Music2

‘ Take a good look at people who try to dedramatize, to desymbolise and designify. They seem to think they can achieve complete demystification and reach things per se, in all their unadorned nakedness, revealing the aims and values that lie hidden beneath the mask. It’s pure platitude, too black and white. With no symbols, no fictions, how could you carry out the cruel dialogue between the I and the me, between living and life? How otherwise could this tale be told, with all its ellipses and silences? Without images and symbols how could you condense the vapours of the living, how could you trace man’s long journey into the dark recesses of his own memory? How could you conjure up the past, that zombie, how could you reanimate it in the name of what is possible, unless you call upon the power of images? If it is true that life as it is lived was always more shoddy and more lousy than could be expressed by a glorious and tragic symbol, at the same time it always makes something much vaster. Music, for example. What does music you make become? Everything. Small worlds and the world at large. The universe. All moments, every one of them. Love, play, knowledge, calmness. An inexhaustible presence- time overflowing with presences- takes hold of you, sweeps you away and changes you by becoming your own presence and your own present, the present moment which- at last- you offer yourself as you enter the realm of everything possible. Everything: joy and suffering, serenity and pain, more and ever more. Inexhaustible depths: a translucent abyss unlike that of the sea (which swallows you up) and the sky (which fascinates you and drowns you in its luminous void). The purest, the simplest, the noblest, the lowliest, divine and demonic- this is what music makes you become. The distance between life and living is bridged. You are clothed in splendor, the splendor of totality. An illusion? Not entirely. Alienation? Maybe, but an alienation which disalienates you before it negates you once more. So do not hesitate to glorify yourself.’

Henri Lefebvre, The message of the crucified sun- Introduction to Modernity