Vocal Chords
Cordial, Focal
Chord is sometimes... used for accord. Thus we say the common chords to such a bass note, meaning its third, fifth, and octave.
—Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, 17531
To compress the world, take the symmetries and proportions presented by the senses and reduce it to something that you can utter, this remakes the world internally: an act of creation.
The motion, proportion, timing, & symmetry of art—the tension of ratios, of “chords”. The critic names these and then uses them as a measure. But the better critic, before foraging a vocabulary, reveals their Eden: their craft (at its best) broadcasts the imagination of a better world.
Auden writes: “So long as a man writes poetry or fiction, his dream of Eden is his own business, but the moment he starts writing literary criticism, honesty demands that he describe it to his readers, so that they may be in the position to judge his judgments.” For why would you ever fear the critic’s pen unless he wanted to live in a world like your Eden? All art builds world; it is a potential energy: what can/could/may/might/shall/should/will/would be.
There are all degrees in poetry and we must be thankful for every beautiful talent. But it is only a first success, when the ear is gained. The best office of the best poets has been to show how low and uninspired was their general style, and that only once or twice they have struck the high chord.
—Emerson, English Traits, 18562
It’s rare for a person to have a vocal beauty and, still, rare even for it to come from that person. I sometimes think of humanity as a search engine for beauty: we are created in such dappled variety, but still, so many of us are stubborn-headed about making things—think of the obsessive artist. You cannot know when and from whom “the high chord” will be struck: and more humanely still, you cannot rule anyone out, either.
I’ve been thinking more and more about the motional arts: dance, etc. I fit calligraphy into this category as well (its execution is motional, but its output is just a reductive imprint of that motion). I would also say much of sports fall into the category of motional art: and many self-claimed “uncreative” types find a music to something outside the fence of “art”—an enjambment of imagination and action.
I need rest and change a while,—not that I feel sick, but the continual fight with malaria leaves a fellow’s nerves terribly slack, like the over-strained chords of a—well, better leave the rest of the simile to you...
—Lafcadio Hearn, 18873
I’m quite fond of Hearn’s literary technique here, of giving the reader of the letter the choice to fill in the simile, of inflecting the unuttered to a command for the listener. Silence can do this quite efficiently in speech, but in writing, we have the fictions of “incomplete sentences” and their enforcerators to deal with.
The capacious lung, the thundering or the tender vocal chords. Don't talk to me of your Archimedes’ lever. He was an absent-minded person with a mathematical imagination. Mathematics commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines. Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.
—Joseph Conrad, 19124
I inquire constantly, in the spirit of curiosity and revelation, what songs or which “right word and right accent” can lever the world. It’s all a guess, but that’s not to say it’s without belief: for we live in guessing and live through believing.
Here are some accounts, as reckoned by a young man named Mehtop, about what some songs to “move the world” can/could/may/might/shall/should/will/would/do/did look like in the world:
The spring dampened the voices: abundance was being re-revealed.
When you live in Gep long enough, you start reckoning the song of the seasons. Just as your voice changes with the thickness or thinness of the air, you can hear a different voice of the mountains: how they carry the songs of birds and leaves and men. Some singers are unable to do their work at all in the Spring, and others in other seasons. Not I. Whether this is by a change in their own voice or the *vehicle of the earth, I do not know. The songs of sight for passing through the night are brighter in the spring—at least much brighter than the songs of sight in Winter. Like the cold and heat of the season, the songs require a breadth of talent: singing and low or loud or soft. You see more beasts during those spring nights’ songs.
—
They say “Sing behind the sedge: for what steps link you to the lion's prowl?”
They say “The oak sings itself under the rising stream: listen, a monk passing by carries a staff for his injured gait.”
—
The wellformed fire guides us in: its bright red voice makes stories of mine. Afterward, the shape of the ashes gives us the world that we told it of. Spring, more than any other season gives a shape that tells of the last year: in that way, it is the brightest and most contrastive time to sing.
—
The songs of fire are those verses handed down among various Geppian families for creating or shaping fire. As far as I know, there is no particular tribe that specializes in this trade. The Beensel Dwev who sing very few songs can sometimes sing rudimentary songs of fire.
I'm told Tamuhu has other families that sing songs of fire, but they are as various as the people. These fire singers travel far and are distanced by some of their own tribes for their strange adoptions. But within Fan, these singers are celebrated whenever they return from journeys to far-off festivals.
These songs of firemaking are long and sharp: their voices shape the air tightly and suddenly snap it like a stick. I sing some of these songs, but it takes me several hours to build the air tightly enough for the spark. But for the work of a master fire singer, one does not need much patience.
A supplement to Mr. Chambers's Cyclopædia · 1st edition, 1753