Response to Comments
Part I
Part I
Dialogue
On the Analogy between Music & Life
Vic, I had difficulty in comprehending the analogy between music and life in your comments on Feng Zhi's Sonnet 2. Do you see the set of equivalences as follows?
Song – life
Sound – actual rendition of life
Body of the song – body of life
But this would contradict your statements:
1. “The body of the song is not the sound either, but the part of the song that is realized as sound. It requires a medium, a vehicle. Life, too, it would seem, requires a medium or a vehicle.”
Life (not the body of life) is the counterpart of the body of the song (not the song) that requires a vehicle?
2. “The body of life, like the song, remains more or less the same, but the actual rendition of the life is fresh and new, like … the new body into which a caterpillar is transformed when it molts.”
The body of life is the counterpart of the song that remains?—that varies?
3. “But the life that we are so concerned to preserve is in fact preserved: it passes on via the body.”
Does the body of the song pass on via the song? Or does the song pass on via the body of the song?
4. “The body is what preserves life and enables it to be reborn and renewed. But the body is not what we thought it was. It is a framework, a vehicle, a structure, a vessel. Like the skins of the cicada, like leaves, like spring color adorning a hill, like sound, it falls, it can be discarded.”
Can the body of the song be discarded as well? Note line 13: “what remains in the end is the body of the music.”
5. “Life is neither the framework nor its physical expression, but the interplay between these.”
How would you transfer this onto the case of song/sound/body of the song?
6. “Life is not a vehicle, but it requires a vehicle.”
Does the song–or the body of the song—require a vehicle?
At this point, I am inclined to assume that your set of counterparts actually looks as follows:
Song – body of life
Sound – rendition of life
Body of the song – life
I am not sure, though, whether this was your intention and whether this really solves the controversies above.
Huiwen
************
Huiwen, you are a sensitive reader! I appreciate that so much. Your questions are based upon an apparent contradiction, and I should have acknowledged that explicitly in my comment. If there were a simple set of equivalences, one that did not contradict itself, I think that the poet would be a lot less profound than it is. What my reflections revealed to me was an extremely complex set of meanings and relationships that oscillate or change depending upon the pairing.
I’ll answer your questions in order, but please understand that I do not expect my answers to simplify. I answer because I am hoping to clarify each of the relations separately. They may seem to contradict anyway. This is because the terms in each analogy have meaning only in that analogy, and may have a different meaning in a different analogy. The question I (or we) need to answer is, how the analogies work together.
1. In this analogy, I imagine (or understand) that there is a song that exists in one’s mind, or in many minds, even when it is not being sung or recalled as a sung song. It is this that enables us to sing, if we choose to, and to recognize that what we are singing is THAT song (perhaps That here is like THAT death?). Life is like this, perhaps, in that it exists separately from its manifestations in THIS life, MY life, THAT life, YOUR life. Does it exist in a mind or minds, like a song? Perhaps, in that I am able to think it. Perhaps not: can I produce it in the way that I can sing the song?
2. The body of life from (1) is the part that does not vary. The variation comes in each manifestation, performance, singing. But in analogy with the caterpillar, it would seem to be that which is transformed. Thus as life manifests itself in particular lives, it is expressing a transformation. Life, then, IN ME, the particular life I call MINE, is a manifestation and a transformation. These are different, and both occur. There is an organic process by which individual life produces individual life through transformation, individual life arises from individual life through transformation, but also individual life manifests and expresses an underlying general life force.
3. Nice questions. Both, I suppose, but given what I write in (2), these are not meant in the same way. The human body is a vehicle for two different things: the expression of life as a general force and the realization of new life through a transformative process. What I meant by my statement, however, focused on our worry about death: the fear of loss. The poem suggests that instead of worrying about loss, we realize the gain. Loss depends upon the assumption that there was no life before my birth. Now there is life. When I pass away, my life passes away. I then am lost together with it. So I think. But the poem causes me to rethink this as follows: life preexists my birth. My body serves as a vehicle for that life, which it manifests and expresses. When I die, the body of life will not die, it will simply await (or pass on to) other vehicles, other manifestations, other expressions. As I live, so I sing the song. In addition, being alive, I can actually choose to sing a song--a voiced expression. Thus I can also shape my life. I can help give it expression, and in so doing, I am helping to give expression to the body of life. Like a singer, I can interpret the song that I sing, I can interpret the life energy that is flowing or channeling through my existence.
4. The human body is not like the body of song. Here is where I have, thanks to the metaphor, reconceived the meaning of body. The human body is more like the actual rendition of the song. But not exactly. It's more that the way in which the consciousness supported by the body and identifying itself with the body is a manifestation of a broader and more persistent consciousness. Life, as described in (3), is a metaphor for consciousness.
5. Life and consciousness do not exist as a reservoir somewhere from which individuals are tapped and into which individuals are later poured back. Where does the song come from when I sing? Is my singing now the song itself? It's not simple. If I hear a jazz version of a song I know, the jazz version causes me to recall the "standard" that I have heard before and carry in my mind. I do not erase the standard, but rather give it new life even as I hear it in a new manifestation. Now the "standard" is changed: it henceforth includes the jazz version. The standard is never just one rendition, like a recording, but a palimpsest of all the renditions I've heard and even of the reverberations they have caused by being placed side by side or atop one another in my mind. This is what is meant by interplay. If life is like a song, then, my expression of it is not a copy, but a contribution. Is there a "mind" somewhere in which my life resonates? No, that's a metaphor, unless the mind is mine and yours as we talk about it. We are not copies of life, renditions of life, but expressions as we express and render. In this way, the "body" of the song is no longer separate from its singing. At the moment of singing, the two are both present and neither has preeminence. The life that I live unites the body of life with . . . what? Here's the fun part: a body. The leaves of the tree express its life force as well as the force of life in general. When they fall, they no longer express any life force. This has passed on. Just so, the human body is shed, like a skin or a husk, by the moving life force to which it no longer gives expression. Which of the two do we now wish to linger over: the fallen leaf, or the force that has passed on? Clearly, the latter. So why then do we find ourselves bowed over the dead body? Why do we not celebrate the living body that has moved on? The poem does celebrate it. The poet celebrates it with his poem. And now the life is in me, as is the poet's song. Both!!! it's no longer metaphorical. Neither is a vehicle in service of the other. Or both are.
6. Perhaps I was wrong. Life requires a vehicle, but it is also at once itself a vehicle, because life, like song, is both the idea of the song and its expression in voice, both the particular life IN ME and the general from which this arises and into which this will pass. What I think I can say is that the human body is only of importance to me when it is expressing life. As soon as it is not doing this, I can cease to be interested in it or concerned about it. Life and song were lived and expressed through this body once, but they are now elsewhere.
The body of the poet who wrote this song is dead, but the song is not dead; it is at work in me right now as I write, and in you right now (another now) as you read. And as you read you have my song in you too. You were a vehicle in bringing the poem to me, now I bring some of its ideas back to you in a different rendition, and so we pass it on. The body of the poem, the life energy about which it speaks and to which it gives expression, is vibrantly alive, speaking through you and me, to you and me, and so passing forward, living on.
Our poet is a swallow of wine; he was a vine on a green hill, the grapes on the vine, the sunshine, the rain, the earth, miraculously brought together in a berry, harvested , pressed, given to living yeast to consume and convert, then bottled and stored and transported, and opened and poured and drunk and gone to our heads and so become the substance of our thoughts.
Along with the vintner I think of Rilke and Plato.
Vic
No comments:
Post a Comment