Only music can create an indestructible complicity between two persons. A passion is perishable, it decays like everything that part takes of life, whereas music is of an essence superior to life and, of course, to death.  

—- Emil Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations

Emil Cioran calls it sublimity. Across decades of words and texts, music shuts him up and pours the ineffable all over his head.

There’s a part in Anathemas and Admirations where Cioran sits inside the stone womb (or the tomb-birthing chapel) of Saint-Severin and listens to an organist playing through Bach's fugues, calling this moment "the refutation of all my anathemas." 

Like music, poetry is composed from sound and silence, two materials which invoke each other and are figured in different ways. Because the resonant sound of a text is subjective, depending on the reader's relationship to sound, the text exists in relationship to the reader's sonic experience. 

"Mute" suggests an inability to speak, or a state of speechlessness which may be imposed from the outside or chosen as a response. But to be muted is to be rendered inaudible, to have one's volume turned down. To say that 'I muted myself' is jarring, since the conventional use of a muted female involves being rendered silent, and then being determined to be complicit in that silence, insinuating that  muteness, as a condition, inscribes the power of the world over the sound one can make. Watching someone go rapt over music is like watching their face during sex, or realizing they love it.

Thelonious Monk and Charlie Rouse playing Epistropy on my wedding dress.

WORDS FOR DEPARTURE

 Louise Bogan

Nothing was remembered, nothing forgotten.
When we awoke, wagons were passing on the warm summer pavements,
The window-sills were wet from rain in the night,
Birds scattered and settled over chimneypots
As among grotesque trees.

Nothing was accepted, nothing looked beyond.
Slight-voiced bells separated hour from hour,
The afternoon sifted coolness
And people drew together in streets becoming deserted.
There was a moon, and light in a shop-front,
And dusk falling like precipitous water.

Hand clasped hand
Forehead still bowed to forehead—
Nothing was lost, nothing possessed
There was no gift nor denial.

2.

I have remembered you.
You were not the town visited once,
Nor the road falling behind running feet.

You were as awkward as flesh
And lighter than frost or ashes.

You were the rind,
And the white-juiced apple,
The song, and the words waiting for music.

3.

You have learned the beginning;
Go from mine to the other.

Be together; eat, dance, despair,
Sleep, be threatened, endure.
You will know the way of that.

But at the end, be insolent;
Be absurd—strike the thing short off;
Be mad—only do not let talk
Wear the bloom from silence.

And go away without fire or lantern
Let there be some uncertainty about your departure.