A Musical Moment

This poem came out of some prose, which I wrote first, a technique the ancient Greeks called metaphrastics, when poems come out of prose. And when out of music, balance, or stasis, flows, as I discuss below.

In alchemy, objects emerge from mixing metabolisms. Our lives are filled with such transformations.

What is made by such alchemies, such metamorphoses, is magic.

Behind Hamlet, behind The Elixir of Love, behind The Wizard of Oz, behind the alchemy of arias and operas themselves, are what the ancient Greeks called metaphrastics, where prose turns into poetry, where something deeper lurks behind the physical depth of matter. As we are made of elements found only in stars, maybe we hide the frequencies of stars inside us, the misunderstood modulations of their magnetic waves, because of whose rarefactions entire galaxies rotate?

Planets spin because of gravity and magnetism, forces we don’t understand. Frequencies generated by motion initiated at the birth of the universe, Pythagoras’s music of the spheres, keeps planets spinning liketops and underlies the energy of the world.

We all seek visions fugitives, phantoms which run away from us. Do we find them in Proust? Or Rachmaninoff’s Moment Musical No. 5, whose lilt, imitating the roll of a gondola in the tides of the Venetian lagoon, imitates the balance created by the exchange of energy, which drives the universe’s energy grid. Schubert wrote six Moments Musicaux, published in 1828, on which, in 1896, Rachmaninoff based his own six “moments.”

Newton believed that heat and light were forms of matter which could only be re-arranged, but never destroyed. So when one thing turns into another (water into ice, air into snow), heat is created, which in turn powers the motion in the universe, while the amount of both energy or matter remains the same.

Both Newtonian gas theory and quantum mechanics posit that energy is never lost, but conserved, by the transformation of one form of energy into another. As a universal constant, the conservation of matter validates the concept of a celestial force which keeps the world in balance, a coy concession to the notion of God.

I always feel that balance in Dylan Thomas’s prescient long sonnet:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

In Thomas’s poem, he balances the world through equating the life force with inevitable death.

Hamlet said that death was only matter rearranged. He says it twice, once to Claudius, explaining “how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar,” expanding on the idea to the gravediggers:

Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander
returneth to dust; the dust is earth; of earth
we make loam; and why of that loam whereto he
was converted might they not stop a beer barrel?
Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.
O, that that earth which kept the world in awe
Should patch a wall t’ expel the winter’s flaw!