… In that world bushes and trees were made of the substance of jewels, and from these trees such sounds were emitted as the sound of emptiness, the sound of signlessness, the sound of absence of wishful thinking, the sound of non-arising, the sound of non-cessation, the sound of no essential nature, the sound of absence of essential characteristics; and as these sounds were emitted, the minds of these beings were freed.

-Sanskrit text Sarvadharmapravrttinirdesa, §6, n.d. In Buddhist Manuscripts in the Schøyen Collection, vol. I, Hermes Publishing.

Kant will further this venture into the non-representational. Beauty is pure when it accords “mere form”, when it concedes an instance that “represent(s) nothing”.[3] In here “form” might be understood as a schema that segregates the norm from a particular case but in its failure neither concept nor case are actualized. The status of the thing is left as “unreal”. Among a few examples Kant gives are fantasias (music without a topic), designs “à la grecque”, classicist meanders inspired by the excavations at Pompeii (1748), “a figure” may be given “light but regular lines, as the New Zealanders do with their tattoos”[4] . The implication that decorative art might be more aesthetically valuable than that of higher noble standing invites contemporary discussion.[5] In these notions we might choose to recognize a wound not toward an enhanced value of abstraction but to usher in unstable ground. Not only form, in whichever sense we can interpret it, but the amorphous confront us with an overflowing reality haunted by potentials.

“I don´t know music but I´m so fond of it that, without understanding it, I will sometimes pick up a sheet from an opera and spend idle hours looking through its pages, looking at the more or less congested groups of notes, the lines, the semicircles, the triangles and the sort of et ceteras so called clefs, and all of this without comprehending the least or extracting any gain… … At that instant a noise was heard… like that of a clock seconds before anouncing the hour; noise of gears that turn, of cords that strain, of machinery that deafly stirs and disposes to use its mysterious mechanic vitality, and a bell rang… there wasn´t a bell in the ruined temple… its vibration could still be heard in the air… everything seemed to come alive but with that galvanic movement that imprints death with contractions parodying life… crossing and entangling capriciously upon themselves they formed with their columns a porphiry labrynth… a distant chord started being heard that could be mistaken for the air´s hum but it was an ensamble of far away low voices that seemed to come from the earth and gradually rose becoming bit by bit more perceptible.” -Gustavo Adolfo Becquer, El Miserere.[6]

In the first paragraph musical language is an unknown object, only the formal constraints are available. We might say that a vacuum transforms and derives meaning, or rather that other meaningful aspects are engendered. [Again] Through failure a sub-text reveals the polysemantic nature which was there in the page all along. It needed a portal. An Added pledge with fluxus is set when vernacular instead of musical notations are also found in the sheet, infused in burkean contagion: “bones crack and from the marrow, howls must seem to come… the notes are bones covered in flesh…”. In the second part what inhabits us is a presence that it appears shouldn´t be -analogous to the work of medium that we´re doing by discussing through these authors, all of them deceased the vibrating sound of a bell without a bell present, a bell that only once was. So why does it persist? The leyend talks about a drifter who set out to tanscribe a phantasmal music. It´d been imprinted in the territory when a mountain monastery was viciously burned down with the monks inside to perish. A spectral droning voice is simultaneously grounded so that it´s confused with the earth and the wind; the music that occurs is water filtered through rock and the bustle of lizards. To bring these things about (as music, as leyend or as event) responds to a being and at the same time one that has to be insisted upon. To deal with potency, with virtuals that “… (don´t lack) reality but (are) something that is engaged in a process of actualization”.[7]

Edited still from video of a hair under microscope.

Glitched and edited 3D scan of a fish from the fresh water aquarium in Zaragoza.

AI enhanced cover for the 1823 Haymarket edition of Burke's A Philosophical Inquiry Into The Origin Of Our Ideas Of The Sublime And Beautiful. AI completed the vacant info by assembling a digital collage.

[3] Kant, I. (1987). Critique of judgement. § 16. Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. What I´ve called non-representational Kant might precisely call a representation in the sense that it´s not truth. Though Kant himself writes that these figures represent nothing

[4] Ibid. 77

[5] See, for instance, Guyer, P. Values of beauty: historical essays in aesthetics (2005), Ch. 4 and 5. Cambridge University Press.

[6] My own translation from Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes (2024).

[7] Deleuze, G. Immanence: a life (2001). Anne Boyman (trans.). Urzone, Inc.

ruins without nostalgia

Marcos Parajua, 2024

What remains after an event? Does language prevail over an image or a sound in presenting “that which remains”? Edmund Burke invokes Milton: “(Over) many a dark and dreary (valley) They (passed), and many a region dolorous; (Over) many a frozen, many a fiery Alp; Rocks, caves, lakes, dens, bogs, fens, and shades of Death”. Burke contends: “This idea or this affection caused by a word (Death), which nothing but a word could annex to the others…”. [1] In this saying, the ways of romantic visual arts are too articulate to lend proper care to indeterminacy. Retrospectively we might argue that Burke contemplated abstraction exclusively as “thought” realised in language but I´d rather follow a different inquiry. Burke also conceives descriptive language an insufficient correlate of the object described; this, he observes, is not a problem of clarity but intensity. To bridge the difference he introduces the mention of “contagion” and the term “passion”, which are tied up with a willingness. Description and object described; their link (language) is the mimetic device -a mirror- but one that must be more than just clear. Here is a good place to return to our second question. I´m not interested in obtaining an answer. I want, however, to toil with the notion that language establishes mimetic relationships to (in a very wide sense) objects. A key to how we apply this whim is the stage of pessimism/optimism that we have towards language.[2] Other questions arise: Is meaning always situated elsewhere, in the objects to which the signs are bound or else in what is left unsaid? Can language be signless? What is the status of asemic ways?

[1] Burke, E. (1823). A philosophical inquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and the beautiful. Haymarket. Digitalized in 2010 by the Internet Archive. Burke cites a passage in John Milton´s Paradise Lost where he describes the march of “the fallen angels through their dismal habitation”. Brackets are mine.

[2] For further inquiry into this topic see Auerbach, E. (1953). Mimesis: The representation of reality in western literature. William R. Task (trans.). Princeton University Press.