An die Musik
And where would we be with music? Would we be elsewhere? It would seem . . . Gone into a space unheard of, I mean not allegorical, not reflective, not recognizable; in other words: not even enigmatic, rather: with no solution, if the enigma and the solution are together, and the enigma murmurs “try to solve the riddle I put to you” (Proust); if the principle of the riddle’s answer (Greek, Greek, Greek) consists in recognizing oneself; if the sphingoid riddle comes upon you repeating, “’tis thee, thou recognizeth not thyself but ‘tis thee, thou Œdipus, Socrates, know thyself . ..”
There, where we have entered, music, it would be other than yourself; it would seem there is non-semblance, layers and not merely a surface to reflect your image and throw it back to you giving you a chance to recognize yourself. There would be something unknown and new deep down; something not translatable, not interpretable, not reducible ¾ without leading back to the ego, to the ego withdrawn at the center of everything, a focal point “behind” its projections whereby to (re)constitute oneself. Could one possibly escape one’s image? Escape the past god and the image that is “the future of humankind” . . . Not I, not it, not even “my other”! The hall of mirrors is broken, the music began by itself. Yet there is no longer even the illusion of feigning that one might get away from illusion by slipping “behind the mirrors.”
