Music, Words, Sex, Silence

The reason our deepest thoughts and emotions can't be said, or even sung, is because they are individual and are of endlessly shifting and indefinite form. Words and music are both too Universal, too humdrum and too specifically molded, too finite to convey them. That is why music is so unerotic. True egoism - love; the flesh; truth itself- is unknown to it.

At least mere words still leave something to the imagination, a tremulous shudder of doubt to fill in with heroic action and obscene innuendos. A deafening and abysmal silence pervades all speech, that is its strength. Silence within music just becomes another part of the music, a part that is even more limited.

My love isn't beautifully and finely crafted like music; my love is limitless terror and a lilac handkerchief thrown into the void. The only soundtrack I can possibly imagine to it is the music to a stabbing in an Alfred Hitchcock film. But how would that do justice to its infinite gentleness?

As Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said 'Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.' At the end of the day, if everything is only a matter of interpretation - ourselves most of all - and ultimately we have no fixed nature... to speak is to lie; and nothing speaks and lies so strongly as music.

Ultimately, the reason it cannot inspire us with lust is that we comprehend it too well, so that even the music intended to threaten most, like Marilyn Manson or, say... Cradle Of Filth! - becomes totally nonthreatening to us. And that is same reason we love it in a more Platonic sense.

The reason sexuality has been seen as dirty in traditional Christian culture is related to the fact it is intimately connected to silence - to the Real - whereas Christianity is the religion of The Word, the Logos which is itself a Mythos that sings and paints elaborate poetry over the abyss. Still, the cracks run deep - as, so I'm told, do the fingers of the good Bishops into those little 'cracks'.

The only solution is a new prosaic poetry, i.e. a philosophy that does justice to the abysmal silence and mystery, the unparalleled singularity, of sexuality, the individual, of Being and of death. A real live human being who combines this unfathomable authentic complexity with outward finite beauty of form is capable of inspiring both erotic devotion and Platonic love.

Ordinarily, we tend to think that Platonic love is for the deep, mysterious soul, and the erotic component is of the flesh, but actually it is not that simple. The opposite is at least as true. The flesh by itself is as unerotic as music. Hence why few people can be aroused by inanimate sex dolls. It is only the selfish will of another, indeterminate in itself, as it limits, molds and sacrifices itself in the arena of objectivity, or even more tantalizingly, chastely struggles not to do so, that holds any interest for us.

Men's ears are not meant to be sexual. Silence is golden in a woman; by it a woman conveys her respect and admiration for a man's power and her own chaste unwillingness to betray and define herself. On the other hand, women respond to the voice of a man precisely because it is so unlike music in its naked, baldly and boldly unscrupulous, and less weighed down by regalia penetration of the air.

But at its best, a man's voice serves only to highlight the silence of the conjugal act and its mystery.