Then he went down to the river to wash out his ears.
Qao Fu took his contempt for politics even further than Xu You.
Qao Fu lived in a small hermitage, well hidden under the foliage, which no one could see, toward the foot of Mount Chi, just above the valley. His sole possessions were a field and an ox. As he went down the side of the valley to the river to water his ox, Qao Fu saw Xu You crouched on the bank, tilting his head to the right, inclining his head to the left, washing out his ears.
Qao Fu went up to Xu You and, having greeted him multiple times, asked him the reason for his rhythmic gestures.
Xu You retorted:
“Emperor Ti Yao offered me the reins of the empire. That’s why I’m carefully washing out my ears.”
Qao Fu’s entire upper body shuddered.
Crying, he contemplated the Ying River.
Qao Fu led away his ox by the halter and did not allow him to drink from the river where Xu You had washed out ears that had heard such a proposition.
In two of Haydn’s London Trios a rare event takes place: phrases that respond to each other and almost have meaning. They are at the limit of human language.
Small gatherings without screaming.
Consonating. An acoustic reconciliation.
Suavitas.
Suave, in Latin, means sweet.
Someone who does not get angry. Parents who do not scold. Men who do not raise their voices in order to dominate. Women who do not complain about being girls when they are not mothers, and who do not whine about being mothers when they are no longer girls.
Someone who caresses.
Someone whose voice is loving, flowing and cheerful like a small stream of melted snow running down the mountain, running down Mount Chi.
Someone who does not offend.
Suasio. Persuasion. What, in Latin, is suavis? The extraordinary opening of Lucretius’s second book answers three times. On three occasions Lucretius defines what is suave:
Suave, mari magno turbantibus aequora ventis
e terra magnum alterius spectare laborem …
“It is suave, when the vast sea is whipped up by the winds, to observe the distress of others from the shore. Not that one feels a pleasant voluptas at the sight of another man’s suffering: it is simply suave to contemplate the evils that we are spared.
“It is also suave to witness without risk great feats of war, to contemplate from above battles being fought down on the plains.
“But of all that is suave, the sweetest (dulcius) is to inhabit the acropolises fortified by the doctrina of wise men …”
The arguments Lucretius invokes have been commentated by tradition throughout the centuries in the driest, most moralizing fashion. They have been judged cynical or insufficient. The finale, however, reveals their secret: do you not hear “what nature barks”? Nature barks (latrare), it does not “speak” (dicere); reality is not endowed with the meaning that only the imagination and the symbolic and social institutions of humans who speak to each other create in terrified await of sound. What nature enunciates is, beyond moaning and aggressive intensity, indeed a cynical sound, a dog’s sound: a nonsemantic sound that precedes us in our very own throat. Latrant, non loquuntur: “They bark, they do not speak.” Zoological sound precedes and, before meaning, makes the heart jump. The barking of the bark is bellowing.
With this barking that closes the text, the suavis, the sweet suddenly carries a more concrete meaning than the arguments, themselves quite ideological and trifunctional, that Lucretius presents: the suavis is less the remoteness that the text describes than the acoustic consequence of distance. The text repeats the same thing three times: we are too far away to hear. The shipwrecked, we cannot hear their cries. We are on the shore. We see tiny figures gesticulating; plowmen of the sea and traders are disappearing beneath the surface of the ocean in the distance. But around us, we hear only the noise of the waves breaking on the shore. The warriors, we hear neither their cries, nor the clash of the weapons and the shields, nor the fire crackling in the barns and in the fields. We are in the thicket at the top of the hill. We see tiny figures falling to the ground. Around us, we hear only birdsong. At the top of the acropolis or at the temple, we no longer hear anything at all. Vultures are the only birds to have sacrificed the group for solitude and song for elevation. We no longer hear even the barking of dogs, or the puffing and panting of work, or the stomach that also, in Rome, like nature, “barks” its hunger (latrans stomachus), or the trampling of the herds coming home, or the fireplaces purring: only the silence of atoms raining through the nocturnal space and the silent letters of the alphabet aligned on the paginae (the furrows) of the volumen. Neither the auctor nor the lector hears the litterae screaming or barking. Litteratura is the language that distances itself from barking. This is suavitas. Suavitas is not a visual notion, but an auditory one. Distance does not, by means of panoramic vision, provide the voluptas of the Celestials: it increases our remove from the acoustic source. It is the suavitas of silence, the suavitas not of the silenced but of the silencing, the suavitas of a far-off barking in horror. A partition made up of distance in space. A suffering that has run out of cries. One of Titus Lucretius Carus’s childhood memories.
At Fontainebleau. In 1613. Marie de’ Medici loved François de Bassompierre.
Messieurs de Saint-Luc and de La Rochefoucauld, who were both in love with Mademoiselle de Néry, were no longer on speaking terms. Bassompierre made the following bet with Créqui: not only would he reconcile them, but he would oblige Saint-Luc and La Rochefoucauld to kiss that very same day.
The Jardin de Diane lay beneath the queen’s windows. Concini is with Marie de’ Medici in the vast bay of the window. He points out Bassompierre down below. With his glove, Concini indicates the four men discussing while gesticulating and kissing among the flowers.
Concini explains to the queen that this kissing and these oaths, these embraces between men who certainly have never seemed to prefer the attributes of their own bodies, are somewhat abnormal.
And yet they are nothing more than dwarfish silhouettes gesticulating silently in the distance, in the freshness and the light of the day being born.
Concini taps his lace. He murmurs, as if to himself, that perhaps it is curious to see Bassompierre animate La Rochefoucauld, as if such a volatile ember needed the help of a flame. He wonders aloud if they are “caballing.” Perhaps even “conspiring.” Otherwise, he adds, of what use are these kisses between people who see each other all the time?
When evening comes, the door to Marie de’ Medici’s apartments is closed to Monsieur de Bassompierre because in the morning he touched Monsieur de La Rochefoucauld’s arm and then kissed Monsieur de Saint-Luc in the small garden situated beneath her window. Concini’s verbal interpretation of the “inaudible words” prevailed. I will add that Concini is like Orpheus: Concini’s body was torn apart and eaten raw by the people of Paris, while all the bells were pealing. I feel a spontaneous fascination with these scenes of “mishearing,” which are really scenes of “not hearing.” This anecdote can be read in Bassompierre’s diary. I have completed it with the help of a letter from François de Malherbe. I am reminded of Claude Lorrain’s paintings. He is thirteen years old at the time (at the time of the scene in the Jardin de Diane at Fontainebleau). His father and his mother are dead. He arrives in Rome. Characters lost in nature. They are not the size of a finger. They are in the foreground and they chat with each other. In Lorrain’s paintings, we are always too far away to hear. They are lost in light. They speak vivaciously and we only hear silence and the falling light.