Jankélévitch famously wrote that “only music can express things which are infinitely ambiguous, as, unlike logic, music must not opt between things which are incompossible or contradictory: it can bring forth and develop, with the help of polyphony, several independent lines of discourse.”(⦼)
As a matter of fact, poetry can do it, as well.
Consider, for example, these verses from Hölderlin’s Empedocles, which Empedocles pronounces before suiciding and we have briefly analysed elsewhere (in connection to frag. 51 of Heraclitus):
O Iris Bogen über stürzenden
Gewässern, wenn die Woog in Silberwolken
Auffliegt, wie du bist, so ist meine Freude.
In our translation:
O rainbow over the tumbling
Waters, when the wave in silver clouds
Takes off, like you are, so is my happiness.
The ascending movement of the wave and its foam (x: ↑) is contrasted with the descending movement of the water (y: ↓), while Empedocles’s happiness consists in the back-bent attunement of these two diverging forces (xy: ↑↓).
Consider too this fragment from Hölderlin’s Hyperion:
Indessen ging ich weiter. Mit jedem Schritte wurd es wunderbarer in mir. Ich hätte fliegen mögen, so trieb mein Herz mich vorwärts; aber es war, als hätt ich Blei an den Sohlen. Die Seele war vorausgeeilt, und hatte die irdischen Glieder verlassen. Ich hörte nicht mehr und vor dem Auge dämmerten und schwankten alle Gestalten. Der Geist war schon bei Diotima; im Morgenlichte spielte der Gipfel des Baums, indes die untern Zweige noch die kalte Dämmerung fühlten.
»Ach! mein Hyperion!« rief jetzt mir eine Stimme entgegen; ich stürzt hinzu; »meine Diotima! o meine Diotima!« weiter hatt ich kein Wort und keinen Othem, kein Bewußtsein.
Schwinde, schwinde, sterbliches Leben, dürftig Geschäft, wo der einsame Geist die Pfennige, die er gesammelt, hin und her betrachtet und zählt! wir sind zur Freude der Gottheit alle berufen!
Es ist hier eine Lücke in meinem Dasein. Ich starb, und wie ich erwachte, lag ich am Herzen des himmlischen Mädchens.
In Eric Santer’s translation:
Meanwhile I walked on. With every step the wonder within me grew stronger. I wanted to fly away, but it was as if my feet were weighted with lead. My soul had hurried on before and forsaken my earthly limbs. I heard no more, every shape grew dim and tremulous before my eyes. My spirit was already with Diotima; the tree top played in the light of morning while the lower branches still felt the chill of dawn.
“Ah! my Hyperion!” a voice now called to me; I flew toward it; “My Diotima! O my Diotima!” – beyond that I had no words and no breath, no consciousness.
Vanish, vanish, mortal life, paltry commerce, in which the lone spirit looks ever and again at the pennies it has gathered together and counts them over; we are all called to the bliss of the gods!
There is a gap in my existence here. I died, and when I awoke I was lying against the heart of the heavenly maiden.(⦶)
There is, on the one hand, the tree top playing in the light of the morning and the attempt of Hyperion’s soul to fly above the earth towards Diotima, where his spirit is already; the awakening of Hyperion beyond the boundaries of his mortal life in the heavenly arms of Diotima, and thereby Hyperion’s divine blessing. And there is on the other hand, in contraposition to all this, the lower branches of the tree which still feel the chill of dawn and the lead whose weight Hyperion feels in his feet and earthly limbs; Hyperion’s earthly death, which is but the reverse of his heavenly awakening. There is once more x (↑) and y (↓), and there is once more too their back-bent attunement (xy: ↑↓), here in the form of an existential gap that sutures this time two diverging sensations: Hyperion’s feeling that his body belongs in the earth and the flight of his soul towards the “light of the morning.”
Interestingly, it is “To Diotima” (An Diotima) that Schumann’s enigmatic Sons of Dawn or Morning Songs (Gesänge Der Frühe, Op. 133), composed in 1853, are dedicated.
Clara Schumann writes on them in her diary: “extremely original as always but hard to understand, their mood [Stimmung] is so very strange.”(⊕) This strange mood is both immediately and particularly perceptible in the first movement, which bears the indication “In a tranquil tempo” (Im ruhigen Tempo):
Mitsuko Uchida performs the first movement of Robert Schumann’s Morning Songs, Op. 133 (1853). CD Decca-27576198, 2013
The overall cadence seems to propel the music downwards (y: ↓), whereas the simplicity, beauty, and transparency of the melody seem to propel it upwards instead (x: ↑); in turn, the frequent dissonances contribute to stress both movements (xy: ↑↓) due to their melodically disrupting qualities (↓) and yet strangely luminous abruptness (↑).
Furthermore, Maria Teresa Arfini suggests that Hyperion’s and Diotima’s names are encrypted at the very outset of the piece, whose opening four notes:
D, A, H, E
=
D[iotim]A, H[yp]E[rion]
may be grouped thus:
DA ⎮ HE
=
Diotima ⎮ Hyperion
For, to begin with, Diotima’s initial “D” and final “a” (= A) and Hyperion’s initial “H” and middle “e” (= E) are the only letters translatable into musical notes (in the sense that there is no “i” note, no “o” note, no “t” note, no “m” note, no “y” note, no “p” note, no “r” note, no “o” note, and no “n” note: the diatonic scale ranges from A to B, or H). Plus HE (or BE) and DA stand in “contrary motion” (moto contrario) to one another (DA↑, HE↓).(⊗)
There is more, though. For an intense feeling of melancholy accompanies the subtle glimmering of the morning light; in fact, it is induced by it as its own effect, rather than being its counterpoint.
Arfini perspicaciously observes that Schumann’s Poet’s Garden (Dichtergarten), written by the musician between 1852 and 1854, includes a citation of Jean Paul which reads:
It is claimed that music doubles joyful and sad sensations, or even generates them itself; that the soul gets lost through the stimuli of music’s sonorous building as if the latter were a temple; that music’s intensity and power is thereby greater than those of any other art; that music tosses us, in a few moments and without any gradual transition, into joy and pain. Yet this claim overlooks that music possesses an even greater peculiarity, namely, the force with which it arouses in us homesickness [Heimweh] not for an ancient and abandoned country but for one in which we are not yet – not for the past but for the future.(⦿)
Precisely! It is an intense melancholic feeling vis-à-vis what Freud would later call the object of desire – vis-à-vis what moves the soul, in Plato’s terms: Diotima/the morning light – that the first movement of Schumann’s Morning Songs mysteriously provokes. And here, we should like to argue, Schumann meets once more Hölderlin. For Hölderlin’s poetry is but a permanent longing for that which is not yet, for that which the poet, be it Hyperion or Empedocles, aspires to: the return of the bygone gods and, through them, the renewal of man’s sacred intimacy with of Nature (as Hölderlin’s gods are Nature’s immanent, ever-living and life-giving, forces).
Who is Diotima in this picture? She is the poet’s psychopomp in that sacred task: the morning light that awoke Hyperion and in view of which Schumann composed one of his most profound and enigmatic works – a work that, as he himself wrote to his publisher in 1854, aims at “describing the sensations experienced as dawn approaches, more as the expression of a feeling than in pictorial terms.”(⊙)
These are the other four movements of Schumann’s Morning Songs, performed once more by Mitsuko Uchida:
(⦼) Vladimir Jankélévitch, Debussy et le mystère de l’instant. Avec 46 exemples musicaux (nouvelle édition; Paris: Plon, 1976), p. 18 (our translation).
(⦶) Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion and Selected Poems (ed. Eric L. Santer; London and New York: Continuum, 1990), p. 58 (emphasis added).
(⊕) Clara Schumann, Ein Künstlerleben nach Tagebüchern und Briefe, (ed. Berthold Litzmann; Leipzig, Breitkopf, and Härtel, 1925), vol. 2, p. 283.
(⊗) Maria Teresa Arfini, “I Gesänge der Frühe e le Geistervariationen Aspetti crepuscolari dell’ultimo Schumann” (Gli spazi della musica 1.2 [2012]: 43-58), p. 54.
(⦿) Quoted in ibid., p. 43 (our translation).
(⊙) Quoted in ibid., p. 44 (our translation).