Sounds are harmonized, and the harmony has an immediate and inarticulate meaning irreducible to the formal constituent parts. Lyrics may articulate a meaning related to that of the harmony, but the meaning will not be an identical one, in fact the harmony between sound and word, creates yet another meaning even richer, more comprehensive and less explicable than the first. It cannot be conveyed by any abstract terms outside of the concrete being of the music itself. The only articulations possible are sympathetic ones which immediately enrich or diminish what is articulated.

*

Parts are harmonized into an irreducible whole. The whole is articulated in words which relate to the whole, within the whole, in participation with the whole.

If the words relate to the whole from outside the whole, the words are alienated from the whole and speak of something essentially different from that which they wish to comprehend.

*

When we try to transcend a whole to which we belong, in which we participate — apart from which we are no longer who we are — that whole expands with the experience or it ceases to be. It is never punctured and viewed whole against the sky like a piece of fruit, a beautiful body, a useful instrument, or a Big Blue Marble.

*

When we attempt to imagine a world beyond time, space and thought we attempt to perceive essential being as particular objective beings, which is all the mind can master.

Much metaphysics is the lust for the god’s-eye-view which dreams of the point of view from which all things are seen objectively and made comprehensible to a human mind. This is the only concrete image available to us when we imagine what it would be like to be a god, knowing good and evil.

Out of sheer incapacity to imagine otherwise, we reduce the Absolute to our human terms rather than raise our human terms in pursuit of the Absolute. For sure, we won’t find the edge and look back down on the Absolute, but we might find many relative edges and look back down onto many relative points and perhaps retain the capacity to recollect how the totality of existence looked when the intellect was constrained within those horizons, in that time, in that place.

*

To the inverted eye of idolatry, as we raise ourselves to the absolute we look like we are are falling into relativism, and as we perfect our obedience and love and look like like traitors and nihilists.

*

Harmony: ORIGIN Latin harmonia ‘joining, concord,’ from Greek, from harmos ‘joint.’

Articulate: ORIGIN Latin articulatus, articulare ‘divide into joints, utter distinctly,’ from articulus ‘small connecting part.’