Witkacy on Music

The following should suffice for an introduction:

“Subconsciously we’re all bastards,” he used to say, judging the behavior of others by his own. A rather banal truism, but, then, Tenzer was not much of an authority when it came to life’s vicissitudes or to theorizing about life.

“Time will tell,” he said. “Only art can do justice to the greatness of being. Art is the mystery of existence staring us in the face like a boar on a platter, as something tangible, see, and not as a system of ideas. The thing you’re talking about I render in the form of sensuous material. But I don’t hear it in the orchestra – and that’s disastrous. Someone has said that music is a lower art because people use hammers to bang on sheep guts and wire, rub against gut-strings with horsehair, and blow away on slobbered-up horns. Noise– what a marvelous thing it is: it can deafen us, blind us, overpower the will, and produce a real Dionysian frenzy in an abstract dimension. And yet it is; it’s not just some intellectual tease. Silence is death. Painting, sculpture – they stand still, they’re static, while poetry and theater are too freighted with life: they’ll never be able to give you that …” He went up to his treasured Steinway, the one luxury in which he had indulged himself after a long and protracted battle with his father-in-law (…) and commenced playing (did he ever!!!). It was as if a peal of thunder from man’s subterranean guts had banged against the sky – not an earthly sky, but the cosmic sky of nothingness, truly infinite and vacuous and from whence, blossoming from metaphysical storm clouds, it crashed, bottoming out in a creeping, fire-engulfed, flattened-out, barren mystery. The joist of the world trembled; in the distance glowed death’s tranquility, transformed into the peaceful sleep of a mysterious deity broken on the wheel of superdivine tortures: the unmediated perception of the real infinity. The eye of satanic knowledge of ubiquitous evil bulged over the desolate expanses of ultimate, seemingly benign concepts; a glare, insufferably hurtful, pierced the thick armor of primevally dark Being, and went painlessly berserk, in a sort of French malaise raised to the power of a continuum.

S.I. Witkiewicz – Insatiability (1930)

… more to come about this and other topics each week going forward.