I’ve been reading a book on Yaddo, that famous (well, maybe only in NY art-land?) artist’s retreat in Upstate NY — doing some semi-directional “research” for some fiction I am maybe admitting to be working on (how’s that for commitment?) And I was struck by this statement from an essayist and academic named Helen Vendler about music and its composition: “I know the verbal arts, my subject, as expressive form; I can understand some art at least as a ‘visible core’…; but music comes from a form of mind I recognize but could never comprehend. Music’s invisibility - vis a vis words and paint - makes it for me more astonishing than the other arts. It is physically incredible , as instant and weightless as thought itself… only music is of the ether.
I think the truth is that she has no connection to music, to sound then. Music, for me is utterly moving. I remember sitting tight as close could be to the speakers in our living room while dad blasted, yup, Mozart. But the lift, the ready “hook” — there is nothing MORE elemental than sound. Think of our first cry, the struggle to speak. It all comes before actual verbalization, the thought that a line (I mean a physical line) might have some significance.
And I think of Arthur, who has been drawn (really no pun meant at all) to sound in a very different way; as something to be gathered from his environment. I remember one summer - he was maybe 12? and he walked out into the woods in Maine. It was one of his first solo summer jaunts. He was testing his wings, I suppose. Walking in our sweet-scented safe woods. And he came back not too much later with a great grin on his face. To tell me about a singing log that he had found. Turned out it was grubs chewing in the long trunk of a felled white pine. But he heard tones and rhythm. In fact, he could approximate all that he had heard in his telling and singing of it though we did go to visit it as well. He returned several times the week we were there. Just to sit and listen.
There is nothing invisible about that experience.
