Muse in the Machine: Essays on Poetry and the Anatomy of the Body Politic

The Mechanical Muse

199 The Mechanical Muse T he distance between music and language—the impossibility of describing music in words, of echoing words in music, the incommensurability of phoneme and tone—is both obvious and notorious, but so is their inextricability. No one has expressed this paradox better than Nietzsche, two quotes from whom will serve to chart out this treacherous territory: Imagine, after all preconditions, what an undertaking it must be to write music for a poem, that is, to wish to illustrate a poem by means of music, in order to secure a conceptual language for music in this way. What an inverted world! An undertaking that strikes one as if a son desired to beget his father! (Fragment, Spring 1871) [T]he most important phenomenon of all ancient lyric poetry: they took for granted the union, indeed the identity of the lyrist with the musician. Compared with this, our modern lyric poetry seems like the statue of a god without a head. (The Birth of Tragedy, 1872) Anyone who has ever thought seriously about this relationship— much less been a practitioner whose work leads into this abyss— will recognize the problem. Music and language are as distinct, and 200 The Muse in the Machine as linked, as the lobes of the brain. Talk about it for a while, and shortly you will begin to sound mystical. It would be interesting to know how many poets of our generation are or have been musicians—whether practicing, failing, dabbling , wannabe, or ex—and how that proportion compares with the population at large. A survey might well reveal, as with a famous “statistic” about suicide, that even more dentists have tried it than poets. Ours is a music-saturated culture in which a certain kind of musician enjoys special status in the popular imagination. So many garages have begat so many decibels, so many high schools have encouraged so many out-of-tune choruses of trombone and violin, that you’d think everybody had been in a band at one time or another. Perhaps the attempt is an American rite of passage. However mundane the idea of a middle-aged male such as myself still caught in the dream of performance (I don’t say stardom because I honestly was never quite that stupid), a mystery remains here. Whether we are considering the Homeric hymns or the latest recording of Robert Bly in the guise of a damsel with a dulcimer, the poet is considered the musician of writers—which means that, however inexpressible the relation may be, the poet’s job is to reassemble what so often presents itself as a broken primal unity. For poets who write primarily for the page, the problem is compounded by the insistent silence of texts. The text is the instrument such a poet plays; and it is notoriously difficult to master precisely because it is so transparent. Too often, models of the poet’s work project an unmediated voice “singing” to an audience. “Who touches this book touches a man,” Whitman beautifully and falsely wrote. Whitman was one of the greatest virtuosi of the page we have ever had, and though he had his reasons for doing so, he insulted his instrument by pretending it did not exist—as if a bagpiper should pretend that all those caterwauls were coming from his own throat. In the case of the poem on the page, one then thinks, “What caterwauls ?” The page is as silent as the grave—which is the true motivation behind Whitman’s resurrection of the book. Named, as we The Mechanical Muse 201 know, for “the beautiful uncut hair of graves,” the barbaric yawp of Leaves of Grass is thus rendered a kind of Christ. However splendid it may be otherwise, from the perspective of the page, the poor, insulted instrument, this is a gross mystification. The counterstory I have to tell concerns the instrument—the thing itself as thing—and its neglect not only in our poetics but also in the “higher” forms of our musicology. The scene is a run-down band room in a run-down school in east central Mississippi; the year is 1959. We are gathered here, we offspring and our parents, because of the children’s musical aptitude , demonstrated by a mastery achieved the previous year on a cheap plastic recorder known as the Flutophone, an instrument capable of producing little more...