6

Taking place

The clouds pass slowly across the sky beneath the moon, numerous clouds, neither too heavy nor too light: the clouds. That’s all.¹

Listening to landscape

Imagine a music that sounds like daydreaming – a music that repeatedly turns over the same unarticulated thought without it ever becoming explicit, a faint stirring of the mind by some movement felt within the body, that presses briefly forward only to then disappear as unremarkably as it came, leaving behind a faint but inexplicable melancholy. Listening to the first movement of Debussy’s Nocturnes one thinks of clouds only because the title tells you so. It is a good title, to be sure, allowing the listener more easily to accept a music that turns over without apparent purpose, and that drifts across the horizon of the listener’s perception with undirected nonchalance. The largely unchanging rhythmic pattern, and the essentially monochrome orchestral palette, make a curiously impersonal frame for the occasional return of the mournful little figure in the cor anglais, like a half-remembered but unspoken regret (Example 6.1).

Example 6.1 Claude Debussy, ‘Nuages’, Nocturnes, bb. 1–9

Such music does not say; it takes place. It is communicative, but it does not convey information or communicate extraneous content. It does not pass messages, tell stories, express emotions, or represent things, events, or states of mind. That we nevertheless ‘freight’ it with such tasks is a sign of how far our linguistic culture refuses to tolerate music’s resistance to the communicative function of language. We insist, instead, that music should be a form of expression – the self-expression of the composer, the performer, the listener, or else the expression of ideas of philosophy, religion, history, or society, or the narrating of stories. Even the romantics, who insisted music was somehow ‘above’ or ‘beyond’ language, at the same time framed it as a higher kind of communication – mysterious, but a language nevertheless. Music after Debussy distances itself from this idea and, by ‘saying nothing’, enhances music’s capacity for a communion of presence.

From this viewpoint, listening to music is less like watching a film or reading a novel and more like contemplating a landscape. But for all that such an aesthetic is now over a century old, it still seems shocking in the face of an essentially linguistic expectation that music should bear some expressive message. Georg Friedrich Haas’s Concerto Grosso No. 1, for four alphorns and orchestra (2014) elaborates an extraordinary landscape over its thirty-minute duration, derived from the haunting tone of the (valveless) alphorns which are, of course, confined to the natural overtone series. Their dialogue with the orchestra expands the ‘inside’ of the sound of the instrument in a delicate, atmospheric, and richly sonorous space that immerses the listener in a way that might be compared to the contemplation of landscape (at its UK premiere at the BBC Proms in July 2018, it was programmed alongside Strauss’s Eine Alpensinfone). And yet, one critic noted, after that performance, the lack of ‘any meaningful development’ in the work, while another commented that the composer’s ‘expressive aims remain opaque’ and that ‘the whole work retains an impenetrable aura of abstraction’.² It would be no less of an anachronism to berate Bach for failing to employ an electric bass.

Landscape has no intention to impart a message. It is not a form of communication by which A says x to B so that B understands x. Which is not to say landscape cannot be read or interpreted – the geologist, geographer, historian, hunter, farmer, traveller, surveyor, planner, builder will all read features of the landscape as signs and traces useful to their own specific projects. But the rise of landscape as a scene of aesthetic experience parallels the rise in the status of an autonomous music – music without words, but also without obvious function. Both have to do with what Kant identified as a ‘formal purposiveness without a purpose’; both were coterminous, in western modernity, with the process of industrialisation and the dominance of instrumental reason on which it was based. Ideas of preserving wild space for their own sake – as in the establishing of national parks – go hand in hand with the public art gallery; both are protected spaces for the cultivation of a contemplative ‘for-itself’ view of the world, a countervailing way of being to the means–end logic of industrial capitalism.

A more recent material and phenomenological turn opens up common ground between the perception of landscape and that of art, and both to the idea of language. I develop this parallel here, arguing that Debussy stands at the beginning of a musical practice that foregrounds an essentially ecological mode of address in place of one of signification. I am not concerned here with the representation of landscape in music, even though this idea often provides the excuse or cover for a radical kind of music not shaped by prevalent ideas of expression or saying; as Jankélévitch says, in relation to the Piano Preludes, the titles are simply ‘pretexts and alibis’.³ My focus is rather with music that works upon its listeners in comparable ways to the aesthetic perception of landscape. Both provoke a distinctive kind of perception, one that listens not to any particular thing but to listening itself. As Michel Serres says, ‘all grand landscape creates an amphitheatre’ in which looking turns to listening ‘the better to see that it is a question of hearing’.⁴

Such a quality of attention is intermittent and hard to sustain. In our insistently signifying culture the noisy imperative of interpretation quickly breaks any momentary silence; language abhors a vacuum and breaks in through the smallest gap to make experience mean something. Even if we seek the epiphanic intensity of a radically empirical presence, outside of signification, we fall quickly into ‘making sense’ of it in language. The primary fact (deed) of any culture, is that the world comes to us already written over and inscribed by meaning. But there remains the possibility, however fleeting or partial, that the aesthetic mode of contemplation holds signification at bay in a bracketing (epoché) of all associative connections or practical concerns. Indeed, art might be considered to be one of the most significant human achievements for this capacity to enhance, expand, and develop such partial moments of radical particularity. If art has a critical capacity, it lies in this ability to resist and hold at bay the instrumental attitude which makes both us and the world instruments of extraneous purposes. Like landscape, its presence is ‘for-itself’ and not as a sign for something else. It takes place. It is present to us and thereby makes us present to ourselves.

The experience is familiar but rare: in the intensity of being in the larger presence of landscape as of music, there is no need to break the silence. I attend to the slow drift of clouds, the gentle ripple of leaves, the warmth of sunlight, the coolness of the air. The world abundantly is, without speech. It says nothing to me, and it asks nothing of me. In being so absorbed, I too am mute because, for a moment, I too am abundantly present. The words come after. They rush in to fill the withdrawal of presence. They try to retrace a set of steps back to the place of the encounter. It is not that they can recover it, but they are an attempt to bring one back to the edge of the wordless content, the threshold or horizon of the experience. This, then, is a two-fold process: a flickering between two non-identical modes of being – the sensory but mute plenitude of wordless being, and the articulate play of language which strives to demarcate a space beyond itself. The jouissance of this flickering, this intermittent spark between the two, is the business of art – neither a collapse back to pure materiality, nor a leap into the abstraction of signification, but the articulation of the resonating space between the two.

Poetry, as Mallarmé famously insisted to Degas, is made not of ideas, but of words. If it seems to be provoked by nature, it is because it is provoked by what language is not. So poetry is always a threshold between the figurative and the unfigured, the word and the wordless. To become a poet (Mallarmé once more) you immerse yourself in words in order to break your way out of them, to use them against themselves, to make them yield a content that exceeds them, a plenitude predicated on wordlessness. Poetry is a trick, an illusion, arising from a specific configuration of words, of something that is (literally) non-existent and without substance, merely the space between words, an object implied by the play of light and shade, a negative image. In Jean-Luc Nancy’s words, ‘art is always the art of not saying it, of exposing that which is not to be said (not an unsayable, but the not-to-be-said of sense) along the edges of all that is exposed, as the sayable itself, and further, as saying itself, as all of saying is its fragmentation’.⁵ To make a pot, the potter needs/kneads clay. You start with clay and work it between your hands, shaping it above the turning wheel. Of course, the purpose of the pot is not the clay itself, but the empty space (the nothing) that it encloses – the space that lends itself to repeated refillings and repourings. The shape of pots may differ, but they all define an emptiness, a nothing, that enables their content.

How is it, then, that music might work on us like a landscape? How is it that it might ground us rather than transport us elsewhere? How can it work differently to all the saying, doing, making, and re-making of the sonata, symphony, or fugue, music in which time is forever in flight, evacuating each moment in order to move to another? Matthieu Guillot presents a compelling case for how a certain kind of music occasions a certain kind of listening to the world – what he calls ‘dialogues with the audible’.⁶ In his account, the audible is a presence of the material world anterior to music, but which music makes us hear anew by first distancing the world (the aesthetic distance of all art) and then, through sonority, bringing us back to it with renewed focus.⁷ Musical sound makes us listen differently; it is the aural equivalent of changing our ‘point of view’. Listening to sounds, in Guillot’s account, is the first stage in a larger process of encounter with the world – ‘a meeting that would provide the occasion of the order of a revelation, a primordial discovery of an auditory sumptuousness’.⁸

As an example of this special kind of listening, Guillot explores the special kind of silence occasioned by landscapes under snow, and a group of musical works that present themselves in a similar way. He listens, for example, to Beat Furrer’s piano piece, Voicelessness. The snow has no voice (1986),⁹ for the same slow and mute processes one might find in a snow-covered landscape. Both musical work and landscape foreground, and bring to attention, a similar quality of voicelessness that not only allows silence to take place, but thereby allows (linguistic) space for the world to take place for us.¹⁰ The silence of snow is a veil that makes something appear, that draws attention to something that otherwise goes unnoticed. It works in the same way as, for Mallarmé, the veils of the dancer frame the appearing of her movement or, for Debussy, the veils of sound spun by the composer brings to presence something that is not literally there. Music, like the veil, is a ‘material intermediary’ that makes something manifest that would otherwise be neither seen nor heard. Music, like the snow, is ‘a presence which engenders absence: a presence that deprives’.¹¹ What it deprives us of is the familiar look and sound of things; what it affords is the appearance of something that we had stopped seeing or hearing. This is therefore a kind of reversal of the normal relation by which silence is an absence which sound fills. Debussy’s ‘Voiles’ is not obviously a ‘snow’ piece, but it works in exactly this way: by laying out a blank (blanc) sonic landscape without figure or event, a landscape consisting almost entirely of featureless whole-tone surface, it frames an absence of differentiation and substance. In this it shows affinity with a quite different piece that declares it is ‘about’ snow – the The Snow is Dancing (from The Children’s Corner, 1906–08). Childlike in its fascination for patterns discerned in swirling sameness, this little piano piece focuses on the play of perception itself. It is precisely through reducing the musical material to patterns of sameness and difference (rather than objects, events, or people) that this piece stages appearing itself, joining the phenomenological epoché with the wide-eyed wonder of the child.

For Guillot, the music of Iannis Xenakis embodies this sense of ‘sonorous presences’ and teaches us how to listen differently. In quoting Michel Serres, to illustrate the effect of this music on the listener, he employs terms familiar from the world of Mallarmé and Debussy. The listener is ‘overwhelmed [accable] beneath the waves [vagues] of noise’ in a ‘shipwreck [naufrage] of perception’ and ‘submerged [englouti] in space, drowned [noyé] in its noise’.¹² Xenakis is here heard as a kind of ‘protomusic’, without ego or subject, that is, in the words of Serres, ‘the naked voice of the things of the universe’.¹³ Guillot hears something similar in the electronic works of Jean-Claude Risset (1938-2016) to which the sounds of the natural world are central – such as the four movements of Elementa (1998), Sud (1985), and Avel (1997). To listen afresh to such music, suggests Guillot, requires ‘putting one’s musical culture in parenthesis, in order to recover a certain innocence of the ear’,¹⁴ to employ an auditory ‘reduction’ (in the phenomenological sense employed by Schaeffer) to listen for itself not for the communication of messages. ‘Facing the sea, or the elements, there is nothing left but to listen to the ungraspable sonorous phenomenon.’¹⁵ Guillot sees a deep connection here between the listening put in play by Risset’s music and the language of Michel Serres trying to frame such an auditory encounter with the world through language, a rapprochement between composer and philosopher that is not simply fortuitous.¹⁶

Sud puts in play a mixture of natural, synthetic, and hybrid sounds, moving constantly across the threshold of the real and the irreal. The composer’s own account ties it to sounds of the sea, of birds, and of insects (the earlier concerns, respectively, of Debussy, Messiaen, and Bartók), blurring the boundaries between things to focus on the act of perception itself. This play of acoustic hybridity might recall the fascination, in Mallarmé and Debussy, with the figure of the faun and the siren – impossible creatures that, as half animal/half human, are unreal but not unimaginable. What, in the iconography of the nineteenth century, draws on mythic or fairy-tale creatures becomes, in the later twentieth century, an idée fixe of electro-acoustic music that moves between the physically present ‘acoustic’ musician and her electronic double or shadow (an idea explored in Chapter 5). Was Debussy not strangely prescient of just this in his apparently light-hearted speculation, in ‘La musique en plein air’ (1901), about ‘a mysterious collaboration of music with the air, the movement of leaves and scent of flowers’?¹⁷ It was, after all, an idea that is foregrounded by a number of his titles – ‘Cloches à travers les feuilles’ (Images, Book 2), ‘Les parfums de la nuit’ (Ibéria/2), ‘Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir’ (Préludes, Book 1).

Martin Seel, in his development of an aesthetics of appearing, fixes on the related ideas of flickering and resonating – qualities of encounter with the natural world which arrest us in particularly intense ways but in which ‘nothing happens’ as such: ‘To look onto a sunlit sea surface in largely calm conditions is also a perception of resonating [ . . . ] we perceive a stirring of light and water that cannot be followed as an orderly movement.’¹⁸ The paradox that arises here, however, is that this space in which nothing happens, occasions an experience which is quite the opposite of emptiness: ‘Here [ . . . ] resonating appears by virtue of the fact that in this emptiness – or acoustically speaking, in this silence – an extraordinary event fullness is perceivable, a fullness that does not reach perception outside of aesthetic attitudes. Even in what is the purportedly empty, therefore, resonating proves to be the presence of a fullness . . . .’¹⁹ Music is of course the prime example, among the arts, of a kind of resonating in which nothing ‘occurs’, but it has often been put more deliberately to a signifying function. My argument about music ‘after Debussy’ is that it recovers and re-foregrounds an idea of music as ‘something occurring in which nothing particular occurs’,²⁰ a focus that Seel himself underlines. But such an emptiness, far from being ‘less’ than music that busily does and says things, seems to afford an extraordinary sense of fullness. Its pleasure, argues Seel, has to do with a kind of ‘self-surrender’ that momentarily leaves behind ‘the strenuousness of self-maintenance’ – a pleasure in self-surrender that was the very thing that Adorno and Horkheimer warned was the temptation of the sirens.²¹

Taking place is central to all three movements of Ibéria (1905–08) the central triptych of the Images for orchestra. Similarly, all three of the Estampes (1903) for piano are stylised landscapes (‘Pagodes’, ‘Soirée dans Grenade’, ‘Jardins sous la pluie’), as too are the pieces that make up the second book of Images for piano (1907) (‘Cloches à travers les feuilles’, ‘Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut’, ‘Poissons d’Or’). As the titles suggest, Debussy’s ‘image’ is generally not of some static, unchanging object disconnected to its environment, but precisely the movement within an environment – the sounding of bells heard across the leaves, the changing light as the moon falls towards the old temple, the falling of the rain upon the garden, the shimmering of the goldfish in the pond. The absence of human figures is key to the effect; there is no human drama here, no expressing or emoting subject. Witness, in ‘Jardins sous la plie’, for example, the erasure of specific identity in the constancy and neutrality of the semiquaver rhythmic figure, a movement of energy without any fixed point or reference. Instead, this music plays with the emerging and disappearing of perceptual patterns, of movement towards and away. In this way, it focuses on the act of perception itself. Like ‘Jeux de vagues’, from La mer, this is a play of forms, sounds, colours, not a saying.

A similar pattern, but in slow motion, shapes ‘Pagodes’. Out of the spatial and harmonic containment little melodic forms emerge only to fall away again. The play between the neutrality of the pentatonic and the poignancy of the melodic descent makes for a gentle dissonance whose echo of desire is, at the same time, already fulfilled in the rich sonority. Even when the piece expands it does so without climax since the whole space is self-contained (through register, harmony, rhythm) such that, at times, the extended repetitions sound like a kind of proto-minimalism. The highly textural coda stages a drawn-out process of disappearing, ending with the full register of the piano keyboard left ringing in the air (laisser vibrer). These pieces involve plenty of movement – they are not blank canvasses – witness the play of ‘Poissons d’Or’ (capricieux et souple is the marking at b. 58). But the noisy gestural play of the moment, excused by the alibi of the goldfish, is contained here within a resonant and immersive sonic space. The play between quite different temporalities – of the gestural present and a suspended, spatialised time – makes this piece another study of perception itself. The listening subject is not expressed by this music, nor invited to emote to some putative story told through music. Rather, the listener is drawn into a sonic environment, absorbed in the play of momentary and insubstantial events that emerge from, and then quickly subside into, the gently containing background. This is music that embodies Merleau-Ponty’s idea of reciprocity of perception and ‘ongoing interchange’; or, in David Abram’s words, of an ‘improvised duet between my animal body and the fluid, breathing landscape that it inhabits’.²²

There is common ground here with Messiaen. The appearance of birdsong in Messiaen’s music is, first and foremost, an act of listening to nature, of taking place, of being in a place, and of sound defining a place. This too is a music which says nothing, without (human) intentionality or communication, and without ‘emotional expression’ or ideas (however much the composer over-writes his scores to say otherwise). But this linguistic silence defines a space which, by stilling the listening body, appears like a kind of garden or landscape in which layered voices affirm a kind of (ornithological) ‘I am’. Indeed, the musical topics of bells, birds, and the resonant sonic spaces they define, echo through music ‘after Debussy’ – from Messiaen’s Des canyons aux étoiles to Grisey’s Vortex temporum.²³

Le jardin clos: Dwelling in music

‘Exaucement’ (Fulfilment), the first song of Fauré’s Le jardin clos (1914), is one of the composer’s simplest but most subtle evocations of dwelling within the space of music. Even the look of the score seems to emphasise ‘les blancs’, the mute spaces framed in Symbolist poetry.²⁴ In the right hand of the piano, the regularity of the falling quaver pattern belies the fact that its harmonic content gently changes with each half-bar unit (see Example 6.2). It never once repeats itself, while being all the time the same, like the image of the fountain in the nocturnal garden that appears in so many poems and songs of this time. The vocal line is contained within the space outlined by the piano figure, blending the two sonorities in a kind of heterophonic elaboration of the same pitch material. The voice is both immersed in the timbral and harmonic space and also emerges from it – distinct and articulated, but contained. The piano left hand appears to add a bass-line but it is one that eschews the normal controlling function of a bass. It produces no firm cadence until the very end, but serves instead to gently offset the arpeggiated figures of the right hand, to keep the harmonic space open-ended, infinitely variegated in its patterning of light and shade, and gently dissonant in being always slightly oblique to a clear tonal function. In a similar way, the piano makes a subtle metrical counterpoint to the voice in its movement on the weak beats of each bar. Rarely did Fauré find more understated and exquisite form for putting in motion the gap between two things otherwise so intimately close.

Example 6.2 Gabriel Fauré, ‘Exaucement’, Le jardin clos, bb. 1–9

Van Lerberghe’s poem has to do with the ‘expiry’ of words – literally, their giving out upon the breath, and, metaphorically, with their failing, leaving only the silent presence of the body. Witness the sudden inflection to the dark interiority of E♭ on the word ‘lèvre’ (lip) in the lines ‘Alors que la parole expire, Sur ta lèvre qui tremble encore’ (As words expire, on your still trembling lip). The muteness of the soul, like that of Fauré’s music, is ‘like a fairy asleep in a secret garden’ (Fée endormie au jardin clos).

The second song, ‘Quand tu plonges tes yeux dans mes yeux’, has to do with being present to another through the senses:

There is an overlap here with the gaze of the lovers in Pelléas et Mélisande: both have to do with the speechlessness of love, the mute plenitude of being wholly present to oneself. But, here too, the music has to do with the movement of appearing; Fauré’s harmony is constantly moving in unexpected ways, like the ‘tipsy’ flight of the seabirds in L’horizon chimérique. Something similar pervades the third song, ‘La messagère’, which has to do with the ecstatic and erotic coming to presence of dawn in spring. Central to Van Lerberghe’s poem is the image of the threshold, the opening door where night becomes dawn, a mystery underlined by the flatwards shift in the harmony and the stilling of the semiquaver movement in the more introspective middle section. This is a song that anticipates Merleau-Ponty’s exposition of the idea of the flesh of the world, the material interchange of self and environment. The lips are the threshold of self and other just as the mouth is both a space in which speech moves outwards and the world moves inward, the threshold of the inhaling and exhaling of breath that makes song itself a threshold between subject and world.

The fourth song, ‘Je me poserai sur ton coeur’, has to do with the plenitude found within the beloved: ‘I shall rest upon your heart / like the spring upon the sea.’ Both poem and song cultivate a sense of surface without forms (‘where no flower can ever grow’), drawing attention to breath-like flowers of light, or like a bird upon the sea, ‘cradling the eternal rhythm of waves and space’ (Et que berce le rythme éternel / Des flots et de l’espace). The fifth song, ‘Dans la nymphée’, centres on the sacred mystery of appearance in the nocturnal garden. Here, too, music anticipates a central idea of Merleau-Ponty – the relation of the visible and the invisible: ‘although your eyes don’t see it, believe in your heart it is there’. This is a song about appearance, about what appears in the secret of the night, through closed eyes. But sometimes, she appears, with her eyes open, she awakes, arises, transforming the garden with her radiance. Fauré’s control of the rise and fall of the vocal line is underpinned by an astonishing sequence of chords: chromatically and vagrantly related triads produce a mute sequence of chords that become, for the voice, the ‘other’ world of the nocturnal garden. The piano makes a sonorous space which the words traverse, but the two remain in related but quite different temporalities – one of vocal saying and the other of sonorous resonance.

And so the cycle goes on. The sixth song, ‘Dans la penombre’, is about the blurring of dream and reality; the seventh, ‘Il m’est cher, amour, le bandeau’, the ecstasy of erotic opening and the blocking out of the visible (by means of blindfold) the better to reveal the invisible (‘Mes lèvres où mon âme chante/ toute d’extase et de baisers/ S’ouvrent comme une fleur ardente/ au-dessus d’un fleuve embrasé’). The eighth and final song, ‘Inscription sur le sable’, is a rewriting of presence. Her departure leaves only dust behind, except that the image of her face is traced in the stones and among the sand and, as song, resonates in the trace that is the music.

The metaphor of the garden as the self-contained space of the soul is an ancient one. It is also a metaphor for art itself – an aesthetic space in which the soul might find itself again. The recurrent image of such poetry is that of two lovers in a nocturnal garden – one that permeates the history of music from Fauré’s ‘Jardin nocturne’ (Mirages) and Messaien’s ‘Jardin du sommeil d’amour’ (Turangalîla Symphony), to Takemitsu’s In an Autumn Garden (1973). ‘My music is like a garden, and I am the gardener’, writes Takemitsu. ‘Listening to my music can be compared with walking through a garden and experiencing the changes in light, pattern and texture.’ In the nocturnal garden of poetry the separate identities of the visual world are displaced by gently interleaved sounds (the splashing of fountains, the movement of leaves on the breeze, the distant sound of the guitar). But in taking such poetry into song, the implied auditory environment is actualised and foregrounded, and the aspects of telling and visual description on which the poem inevitably hinges fall away to the background. The self-enclosed space of the nocturnal garden thus becomes the ideal metaphor for that of music itself.²⁵ Merleau-Ponty’s example of nocturnal space, as one in which looking has to give way to listening, might just as well refer to the case of music:

When, for example, the world of clear and articulated objects is abolished, our perceptual being, now cut off from the world, sketches out a spatiality without things. This is what happens at night. The night is not an object in front of me; rather, it envelops me, it penetrates me through all my senses, it suffocates my memories, and it all but effaces my personal identity.²⁶

Fauré’s Le jardin clos marks a concern with the idea of this heterotopic space that runs across his work. Four years earlier he had completed one of his most extensive explorations of this theme in La chanson d’Ève, Op. 95 (1906–10), a cycle of ten songs also based on the poetry of Charles Van Lerberghe (a contemporary of Maeterlinck and one of the most important of the Belgian Symbolists). Lerberghe’s volume of the same title had appeared in 1904 and consisted of some ninety-six poems. It came to Fauré’s attention in 1906, a year before the poet’s death, but the cycle was not completed until 1910. The ten songs add up to an astonishing act of remaking the world through song, of creating an aesthetic garden in which to dwell, and reconnecting saying with being through singing.

In the first song, ‘Paradis’, nothing is said. The world simply is. ‘A blue garden blossoms out.’ All that is heard is the sound of nature – an ‘Immense murmur; which is, however, silence.’ This is the completion of nature before God instructs Eve to go out into the world and to speak, to name the things of the world. For now, the garden listens: ‘The voice is silence but all still listens [ . . . ] until, with the rise of the evening star, Eve sings.’ It is a remarkable song about song itself, about the coming to presence of song, but also about the voice that listens and about a speech that might still come from things themselves. It marks a wider yearning among writers, in the years around 1900, that language might recover some original purity – witness Karl Kraus, in Vienna, who balanced his caustic critique of journalistic misuse of language with poetry that longed for the purity of the origin (Ursprung). As Katharine Bergeron has explored, Fauré’s vocal style here is remarkably stripped back.²⁷ The score is full of the ‘blancs’ cultivated by Mallarmé and Maeterlinck, of simple intervals, silences, and the cultivation of a pure vocal tone and open, bassless piano chords. From this Ursprung the song gradually blossoms forth (into a rhythmically pulsing E major, a breathing space, and then increasingly more complex harmony and denser rhythmic textures) as all becomes ‘confused and mingled’. It returns to its opening simplicity for the awakening of Eve, a moment entrusted to the wordless voice of the piano. The contrast of the teeming richness of nature and the bare simplicity of a declamatory language structures the song until the final verse, at which point it becomes a song not about speaking but about listening. The whole world listens for the song of Eve; the E major fullness here is not the silence of paradise, nor that of Eve, but the fullness of song, the sounding of one by the other: the resonance of paradise in song.

The second song, ‘Prima verba’, celebrates the birth of a language that joins the body to the world, that finds a kind of unity of the materiality of the voice and that of the world, but also a kind of re-creation of the world through language. Contra Saussure, contra Derrida, contra Bergson, contra Mallarmé, contra Serres – Lerberghe’s idealised Edenic space in which language brings the world into presence nevertheless expresses, in its profound yearning, the central lack of modernity. That Fauré should respond to it with his most extended song cycle underlines the central role that music was understood to play in this restoration of a broken relation: exactly as Derrida would later deny, the voice here promises to make present. This quiet rapture defines the tone of the whole cycle. In the third song, ‘Roses ardentes’, the piano’s gently rocking containment of E major opens up a sense of chiasmic exchange between the singing voice of the poet and the fullness of nature: ‘Ardent roses, in the motionless night, tis in you that I sing, and take being.’ I am eternal in the woods, the poet seems to say, I am born again in the deep seas, in its waves and under the sun. It is an astonishing act of reconjuring an imagined primal state of language, when word and world were one, just as the awareness of that gap was reaching a kind of crisis point. The sense of radiant fullness continues through the fourth song, ‘Comme Dieu rayonne’ – how God radiates through these flowers, how he murmurs in this spring and sings in the birds. There are few such undiluted assertions of the idea that poetry makes present. Where Mallarmé, in L’après-midi d’un faune, explores the gap between speech and presence, Lerberghe imagines a primal world without any gap. For Fauré, it must have seemed like a statement of what his music had always been wordlessly embodying.

‘L’aube blanche’ and ‘Eau vivante’ mark the opening out to the world of the awakening subject, running out into the world like the breaking out of light and running water. The next song, ‘Veilles-tu, ma senteur de soleil’ explores presence through the revelation of scent, an evanescent, shimmering, ungraspable song without any of the periodic ‘form’ we associate with nineteenth-century song but only a constant flow, modulated from within, like a musical elaboration of Bergson’s durée. ‘Dans un parfum de roses blanches’ offers a different take on the same idea, a merging and blurring of the identities of the world that comes and the consciousness that perceives it. The last two songs return to the simplicity of the beginning. ‘Crépuscule’ seems to anticipate that the fullness of this Edenic relation will not last beyond this ‘first day’. Its D major wholeness and simple lines nevertheless contain a premonition of the breaking into chromatic yearning that will follow. It is a striking thought that Fauré’s song cycle is contemporary with that most powerful and violent statement of the expulsion from Edenic wholeness, Schoenberg’s song cycle Das Buch der hängenden Gärten (1909) – the work with which he definitively marks the move to atonality and whose final song takes place, ‘outside of Eden’s walls’. This seems a world away from Fauré’s gentle premonition. The final song of La chanson d’Ève, ‘O mort, poussière d’étoiles’ is in a rich D♭ major; like Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, also written in 1909, the last two songs of Fauré’s cycle move from D major to D♭ major. This is a song of death but death as a return to the totality of the whole, and as a desired dissolution.

Schoenberg, via Stefan George’s poetry, inverts a central cultural symbol of the harmony between humankind and the world, and thus between words and things. If at times, in the subsequent reception of Schoenberg’s work across the twentieth century, this ‘explosion in the garden’²⁸ has been taken to be a definitive and irreversible historical moment for the whole of western culture, the persistence of the motif in art, music, and literature across the last hundred years tells a different story. Because the space of the nocturnal garden is a heterotopos, it is not so easily destroyed. Shakespeare and Mozart (respectively in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Le nozze di Figaro) both present the nocturnal garden as a space apart in which the dissonance of human relations is resolved by a process of coming to one’s senses (and thus, coming to self-presence). But in both cases, it is marked as an aesthetic heterotopia – the fictional ‘as if’ of all art – the space of dream-illusion defined by music. Ravel evokes a similar space in L’enfant et les sortilèges, a nocturnal theatre in which the dissonant relations of the child and his environment indoors are reconfigured in the music of the night outdoors. ‘How wonderful to find you again, Garden’, sings the child, on his return to a place in which he first has to acknowledge the infantile violence he has perpetrated on nature before the plenitude of forgiveness blooms in the expansion of the closing music.

From Fauré and Ravel to Murail and Saariaho, via Messiaen and Takemitsu, what all these pieces have in common is an emphasis on immersion in an extended moment rather than the unfolding of a linear or narrative temporality. As Makis Solomos puts it: ‘To be in sound, to be immersed in sound, enveloped by sound, to travel to the heart of sound, to disappear into the abyss of sound [ . . . ] become the new metaphors, inspiring composers as much as listeners.’²⁹ This paradox is central to new music ‘after Debussy’: this is neither musical minimalism nor an imitation of models of musical temporality from outside the European tradition. This music is highly differentiated in its materials, not lacking in ‘events’ or structural breaks, but nevertheless defined by the elaboration of a globally contained and immersive space. If there is a paradigm shift in musical thought of the twentieth century it surely has to do with the move to thinking about sound as a single substance, endlessly moving and elaborated from within itself, rather than as a set of isolated and atomistic fragments to be reconstituted in acts of composition.

Landscapes without figures

‘Nothing will have taken place except perhaps the place.’ This line, emerging across the pages of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés by means of its capitalised font, might sum up the effect of listening to landscape. A new sensibility of place, of the contemplation of landscape and being situated within a landscape for its own sake, was coterminous with the rise of the idea of an autonomous music in the late eighteenth century. But what distinguishes Mallarmé or Debussy from this early Romanticism is that, whereas the romantics cultivated an experience of landscape through the experience of the sensitive viewing subject, a century later art explored landscape as the site of a kind of erasure or absorption of the subject. What is striking about works like Debussy’s Nocturnes or La mer is the absence of any autonomous agency standing over and against the landscape.³⁰ This absence of agency is demarcated by a striking absence of voice. Paradoxically, the introduction of actual voices in Sirènes serves only to highlight the absence of the kind of subjective, lyrical or narrative voice which usually articulates symphonic music. The first movement of the Nocturnes (Nuages) similarly refuses any discourse or argument. It simply presents unchanging musical objects that are realigned through a constantly changing kaleidoscopic rotation. This is an art of time, space, colour, repetition, and change – but never of discourse, argument, or narration. It says nothing in the way that clouds say nothing (see Figure 6.1). Fêtes offers a different take on the same idea – rhythmically sharp where Nuages is soft-edged; dynamic and noisy where the first movement is suspended and generally muted – but Fêtes also avoids a subjective or discursive voice; its material is often mechanical rather than organic, as in the march section for example, and the shadowy figures of its nocturnal landscape are blurred and without identity.

Figure 6.1 Claude Monet, Les nymphéas – Les nuages (1914-26), detail

The cover image of the first edition of Debussy’s La mer is perhaps more famous than the piece itself (see Figure 6.2). But the image used by Debussy and his publisher is not simply a reproduction of the famous print by Katsushika Hokusai (see Figure 6.3). The original has been cropped (and redrawn) to remove two boats and fishermen that are about to be engulfed by the mighty wave. This erasure of the human figure is not insignificant. It ties in with the reading of Jankélévitch that in La mer ‘the human face has utterly disappeared’.³¹ Instead, he goes on, we are with ‘the inhuman sea, far from any shores, trees or houses, [that] has ceased to be “landscape”. One hears only the noise of amorphous elements, anonymous and unconscious, which have competed with one another since the origin of the world.’³²

Figure 6.2 Claude Debussy, La mer, front cover (Paris: Durand, 1905)

Figure 6.3 Katsushika Hokusai, The Great Wave off Kanagawa (1832)

Perhaps the most disturbing change, and the one that produces all the others, is the erasure of the musical subject, exactly what Debussy does in the music of La mer. The sense of music as the narration of a subject, a communication from the author to the listener, of music as reconfirming, reproducing, and reinforcing a certain kind of subject, is dissolved in music ‘after Debussy’. Erasure does not, however, simply leave a blank, a nihilistic nothing, but works to open up the space left by such an act, like the opening of a window onto the sea (as Mélisande requests in the final act of Debussy’s opera). Debussy’s approach in these orchestral works might thus be compared to what Paul Klee found in the example of Paul Cézanne – ‘not to script with geometric volumes, but rather to deconstruct representation and invent a space of the invisible, of the possible’.³³

Compared with the violent deformations of Expressionism, the deconstruction of the integrated subject in Impressionism is overwhelmingly gentle, as a result of which it lent itself readily to being appropriated as merely shoring up the culture of sensibility of the bourgeois subject – a pleasant antidote to the hard edges and instrumental purposiveness of an industrialised society. But music ‘after Debussy’ suggests a more radical reading. Impressionism erases the fixed outlines of things by breaking up line, playing with light, shade, and colour. As Mallarmé does with language, it plays at the edges of things to draw attention to the exchange of perception rather than to the signifying or representation of things. It thereby foregrounds an immersive looking and listening as modes of being, rather than the division of the world into things. It foregrounds the chiasmic plenitude of sensuous knowledge over the lack at the heart of a linguistic knowledge of things.

‘De l’aube à midi sur la mer’, the opening movement of La mer, deploys a familiar convention – beginning from nothing and expanding outwards to acoustic fullness. From Haydn’s Representation of Chaos to Wagner’s Rheingold prelude, from the sunrise in Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé to Jonathan Harvey’s From Silence, this is a basic trope of the evocation of nature. But the quiet radicalism of Debussy’s form is that this is all it does. It does not stage the appearance of something or someone that walks out on stage to speak or to act. Jean Barraqué, in a famous analysis of La mer, aptly describes the opening as ‘a kind of raising of the curtain’³⁴ except here the curtain rises to reveal an empty stage. The opening thirty bars can certainly be understood in terms of a simple harmonic reduction, by which a pentatonic set (F♯–G♯–A–B–C♯) turns out to function as a prolonged altered dominant of the tonic key of D♭. Far more significant, however, is the gradual emergence of clear orchestral tones out of silence and indistinct noise, and the sense of spatial expansion created by means of register, timbre and rhythm. The low B in the opening bar begins as an almost imperceptible hum, not as distinct musical tone. The addition of the F♯ and G♯ (in the harps and cellos) clarifies tone through articulation and presents the origins of a rhythmic figure definitive for the whole piece – the dotted-note rhythm in the cellos (see Example 6.3). Barraqué refers to this as ‘the call motif’ – both a call to presence and of presence. Its dotted rhythm is a basic form of autogenesis – like the dividing of a cell – a single explosive moment of self-production.

Example 6.3 Claude Debussy, ‘De l’aube à midi sur la mer’, La mer, bb. 1–5

The emptiness of Debussy’s introduction gives way to a kind of sonic plenitude. Opening over a sustained D♭ pedal, the ensuing section of Debussy’s piece presents no less than five motifs over fifty-three bars. A familiar formal function is clearly presented as the ambivalent tonal introduction leads to a principal key area and an exposition of motifs, but the familiarity of this plot masks a subtle process of defamiliarisation. The tension between the two is manifest in the way that generations of commentators have struggled with how to understand the articulation of form here. Take for example the build up towards what Roy Howat hears as the first big climax at b. 76 and the appearance of a three-note motif heard for the first time (see Example 6.4). Howat calls this Motif A, even though it is heard after several others.

Example 6.4 Claude Debussy, ‘De l’aube à midi sur la mer’, La mer, bb. 76–81

What is presented here is surely a moment of non-arrival; the startling thing about Motif A is its emptiness. The stark sequence of parallel fifths, with a rapid after-echo in the trumpets, is followed immediately by a falling back to the emptiness and indistinct noise of the beginning. The swell and surge of musical waves deliver not human presence, but a falling away – nothing appears. In retrospect, the whole of the preceding section, with its over-richness of motivic forms and orchestral colours, simply dissipates and arrives nowhere. Except, precisely from this collapse and ensuing emptiness, something utterly unexpected does arrive: the extraordinary cello theme (see Example 6.5).

Example 6.5 Claude Debussy, ‘De l’aube à midi sur la mer’, La mer, bb. 82–90

This act of appearing is unprepared. The B♭ major tonality and the rich sonority of closely scored cellos and unmuted horns appears out of thin air. To be sure, the generative dotted rhythm picks up an earlier idea, though transformed here into a new three-note figure, ending with an open fifth. But the logic of this moment is primarily neither tonal nor motivic; its principal act is to displace distance with palpable proximity, silencing the earlier wash of multiple orchestral layers to foreground a single gesture of arresting clarity. This is a framed moment of appearing – a gesture of breaking open – and, as such, it cannot really develop. Instead, it generates an extended textural passage, across the next thirty-eight bars, using the repetitive rocking figure to fashion a series of wave-like swells. The climax of this collective presence is followed by an extended process of disintegration – a fall back towards emptiness and inarticulation. This, in turn, leads to one of the most extraordinary passages not only in this piece, but in the whole of Debussy’s music (see Example 6.6).

Example 6.6 Claude Debussy, ‘De l’aube à midi sur la mer’, La mer, bb. 121–25

Roy Howat labels this passage as a ‘transition’, on the basis that its function is to move the music from the end of the preceding section into the ensuing Coda. But to conceive of it purely in terms of its tonal function, as a prolonged dominant, is astonishingly reductive. It turns one of the most arresting moments in the whole piece, a moment defined by a quality of sound like nothing else heard before or after, into a purely abstract function of musical form. To do so surely misses the point of this extended epiphanic moment. The cor anglais (doubled by two solo cellos) moves gently between two musical spaces – its octave descent accentuates a dominant harmony, its returning ascent suggests a whole-tone space. The instrument associated with Tristan-esque absence and longing here hangs tantalisingly on the edge of appearing. It is one of music’s most precise articulations of the sense of a threshold, a liminal shoreline between two different musical spaces. Its promise of appearing is far more intense than the brief, brash and conventional coda that will silence it.

Of course, tonally, the coda fulfils the function of this ‘transition’ passage: D♭ major arrives, marked with brassy statements of the dotted-note motif in the trumpets and horns, before even the brass are submerged in the noisy turbulence of tremolando strings, cymbal rolls, and tam-tam. But, for all the coda’s outward trappings of a substantive moment of appearance, nothing appears as such. The brief climactic moment offers instead only the jouissance of an act of appearing itself, without any object, a sense that is reinforced by what follows. After the gap that separates the first and second movements, the nothing that has appeared is the entire insubstantial substance of ‘Jeux de vagues’, one of the most radical movements Debussy ever wrote – even the title draws our attention not to objects but simply to the purposeless play of changing surfaces. And ‘Jeux de vagues’ begins with a trace of exactly the same sonorities with which the previous movement ended: the sizzle of the cymbal is here transformed into the glitter of glockenspiel, harp and the faintest touch of cymbal itself, articulating the gentle rise and fall of the open fifth in tremolando strings, while the sonority of the cor anglais colours the woodwind chords (see Example 6.7).

Example 6.7 Claude Debussy, ‘Jeux de vagues’, La mer, bb. 1–4

‘Jeux de vagues’ not only foregrounds and makes thematic the idea of appearing and disappearing, it does so in a play of forms without human presence of any kind. As signalled in its title, its formal paradigm is play and its material is the ungraspable nature of movement itself. Waves go nowhere, turn in on themselves, are formed from nothing, and collapse back to nothing; they are merely the mobile traces of an invisible and undirected energy. It makes for a quietly shocking quality to this music, a ‘lightness of being’ that could not be further from the noisy discourse of symphonic music. Try listening to a few minutes of ‘Jeux de vagues’, for example, after a Bruckner symphony; it’s like the difference between observing the shimmer of light on water one moment, and then the next, feeling the full force of a Titanic-like ocean liner, cutting through the water on its unstoppable course, its massive weight of steel driven on by rows of noisy engines.

The final movement of La mer, ‘Dialogue du vent et de la mer’, exhibits far greater continuity, but with one notable exception: the violent cut off (b. 55) and the unprepared appearance of a new soundworld that follows. This is the first appearance of ‘the call of the sea’ motif which Jankélévitch hears as an explicitly siren voice: ‘Viens à moi’ they seem to sing, he suggests, in ‘a song of seduction which leads us vertiginously, irresistibly into abysmal depths’.³⁵ When the motif returns later in the movement, over a sustained tonic pedal (b. 157), it is accompanied by the ethereal sonority of a high violin harmonic, marking it as a distant and heterotopic space, a promise of ‘somewhere else’ (see Example 6.8(a)). Not inconsequentially, this passage recalls a similar moment in the Act 4 love scene of Pelléas et Mélisande, the singular moment after the half-heard declaration of love, in which Pelléas describes Mélisande’s voice as one ‘that comes from the end of the world’ (see Example 6.8(b)).

Example 6.8(a) Claude Debussy, ‘Dialogue du vent et de la mer’, La mer, bb. 157–60

Example 6.8(b) Claude Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande, Act 4.iv, bb. 93–94

In the radical absence of human presence in La mer we hear a call that is half-human, like that of the sirens, but which calls us out of ourselves to an oceanic whole. As Jankélévitch warns, this is both alluring and also a kind of death – as Mallarmé’s mariner, sinking to the bottom of the sea after the shipwreck of language, experiences a kind of death. But the echo of the suspended moment in Pelléas et Mélisande after the declaration of love also marks this sound as a call to plenitude (a voice ‘that comes from the end of the world’), a space that exceeds that of the individual human being which is heard, momentarily, in Debussy’s sounding of a linguistic silence. The landscape without figure, and the unsayable space accessed at the moment the lovers declare their love, seem to border one another in the same sonority.

Ecstasis, as Plotinus says, is a reversion back to the One, but, as Heidegger reminds us, it does so by displacing the subject outside of itself. The ‘rapt’ experience of landscape and music converge in this exceeding of the boundaries of the self. This is the flipside of what Jankélévitch sees as the impersonal and even anonymous quality of Debussy’s La mer, its ‘erasure of the human figure’ in a place where ‘there is nothing [here] but the dialogue of the winds and the sea, which is moreover the monologue of the ocean, excluding all anthropomorphism, all reference to the subject’.³⁶ Such a music borders not only the idea of non-representation, but also of the a-linguistic world of nature, the ‘nothingness’ of the space where humans are not, the a-linguistic and uninhabitable space of the ocean. Boulez, writing about his Third Piano Sonata in 1963, picked up on this idea of the objectivity and anonymity of nature (that is to say, a nature without names).

Form is becoming autonomous and tending towards an absolute character hitherto unknown; purely personal accident is now rejected as an intrusion. The great works of which I have been speaking – those of Mallarmé and Joyce – are the data for a new age in which texts are becoming, as it were, ‘anonymous’, ‘speaking for themselves without any author’s voice’. If I had to name the motive underlying the work that I have been trying to describe, it would be the search for an ‘anonymity’ of this kind.³⁷

It is not insignificant in this respect that, at one stage, Debussy subtitled his piece ‘Trois esquisses symphoniques’,³⁸ a wonderfully contradictory title that surely signals a sense of non-identity with the Austro-German symphony, a deliberate distance from its discursive ambition and formal accomplishment. This is no surprise from a composer who asserted, in 1901, that the symphony was no longer a valid form; it had, Debussy wrote, become anachronistic, formalistic, and constraining; in a word, ‘useless’. Compared to the formal proposition of a symphony, a sketch is incomplete, the result of a few brief movements, defined as much by empty spaces as the lines made with the pen. It is understood to be preparatory – a momentary appearance that implies being filled out later in more solid form.³⁹ Nevertheless, Debussy’s Trois esquisses symphoniques might be heard to reference the symphony in order to place it under erasure; in doing so, it also places the symphonic subject under erasure. Contemporary with Mahler’s middle-period symphonies, which wrestle with the legacy of the heroic subject of the nineteenth century, La mer already looks forward to a radical kind of post-subjectivity. Jankélévitch suggested that ‘in the three movement of La Mer, “musique concrète” had already found its language’⁴⁰ and that Debussy was already investigating the spatialisation of sound, limited by the concert hall but which the development of electro-acoustic music would begin to change forty years after his death.⁴¹ Listening to ‘Vagues’ (Waves), the third movement of Saariaho’s Oltra mar, or to Tristan Murail’s orchestral work, Sillages (Wakes), it is not hard to hear the echoes of La mer and a shared fascination with elaborating a musical space that blurs the distance between subjective agency and immersive environment.

By the same token, one might hear the origins of such a move explored in a song written by Fauré before Debussy was even born. ‘Mai’, Op. 1, no. 2 (c.1862), one of Fauré’s earliest songs, was written when the composer was just 17. Here, the spring ‘demands us’ (nous réclame), and the singer urges you ‘to mix your soul with the countryside’ (de mêler à ton âme, la campagne). Its woods, its shades, its great moonlit nights by the side of sleeping waters, are all thresholds: literally, in Victor Hugo’s text, the paths end where the way begins (le sentier qui finit où le chemin commence). From his earliest song, Fauré embodies the idea of the song as itself a kind of horizon: ‘the horizon by which this world is joined humbly and joyously, like a hem at the edge of heaven’s robe’ (L’horizon que ce monde attache humble et joyeux, Comme une lèvre au bas de la robe des cieux). Hugo’s picture is of nature streaming towards us – it is the stars that look at us, the scents and sounds of the world that are carried by the wind to us. This is a song about listening, not doing.

This is the flipside of the linguistic shipwreck and fall to the abyss of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés – the expansion of a sensual whole that opens up like a constellation in the absence of linguistic division. Debussy’s La mer, no less than Mallarmé’s poem, is also riven with the gaps and spaces that are opened up by the dissolution of grammatical forms that bound together the planks of language. La mer, as Jankélévitch suggests, may well listen to the sirens and allows the drowning of the directed forms of tonality. It too risks an abysmal silence and formlessness but in order to deliver the luminous constellation that appears in the place of old forms. Jean Marnold, reviewing the premiere in 1905, surely sensed this when he described La mer as a music ‘in which one could believe oneself to be skirting vast abysses and staring into the depths of space.’⁴²

The drowning of the tone is also a loss of unitary tonal direction. Debussy’s music moves constantly, but not in the linear manner his contemporaries would have expected. The poetic metaphor of the sea deployed in this collection of three orchestral sketches works perfectly as a kind of ‘legitimation’ for the drowning of the tone he had called for years before. The movement of the waves, as Jankélévitch underlines, offers a perfect formal corollary for Debussy’s musical ‘static movement’, its ‘immobility of the mobile’, explored elsewhere through the image of the fountain. But most of all, it is presented here as a kind of ‘unformed’ movement, disordered and unruly (desordonnée).⁴³ The movement of the waves is not simply random, without any sense at all, but exhibits recurrent, though infinitely varied patterns of rising and falling, of forming and falling apart. ‘The edifice of a [single] second and of labile construction, the wave forms only to fall apart. The ocean is something that falls apart ceaselessly.’⁴⁴ The absence of sens – to take up Vincent D’Indy’s criticism of Debussy’s music – is precisely the absence of linguistic sense and direction by which the sense of the world is allowed to come to presence. It takes a certain kind of non-sense in order to release sense, which is why Debussy’s music makes its tonal relations ‘non-functional’ in order to foreground a different kind of sense-making.

Once again, this is the real function of the ‘alibi’ of natural forms. Jankélévitch might just as well have been talking about La mer in his impassioned defence of the sens of Debussy’s music. A landscape without figures is not shaped to the form of human saying.

The wind in the plain has no sens; the wind in the plain has no more sens than the clouds in the sky; nor any more sens that the drop of water falling back into the sea amid the play of waves and the rolling of the foam [ . . . ] the song of The Wind in the Plain sings nothing. The wind blows without its trumpet and does not speak to us! What the west wind saw, the west wind does not tell us. It rumbles, it howls, the west wind, but it says nothing.⁴⁵

But it is precisely this refusal of linguistic sense and the concomitant cultivation of an opening to the landscape outside of language, choosing the sense of the senses over that of syntactical forms, that Debussy’s music, and the idea of music that comes after him, takes as its primary focus. The result is a quite different relation ‘of sentient to sensible’. David Abram quotes a striking passage in which Merleau-Ponty explores the reciprocity of this relation as being like that ‘between the sleeper and his sleep’:

I breathe slowly and deeply to call forth sleep, and suddenly, one might say, my mouth communicates with some immense external lung that calls my breath forth and forces it back. A certain respiratory rhythm, desired by me just a moment ago, becomes my very being, and sleep, intended until then as a signification, turns itself into a situation. Similarly I offer my ear or my gaze with the anticipation of a sensation, and suddenly the sensible catches my ear or my gaze; I deliver over a part of my body, or even my entire body, to this manner of vibrating and of filling space named ‘blue’ or ‘red’.⁴⁶