The following text is a reworking of excerpts from the book Beauty, Burning: The Condition of Music, forthcoming on Sublunary Editions.

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What is beauty? The question emerged, viscerally and persistently. It pierced with the ancient force of a presence and a summoning. Here I am. Come.

The answer does not answer but hosts and considers states in motion, rhythms grounded on recurring states of heart. The answer to what? does not specify what, but unfurls a quivering do-not-know-what that burns. A do-not-know-what which they continue to stutter, the answer is heard in Juan de la Cruz’s Un no se qué que quedan balbuciendo; in the aural incantation of que, que, que, the answer of repetition and return says nothing and all, nothing because it exists before words, all in the fullness of its being and its rhythm.

The question has beauty at its core: a beauty not beautiful, demanding attention and scrutiny, holding interruptions, the imminence of a finding, stirring muscular tension before release.

The answer is the condition of music.

The answer does not write about music and does not write about beauty: not as targets to aim at, or riddles to solve. The answer is formed, this book is formed, as a fading in and out of atmospheres punctuated by heartbeats that are psychic knots, written from the site of my eros: the force of desire, at a time when I no longer know what writing might mean and I find myself longing, through reading and hearing, for connections; for a trembling song-soul that came to me long ago, long before me, longing for a soulful song which might not quite exist other than as a composite of many singing voices, imaginal song chiming with voices heard in reading, with the rhythms of being here, still, alive, today.

In the answer, moments in life are read and heard from the sight of my rose: mystic rose, flower, symbol and site of transformations where my neurosis morphs into new roses. There arose a reading-hearing where enmeshments are alive yet exist more than just among the living, someone said to me in a larger conversation. The thorns in the language, in which such condition is presented, pierce my words and are never smoothed out. I must reencounter my difficulty. It comes from what is true in me, someone said to me in her breath of life.

The answer is written in the sigh of my sore: in transformations brought about by pain which deepened and grounded, pain-portal which deepened the necessary forces that pull down the body, grounded the ways in which it became possible to go about it, as days went by and through care and contemplation sore gradually became rose through the stirrings of eros.

Eros, rose, sore. Eros a rose out of sore, eroseion of sorrow, eros arose from pain and renewed desire, pain burning being. Eros rose sore coexist in their phantom frequencies, in encounters that startle, empty, animate. Supported by their uneven pacing, they appear in a patterned circling complexity: sometimes song, sometime shade, sometimes rip, sometimes rhythm.

Thrusting the attention towards muscular tensions, unintensional but significant, reopening a life into care, recognising being and being with others, beginning to sing again even when the song has long gone and must be reimagined, patched up, mended but driven.

Words of eros-rose-sore are brought together by movements of spinning: inwards, backwards, outwards, centrifugally and centripetally, fugue and petals, escaping canons and shedding flowers. They circle back onto themselves and spin outwards, they never solidify into concepts, in that site where to look back spinning means that what is looked at is not past or gone but is yet to happen. It is received and heard as something which must be. Something which morphs neurosis into new roses into eros.

New roses are flowers from a past, from gardens recalled and imagined in which a certain stillness was perceived.

The moment arrives when on reading, something inside whispers yes, yes in the other, and the encounter in difference leads into the darkness of unknowing, whose cloud covers these pages with a question of dissonance, an altered rhythm.

The rhythm of the encounter with beauty is piercing and obscuring, it unravels as each moment of tangency marks a slight variance, each recognition of kinship holds the awareness of difference. Clarice Lispector wrote of a vague sensation of beauty, the way you have a worrying sensation of beauty: when some thing seems to say some thing and there is that obscure encounter with a feeling. That obscure encounter with a feeling: a darkening and entangling, not even proportion but movement dictated by off-centred measures introducing brief and nearly imperceptible pauses, the opposite of what is usually understood as rigid structure, so rhythm is not dictated but embodied, asymmetrical, rhythm, most profound mode, qualitative, not quantitative articulation. It circles around an ungraspable centre, the point of irradiation of the relationship between many entities, each one with its distinctive quality, rhythm, psycho-physical force transforming movement of voices, of hands that write, into depth, give them weight. It is not a precise division of time, rhythm, rather a hovering, centred and unstable. In rhythm, voices in conversations are the same and not quite so, in their moving and centred ways of being, where I hear your voice that is my voice that is another, where sense is presented not in a logic formula but in rhythm which enmeshes various elements, confounds and re-founds them. Timelines are scrambled, timeliness no longer an issue, it is not a theory that demands to be written here but a refrain that wants to be heard, its cadence touching a deep substratum of being. As its rotational spin deepens, it retraces in my reimagining-reading the great circle of shadow that Dante traced at the beginning of one of his Rime Petrose (Stony Rhymes), where beauty is not still but moving vital presence. Here the same word rhymes and rhythms and rhymes with the same word, hear: petra, petra, petra, tempo, tempo, tempo, luce, luce, luce, stone, stone, stone, time, time, time, light, light, light, an armour of closely rhyming rhythming words at the end of each verse holds the burning matter in the rest of each verse. At times it is a mineral formation, at times a triumph of flora, at times it buzzes in the twilight stare of melancholy as an altered rhythm, a question of dissonance.

Welcome, dissonance. Did you know, dissonance, did you know, that energy is an aesthetic?

Energy is an aesthetic. I read this sentence, I cannot understand it, it disturbs me, makes me stop. I do not know how it is that the force of its calling does not let go of me; I know I must stay with the oblique significance it appears to hold. Energy is an aesthetic: so ends a section in Gaston Bachelard’s profound reading of Lautréamont, a reading around poetic tension as the force that allows a writer to detach from the pulls of subjectivity while remaining embodied; a reading which suggests an internal psycho-physical training of muscles and yielding, of bodily thrust and spiritual trust. I read the sentence today, after spending a long time watching a landscape terse with late summer light in central Italy. Both the sentence and the landscape stir a troubled awakening, in the attempt to bring together the training of muscles and yielding and thrust and contemplation and beauty which startled me: energy is an aesthetic. Bewildered and provoked, I let the sentence stay and spin in my head, open another book. Contemplation as a mode, Tim Lilburn tells me in Living In The World As If It Were Home, is not an item of knowledge but where I love, where my look rests in insistent and adoring incomprehension. I do not define the branch; it defines me by giving me a home. What home do these mountains give me, as I watch and watch them? It is dusk and they are becoming darker, their blue deeper, not only as a visible phenomenon but carrying a force of sad unknowing which seems to be the only possible home, shaken and shaded, where once was home, another and safe. Contemplation is knowledge impoverished and embarrassed but that keeps going. Impoverished and embarrassed, is contemplation my energy, moving me feebly but persistently? This is not a naming but a praising, a sway in the tongue. I praise and contemplate this energy that is an aesthetic, beauty which moves me and which I cannot fully grasp. This is also a lament sung by thinking. This energy, I hear, this beauty, is also a lament sung by thinking, sunk by sinking, sunk by singing: a phrase and its resonant frequencies, buzzing in other pages which I heard and wrote years ago. They return now, their energy returns, with the force of an uncontrollable premonition, a psychic rhyming with the same words written by someone else, in another time, now again heard. Here contemplation becomes my energy that is an aesthetic: I watch (contemplate) these mountains in the late summer haze at the end of a day, I feel tensions (energy) in my body, sometimes muscular spasms that steal nights and days, sometimes jolts, I find an unnamed beauty (aesthetic) in this, the sway in the tongue that tells me to watch, listen, think and then, only much later, write, write the tension towards psychically-rhyming clusters of words even when not understanding. Then sore shall be lived through, with such sharpness that it will turn into eros, drive and fullness of living, which blooms into rose and nurtures despite its thorny texture, its rotten sickly scent. This is my contemplation, in energies unnamed yet present, which give me a tentative home. In the middle of contemplation my muscles stirred. Here my energy is an aesthetic.

Energy is an aesthetic. Even James Hillman, who often in the past articulated decisive turning moments in my inhabitation of complex psychic issues, refers to Bachelard’s statement as this obscure phrase, rhyming unevenly and profoundly in my reading with Clarice’s words on beauty, that obscure encounter with a feeling. A darkening lodges in the encounter. The obscure phrase closes a chapter on muscles and cries, where a cry is described as the antithesis of language, that imitates nothing, and the beautiful is not a simple arrangement; it needs power, energy… Statues themselves have muscles. The formal cause is of an energizing order. The beautiful is not still, statues have muscles: energy is an aesthetic as it is the founding and obscuring thrust of beauty. Hillman echoes: In this sounding, the dynamis of nature becomes aesthetic, and all aesthetic reaction of our… muscles, throat and teeth are the force of nature through us. I raise my gaze, look again at those mountains at dusk, tune into the emptying presence of a pain whose obscuring energy is carrying me back into the world through the thrust of a desire heard from afar, heard as it is sung in the words of others, which finds a home in me and whose aesthetic is energy of metaphor and metamorphosis. It is in the study of flow, darkening and distortion of forms that my attention shall be placed and my body placated, or at least settled into another rhythm, to allow questions of dissonance to reverberate broadly. Bachelard again writes: Certain… poets bring about… a rhythm of the nerves in our feelings that is different from linguistic rhythm. I feel this different rhythm in my head, face and mouth, where Bachelard’s statement is located, in the obscure back neck muscles which are so near the head yet so far from consciousness. In this chorus of dynamic nature, I hear words from the first chapter of Jacques Rancière’s Aisthesis, on Winckelmann writing of the Belvedere Torso. Here, beauty is a counter-revolution of suspended expression as muscles melt into one another like waves in the sea… The tension of many surfaces on one surface, of many kinds of corporality within one body, will define beauty from now on… composing the conflicting movements of the dancing body, but also of the sentence, the surface, of the coloured touch that arrest the story while telling it, that suspend meaning by making it pass by or avoid the very figure they designate. In the cumulative force of their telling and of my reading, the coexistence of motion and rest in muscles that melt, of stirring presence and inactivity, of eros and impossibility, tension and stillness around suspension and subtraction, interruption of story and meaning, head and face perceived as phantom limbs through movement, repeat to me now: energy is an aesthetic, energy is an aesthetic, phrase deprived here of a specific purpose but unravelling in the purpose and circularity of its being, which releases presence through tension, arresting any story, telling it by other means. The headless torso sings. The story goes nowhere. No logic or explanation but an occasion for metamorphosis, as a tone then another and more are heard and do not stop.

At this point I become melancholy. I sense melancholy in this offering, in my reading of a reading of a headless and limbless torso that sparks thinking through the melting of muscles, as energy becomes an aesthetic by becoming anaesthetic: numbing down, or better, as pain is numbed down through the turns and returns of a melancholy disposition. And melancholy, I heard long ago in Alejandra Pizarnik’s words, is a question of dissonance.

Melancholy is a question of dissonance; of the inevitable discrepancies that arise in listening and through kinship; of tangencies born from discrepancies such as musical dissonance provokes. Engagements a-rose from melancholy summonings, containing noise and interference to welcome a breath of life. New roses bloomed, after neuroses had emerged from a type of discomfort best held by the Italian expression avere le paturnie, to have the paturnie: to be in a low mood, to have the blues. More specifically, one afternoon I heard myself say, in Italian, mi sono venute le paturnie, paturnie came to me: a deeply probing expression whose psychic knot is tied in the merging of patire, to suffer, and Saturno, considered to be the god of melancholy by Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl in their book Saturn and Melancholy. Patire+Saturno=paturnie. Paturn, Saturn, Return. Melancho-lily, flowering painfully, melancholy is a question of dissonance, paturnie is a word which only exists in the plural. In the condition of melancholy, dissonance is plural too, many-voiced.

Looking at Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I, at the heart of Klibansky, Panofsky and Saxl’s study, I am drawn to the angel’s head resting on the hand—closed fist holding muscular tension, gesture of malaise, fatigue, contemplation, tightened energy—and to the twilight gaze, a dark shadow cast over piercing eyes. The muscles underneath the angel’s tunic melt into one another like waves in the multi-layered sea of the fabric’s draping waves. With obsessive diligence I have been watching and watching recordings of runway fashion shows by Rick Owens, who continues to offer versions, variations and deviations of the same core elements in his collections: in my understanding, an acknowledgement of the Greek moira, the portion given to us and which we must attend to, the circle that binds us and invites and torments us to find and draw our morphologies, those which necessarily and simultaneously challenge, haunt, hold and soothe us, or, the manic exploration of the boundaries of self as it is ripped off and sewn again in a ceaseless spiralling of patterns and textures, edges and waves. Owens’ garments materialise in the interplay of formal restraint and daring geometries, of fabric which enwraps, re-imagines and re-fashions bodies against any obvious notion of beauty, in the contradictions of motion, in a commotion of senses. Their multi-layered draping is elegance in the turbulence of desire, as melting lines coexist with muscular hard edges, as corners curl into long draping trains of silk tulle which may be fog, as austerity is never far from humour. What I see in Dürer’s melancholy, dissonant engraving is not a Renaissance tunic but a Rick Owens gown; not a wing on the angel’s side of the body, but an exaggerated peaked shoulder from one of Owens’ jackets. Such a construction holds the pull of my desire, a desire that wants to fly, as in the Greek Pteros, Eros with wings, and in turn gives wings to my words that spin and flutter around implausible yet existing connections and inter-echoes, emotionally palpable in the eroseion of conformity and in the spinning of chimeric perceptions, in the metamorphosis of eros into hearos into rose.

Hear melancholia morphed into melancho-lily, more flowers, there will be flowers, eros, roses, as neurosis morphs into new roses. Holding the hearing and the movements of rose from eros-sore and of lily from melancholy, a rose is eros is a lily: unknowing or, as I hear in Henry Corbin, knowing which is not linear accumulation but circling spiritual heritage, a knowledge of the soul whose reach is measured by the sigh of desire. Always desire, always a sigh, a lack, a limit, surpassed in dissonant transformation.

Today desire shakes the fragile coiling leaves of a certain tentacle-plant that stands on one of the loudspeakers in this room. Outside, shrubs of old untidy roses. I only look out at dawn, I only look out at dusk. Today, the air feels more solemn than usual. In that saturated silence a verse comes back to me, from the edge of a very long season. Any time I attempt to sing it, it stirs.

I have heard it before. I read my words haunted by another’s. Writing might sing with the other’s writing, not comment on it, not think but sing, because something was written already, in the csite of correspondence, in a language that may be torn, sentimental and it is sensed and sings, with friends whom I encounter again in their prose, and when they look at me I smile and when they turn I darken and when they write I am enchanted and as they write I sing.

This is not the book of music but the condition of music: more porous, less encaged. A hovering form solely drawn on connections and circling encounters, it transfigures eros-sore-rose—initiatory flower never too far from fire—into a song of neurosis into new roses.

The song once burned, a verse from the broken song says: today my lack of voice morphs.

Today my lack of voice morphs neurosis in new roses. It might have been a verse from a song, written and burned, singed, it must have been song, singed, sung, sunk, en, then, now, into the depths of a past now floating back to surface. It must have been a song never complete, a composite song, monstrous, chimeric, ever shifting and ever present.

Where is the song heard. In shards of words from the outer edge of a buried age.

The new roses in the never-complete, never-completely-recalled song are old: they grew, knotty and unruly, among other plants in the magic balcony of my childhood, a site full of wonders at the back of my grandmother’s small flat in Southern Italy. First, there were the sensitive plants. Folding and dropping when touched. Sensitive plant, humble plant, Touch-me-not, those plants sang. What do they sing in my ears, in those later years now? They sing. Touch me not, touch me not, come back tomorrow. Sing to me. For you sing. Touch me not.

In the same balcony, hiding mysteriously among the plant pots, there lurked the tortoise. Old and big, rescued by one of my uncles on the side of a busy road, so the family story goes. In my childhood eyes and understanding, the tortoise had materialised there as the severe guardian of the touch-me-nots and of the roses. Her, and her slow pace, presented a way of being-as-staying that did not fret but stopped and considered, each of the thousand wrinkles in that wise ancient face holding a fold of time kept, given back in petrified stares that seemed to invite quietude and long times, a measured pace, a solemn presence. As she slowly ate salad leaves while keeping watch, I knew the tortoise was there even when hiding. I thought at night she sang. Sing to me, tortoise. Oh my heart shies from the sorrow. Sing to me. Touch me not. Oh my heart shies, her head shied too, like the touch-me-nots: all the creatures on that balcony seemed to invite a movement towards quiet, inward places. Sing to me, let me enfold you.

Oh my heart, finally, the roses. Oh my heart, now let me enfold you. I will not tell you of those knotty old roses, growing unruly in pots on the magic balcony, their thorns and petals conjoining beauty and danger, fascination and risk. I will not tell you of those old roses, knotty props for insidious cobwebs that would gleam and quiver in the breeze after the rain, echoing again the coupling of danger and beauty in their gossamer geometries. Touch me not, the leaves of the sensitive plant fold in, the head of the tortoise retracts, the cobwebs are blown away and the spider retreats. In this pervading retiring movement what is left are those roses that I will not tell, will not sing and yet they’re there, as the verse from the forgotten singed song comes back and not in full, renewing today my neurosis in new roses that are old, a sense of presence in mystery and beauty, beauty and danger, danger and song, danger, dancer, now dance the song that morphs my neurosis in new roses.

Roses I become, or mist in a field, at that threshold hour of the day not quite twilight but a mysterious morphing passage when all sounds fold and the stillness quietly admonishes, as if the tortoise spirit of the balcony had come back, humming its silent song from the outer edge of a buried age, never entirely remembered. The song would be sung in that morphing passage, in presence and forgetfulness, in broken verses, is this a wave breaking in a song of no name, know name, voice with no face, know face, in disjointed vocalisations, shifting, so now I want to choke, want to laugh, want to smash this microphone want to crash, I did all my best to smile but I’m in pain and I sing, bleeding from my mouth I sing and the song is not there or at least, not entirely.

Not sure what I am tuning and turning into, now it is the depth of night, mouth sore. Eros, soon again it will be time to sing and I will not sing, those words will sing me, sing to me let me enfold you. Lips curled, voice astray, rose arose into another song, where the edge of my voice bleeds: a shift from the touch-me-not admonition of a text to a voice in let me enfold you, where writing is heard in a telling. I hear a cadence inside my perception of writing in and out of the page, enfolding radiance and discourse, presence and concealment. The subtle voice of prose, rose, the voice of a page is not a lyrical ornament, just because it cannot be summarised or captured does not mean it is devoid of substance. I cannot change much. I can transmit transform this faint tortuous tortoise hum. It is cold here, it is the depth of night. Song, you escape me. You say no, you are tired, you quieten. Let me enfold you and I faint, fall, and in my fall I hear, my lack of voice lack of words taking you away. So it ends and begins with no whole song, a cadence, shall I sing with the rose, sore and eros, with the hum, out of the bleeding mouth the song will arise out of sore, as again today my lack of voice morphs neurosis in new roses.