Mythopoetics

A golden sandstorm engulfed the arian chariot opening up the cloud of orange dust on the top of a deep blue hill. Down in the valley, the fighting armies facing each other. Your family and your friends fight in both sides. Arjun wants an explanation for the nonsense of life, of battle. Reality seems simply like a cosmic mistake, an error. What shall we do with our lives? How are we going to live them? Simple basic questions. One direct path is the “Path of Beauty”, to move from fear to wonder, to awe and amazement. Beauty leads the restless and tireless navigator in you to pursue the fugitive horizon, the threshold of Greatness, and leads the horizon to be the rising Light, and answer to the desire to navigate. An arrow might kill us tomorrow, but today we have the wine of love and poems of old epics, when the gods rumbled the earth, Krishna and mighty Vishnu, drunk and starving rishis dreaming the heavens. So pour some more wine from last night and sing for me that...

Old Norse: awe is agi , a feeling of great respect and liking. Let’s add: a sense of expansion and greatness, a blissful state which includes surprise, and the arousal of the will to play, for awe is active…the conscious creation of an identity by expressing objects and actions which produce awe. In the fight for Hastinapura, Prince Arjun transformed fear before Brahman into awe before existence, awe before the experience of the sublime .

 The Kantian way: sublime is the starry night above us, the unending ocean, whatever overcomes our sense of individuation.  Beyond that: “Sublime” is a very complex emotion. It is the experience of dissolution into something greater, ampler, wider, newer, everlasting.  In the Bhagavad-Ghita, the sublime as Brahman, with and without attributes produces the reaction of the deepest fear, the fear of dissolving. But there is also awe and wonder  The experience of the sublime is overwhelming and dissolves the ego, which surrenders before the beauty of the fleeting spring of the rose, the slow streaming strings of Mahler at the end of the summer, the flocks of birds at sunset.  The concept of the “sublime “ is related to traditional religious experiences. Can we free our experience of the sublime from the images of the past? Falling star The frog from the lotus Into the bottomless instant

Samsara, Maya, the illusion, what is not real. There is a non-transcendentalist interpretation of the concept which does not appeal to a substantial reality, or truth, or whatever final and definite referent for things (i.e. an exomorphism ), for the universe, and for us. Samsara is the trivial pursuit and pain of most human lives. Bound to nothing, to empty air, to obsolete myths, withered patterns of emotional protocols that maintain life at the high price of repetitive nothingness and misery. It is not only the trait of modern life, old inertias of transcendental thought carry the same burden, a hunt for phantoms, a feast of crazy magpies stealing the shining shit and thinking it a golden treasure. Heavy human sleepwalking, chained to our physiology and proud of it. Once you see the patterns of the eternal return of the movements of life, the endless repetition, the perennial dreams of choice, then the game is over, and you find yourself out, as good as dead, dead for the others...

   Kant talks about transcendental ideas as cognitions that are taken beyond any possible experience, i.e. beyond the boundaries of empirical knowledge, though still in connection with it. Those ideas are basic epistemological objects of the philosophical traditions of the world (not only Western) which express fundamental ways of the development of the human thinking. Kant noticed that precisely by their distance from experience they become problematic and shaky in their epistemological content. He proved that, in fact, when trying to prove them logically, they produce antinomies. I understand those transcendental objects as conceptual constructions of the Überlebenswelt (the reflexive and formalized knowledge) which use as building blocks intuitions from the Lebenswelt (the knowledge of everyday life) containing at least one undefined concept (exomorphism). An example would be the concept of “implication”, a rather simple and basic intuition which in our everyday life mea...

  Silence is more than repose or the mere absence of sound, for repose has a duration, and absence is the negation of something. This obvious facts were made completely clear and explicit by Cage in his wonderful  4’33’’ . Thus, it should make more sense to talk about  silences , in plural, avoiding the common reification of a concept that usually expresses an indefinite absence and metaphysically grows to express a final and pervasive state of the cosmos.  In music, there is one kind of silence whose function is orchestrational: we decide which voices intervene, and the absence of a voice at a given moment in a piece implies choices of color and texture. Furthermore, as we read in Berlioz ( Treatise upon Orchestration ), silence can be obtained through orchestration:  With the view of expressinig a lugubrious silence, I have in a cantata divided the double-basses into four parts ; causing them thus to sustain long pianissimo chords, beneath a decrescendo ...

1. We consider that A is the conceptual ground or foundation of B when the cognition of B is impossible without the cognition of A, and A is immediately certain for our intuition. We say that A gives a semantical self-image, for it does not need further explanation, but B cannot produce a semantical self-image. 2. Music Theory has developed since Antiquity with the aid of mathematics, reaching today a fully mathematical status. 3. Mathematics is a formalized symbolic language. 4. Tarski’s theorem states that a formalized language cannot produce a semantical self-image. Therefore, music theory could not be the ground of musical action or of anything else. In fact, music theory -as well as musical action- are based on the social life of the human group, which in turn are based on the homeostatic protocols for survival: emotions.