“Oh mirror! Cold water frozen by boredom within your frame,
How many times, for hours on end,Saddened by dreams and searching for my memories,
Which are like dead leaves in the deep hole beneath your glassy surface,
Have I seen myself in you as a distant ghost!
But, oh horror!
On certain evenings, in your cruel pool,
I have recognised the barrenness of my disordered dream!”
–Stéphane Mallarmé, “Herodias”,
“Why then should one insist on forcing dreams, texts, words, and actions to signify? Keep the dream-bursts apart; let them resound together without filling the intervals that allow them to coexist in all their richness within dissonance … Forget meaning and with it the subject. Repression cannot resist the folly of winds. Beauty will be amnesiac or it will not be at all" ~ Sylvère Lotringer, "The Dance of Signs"
“All my efforts are for the moment directed along one line: conquer boredom. I think of nothing else night and day”. - Andre Breton, to Jean Cocteau
“The lucidity of the depths of torpor” – Maurice Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to
Death,” from The Work of Fire
Death,” from The Work of Fire
“Boredom had reached an intolerable depth. The boredom was as deep as the love and more enduring – indeed it descends on me too often today” - Graham Greene
"He stared at the trees for a few moments, then allowed his eyes to glaze over until the objects before him lunged out of focus. A blur of slate grey and chocolate brown and pastel green... How the world strained to keep itself busy! Already Benjamin felt so distant from all of that, so far removed. He continued merely to sit at the typewriter, in a swoon of heaviness and incuriosity... He would have to go too, in a minute. Couldn’t very well sit here all weekend. And yet there was something strangely comfortable about this listlessness, this solitude.... Far preferable now just to savour this aloofness, to close himself off, settle further into a luscious insensibility that no sound, no image, would ever be able to pierce.”
- Jonathan Coe, The Rotters Club
“Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us, — for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end….. How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.”
- Walter Pater, Conclusion to The Renaissance
“Well the music is your special friend
Dance on fire as it intends
Music is your only friend
Until the end”
- Jim Morrison
"One must always be drunk. Everything lies in that: it is the only question worth considering. In order not feel the horrible burden of Time which breaks your shoulders and bows you down to earth, you must intoxicate yourself without truce, but with what? With wine, poetry, or art? – As you will; but intoxicate yourself.
… Ask what time it is? And the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, will answer you: ‘It is time to intoxicate yourself’. In order to escape from the slavish martyrdom of Time, intoxicate yourself, unceasingly intoxicate yourself; - with wine, with poetry, with art, with virtue, or with what you will” -
- Charles Baudelaire
“The Daemonic is that which cannot be accounted for by understanding and reason.... In Poetry there is from first to last something daemonic, and especially in its unconscious appeal, for which all intellect and reason is insufficient, and which, therefore, has an efficacy beyond all concepts. Such is the effect in Music to the highest degree, for Music stands too high for any understanding to reach, and an all-mastering efficacy goes forth from it, of which, however, no man is able to give an account. Religious worship therefore cannot do without music. It is one the foremost means to work upon men with an effect of marvel” - Goethe
“Adulthood is the abdication of ecstasy” - Simon Critchley, Mysticism.
- Walter Pater, Conclusion to The Renaissance
“Well the music is your special friend
Dance on fire as it intends
Music is your only friend
Until the end”
- Jim Morrison
"One must always be drunk. Everything lies in that: it is the only question worth considering. In order not feel the horrible burden of Time which breaks your shoulders and bows you down to earth, you must intoxicate yourself without truce, but with what? With wine, poetry, or art? – As you will; but intoxicate yourself.
… Ask what time it is? And the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, will answer you: ‘It is time to intoxicate yourself’. In order to escape from the slavish martyrdom of Time, intoxicate yourself, unceasingly intoxicate yourself; - with wine, with poetry, with art, with virtue, or with what you will” -
- Charles Baudelaire
“The Daemonic is that which cannot be accounted for by understanding and reason.... In Poetry there is from first to last something daemonic, and especially in its unconscious appeal, for which all intellect and reason is insufficient, and which, therefore, has an efficacy beyond all concepts. Such is the effect in Music to the highest degree, for Music stands too high for any understanding to reach, and an all-mastering efficacy goes forth from it, of which, however, no man is able to give an account. Religious worship therefore cannot do without music. It is one the foremost means to work upon men with an effect of marvel” - Goethe
“Adulthood is the abdication of ecstasy” - Simon Critchley, Mysticism.
“Only as an aesthetic phenomenon is life and the world eternally justified.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music,
“The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations” - Susan Sontag
“The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations” - Susan Sontag
“Criticism is always historical or prospective, the presentation of bliss, is forbidden it; its preferred material is thus culture, which is everything in us except our present” – Roland Barthes
'Pop songs celebrate not the articulate but the inarticulate ... they measure the depth and originality of their emotions by reference to their inability to find words for them'.
- Simon Frith, Sound Effects
"My argument has always been that the way rock works, both in terms of its emotional effectiveness but also in terms of its politics, is at the level of sound. No matter how powerful you think “Ohio” is, in terms of politics “Tutti Frutti” is more politically profound."
- Robert Ray
“It almost ruined it, in a way. It became journalism and not poetry” – John Lennon falling under the influence of Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman and recording Sometime in New York City.
“To the listener who desires to hear the words above the music corresponds the singer who speaks more than he sings” versus folk, which contains “the most intense effort of language to imitate the condition of music…. The continuously generating melody scatters image sparks all around, which in their variegation, their abrupt change, their mad precipitation, manifest a power quite unknown to the epic and its steady flow”
– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music,
“Music has its existence on the borderline between meaning and nonsense. That is why most attempts to attribute a specific meaning to a piece of music seems to be beside the point…. At the end of the eighteenth century, music was the envy of all the other arts because of its refusal to be bound by any rigid system of meaning…. Music will not acknowledge a context greater than itself – social, cultural, or biographical – to which it is conveniently subservient. ” – Charles Rosen
“The function of music is to release us from the tyranny of conscious thought”
- Thomas Beecham
“To grant music a moral function, however, it would seem necessary to amputate and discard all its pathos, everything heady and orgiastic in it, and, finally, to deprive oneself of poetic intoxication in any form. For music does not always convey the serenity of wise men; it fevers those who listen to it, drives them mad. Music is derationalizing and unhealthy…. Music invokes an unreasonable existence, a bit orgiastic, consciousness made frenetic, ravaged by tragedy or deliria, prey to backward-looking nostalgia or to the wrathful storms of passion. Intoxication is not wisdom.”
- Vladimir Jankelevitch
“Daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
“Tarkovsky is for me the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream… When film is not a document, it is dream. That is why Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He doesn’t explain. What should he explain anyhow?... All my life I have hammered on the doors of the rooms in which he moves so naturally. Only a few times have I managed to creep inside” - Ingmar Bergman on Andrei Tarkovsky:
"The highest criticism, then, is more creative than creation, and the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really is not" – Oscar Wilde
- Simon Frith, Sound Effects
"My argument has always been that the way rock works, both in terms of its emotional effectiveness but also in terms of its politics, is at the level of sound. No matter how powerful you think “Ohio” is, in terms of politics “Tutti Frutti” is more politically profound."
- Robert Ray
“It almost ruined it, in a way. It became journalism and not poetry” – John Lennon falling under the influence of Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman and recording Sometime in New York City.
“To the listener who desires to hear the words above the music corresponds the singer who speaks more than he sings” versus folk, which contains “the most intense effort of language to imitate the condition of music…. The continuously generating melody scatters image sparks all around, which in their variegation, their abrupt change, their mad precipitation, manifest a power quite unknown to the epic and its steady flow”
– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music,
“Music has its existence on the borderline between meaning and nonsense. That is why most attempts to attribute a specific meaning to a piece of music seems to be beside the point…. At the end of the eighteenth century, music was the envy of all the other arts because of its refusal to be bound by any rigid system of meaning…. Music will not acknowledge a context greater than itself – social, cultural, or biographical – to which it is conveniently subservient. ” – Charles Rosen
“The function of music is to release us from the tyranny of conscious thought”
- Thomas Beecham
“To grant music a moral function, however, it would seem necessary to amputate and discard all its pathos, everything heady and orgiastic in it, and, finally, to deprive oneself of poetic intoxication in any form. For music does not always convey the serenity of wise men; it fevers those who listen to it, drives them mad. Music is derationalizing and unhealthy…. Music invokes an unreasonable existence, a bit orgiastic, consciousness made frenetic, ravaged by tragedy or deliria, prey to backward-looking nostalgia or to the wrathful storms of passion. Intoxication is not wisdom.”
- Vladimir Jankelevitch
“Daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
“Tarkovsky is for me the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream… When film is not a document, it is dream. That is why Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He doesn’t explain. What should he explain anyhow?... All my life I have hammered on the doors of the rooms in which he moves so naturally. Only a few times have I managed to creep inside” - Ingmar Bergman on Andrei Tarkovsky:
"The highest criticism, then, is more creative than creation, and the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really is not" – Oscar Wilde
“Music...is the vapour of art. It is to poetry what reverie is to thought, what the fluid is to the liquid, what the ocean of clouds is to the ocean of waves” - Victor Hugo, in William Shakespeare, 1864
“Directly, in itself, music signifies nothing, unless by convention or association. Music means nothing and yet means everything…. In the very measure that one tends to confer upon music the dimension of depth, music is, perhaps, the most superficial form of appearance”
- Vladimir Jankelevitch
“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it. That the mere matter of a poem, for instance, its subject, namely, its given incidents or situation... should be nothing without the form... that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter: this is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees.... It is the art of music which most completely realises this artistic ideal, this perfect identification of matter and form. In its consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression; they inhere in and completely saturate each other”- Walter Pater, in ‘The School of Giorgione’; from The Renaissance: Studies in Art & Poetry, 1877
“Without music, life would be a mistake” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer, 1889
- Vladimir Jankelevitch
“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it. That the mere matter of a poem, for instance, its subject, namely, its given incidents or situation... should be nothing without the form... that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter: this is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees.... It is the art of music which most completely realises this artistic ideal, this perfect identification of matter and form. In its consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression; they inhere in and completely saturate each other”- Walter Pater, in ‘The School of Giorgione’; from The Renaissance: Studies in Art & Poetry, 1877
“Without music, life would be a mistake” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer, 1889
