On a More Rational Note

The metaphor of this little composition is the musical note.

I am a composer, an orchestrator --
I orchestrate the text, even as I am composing it.
This music points towards the identity of an “I”, that is,
A linguistic proposition.

But this is a metaphor --
As my French professor was fond of saying, a speaking around
-- But more reliably a transference, a bearing across:
The “I” is at least partially borne across
-- Writing as an act of navigation.

Thus the science of writing is the science of navigation.

Case in point: Nietzsche on Wagner,
Also a musician,
Bene navigavit, qui naufragium fecit

-- That is, the science of writing is a science of contingency.

What, contingency?
Since I am so fond of etymologies
“Contingere”, to befall, Latin, late, apparently Medieval.
Objection -- we are living in the classical age:
“Con” + “Tingere,” “That which touches with”
(And here we have the Adagio, a halting iambic).

If I linger over the implications of this communal sensuality,
Either a going together or a being together
-- That is, a synontology (in Plato’s sense),
Or, to serve up a more Englished port,
(Stronger and livelier,
Ergo wine is music’s inevitable companion,
-- If we were audacious, we would even say wine is music)
Conversation. And I cannot emphasize this too much,
Since it is a turning together,
The necessary angel of communication
Accompanied by and accompanying it,
Since they go together,
What we could call the harmony of human beings,
Which suggests that music is not the passive reception of an instrument,
But that somehow the listener plays the performer
And of course vice versa
(As we are too sophisticated for chiasmus),
A notion which suggests the dance,
Since that is what it means to play.
But whereas the dance makes the music its purpose,
The music, in turn, determines the dance,
And hence, W.B. Yeats.

I would term this the fitness of thought,
The Idea in allegro.

In short, so many things make up the “I”
That writing, if it is to remain a conversation,
And not devolve into the parody of a communication with the self,
That is, a condemnation to solitude and loneliness,
(And here we trace the beginnings of a logic of immortality,
Since we are immortal by nature, but not sui generi or per se,
More precisely per nos in that we are human,
And hence the reason we call the immortality of tradition
The Humanities)
Must continually invite the reader
(And we see in this invitation the force of life
And of the will)
Into his own community, which is at once a persuasion and,
Through that persuasion,
A recognition of the reader’s thought.

If we were to end with a cadenza
(Sing it with me in duet):
We recognize that our thoughts are not permanent,
But subject to the exigencies of time,
Particular for the accidents of a momentary thought,
Cumulative for the erection of systems,
And ephemeral or transitory in the recognition of change,
The tension of a movement in between.

If thought seeks an eternal home,
Then the mind is its constant wanderer;
Because it is wandering between homes,
It is homeless,
The vagrancy of the mind is change.

In the meantime, we build with those things that are to hand
(A bird cannot sing an adagio,
But an adagio might try to imitate a bird),
That is, the past, tradition, the Humanities,
Our shared recognition
-- which means not only the intellectual
But also the callow,
Youth, but also experience,
And the experience of youth,
The masculine through the feminine --
You understand.

Since this is so, it is beside the point, even counterproductive, to reject:
We can no more reject the errors of our readers than matter can move without void,
These disagreements are the negative space through which we must pass.

Furthermore: Einstein’s notion that motion can always be transferred into time,
That motion and time are metaphors.

And so from now on I will undertake the work of the translator,
And think a bit more before I react,
Since reaction is always futile within the scope of an infinite time,
And the extra thought will carry the tune
Consideration, the music of the spheres.