The mind's form is a butterfly

(La forme de l'esprit est un papillon)

n°95 - 2002-04 - 35’35” - octophony
Ombrages et trouées (shade and gaps) - couleurs inventées (invented colors)
Ombrages et trouées (Shade and gaps) 22’30” - 2002-04

Slip into a spark’s timing ! Like under a tree, settle in there…
A large quiver will cover a rustling zone with its boughs, breached with light and colors.
The multi-resonant continuum emits forms. Markers, figures, signs are concealed there. Here or there, entangled dynamic entities emerge. Sometimes these “markers” rather reveal movements of the orchestrated hand-ear; elsewhere, some figures are born of meaningful will.
These listening ranges intend to maintain a meta-stable balance, ready to create in the listener’s immediate memory an instantaneous precipitate at the first glint of attention.
It is indeed its own interest that will suddenly determine the shortest path among the configurations that join the constellations of outbursts perceiving them as accents of desire.
Accidents of attention circulate among the calls or rather “flit about like butterflies” from one to the other in a spiky, halting, multi-polar dance.
Five moments follow, one after the other, latticed with reminders, extensions :
- formes espacées (épars / dispars) spaced forms (scattered / vanished) up to 2’30”, and also - formes resserrées (résonances internes) constricted forms (internal resonances) 2’30” to 5’16”, - formes enchevêtrées (éclats d’intensités) tangled forms (bursts of intensities) 5’16” to 10’14”, - formes contrastées (klangfarben / trouées) contrasted forms (klangfarben / gaps) 10’14” to 17’11”, - formes ondulées (liens / ritournelle) undulated forms (links / ritornelle) 17’11” to 22’37”.

Couleurs inventées (Invented colors) 13’05” - 2002-03

Two aural sensitivities, two conceptions of the butterfly-like form are expressed in this diptych : extended polymorphic space - in ombrages et trouées (shade and gaps); polychromatic time held in abeyance - in couleurs inventées (invented colors).
After the previous intensity, a moment of calm arises here. Only the “concrete immateriality” of the multiple image of colorful and shapely resonances is offered here for listening, only to let its volumes and brightness play (like red placed on well-drawn lips). The listening experience (already for more than twenty minutes !) , under pressure by what preceded, suddenly depressurizes and dilates like a hot, rising gas.
In order to guarantee free anarchy and to maintain it as much as possible, figures of lines and points capture part of the attention and array five “micro-climates” on successive surfaces : -couleurs claires (light colors) up to 3’13”, - couleurs sombres (dark colors) from 3’13” to 4’22”, - couleurs nocturnes (nocturnal colors) from 4’22” to 5’37”, - couleurs graves (solemn colors) from 5’37” to 6’12”, - couleurs éclatées (bursting colors) from 6’12” to 6’58, up to a quasi-central moment, couleur-cristal (cristal-color) from 6’58” to 7’49”.
The colorful listening then shifts to a dynamic listening, that takes over by its hammering up until the end with couleurs-mouvements (movement-colors) from 7’49” to 11’57” and couleurs-temps (time-colors) from 11’57” to 12’17”.
Looking back, we see that these markers of the hand-ear gathered here constitute the generative core from which several aspects of the entire diptych originate. Scattered here and there, one finds traces, remote pre-echos that reveal the work’s organic thrust.

Hence the mind is nourished by fantasy (even to absurd levels !) and will draw upon the innocent disparity of circumstances of that which germinates, bolted to the feverish flash of an idea’s invention that takes form and takes to flight, itself swept away in the wind of indifferent gods and demons.
F. Bayle

to the ideal listener…

Our conscious attention fluctuates, flutters like a butterfly,
escapes our control. It lacks penetration.
Penetrating intuition results from thought’s expectations.
This is the secret of attention.
according to A.N. Whitehead - Process and Reality - 1929

It is pleasant to find this rather zen observation from the pen of an austere philosopher !
Can consciousness, in its thwarted stream, breached with silence, fluctuations, neutral time lapses auspicious to forms’ invasions (or ingressions, according to the term coined by Whitehead), through a fortunate lack, open itself up to the presence of things ? and to the spirit of sounds ?
And if it were precisely from this same suspension of thought that intuition looms up by surprise, whereas musical thought, not being formed (deformed) by language, better proves this by functioning freely, like in nature, through coherency and implication.
So we believe that water flows naturally, following capricious meanderings : merely an apparent fantasy ! Rather, the carefree expression of the gradual and rectilinear rigor of a downward path, and one that ignores hesitation. This is how the sonorous self-organizes.
Although a butterfly in flight isn’t unaware of this, this animal dimension of restlessness by which consciousness is derived from an imprecise memory of effort and of a vague hope : its reward. It is due to either one or the other of these uncertain whims, even though they are cast by desire and ideas, that musical figures function, those flowers conceived for (or stemming from ?) deep listening.
Yet the “perishing” as well as the “becoming” of any form - which auditory entities express so fully - also affect memory, that place of valorizing metamorphoses.
Hence proceeds emotion, with the joy of losing and of finding (oneself).