Phonography, notation, and a new eroticism-this is precisely the
constellation
described by Maurice Renard in a short story of 1907, ten years prior to Rilke's essay.
Kittler-Gramophone-Film-Typewriter
With these few things one part of the mysterious machine was made, receiver and reproducer were com- plete.
It now only remained to construct the receiving cylinder, which could be moved close to the needle marking the sounds by means of a small rotat- ing handle.
I do not remember what we made it of; there was some kind
of cylinder which we covered with a thin coating of candle wax to the
best of our ability. Our impatience, brought to a pitch by the excitement of sticking and fitting the parts as we jostled one another over it, was such that the wax had scarcely cooled and hardened before we put our work to the test.
How now this was done can easily be imagined. When someone spoke or sang into the funnel, the needle in the parchment transferred the sound waves to the receptive surface of the roll slowly turning beneath it, and then, when the moving needle was made to retrace its path (which had been fixed in the meantime with a coat of varnish), the sound which had been ours came back to us tremblingly, haltingly from the paper funnel, uncer- tain, infinitely soft and hesitating and fading out altogether in places. Each time the effect was complete. Our class was not exactly one of the quietest, and there can have been few moments in its history when it had been able as a body to achieve such a degree of silence. The phenomenon, on every reception of it, remained astonishing, indeed positively staggering. We were confronting, as it were, a new and infinitely delicate point in the texture of reality, from which something far greater than ourselves, yet indescribably immature, seemed to be appealing to us as if seeking help. At the time and all through the intervening years I believed that that independent sound, taken from us and preserved outside of us, would be unforgettable. That
it turned out otherwise is the cause of my writing the present account. As will be seen, what impressed itself on my memory most deeply was not the sound from the funnel but the markings traced on the cylinder; these made a most definite impression.
I first became aware of this some fourteen or fifteen years after my school days were past. It was during my first stay in Paris. At that time I was attending the anatomy lectures in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts with consid- erable enthusiasm. It was not so much the manifold interlacing of the mus-
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cles and sinews nor the complete inner agreement of the inner organs with another that appealed to me, but rather the bare skeleton, the restrained en- ergy and elasticity of which I had already noticed when studying the draw-
ings of Leonardo. However much I puzzled over the structure of the whole, it was more than I could deal with; my attention always reverted to the study of the skull, which seemed to me to constitute the utmost achieve- ment, as it were, of which this chalky element was capable; it was as if it had been persuaded to make just in this part a special effort to render a de- cisive service by providing a most solid protection for the most daring fea- ture of all, for something which, though itself narrowly confined, had a field of activity which was boundless. The fascination which this particular struc- ture had for me reached such a pitch finally, that I procured a skull in order to spend many hours of the night with it; and, as always happens with me and things, it was not only the moments of deliberate attention which made this ambiguous object really mine: l owe my familiarity with it, beyond doubt, in part to that passing glance with which we involuntarily examine and perceive our daily environment, when there exists any relationship at all between it and us. It was a passing glance of this kind which I suddenly checked in its course, making it exact and attentive. By candlelight-which is often so peculiarly alive and challenging-the coronal suture had become strikingly visible, and I knew at once what it reminded me of: one of those unforgotten grooves, which had been scratched in a little wax cylinder by the point of a bristle!
And now I do not know: is it due to a rhythmic peculiarity of my imag- ination that ever since, often after the lapse of years, I repeatedly feel the impulse to make that spontaneously perceived similarity the starting point for a whole series of unheard-of experiments? I frankly confess that I have always treated this desire, whenever it made itself felt, with the most unre- lenting mistrust-if proof be needed, let it be found in the fact that only now, after more than a decade and a half, have I resolved to make a cau- tious statement concerning it. Furthermore, there is nothing I can cite in favor of my idea beyond its obstinate recurrence, a recurrence which has taken me by surprise in all sorts of places, divorced from any connection with what I might be doing.
What is it that repeatedly presents itself to my mind ? It is this:
The coronal suture of the skull (this would first have to be investigated)
has-let us assume-a certain similarity to the close wavy line which the needle of a phonograph engraves on the receiving, rotating cylinder of the apparatus. What if one changed the needle and directed it on its return jour- ney along a tracing which was not derived from the graphic translation of
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sound but existed of itself naturally-well, to put it plainly, along the coro- nal suture, for example. What would happen? A sound would necessarily result, a series of sounds, music. . . .
Feelings-which? Incredulity, timidity, fear, awe-which of all feelings here possible prevents me from suggesting a name for the primal sound which would then make its appearance in the world? . . .
Leaving that aside for the moment: what variety of lines, then, occur- ring anywhere, could one not put under the needle and try out? Is there any contour that one could not, in a sense, complete in this way and then expe- rience it, as it makes itself felt, thus transformed, in another field of sense?
At one period, when I began to interest myself in Arabic poems, which seem to owe their existence to the simultaneous and equal contributions from all five senses, it struck me for the first time that the modern European poet makes use of these five contributors singly and in very varying degree, only one of them-sight overladen with the world-seeming to dominate him constantly; how slight, by contrast, is the contribution he receives from inattentive hearing, not to speak of the indifference of other senses, which are active only on the periphery of consciousness and with many interrup- tions within the limited sphere of their practical activity. And yet the perfect poem can only materialize on condition that this world, acted upon by all five levers simultaneously, is seen, under a definite aspect, on the supernat- ural plane, which is, in fact, the plane of the poem.
A lady, to whom this was mentioned in conversation, exclaimed that this wonderful and simultaneous capacity and achievement of all the senses was surely nothing but the presence of mind and grace of love-incidentally she thereby bore her own witness to the sublime reality of the poem. But the lover is in such splendid danger just because he must depend on the co- ordination of his senses, for he knows that they must meet in that unique and risky center in which, renouncing all extension, they come together and have no permanence.
As I write this, I have before me the diagram which I have always used as a ready help whenever ideas of this kind have demanded attention. If the world's whole field of experience, including those spheres which are beyond our knowledge, be represented in a complete circle, it will be immediately evident that when the black sectors, denoting that which we are incapable of experiencing, are measured against the lesser, light sections, correspond to that which is illuminated by the senses, the former are very much greater.
Now the position of the lover is this: that he feels himself unexpectedly placed in the center of the circle, that is to say, at the point where the
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known and the incomprehensible, coming forcibly together at one single point, become complete and simply a possession, losing thereby, it is true, all individual character. This position would not serve for the poet, for indi- vidual variety must be constantly present for him; he is compelled to use the sense sectors to their full extent, as it must also be in his aim to extend each
of them as far as possible, so that his lively delight, girded for the attempt, may be able to pass through the five gardens in one leap.
As the lover's danger consists in the nonspatial character of his stand- point, so the poet's lies in his awareness of the abysses which divide the one order of sense experience from the other: in truth they are sufficiently wide and engulfing to sweep away from before us the greater part of the world- who knows how many worlds ?
The question arises here as to whether the extent of these sectors on the plane assumed by us can be enlarged to any vital degree by the work of re- search. The achievements of the microscope, of the telescope, and of so many devices which increase the range of the senses upward and down- ward: do they not lie in another sphere altogether, since most of the increase thus achieved cannot be interpreted by the senses, cannot be "experienced" in any real sense? It is perhaps not premature to suppose that the artist, who develops the five-fingered hand of his senses (if one may put it so) to ever more active and more spiritual capacity, contributes more decisively than anyone else to an extension of the several sense fields; only the achievement which gives proof of this does not permit of his entering his personal exten- sion of territory in the general map before us, since it is only possible, in the last resort, by a miracle.
But if we are looking for a way by which to establish the connection so urgently needed between the different provinces now so strangely separated from one another, what could be more promising than the experiment sug- gested earlier in this recollection? If the writer ends by recommending it once again, he may be given a certain amount of credit for withstanding the temptation to give free reign to his fancy in imagining the results of the as- sumptions which he has suggested.
Soglio. On the day of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, I 9 I 9 .
Rilke dedicated the most impassionate of reports to phonography. Re- gardless of the fact that he wrote it on the Assumption, "he was a poet and hated the approximate. "47 Therefore the strange precision with
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which his text enumerates all the parts of an apparatus that Rilke's physics teacher, employed not coincidentally at an imperial military school, constructed around 1890. As if to confirm the fictional Edison of Tomorrow's Eve, who had no supply problems whatsoever when design- ing the phonograph, a combination of cardboard, paper, the bristles of a clothes brush, and candle wax suffice to open a "new and infinitely deli- cate point in the texture of reality. " Oblivious to the knowledge of the physics teacher and the school drill, students hear their own voices. Not their words and answers as programmed feedback by the education sys- tem, but the real voice against a backdrop of pure silence or attention.
And yet the "unforgettable" (in the word's double meaning) phono- graphic sound recording is not at the center of Rilke's profane illumina- tion. In the founding age of media, the author is captivated more by the technological revolutions of reading than of writing. The "markings traced on the cylinder" are physiological traces whose strangeness tran- scends all human voices.
Certainly, the writer is no brain physiologist. His amateur status at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts enables him to become acquainted with the vi- cissitudes of the skeletal structure, but not with the facilitations on which Exner or Freud based their new sciences. But when it comes to mounted and exhibited skeletons, Rilke is fascinated by that "utmost achievement" known as the skull, because "it was as if it had been persuaded to make just in this part a special effort to render a decisive service by providing a most solid protection for the most daring feature of all. " During his Parisian nights, Rilke reduces the skull sitting in front of him to a cerebral container. Describing it as "this particular structure" with a "boundless field of activity," he merely repeats the physiological insight that for our central nervous system, "our own body is the outside world. "48 One no less than Flechsig, Schreber's famous psychiatrist, had proven that the cerebral cortex contains a "sphere of physical perception" that neurolog- ically reproduces all parts of the body, distorted according to their im- portance. 49 Rilke's belief in later years that it was the task of poetry to transfer all given data into an "inner world space" is based on such in- sights. (Even though literary scholars, still believing in the omnipotence of philosophers, choose to relate Rilke's inner world space to Husserl. )50
"Primal Sound" leaves no doubt whatsoever about which contempo- rary developments were most important to literature in 1900. Instead of lapsing into the usual melancholic associations of Shakespeare's Hamlet or Keller's Green Henry at the sight of a human skull in candlelight, the writer sees phonographic grooves.
44 Gramophone
? Coronal suture from stp to stp.
A trace or path or groove appears where the frontal and parietal bones of the "suckling infant"51-to use Rilke's anatomically correct term-have grown together. As if the facilitations of Freud and Exner had been projected out of the brain onto its enclosure, the naked eye is now able to read the coronal suture as a writing of the real. A technologically up-to-date author follows in the wake of the brain physiologists, who since the days of Guyau and Hirth have automatically thought of Edison's phonograph when dealing with nerve pathways. Moreover, Rilke draws conclusions more radical than all scientific boldness. Before him, nobody had ever suggested to decode a trace that nobody had encoded and that encoded nothing.
Ever since the invention of the phonograph, there has been writing without a subject. It is no longer necessary to assign an author to every trace, not even God. "Project for a Scientific Psychology" centered on fa- cilitations inscribed by acts of perception, but there is no reason not to set the gramophone needle to random anatomic features. A transgression in the literal sense of the word, which shakes the very words used to phrase it. Acoustics arises from physiology, technology from nature. In Rilke's time, skulls were measured in search of all possible features: intelligence and idiocy, masculinity and femininity, genius and racial characteristics. But their transposition into the acoustic medium remained a challenge that forced dots and question marks onto the writing hand.
What the coronal suture yields upon replay is a primal sound with- out a name, a music without notation, a sound even more strange than
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any incantation for the dead for which the skull could have been used. Deprived of its shellac, the duped needle produces sounds that "are not the result of a graphic transposition of a note" but are an absolute trans- fer, that is, a metaphor. A writer thus celebrates the very opposite of his own medium-the white noise no writing can store. Technological media operate against a background of noise because their data travel along physical channels; as in blurring in the case of film or the sound of the needle in the case of the gramophone, that noise determines their signal- to-noise ratio. According to Arnheim, that is the price they pay for deliv- ering reproductions that are at the same time effects of the reproduced. Noise is emitted by the channels media have to cross.
In 1924, five years after Rilke's "Primal Sound," Rudolph Lothar wrote The Talking Machine: A Technical-Aesthetic Essay. Based on the not-very-informed premise that "philosophers and psychologists have hitherto written about the arts" and "neglected" phonography,52 Lothar drew up a new aesthetic. Its key propositions center exclusively on the re-
lationship between noise and signals.
The talking machine occupies a special position in aesthetics and music. It de- mands a twofold capacity for illusion, an illusion working in two directions. On the one hand, it demands that we ignore and overlook its mechanical features. As we know, every record comes with interference. As connoisseurs we are not al- lowed to hear this interference, just as in a theater we are obliged to ignore both the line that sets off the stage and the frame surrounding the scene. We have to forget we are witnessing actors in costumes and makeup who are not really expe- riencing what they are performing. They are merely playing parts. We, however, pretend to take their appearance for reality. Only if we forget that we are inside a theater can we really enjoy dramatic art. This "as if" is generated by our capacity for illusion. Only when we forget that the voice of the singer is coming from a wooden box, when we no longer hear any interference, when we can suspend it the way we are able to suspend a stage-only then will the talking machine come into its own artistically.
But, on the other hand, the machine demands that we give bodies to the sounds emanating from it. For example, while playing an aria sung by a famous singer we see the stage he stands on, we see him dressed in an appropriate cos- tl,lme. The more it is linked to our memories, the stronger the record's effect will be. Nothing excites memory more strongly than the human voice, maybe because nothing is forgotten as quickly as a voice. Our memory of it, however, does not die-its timbre and character sink into our subconscious where they await their revival. What has been said about the voice naturally also applies to instruments. We see Nikisch conduct the C-minor symphony, we see Kreisler with the violin at his chin, we see trumpets flashing in the sun when listening to military marches.
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But the capacity for illusion that enables us to ignore boxes and interference and furnishes tones with a visible background requires musical sensitivity. This is the most important point of phonographic aesthetics: The talking machine can only grant artistic satisfaction to musical people. For only musicians possess the ca-
pacity for illusion necessary for every enjoyment of art. 53
Maybe Rilke, who loved the gong, with its resounding mixture of frequencies, above all other instruments, wasn't a musical person. 54 His aesthetic-"Primal Sound" is Rilke's only text about art and the beautiful in general-subverts the two illusions to which Lothar wants to commit readers or gramophone listeners. From the fact that "every record comes with interferences" he draws opposite conclusions. Replaying the skull's coronary suture yields nothing but noise. And there is no need to add some hallucinated body when listening to signs that are not the result of the graphic translation of a note but rather random anatomical lines. Bod- ies themselves generate noise. And the impossible real transpires.
Of course, the entertainment industry is all on Lothar's side. But there have been and there still are experiments that pursue Rilke's primal sound with technologically more sophisticated means. In the wake of Mondrian and the Bruitists (who wanted to introduce noise into literature and music), Moholy-Nagy already suggested in 1923 turning "the gramo- phone from an instrument of reproduction into a productive one, gener- ating acoustic phenomena without any previous acoustic existence by scratching the necessary marks onto the record. "55 An obvious analogy to Rilke's suggestion of eliciting sounds from the skull that were not the re- sult of a prior graphic transformation. A triumph for the concept of fre- quency: in contrast to the "narrowness" of a "scale" that is "possibly a thousand years old" and to which we therefore no longer must adhere,56 Moholy-Nagy's etchings allow for unlimited transposition from medium to medium. Any graphisms-including those, not coincidentally, domi- nating Mondrian's paintings-result in a sound. Which is why the exper- imenter asks for the "study of graphic signs of the most diverse (simulta- neous and isolated) acoustic phenomena" and the "use of projection ma- chines" or "film. "57
Engineers and the avant-garde think alike. At the same time as Moholy-Nagy's etching, the first plans were made for sound film, one of the first industrially connected media systems. "The invention of Mr. Vogt, Dr. Engel, and Mr. Masolle, the speaking Tri-Ergon-film," was
based on a "highly complicated process" of medial transformations that could only be financed with the help of million-dollar investments from
? Gramophone record. (Photo: Moholy-Nagy)
the C. Lorenz Company. 58 The inventors say of it, "Acoustic waves ema- nating from the scene are converted into electricity, electricity is turned into light, light into the silver coloring of the positive and negative, the coloring of the film back into light, which is then converted back into electricity before the seventh and final transformation turns electricity into the mechanical operation of a weak membrane giving off sounds. "59
Frequencies remain frequencies regardless of their respective carrier medium. The symbolic correlation of sound intervals and planetary or- bits, which since [Cicero'S] Dream ofScipio made up the harmony of the spheres, is replaced by correspondences in the real. In order to synchro- nize, store, and reproduce acoustic events and image sequences, sound films can let them wander seven times from one carrier to the next. In Moholy-Nagy's own words, his record etchings are capable of generating a "new mechanical harmony": "The individual graphic signs are exam- ined and their proportions are formulated as a law. (Here we may point
Gramophone 47
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? Block schematic of an analog vocoder. The synthesis component is in the lower signal path, the analysis component, in the upper signal path. The latter's low- and high-pass filters limit the input, for example, of "speech," while its band-pass filters break down the audible range into several component frequency channels. Following its coordination as envelope curves, the analysis output-using a switching matrix with arbitrarily chosen correspondences between the signal paths-controls the voltage-controlled amplifiers (yeAs), whose band-pass filters have also broken down the "input" or carrier into several component frequency channels. The sum signal at the exit (of the vocoder) appears as an instrumental sound encoded by a voice (vox).
out a consideration that is at present still utopian: based on strict propor- tional laws graphic signs can be transposed into music. )"60
This idea had lost its utopian character long before it was written down. Fourier's solution of all continuous functions (including musical notes) into sums of pure sine harmonics was achieved before Helmholtz and Edison. Walsh's equally mathematical proof that square wave vibra- tions may also serve as summands of the Fourier analysis was roughly contemporaneous with Moholy-Nagy's writings. As a result, in 1964 Robert A. Moog, with his electronic talents and the "American vice of modular repetition,"61 was able to equip all the sound studios and rock bands of this world with synthesizers. A subtractive sound analysis, that is, one controlled by frequency filters, transfers the proportional relation- ships of graphic depictions (rectangles, saw tooth curves, triangles, trape- zoids, and maybe even sine curves) into the music envisioned by Mon- drian and Moholy-Nagy. 62
Rilke's urgent demand to put under the needle and try out a "variety of lines, occurring anywhere," to "complete [it] in this way and then ex-
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perience it, as it makes itself felt, thus transformed, in another field of sense": it is realized every night in the combination of amplifier and os- cillographic display.
But there is more to it. Between 1942 and 1945, while working for Bell laboratories and the British Secret Service, respectively, Shannon and Turing developed the vocoder, a wonder weapon that would make the transatlantic telephone conversations between Churchill and Roosevelt safe from interception by Canaris and the German Abwehr63 and that, like so many electronic achievements of the Second World War, is now in- dispensable to popular music. It lives up to its name: it encodes any given data stream A with the envelope curves of another sound sequence B, for example, the voice of a singer, after a switching matrix has changed the frequency of the envelope curves by way of free permutation. In the case of Laurie Anderson's electronic violin, the one-third octave band between 440 and 550 Hz follows in absolute synchronicity the volume her voice happens to have in the one-third octave band between 1760 and 2200 Hz, while a third one-third octave band of her songs controls a fourth band of her violin, and so on and so forth. Primal sounds do not cor- respond to anatomical features and sounds do not follow Mondrian's graphics; rather, the paradoxical result is that one and the same controls one and the same: one acoustics controls the other.
To test his vocoder, by the way, Turing first played a record of Win- ston Churchill's belligerent voice, whose discreet or cut-up sampled val- ues he then mixed with a noise generator using modular addition. Where- upon British officers heard the voice of their prime minister and com- mander in chief contaminate the speakers as just so much white noise (not to say, primal sound). Appropriately, Turing's vocoder was named af- ter Delilah, who in the Book of Judges tricked another warrior, the Danaite Samson, out of the secret of his strength. Turing's skill as a tin- kerer, however, revealed the secret of modern political discourse to be something far worse than weakness: it is "a perfectly even and uninfor- mative hiss,"64 which offered no regularities and, therefore, nothing in- telligible to the ears of British officers or those of German eavesdroppers. And yet, sent through the vocoder a second time, Churchill's original voice emerged from the receiving end.
This is what has become of the "abysses" that, according to Rilke's ingenious formula, "divide the one order of sense experience from the other. " In today's media networks, algorithmically formalized data streams can traverse them all. Media facilitate all possible manipulations: acoustic signals control the optical signals of light consoles, electronic lan-
50 Gramophone
guage controls the acoustic output of computer music, and, in the case of the vocoder, one set of acoustic signals controls another. Finally, New York disc jockeys turn the esoteric graphisms of Moholy-Nagy into the everyday experience of scratch music.
But Rilke's astute diagnosis only applies to the founding age when the three ur-media-phonograph, film, and typewriter-first differentiated acoustics, optics, and writing. Nevertheless, as if anticipating today's me- dia systems, he searched "for a way to establish the connection so ur-
gently needed between the different provinces now so strangely separated from one another. " Which is why he fell back on "Arabic poems, which seem to owe their existence to the simultaneous and equal contributions from all five senses," and which let eyes trained in the art of calligraphy enjoy the very materiality of letters. This explains his criticism, histori- cally extremely accurate, of literary epochs such as the Age of Goethe, in which "sight" alone seems to dominate authors and readers because cor- rect reading involves a hallucinatory process that turns words into a real and visible world. This explains as well his proposition for an equally lyrical and scientific coronal suture phonography, which would pay more attention to acoustics than did the "inattentive hearing" of authors from
the Age of Goethe.
But before Rilke wrote down his proposal on the Assumption in the alpine solitude of the Bergell, he related it to a woman. Synchronicity of the asynchronic: on the one hand a writer whose "extension" or combi- nation of sensory media goes beyond "the work of research"; on the other a woman who mistakes coronal suture phonography for "love," and love-as involuntary evidence for "the sublime reality of the poem"-for poems. Only as long as the unchallenged and unrivaled medium of the book was able to simulate the storage of all possible data streams did love remain literature and literature love; the ascension of female readers.
But a writer whose school teaches physics instead of philosophy ob- jects. The combination of sensory data streams achieved by love is devoid of "permanence. " It cannot be stored by any medium. Moreover, it loses "all individual character. " That is, no real can pass through the filter of love. Whichiswhylovedoes "notserveforthepoet,forindividualvari- ety must be constantly present for him; he is compelled to use the sense sectors to their full extent," or, simply, to become a media technician among media technicians.
Marinetti's Technical Manifesto ofFuturist Literature of 1912 pro- claimed that crowds of massed molecules and whirling electrons are
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more exciting than the smiles or tears of a woman (di una donna). 65 In other words: literature defects from erotics to stochastics, from red lips to white noise. Marinetti's molecular swarms and whirling electrons are merely instances of the Brownian motion that human eyes can only per- ceive in the shape of dancing sun particles but that in the real are the noise on all channels. According to Rilke, the "abysses" dividing the or- ders of sense experience are "sufficiently wide and engulfing to sweep away from before us the greater part of the world-who knows how many worlds? " Which is why love is no longer sufficient for authors who, like Rilke himself, transcribe all the details of sensory perception into an inner world-space known as the brain or literature and, subse- quently, phonographically trace the facilitations of this unique container as primal sound itself.
Phonography, notation, and a new eroticism-this is precisely the constellation described by Maurice Renard in a short story of 1907, ten years prior to Rilke's essay. What Rilke saw in the coronal suture Re- nard's fictitious composer Nerval encounters in a roaring seashell, which, like Rilke's skull, is a physiological substitute for Edison's apparatus. Thirty years later Paul Valery used almost the same title as that of Re- nard's story to celebrate shells as architectural works of an artistic na- ture,66 but Renard focuses on the central nervous system, on the labyrinth of shells, auricles, and sound. Since machines have taken over the func- tions of the central nervous system, nobody can say whether the roaring comes from the blood or from the sirens, from the ears or from the sea goddess Amphitrite.
MAURICE RENARD, "DEATH AND THE SHELL" (1907)
And her shape is of such mysterious nastiness that you
brace yourself to listen.
-HENRI DE REGNIER, Contesasoi-meme
Put the shell back where it belongs, Doctor, and do not hold it to your ear for the pleasure of mistaking the roaring of your blood with that of the sea. Put it back. The very man we just buried, our beloved great musician, would still be alive had he not committed the childish mistake of listening to what the mouth of a shell has to say . . . Yes indeed: Nerval, your very own patient . . . You talk of congestion? Maybe. But I am skeptical. Here are my reasons. Keep them to yourself.
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Last Wednesday night, on the day before the accident, I dined at Ner- val's. His close friends have been meeting there every Wednesday for twenty years. There were five in the beginning. But this time, and for the first time, there were only two of us: a stroke, a contagious flu, and a suicide left Ner-
val and me facing each other. When you reach sixty such a situation has nothing amusing about it. You keep asking yourself who will be next.
The meal was as gloomy as a funeral feast. The great man remained silent. I did everything possible to cheer him up. Maybe he was mourning other deaths, the secrecy of which made them even more bitter. . . .
Indeed, he was mourning others.
We went to his study. The piano had not been closed; on it there was the first page of a new composition.
" What are you working on, Nerval ? "
H e raised his finger and spoke like a sad prophet announcing his god:
"Amphitrite. "
"Amphitrite! At last! For how many years have you been saving her up? " "Since the Rome prize. I waited and waited. The longer a work is al-
lowed to mature, the better it is, and I wanted to infuse it with the dream and experience of a whole life . . . I believe it is time . . . "
"A symphonic poem, isn't it? . . . Are you satisfied? "
Nerval shook his head.
"No. In a pinch, it might work . . . My thoughts are not distorted be-
yond recognition . . . "
He interpreted the prelude with great virtuosity: a " Train of Neptune. "
You will relish it, Doctor; it is a miracle!
"You see," Nerval said to me while striking strange, outrageous, and
brutal chords, "up to this fanfare of Tritons it works . . . "
"Marvelous," I answered; "there is . . . "
"But," Nerval continued, "that is all there is to it. The choir that fol-
lows . . . a failure. Yes, I can feel my powerlessness to write it . . . It is too beautiful. We no longer know . . . It would have to be composed the way Phidias created his sculptures; it would have to be a Parthenon, as simple
as . . . We no longer know . . . Ha ! " he suddenly screamed, "to have arrived there, I . . . "
"Listen," I said to him, "you are among the most famous, so . . . "
"So, if this is how I end up, what do others know? But at least their mediocrity is a blessing, which is itself mediocre and satisfied with little. Famous! What is fame when engulfed in sadness! . . . "
"The peaks are always clouded! . . . "
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"Enough," Nerval resumed, " a cease-fire for flattery! This is truly a sad hour, so let us, if you wish, dedicate it to real sorrows. We owe it to the departe d . "
Following these rather mysterious words he took a phonograph from underneath a blanket. I understood.
You can well imagine, Doctor, that this phonograph did not play the "Potpourri from The Doll, performed by the Republican Guard under Pares. " The very improved, sonorous, and clear machine only had a few cylinders. It merely spoke . . .
Yes, you guessed it: on Wednesday the dead spoke to us . . .
How terrible it is to hear this copper throat and its sounds from beyond the grave! It is more than a photographic, or I had better say cinemato- graphic, something; it is the voice itself, the living voice, still alive among carrion, skeletons, nothingness . . .
The composer was slumped in his chair next to the fireside. He listened with painfully knit brows to the tender things our departed comrades said from the depths of the altar and the grave.
" Well, science does have its advantages, Nerval! As a source of miracles and passions it is approaching art. "
"Certainly. The more powerful the telescopes, the larger the number of stars is going to be. Of course science has its good sides. But for us it is still too young. Only our heirs will benefit from it. With the help of each new in- vention they will be able to observe anew the face of our century and listen to the sounds made by our generation. But who is able to project the Athens of Euripides onto a screen or make heard the voice of Sappho ? "
He livened up and played with a large shell he had absentmindedly taken off the chimney mantelpiece.
I appreciated the object that was to revive his spirits, and because I an- ticipated that the elaboration of the scientific, if not paradoxical, theme would amuse him, I resumed:
"Beware of despair. Nature frequently delights in anticipating science, which in turn often merely imitates it. Take photography, for instance! The world can see the traces of an antediluvian creature in a museum-I believe it is the brontosaurus-and the soil retains the marks of the rain that was falling when the beast walked by. What a prehistoric snapshot! "
Nerval was holding the shell to his ear.
"Beautiful, the roaring of this stethoscope," he said; "it reminds me
of the beach where I found it-an island off Salerno . . . it is old and crumbling. "
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I used the opportunity.
"Dear friend, who knows? The pupils of the dying are said to retain the last image they received . . . What if this ear-shaped snail stored the sounds it heard at some critical moment-the agony of mollusks, maybe? And what if the rosy lips of its shell were to pass it on like a graphophone? All in all, you may be listening to the surf of oceans centuries old . . . "
But Nerval had risen. With a commanding gesture he bid me be quiet. His dizzy eyes opened as if over an abyss. He held the double-horned grotto to his temple as if eavesdropping on the threshold of a mystery. A hypnotic ecstasy rendered him motionless.
After I repeatedly insisted, he reluctantly handed me the shell.
At first I was only able to make out a gurgling of foam, then the hardly audible turmoil of the open sea. I sensed-how I can not say-that the sea was very blue and very ancient. And then, suddenly, women were singing and passing by . . . inhuman women whose hymn was wild and lustful like the scream of a crazed goddess . . . Yes, Doctor, that's how it was: a scream and yet a hymn. These were the insidious songs Circe warned us not to lis- ten to, or only when tied to the mast of a galley with rowers whose ears are filled with wax . . . But was that really enough to protect oneself from the danger? . . .
I continued to listen.
The sea creatures disappeared into the depths of the shell. And yet minute by minute the same maddening scene was repeated, periodically, as if by phonograph, incessantly and never diminished.
Nerval snatched the shell away from me and ran to the piano. For a long time he tried to write down the sexual screaming of the goddesses.
At two in the morning he gave up.
The room was strewn with blackened and torn sheets of music.
"You see, you see," he said to me, "not even when I am dictated to can I transcribe the choir! . . . "
He slumped back into his chair, and despite my efforts, he continued to listen to the poison of this Paean.
At four o'clock he started to tremble. I begged him to lie down. He shook his head and seemed to lean over the invisible maelstrom.
At half past five Nerval fell against the marble chimney-he was dead. The shell broke into a thousand pieces.
Do you believe that there are poisons for the ear modeled on deadly
perfumes or lethal potions? Ever since last Wednesday'S acoustic presenta- tion I have not been feeling well. It is my turn to go . .
of cylinder which we covered with a thin coating of candle wax to the
best of our ability. Our impatience, brought to a pitch by the excitement of sticking and fitting the parts as we jostled one another over it, was such that the wax had scarcely cooled and hardened before we put our work to the test.
How now this was done can easily be imagined. When someone spoke or sang into the funnel, the needle in the parchment transferred the sound waves to the receptive surface of the roll slowly turning beneath it, and then, when the moving needle was made to retrace its path (which had been fixed in the meantime with a coat of varnish), the sound which had been ours came back to us tremblingly, haltingly from the paper funnel, uncer- tain, infinitely soft and hesitating and fading out altogether in places. Each time the effect was complete. Our class was not exactly one of the quietest, and there can have been few moments in its history when it had been able as a body to achieve such a degree of silence. The phenomenon, on every reception of it, remained astonishing, indeed positively staggering. We were confronting, as it were, a new and infinitely delicate point in the texture of reality, from which something far greater than ourselves, yet indescribably immature, seemed to be appealing to us as if seeking help. At the time and all through the intervening years I believed that that independent sound, taken from us and preserved outside of us, would be unforgettable. That
it turned out otherwise is the cause of my writing the present account. As will be seen, what impressed itself on my memory most deeply was not the sound from the funnel but the markings traced on the cylinder; these made a most definite impression.
I first became aware of this some fourteen or fifteen years after my school days were past. It was during my first stay in Paris. At that time I was attending the anatomy lectures in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts with consid- erable enthusiasm. It was not so much the manifold interlacing of the mus-
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cles and sinews nor the complete inner agreement of the inner organs with another that appealed to me, but rather the bare skeleton, the restrained en- ergy and elasticity of which I had already noticed when studying the draw-
ings of Leonardo. However much I puzzled over the structure of the whole, it was more than I could deal with; my attention always reverted to the study of the skull, which seemed to me to constitute the utmost achieve- ment, as it were, of which this chalky element was capable; it was as if it had been persuaded to make just in this part a special effort to render a de- cisive service by providing a most solid protection for the most daring fea- ture of all, for something which, though itself narrowly confined, had a field of activity which was boundless. The fascination which this particular struc- ture had for me reached such a pitch finally, that I procured a skull in order to spend many hours of the night with it; and, as always happens with me and things, it was not only the moments of deliberate attention which made this ambiguous object really mine: l owe my familiarity with it, beyond doubt, in part to that passing glance with which we involuntarily examine and perceive our daily environment, when there exists any relationship at all between it and us. It was a passing glance of this kind which I suddenly checked in its course, making it exact and attentive. By candlelight-which is often so peculiarly alive and challenging-the coronal suture had become strikingly visible, and I knew at once what it reminded me of: one of those unforgotten grooves, which had been scratched in a little wax cylinder by the point of a bristle!
And now I do not know: is it due to a rhythmic peculiarity of my imag- ination that ever since, often after the lapse of years, I repeatedly feel the impulse to make that spontaneously perceived similarity the starting point for a whole series of unheard-of experiments? I frankly confess that I have always treated this desire, whenever it made itself felt, with the most unre- lenting mistrust-if proof be needed, let it be found in the fact that only now, after more than a decade and a half, have I resolved to make a cau- tious statement concerning it. Furthermore, there is nothing I can cite in favor of my idea beyond its obstinate recurrence, a recurrence which has taken me by surprise in all sorts of places, divorced from any connection with what I might be doing.
What is it that repeatedly presents itself to my mind ? It is this:
The coronal suture of the skull (this would first have to be investigated)
has-let us assume-a certain similarity to the close wavy line which the needle of a phonograph engraves on the receiving, rotating cylinder of the apparatus. What if one changed the needle and directed it on its return jour- ney along a tracing which was not derived from the graphic translation of
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sound but existed of itself naturally-well, to put it plainly, along the coro- nal suture, for example. What would happen? A sound would necessarily result, a series of sounds, music. . . .
Feelings-which? Incredulity, timidity, fear, awe-which of all feelings here possible prevents me from suggesting a name for the primal sound which would then make its appearance in the world? . . .
Leaving that aside for the moment: what variety of lines, then, occur- ring anywhere, could one not put under the needle and try out? Is there any contour that one could not, in a sense, complete in this way and then expe- rience it, as it makes itself felt, thus transformed, in another field of sense?
At one period, when I began to interest myself in Arabic poems, which seem to owe their existence to the simultaneous and equal contributions from all five senses, it struck me for the first time that the modern European poet makes use of these five contributors singly and in very varying degree, only one of them-sight overladen with the world-seeming to dominate him constantly; how slight, by contrast, is the contribution he receives from inattentive hearing, not to speak of the indifference of other senses, which are active only on the periphery of consciousness and with many interrup- tions within the limited sphere of their practical activity. And yet the perfect poem can only materialize on condition that this world, acted upon by all five levers simultaneously, is seen, under a definite aspect, on the supernat- ural plane, which is, in fact, the plane of the poem.
A lady, to whom this was mentioned in conversation, exclaimed that this wonderful and simultaneous capacity and achievement of all the senses was surely nothing but the presence of mind and grace of love-incidentally she thereby bore her own witness to the sublime reality of the poem. But the lover is in such splendid danger just because he must depend on the co- ordination of his senses, for he knows that they must meet in that unique and risky center in which, renouncing all extension, they come together and have no permanence.
As I write this, I have before me the diagram which I have always used as a ready help whenever ideas of this kind have demanded attention. If the world's whole field of experience, including those spheres which are beyond our knowledge, be represented in a complete circle, it will be immediately evident that when the black sectors, denoting that which we are incapable of experiencing, are measured against the lesser, light sections, correspond to that which is illuminated by the senses, the former are very much greater.
Now the position of the lover is this: that he feels himself unexpectedly placed in the center of the circle, that is to say, at the point where the
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known and the incomprehensible, coming forcibly together at one single point, become complete and simply a possession, losing thereby, it is true, all individual character. This position would not serve for the poet, for indi- vidual variety must be constantly present for him; he is compelled to use the sense sectors to their full extent, as it must also be in his aim to extend each
of them as far as possible, so that his lively delight, girded for the attempt, may be able to pass through the five gardens in one leap.
As the lover's danger consists in the nonspatial character of his stand- point, so the poet's lies in his awareness of the abysses which divide the one order of sense experience from the other: in truth they are sufficiently wide and engulfing to sweep away from before us the greater part of the world- who knows how many worlds ?
The question arises here as to whether the extent of these sectors on the plane assumed by us can be enlarged to any vital degree by the work of re- search. The achievements of the microscope, of the telescope, and of so many devices which increase the range of the senses upward and down- ward: do they not lie in another sphere altogether, since most of the increase thus achieved cannot be interpreted by the senses, cannot be "experienced" in any real sense? It is perhaps not premature to suppose that the artist, who develops the five-fingered hand of his senses (if one may put it so) to ever more active and more spiritual capacity, contributes more decisively than anyone else to an extension of the several sense fields; only the achievement which gives proof of this does not permit of his entering his personal exten- sion of territory in the general map before us, since it is only possible, in the last resort, by a miracle.
But if we are looking for a way by which to establish the connection so urgently needed between the different provinces now so strangely separated from one another, what could be more promising than the experiment sug- gested earlier in this recollection? If the writer ends by recommending it once again, he may be given a certain amount of credit for withstanding the temptation to give free reign to his fancy in imagining the results of the as- sumptions which he has suggested.
Soglio. On the day of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, I 9 I 9 .
Rilke dedicated the most impassionate of reports to phonography. Re- gardless of the fact that he wrote it on the Assumption, "he was a poet and hated the approximate. "47 Therefore the strange precision with
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which his text enumerates all the parts of an apparatus that Rilke's physics teacher, employed not coincidentally at an imperial military school, constructed around 1890. As if to confirm the fictional Edison of Tomorrow's Eve, who had no supply problems whatsoever when design- ing the phonograph, a combination of cardboard, paper, the bristles of a clothes brush, and candle wax suffice to open a "new and infinitely deli- cate point in the texture of reality. " Oblivious to the knowledge of the physics teacher and the school drill, students hear their own voices. Not their words and answers as programmed feedback by the education sys- tem, but the real voice against a backdrop of pure silence or attention.
And yet the "unforgettable" (in the word's double meaning) phono- graphic sound recording is not at the center of Rilke's profane illumina- tion. In the founding age of media, the author is captivated more by the technological revolutions of reading than of writing. The "markings traced on the cylinder" are physiological traces whose strangeness tran- scends all human voices.
Certainly, the writer is no brain physiologist. His amateur status at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts enables him to become acquainted with the vi- cissitudes of the skeletal structure, but not with the facilitations on which Exner or Freud based their new sciences. But when it comes to mounted and exhibited skeletons, Rilke is fascinated by that "utmost achievement" known as the skull, because "it was as if it had been persuaded to make just in this part a special effort to render a decisive service by providing a most solid protection for the most daring feature of all. " During his Parisian nights, Rilke reduces the skull sitting in front of him to a cerebral container. Describing it as "this particular structure" with a "boundless field of activity," he merely repeats the physiological insight that for our central nervous system, "our own body is the outside world. "48 One no less than Flechsig, Schreber's famous psychiatrist, had proven that the cerebral cortex contains a "sphere of physical perception" that neurolog- ically reproduces all parts of the body, distorted according to their im- portance. 49 Rilke's belief in later years that it was the task of poetry to transfer all given data into an "inner world space" is based on such in- sights. (Even though literary scholars, still believing in the omnipotence of philosophers, choose to relate Rilke's inner world space to Husserl. )50
"Primal Sound" leaves no doubt whatsoever about which contempo- rary developments were most important to literature in 1900. Instead of lapsing into the usual melancholic associations of Shakespeare's Hamlet or Keller's Green Henry at the sight of a human skull in candlelight, the writer sees phonographic grooves.
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? Coronal suture from stp to stp.
A trace or path or groove appears where the frontal and parietal bones of the "suckling infant"51-to use Rilke's anatomically correct term-have grown together. As if the facilitations of Freud and Exner had been projected out of the brain onto its enclosure, the naked eye is now able to read the coronal suture as a writing of the real. A technologically up-to-date author follows in the wake of the brain physiologists, who since the days of Guyau and Hirth have automatically thought of Edison's phonograph when dealing with nerve pathways. Moreover, Rilke draws conclusions more radical than all scientific boldness. Before him, nobody had ever suggested to decode a trace that nobody had encoded and that encoded nothing.
Ever since the invention of the phonograph, there has been writing without a subject. It is no longer necessary to assign an author to every trace, not even God. "Project for a Scientific Psychology" centered on fa- cilitations inscribed by acts of perception, but there is no reason not to set the gramophone needle to random anatomic features. A transgression in the literal sense of the word, which shakes the very words used to phrase it. Acoustics arises from physiology, technology from nature. In Rilke's time, skulls were measured in search of all possible features: intelligence and idiocy, masculinity and femininity, genius and racial characteristics. But their transposition into the acoustic medium remained a challenge that forced dots and question marks onto the writing hand.
What the coronal suture yields upon replay is a primal sound with- out a name, a music without notation, a sound even more strange than
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any incantation for the dead for which the skull could have been used. Deprived of its shellac, the duped needle produces sounds that "are not the result of a graphic transposition of a note" but are an absolute trans- fer, that is, a metaphor. A writer thus celebrates the very opposite of his own medium-the white noise no writing can store. Technological media operate against a background of noise because their data travel along physical channels; as in blurring in the case of film or the sound of the needle in the case of the gramophone, that noise determines their signal- to-noise ratio. According to Arnheim, that is the price they pay for deliv- ering reproductions that are at the same time effects of the reproduced. Noise is emitted by the channels media have to cross.
In 1924, five years after Rilke's "Primal Sound," Rudolph Lothar wrote The Talking Machine: A Technical-Aesthetic Essay. Based on the not-very-informed premise that "philosophers and psychologists have hitherto written about the arts" and "neglected" phonography,52 Lothar drew up a new aesthetic. Its key propositions center exclusively on the re-
lationship between noise and signals.
The talking machine occupies a special position in aesthetics and music. It de- mands a twofold capacity for illusion, an illusion working in two directions. On the one hand, it demands that we ignore and overlook its mechanical features. As we know, every record comes with interference. As connoisseurs we are not al- lowed to hear this interference, just as in a theater we are obliged to ignore both the line that sets off the stage and the frame surrounding the scene. We have to forget we are witnessing actors in costumes and makeup who are not really expe- riencing what they are performing. They are merely playing parts. We, however, pretend to take their appearance for reality. Only if we forget that we are inside a theater can we really enjoy dramatic art. This "as if" is generated by our capacity for illusion. Only when we forget that the voice of the singer is coming from a wooden box, when we no longer hear any interference, when we can suspend it the way we are able to suspend a stage-only then will the talking machine come into its own artistically.
But, on the other hand, the machine demands that we give bodies to the sounds emanating from it. For example, while playing an aria sung by a famous singer we see the stage he stands on, we see him dressed in an appropriate cos- tl,lme. The more it is linked to our memories, the stronger the record's effect will be. Nothing excites memory more strongly than the human voice, maybe because nothing is forgotten as quickly as a voice. Our memory of it, however, does not die-its timbre and character sink into our subconscious where they await their revival. What has been said about the voice naturally also applies to instruments. We see Nikisch conduct the C-minor symphony, we see Kreisler with the violin at his chin, we see trumpets flashing in the sun when listening to military marches.
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But the capacity for illusion that enables us to ignore boxes and interference and furnishes tones with a visible background requires musical sensitivity. This is the most important point of phonographic aesthetics: The talking machine can only grant artistic satisfaction to musical people. For only musicians possess the ca-
pacity for illusion necessary for every enjoyment of art. 53
Maybe Rilke, who loved the gong, with its resounding mixture of frequencies, above all other instruments, wasn't a musical person. 54 His aesthetic-"Primal Sound" is Rilke's only text about art and the beautiful in general-subverts the two illusions to which Lothar wants to commit readers or gramophone listeners. From the fact that "every record comes with interferences" he draws opposite conclusions. Replaying the skull's coronary suture yields nothing but noise. And there is no need to add some hallucinated body when listening to signs that are not the result of the graphic translation of a note but rather random anatomical lines. Bod- ies themselves generate noise. And the impossible real transpires.
Of course, the entertainment industry is all on Lothar's side. But there have been and there still are experiments that pursue Rilke's primal sound with technologically more sophisticated means. In the wake of Mondrian and the Bruitists (who wanted to introduce noise into literature and music), Moholy-Nagy already suggested in 1923 turning "the gramo- phone from an instrument of reproduction into a productive one, gener- ating acoustic phenomena without any previous acoustic existence by scratching the necessary marks onto the record. "55 An obvious analogy to Rilke's suggestion of eliciting sounds from the skull that were not the re- sult of a prior graphic transformation. A triumph for the concept of fre- quency: in contrast to the "narrowness" of a "scale" that is "possibly a thousand years old" and to which we therefore no longer must adhere,56 Moholy-Nagy's etchings allow for unlimited transposition from medium to medium. Any graphisms-including those, not coincidentally, domi- nating Mondrian's paintings-result in a sound. Which is why the exper- imenter asks for the "study of graphic signs of the most diverse (simulta- neous and isolated) acoustic phenomena" and the "use of projection ma- chines" or "film. "57
Engineers and the avant-garde think alike. At the same time as Moholy-Nagy's etching, the first plans were made for sound film, one of the first industrially connected media systems. "The invention of Mr. Vogt, Dr. Engel, and Mr. Masolle, the speaking Tri-Ergon-film," was
based on a "highly complicated process" of medial transformations that could only be financed with the help of million-dollar investments from
? Gramophone record. (Photo: Moholy-Nagy)
the C. Lorenz Company. 58 The inventors say of it, "Acoustic waves ema- nating from the scene are converted into electricity, electricity is turned into light, light into the silver coloring of the positive and negative, the coloring of the film back into light, which is then converted back into electricity before the seventh and final transformation turns electricity into the mechanical operation of a weak membrane giving off sounds. "59
Frequencies remain frequencies regardless of their respective carrier medium. The symbolic correlation of sound intervals and planetary or- bits, which since [Cicero'S] Dream ofScipio made up the harmony of the spheres, is replaced by correspondences in the real. In order to synchro- nize, store, and reproduce acoustic events and image sequences, sound films can let them wander seven times from one carrier to the next. In Moholy-Nagy's own words, his record etchings are capable of generating a "new mechanical harmony": "The individual graphic signs are exam- ined and their proportions are formulated as a law. (Here we may point
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? Block schematic of an analog vocoder. The synthesis component is in the lower signal path, the analysis component, in the upper signal path. The latter's low- and high-pass filters limit the input, for example, of "speech," while its band-pass filters break down the audible range into several component frequency channels. Following its coordination as envelope curves, the analysis output-using a switching matrix with arbitrarily chosen correspondences between the signal paths-controls the voltage-controlled amplifiers (yeAs), whose band-pass filters have also broken down the "input" or carrier into several component frequency channels. The sum signal at the exit (of the vocoder) appears as an instrumental sound encoded by a voice (vox).
out a consideration that is at present still utopian: based on strict propor- tional laws graphic signs can be transposed into music. )"60
This idea had lost its utopian character long before it was written down. Fourier's solution of all continuous functions (including musical notes) into sums of pure sine harmonics was achieved before Helmholtz and Edison. Walsh's equally mathematical proof that square wave vibra- tions may also serve as summands of the Fourier analysis was roughly contemporaneous with Moholy-Nagy's writings. As a result, in 1964 Robert A. Moog, with his electronic talents and the "American vice of modular repetition,"61 was able to equip all the sound studios and rock bands of this world with synthesizers. A subtractive sound analysis, that is, one controlled by frequency filters, transfers the proportional relation- ships of graphic depictions (rectangles, saw tooth curves, triangles, trape- zoids, and maybe even sine curves) into the music envisioned by Mon- drian and Moholy-Nagy. 62
Rilke's urgent demand to put under the needle and try out a "variety of lines, occurring anywhere," to "complete [it] in this way and then ex-
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perience it, as it makes itself felt, thus transformed, in another field of sense": it is realized every night in the combination of amplifier and os- cillographic display.
But there is more to it. Between 1942 and 1945, while working for Bell laboratories and the British Secret Service, respectively, Shannon and Turing developed the vocoder, a wonder weapon that would make the transatlantic telephone conversations between Churchill and Roosevelt safe from interception by Canaris and the German Abwehr63 and that, like so many electronic achievements of the Second World War, is now in- dispensable to popular music. It lives up to its name: it encodes any given data stream A with the envelope curves of another sound sequence B, for example, the voice of a singer, after a switching matrix has changed the frequency of the envelope curves by way of free permutation. In the case of Laurie Anderson's electronic violin, the one-third octave band between 440 and 550 Hz follows in absolute synchronicity the volume her voice happens to have in the one-third octave band between 1760 and 2200 Hz, while a third one-third octave band of her songs controls a fourth band of her violin, and so on and so forth. Primal sounds do not cor- respond to anatomical features and sounds do not follow Mondrian's graphics; rather, the paradoxical result is that one and the same controls one and the same: one acoustics controls the other.
To test his vocoder, by the way, Turing first played a record of Win- ston Churchill's belligerent voice, whose discreet or cut-up sampled val- ues he then mixed with a noise generator using modular addition. Where- upon British officers heard the voice of their prime minister and com- mander in chief contaminate the speakers as just so much white noise (not to say, primal sound). Appropriately, Turing's vocoder was named af- ter Delilah, who in the Book of Judges tricked another warrior, the Danaite Samson, out of the secret of his strength. Turing's skill as a tin- kerer, however, revealed the secret of modern political discourse to be something far worse than weakness: it is "a perfectly even and uninfor- mative hiss,"64 which offered no regularities and, therefore, nothing in- telligible to the ears of British officers or those of German eavesdroppers. And yet, sent through the vocoder a second time, Churchill's original voice emerged from the receiving end.
This is what has become of the "abysses" that, according to Rilke's ingenious formula, "divide the one order of sense experience from the other. " In today's media networks, algorithmically formalized data streams can traverse them all. Media facilitate all possible manipulations: acoustic signals control the optical signals of light consoles, electronic lan-
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guage controls the acoustic output of computer music, and, in the case of the vocoder, one set of acoustic signals controls another. Finally, New York disc jockeys turn the esoteric graphisms of Moholy-Nagy into the everyday experience of scratch music.
But Rilke's astute diagnosis only applies to the founding age when the three ur-media-phonograph, film, and typewriter-first differentiated acoustics, optics, and writing. Nevertheless, as if anticipating today's me- dia systems, he searched "for a way to establish the connection so ur-
gently needed between the different provinces now so strangely separated from one another. " Which is why he fell back on "Arabic poems, which seem to owe their existence to the simultaneous and equal contributions from all five senses," and which let eyes trained in the art of calligraphy enjoy the very materiality of letters. This explains his criticism, histori- cally extremely accurate, of literary epochs such as the Age of Goethe, in which "sight" alone seems to dominate authors and readers because cor- rect reading involves a hallucinatory process that turns words into a real and visible world. This explains as well his proposition for an equally lyrical and scientific coronal suture phonography, which would pay more attention to acoustics than did the "inattentive hearing" of authors from
the Age of Goethe.
But before Rilke wrote down his proposal on the Assumption in the alpine solitude of the Bergell, he related it to a woman. Synchronicity of the asynchronic: on the one hand a writer whose "extension" or combi- nation of sensory media goes beyond "the work of research"; on the other a woman who mistakes coronal suture phonography for "love," and love-as involuntary evidence for "the sublime reality of the poem"-for poems. Only as long as the unchallenged and unrivaled medium of the book was able to simulate the storage of all possible data streams did love remain literature and literature love; the ascension of female readers.
But a writer whose school teaches physics instead of philosophy ob- jects. The combination of sensory data streams achieved by love is devoid of "permanence. " It cannot be stored by any medium. Moreover, it loses "all individual character. " That is, no real can pass through the filter of love. Whichiswhylovedoes "notserveforthepoet,forindividualvari- ety must be constantly present for him; he is compelled to use the sense sectors to their full extent," or, simply, to become a media technician among media technicians.
Marinetti's Technical Manifesto ofFuturist Literature of 1912 pro- claimed that crowds of massed molecules and whirling electrons are
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more exciting than the smiles or tears of a woman (di una donna). 65 In other words: literature defects from erotics to stochastics, from red lips to white noise. Marinetti's molecular swarms and whirling electrons are merely instances of the Brownian motion that human eyes can only per- ceive in the shape of dancing sun particles but that in the real are the noise on all channels. According to Rilke, the "abysses" dividing the or- ders of sense experience are "sufficiently wide and engulfing to sweep away from before us the greater part of the world-who knows how many worlds? " Which is why love is no longer sufficient for authors who, like Rilke himself, transcribe all the details of sensory perception into an inner world-space known as the brain or literature and, subse- quently, phonographically trace the facilitations of this unique container as primal sound itself.
Phonography, notation, and a new eroticism-this is precisely the constellation described by Maurice Renard in a short story of 1907, ten years prior to Rilke's essay. What Rilke saw in the coronal suture Re- nard's fictitious composer Nerval encounters in a roaring seashell, which, like Rilke's skull, is a physiological substitute for Edison's apparatus. Thirty years later Paul Valery used almost the same title as that of Re- nard's story to celebrate shells as architectural works of an artistic na- ture,66 but Renard focuses on the central nervous system, on the labyrinth of shells, auricles, and sound. Since machines have taken over the func- tions of the central nervous system, nobody can say whether the roaring comes from the blood or from the sirens, from the ears or from the sea goddess Amphitrite.
MAURICE RENARD, "DEATH AND THE SHELL" (1907)
And her shape is of such mysterious nastiness that you
brace yourself to listen.
-HENRI DE REGNIER, Contesasoi-meme
Put the shell back where it belongs, Doctor, and do not hold it to your ear for the pleasure of mistaking the roaring of your blood with that of the sea. Put it back. The very man we just buried, our beloved great musician, would still be alive had he not committed the childish mistake of listening to what the mouth of a shell has to say . . . Yes indeed: Nerval, your very own patient . . . You talk of congestion? Maybe. But I am skeptical. Here are my reasons. Keep them to yourself.
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Last Wednesday night, on the day before the accident, I dined at Ner- val's. His close friends have been meeting there every Wednesday for twenty years. There were five in the beginning. But this time, and for the first time, there were only two of us: a stroke, a contagious flu, and a suicide left Ner-
val and me facing each other. When you reach sixty such a situation has nothing amusing about it. You keep asking yourself who will be next.
The meal was as gloomy as a funeral feast. The great man remained silent. I did everything possible to cheer him up. Maybe he was mourning other deaths, the secrecy of which made them even more bitter. . . .
Indeed, he was mourning others.
We went to his study. The piano had not been closed; on it there was the first page of a new composition.
" What are you working on, Nerval ? "
H e raised his finger and spoke like a sad prophet announcing his god:
"Amphitrite. "
"Amphitrite! At last! For how many years have you been saving her up? " "Since the Rome prize. I waited and waited. The longer a work is al-
lowed to mature, the better it is, and I wanted to infuse it with the dream and experience of a whole life . . . I believe it is time . . . "
"A symphonic poem, isn't it? . . . Are you satisfied? "
Nerval shook his head.
"No. In a pinch, it might work . . . My thoughts are not distorted be-
yond recognition . . . "
He interpreted the prelude with great virtuosity: a " Train of Neptune. "
You will relish it, Doctor; it is a miracle!
"You see," Nerval said to me while striking strange, outrageous, and
brutal chords, "up to this fanfare of Tritons it works . . . "
"Marvelous," I answered; "there is . . . "
"But," Nerval continued, "that is all there is to it. The choir that fol-
lows . . . a failure. Yes, I can feel my powerlessness to write it . . . It is too beautiful. We no longer know . . . It would have to be composed the way Phidias created his sculptures; it would have to be a Parthenon, as simple
as . . . We no longer know . . . Ha ! " he suddenly screamed, "to have arrived there, I . . . "
"Listen," I said to him, "you are among the most famous, so . . . "
"So, if this is how I end up, what do others know? But at least their mediocrity is a blessing, which is itself mediocre and satisfied with little. Famous! What is fame when engulfed in sadness! . . . "
"The peaks are always clouded! . . . "
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"Enough," Nerval resumed, " a cease-fire for flattery! This is truly a sad hour, so let us, if you wish, dedicate it to real sorrows. We owe it to the departe d . "
Following these rather mysterious words he took a phonograph from underneath a blanket. I understood.
You can well imagine, Doctor, that this phonograph did not play the "Potpourri from The Doll, performed by the Republican Guard under Pares. " The very improved, sonorous, and clear machine only had a few cylinders. It merely spoke . . .
Yes, you guessed it: on Wednesday the dead spoke to us . . .
How terrible it is to hear this copper throat and its sounds from beyond the grave! It is more than a photographic, or I had better say cinemato- graphic, something; it is the voice itself, the living voice, still alive among carrion, skeletons, nothingness . . .
The composer was slumped in his chair next to the fireside. He listened with painfully knit brows to the tender things our departed comrades said from the depths of the altar and the grave.
" Well, science does have its advantages, Nerval! As a source of miracles and passions it is approaching art. "
"Certainly. The more powerful the telescopes, the larger the number of stars is going to be. Of course science has its good sides. But for us it is still too young. Only our heirs will benefit from it. With the help of each new in- vention they will be able to observe anew the face of our century and listen to the sounds made by our generation. But who is able to project the Athens of Euripides onto a screen or make heard the voice of Sappho ? "
He livened up and played with a large shell he had absentmindedly taken off the chimney mantelpiece.
I appreciated the object that was to revive his spirits, and because I an- ticipated that the elaboration of the scientific, if not paradoxical, theme would amuse him, I resumed:
"Beware of despair. Nature frequently delights in anticipating science, which in turn often merely imitates it. Take photography, for instance! The world can see the traces of an antediluvian creature in a museum-I believe it is the brontosaurus-and the soil retains the marks of the rain that was falling when the beast walked by. What a prehistoric snapshot! "
Nerval was holding the shell to his ear.
"Beautiful, the roaring of this stethoscope," he said; "it reminds me
of the beach where I found it-an island off Salerno . . . it is old and crumbling. "
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I used the opportunity.
"Dear friend, who knows? The pupils of the dying are said to retain the last image they received . . . What if this ear-shaped snail stored the sounds it heard at some critical moment-the agony of mollusks, maybe? And what if the rosy lips of its shell were to pass it on like a graphophone? All in all, you may be listening to the surf of oceans centuries old . . . "
But Nerval had risen. With a commanding gesture he bid me be quiet. His dizzy eyes opened as if over an abyss. He held the double-horned grotto to his temple as if eavesdropping on the threshold of a mystery. A hypnotic ecstasy rendered him motionless.
After I repeatedly insisted, he reluctantly handed me the shell.
At first I was only able to make out a gurgling of foam, then the hardly audible turmoil of the open sea. I sensed-how I can not say-that the sea was very blue and very ancient. And then, suddenly, women were singing and passing by . . . inhuman women whose hymn was wild and lustful like the scream of a crazed goddess . . . Yes, Doctor, that's how it was: a scream and yet a hymn. These were the insidious songs Circe warned us not to lis- ten to, or only when tied to the mast of a galley with rowers whose ears are filled with wax . . . But was that really enough to protect oneself from the danger? . . .
I continued to listen.
The sea creatures disappeared into the depths of the shell. And yet minute by minute the same maddening scene was repeated, periodically, as if by phonograph, incessantly and never diminished.
Nerval snatched the shell away from me and ran to the piano. For a long time he tried to write down the sexual screaming of the goddesses.
At two in the morning he gave up.
The room was strewn with blackened and torn sheets of music.
"You see, you see," he said to me, "not even when I am dictated to can I transcribe the choir! . . . "
He slumped back into his chair, and despite my efforts, he continued to listen to the poison of this Paean.
At four o'clock he started to tremble. I begged him to lie down. He shook his head and seemed to lean over the invisible maelstrom.
At half past five Nerval fell against the marble chimney-he was dead. The shell broke into a thousand pieces.
Do you believe that there are poisons for the ear modeled on deadly
perfumes or lethal potions? Ever since last Wednesday'S acoustic presenta- tion I have not been feeling well. It is my turn to go . .
