… ” … my stream of thought would seize on some sentence fragment, and, like an able dancer, would use it as a trampoline, to spring to distant dreams.”
This is from Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts by Douglas Kahn (1999):
… Humans perceive the world while being within the world; they are implicated within it and are not somehow outside looking in or on. The object does not extend itself to the waiting individual: the individual finds it. And if meaning and feeling resides there, it is because the individual finds a piece of himself or herself. The person precedes the perception, making the process an emphatic one: the beloved is already loved, the distance has already been traveled. But what might be the sentient means of getting outside ourselves?
… Terrestrially, sound is not only experienced as occurring in between but as surrounding the listener, and the source of the sound is itself surrounded by its own sound. This mutual envelopment of aurality predisposes an exchange among presences. Baudelaire hears the wind in a tree as sighs already endowed with empathy through observation: “First you lend the tree your passions, your desires or your melancholy; its sighs and its oscillations become yours and soon you are the tree.”
… Moreover, sounds can be heard coming from outside and behind the range of peripheral vision, and sound of adequate intensity can be felt on and within the body as a whole, thereby dislocating the frontal and conceptual associations of vision with an all-around corporeality and spatiality.
… The sense of immersion in noise is guaranteed by the ease through which so much can be perceived within it. There was a proliferation of acts and techniques within the avant-garde for interpolating noise, most of them related to seeing images within visual noise, as innocently as children see animals and faces within the clouds, just a little more intoxicated. Nowhere was this more pronounced than in Surrealism, where such interpolation became elevated through its psychological, psychic, and psychotic associations. While much of the avant-garde was concerned with processes of abstraction, it was exactly the opposite with Surrealism. The interpolation of noise was a means by which meaning was generated from abstraction and thus corresponded directly to Surrealism’s larger project of bringing realms of reality hitherto guarded or unknown into mimetic practice.
… Max Ernst … drew images out of visual noise, unlike Dalí and Artaud, who culled from a preexisting field of noise, his technique of frottage generated the noise in the first place. His discovery of this technique was nevertheless dependent on a preexisting noise. As the legend goes, while at an inn on a rainy day by the seaside, he looked down on the floor and was reminded of his childhood and how a piece of imitation mahogany produced, as he prepared to fall asleep, a repertoire of images. He took a rubbing of the floorboards and found within the scratches, pits, and grain all manner of images. These images recommended themselves because they were wrenched from an “irritated” mind far from the complacent crowd of “Renoir’s three apples, Manet’s four sticks of asparagus, Derain’s little chocolate women, and the Cubist’s tobacco-packet.” … Ernst used noise to remove himself from genteel Europe. Nevertheless, amid his self-generated nature the image of Ernst’s Loplop was often divulged phoenix-like from the noise, a creature with an uncanny resemblance to Ernst’s own bird-like countenance. As with so many techniques of interpolation, nature refracts.
Max Ernst, Palermo… Ernst found precedent for his noise-generating techniques in Leonardo da Vinci’s Treatise on Painting, in which he proposed throwing a sponge soaked in different colors up against a wall and finding landscapes in the blotch of paint. Where Ernst remained within a visual register, Leonardo himself related this technique to how one could hear a multitude of voices in chiming bells.
… it is commonplace for even the most dedicated musical aesthete to listen at times more concertedly to the psyche than to the concert as he or she prefigures a particular passage with an expectation about how it should or has sounded in the past, associates a passage with another work or with matters of the world , adjusts breathing to take in an emotive rendering or suppresses a cough — all those apperceptual processes that constitute listening. Baudelaire’s experience on hashish was but an amplification of an infinite number of conditions and settings where the same takes place: “I will not try to tell you that I listened to the players; you know that’s quite impossible; now and then, my stream of thought would seize on some sentence fragment, and, like an able dancer, would use it as a trampoline, to spring to distant dreams.”
Oscillating between stage and seat, constantly interrupting or melding in a mix that is, ironically, the means through which an idea of unity is negotiated. Again, Baudelaire confirms this as he continues his description: “You might suppose that a play heard in this way would lack logic and connection: allow me to enlighten you; I found a very subtle meaning in the drama spun by my distracted state of mind. Nothing fazed me.” There is a constant state of interruption, shattering the continuity of the music because the “stage” is always oscillating from one location to the other, at times entirely masking one or ephemerally fusing the two. Moreover, this mix is the very process through which some idea of a unity is brought to bear on the actual profusion and disparity of phenomena. In other words, it is through interruption that the semblance of a continuous integrity is established; it is only through noise that the famed ephemerality of music is secured as ephemeral. In the café where the sound is not the object of thought, the mix is exteriorized and thus brings unity to an inaudible intellectual life by providing an atmospheric dispensary for tangents as a stand-in for sociality.
My previous post from Kahn’s book is here.
-Julie
