The Hatred of Music

Eighth Treatise. RES, EOCHAID, ECKHART

Res was a cowherd on the Bahlisalp. In the summers he would go up to the pasture and spend the nights on the mountain. Every night, he made sure to bolt the wooden lock on the door to his cabin. One day, after putting out the flames, scattering the embers, covering them with the ashes, and falling asleep, suddenly he saw around the hearth, in a bright light, a giant with thick hands and red cheeks, a servant with a pale face carrying buckets of milk, a green hunter holding a branch in his hand.

The servant with the pale face handed three buckets full of milk one by one to the giant. Then, while the giant and the green hunter made cheese, the pale young man went over to the door of the cabin, which was open, leaned against the left doorpost, and played the alphorn to the great delight of Res and his herd.

As the giant with the colorful cheeks finished pouring the whey into the buckets, it so happened that the whey took on a color as red as blood in the first container.

It became green as the forests in the second.

It became white as the snow in the third.

The giant then shouted to Res. He commanded him to choose between the buckets. Speaking very loudly, he said:

“Take the red one, I’m giving it to you. Drink it. You’ll become strong like me. No one will stand up to you and defeat you. You’ll be the most powerful man of the mountain and you’ll be surrounded by a hundred bulls and their cows.”

The hunter spoke in his turn and said, calmly addressing Res:

“What is strength? What’s a herd to care for, to milk, to lead, to pair, to calve, and to feed in the winter? Drink from the green bucket and your right hand will be made of gold while all that the other touches will turn to silver. Gold and silver take up less space in your pocket than a herd on the pasture. You’ll be free to go wherever you like in the world. You’ll be rich.”

And, having spoken, the hunter threw a pile of gold and silver at Res’s feet.

Res hesitated to answer the giant and the green hunter. Bewildered, he turned to the servant, who was leaning against the left doorpost and who had not yet spoken. He held his alphorn in his hands. He turned his white face toward Res. He lifted his blue eyes toward him. He left the doorstep. He approached Res. He said:

“What I have to offer you is rather paltry and can in no way be compared to the strength or wealth you’ve been offered. I can teach you to yodel songs. I can also teach you to play the alphorn. Animals, men, their wives, their children will obey you. Even benches and tables will dance in their cabins. Bulls will stand up on their hind legs and jump over hedges when you play the horn. All this is contained in the bucket filled with white whey, like the one you drink every day.”

Res, the cowherd on the Bahlisalp, chose the white bucket and its corresponding gift. This is how music came to mankind, pallor and obedience.

The first king to rule Ireland was Eochaid, who was nicknamed Feidleach. His people thought that he had been nicknamed Feidleach because he was feidil, which means just. But the sobriquet had a completely different meaning.

Eochaid once had four sons. When he was old, his four sons joined forces against him. They fought him at a place known as Druim Criach. Initially, Eochaid tried to reach a truce with his sons. But only the youngest accepted and left Druim Criach, unwilling to fight against his brothers. The three others rejected the agreement. Eochaid promptly cursed his three sons, saying:

“Let them be like their name!”

Eochaid then did battle and killed seven thousand warriors, despite having only, for his part, three thousand men at his command. His three sons fell in the battle. Afterward, all three having been decapitated, their three heads were brought to Druim Criach before the end of the day. Eochaid looked at them and did not speak until night fell and buried all four of them — the three children and their father — in darkness. Whence the nickname Feidleach, which means fedil uch, long sigh, since after his sons had been killed in the battle of Druim Criach, sorrow never left his heart.

Not a single warrior doubted the suffering the king felt before the heads displayed before his eyes.

They all admired him, for the king had not dismissed his pain.

Since he had not emitted the slightest moan, he was nicknamed Long Sigh.

Saying is losing.

He wished to keep his children in his heart.

Nocturnal cave, animal maw, human mouth are all the same.

Room of paintings, mask-room, initiation room, cannibal room, forbidden room, secret room are all the same.

Until his death, even at the instant of his death, the suffering that Eochaid had endured in the twilight that followed the battle of Druim Criach, when night began to settle on the severed heads of his three sons, never crossed his lips.

Long sigh because he held it until he was among the dead, where he joined them.

Long sigh overflowing the lips, immense sigh pouring out, endless sob that holds nothing back, that unleashes all suffering to the point of hailing it and loving it, this is how, as king Eochaid’s antonym, the totality of European music of the nineteenth century presents itself. I label European Romantic music everything that was written from 1789 to 1914. This music has become completely inaudible, sentimental, outrageous, by now global, electrically multiplied, essentially bellicose. Tears of nostalgia for the land of their fathers fall from Frédéric Chopin’s eyes, from Richard Wagner’s, from Giuseppe Verdi’s. What did Romantic Europe invent? Horrendous war. Nationalism was the Romantics’ great claim and they perceived it as a right to a war that they considered feidil, which is to say just.

The legend that comes from the book of ancient Irish kings says that feidleach does not mean just, but fedil uch, long sigh.

Suddenly, war was defined by the Romantics as a liberation.

Meister Eckhart comments on Saint Augustine.

Saint Augustine wrote, at the end of the fourth century, twelve years before Rome was invaded, in book IV of the Confessions, recalling his years teaching rhetoric in Carthage: “My soul, be deaf in the ear belonging to your heart.”

Eckhart the Thuringian wonders ten centuries later: “How does one become deaf in aure cordis (in the ear of the heart)?” He adds: “I sow thorns and brambles.”

Then Eckhart writes: “I recommend abandoning everything that sounds. Isaiah said: ‘The voice cries out in the wilderness.’ Have you found in yourself the mark of the wilderness?”

Eckhart comments: “Therefore, in order for the voice to be heard and to cry out in the ear of your heart, make yourself, in your heart, the wilderness where it cries. Become wilderness. Listen to the wilderness of sound.”

This is the first argument Eckhart puts forth.

Eckhart suggests a second argument: “Hearing implies time. If hearing implies time, then hearing God is hearing nothing.

“Hear nothing.

“Free yourself from music.”

Eckhart suggests a third argument: “There are people who go out to sea with a weak wind and cross the sea: they do this but they do not cross it.

“The sea is not a surface. It is, from top to bottom, an abyss.

“If you want to cross the sea, sink.”