What is beauty? The question emerged, viscerally and persistently. It pierced with the ancient force of a presence and a summoning. Here I am. Come.
The answer does not answer but hosts and considers states in motion, rhythms grounded on recurring states of heart. The answer to what? does not specify what, but unfurls a quivering do-not-know-what that burns. A do-not-know-what which they continue to stutter, the answer is heard in Juan de la Cruz’s Un no se qué que quedan balbuciendo; in the aural incantation of que, que, que, the answer of repetition and return says nothing and all, nothing because it exists before words, all in the fullness of its being and its rhythm.
The question has beauty at its core: a beauty not beautiful, demanding attention and scrutiny, holding interruptions, the imminence of a finding, stirring muscular tension before release.
The answer is the condition of music.
The answer does not write about music and does not write about beauty: not as targets to aim at, or riddles to solve. The answer is formed, this book is formed, as a fading in and out of atmospheres punctuated by heartbeats that are psychic knots, written from the site of my eros: the force of desire, at a time when I no longer know what writing might mean and I find myself longing, through reading and hearing, for connections; for a trembling song-soul that came to me long ago, long before me, longing for a soulful song which might not quite exist other than as a composite of many singing voices, imaginal song chiming in another race of vibration, chiming and chimering with voices heard in reading, with the rhythms of being here still alive today.
In the answer, moments in life are read and heard from the sight of my rose: mystic rose, flower, symbol and site of transformations where my neurosis morphs into new roses. There arose a reading-hearing where enmeshments are alive yet exist more than just among the living, someone said to me in a larger conversation. The thorns in the language, in which such condition is presented, pierce my words and are never smoothed out. I must reencounter my difficulty. It comes from what is true in me, someone said to me in her breath of life.
The answer is written in the sigh of my sore: in transformations brought about by pain which deepened and grounded, pain-portal which deepened the necessary forces that pull down the body, grounded the ways in which it became possible to go about it, as days went by and through care and contemplation sore gradually became rose through the stirrings of eros.
Eros, rose, sore. Eros a rose out of sore, eroseion of sorrow, eros arose from pain and renewed desire, pain burning being. Eros rose sore coexist in their phantom frequencies, in encounters that startle, empty, animate. Supported by their uneven pacing, they appear in a patterned circling complexity: sometimes song, sometime shade, sometimes rip, sometimes rhythm.
Thrusting the attention towards muscular tensions, unintensional but significant, reopening a life into care, recognising being and being with others, beginning to sing again even when the song has long gone and must be reimagined, patched up, mended but driven.
Words of eros-rose-sore are brought together by movements of spinning: inwards, backwards, outwards, centrifugally and centripetally, fugue and petals, escaping canons and shedding flowers. They circle back onto themselves and spin outwards, they never solidify into concepts: from a piercing gaze backwards in a film sequence to whirling dervishes in a music video, from the anticlockwise movement of models in a fashion show to the breaths-into-words of Western mystics, wild and hushed. In that site where to look back spinning means that what is looked at is not past or gone but is yet to happen. It is received and heard as something which must be. Something which morphs neurosis into new roses into eros.
New roses are flowers from a past, from gardens recalled and imagined in which a certain stillness was perceived.
The word is a Psyche. The word Eros carries Psyche, and together they make space for encounters in a museum, where Psyche has wings made of felt, wings felt and thick with soma as they flutter over these pages.
The moment arrives when on reading, something inside whispers yes, yes in the other, and the encounter in difference leads into the darkness of unknowing, whose cloud covers these pages with a question of dissonance, an altered rhythm.
The rhythm of the encounter with beauty is piercing and obscuring, it unravels as each moment of tangency marks a slight variance, each recognition of kinship holds the awareness of difference. Clarice Lispector wrote of a vague sensation of beauty, the way you have a worrying sensation of beauty: when some thing seems to say some thing and there is that obscure encounter with a feeling. That obscure encounter with a feeling: a darkening and entangling, not even proportion but movement dictated by off-centred measures introducing brief and nearly imperceptible pauses, the opposite of what is usually understood as rigid structure, so rhythm is not dictated but embodied, asymmetrical, rhythm, most profound mode, qualitative, not quantitative articulation. It circles around an ungraspable centre, the point of irradiation of the relationship between many entities, each one with its distinctive quality, rhythm, psycho-physical force transforming movement of voices, of hands that write, into depth, give them weight. It is not a precise division of time, rhythm, rather, a hovering, centred and unstable. In rhythm, voices in conversations are the same and not quite so, in their moving and centred ways of being, where I hear your voice that is my voice that is another, where sense is presented not in a logic formula but in rhythm which enmeshes various elements, confounds and re-founds them. Timelines are scrambled, timeliness no longer an issue, it is not a theory that demands to be written here but a refrain that wants to be heard, its cadence touching a deep substratum of being. As its rotational spin deepens, it retraces in my reimagining-reading the great circle of shadow that Dante traced at the beginning of one of his Rime Petrose (Stony Rhymes), where beauty is not still but moving vital presence. Here the same word rhymes and rhythms and rhymes with the same word, hear: petra, petra, petra, tempo, tempo, tempo, luce, luce, luce, stone, stone, stone, time, time, time, light, light, light, an armour of closely rhyming rhythming words at the end of each verse holds the burning matter in the rest of each verse. At times it is a mineral formation, at times a triumph of flora, at times it buzzes in the twilight stare of melancholy as a question of dissonance, an altered rhythm.
Beauty, Burning: The Condition of Music is available now from Erratum Press. You can order a copy here.
Daniela Cascella is an Italian-British writer and editor. Writing in English as a second language, writing as a stranger in a language, she is drawn toward unstable and uncomfortable forms of writing-as-sounding, and toward the transmissions and interferences of knowledge across cultures. She is the author of five books in English that articulate an approach to writing she calls chimeric: monstrous, composite, many-voiced, driven by yearning: Chimeras: A Deranged Essay, AnImaginary Conversation, A Transcelation (Sublunary Editions, 2022), Nothing As We Need It (Punctum Books / Risking Education, 2022), Singed. Muted Voice-Transmissions, After The Fire (Equus Press, 2017), F.M.R.L. Footnotes, Mirages, Refrains and Leftovers of Writing Sound (Zer0 Books, 2015) and En Abîme: Listening, Reading, Writing. An Archival Fiction (Zer0 Books, 2012).
www.danielacascella.com
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