on the way can I point you in the right direction by hazarding a speculation?  It is that the nearest that you can get to a sort of spontaneous and demotic [?] natural theology-to a sort of pre-theological anticipation of theology-is in poetry and music, but especially in music.  And if this is so, perhaps it is because of those paradoxical conjunctions of music’s being closest to us in its intense physicality, and yet wholly open as to its significance, so very indeterminate, so lacking in particular reference, so purely formal.  And for that reason, it opens up spaces of our experience beyond our particularity, beyond our confined individualities.  The ancients-Pythagoras and Boethius-did not think as we do now that some music is sacred and some secular.  They thought that music was sacred as such and whatever the reasons of the ancients, I think that we moderns too intuitively experience in music a natural capacity for the transcendent.  If that is so, it would appear to have to do with the fact that music’s very impersonality and otherness is what allows for such free, spontaneous and utterly personal responses.  To paraphrase Nietzsche, music is all feeling-all sadness, all joy-but as subjectively and objectively unhooked.  Subjectively unhooked because it is no one’s sadness or joy.  Objectively unhooked because its sadness or joy is not about anything in particular.  It is feeling as anyone’s and feeling which is absolutely self-less and absolutely object-less.  So it can be absolutely yours as well as absolutely mine, but always as transcending us both, moving experience in a space from of the constative.  It is communication absolutely free of judgment-free of Thomas’ confirmando et dividendo, and so at once rational and wholly free of rationality in the minimal sense that I earlier described.  And perhaps that is why music is the most commonly experienced form of what the medievals called an excisus[?] or in Greek an ec-statis or in English taking leave of your senses.  It is rationality escaping from itself-but here’s the paradox-in music by the most sensual, most bodily and so rational of means.