memory and form
When North America was hardly explored, a French trapper went westward from Montreal, and he became the first European to see the Niagara Falls. When he returned he told of waterfalls that were more vast and immense than people had ever dreamed of. But no one believed him. They thought he was mad, or lying. They asked him “what proof have you?” He answered, “my proof is, I have seen them”.
The hero tells this story in Herzog’s tale of Fitzcarraldo. All that is left for the trapper, and for Fitzcarraldo, having borne witness to what is incomprehensible to anyone they speak to, is their memories of what they have seen. The trauma of having seen what is indescribable and what no one else can understand must be substantial. Could you be sure that you had seen it yourself?
Language traps us in a difficulty that has some of the characteristics of such a problem. What we commit to our memory in words becomes immediately subject to the meanings that our community confers upon those words. We do not, after all, invent the meanings of our words on our own - we inherit them from our community, and our community plays a substantial role in deciding their future meaning. If our community disagrees with us about the meaning or reference of some sentence or description, or if the meanings of those words change over time, transmitting the original memory over generations becomes increasingly difficult. If memories are reduced to linguistic descriptions of the past, their felicity becomes questionable.
Linguistic characterizations of the past have, on the other hand, an extraordinary advantage. We can share our perspectives on what we have seen with a level of detail and sophistication that approaches a total departure from the communicative capacities of our nearest animal cousins. But, the more we rely on language to house our memories, the more susceptible we are to changes in the meanings of words undermining the stability of those memories.
It is important for us, then, to remember using more than just descriptions of our past. Colors, sounds and smells all play a role in constructing the thoughts that form the basis of our memories. But bare sensations, in no particular order, cannot serve to tell us about our past, but only perhaps to induce impulsive reactions in us. To tell us about our past, memory demands form. We are thus caught in a potential dilemma: we need form to remember, but the most obvious formal vehicle, that of language, risks undermining the authenticity of our memories altogether.
What we are looking for, then, is non-linguistic form. There are many such forms: architects plans, paintings, sculptures. All contain evidence of the ideas of our ancestors – our cultural memory. None of these is quite as culturally pervasive, however, as musical form. When we hear a melody, written perhaps thousands of years ago (in the case of Greek modes, or plainchant), we are being given direct access to the actual form of an ancient event, in spite of having no available description of the event. In fact, as we are well aware, music defies linguistic description. And this makes it available to non-linguistic creatures, as Messaien so pointedly observed in his incorporation of the tradition of birdsong (where melodies are passed on across generations for millennia) in his composition.
We humans, however, are extraordinarily lucky. Because not only have we inherited a similar framework of aural memetics to birds: the ability to hear songs and reproduce them; but, we also have the ability to understand what we are engaging with in this tradition: the actual form of our own and others’ potentially ancient experiences, forms of what verbal descriptions can only be about.
Appeared in the 2007 program for the EAR electronic music festival, Drogheda, Ireland