Tristimania by Jay Griffiths Page A

inspiration. What is to me the spire of song (Allegri’s ‘Miserere’) is the irresistible aspiration within the psyche, for God or love or Orpheus.
    Music, neutralizing the power of the siren song, is at the heart of the Orpheus myth. Orpheus sails with the Argonauts and, when they are in danger of being bewitched by the sirens’ beautiful, fatal music, Orpheus draws out his lyre and plays music louder and lovelier than the siren song, and the ship sails safely on. It is as if Orpheus stands for the soul of music, and this story illustrates music’s power over the psyche’s self-destructions. If the siren voices of suicide seduced me, listening to music could sometimes swing me back round to safety.
    It was a shock to hear music as I did at that point. Nothing could ever be quite as intimate as this when something from outside could steal gently into my psyche. The intensity of this intimacy is at one moment exquisite but might at a further pitch become unbearable because it unveils part of the mind, usually curtained even to itself. It is utterly intimate, and yet music could hardly be more public; it happens, after all, in the fundamental commons of the air. Connecting, linking the outer and the inner, it is part of the sense of connection which is key to mania. Hyper-connected, the manic mind is looking for rhyme and rhythm, sending out its lines into the world and responding in turn to the strings and cords and chords of strings. Unsurprisingly, composers, dwellers at that dangerous interconnecting border, suffer disproportionately from manic depression.
    I did not just listen to classical music; Arcade Fire’s flaming honky-tonk lit me sometimes, or Tom Waits would step into an evening with his raw, hurt hope, his self-bewildering, damaged brilliance, unfurling a gutterful of aces. But mainly I was tuned to classical. Sometimes I felt as if music painted the mind’s sweetest serenity cerulean, sky blue and soaring, and I would feel like flying. Tie me to the earth when the sky is so canted. Tilted by its own incantatory song, world, stepping ever further inwards, becomes self. I was enchanted. Etymologically and actually. Bewitched by song – chant – which fascinated me and held me spell-bound, bound to listen, unfree to leave, surrendered to song.
    Music created grandeur, the fullness of a composer’s mind so august, so augmented, so matured, so autumned, that its golden chords swell to a ripeness so perfect there is no listening left for anything less, but then its gold gives, gives, gives into a sunset so blinding that in its grandeur, too, it becomes unbearable.
    Sometimes I didn’t dare listen to music, because I thought I would be lost; I’d never come back. Specifically, I thought if I really listened I’d never eat again; as if madness turned music to manna from heaven and if you’ve eaten the food of the gods you would never want mortal food again. Sometimes I would be frightened that music would mean a kind of dissolution, as if my words, my thoughts and my self-hood were made of sand and the inrush of liquid music would dissolve me entirely; no particularity would stand. All that would remain would be the rounded nubs of damp sand on a beach after the first wave has unspecified the sandcastle, and has departicularized the sharp, dry towers into soft, wet mounds. Then, lost to the tide and the tide’s song, I would become music. What was ‘I’ would be gone.
    The rest would be silence. Music wanted me, swamped me, tookme and lost me, until, and finally, nothing more could be said. An ultimate creation of music is the quality of silence it inspires in the moment when it has ended – in Mahler’s Ninth, for example – as the ultimate creation of a human life could be regarded as the quality of appreciation after its death. But the silence, perfected, exquisite, eloquent, is also unbearable because it silenced me. My words would