The Hatred of Music

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We wrap in cloth an extremely injured and infantile acoustic nudity, which remains without expression deep within us. This cloth is of three kinds: cantatas, sonatas, poems.

That which sings, that which sounds, that which speaks.

With the help of this cloth, just as we try to keep most of the noises of our body from the ears of others, we keep from our own ears certain more ancient sounds and groans.

Mousikè—says a verse by Hesiod — pours small libations of oblivion on sorrow. Sorrow is to the soul in which memories build up what dregs are to the amphora filled with wine. All we can wish for is that they settle. In ancient Greece, the mousa of mousikè was named Erato. She was a prophetess of Pan, the god of panic, traveling in a state of trance under the effect of drink and the consumption of human flesh. Shamans were inspired by animals, priests by immolated humans, bards by the muses. Always victims. Works, however modern they pretend to be, are always more untimely than the times that welcome or reject them. They are always inspired by “panickeas.”1 Panickeas, accompanied by shamanic thyrsi, Pan flutes, and hoarse, mimetic singing, in Latin bacchatio, consisted in putting a young man to death by tearing him apart while still alive and immediately eating him raw. Orpheus is eaten raw. The muse Euterpe brings a flute to her mouth. Aristotle says in his Politics that the mouth and the hands of the muse are occupied exactly like those of a prostitute who, with her lips and fingers, reinflates her client’s physis in order to make it stand below his belly, in such a way that it emits his seed. Works (opera) are not made by free men. All that operates is occupied. The “preoccupation” of sorrow.

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