Subject: MB: The Running Mouth of Silence
Date: Mon, 16 Feb 1998 21:47:13 PST


All discourse is 'meta-discourse', in the sense that the prefix 'meta-' 
may refer to a later stage in the development of something -- in this 
case, of discourse.  And discourse has no origin; it is always already a 
sort of posthumous improvement upon a previous discourse.  In fact, 
'meta' can easily be regarded as a prefix denoting improvement.  The 
word 'discourse' has its root in the Latin verb _currere_ (to run).  
Discourse is then opposed to thinking, which is an idle, SILENT pursuit.  
We only begin to discourse when we have run out of things to THINK.  But 
what is the nature of this silence of thinking?  Thought is only silent 
to the discursive world, to the world of beings -- that is, to those who 
have already turned themselves over to the comfort of silence, to 
"dictators" (see Blanchot, 'The Death of the Last Writer', _The Blanchot 
Reader_: Blackwell 1995, pp. 153-154).  The one who thinks, who TRULY 
thinks, experiences "the reverberation, in advance, of what has not been 
said and never will be said" (ibid., p. 151).

Pure thought, therefore, possesses no ideas, can arrive at no ideas -- 
every potential idea is always already in the process of being over-run 
by what runs before it always.  Thought is idle, and operates only by 
virtue of that idleness.  Reverberations pass through the thinking 
subject, and have the character of music, which is a non-discursive art 
form.  

In the aforementioned essay, Blanchot can only speak, tellingly, of 
painting, scultpure, writing -- that is, of all art forms that can be 
placed in museums.  Such art forms have a relationship with silence that 
music and thought do not.  Music says nothing, and therefore is never 
silent.  Yet music is precisely the metaphor for what passes through the 
idle thinker, inspiring him or her to that continued idleness required 
by thinking.  Is thought, then, entertainment of the self in idleness?

I read, recently, in the magazine _21st Century Science & Technology_ 
(Winter 1997-1998), of a Neanderthal flute, fashioned from a bear's 
femur.  This flute was tuned to the pentatonic scale -- the very mode 
which our greatest Western music utilizes, and depends upon for its 
beauty.  And in that article mention was made of the oldest surviving 
"song," found inscribed on a 4000 year old tablet from Ur, which 
apparently also utilized the pentatonic scale.  This familiarity with 
the ancient and incredibly ancient past, manifested, not in discursive 
form of expression like literature, or in visual artifacts like 
sculptings and paintings, but in a non-discursive form of expression 
like music, shows how the idleness of thought, and the 
"inexhaustibility" of its "murmur," are historical realities.  But the 
dependence of discourse upon silence (this dependence is the cause of 
discourse: the running to escape the influence of a murmur more profound 
and effective than silence) affects even the idle non-discursive realm, 
through its effect of _alienization_: the making obscure of familiar and 
universal "modes" of being by framing them within a (con)text of silent 
historical movement.

Evidence of this discursive interference with the self-same nature of 
idle (non-discursive) thought, can be found in a musical document of not 
merely historical interest.  I recently purchased a recording of the 
extant fragments of the music of ancient Greece (_Musique de la Grece 
Antique_, Harmonia Mundi France, CD-1901015).  The recording begins with 
a surprising and unpleasant burst of sound.  The liner notes, written by 
the musicians, explain it thus:

"Before sounding the first note of the Euripides papyrus, we commence 
the recording with a sonorous explosion which, in the manner of the 
_Anakrousis_ or preludes, recreates the silence necessary to enter in 
contact with a music as remote and unknown as this."

In a discursive, historical, NARRATIVE tradition -- a tradition which is 
always running ahead of itself -- the music may seem "remote and 
unknown"; but in the realm of pure thought, which is also the realm of 
music, the experience of hearing will be quite familiar to the one not 
accustomed to discursive silence.

We may understand, then, how there can no 'meta-music' or 
'meta-thought'; such terms strike us as absurd.  This is because, as I 
said, thought and music (those operations of the non-silent) are 
non-discursive.  The discursive art forms, theatre, poetry, literature 
itself, are 'meta' before they are even recognized as such.  For 'meta' 
is a prefix that denotes late-coming.  A self-proclaimed "meta-theatre," 
for example, is moving closer to the idle self-sameness of thought and 
music: that condition of self-sufficiency through openness, when all 
experience passes through the subject, while the subject preserves its 
identity as receptor of the inexhaustible murmur.


Edward Moore 

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