Can music, poetry and art be true?

[Florestan]

If the temperature is not absolute zero (0 Kelvin, -273.15 C) thermal motion will continue. It will be infinitesimally small, of course. And from a quantum mechanical point of view there is no zero-energy state.

Yes, indeed. I was talking about mechanical, visible motion. And I certainly didn't imply that a state of complete mechanical stillness is a zero-energy state.

Still (pun), I think that at the level of ordinary human perception Newtonian mechanics can accurately describe and predict how the inanimate world works  whereas psychology cannot accurately describe and predict how human beings behave.

[Mandryka]

ritter can unfortunately not explain this one. He can admire it, though... 

Worried person alone in dark room at sunset. You can just make out the design on the frame of a mirror. But when night falls all that vanishes and all you see is the reflection of seven stars.

Now, why didn't Mallarmé just put it like that?!

[Florestan]

Worried person alone in dark room at sunset. You can just make out the design on the frame of a mirror. But when night falls all that vanishes and all you see is the reflection of seven stars.

Now, why didn't Mallarmé just put it like that?!

"Nommer un objet c'est supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du poème, qui est faite du bonheur de deviner peu a peu : le suggérer . . . voila le rêve".

[Mandryka]

"Nommer un objet c'est supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du poème, qui est faite du bonheur de deviner peu a peu : le suggérer . . . voila le rêve".

Yes, maybe. Just look at the first two lines

Ses purs ongles très-haut dédiant leur onyx,
L'Angoisse, ce minuit, soutient, lampadophore,

Look at all the work you have to put in to realise that he's talking about some weird onyx lamp in the shape of a pair of hands (and that lamp is itself weird), and in the middle of it all he plants, as if to put us off track, L'angoisse ce minuit. I suppose you realise something strange is going on as soon as you read très haut.


And then there's this mysterious word ptyx. I mean, what the fuck is a ptyx? Does he expect the reader to know, or to scratch his head in confusion?

[Florestan]

Yes, maybe. Just look at the first two lines

Ses purs ongles très-haut dédiant leur onyx,
L'Angoisse, ce minuit, soutient, lampadophore,

Look at all the work you have to put in to realise that he's talking about some weird onyx lamp in the shape of a pair of hands (and that lamp is itself weird), and in the middle of it all he plants, as if to put us off track, L'angoisse ce minuit. I suppose you realise something strange is going on as soon as you read très haut.


And then there's this mysterious word ptyx. I mean, what the fuck is a ptyx? Does he expect the reader to know, or to scratch his head in confusion?

As I told you before, it's all an intellectual game expressing nothing but itself --- something I am not keen on, be it poetry or music. I vastly prefer Baudelaire and Verlaine over Mallarme.

[Wanderer]

And then there's this mysterious word ptyx. I mean, what the fuck is a ptyx? Does he expect the reader to know, or to scratch his head in confusion?

«  Enfin, comme il se pourrait toutefois que, rythmé par le hamac, [...] je fisse un sonnet, et que je n'ai que trois rimes en ix, concertez-vous pour m'envoyer le sens réel du mot ptyx, ou m'assurer qu'il n'existe dans aucune langue, ce que je préférerais de beaucoup afin de me donner le charme de le créer par la magie de la rime. [...] je vous en supplie avec l'impatience « d'un poëte en quête d'une rime » . »

— Stéphane Mallarmé, À Eugène Lefébure, 3 mai 1868

[Mandryka]

That's cheating!

[Mandryka]

As I told you before, it's all an intellectual game expressing nothing but itself --- something I am not keen on, be it poetry or music. I vastly prefer Baudelaire and Verlaine over Mallarme.

I now think my little exegesis was total horseshit and I missed the real central idea of the poem -  the lamp is the sun, the onyx nails are the stars.

It's like modernist music, at first everyone is totally disoriented, but slowly if you persevere you start to glimpse something good going on. I like that process.

[Florestan]

I now think my little exegesis was total horseshit and I missed the real central idea of the poem -  the lamp is the sun, the onyx nails are the stars.

How do you know? It can be the former, it can be the latter, it can be something completely different. I very much doubt Mallarme himself would've been able to explain it in no uncertain terms. 

[Mandryka]

How do you know? It can be the former, it can be the latter, it can be something completely different. I very much doubt Mallarme himself would've been able to explain it in no uncertain terms. 

I know because there's an earlier version of the sonnet which makes it clear.


La Nuit approbatrice allume les onyx
De ses ongles au pur Crime, lampadophore,
Du Soir aboli par le vespéral Phoenix
De qui la cendre n'a de cinéraire amphore

Sur des consoles, en le noir Salon: nul ptyx,
Insolite vaisseau d'inanité sonore,
Car le Maître est allé puiser de l'eau du Styx
Avec tous ses objets dont le Rêve s'honore.

Et selon la croisée au Nord vacante, un or
Néfaste incite pour son beau cadre une rixe
Faite d'un dieu que croit emporter une nixe

En l'obscurcissement de la glace, décor
De l'absence, sinon que sur la glace encor
De scintillations le septuor se fixe.

[Crudblud]

While I wonder what it is for music to be 'true', I also wonder how music can express anything other than itself.

Perhaps in expressing what is immanent to itself music is 'true'.

[Mandryka]

While I wonder what it is for music to be 'true', I also wonder how music can express anything other than itself.

Perhaps in expressing what is immanent to itself music is 'true'.

This all started for me with the idea that Rothko's large murals - Seagram, the Houston chapel - offer the viewer a glimpse of some sort of transcendent truth, whatever that means. Rothko and his friends - the De Menils in Houston and Feldman for example - thought the same about Mondrian, De Kooning and others. And Feldman himself had wanted, I think, to make musical equivalents of Rothko paintings.

[Crudblud]

This all started for me with the idea that Rothko's large murals - Seagram, the Houston chapel - offer the viewer a glimpse of some sort of transcendent truth, whatever that means. Rothko and his friends - the De Menils in Houston and Feldman for example - thought the same about Mondrian, De Kooning and others. And Feldman himself had wanted, I think, to make musical equivalents of Rothko paintings.

I suppose I don't really have those kinds of thoughts about music at least. I can see music transcending meaning, but as to getting at something transcendent I don't know. Perhaps I lack the temperament for that kind of thinking. At any rate I've never seen a Rothko in person, so maybe that revelation awaits me yet.

[Florestan]

I know because there's an earlier version of the sonnet which makes it clear.

Next time you meet your friend Petru, ask him to translate this for you and discuss.

Joc secund

by Ion Barbu ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Barbu )

Din ceas, dedus adâncul acestei calme creste,
Intrată prin oglindă în mântuit azur,
Tăind pe înecarea cirezilor agreste,
În grupurile apei, un joc secund, mai pur.

Nadir latent! Poetul ridică însumarea
De harfe resfirate ce-n zbor invers le pierzi
Şi cântec istoveşte: ascuns, cum numai marea
Meduzele când plimbă sub clopotele verzi.

Make sure to have plenty of Chardonnay, you'll need it. 

[Mandryka]

By the way @Florestan, I now think that Ses purs ongles très-haut dédiant leur onyx is about sex -- in particular the feeling of a lover alone in the bedroom after her beloved has left her. Des licornes ruant du feu contre une nixe -- every unicorn has a phallic horn. And a nixe turns out to be what in English we call a nymph. A fiery battle between a unicorn and a nymph is a wonderful image of sex. And the stars appearing as she is left alone, full of anguish because her lover has departed to Styx -- the river of forgetfulness -- isn't that wonderful!   @ritter -- look what you were missing!

I'll email the poem to Petru -- who tells me now that he wants to be called Marius because Petru is his saint's name (or baptism name -- I know nothing about this!) and all his friends in Romania use Marius.

[Florestan]

By the way Florestan, I now think that Ses purs ongles très-haut dédiant leur onyx is about sex -- in particular the feeling of a lover alone in the bedroom after her beloved has left her. Des licornes ruant du feu contre une nixe -- every unicorn has a phallic horn. And a nixe turns out to be what in English we call a nymph. A fiery battle between a unicorn and a nymph is a wonderful image of sex. And the stars appearing as she is left alone, full of anguish because her lover has departed to Styx -- the river of forgetfulness -- isn't that wonderful!  ritter -- look what you were missing!

A lamp; the Sun and the stars; sex. I wonder what you will come up with tomorrow. 

If you ask my opinion on that Mallarme sonnet, here it is: I don't know and I don't care. I have better things to do than to scratch my head over it.

[AnotherSpin]

Poetry endlessly strives for truth, like a butterfly strives for the flame of a candle. The end is predictable. And yet, the truth is here and never disappears under any circumstances, only temporarily, maybe. And, the truth is not in poetry. Poetry is a butterfly.

[Spotted Horses]

Poetry endlessly strives for truth, like a butterfly strives for the flame of a candle. The end is predictable. And yet, the truth is here and never disappears under any circumstances, only temporarily, maybe. And, the truth is not in poetry. Poetry is a butterfly.

A proper undefined answer to an undefined question.

[pjme]

Mallarmé... - the impossibly difficult one....

I found this:

This sonnet is particularly hermetic.
Very exceptionally Mallarmé had given a commentary on it in his letter to (friend & poet) Henri Cazalis of July 18, 1868:

"I extract this sonnet, which I had once thought of, from a study projected on the Word: it is inverse, I mean that the meaning, if it has one, (but I would console myself for the contrary thanks to the dose of poetry that it contains, it seems to me) is evoked by an internal mirage of the words themselves. By letting oneself go to murmur it several times one experiences a rather cabalistic sensation. It is to confess that it is not very "plastic" as you ask me, but at least it is as "black and white" as possible, and it seems to me to lend itself to an etching full of Dream and Emptiness. - For example, an open nocturnal window, the two shutters attached; a room with no one in it, despite the stable air presented by the attached shutters, and in a night made of absence and questioning, without furniture, except for the plausible outline of vague consoles, a frame, bellicose and dying, of a mirror hanging in the background, with its reflection, stellar and incomprehensible, of the Great Bear, which connects to the sky alone this abandoned dwelling of the world. - I took this subject of a null sonnet reflecting itself in all ways because my work is so well prepared and hierarchical, representing, as it can the Universe, that I would not have known, without damaging one of my staged impressions, to remove anything from it - and no sonnet is found there".

This letter is very useful for the commentary of the second version of a text "speaking for itself and without the author's voice", according to the terms of Mallarmé in his letter to Verlaine of 1887.

https://www.studocu.com/fr/document/universite-de-lille/litterature/fiche-mallarme-sonnet-en-xy/6684727

In July 1868, Mallarmé sent Cazalis the manuscript of this poem. Cazalis had asked him for a sonnet for a collection that the publisher Lemerre had entrusted to Philippe Burty. The idea was to join sonnets by living poets to plates by the best artists of the time under the title "Sonnets et Eaux-fortes".

https://librairie-walden.com/document/sous-cartonnage-editeur/

But Mallarmé was not included. A letter from Cazalis to Mallarmé explains the reason: "You can see I am furious, I did not take your sonnet to Lemerre. Saturday when I arrived with a very beautiful sonnet by Lefébure, Lemerre replied to me that Burty, the impresario of this foolish affair, now had more sonnets than etchers, and would not accept any more, even if it was a sonnet by God himself. I replied to him that he was a fool, that his volume would be as ridiculously written as the Parnassus, that it was absurd to entrust Burty with the keys to the kingdom of Saint-Pierre, when this Burty was neither an etcher nor a poet, ... No matter, I will return to the attack. Your sonnet is very bizarre. Will it please? No, certainly not; but it is your honor to flee the taste of the popular."

[Mandryka]

A lamp; the Sun and the stars; sex. I wonder what you will come up with tomorrow. 

If you ask my opinion on that Mallarme sonnet, here it is: I don't know and I don't care. I have better things to do than to scratch my head over it.

It's not a question of scratching heads, it's a question of going deeper and deeper. It's like great music in that respect. All of these things are there -- lamp, sunset, sex. They're not incompatible, the poem contains multitudes.