The Meaning Is in the Singing

Many years ago, as I was researching ideas of meaning in music, I came across an idea that has greatly affected my thinking ever since. Because I am who I am, I don’t remember the book or the author or even the century the author lived in. All in all, I’d rather be the kind of reader who forgets the source but is changed by the idea than the kind who remembers all the bibliographic details but isn’t moved by what he reads at all.

The idea was this: meaning in music is like meaning in baby talk. Yes, toddlers eventually assign words to objects and activities, sometimes totally fabricated words. (Our first called a tree a “doot.”) But the cooing of the infant can’t be translated, is not a thought expressed in words with codified meanings. And yet the baby’s cooing isn’t meaningless. The meaning of a baby’s talking is in the talking. His talking means that he is expressive. It means he wants to make an aural mark on his world. It means he wants to be like all the strange big animals he sees who make sounds with their mouths constantly. It’s not that “bak-gak” means a bottle and “bbbthhhhh” means a toy. It’s that they both mean, “Talking is fun!” Similarly, except in cases of quotation or obvious iconic reference, harmonic progression and melodic shape don’t and can’t ever say anything as specific as, say, “I want an orange because my mother liked apples.” And, contrary to the claim of another author, whose name I have deliberately and justly forgotten, as reported in a professional music journal that should have known better, there is no “gay” chord in Schubert. No, the meaning of the melody is in the singing itself. (I’m reminded here of Annie Dillard talking about the beauty of birdsong. Thanks, Annie Dillard!)

This year, many years after my introduction to him in a poetry class in college, I decided to revisit and deepen my acquaintance with T. S. Eliot. I remember the professor of that class saying of The Waste Land, “Even experts have trouble understanding it all.” In my ignorant, cocky, youthful confidence, I told myself that I would work it out. After all, I had recently learned to understand Shakespeare, and I had grown up with the idea that he, too, was impenetrable. Alas, I got lost on the first page, somewhere around Eliot’s announcement that he goes south for the winter. But I wanted to understand The Waste Land. I wanted to work it all out. Anybody who can come up with such great phrases as “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” and “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper” deserves to be understood. (Yes, I know that last one is from Hollow Men, but it’s still a really great phrase.)

Well, this time around, I was surprised to find that the foreign-language bits were much shorter and fewer than I remembered and that most of the English bits made much more sense without any extra work. It helped to be 62 and to know more literature and more history than I did at 19. It helped (a little) to know that the title referred to the waste land in the Arthurian legends. But still there were all those elusive allusions. Maybe, I thought, I should buy a book that will tell me what it all means, a guide that will help me work it all out.

Then it occurred to me that my problem was in thinking that a poem was something to be worked out. I understood the point Eliot was making in presenting vapid conversation even if I didn’t always know who was talking or exactly what they were talking about. Why should I learn what they were talking about anyway if the point is that the conversation is vapid? The thought sprang up: The meaning of the music is in the singing. And I thought of Eliot like a bird sitting in the waste land of inter-war European society wanting to sing beautiful melody and finding the reverberations of his song made tinny and hollow by the corruption of the landscape around him. I understood The Waste Land so much more when I quit trying to understand it.

Already very happy with my plan to reap great swaths of Eliot this summer after reading all the early poems, I next came upon the choruses from The Rock. Not only did I have one of the best reading days of the year. I also found that much of what I had quit trying to understand in the earlier work suddenly became very clear. Like Wallace Stevens’s jar in Tennessee (look it up if you don’t know this one!), the first chorus made all the rest of the Eliot wilderness (including the Eliot Waste Land) an organized realm rising up to its thoughts. In fact, the chorus presents a similar image when it speaks of the Incarnation as a point in history that contains all history and makes all history an organized story surrounding and flowing both toward and from it. Suddenly all the seeming contradictions in all of Eliot’s poetry made sense as echoes of this one thought. I thought of the circles in the Divine Comedy that turn inside out when Dante reaches the Empyrean Heaven, the Divine Point in the center becoming the all-encompassing circumference. (Eliot may have been thinking of that image, too, if only because no Christian poet can long have Dante out of his mind: at some point in the choruses, Eliot quotes Dante in invoking Mary as figlia del tuo figlio, an expression of mystery that, in context, also gave me images of points that contain the circles that surround them.) I also thought of Henry Vaughan and “I saw Eternity the other night,” another poem of divine circles. (Look this one up, too, if you don’t know it!)

This morning, I read Thomas’s Christmas sermon in Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. We celebrate, the soon-to-be-martyred saint tells us, both the birth and death of Christ in a mass on that most blessed day. How can we celebrate both at the same time? How can we be both joyful and sorrowful at the same time, joyful in our sorrow and sorrowful in our joy? The world doesn’t understand the peace that Jesus gives, he reminds us (“Not as the world gives, give I unto you”), and it doesn’t understand the joy that is compatible with sorrow. If the image of the point that contains the whole line of history summarizes what I felt reading Eliot, this theological statement on joy-and-sorrow summarizes what I took to be the meaning of his singing. I’ve had to learn the hard way in my life that all those Christians who have told me I didn’t have the joy of the Lord must not truly understand the divine joy in godly sorrow. (Or let us charitably say that they momentarily forgot that they understood it.) In the last post, I said I hoped for an antidote to my disappointment in William Morris, as Bryant had been after Browning. I didn’t know the elixir would be right around the corner.