The Hatred of Music

Fourth Treatise. ON THE SUBJECT OF THE BONDS BETWEEN SOUND AND NIGHT

It sometimes happens that we doubt the dark audience. It sometimes happens that the chimeras of an amniotic, aquatic, muffled, faraway world seem like contentious facts to us. It sometimes also happens that we feel that we vividly remember this world. But remembering is a narration, like stories that tell dreams: these narrations or stories bring so much with them that we are justified in mistrusting ourselves. We are merely a conflict of stories rolled up in a name.

Can we find evidence, in history, that might attest to the torment of this somber audience and that might at the same time be free of any presupposition?

This evidence exists.

It is devoid of meaning; it is the strangest evidence, the most incomprehensible in its extent, and it is situated precisely at the temporal source of the differentiation of the species in the slow desynchronization that took place in the course of prehistory.

We believe −20,000 to be the millennium during which, equipped with almost smokeless lamps made from the fat of prey that were put to death and scraped before preparing the skins, humans entered completely dark places found in cliffsides and in mountain caves. With the help of these lamps, they adorned vast halls, doomed until then to perpetual night, with large monochromatic or two-colored animal images.

Why did the birth of art find itself tied to a subterranean expedition?

Why was art and why does it remain a dark adventure?

Was visual art (at least art visible in the light of a grease lamp flickering in the dark) tied to dreams, which are themselves visiones nocturnae?

Twenty-one thousand years passed: at the end of the nineteenth century humanity flocked to bury itself in the dark halls of cinematography.

Why have numerous dead, through the Mesolithic, been found with their limbs gathered together, bound with the tendons of dead reindeer, in a fetal position, their head between their knees, in the form of eggs covered in red ochre, wrapped in the skins of decapitated and sewn-up animals? Why are the first depictions of humans chimerical, mixing animality and humanity, bison-men, singing shamans with animal heads?

Why these stags with their horns depicted in the act of bellowing? Why these goats depicted bleating during rutting season? (Tragōdia in Greek still means, explicitly for a modern Greek, goat song.) Why these lions with their jaws open, roaring?

Is music depicted through these first images?

Were these “visionaries,” these dreamers of the cavernous night, these shamans, the first fresco painters, particularly interested in the transformation of animals shedding antlers and changing voices?

More precisely: in the transformation of young boys at the age when their bodies and their voices change, at the age when they change from children into men, that is to say at the age of their initiation into the secrets of hunters (that is, into the secrets of animal-men) and into the secret language of the animals that they pursued, that nourished them and in whose skin they dressed?

Can the horns of ibexes, of bulls, of reindeer distinguish within themselves the tool used for drinking their blood and sharing it after the sacrifice, the one for the fermented drink that inspires visions and mimetic dances, and the one for the sound of their call?

Did these men sing while they painted, like the Australian Bushmen? (In the same way that the legends about the great Greek painter Parrhasius describe him as singing.)

Why do all inventoried sanctuaries begin where the light of day and the astral brightness are no longer perceptible, where the darkness and the concealed depths of the earth reign supreme?

Why was it necessary to hide these images (which are not images, which were always visions, phantasmata, which could be glimpsed only by a flickering flame resting in the fat of a dead animal) in the hidden earth? Why then scratch out what is shown? Why riddle the depicted with arrows like in the ball or dart games of traditional festivals and fairs? Like so many Saint Sebastians?

André Leroi-Gourhan, in The Art of Prehistoric Man, boils down the question to a single sentence: why did the thought of bison and horse hunters “bury” itself at the time of the glacial retreat?

I will present the speculation specific to this short treatise in the following manner: these caves are not sanctuaries for images.

I maintain that Paleolithic caves are musical instruments whose walls were decorated.

They are nocturnal resonators that were painted in a manner that was by no means panoramic: they were painted in the invisible. The choice of the decorated walls was based on echoes. The place of acoustic doubles is the echo: they are echo chambers. (In the same way that the space of visible doubles is the mask: bison masks, stag masks, masks of birds of prey with hooked beaks, bison-men puppets.) The stag-man depicted at the end of the cul-de-sac in the Cave of the Trois Frères is holding a bow. I will not distinguish the hunting tool from the first lyre, just as I did not distinguish Apollo the archer from Apollo the citharede.

Cave paintings begin where we can no longer see our hands before our eyes.

Where we see the color black.

Echoes are guides and reference points in the silent darkness that they enter and where they search for images.

Echoes are the voice of the invisible. The living do not see the dead in the light of day. Whereas they see them at night in their dreams. In echoes, the emitter cannot be found. It is a game of hide-and-seek between the visible and the audible.

The first humans painted their visiones nocturnae by letting themselves be guided by the acoustic properties of certain walls. In the caves of Ariège, the Paleolithic shaman-painters depict roaring, just in front of the jaws or muzzle of wild beasts, in the form of a group of strokes. These strokes or even incisions are their roar. They also painted masked shamans holding their birdcalls or their bows. Resonance, in the great resonant sanctuaries, was tied to apparition, behind the curtain of stalagmites.

To the light of the grease lamp, which one by one revealed the animal epiphanies shrouded in darkness, responded the music of calcite lithophones.

In Malta, in the Hypogeum cave, a resonating cavity has been hollowed out by human hands. Its frequency is ninety hertz, the amplification of which proves to be terrifying provided that the emitted voices are low.

R. Murray Schafer made an inventory in his books of all the ziggurats, temples, crypts, and cathedrals that echo, that reverberate, that constitute a polyphonic labyrinth.

Echoes engender the mystery of the alter ego world.

Lucretius simply stated that all places that echo are temples.

In 1776, Vivant Denon visits the echoing cave of the Sibyl and notes in his travel journal: “There is not a more impressive sound. It is perhaps the most beautiful acoustic body that exists.”

In the Cave of the Trois Frères, the shaman with reindeer antlers, reindeer ears, horse tail, lion paws, has the eyes of an owl: he has the eyes of a predator that relies on hearing. Of cavernicoles.

The Aranda verb for being born is alkneraka: becoming-eyes.

The inhabitants of ancient Sumer named the place where the dead go: the Land-of-No-Return.

Sumerian texts describe the Land-of-No-Return thus: the breath of the dead barely survives, asleep, covered in dirt and feathers, wretched, like “nocturnal birds living in caves.”

Isis, when she offered the model of lamentation to the first Egyptians, said in her lamentation that, when eyes do not see, eyes desire.

The hymn makes clear, to the detriment of language, that the voice that hails the dead does not reach their ears. The voice only names them. It can only summon the pain of those who are deprived of their loved ones.

The myth says that when Isis began the first lamentation — the lamentation over Osiris’s castrated corpse, whose sex is lost — as soon as Isis sang, the child of the Queen of Byblos died.

The first figurative narration was painted at the bottom of a well, itself at the bottom of a completely dark cave. It is a dying, ithyphallic man knocked down on his back, a bison, gored by a spear, charging at him, a staff surmounted by the head of a hook-beaked bird.

The last religion that persists in the space where I live depicts a dying man.

It is said, in the New Testament, that Christ was blindfolded when he was slapped.

Every God bleeds in the dark.

God bleeds only in hearing and in the night. Outside the night and caves, he shines like a sun.

Isaac can no longer see. He is in the night. Jacob says: “I did not bring you a ewe killed by wild beasts.”

Jacob did not bring a ewe killed by wild beasts but he covered his arms with it.

Isaac feels him and says: “The voice is Jacob’s but the arms are Esau’s” and he blesses him.

He reflects: “His voice has not yet changed and yet his body is covered in hair.”

As a child, I sang. As an adolescent, like all adolescents, my voice broke. But it remained muffled and lost. I passionately buried myself in instrumental music. There is a direct link between music and voice change. Women are born and die in a soprano that seems indestructible. Their voice is their reign. Men lose their childhood voices. At thirteen, they become hoarse, quaver, bleat. It is curious that our language still says that they bleat. Men are counted among the animals whose voices break. Within the species, they make up a species that sings in two voices.

They can be defined, from puberty on: humans who have shed their voice.

In the male voice, childhood, nonlanguage, the relationship with the mother and her dark water, with the amnion, as well as the obedient elaboration of the first emotions, finally the child’s voice that attracts the maternal language, are a snake’s coat.

Men therefore cut off their voice change as they cut off their testicles. A forever childlike voice. They are castrati.

Or men compose with their lost voice. We call them composers. They recompose as best they can an acoustic territory that does not change, unchangeable.

Or perhaps still, humans compensate with instruments for their bodily lack and the acoustic abandonment in which the deepening of their voice has plunged them. They thus regain the both puerile and maternal high registers of nascent emotion, of their acoustic home.

We name them virtuosi.

Human castration can be defined as the Neolithic domestication of the voice. Intraspecific domestication that lasted from the Neolithic until the end of the eighteenth century in Europe. It reflects the underground circumcisions in shamanic caves where dying to childhood and being reborn mutated into an animal-man, into a hunter, was one and the same metamorphosis.

In the Hypogeum cave, women’s and children’s voices cannot make the stone instrument resound, the frequency of their voices not being low enough to set the rocky resonance going.

Only boys whose voices have changed can make the Hypogeum cave resound.

Changing voice, dying and being reborn: the funerary or nocturnal journey and juvenile initiation are inseparable. Propp said that all the world’s fantastic tales recounted this initiation journey: returning home bearded and hoarse.

What is a hero? Neither a living nor a dead person. A shaman who enters the other world and who returns.

A changed person.

It is coming back from the cave, from the jaws of the animal that swallows, tears to pieces, that is to say incises, and spits out into the sunlight.

Since the zoological emergence, three million years separate us from weapon-tools made of stone. Then forty thousand years of prehistory. Finally nine thousand years of history, which is nothing but infinite war. Humans coming out of prehistory, at the very beginning of the Neolithic, tearing time apart to the point where they could plan the year, considered plants, animals, humans as breeders. They sacrificed the first fruits, the firstborn of their herds and of their own kind. They castrated.

Osiris is torn apart and emasculated. The fourteenth piece of his body, nowhere to be found, is his sex. During the Osiris processions, women musicians would sing his hymn in his honor while moving with strings the obscene marionettes of their god. Attis tears off his penis under a pine and splatters the earth with blood. The ritual was accompanied by tambourines, cymbals, flutes, and horns. The hymns of the eunuch priest colleges of Attis were immensely renowned all over the Orient. The musician Marsyas, having picked up the flute thrown away by Athena, was bound to a pine and emasculated, then flayed. The Greeks would go to see his skin at Celaenae, in the historical era, in a cave, at the foot of the citadel. They said that his skin would still quiver, as long as the aulete played his flute well. Orpheus is emasculated and torn apart. Music and the marvelous voice, the domesticated voice, castration are bound together.

Death is hungry. But death is blind. Caeca nox. Dark night means blind night, unseeing.

As night, the dead can recognize only by the voice.

In the night, orientation is acoustic. In the depths of caves, in the absolute and nocturnal silence in the depths of caves, the white, golden calcite curtains, serving as lithophones, are broken at the height of a human being.

The broken stalagmites and stalactites were transported, in the prehistoric era, out of caves. They are fetishes.

The Greek geographer Strabo reports that in the depths of the Corycian cave, two hundred feet from its entrance, under the dripping stalactites, where the subterranean spring spouted and then disappeared with a rumble into a fissure, in the most complete darkness, the pious men of Greece would hear cymbals played by the hands of Zeus.

Strabo adds that other Greeks, in the first century Before Christ, affirmed that it was the mashing of the jaws of Typhon, Stealer of Bear Nerves.

In the eighteenth century of our era, Jan de l’Ors (Jean of the Bear) securely fastens the rope under his arm. He descends to the bottom of the well. The hole continues vertically into the earth so far that he cannot see the bottom. The walls are slimy. Bats silently take flight in the darkness. The descent lasts three full days.

At the end of the third day, his forty-quintal stick touches the bottom of the earth. Jan de l’Ors unfastens the rope. He takes a couple of steps in the immense cavern in which he has just landed.

A large pile of bones is strewn on the ground.

He treads between skulls.

He enters a castle in the middle of the cave. He walks but his steps no longer resonate.

Jan throws his forty-quintal stick on the marble floor: it makes the sound of a bird feather falling on snow.

Jan de l’Ors immediately understands that this castle is the land where sounds cannot be born.

He raises his head toward a gigantic cat made of calcite, luminous glass, crystal. The great cat wears on its forehead a carbuncle blazing in the darkness. Everywhere are trees full of golden apples surrounding a silent fountain: the water spouts and falls without a sound.

Sitting on the edge of the fountain, a young girl, as beautiful as dawn, combs her hair with a crescent moon.

Jan de l’Ors approaches her but she does not see him. The eyes of the marvelous young girl remain irresistibly fixed on the flames of the carbuncle that holds the place under its charm.

Jan wants to speak to her: he asks his question but his question does not resonate.

“The woman is bewitched,” Jan de l’Ors thinks, “and I’m going to go mad in this deathly silence.”

So Jan picks up his forty-quintal stick, brandishes it, and strikes the head of the great crystal cat.

All the stalactites break, emitting the world’s most beautiful song. The imprisoned sounds are suddenly set free. The fountain murmurs. The slabs resonate. The leaves rustle on the tree branches. The voices speak.