Song as gathering
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Singing and not song, not a learned text, but an activity between complex rhythmic ensembles, in the breath, the emotive tonality, the resonant sonority of bodies, an activity that escapes through a special dynamism, "the impalpable operation of charm (charme) [...] the innocence of a poetic act that has time as its only dimension" (Jankélévitch). - Charm and not enchantment or witchcraft, that is why it is "innocent", because it is the persuasion of an atmosphere, not a rhetorical technique to make you fall or lead you to do. At least until the metropolitan extension of that strange acoustic and olfactory marketing, electrically amplified claim, without flowers, without voice, without instruments, that incites sometimes rather to flee. But also to the spread of certain methods of torture, which have gone from sensory isolation to the invasion of sensory space, playing heavy metal at full volume as in Abu Ghraib.
Government forces do not hesitate to try to capture and deform what is precious and precarious. "The eloquent and mute lesson of enchantment operates only with a nescient and entirely spontaneous suggestion of the operator: for if the operator wants too much, it is the patient who no longer wants [...] There are no recipes for enchantment, but there are recipes for being an enchanter, that is to say, an idiot. Everything that is precious and precarious [...] is in this way" (idem).
The song or the music, sometimes it comes out and sometimes it doesn't. If it comes out we are transported, the whole atmosphere vibrates and carries us away. If it doesn't come out, in Andalusia it was said that "the duende failed him". The duende "is a power and not a doing, it is a fighting and not a thinking", said Federico García Lorca. It is not the demon of doubt, nor the destroyer. It is not the Angel that dazzles nor the Muse that dictates or blows. The duende "must be awakened in the last rooms of the blood" and fought with him. As in the songs and dances of archaic mimesis described by Marius Schneider, where the force of an animal spirit or any other elemental power is summoned to wrestle with it. "Cut off from nature, alienated in the closed universe of its own representation, the 'imaginary freedom' of the species would find the inversion of its sombre character, the free imagination of the original mimetic that precedes the analogue language and then that of abstract signification, where the deep 'waters of oblivion' that cover its past would be awakened to memory. [...] In this night lies the 'treasure', the 'realm of images' of the 'dreaming spirit', before its awakening in the 'realm of names'. [...] Beforehand the social symbolic [...] in the pre-causal dream-time of the maternal chthonic universe, the intense background of natural events has not yet been sclerotised, with the language of human meanings, into a stable possession, reduced to a sum of things" (Gianni Carchia).
Singing is not in itself an instrumental operation, it is not a means to an end: "Song, by Your example, does not concern desire,/ Nor pursuit and attainment of its object;/ Song is - to be. Trifling for the god;/ But when shall we be? [...] / True singing is breath of another kind./ A breath that aims nowhere. Pneuma within the god. A zephyr." (Raine Maria Rilke/ translt. Robert Temple).
Singing is then a going out, like ek-sistere. Going out, but out where? To the medial dimension where souls rejoice? Language also participates in the medial dimension. Not language as in-formation, when it imperatively shapes or deforms things, not when it is discussed in order to bring reason to the point of manipulation, nor in the giving of orders in the realm of judgement, which presupposes guilt. Jankélévitch said in La musique et l'ineffable, "Saying is an atrophied, aborted and somewhat degenerate Doing: action in retreat or barely sketched, the word is easily pharisaical and acts only indirectly, except, of course, in poetry, where the very saying is doing". This is true, except that he does not distinguish between saying as "dictating", which is an atrophied and easily pharisaical doing, and saying as a component of the "encounter", where the intelligence of the heart flows anonymously in friendship. Language in the medial dimension - in which the spiritual being of things manifests itself insofar as it is communicable, said Walter Benjamin; song and speech were only belatedly separated - emerges in the suspension of the administered world, in the revolt that does not seek to found a power, that comes from the world of the day before yesterday and points to the world of the day after tomorrow, where the carnival outside time pulses; it also emerges in friendship and love, "'Two' is not 'one plus one' - said Florensky -. Two' is a new chemical composition of the spirit"; it emerges in the conversation free of presuppositions, which does not establish or found or try to manipulate, pure exposure to what happens, to the other as alteration, to the encounter as participation, like the song full of duende that is exposed and given and should snatch us precisely to participation, rhythmic and sonorous and gestural, like revolt or friendship. Against the rationalisations of the carnival and what they claim to tell us about the spiritual and sensitive dimension between beings - the black anti-sun - rationalisations that neutralise the song and the visionary experience, the trance and the party, the encounter and the revolt, we should pay attention to some of Florens Christian Rang's intuitions: "But it is time to abandon this faith that leads us to the miserable conclusion that human spirituality would have arisen through the combination of rational or useful inventions and discoveries, with the always more enlightened images of the dream. No passion therefore, no outpouring of fanaticism. Spirit does not mean evolution, but passion of the soul, passion up to revolution" (Psicologia storica del carnevale).