The Hatred of Music

Fifth Treatise. THE SONG OF THE SIRENS

In book IX of the Odyssey, Ulysses, breaking down in tears, confesses his name. The bard puts down his cithara and falls silent. From then on Ulysses speaks in the first person and tells the rest of his adventures: first the cave, then Kirkè’s island, finally his journey to the land of the dead.

Returning from the land of the dead, Ulysses sails along the coast of the island of the Sirens.

Kirkè means bird of prey, Sparrowhawk. Circe sings on the island Aiaiè. Aiaiè in Greek means Moan. Kirkè sings a moaning and languorous song and her song transforms whoever hears it into a pig. Circe the singer has warned Ulysses: the shrill, piercing (ligurè) song (aoidè) of the Sirens pulls (thelgousin) men: it attracts and binds whoever hears it in fascination. The Sirens’ island is a humid meadow (leimōni) surrounded by human bones covered in rotting flesh. The two ruses revealed to Ulysses by the sparrowhawk shaman are as simple as they are precise. Each one of Ulysses’ men must plug both his ears with kneaded wax, removed from a honeycomb with the help of a bronze knife. Ulysses alone is allowed to keep his ears open on condition that he be bound with ropes three times: hands bound, feet bound, and, standing on deck, his thorax bound to the mast.

Each time Ulysses asks to be released, Eurylokhos and Perimedes will tighten the ropes. He can then hear what no mortal has heard without dying: the scream-songs (at the same time phthoggos and aoidè) of the Sirens.

The end of Homer’s scene is more inconsistent.

When silence has returned to the sea, it is in all likelihood the sailors, whose ears are plugged, who hear the Sirens’ song fading in the distance, since it is agreed that if Ulysses were to ask that the ropes be loosened, they would only be tightened by Eurylokhos and Perimedes. In short, the sailors, whose ears are plugged, upon hearing the silence, hasten to remove from their ears the pieces of wax that Ulysses had cut with his bronze knife and kneaded with his fingers.

At that moment, Eurylokhos and Perimedes untie (anelysan) Ulysses. It so happens that this is also the first time the word analysis appears in a Greek text.

The simple act of inverting the episode seems to me to give it its soundest meaning.

With their supernatural song, birds attract men to the place strewn with bones where they perch: with their artificial song, men attract birds to the place strewn with bones where they nest.

The artificial song that serves to attract birds is called a birdcall. The Sirens are birds’ revenge on the birdcalls that make them victims of their own song. Archaeological digs in the oldest caves reveal whistles and birdcalls. Paleolithic hunters mimetically lured the animals they hunted and from whom they did not distinguish themselves. Reindeer and ibex horns were depicted on the nocturnal walls. They are exhibited in books as illustrations flooded with light: it must not be forgotten that horns can also sound. The first human depictions sometimes hold a horn in their hands. To drink its blood? To hail the animal of which it is a sign (a sign that falls in the forest when it is shed) to the point of becoming the sound that signals it?

The speculation can then be articulated in the following way: Homer’s text retells in an inverted episode a prototypical tale about the origin of music, according to which the first music was that of hunters’ whistles-birdcalls. The secrets of hunting (animals’ speech, that is, the cries they emit and that call them) are taught during the initiation. Kirkè is the Sparrowhawk. If vultures and falcons, eagles, owls have been “deified” gradually by their status as celestials, to which hunters left a part of the prey that they had put to death at the ritual moment of sacrifice (detaching the skin, severing the limbs, and separating the organs from the flesh), the calls that attracted them were gradually “theologized.” This is how music, subsequently, became a song that attracted the gods to man, having attracted birds to hunters. It is a later development but the function remains the same.

Their ears lead them to the birdlime where their feet are ensnared: the wax in their ears prevents them from hearing the decoy.

In Rome, deer were considered cowardly animals — unworthy of senators who preferred boar — because they fled when they were attacked and were thought to adore music. Deer were hunted with calls or decoys: either a sort of syrinx mimicking a breeding grunt, or a live bound deer, bellowing and serving as a lure. Deer hunting, considered servile, was done not with spears but with nets: the antlers would become inextricably entangled in the mesh.

All tales tell stories of young men who acquire, in the course of an initiation, the language of animals. Both the call and the decoy hail the emitter in its song. Music in no way consists in bringing something into a human ronde: it allows entry into a re-created zoological ronde. The imitations bring about one another mutually. Birds are alone, like humans, in knowing how to imitate the songs of neighboring species. Mimetic sounds, which are the prey’s acoustic masks, bring the celestial animal, the terrestrial animal, the aquatic animal, all predatory animals including man, thunder, fire, sea, wind into the predatory ronde. Music makes the ronde turn through the sounds of animals in the dance, through images of animals and stars on the walls of the oldest caves. It intensifies the rotation. For the world turns, as do the sun and the stars, seasons and changes, blooms and fruits, ruts and reproductions of animals.

After predation, it ensures domestication. A call is already a domesticator. A decoy is already domesticated.

Ulysses is something of an Athenian. The rite of the Anthesteria in Athens relies on ropes and pitch. Once a year the souls of the dead would return to the city and the Athenians would tie up the temples with ropes and smear the doors of the houses with pitch. Should the errant breaths of the ancestors try to enter their former homes, they would get stuck outside the threshold like flies.

For the entire day clay pots full of food that had been prepared for them were displayed in the middle of the streets.

These breaths (psychè) were later called ghosts (daimōn) or even vampire-sorcerers (kères).

Sir James George Frazer reports that the Bulgarians, at the beginning of the twentieth century, had kept the following custom: in order to ward off evil spirits from their homes, they would paint a cross in tar on the outside of the door while hanging over the threshold a tangled skein composed of multiple threads. Before the ghost could count all the threads the cock would almost certainly crow and the shadow would have to hasten back to its grave before light started to spread, threatening to erase it.

Ulysses bandaged to his mast is also a tireless Egyptian scene. Coming out of the Underworld, Ulysses knows death and resurrection through magic song, surrounded by mummies whose ears have been plugged with natron and resin. Pharaoh in his solar boat crosses the celestial ocean.

Ithyphallic Osiris, on the walls of the tombs hidden in the pyramids, impregnates the bird Isis, who is straddling his belly, conceiving the bird-headed man, the falcon Horus.

The deceased (dark shadow) is depicted before the gates of the underworld preceded by his ba (the colorful siren spreading or folding its wings).

The mummification of corpses was accompanied by the embalmers’ singing. In the funeral accounts, the first budget entry is the linen, the second the mask, the third the music. The Harper’s Song, written in every tomb, repeats the refrain:

The call of the song never saved anyone from the grave.

So make your day happy and do not grow weary listening to the funereal call.

See: no one has brought his belongings with him …

See: no one has come back, who has left.

The ba is an inner bird with a human head and human hands in search of breath. It leaves the body and joins the mummy. The ba of the ancient Egyptians is close to the psychè of the ancient Greeks. In fact, the design of the human-headed bird ba was meticulously copied by Greek potters drawing the Sirens tempting Ulysses on their vases. What we call the Songs of the Desperate of ancient Egypt were really titled Dispute Between a Man and His Ba. The nocturnal refuge of the grave, its cool, water, and food, form the bait that attracts breaths drifting in the air, afflicted by the heat, hungry, thirsty.

Ulysses is bound like a sheaf of grains. He is tied like the carnival bear that is made to dance to the sound of pipes and rattles before being pushed into the river.

He resembles a Yakutian shaman: strapped to the top of a tree he marries the eagle and, on the banks of the Currant River, sinks knee-deep into the bones of the dead.

Sargon before the bird Ishtar.

Every tale, even before changing into the particular plot it stages, is in itself a lure-story (a fiction, a trap) to appease the souls of the exploited animals. All hunting with lures makes atonement through an offering that is nothing but a counterlure. In the same way that one must use songs and fasting to clean weapons infested by the spirits of the bodies that they have cast to the ground in blood and death.

Admitting the ruse that he inverts in the tale, the hunter coming from Kirkè’s abode exorcises the vengeance of the birds that the lure has placed in the song. The tale even exorcises the rope of the nets (that binds Ulysses). Even the birdlime (that plugs the ears of the hero’s companions).

Even the thorax (kithara) covered with strings that Ulysses becomes before the bird.

The word harmonia in Greek describes the way strings are attached in order to be tightened.

The first name for music in archaic Greece (sophia) referred to shipbuilding skills.

When Myron wanted to represent the god of music, he sculpted Marsyas, tied to a tree trunk, in the process of being skinned alive.

The peregrine falcon swoops down on the mallard.

The whistling of the nosedive, due to the speed of the fall, stuns the prey.

Harps, flutes, and drums come together in all music. Strings and fingers, wind and mouth, percussion of hands, and stamping of feet, all parts of the body dance under the influence.

The musical pieces of ancient Japan were always divided into three parts: jo, ha, kyou. The beginning was called “introduction,” the middle was called “tearing,” the end was called “presto.”

Penetration, tearing, very quickly.

The Japanese sonata form.

The shaman-sparrowhawk stands before the lark-spirit.

The shaman is a predator, a soul hunter: he sets traps, nooses, pitfalls, baits, birdlimes. He knows how to hold souls captive and coerce them with severed heads and bound hair. He knows one by one the roads (the songs) that lead to the souls. What the shaman calls road (odos, an ode) is a half-recited and half-sung narration.

They are lures. The image of a fish thrown into the sea entices shoals of its congeners. Music is a call just as the image is a bait.

Even before the image became a bait: color was. Coating the walls with blood means dyeing the walls with the killed animal.

The first color is black (night, then the more absolute black in the darkness of the caves). The second is red.

Thunder is the call of the rainstorm.

The bullroarer¹ is the call of thunder.

The shaman’s drumming does not produce rain: the drummer hails the sound of thunder that in its turn calls the rainstorm.

Music is not a song specific to the species Homo. The song specific to human societies is their language. Music is an imitation of languages taught by prey at the time of the reproduction of the song of the prey during their reproduction.

Nature’s concerts. Music makes us moo, it makes us bray, it makes us trumpet.

It neighs.

It pulls from the belly of the shaman the absent animal that the body mimics and that the skin and the mask show.

Dance is an image. As painting is a song. Simulacra simulate. A rite repeats a metaphora (a voyage). Moving trucks in modern-day Greece still have the word METAPHORA on their sides. A myth is the danced image of the rite itself, which is expected to attract the world.

The shaman is a specialist in animal roars. The master of spirits can metamorphose into anyone or anything — although birds move the fastest and allow him to cross the sea or soar above the mountains. Birds are the most nomadic of nomads. The shaman is an accelerator of transport, of time, that is to say of metaphor, of metamorphosis. Finally he is the most acoustic of the acousticals.

His territory is the air delimited by songs.

1. Music summons to the place where it takes place, 2. it subjugates biological rhythms in dance, 3. in the circle of trance, makes the lowing that speaks in the shaman drop to the ground.

If the voice quavers, the body prances. Jumping is not leaping. Crawling is not sliding. Carp skip-up, tarantella, ball, and masquerade are originally the same thing. From where do we get wriggling, fidgeting, staggering? Lists indexing animal cries, in grammars, exercise an irresistible attraction, provoking endless competitions between children, which persist even among adults.

Ranting, yelling, bawling, barking, wailing, chirping, blabbering, hooting …

Ethnologists have inventoried musical techniques specifically used for intimidating tornadoes, whipping up hurricanes, quenching fire, stunning the wind, spreading panic in rains in order to measure their output by the drum’s rhythm, luring the flock to its trampling, bewitching the arrival of the wild beast in the body of the sorcerer, terrifying the moon, souls, and time into obedience.

In Saint-Genou one can still admire the sculpted Bird Ladies in the church. Cranes holding live rock in their claws. Their necks are tied into a knot, preventing any cry from leaving their throats. This cry is so dense that it kills any being that hears it, but it is so high-pitched that it vanishes into silence, unheard by the living, reminding them that the language of songs preceded the language of languages.

The men return from the underworld and roam the acoustic sea. All the living are under threat of being swallowed by the acoustic sea. Music lures them. Music is the call that lures them toward death.

That lures voices into a resemblance where they are lost.

In the estuary, the river no longer exhibits any of the delicacy of the source. Saving the source, this is my obsession. Saving the source of the river itself, which the source engenders, and which the river swallows by making it grow. We excavate Troy and peel an infinite onion. The great cities of ancient times have not returned to the forests that they cleared away. They will not return to this state. Civilizations, at best, give way to ruins. At worst, to irreversible deserts. I am part of what I have lost.