Anam Cara

3

T

HE

M

USIC OF

B

EAUTY

Because difference constitutes music . . .

Sound is . . . the rubbing of notes between two drops of water,

the breath between the note and the silence, the sound of thought.

. . . To write is to note down the music of the world.

HÉLÈNE CIXOUS

T

HE

M

USIC OF THE

E

ARTH

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE SILENCE. BEFORE ANYTHING WAS, there was silence everywhere. As the universe was born the silence was broken in the fiery violence of becoming. As planets settled in the cold, endless night of the cosmos, silence was restored; and it was a deep and dark silence. We can imagine the cry of the first wind as it billowed against the strange curvature of new mountains and warmed over the restless, boiling oceans. In time, the earth settled and entered the adventure of its own journey. The rippling of waters and the wail of the wind were the only sounds until the arrival of the animals. Gradually the earth developed its own music. Streams gave voice to the silence of valleys. Between the mountains and the ocean, rivers ferried the long songs of landscape. In fresh spring wells the dreaming of stone mountains sounded forth. And from infinite distance the moon choreographed each sequence of tides. As the memory of the earth deepened, the wind built into a Caoineadh – a huge keening. It was as if the music of the mourning wind voiced the distilled loneliness of the earth. Who knows what presences depended on the wind in order to come to voice or how long they have waited for voice. The wind is the spirit-sound of the ancient earth.

Over hundreds of millions of years, the earth deepened its elemental music. Each note arises out of the infinite silence of the earth and falls away again into the vast stillness. The elemental conversation of the silence and the music of nature gives the earth a spirit of intimacy. There is an interesting symmetry between the silence of the earth and the silence of the human body. Just as the music of the wind and water breaks the deep silence of the earth, so the sound of the word breaks the private silence of the body. This threshold between silence and word sets the imagination free to create beauty. A world without this threshold would be a world of nightmare. An earth where noise never stopped or where clear dead silence was endless could never be a home for the mind. It is somehow consoling that at a primal level the heart of silence ripples in music and word. In terms of our theme, it is as though the deepest dream of silence is the beauty of music and word.

Unlike all our ancestral creatures, we have transformed the earth. We have brought much destruction and done much damage, yet our music is among the most delightful sounds on earth. Faced with the strangeness and silence of the earth, one of the most beautiful human creations has been music. The creation of exquisite music is one of the glories of the human imagination. Indeed, if we had done little else, music would remain our incredible gift to creation for there is no other sound on earth to compare with the beauty and depth of music. It has an eternal resonance. Yet of course that is as we hear it. Perhaps to animal hearing, there is nothing more beautiful than the sound of wind through a forest or the rhythmic salsa of Wild Ocean as it crashes against a cliff-face. To the human ear, however, music echoes the deepest grandeur and the most sublime intimacy of the soul.

M

USIC

C

REATES

I

TS

O

WN

T

IME

Music survives, composing her own sphere,

Angel of Tones, Medusa, Queen of the Air,

And when we would accost her with real cries

Silver on silver thrills itself to ice.

GEOFFREY HILL, ‘Tenebrae’

IN CONTRAST TO MOST OTHER FORMS OF ART, MUSIC ALTERS YOUR experience of time. To enter a piece of music, or to have the music enfold you, is to depart for a while from regulated time. Music creates a rhythm that beats out its own time-shape. Whilst theatre invites the suspension of disbelief as we enter and participate in the drama the characters create, in music there is a suspension of the world. We are deftly seduced into another place of pure feeling. No other art distils feeling the way music does; this is how it can utterly claim us. Despite the complexity of its content or structure, the tonality of music invades the heart. In music, the most intricate complexity can live in the most lyrical form. Music is depth in seamless form. It is no wonder then that all poetry strives towards the condition of music. As T.S. Eliot said: ‘Poetry like music should communicate before it is understood.’

Feeling is where the heart lives. In claiming the heart so swiftly and totally, the beauty of music crosses all psychological and cultural frontiers. There is a profound sense in which music opens a secret door in time and reaches in to the eternal. This is the authority and grace of music: it evokes or creates an atmosphere where presence awakens to its eternal depth. In our everyday experience the quality of presence is generally limited and broken. Much of the time we are distracted; we might manage to be externally present, but often our minds are secretly elsewhere. Music can transform this fragmentation, for when you enter into a piece of music your feeling deepens and your presence clarifies. It brings you back to the mystery of who you are and it surprises you by inadvertently resonating with depths inside your heart that you had forgotten or neglected. Music can also stir memories, good or bad, and transport you back in time.

Music embraces the whole person. It entrances the mind and the heart and its vibrations reach and touch the entire physical body. Yet there is something deeper still in the way that music pervades us. In contrast to every other art form, it finds us out in a more immediate and total way. The inrush of intimacy in music is irresistible. It takes you before you can halt it. It is as though music reaches that subtle threshold within us where the soul dovetails with the eternal. We always seem to forget that the soul has two faces. One face is turned towards our lives; it animates and illuminates every moment of our presence. The other face is always turned towards the divine presence. Here the soul receives the Divine Smile or the Kiss of God, as Meister Eckhart might express it. Perhaps this is where the mystical depth of music issues from: that threshold where the face of the soul becomes imbued with the strange tenderness of divine illumination.

T

HE

S

IMULTANEITY OF

M

USIC

The essence of rhythm is the preparation of a new event by the

ending of a previous one . . . Everything that prepares a future

creates rhythm; everything that begets or intensifies

expectation . . .

SUSANNE K. LANGER

MUSIC ARISES FROM THE REALM OF SIMULTANEITY. IT TAKES US TO a level where time becomes a circle. Here one thing does not follow another in a regular line of sequence. Somehow at that depth, all times are present together: the joys and losses of your past, the wonder of the present and the unknown possibilities of the future; music plays out of this profound simultaneity. This is why often when one listens to Beethoven or Bach, one feels one is being cradled in a sublime Now; there is no ‘before’ or ‘after’, ‘otherwise’ or ‘elsewhere’. Here memory and possibility come together in an invisible embrace. Music draws us into transfigured time through the sonority of distilled feeling. Music is the most immediate of presences; it infuses the whole self, and is at the same time utterly elusive. Yet it is impossible to be definite about music. It creates its own time and cannot be measured by seconds or minutes. It also creates a new space that cannot be measured by inches or metres. Music dwells in a world of its own.

I remember a night of music in Piazza San Marco in Venice. There was an international dance festival. It was the night of a full moon. Out on the ocean a storm was raging. The sea was rising fiercely and frighteningly in and around Venice. The orchestra on stage were playing Stravinsky to an accompanying ballet. Somewhere in that evening of music everything came together in a magnificently charged way: the ocean, the dance, the music, all of us caught in a dark, elemental surge. The music brought everything into one seamless circle of being. For a while we dwelt inside the music, were embraced and protected by it. For a while there was no ‘outside’.

M

USIC

I

S THE

D

REAM OF

S

ILENCE

And harmonies unheard in sound create the harmonies we hear

and wake the soul to the consciousness of beauty.

PLOTINUS

IT IS STRANGE THAT ALTHOUGH WE CANNOT SEE OR TOUCH MUSIC, it evokes and creates such a clear and sure world. Especially at orchestral concerts, I have often been struck by the question: where does music actually dwell? I love the ritual and form of a concert: how the conductor evokes a fluency and harmony from the diversity that is an orchestra; how the soprano soars to meet the music; how the audience and performers are affected and enfolded in this invisible force. A deaf alien would be amazed at our gathered attention and unity. Though we cannot see music with the eye, many musicians speak of seeing music with their inner senses; they see shapes of flow, shapes of structure. Some see music in their dreams appearing as forms or patterns. A friend once had a dream of seeing her Sufi teacher walking into heaven. She vanished beyond visibility; when she returned later there were notes sticking to her limbs like bars of light. For a while she had been walking in that other land where the stuff of music grows naturally!

There is a sense in which music is a homecoming. As we slip below the surface mind, below the flotsam of the surface world, we travel to our true level, where the deep silence of identity, that silence that holds the mind in poise, is reached and embraced by music. Like the flow of some primal wave, music has the confidence of an originary force. Once evoked, it knows where the deepest source awaits. Ravel said: ‘Music is dream crystallized into sound.’

Music is the surest voice of silence. From the beginning silence and sound have been sisters. Music invites silence to its furthest inner depths and outer frontiers. The patience in which silence is eternally refined could only voice itself in music. Music and silence are like lovers who gaze at each other and long for each other. Schubert once said: all music begins and ends in silence. Indeed, the secret of Schubert is how he sculpts silence with sound. The dream of silence is music. Though the content may be full of sorrow or pathos, music seems to desire a certain lightness and playfulness; physically as sound it continues to move and flow. Perhaps listening to music renews the heart precisely for this reason: it plumbs the gravity of sorrow until it finds the point of submerged light and lightness. Listening to music stirs the heavy heart; it alters the gravity. Unconsciously it schools us in a different way to hold sorrow. When the music is dark it works through dissonance and harsh notes; like underpainting their beauty is slow to reveal itself but it does ultimately dawn. It frees a space to let in lightness. Unlike anything else in the world, music is neither image nor word and yet it can say and show more than a painting or poem.

W

HEN THE

L

AND

G

ETS INTO THE

M

USIC

We have fallen into the place

where everything is music.

RUMI, ‘Where Everything Is Music’

IRELAND HAS A GREAT STORE OF TRADITIONAL MUSIC AND THERE is a great diversity of style and nuance. Each region has a distinctive tradition. One can hear the contours of the landscape shape the tonality and spirit of the music. The memory of the people is echoed in the music. Traditional Irish music is joyous and lively. The reels, jigs, hornpipes, polkas and slides have tremendous energy and passion. In the ‘slow airs’ the wistfulness of loss and sorrow is piercing. When one considers the history of suffering which the Irish have endured through colonization, famine and emigration, it is fascinating that our music has such heart. Indeed some of the greatest and most distinctive Irish music developed among Irish emigrants, especially in America, and must have been one of their few shelters in exile. Arriving in a strange land and having to work hard, far away from their family, friends and home landscapes, music must have opened secret doors in the memory and allowed the heart to come home again. When they felt lost and forsaken, they rejoiced in this universal language that crosses all frontiers and barriers. The music of a people offers a unique entry to their unconscious life. The tenor of what haunts and delights them becomes audible there. The cry of a people is in their music. The mystery of music is its uncanny ability to coax harmony out of contradiction and chaos. Often the beauty of great music is a beauty born from the rasp of chaos. The confidence of creativity knows that deep conflict often yields the most interesting harmony and order.

In the Irish tradition we have sean-nós singing. This is a style of unaccompanied singing in the Irish language which has a primal tonality and very beautiful rhythm. The resonance and style of sean-nós seems to mirror the landscape and sensibility of the people. There is a special repertoire of these songs and they are sung over and over. Each sean-nós singer has a unique but easily recognizable style. The song comes alive in a new way as it is etched in the singer’s voice; the cut and style of the phrasing determines everything. The sounds of the Irish soul cannot be expressed in the same way in English.

B

ELONGING TO

M

USIC

Music is a science of love relating to harmony and rhythm.

PLATO

MUSIC BRINGS GREAT BEAUTY INTO OUR LIVES. IN THE WAY THAT IT arrives, lingers and vanishes, it offers us a clue to the eternal nature of beauty. Like music, beauty dwells in some invisible realm adjacent to us, yet it never becomes our possession. But when it emerges to visit us, it wafts us away to a realm where desolation and gravity no longer preside. Though we may indeed be wounded by beauty at times, like the darkness of music, it can be a sweet pain.

When you really listen to music, you become detached from the world; indeed you enter another world. Within the shelter of music, other things become possible for you, things that you could never feel or know in your day to day world. Sound can create a world as real as that of the clock, the field or the street. You breathe and dwell within that soundscape as though it were a world specially created to mirror and echo the deepest longings of your life. There is profound belonging in music which at certain times in your life can embrace and reach you more deeply than friend or lover. It is as though the music instinctively knows where you dwell and what you need.

Music does not touch merely the mind and the senses; it engages that ancient and primal presence we call soul. The soul is never fully at home in the social world that we inhabit. It is too large for our contained, managed lives. Indeed, it is surprising that the soul seems to accommodate us and permit us to continue within the fixed and linear identities we have built for ourselves. Perhaps in our times of confusion and forsakenness the soul is asserting itself, endeavouring to draw us aside in order to speak to our hearts. Upheavals in life are often times when the soul has become too smothered; it needs to push through the layers of surface under which it is buried. In essence, the soul is the force of remembrance within us. It reminds us that we are children of the eternal and that our time on earth is meant to be a pilgrimage of growth and creativity. This is what music does. It evokes a world where that ancient beauty can resonate within us again. The eternal echoing of music reclaims us for a while for our true longing.

T

HE

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ARK

B

EAUTY OF

E

ROS IN

TRISTAN AND ISOLDE

THE MUSIC OF WAGNER HAS A MAGNIFICENT ARCHITECTURE OF longing. His opera Tristan and Isolde explores the voyage of love in terms of longing and the search for fulfilment and union. Tristan and Isolde are deeply in love but their love can never find consummation or completion. The music constantly holds out the promise of ecstasy but never allows it to be realized. This structure of longing and its suspension makes up the intense drama of the music. The opening chord, known as the ‘Tristan chord’, famously holds two dissonances together; and from that moment on the music creates a continuous sequence of discord. As each emerging discord is resolved, the resolution creates another, new and deeper discord. Throughout the opera there is a cumulative increase in tension and it is not until the final chord is heard that the discord is finally resolved. Wagner was powerfully influenced by the philosophy of Schopenhauer. The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges says that he learned German for one reason: to read Schopenhauer in the original. Schopenhauer considered the world and its inhabitants embodiments of longing. The world and life in it is an expression of will. Wagner too saw music as the embodiment of this intense longing. For him, music was not simply another creative or aesthetic dimension of human experience and expression; it was the real expression of human nature. No other mode of expression corresponds as intimately and directly to who we are – to the longing that animates us and informs our presence in the world. The music of Tristan and Isolde articulates our huge craving for love. The real drama here is not the action or plot; they serve merely to render visible the depth, poignancy and craving of the invisible worlds of Tristan and Isolde. Wagner said of the opera: ‘Here I sank myself with complete confidence into the depths of the soul’s inner workings, and then built outwards from this, the world’s most intimate and central point, towards external forms . . . Here life and death and the very existence of the external world appear only as manifestation of the inner workings of the soul.’

Wagner’s music is charged with an incredible force of Eros. It is not the surface Eros of transient lust but the deepest Eros where soul and senses are awakened within the strain of primal longing. Tristan and Isolde is patterned with imagery of day and night. Usually in the world of the imagination, day stands for brightness, colour and goodness whereas the night represents the unknown, darkness and often evil. Wagner reverses this: day brings sorrow and night brings joy and rapture. This opera is a magnificent voyage into the Eros at the heart of the world; it is the call to life and creation that quickens the soul and captures the heart. When we enter the opera, forgotten sanctuaries open in the heart and neglected voices become audible in us. The magnificence of this music of Eros consists above all in the fact that it is a profound engagement with the other side of Eros, namely death. The glory of Wagner is the transfiguration of death and Eros in music. Wagner’s music has a profound, dark beauty that shores up against the great silence into which every life finally fades.

T

HE

H

AUNTING

B

EAUTY OF

B

EETHOVEN

GREAT MUSIC IS NOT A MATTER OF GREAT IDEAS OR INTRICATE melodies. It is not about difficult phrasing or complex harmonies. Truly great music brings to expression the states of the soul. This huge nobility enhances the heart and opens the imagination to the deeper mystery and riches of being here. The human soul is tested and exposed by suffering and there is an elegance in the way great music explores suffering. Beethoven created music out of his own suffering. It is one of the loneliest ironies in the Western tradition that this magnificent composer suffered illness precisely when he had reached the heart of his gift. For him, who had gleaned divine music from the depths of silence, all fell silent. He became deaf. For someone like Beethoven, for whom life was music, it is unimaginable what pain this caused. He wrote about this torment in the famous ‘Heiligenstadt Testament’ which was only discovered after his death:

I was compelled early to isolate myself, to live in loneliness, when I at times tried to forget all this, O how harshly was I repulsed by the doubly sad experience of my bad hearing . . . Ah how could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense which should have been more perfect in me than in others, a sense which I once possessed in highest perfection, a perfection such as few surely in my profession enjoy or have ever enjoyed . . . But what a humiliation when one stood beside me and heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone heard the shepherd singing and again I heard nothing, such incidents brought me to the verge of despair, but little more and I would have put an end to my life . . . only art it was that withheld me, ah it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt called upon to produce . . .

When the first signs of deafness began, Beethoven responded with defiance. In the scherzo in the Ninth Symphony there is a wonderful evocation of the force that triumphs over destiny, and his Eroica or Third Symphony charts the great transition where his soul moves towards acceptance of and integration with his awful destiny. From that isolation of deafness he creates music of an immensely profound, divine and complex beauty. This new growth of soul comes to magnificent flowering in the last string quartets. From despair and forsakenness, he creates sublime and unforgettable beauty. Sorrow is transformed by tranquillity.

The violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, who loves Beethoven, echoes this when speaking of beauty: ‘Beauty, for me, is felt to be beautiful only when it is contrasted with its opposite, when we can also see the abyss, the shadow.’

M

USIC AND

H

EALING

:

‘I C

AN

S

EE DOWN ALONG THE

M

USIC

’

I HAVE A FRIEND WHO IS A MUSIC THERAPIST. I HAVE SEEN HER work with a man who had had a stroke; he could no longer speak. I saw her last session with him where she sang and played in an attentive and accompanying improvised style. Within the emerging rhythm as she accompanied, anticipated and challenged him, both of them remained within the flow of the melody. He began to hum the music with her and ended up actually speaking. It was such a touching experience to see this person unexpectedly freed.

Music is often the only language which can find those banished to the nameless interior of illness. It calls out to the buried knowing in them, its rhythmic, lyrical warmth eventually freeing their frozen rhythm. She says: ‘I can see down along the music into a person – as though the music were a tunnel between them and me. Or to use another image: through the invisible hands of music I search for the person and the music can find them and bring them back. Only music can reach the trapped knowing within them.’

T

HE

M

USIC OF THE

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OICE

And you, who with your soft but searching voice

Drew me out of the sleep where I was lost,

Who held me near your heart that I might rest

Confiding in the darkness of your choice:

Possessed by you I chose to have no choice,

Fulfilled in you I sought no further quest.

GEOFFREY HILL, ‘Tenebrae’

EVEN WITHIN THE HIGH REFINEMENT OF CLASSICAL MUSIC THE human voice still creates the most touching and tender music of all. A beautiful voice raises our hearts and stirs something ancient in us, perhaps reminding us of our capacity for the eternal. Such a voice can claim you immediately even before you have time to think about it. I have often been at a music session where someone might be asked to sing and as soon as the beautiful voice rises up all noise and distraction cease and everyone becomes enraptured as the beauty of the voice brings out the music of the heart. When you hear a soprano like Joan Sutherland scale the highest mountains of Mozart, it takes your breath away, or Jessye Norman singing the Four Last Songs of Strauss. But why does exquisite song stir us deeply? Perhaps, more than any instrument, song can capture us because the human voice is our very own sound; the voice is the most intimate signature of human individuality and, of all the sounds in creation, comes from an utterly different place. Though there is earth in the voice, the voice is not of the earth. It is the voice of the in-between creature, the one in whom both earth and heaven become partially vocal. The voice is the sound of human consciousness being breathed out into the spaces. Unlike things of clay which contain themselves, the soul always strains beyond the body. A stone can dwell within itself for four hundred million years, take every sieve of wind and wash of rain, yet hold its Zen-like stillness. From the very moment of birth, consciousness is already leaking from our intense yet porous interiority. To be who we are, we need the consolation and companionship of the outside. Utter self-containment is either the gift of the mystic who has broken through to the divine within, or the burden of one who has become numbed and catatonic because the outside was too terrible. The human voice is a slender but vital bridge that takes us across the perilous distance to the others who are out there. The voice is always the outer sounding of the mind; it brings to expression the inner life that no-one else can lean over and look into.

Yet the voice is not merely an instrument, nor a vehicle for thought. The voice is almost a self; it is not simply or directly at the service of its owner; it has a life of its own. Its rhythm and tone are not always under the control of the conscious, strategic self. Each person has more than one voice. There is no such thing as the single, simple self; a diversity of selves dwells in each of us. In a certain sense, all art endeavours to attain the grace and depth of human mystery. There is wonderful complexity in nature and indeed in the world of artificial objects; yet no complexity can rival the complexity of the human mind and heart. Nowhere else does complexity have such fluency and seamless swiftness. Whole diverse regions within the heart can quicken in one fleeting thought or gesture. A glimpse of an expression in someone’s eyes can awaken a train of forgotten memories. The mystery of the voice lies in its timbre and rhythm. Often in the human voice things long lost in the valleys of the mind can unexpectedly surface. As the voice curves, rises and falls, it causes the listener to hearken to another presence that even the speaker might barely sense but cannot silence. Sometimes, without our knowing or wanting it, our lives speak out. In spite of ourselves, we end up saying things that the soul knows but the mind would prefer to leave unsaid.

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ECIPHER THE

V

OICES WITHIN THE

V

OICE

IT CAN BE QUITE SURPRISING TO DISCOVER THE ‘OWNER’ OF A VOICE to be someone totally different from what one expected from merely hearing their voice. People often have this experience with radio. For years they may have listened to their favourite radio presenter. The kingdom of that voice has conjured up a certain image of the person in their minds. When they meet the person in reality, the face does not fit the voice. It is as though our voices have a certain independence, a life of their own without us. Yet sometimes nothing represents us as accurately as our voices. When you know someone well, you can tell from the music of their voice what is happening in their heart. The lone voice always tells more than it intends.

The idea that words are a clear expression of the mind’s content is an illusion. There is a range and depth to the voice that can neither be predicted nor controlled. To decipher the voices within the voice is an art in itself. Sometimes a voice can carry a world towards you. When you are far away from someone you love, think of the promise that voice can hold when you telephone each other. The physical sound of the voice in your ear is almost like the touch of the person’s hand upon your shoulder. Over the distance the voice can ferry a world of presence. It is often a little startling after such a call to come off the phone and find the person is not there. The voice has evoked the intimacy and made the person present. Indeed, the telephone is frequently an instrument of revelation; it is one of the most natural extensions of human presence. Without leaving your living room your voice can be heard in an office thousands of miles away. And how funny it now seems to us that years ago, before every home had a phone, when an old person used a phone for the first time they instinctively shouted into it as if the extra volume was required for the voice to cover the distance.

T

HE

D

ISCERNING

V

OICE

But on condition that we liberate ourselves from our own

interior despots, we are the most poetic beings, the newest, the

most virgin in the world.

HÉLÈNE CIXOUS

HUMAN IDENTITY IS COMPLEX. NOTHING IS EVER GIVEN SIMPLY OR immediately. Even the simplest act of perception has many layers. Often at night a dream can take up a gesture or glimpses barely registered during the day and create a whole drama. Time and memory often reveal things later that were staring us in the eye, but we never noticed then. The quest for the truth of things is never ending. To be human is to be ambivalent. Every experience is open to countless readings and interpretations. We never see a thing completely. In sure anticipation, our eyes have always already altered what awaits our gaze. The search for truth is difficult and uncomfortable. Because the mystery is too much for us, we opt to settle for the surface of things. Comfort becomes more important than true presence. This is precisely why we need to hear the discerning voice.

Somewhere in every heart there is a discerning voice. This voice distrusts the status quo. It sounds out the falsity in things and encourages dissent from the images things tend to assume. It underlines the secret crevices where the surface has become strained. It advises distance and opens up a new perspective through which the concealed meaning of a situation might emerge. The inner voice makes any complicity uneasy. Its intention is to keep the heart clean and clear. This voice is an inner whisper not obvious or known to others outside. It receives little attention and is not usually highlighted among a person’s qualities. Yet so much depends on that small voice. The truth of its whisper marks the line between honour and egoism, kindness and chaos. In extreme situations, which have been emptied of all shelter and tenderness, that small voice whispers from somewhere beyond and encourages the heart to hold out for dignity, respect, beauty and love. That whisper brings forgotten nobility into an arena where violence has traduced everything. This faithful voice can illuminate the dark lands of despair. It becomes both the sign and presence of a transcendence that no force or horror can extinguish. Each day in the world, in the prisons, hospitals and killing fields, against all the odds, this still, small voice continues to echo the beauty of the human being. In haunted places this voice carries the light of beauty like a magical lantern to transform desolation, to remind us that regardless of what may be wrenched from us, there is a dignity and hope that we do not have to lose. This voice brings us directly into contact with the inalienable presence of beauty in the soul.

The lone, discerning voice has an effect utterly disproportionate to its singularity. Tempered with the tungsten edge of truth, it can cut through the densest morass of falsity. Asked at the right time, a searching question can make a fortress collapse. Despite all the illusion, deception and cover-up, something at the heart of the world still wishes to remain faithful, and hidden deep in everything is a presence that cannot resist truth. As Plato, Plotinus and Aquinas insisted, the Good and the True are sisters of the Beautiful.

The discerning voice can also show a darker side and turn in on itself to become a voice of self-criticism and make your heart into a place of torment. Harsh and unrelenting, it finds fault with everything. Even when unexpected acknowledgement or recognition comes your way, this voice will claw at you and make you feel you are unworthy. Nothing can ever be good enough. In some people’s lives this self-critical voice is highly developed and has managed to install itself permanently as the primary internal choreographer. This voice can assume complete control in determining how you see yourself and the world. It can make you blind to the beauty in you. Shakespeare captures this perfectly in Sonnet 1 (where ‘self-substantial’ means ‘self-consuming’):

But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,

Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,

Making a famine where abundance lies,

Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.

T

HE

H

EALING

V

OICE

WHEN SUFFERING ARRIVES AT THE DOOR OF YOUR LIFE, YOU FEEL lost and isolated. Pain becomes more intimate than anything else. This is when the companionship and support of family and friends makes all the difference. Their presence beside you brings a grace of courage and hope. It is a wonderful moment, then, when a voice of kindness and care reaches towards you. Suffering brings you to a land where no-one can find you. Yet when the human voice focuses in empathetic tenderness, it can find its way across any distance to the desolate heart of another’s pain. The healing voice becomes the inner presence of the friend, watchful and kind at the source.

In the desolate and torn terrain of suffering, there is no beauty that reaches deeper than the beauty of the healing voice. In his classic reflection on Being and Time, Martin Heidegger discovered that at the heart of time dwelt ‘care’. The ability to care is the hallmark of the human, the touchstone of morality and the ground of holiness. Without the warmth of care, the world becomes a graveyard. In the kindness of care, the divine comes alive in us.

T

HE

I

NNER

V

OICE OF THE

S

OUL

We live in wordsheds.

NED CROSBY

THE VOICE OF COMPASSION IS NOT ABSORBED WITH ITSELF. IT IS not a voice intent on its own satisfaction or affirmation; rather it is a voice imbued with understanding, forgiveness and healing. This voice dwells somewhere in every human heart. Ultimately it is the voice of the soul. Part of the joy in developing a spiritual life is the discovery of this beautiful gift that you perhaps never even suspected you had. When you take the time to draw on your listening-imagination, you will begin to hear this gentle voice at the heart of your life. It is deeper and surer than all the other voices of disappointment, unease, self-criticism and bleakness. All holiness is about learning to hear the voice of your own soul. It is always there and the more deeply you learn to listen, the greater the surprises and discoveries that will unfold. To enter into the gentleness of your own soul changes the tone and quality of your life. Your life is no longer consumed by hunger for the next event, experience or achievement. You learn to come down from the treadmill and walk on the earth. You gain a new respect for yourself and others and you learn to see how wonderfully precious this one life is. You begin to see through the enchanting veils of illusion that you had taken for reality. You no longer squander yourself on things and situations that deplete your essence. You know now that your true source is not outside you. Your soul is your true source and a new energy and passion awakens in you. The soul dwells where beauty lives. Hermann Broch says: ‘For the soul stands forever at her source, stands true to the grandeur of her awakening, and to her the end itself possesses the dignity of the beginning; no song becomes lost that has ever plucked the strings of her lyre, and exposed in ever-renewed readiness, she preserves herself through every single tone in which she ever resounded.’

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DANTE’S EPIC BEGINS FAMOUSLY WITH THE NARRATOR SAYING:

In the middle of the journey of our life

I came to myself within a dark wood

Where the straight way was lost.

Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell

Of that wood, savage and harsh and dense,

The thought of which renews my fear!

So bitter is it that death is hardly more.

In a certain sense, the whole Divine Comedy is an exploration of the inner wilderness of the lost voice. This is, however, a voice that is magnificently lost. The rich kingdoms of medieval sensibility gather here in all their fascination and terror. As in the unfurling of individual destiny, times of loss can bring discovery. This is recognized trenchantly in the mystical tradition. The Dark Night of the Soul is the night in which all images die and all belonging is severed; the abyss where Nothingness dwells. When the voice speaks from the realm of such relentless Un-doing, it is a voice in which wilderness has come alive.

This is a limbo of desolation and despair, reminiscent of Shakespeare’s phrase: ‘With what I most enjoy contented least.’ Endurance is all; now there is nothing else. A time of bleakness can also be a time of pruning. Sometimes when our minds are dispersed and scattered, this pruning cuts away all the false branching where our passion and energy were leaking out. While it is painful to experience and endure this, a new focus and clarity emerge. The light that is hard won offers the greatest illumination. A gift wrestled from bleakness will often confer a sense of sureness and grounding of the self, a strengthening proportionate to the travail of its birth. The severity of Nothingness can lead to beauty. Where life had gone stale, transfiguration occurs. The ruthless winter clearance of spirit quietly leads to springtime of new possibility. Perhaps Nothingness is the secret source from which all beginning springs.

There are also times of malaise, when life moves into the stillness of quiet death. Though you function externally, something is silently dying inside you, something you can no longer save. You are not yet able to name what you are losing, but you sense that its departure cannot be halted. Those who know you well can hear behind your words the deadened voice, the monotone of unremedied sadness. Your lost voice cannot be quieted. It becomes audible despite your best efforts to mask it. Sometimes even from a stranger one overhears the pathos of the lost voice: it may speak with passion on a fascinating topic, yet its mournful music seeps out, suggesting the no man’s land where the speaker is now marooned. Put flippantly, no-one ever really knows what they are saying. The adventure of voice into silence and silence into voice: this is the privilege and burden of the poet.

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Chiefly because our pauper-speech must find

Strange terms to fit the strangeness of the thing.

LUCRETIUS, De rerum natura

POETRY IS WHERE LANGUAGE ATTAINS ITS GREATEST PRECISION and richest suggestion. The poem is a shape of words cut to evoke a world the reader can complete. The poem is shaped to enter and inhabit forgotten or not yet discovered alcoves in the reader’s heart. The vocational quest of the poet is the discovery of her own voice. The poet never imitates or repeats poems already in the archive of the tradition. The poet wants to drink from the well of origin: to write the poem that has not yet been written. In order to enter this level of originality, the poet must reach beyond the chorus of chattering voices that people the surface of a culture. Furthermore, the poet must reach deeper inward; go deeper than the private hoard of voices down to the root-voice. It is here that individuality has the taste of danger, vitality and vulnerability. Here the creative is not forced or appropriated from elsewhere. Here creativity has the necessity of inevitability; this is the threshold where imagination engages raw, unformed experience. This is the sense you have when you read a true poem. You know it could not be other than it is. Its self and its form are one. There is nothing predictable here. For the poet there is a sense of frightening vulnerability, for anything can come, anything can happen. The unknown outside and the unknown interior can conceive anything. The poet becomes the passing womb for something that wants to be born, wants to become visible and live independently in the world. A true poem has a fully formed, autonomous individuality. Keats says: ‘Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle or amaze it with itself, but with its subject’ (Letter, 3 Feb. 1818).

It is interesting that true poetic beauty emerges when the poet is absolutely faithful to the uniqueness of her own voice. Beauty holds faith with the deepest signature of individuality; it graces the passion of individuality when it risks itself beyond its own frontiers, out to where the depth of the abyss calls. The danger of that exposure seems to call beauty. Here the gaze of familiarity falls away and repetition arrests. Something original and new wants to come through. Beauty is individual and original, a presence from the source. She responds to the cry of the original voice. Keats also said: ‘Poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity . . . if poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree it had better not come at all’ (Letter, 27 Feb. 1818).

Silence is not just the space or medium through which sound comes. Rather silence comes to voice in sound. The primeval beauty of silence becomes audible in the elemental music of the earth and in our music of instrument and voice. At the core of the world and at the core of the soul is silence that ripples with the music of beauty and the whisperings of the eternal.

While music and its voices sound out the depths of silence and delight our listening, colour calls forth the secrets of darkness and light to bring joy to the eye.