On One on One

Abstract

ON ONE ON ONE BENJAMIN BORETZ Love, what is it but space and time rendered perceptible by the heart. (Proust, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrief) A nameless frisson courses, consumes, does not have to tell what it is, or that it matters, or what mattering is, just comes into being as an engulfing deluge, or a consuming holocaust. incavates as feel, as meme, as signifying without symbol, without voice, what makes hard, what makes ecstatic, what burns being, what screams NO!!!STOP!!! what matters before it means. 6 Perspectives of New Music me. 81 ÷ 9 yrs old Anna Livia Plurabelle on crappy headphones in the Brooklyn Public Library. It was the same as music, no one told me it mattered, It just was what became me, I was those notes, Those wordshapes, those shadows of being being manifested or evoked, The world what it was only instantaneously as the flashes of now, every flash a transformation, some transformations remake consciousness, what there is. And it lodges as lifelong recollected miracle, this spontaneous instant outbursting of a suffusing inner music by the invasion of a particular sound from without. Often retold in self-revelatory posture, easily assimilated as the model epiphany of those indelible expressive moments in which what Ralph Shapey called "the graven image" was permanently embedded in the receptual DNA coloring every subsequent experience. But even as I tell it, and even as my inward mindtrack traverses the event and its descriptive recollection, I suddenly feel the infinitesimal inchoate gap between them, and realize that something else has been created in that gap, in the inscrutability of the experience and what can be captured of it in any language about it. How does it happen, this spontaneous instantaneous ignition of an overwhelming suffusing music within me by the entry into my body of some arbitrary noise. The cognitive link between one and the other seems a cosmic gap, which has been leapt in some unidentified dimension of being. Description can only capture the boundaries fore and aft, the measurable and determinate and material phenomena and experiences but never the passage between. What is in being in that cognitive gap, what our living through it has brought into being, is without dimensions and characteristics or operational mechanisms; specifically: a mystery. It is the pure immateriality of these transcendent experiential phenomena, that seem to define globally the essence of mattering, that arouses me; they seem always to be sonic phenomena, immaterial timeobjects made explicitly and exclusively of sound and yet unmistakably saturated with unmistakable selfhood: life’s very first thunderstorm with its spasm of total terror gigantically metastasized by the absence On One on One 7 of any accompanying spatiotemporal visualizations. How, from within our metrically spatialized rational prisons, do we contrive to ontologize these undenotable events? How are we even able to, or to conceive doing so (the force of the experience compels us.)? Should we even imagine the possibility of a hardwired Chomskyan innateness of soundlanguage, or even explicitly of musiclanguage? Innateness: is it not a strange and sinister noun? But—on the bright side—should it not follow rather naturally that organically nonverbal phenomena would in any case have no descriptive/explanatory metalanguages, verbal or any other kind. Particularly since the very notion of metalanguage is, well, linguistic. And can denotation denote the not-there? Even if it has feelable presence? And if perhaps Time’s arrow has no arrowhead, after all, what then? But that still leaves us, at least, speechless. So it seems that the coming into being of mattering is prima facie a work of imagination: the conceptualization of a supervenience connecting a scatter of transcendent purely psychic episodes by an act of imaginal set-creation. But set-creation is in the quantified material world mere bricolage, disjuncted from the sensing world by the same transformational gap; the sense of sense that directs it is vanished in the conceptual gap between concept and content and leaves only a determinate-feeling energy on one side and a neutral aggregate of denotables on the other. So are the things that matter not things at all? Or are they things metaphorically separated from the mattering attributed to them...