In Jonah.
Animal ventriloquy, danced mimicry predate domestication: mastery of animals is predomestication. The first specialized hunter was the shaman: this hunter whose specialty is the hunt for breaths, for voices, for visions, for spirits. This specialization was infinitely slow and progressive: the power over the language of animals, then the power over the initiation of young hunters into the language of animals, then the power over death and rebirth, then the power over sickness and healing. The shaman can go searching for any breath during his journeys in order to bring it back and drop it in the middle of the group at the end of the musical trance.
It so happens that ventriloquy, glossolalia, speaking the languages of animals, simply speaking “in tongues,” only characterize one member of the shamanic couple. Georges Charachidzé reports that the Georgians of the Caucasus name those who speak in a state of trance “linguists,” while they call those whose possession is visual “standard bearers.”
The linguist in trance enunciates, without understanding or translating, what the spirits of animals, humans, elements, and plants pronounce through his mouth. The standard bearer sees these spirits in the form of birds or apparitions but does not hear them. He remains seated apart. He seems to be conversing in silence with the birds that are perched on his flagpole — without anyone seeing them land there — and who describe to him in images what they have seen during their travels.
The shamanic couple sets the linguist against the standard bearer. It is a game of tag, a back-and-forth more than a couple. It is the Russian tale Good Ear and Sharp Eye. It is the singer and the seer. It is the oracle against the soothsayer.
It is thunder and lightning.
It is the ear and the eye.
The possessed ear that transmits to the mouth that repeats is a fierce verbal struggle with what lies beyond language, or with language’s other, or with the totality of languages that preceded language: “From the time when the animals spoke.”
The stricken eye is a journey through the nocturnal world of apparitions in dreams, of painted images in caves, of the resurging dead.
Every time, the experience of a storm is abyssal. Every time, the body shivers, the heart trembles, in the interval between lightning and thunder.
The desynchronization of the eye and the ear.
What attracts the rain is twofold.
Perceiving lightning, in the night of the rain-laden cloud, and hearing the terrifying thunder are independent of each other, give rise to expectation, apprehension, calculation of the time of the interval.
And finally the rain falls on the ground like a shaman.
A piercing cry, such is the abyssal call.
The abyssal call has two organs: acoustic and visible, to which must be added birth, coupling, and death.
We live in pathetic temporal urgency. Temporal means continuously originary.
Continuously obedient.
The ancient Greeks claimed that the gods give organs to humans so that they might respond to the call of the abyss of the promontory or of the source-cave. Pindar says in the twelfth Pythian: Athena gave the aulos to man to spread his lamentations.
Cusanus said in a similar fashion: “Passio precedes knowledge. Tears precede ontology: tears cry for the unknown.”
Of what is music the instrument?
What is the original intonation of music? Why are there musical instruments? Why do myths pay attention to their birth?
Why was human hearing often 1. collective, 2. circular or semicircular? In the Greek language, the magic circle is called orchestra. The auditory circle or the danced ronde configure in space what in illo tempore inscribes in the temporal order.
A curious calculation present in the Vedic texts estimates that human speech added to divine speech represents only a quarter of all speech.
Similarly, the Vedas affirm that the creaking of a wheel on the cart that transports the soma at the moment that it enters the sacrificial ground is a more important form of speech than the profoundest maxim of the most clear-sighted of sages.
Nonverbal speech is greater in extension and in truth than articulated speech.
Except when the latter becomes extremely dense and eventually retracts in the form of a breath because, in that case, the sacrifice has reached the verbal itself and has dismembered it like a victim.
Music has a precise function in shamanism and concerns only the linguists: the cry that triggers the trance, just as respiration is triggered at birth in the cry. In Sulawesi, the shaman is called Gong or Drum, since the gong or the drum brings out the entranced speech (the animal roughness of the spirits’ voices that all of a sudden invade the body of their prophet).
Neither internal nor external, no one can clearly distinguish, in what music unfolds, between what is subjective and what is objective, between what belongs to hearing and what belongs to the production of sound. A worry common to every childhood consists in distinguishing in the fascinating and quickly shameful noises of the body between those which we have made ourselves and those that belong to another.
The acoustic, not delimiting anything, has not so much individualized the ears as it has devoted them to grouping. This is called: pulling by the ears. National anthems, municipal fanfares, religious hymns, familial songs identify groups, unite natives, subjugate subjects.
The obedient.
Undelimitable and invisible, music appears to be the voice of everyone. There is perhaps no music that does not group together, because there is no music that does not at once mobilize breath and blood. Soul (pulmonary animation) and heart. Why do the moderns listen more and more to music in concert, in larger and larger halls, despite very recent possibilities of private diffusion and reception?
Even the most refined, resolutely solitary, Chinese music demonstrates in its most radical legends the idea of the group: at the very least the meeting of two steadfast friends. A couple.
This tale appears in the Lüshi Chunqiu: the scholar Yu Boya was a prodigious qin player, but it so happened that only a poor lumberjack, Zhong Ziqi, was able to understand the sentiments that his compositions and his playing expressed.
He would come join him in the forest. The lumberjack would orient himself by the sound of his friend’s cithara among the branches and the shadows.
When Zhong Ziqi died, Yu Boya broke his qin because there were no longer ears for its song.
In Cao Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber, Sister Lin confesses to Brother Jade that she once learned to play the horizontal cithara. Alas, she quit. The saying goes: “Three days without touching the strings, your fingers turn into brambles.” She then explains to Brother Jade the profound nature of music. The music teacher Kuang, when playing the seven-stringed horizontal cithara, stirred up wind and thunder and conjured up dragons and sixteen black cranes who each were two thousand years old. But the purposes of music can be reduced to a single one: attracting the other. Yu Boya attracting Zhong Ziqi in the forest. Music, in order to hail the other, sets up taboos: “The name of the seven-stringed horizontal cithara (qin) is pronounced like one of the words that commonly designate taboos. According to the institutions of the Ancients, the instrument was originally used to maintain the energetic essence of life.” In order to play this instrument, it was important to choose either an isolated room on an elevated terrace or on the upper floor of a tall pavilion, or a secluded place in a forest, at the summit of a mountain or on the shore of a vast body of water. All music had to be played at night. One had to know how to take advantage of a nocturnal hour when heaven and earth were in perfect harmony, the wind pure, the moon bright, to sit down with legs crossed, a heart free of all oppression, a slow and steady pulse. This is why the ancient Chinese acknowledged that it was very rare to come across a being who really understood the strains of its music. For lack of initiated listeners, they said it was better to give into the pleasure of music only in the presence of forest monkeys and old storks. One had to do one’s hair in a secret fashion and dress according to the rules so as not to prove unworthy of the ancient instrument.