Winter VI. Tea + Consonance and dissonance, again

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Winter V. Self regained

One of the shining moments of my day is that when, having returned a little weary from an afternoon walk, I exchange boots for slippers, out-of-doors coat for easy, familiar, shabby jacket, and, in my deep, soft-elbowed chair, await the tea-tray. Perhaps it is while drinking tea that I most of all enjoy the sense of leisure. In days gone by, I could but gulp down the refreshment hurried, often harassed, by the thought of the work I had before me; often I was quite insensible of the aroma, the flavour, of what I drank. Now, how delicious is the soft yet penetrating odour which floats into my study, with the appearance of the teapot! What solace in the first cup, what deliberate sipping of that which follows! What a glow does it bring after a walk in chilly rain! The while, I look around at my books and pictures, tasting the happiness of their tranquil possession. I cast an eye towards my pipe; perhaps I prepare it, with seeming thoughtfulness, for the reception of tobacco...

In nothing is the English genius for domesticity more notably declared than in the institution of this festival -- almost one may call it so -- of afternoon tea. Beneath simple roofs, the hour of tea has something in it of sacred; for it marks the end of domestic work and worry, and beginning of restful, sociable evening. The mere chink of cups and saucers tunes the mind to happy repose... it is -- again in the true sense -- the homeliest meal of the day. Is it believable that the Chinese, in who knows how many centuries, have derived from tea a millionth part of the pleasure or the good which it has brought to England in the past one hundred years?

Alpha.

That last sentence got me thinking. It seems that “afternoon tea” in the sense Gissing uses it, only dates from the 1840s, less than a century before. And tea was introduced to the English court in the 1660s, about 240 years before. It’s hard to imagine the English without tea. His claim that they have derived more enjoyment from tea than have the Chinese, or Japanese, suggests a veritable festival of hyperbole. I am also reminded of a favorite passage from Proust, “What fun it would be to have a little woman like that in a place where one could always be certain of finding, what one never can be certain of finding, a really good cup of tea”. This is one of the sections of this book I would want to read more frequently, maybe even daily, to remind me to pay attention -- to celebrate -- the moment and my meals. The traditional Chinese and Japanese tea ceremony has this some function, of focusing the mind on the moment and heightening the senses. The truth is that most days I just have iced tea, and don’t pay much attention even to that.

Consonance and dissonance, again.

...What congruence links a Claesz, a Raphael, a Rubens and a Hopper? We need not search, our eye locates the form that will elicit a feeling of consonance, the one particular thing in which everyone can find the very essence of beauty, without variations or reservations, context or effort. In the still life with a lemon, for example, this essence cannot merely be reduced to the mastery of execution; it clearly does inspire a feeling of consonance, a feeling that this is exactly the way it ought to have been arranged. This in turn allows us to feel the power of objects and of the way they interact, to hold in our gaze the way they work together and the magnetic fields that attract and repel them, the ineffable ties that bind them and engender a force, a secret and inexplicable wave born of both tension and the balance of the configuration -- this is what inspires the feeling of consonance. The disposition of the objects and the dishes achieves the universal in the singular: the timeless nature of the consonant form.

-Renee Michel in Hedgehog

Previously, when reading this passage, I focused on the mysterious consonance of art and objects Muriel Barbery is drawing our attention to here. Combining our instinctual appreciation of art with what we can guess of the phenomenological and Quantum reality that underlies what we apprehend (we can leave String theory to the apprehension of music, though it also applies here) leaves us to wonder at the inner workings of beauty and to marvel how much more complex and mysterious the everyday world really is. But this time, reading Hedgehog, I was struck by the first meeting of all the central characters: Renee and Manuela, Paloma, and finally Kakuro. This meeting doesn’t take place until page 267 (with only 58 pages left in the book). By now we know all these characters and how well they fit together -- how well they belong together. In a word, how consonant their personalities are.

What Barbery has been saying about art applies even more to people. Kakuro recognizes in both Renee and Paloma congruent spirits. The three of them instantly fit together because of all they share, including the commonality of how they differ from all the others. We’ve all had this experience many times, of suddenly, after not having anything at all in common with those around us, coming into contact -- communion -- with someone we can actually talk to with some hope of being understood.

How this works is as much a mystery as a Dutch still life. Suddenly, after becoming used to avoiding people or limiting contact or straining to find some common ground, we run into a person we can’t stop talking to, and look forward to engaging again. It can be a shock to the system.

And it isn’t always quite that simple. The woman who most shaped my character, who I best meshed with, was not an immediate fit. She was someone I had to grow into -- too slowly, as it turned out. Yet even then, there was a shared intelligence and way of seeing the world that first drew us together, despite the discrepancies in our personalities. Interpersonal confrontations like this mirror the “shock of the new” in art. And this is also where dissonance comes in, just as I argued that it does in art (Spring XXI. Consonance) in both painting and especially in music. Complete consonance would be bland and insipid when it comes to new people. It’s the level of dissonance that spikes our interest and challenges us to grow.

So, alluding once again to synesthesia and the ability of some people to “see” things differently, could there be people who perceive personalities like my friend as a new type of art. Rather than seeing hair and features and clothes and jewelry (a Renoir portrait, let’s say,

...do they instead see a Van Gogh? 

Next: Winter VII. English cooking.

Spring XXI. Bird song + consonance

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: XX. Art

All about my garden to-day the birds are loud. To say that the air is filled with their song gives no idea of the ceaseless piping, whistling, trilling, which at moments rings to heaven in a triumphant unison, a wild accord.  Now and then I notice one of the smaller songsters who seems to strain his throat in a madly joyous endeavour to outcarol all the rest. It is a chorus of praise such as none other of earth’s children have the voice or the heart to utter. As I listen, I am carried away by its glorious rapture; my being melts in the tenderness of an impassioned joy; my eyes are dim with I know not what profound humility.

Alpha.

Here I can not really compete with Ryecroft’s world. Our wrens and sparrows are more chatterers than songsters. Our pigeons and seagulls add nothing in the way of music while our crows, while loud, are fairly disagreeable. Even our old standby doves are, while not unpleasant, rather monotonous.  Our parrots are, if anything, worse than the crows. The occasionally heard cry of the hawks that soar perpetually over park and tower alike, while stirring, is a weak basis for rapture.

Beta.

I was struck in this passage by Gissing’s use of the word “accord.”  For one thing, "wild accord" suggests both the overall consonance of the birdsong in his garden and also the life affirming quality all that sound implies or creates in the heart of the person listening. 

Obviously accord/discord are mirror terms, closely related to consonance/dissonance. Both sets have both a musical and a metaphorical meaning the profoundness of which I frequently struggle to grasp. Muriel Barbery, in The Elegance of the Hedgehog first got me really thinking about this

Beauty is consonance is a sublime thought... aesthetics are really nothing more than an intuition to the Way of Consonance, a sort of Way of the Samurai applied to the intuition of authentic forms. We all have a knowledge of harmony, anchored deep within. It is this knowledge that enables us, at every instant, to apprehend quality in our lives and, on the rare occasions when everything is in perfect harmony, to appreciate it with the apposite intensity... those who feel inspired... by the greatness of small things will pursue them to the very heart of the essential where, cloaked in everyday attire, this greatness will emerge from within a certain ordering of ordinary things and from the certainty that all is as it should be, the conviction that it is fine this way.

-Renee, p 165 - The Elegance of the Hedgehog

That Barbery uses “consonance” (what is primarily a musical term contrasted with dissonance) in this way is interesting because the history of western music has seen a trend toward the acceptance of ever greater levels of dissonance in music. You could say that today, the music we experience as beautiful is spiced with levels of dissonance that would have been objectionable a thousand, or even a hundred years ago.

I am not well enough educated in musicology to know what is and isn’t dissonance in the technical sense, but I think it’s something you know when you hear it for the most part. But I may be stretching the term when I use it with respect to jazz and rock. But, having said all that, I think the history of jazz since WW2 is a good example of the acceptance of -- even the craving for -- ever greater levels of dissonance. The saxophone playing of Johnny Hodges...

...is the epitome of consonance while the playing of Charlie Parker...

...and John Coltrane introduced heightened levels of at least figurative dissonance. The same phenomenon is at work in the piano playing of Bill Evans...

...and the playing and music of Thelonious Monk...

But the most striking example of this trend is in the playing of the electric guitar. I’m not sure that people in the past would even recognize the playing of Santana, Jimmy Page, Hendrix, or Eric Clapton as music. Here's one of my favorite examples of this new sound, Hendrix's Little Wing played by Stevie Ray Vaughan...

So saying that “Beauty is consonance,” while probably true, doesn’t explain what an acceptable mixture of consonance and dissonance might be. Also, it doesn’t explain why certain sounds -- or certain patches of color on canvas -- appear to us as consonant in the first place. You could also see wabi-sabi as a recognition of the limits of consonance and the need for some touch of dissonance.

(Wabi-sabi represents a comprehensive Japanese world view or aesthetic centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is “imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.”)

...great works are the visual forms which attain in us the certainty of timeless consonance... our eye locates the form that will elicit a feeling of consonance, the one particular thing in which everyone can find the very essence of beauty, without variations or reservations, context or effort.

-Renee, p 201 - The Elegance of the Hedgehog

And then Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, pushed me even further. The notion, derived from String Theory, of the universe and all its “particles” and waves as a sort of cosmic music, pushes me further still. I will come back to this in the future.

What interests me most, I think, is the value of dissonance... and also discord. If you think of God as the cosmic author or artist, then discord is an essential tool in her arsenal. Without discord there is no story.

Here’s a quote from Dr. Michio Kaku, theoretical physicist and co-inventor of String theory:

The latest version of String Theory is called M-Theory, “M” for membrane. So we now realize that strings can coexist with membranes. So the subatomic particles we see in nature, the quark, the electrons are nothing but musical notes on a tiny vibrating string.

What is physics?

Physics is nothing but the laws of harmony that you can write on vibrating strings.

What is chemistry?

Chemistry is nothing but the melodies you can play on interacting vibrating strings.

What is the universe?

The universe is a symphony of vibrating strings.

And then what is the mind of God that Albert Einstein eloquently wrote about for the last 30 years of his life?

We now, for the first time in history have a candidate for the mind of God. It is, cosmic music resonating through 11 dimensional hyperspace.

We are nothing but melodies. We are nothing but cosmic music played out on vibrating strings and membranes. Obeying the laws of physics, which is nothing but the laws of harmony of vibrating strings.

Next: Spring XXII. Literary journals a poor mirror.