October 28, 2013 / / 0 Comments
Kevin Seidel
Eastern Mennonite University
First Reading of Psalm 42
When our scriptural reasoning group first met, we found it difficult to let the yearning of verse 1 be, to let the deer thirst for flowing streams without that thirst being quenched somewhere in the psalm. Doesn’t God always satisfy the thirsty soul? Much of our group’s initial conversation involved searching the psalm for some kind of water: in the expression of grief and tears (v. 3), in the memory of the psalmist celebrating with the “multitude keeping festival” (v. 4), in the landscape of the Jordan (v. 6), or even in the act of prayer itself. But the psalm ends with the soul still cast down (v. 11) as if all those sources of solace ultimately failed. Somehow, it was easier for us to look for the soul’s gratification, to find words for that, even if they rang a bit false. It was much harder to put words to the soul’s yearning.
We were also struck by the differences between the two primary metaphors for the soul’s relationship to God in this psalm. In verse 1, the soul is to God as the deer is to water. In verse 7, the soul is to God as deep is to deep. Reflecting on those metaphors now, there’s something easy and familiar about the image from verse 1. It suggests water is on the way. The soul’s thirst will be quenched. The object of desire once invoked – whether flowing streams or God – seems already to satisfy the longing. However, the second image in verse 7 proved more difficult. God is no longer the object of the soul’s desire. Instead, there is a kind of symmetry between the soul and God, each described as a “deep.” It is not until the next verse that the psalmist makes distinctions, comparing the soul to the deep that the water rushes into and roars over. Perhaps God is the river and the soul is the cliffs and carved out places of the riverbed.
What is hard about both of these metaphors (verse 1 and 7) is that they are doubled, relational. That is, the vehicle of each metaphor is not a single thing but a relationship. In the first case, the relationship is deer to water, in the second the deep water to the deep recesses of the river. One anticipates satisfaction, quenching; the other is beyond quenching, an overwhelming. Though both are metaphors for the soul’s relationship to God, the tenor feels very different in verse seven and, again, very difficult to describe, as if the psalmist himself was straining to catch in words what wanted expression.
Finally, we noted the shifts in addressee, in whom the psalmist is speaking to. The psalmist speaks to God in verse one, then to his soul in verses 2-6, then to God again in verse 7, and then to the soul again in verses 8-11.
Our group’s initial discussion of Psalm 42 left me asking how we could stay with the yearning of verse 1, let it remain unresolved. It also left me wondering what to make of the metaphor in verse 7, of deep calling to deep. It left me wondering what we could make, if anything, of the shifts in whom the psalmist addresses.
First Listening of “Psalm 42”
Before Oded Zehavi played his version of Psalm 42, he briefly commented on the way in which yearning is not resolved in the psalm. He wanted to make a music of that yearning rather than a music of its resolution, and that comment, even before I heard the piece, helped to clarify our group’s conversation. We were looking in the psalm for the music of resolution, not the music of yearning. Zehavi also said that the psalm seemed unbalanced in its lower ranges, and he wanted to keep that sense of unbalance with the cello.
When I listened to the music, I felt right away the strained relationship between the cello and the piano. It’s as if each instrument is calling out to the other, trying various notes to bring the other instrument into the song. Each stumbles in rhythm, not because the player is faltering so much as waiting for the other instrument to join. Sometimes the other instrument comes in, sometimes not. Sometimes they find a kind of harmony playing together, but more often they are dissonant.
Later in the week, Zehavi talked about the inhuman in his music, the sound that exists just outside the harmonic scale, beneath the low thrum at the bottom of the cello’s register or above the flicker and screech at its top. It is hard for me not to hear that in his “Psalm 42” now, even though I wasn’t listening for it the first time through.
Not only does Zehavi want us to be aware of what might be beyond the range of the harmonic scale, but he also wants us to hear the cello notes starting on the string, letting them screech and falter a bit before they find their proper note. Likewise, we hear the note of the piano decay, hear it long enough to remember that it’s made of keyboard wires and a hollow wooden body.
What surprised me as I attended to Oded’s music, to his letting wood, wire, and bow make their own sounds, was the way I felt the company of these inhuman instruments. There’s a cello note in “Psalm 42” where the bow is pulled so slowly and steadily, at such a low register, that the sound of the bow and string disappear and all one hears is the air vibrating in the hollow body of the cello. It sounds uncannily like a human voice, inarticulate, impossibly low, without words, but somehow like our own. That sound did not make me think, “Right, the cello is like us after all.” Rather, it worked the other way: I could not pull that cello note into the register of familiar human sounds. Instead, the cello had a way of expanding my previous sense of human capacity, helping me feel how humanity can groan at those depths, too. The music brought me into the company of the inhuman, not the other way around.
First Reading and Listening Together
How does the psalm read differently after listening to Zehavi’s music? The emotional subtlety and range of the relationship between the cello and piano helps me to again feel various relationships in the psalm. In other words, attending to the complex, strained, changing relationship of piano and cello helps me to recognize changes and tensions in different relationships within the psalm. For example, one could say that the cello is to the piano as:
The soul is to the self. Here one could listen through the song and hear the various ways in which the self tries to reassure the soul, calling it into the song, while the soul tries but falters, keeps bottoming out, screeching, etc.
The self is to the congregation. Here one could listen to the piano as the representative of the group (perhaps the accusing “people” of verse 3 or “festive throng” of verse 4) trying to bring the cello into its song. There are a number of variations on this relationship: the individual to the tradition, the instrument to the symphony, the lyrical voice to congregational song.
Mourning is to thanksgiving. Here one could listen to the piano as the representative of the “song of thanksgiving” in verse 4 and the cello as the soul in “disquiet.” Can any harmony between these two be found?
And how would the psalm sound differently if we were to switch instruments in these analogies and make the cello the representative of the earnest self, the congregation in praise, or the grateful affections?
Maybe what this psalm is doing is seeking God outside the social, not finding God, exactly, but looking for God in our most basic bodily desires and attachments, like thirst and the landscape. Another way of putting this might be that the psalmist is driven to widen the scope of his community, from people to animals and land. In doing so, he is not merely placating himself, assuaging his pain. Rather, he identifies with the deer’s thirst, not its gratification through the river’s deep, gouged out recesses. Perhaps the riverbed in the psalm, with its recesses and caverns, is a kind of instrument played by the rushing water. After listening to Zehavi’s music, it seems like the psalmist too might be working with sounds more than images. So one might hear the deer panting for water in verse 1, and hear the sound of the river in verse 7.
A final question. Where is God in the music and the psalm? In the beginning of the psalm, God is sought in the coming together of grief and thanksgiving, one accompanying the other in a kind of fragile, imperfect unison, but the soul remains downcast, disquieted, unbalanced. The psalm does not end with the resolution it seems to promise in the first verse, rather the longing is left unfilled, unmet.
Zehavi’s music goes even further by shifting the role of the piano from the beginning of the piece to the end. It starts, I think, as a call for gratification. The piano plays toward a resolution, making room for the cello in its song, but at the end of Zehavi’s piece, its role has changed. Instead of pleading for the cello’s accompaniment, for it to get in line with its song, the piano finally accompanies the cello, actually upholds and accentuates the plaintive, faltering last notes of the cello. It is not so that those last pulls of the cello string can live or sound by themselves, but so that they can be beautiful on their own terms, not cajoled into resolution or corrected by the piano, but sustained in irresolution. Words are hard here. The main thing one can feel and hear is the reversal, where instead of longing and its gratification, instead of piano and cello finally meeting in unison, the piano is there to keep, remember, and accentuate the grief of the cello. Hearing that in the music, it is possible for me to see it in the psalm, and in a way I never could without the music. This raises the possibility that God is found in that changed relationship between cello and piano – not in the cello finally finding its place in the piano’s song, but the other way around, in the piano accompanying the cello in its grief and unmet longing.
After Reading Randi Rashkover’s and Mark James’s Responses
I was surprised by how many connections there were between the three of us, in how we read the psalm and heard the music, even though none of us were in the same scriptural reasoning groups initially. In a sense, we’re forming a new, temporary group here on the page through this process of sharing our responses.
Some similarities:
Initially, I heard between the cello and piano various conflicting relationships in the psalm: between the soul and the self, between the self and the congregation, and between affections like mourning and praise. Mark James describes this much more precisely and insightfully, I think, in his discussion of four different forms of “experiential discord” in the psalm: social, theological, within the self (noting how the psalm multiplies descriptions and images of the psalmist at odds with himself) and, provocatively, discord within God. James suggests that the piano and cello in Zehavi’s music might be analogous to these different kinds of discord in the psalm, but when James goes on to analyze the music, he doesn’t try to link it to any particular form of discord. Instead, he tries to listen to the music on its own terms, hearing a kind of progress from the beginning to the end of the piece: the initial discord doesn’t diminish or give way to resolution so much as become meaningful against the background Em that emerges in the second half of the song. The way we hear the end of the music as sustaining and making room for discord is similar. I wonder now how James would connect his reading of the psalm and his hearing of the music.
Some differences:
I listened to Zehavi’s piece as a version of Psalm 42, a kind of translation in music. Mark James listened to it more as a commentary, in which the commentator gradually learns to let the discord in the psalm be such that the psalm and its repetitions of discord can, like the liturgy, make our grief meaningful and more manageable. Randi Rashkover, on the other hand, hears the music as a divine response to the psalm. Where the psalmist tends to run over or bury the pauses and gaps in language, forcing answers with questions, the piano breaks such repetitions down, remaining discordant, telling the psalmist something about God. But it does not answer the psalmists questions, does not conform or squeeze itself to meet the psalmist’s interrogatives. Meanwhile, the cello registers a different kind of response to the psalm in Rashkover’s hearing. Where the piano takes up or invites comparison to language, the cello sounds outside the range of human language. It is interesting that Rashkover connects the piano to the deer in verse 1 and the cello to the deep in verse 7 while emphasizing the way in which the music does not conform to the images, cannot be accommodated by them. The discordant piano tells the panting psalmist something but it does not give water; likewise the cello, but it is not an answering deep. Why this emphasis? To keep God from being reduced to merely the object of human desires, the answer to human questions. There are some similarities between my take on the music and psalm, as bringing us into the company of the non-human, and Rashkover’s ruminations of the “non-relational relation” that the music brings to the psalm.
But Rashkover does not talk about the relationship between the piano and the cello, only about the relationship between each and the psalm: the cello a kind of amplification of the piano to the psalmist, sounding a divine order that is not human. I wonder what Rashkover would say about the relation between the piano and the cello. Staying with the non-relational relation she hears between psalm and music, perhaps she would hear between the piano and cello the fourth discord that Mark James mentions, the discord within God, or, in Rashkover’s terms, between the divine order of the piano and the divine order of the cello.
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October 28, 2013 / / 0 Comments
Randi L. Rashkover
George Mason University
The following discussion functions within a mode of thinking common to work in scriptural reasoning. In particular, I think of the following remarks as what I will call ‘after-reflection’ or ‘after-thought.’ Quite some time ago, Peter Ochs, Steven Kepnes, and Robert Gibbs composed a slim volume called Reasoning after Revelation: Dialogues in Postmodern Jewish Philosophy, not only coining a new term but courageously developing Karl Barth’s notion of ‘nach-denken,’ or ‘after-thinking,’ to describe the exercise of reflection characteristic of Textual Reasoning and, now, Scriptural Reasoning. Here I continue to engage this trope. However, I want to suggest specifically (though this was clearly implied in the conversations charted in that book) that the ‘after-reflection’ characteristic of Scriptural Reasoning bleeds into all forms of thought that can take place ‘after’ SR study. In this piece, I will experiment with after-reflection for what I consider a kind of SR philosophical thinking, but one need not consider philosophy or theology as the only possible branches of after-thought. There are many possible modes of SR after-thought, but the more pressing question is what characterizes ‘after-reflection.’ Here, I only want to make a few initial suggestions—suggestions that I hope will be taken up and explored by others.
On the one hand, by ‘after-reflection’ I mean nothing more mysterious than the notion that through SR, we discover that our thought presupposes what has ‘already’ been thought. We might say that Scriptural Reasoning reflection (during and ‘after’) happens ‘after’ divine thought, ‘after’ scriptural thought, ‘after’ commentary, ‘after’ discussion of commentary. As well, this ‘after’ or ‘already’ of thought within which reflection happens points to what we might call an exponential future of thought, the adding-on to which is the inevitable result of the accrual of perpetual ‘afters.’ Still, ‘after-thought’ so considered need not only imply a succession of thought, but it can also point to a notion of thought as ‘reflection’—whether by reflection we mean a reproduction of parts of what has ‘already’ been thought, or a ‘turning over’—a reconsideration of that which is prior. In either event, after-thought is by virtue of its indebtedness to what comes before, never fixed, always responsive, animated, effected and relational. The remarks that follow embody both of these features and may serve as an example for a kind of thinking and writing that can take place as a response to the practice of scriptural reasoning.
I. Initial After-Hypothesis
In my initial writing session, I advanced the following hypothesis (or ‘after-hypothesis’): Oded Zehavi’s musical composition functions as a response to the psalmist’s cry—the psalmist’s question. More specifically, it is a response which we might characterize as offering a ‘non-relational relation’. The piece is not only a response to the content of the psalmist’s question—“Where is the living God for whom I long?”—but to the grammar or the form of the question: the interrogative. The psalmist’s interrogative posits a language which waits, therefore vacating its own announcement. That is what a question is: it is a vacating of one’s announcement by way of a waiting for another announcement, and the psalmist positions himself in this grammar, in this vacancy. It seems that the vacancy endures in the daylight of deed and also in the prayer of night. In other words, the question persists.
Before detailing the particular reading I offer, let me specify a bit more what a ‘non-relational relation’ might be. Four possibilities present themselves, though certainly many more could be developed. It is worth noting that the four possibilities presented here derive from both my own considerations and the considerations of the following written papers presented by Mark James and Kevin Seidel.
1.) A non-relational relation could mean a parallel but not directly engaged response—i.e., a filling up of the vacancy, but not by way of correlation with the question or interrogative. Rather, it is a ‘more-saying’ afforded by the music that is itself a filling-up of linguistic space but that is not relational to the particular emptiness announced by the question.
2.) A non-relational relation might refer to a ‘relation’ in the sense of context or whole. Seen from this perspective, the music might be said to provide an order within which the interrogative operates.
3.) It could mean a co-presence which, because it is not relational, does not share in the identity of that with which it has a relation—for example, a monadic co-presence such that the music were one monad and the text—i.e., the interrogative—another. So understood, the two forms stand next to one another but do not interact, nor do they share features other than that they both occupy time (although how would need further elaboration) and space.
4.) Finally, non-relational relation might refer to a metaphysical context of radical indifference to that which exists within it. Such a metaphysical context would therefore differ from the aforementioned notion of context or order so far as it would exceed any order it might contain, becoming more than the sum of the parts which constitute a unity.
In the context of the discussion below, I will look into each of these formal possibilities in consideration of the hypothesis that Zehavi’s piece alters the grammar of the interrogative, that it musically scripts what I call a non-relational relation in the piano’s part, with the repetition and pattern of its chords, and in the cello’s part, i.e. its elongated notes and horizontal overlay on the piano chords.
II. The Music
A. The Piano Chords
This discussion will consist of two parts: a description of the character of the chord repetition and an examination of what it might mean to suggest that they operate in a non-relational relation to the psalmist’s question.
The most noteworthy feature of the piano chords is their repetition. Such repetition grounds and generates our anticipation of recurrent chords. Subsequent chords which do arise, however, presuppose and constitute a memory or signify the prior chords from which or out of which they follow. Chords relate together like pearls on a string; the earlier suggest the later and the later refer back to the earlier. Such a pattern of ‘repetition’ does not, however, preclude alteration in the string of pearls, for alteration remains possible provided that there is repetition of some sort prior and after. Said otherwise, novelty remains possible as long as the new moment introduced bears a relation to a moment prior, constituting a kind of partial memory. In his piece, James notes an example of such apparent novelty which is immediately resituated into rule. The piece, he tells us, ends with a ‘C’ which, though “ambiguous” and “dissonant,” nonetheless “remains comfortably within the E minor framework of the song’s closing section.”
If we analyze this for a moment, we might say that the repeated piano chords operate similarly to written and spoken language. Language, we might speculate, works on at least two conditions: 1.) the perpetual relation between words/letters (in a sentence or in a string of sentences) prior and words/letter after 2.) the rule-governed repetition of letters and words which constitute the before and after within a phrase, sentence, or string of sentences. Both chords and language therefore function by repetition or rule.
Alternatively, we might introduce a second analogy which more deeply illuminates both language and music. We might say that the repetition/relationality of the chords and/or language operate organically. Why do I say “organically?” Because the repetition is a demonstration of both continuity and the need for continuity. Repetition in both the chords and language works like a heartbeat. The heart beats continuously—it repeats over and over—and its repetition constitutes its vitality, its longevity, its continuation. Still, it is also the case that, from heartbeat to heartbeat, there is a hollow, a privation, a moment of non-heartbeat and a prospect of end—of nothing. Perhaps we might say there is a ‘novelty’ that cannot be reintegrated into a rule. Of course, it then becomes interesting to consider the extent to which novelty marks the nothingness of vacancy or the prospect of new life.
Without the perpetual repetition of the next beat, there is nothing—no more life. Life is constituted by a repetition that strives or aspires to overcome the ever-present possibility of vacancy. Both language and the chord repetition seem to mimic this exercise of life. The repetition in both language and in the chords seems to bury the prospect of no-language or no-saying. Both seem anxious to overcome the prospect of vacancy suggested by the interrogative (more on this below). Indeed, both language and the chords exploit rhythm; that is, both manipulate time through rhythm in such a way that the apparent ’emptiness’ of ‘quiet’ time (announced in the interrogative) is appropriated as a moment within the relations between letters or words or chords—i.e., what was an ’empty’ moment of no-saying or no-sound is taken up as a modifier of either a word, sentence, or chord relation. Both language and the chord repetitions ‘take’ time and ‘organize’ time. They ‘use’ time and render it a supplement or feature of language or music.
The above consideration of repetition in language and in the musical chords presents us with a question regarding relationality as organic. It seems that the relationality implicit within the repetition found in both language and in the chords is a relationality characteristic of life. With this observation, we might pose two immediate questions. Is it the case that the relationality discovered in repetition (in language and in the chords) is an ‘organic’ relationality—i.e., a relationality characteristic of life, of what lives? And if relationality is a characteristic of what is organic, does the organic qua vitality presuppose the prospect of non-vitality—i.e., is relationality a characteristic of that which is non-eternal? Could we not imagine a relationality or vitality that is not challenged by a non-vitality, but rather a relationality of what always perdures? In other words, is relationality a feature of finitude, or does such finitude preclude the possibility of a kind of infinity? I leave these as questions for the time being.
But how does this description of the chords help us to consider the relation between Zehavi’s piece and the psalmist’s question? How might we think of the chord repetition in the music as a response to the interrogative expressed by the psalmist? Recall my earlier suggestion that the interrogative of the psalm introduces a waiting, a vacancy. (One can imagine an existential anxiety accompanying this grammar—“Will life go on? Will there be relation? Will there be a ‘more’ without which there is nothing?” expressed by the interrogative.) Certainly, it seems that both the chords and language more generally also presuppose a waiting—a hollow or an emptiness. In what follows, however, I will suggest that the emptiness of the former is not the same as the emptiness of the latter but is, in fact, transposed by it. The chords, I will suggest, present what I earlier referred to as a non-relational relation to the interrogative. More specifically, of the four possible understandings of non-relational relation introduced above, two of them apply to the role of the chords in Zehavi’s piece.
What is it that distinguishes the vacancy present in the interrogative and that which appears in the space between the chords? The most immediate difference we may note is that the emptiness of the interrogative ‘remains.’ This is definitional here. The ‘question’ is exactly the announcement of waiting, of open-endedness, of the anxiety that accompanies the inability to anticipate what might be next. Conversely, the emptiness of the space between the chords is an emptiness that operates as a sign of what comes next. The emptiness functions as a ‘bridge’ between two moments of relation, which together constitute a unit of meaning, a unit of a semantic ‘something,’ however undefined or indeterminate—a something that can be interpreted or considered.
To say, however, that the emptiness of the one differs from the emptiness of the other is not the same as saying that there is no relation between the chords and the interrogative. The chords fill up the empty space of the interrogative. They ‘speak’ or offer a ‘saying’ that nonetheless does not communicate directly to the empty space of the psamlist’s question, much in the way that the repetition of God’s greatness and glory in the Mourner’s Kaddish fills the space and the time of the mourner but does not take up the sadness of the mourner. The chords do not prepare or stage an additional space or opportunity for a subsequent reply by the psalmist. They simply fill the emptiness with a ‘more,’ a ‘something’ that has past and has future: the ‘more’ of life. That such a ‘more’ retains its own fragility is left for consideration. Such a ‘more’ may signify an eternal ‘more’ whose repetition always and everywhere appropriates the time between. Such a ‘more’ may amount to nothing other than a finite or even infinite string of finite relations. The organic character of the relational ‘more’ may point to an inhuman (divine? natural?) ‘more’ in any number of senses worth considering. In any of its possible variations, however, such a ‘more’ operates in a non-relational relation to the psalmist’s question; it ‘affects’ the question without acknowledging it.
Still, we might consider a second possible understanding of what it means to describe the chords as offering a non-relational relation to the psalmist’s cry, one implicit in my description of the repetitious character of the chords and brought into higher relief by James’s comments. In his initial comments, he says the following:
More striking to me is that Zehavi attempts to offer a kind of resolution to the elemental crying with which he begins. He clearly does not envision the possibility that soul’s churning can simply be overcome, the self and its relations to others and God neatly wrapped into a simple chordal triad. But his piece does slowly carve out a determinate space – his E minor – a background of sense against which the cries of the second half of the song become both meaningful (because against the background of a kind of regularity) and more manageable…If the self is like a piece of music, its unity will not be that of an underlying substance, but the possibility of repeating patterns in time, of rhythm and harmony into which discord too can enter without the threat of the self completely dissolving. Perhaps Zehavi is evoking the order which the psalmist finds in God – in his memories of what was, in today’s cataracts, in his night-song, and in his hope that the future may yet contain praise for God.
Recall model two of non-relational relation introduced above, namely a non-relational relation of a context or order within which elements or laws operate. The above comments by James help to illustrate how such a model may emerge from a recognition of the repetitive character of the chords. Specifically, Mark speculates on the notion of the chord repetitions as constitutive of a ‘unity’ or a ‘whole’ (my word) which, though non-substantive, nonetheless ‘houses’ all moments, including that of the psalmist’s cry. Such an order does not directly or even intentionally speak to the cry of the question. Still, as present, such a unity, system, or context can console the one who cries. Yes, as James indicates, the interrogative announces despair, but the context announces a perpetual something within which vacancy is reinterpreted as a piece of a whole. The interrogative is no longer open-ended nor is it isolated without relation. Rather it is one of many parts woven into a network of pieces constitutive of a unity.
Before moving on to the cello part, we might, without offering a developed analysis, ask about the theological implications of either of these two possible accounts of the relation between music and the interrogative or ‘cry.’ Most obviously, we might ask whether there is a revelatory or redemptive character to the chord repetition in Zehavi’s piece. One way to address these questions might be to take up the above-stated hypothesis regarding the non-relation/relation and apply it to each. As a something that stands next to, beside, above, below, or around another something with which there is no identity—only common space or common time—the chord repetition announced in Zehavi’s “Psalm 42” appears revelatory to the one who cries so far as it is precisely the anticipation of the ‘more’ and/or the unity or order signified by the chord repetition which the psalmist’s cry does not contain and does not know. It is, in this way, an ‘other’ to the psalmist and adds a something ‘new.’ Whether or not this ‘something new’ is redemptive, however, is another issue. As a non-relation, the ‘something new’ is not purposefully directed towards the vacancy of the question, but it nonetheless ‘speaks’ to it without communicating with it.
B. The Cello
If the chord repetition in Zehavi’s piece presents an organic indifference of finite repetition and/or an order within which repetition takes place, the cello part expresses an even stranger announcement—the sound of what Seidel refers to as “the inhuman” and which, from my perspective, stands in a non-relational relation to the cry of the psalmist. Again, let me begin with a description of the cello part and then analyze what it might mean to say that it relates non-relationally to the interrogative.
1.)We might first consider the cello’s own relation to the piano. The cello announces itself at the start. Later, piano chords emerge. At times, there is simultaneity between the two, but there is almost never a fusing, a harmony, a blurring or a merging of the two. (There are odd occasions on which the piano attempts to ‘follow’ the announcement of the cello, but they disappear.) The cello is either separate from the piano or an imposition or overlay on top of the piano. It exercises a dramatic and knowing indifference to the piano chords below it. Again, the cello offers a ‘telling’ and does not wait for a reply. It operates horizontally and almost never vertically in relation to the chords.
2.) The cello’s part does not, like the piano, perform a repetition. It does not, we might say, pulsate. Its elongated notes express a certain and undying sound. They are devoid of rhythm, existing and then dying without anticipation of a next. There is no timing that links them to what was prior and what comes after. The sound moves, but like a perpetual wave deep in the water. Without pulsation, it is neither life nor non-life. It simply is. In its announcement, it can afford to be and then not to be, but it comes and goes in its depth as it sees fit without the desperation for a repetition or a rule needed to sustain it.
3.) It is sound that is not discourse. It is sound that is not grammar. It is sound that we do not wait for and which does not wait for us. It is there, and we are listening to it, but it is a sound which speaks only to a soul and not to a thinking mind which organically anticipates and remembers. In this sound, we are taken. It precedes us and goes on without us.
As before, we might speculate on two models of non-relational relationality emerging in the role of the cello. In all three of the above descriptions, the cello, unlike the repetition of the piano chords, refers not to what is organic—not to what is vital. If anything, it refers to what Seidel calls “the inhuman.” As such, we might speculate on two different types of non-relational relation between this “inhuman” and the all too human interrogative. We might, taking our cue from Seidel’s own thought, consider the inhuman as elements in nature—rocks, canyons, streams—elements which, as inhuman, do not relate to our cries. But nonetheless, like separate monads, each individually stand next to, nearby, above, under and around us in our waiting. On the one hand, they are indifferent to us. On the other hand, as Seidel suggests they are there, and this presence seems to non-purposefully, unintentionally, beckon us into “their company,’ invite us to ‘be with them,’ to relate to them non-relationally but to co-fill a space or constitute a place in an order. What might such a co-belonging of element (human) and element (non-human) be like? And again, I wonder: might it be revelatory? Might it be redemptive?
But what if the inhuman were not a monad, not another element? What if the inhuman were a metaphysical indifference or a metaphysical no-living/no-dying—a context, as before, but a context that is more than any order it might contain? What if it is a context that precedes any order within it and perdures beyond any order that may or may not continue—a metaphysical, meta-grammatical and meta-elemental something that cannot live or die but greets us always as indifferent, as simultaneously there but always other?
“Where,” we might ask as Seidel does, “is God, in the music and in the psalm?” If, as I’d like to suggest, God is in the music, I’d also like to suggest that we find a God with whom we are radically unfamiliar—if by unfamiliar we mean unschooled. Still, existentially, such a God is entirely familiar. All too frequently (all the time), we find this God in the indifference of organic repetition and overarching order, in the darkness of what precedes our world and in the silence of what accompanies it and outlasts it. Absolutely revelatory, Zehavi’s music presents us with a divine non-redemption, a divine non-relational relation, an overlay, a telling, an eternality, without any prospect of not being. It presents us with a non-answer to the psalmist’s desperate cry for a ‘living’ God from a God who does not live, who is there but is not ‘present,’ who does not engage, who will not communicate, who will not wait, and who, perhaps, should not be waited for: the God that precedes and follows all that waits.
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October 9, 2013 / / 0 Comments
Keven Seidel, Eastern Mennonite University
First reading of Psalm 42
When our scriptural reasoning group first met, we found it difficult to let the yearning of verse 1 be, to let the deer thirst for flowing streams without that thirst being quenched somewhere within the psalm. Doesn’t God always satisfy the thirsty soul? Much of our group’s initial conversation involved searching the psalm for some kind of water: in the expression of grief and tears (v. 3), in the memory of the psalmist celebrating with the “multitude keeping festival” (v. 4), in the landscape of the Jordan (v. 6), or even in the act of prayer itself. But the psalm ends with the soul still cast down (v. 11) as if all of those sources of solace ultimately failed. Somehow, it was easier for us to look for the soul’s gratification, to find words for that, even if they rang a bit false. It was much harder to put words to the soul’s yearning.
We were also struck by the differences between the two primary metaphors for the soul’s relationship to God in this psalm. In verse 1, the soul is to God as the deer is to water. In verse 7, the soul is to God as deep is to deep. Reflecting on those metaphors now, there’s something easy and familiar about the image from verse 1. It suggests that water is on the way, that the soul’s thirst will be quenched. Whether the flowing streams or God, the object of desire, once invoked, seems already to satisfy the longing, make it seem already met. However, the second image in verse 7 proved more difficult. God is no longer the object of the soul’s desire. Instead, there is a kind of symmetry between the soul and God, each described as a “deep.” It is not until the next verse that the psalmist makes distinctions, comparing the soul to that which the water rushes and over which it roars. Perhaps God is the river and the soul is the cliffs and carved out places of the riverbed.
What is hard about both of these metaphors (verses 1 and 7) is that they are doubled, relational. That is, the vehicle of each metaphor is not a single thing but a relationship. In the first case, the relationship is deer to water, in the second the deep water to the deep recesses of the river. One anticipates satisfaction, quenching; the other is beyond quenching, an overwhelming. Though both are metaphors for the soul’s relationship to God, the tenor feels very different in verse seven and, again, very difficult to describe, as if the psalmist himself was straining to catch in words what wanted expression.
Finally, we noted the shifts in addressee, to whom the psalmist is speaking. The psalmist speaks to God in verse one, then to his soul in verses 2-6, then to God again in verse 7, and then to the soul again in 8-11.
Our group’s initial discussion of Psalm 42 left me asking how we could stay with the yearning of verse 1, let it remain unresolved. It also left me wondering what to make of the metaphor in verse 7, of deep calling to deep. It left me wondering what we could make, if anything, of the shifts in whom the psalmist addresses.
First listening of “Psalm 42”
Before Oded Zehavi played his version of Psalm 42, he briefly commented on the way in which yearning is not resolved in the psalm. He wanted to make a music of that yearning rather than a music of its resolution, and that comment, even before I had heard the piece, helped to clarify our group’s conversation. We were looking in the psalms for the music of resolution, not the music of yearning. Zehavi also said that the psalm seemed unbalanced in its lower ranges, and he wanted to keep that sense of unbalance with the cello.
When I listened to the music, I felt right away the strained relationship between the cello and the piano. It is as if each instrument is calling out to the other, trying various notes to bring the other instrument into the song. Each stumbles in rhythm, but not because the player is faltering so much as waiting for the other instrument to join. Sometimes the other instrument comes in, sometimes not. Sometimes they find a kind of harmony playing together, but more often they are dissonant.
Later in the week, Zehavi talked about the inhuman in his music, the sound that exists just outside the harmonic scale, beneath the low thrum at the bottom of the cello’s register or above the flicker and screech at its top. It is hard for me not to hear that in his “Psalm 42” now, even though I wasn’t listening for it the first time through.
Not only does Zehavi want us to be aware of what might be beyond the range of the harmonic scale, but he also wants us to hear the cello notes starting on the string, letting them screech and falter a bit before they find their proper note. Likewise, we hear the note of the piano decay, hear it long enough to remember that it is made of keyboard wires and a hollow wooden body.
What surprised me as I attended to the inhuman sounds of Oded’s music was that, as his letting wood, wire, and bow made their own sounds, I felt the register of the human expand, felt the company of these inhuman instruments. There is a cello note in “Psalm 42” in which the bow is pulled so slowly and steadily, at such a low register, that the sound of the bow and string disappear and all one hears is the air vibrating in the hollow body of the cello. It sounds uncannily like a human voice – inarticulate, impossibly low, without words, but somehow like our own. That sound did not make me think, “Right, the cello is like us after all.” Rather, it worked the other way; I could not pull that cello note into the register of familiar human sounds. Instead, the cello had a way of expanding my previous sense of human capacity, helping me to feel how humanity can groan at those depths, too. The music brought me into the company of the inhuman, and not the other way around.
First reading and listening together
How does the psalm read differently after listening to Zehavi’s music? The emotional subtlety and range of the relationship between the cello and piano helps me to feel again the various relationships within the psalm. In other words, attending to the complex, strained, changing relationship of piano and cello helps me to recognize changes and tensions in different relationships within the psalm. For example, one could say that the cello is to the piano as:
The soul is to the self. Here, one could listen through the song and hear the various ways in which the self tries to reassure the soul, calling it into the song, while the soul tries but falters, keeps bottoming out, screeching, etc.
The self is to the congregation. Here, one could listen to the piano as the representative of the group (perhaps the accusing “people” of verse 3 or the “festive throng” of verse 4) trying to bring the cello into its song. There are a number of variations on this relationship: the individual is to the tradition, the instrument to the symphony, the lyrical voice to congregational song.
Mourning is to thanksgiving. Here, one could listen to the piano as the representative of the “song of thanksgiving” in verse 4 and the cello as the soul in “disquiet.” Can any harmony between these two be found?
And how would the psalm sound differently if we were to switch instruments in these analogies and make the cello the representative of the earnest self, the congregation in praise, or the grateful affections?
Maybe what this psalm is doing is seeking God outside the social, not exactly finding God but looking for God in our most basic bodily desires and attachments, like thirst and the landscape. Another way of putting this might be that the psalmist is driven to widen the scope of his community, from people to animals and land. In doing so, he is not merely placating himself or assuaging his pain. Rather, he identifies with the deer’s thirst – not its gratification through the river’s deep, gouged out recesses. Perhaps the riverbed in the psalm, with its recesses and caverns, is a kind of instrument played by the rushing water. After listening to Zehavi’s music, it seems like the psalmist too might be working with sounds more than images. So one might hear the deer panting for water in verse 1 and hear the sound of the river in verse 7.
A final question. Where is God in the music and in the psalm? In the beginning of the psalm, God is sought in the coming together of grief and thanksgiving, one accompanying the other in a kind of fragile, imperfect unison while the soul remains downcast, disquieted, unbalanced. The psalm does not end with the resolution it seems to promise in the first verse. The longing is left unfilled, unmet.
Zehavi’s music goes even further by shifting the role of the piano from the beginning of the piece to the end. It starts, I think, as a call for gratification. The piano plays toward a resolution, making room for the cello in its song, but at the end of Zehavi’s piece, its role has changed. Instead of pleading for the cello’s accompaniment, for it to get in line with its song, the piano finally accompanies the cello, upholding and accentuating the plaintive, faltering last notes of the cello. It is not so that those last pulls of the cello string can live or sound by themselves, but so that they can be beautiful on their own terms – not cajoled into resolution or corrected by the piano, but sustained in irresolution. Words are hard here. The main thing one can feel and hear is the reversal in which, instead of longing and its gratification, piano and cello meet in unison. The piano is there to keep, remember, accentuate the grief of the cello. Hearing that in the music, it is possible for me to see it in the psalm, and in a way in which I never could without the music. This raises the possibility that God is found in that changed relationship between cello and piano – not in the cello finally finding its place in the piano’s song, but in the piano accompanying the cello in its grief and unmet longing.
After reading Randi’s and Mark’s responses
I was surprised by how many connections there were between the three of us, in how we read the psalm and heard the music, even though none of us were initially in the same scriptural reasoning groups. In a sense, we are forming a new, temporary group here on the page through this process of sharing our responses.
Some similarities
Initially, I heard between the cello and piano various conflicting relationships in the psalm: between the soul and the self, between the self and the congregation, and between affections like mourning and praise. Mark describes this much more precisely and insightfully, I think, in his discussion of four different forms of “experiential discord” in the psalm: the social, the theological, the discord within the self (noting how the psalm multiplies descriptions and images of the psalmist at odds with himself), and, provocatively, the discord within God. Mark suggests that the piano and cello in Zehavi’s music might be analogous to these different kinds of discord in the psalm, but when Mark goes on to analyze the music, he doesn’t try to link it to any particular form of discord. Instead, he tries to listen to the music on its own terms, hearing a kind of progress from the beginning to the end of the piece. The initial discord doesn’t diminish or give way to resolution so much as it becomes meaningful against the Em background that emerges in the second half of the song. The ways in which we hear the end of the music as sustaining and making room for discord is similar. I wonder now how Mark would connect his reading of the psalm and his hearing of the music.
Some differences
I listened to Zehavi’s piece as a version of Psalm 42, a kind of translation in music. Mark listened to it more as a commentary, where the commentator gradually learns to let the discord in the psalm be such that the psalm and its repetitions of discord can, like the liturgy, make our grief meaningful and more manageable. Randi, on the other hand, hears the music as a divine response to the psalm. Where the psalmist tends to run over or bury the pauses and gaps in language, forcing answers with questions, the piano breaks such repetitions down and remains discordant, in the process telling the psalmist something about God. But it does not answer the psalmist’s questions, nor does it conform itself to meet the psalmist’s interrogatives. Meanwhile, the cello registers a different kind of response to the psalm in Randi’s hearing. Where the piano takes up or invites comparison to language, the cello sounds outside the range of human language. It is interesting that Randi connects the piano to the deer in verse 1 and the cello to the deep in verse 7 while emphasizing the way in which the music does not conform to the images, cannot be accommodated by them. The discordant piano tells the panting psalmist something, but it does not give water; likewise the cello, but it is not an answering deep. Why this emphasis? To keep God from being reduced to the mere object of human desires, to the answer to human questions. There are some similarities between my take on the music and psalm as bringing us into the company of the non-human and Randi’s ruminations of the non-relational relation that the music brings to the psalm.
But Randi does not talk about the relationship between the piano and the cello, only about the relationship between each and the psalm: the cello a kind of amplification of the piano to the psalmist, sounding a divine order that is not human. I wonder what Randi would say about the relation between the piano and the cello. Staying with the non-relational relation that she hears between psalm and music, perhaps she would hear between the piano and cello the fourth discord that Mark mentions, the discord within God, or, in Randi’s terms, between the divine order of the piano and the divine order of the cello.
Kevin Seidel, Eastern Mennonite University
October 9, 2013 / / 0 Comments
Mark Randall James
The University of Virginia
I.
The psalmist in Psalm 42 expresses three interrelated modes of agonizing experiential discord. The most external and visible is the social discord of the psalmists’s victimization at the hands of others: “Why must I walk in gloom, oppressed by my enemy?” he asks (v. 10). This oppression likely includes an element of physical violence, which, as real or threatened, usually underlies social discord. In Psalm 43 (originally part of the same psalm, as the repeated refrain in 42:6, 12, and 43:5 shows), the psalmist prays for deliverance from his unjust and deceitful enemies (43:1), showing that he is in some sense subject to them. But the worst part of their oppression is the cruelty of their taunt, “Where is your God?” (v. 4, 11), the agony of which the psalmist compares to physical suffering: “As with a crushing in my bones, my adversaries taunt me” (v. 11).
This taunt shows that the psalmist’s social discord is bound up with a second and more radical form of discord: the experience of divine absence and abandonment. “Why have you forgotten me?” he asks (v. 10). In the opening words of the psalm, his expression of animal desire for God is also a confession of this divine absence: “Like a hind crying for water, my souls cries for you, O God; my soul thirsts for God, the living God; O when will I come to appear before God!” (vv. 1-2). Similarly, the fact that he remembers appearing before God in the past (in vv. 5 and 7) and hopes for God in the future (in vv. 6 and 12) bittersweetly underscores God’s inexplicable absence in the present.
Third is the astonishing range of internal discord and conflict to which the psalmist gives expression and which is, it seems to me, the heart of the psalm. In general, this discord occurs between the linguistic self who speaks the psalm and the suffering ‘soul’ that it expresses, addresses, and commands throughout the psalm. I find at least five particular modes of this inner conflict:
- Pain: the immediate subjective experience of discord and conflict (“My tears have been my food day and night,” he says in v. 4.)
- Desire: a motive force for change, which presupposes the conflict between an undesired actual state and a desired possible state (expressed above all in the psalmist’s animal yearning for God’s presence in vv. 2-5.)
- Memory: the conflict between the remembered past and the painful present (In v. 5, his past participation with the crowd contradicts his present inability to do so.)
- Hope: the conflict between the painful present and the anticipated future (In vv. 6 and 12, he anticipates praising God for his deliverance.)
- Command: an authority’s attempt to determine the actions of a subordinate through language backed by the threat of force. (The commanding self orders the wavering soul to “have hope in God” (vv. 6 and 12) and to “remember” previous experiences (v. 5))
Obviously this extraordinary internal discord is inseparable from, not least instigated by, his social and spiritual discord. The violence of others and the absence of God leads to the threat of the fracturing of the self.
The psalmist also hints at a fourth discord, to which he seems to appeal to make sense of his own contradictory experience. If God is in some sense the power that brings order and harmony, the experience of extreme conflict could be taken as a sign of discord in God himself. If God is the ‘God of my life’ (v. 9), perhaps he must be a God characterized by the discord in which the psalmist lives. The psalmist offers a number of hints in this direction: “By day the LORD commands his love” (v. 9). But must God too command himself, as the psalmist must? Is God’s love as wavering as the soul is? Although the next verse seems to assert God’s stability by calling him “rock,” the psalmist immediately goes on to speak of God “forgetting” him, which only renews the charge of divine instability. We might also ask why God commands his love by day. Is God’s love somehow more steadfast at night? Perhaps his enemies oppress him during the day, while awake, and so the psalmist sings “a prayer to the God of my life” (v. 9) in the nighttime because only then, safely home, does he have confidence in God’s love. Or is night an ominous time, when God’s love is most questionable – where all that remains for him is a mere prayer? We can hear the same possibility of divine discord in v. 8: “Deep calls to deep at the thunder of your cataracts; all your breakers and billows have swept over me.” God himself is like the violent rough and tumble of water against water, like the chaotic “deep” (tehum) that preceded the first words – commands — of creation (Genesis 1:2), as if to say that when God ‘commands’ his love, is it like the creation of order from chaos.
All this, it seems, must be ventured for the poet to make sense of his threefold experience of discord, as it is ventured by those communities that pray this psalm in the face of violence, divine absence, and inner turmoil.
II.
Our task is to hear Oded Zehavi’s “Psalm 42” as a kind of commentary on or response to this psalm. My reading takes its cue from the interplay between harmony and discord in Zehavi’s dissonant piece. I suggest that Zehavi gives expression to the discords of the psalmist’s experience, while also ordering and reconfiguring them by charting a possible temporal progression through them.
Zehavi’s piece is a duet for cello and piano. It begins with a recurring trope, the cello holding long notes that leap large intervals across its range. These intervals allow Zehavi to express harmony and dissonance in their most elemental forms (elemental harmony as the octave and the fifth, elemental dissonance as the half-step and the tri-tone). The cello holds its low C, then up an octave and a fifth to a G, then moves a tri-tone to answer with a scratchy, squeaky high Db, and finally down to a Gb. Deep harmony is answered by painful discord. The piano answers with two long, descending notes a tritone apart, and then the cello again: low C, up two fifths to a D, and then a high, scratchy, dissonant C#. The effect of all this is to suggest harmonious order to the listener – and then violently wrench it away. Frequently, especially in the first half of the piece, a few measures of movement are interrupted by moments of this elemental discord: briefly in measure 24; descending in measures 32-3; in 36-7 introducing an eerie melody; in 42-44, more lyrically; and the most obvious and emphatic recapitulation of this theme in measures 57-60. (Already, however, the very repetition of this discord establishes a kind of order.)
Even where the piece opens up into something more recognizably melodic, the melodies also take great leaps, as if trying to find and imitate these elemental harmonies. The cello plays a haunting, lyrical melody in measures 14-24 that briefly settles into Eb during measures 16-19. This harmonic moment culminates in an octave leap, but a few measures later, the cello traverses through an increasingly discordant cycle of tones (Db – Gb – C – E). The cello seems to find the key of E for a few more measures, but the right-hand of the piano is completely dissonant. This pattern of melodic leaps in the cello also repeats itself frequently: it traverses up a circle of fourths in 30, up an octave at 51. In measure 53, the cello leaps an octave and a half-step from E to F, although the piano resolves to a D minor chord, prefiguring the possibility of a harmonious resolution to discord. Similar melodic leaps continue throughout the cello’s melodic lines.
For its part, the piano in the first 40 measures is as if struggling between the regular order of rhythmic open fifths and irregular dissonant chords. Beginning in measure 11, the right hand plods eighth notes on an open fifth while the left hand ascends with dissonant chords. As already observed, a melody first emerges in 14-24, only to disappear again quickly in the piano’s dissonant chords and the elemental leaps of the cello. At 45, suddenly a steady, driving Phrygian melody in C minor emerges in the cello line, which, after passing through a haunting measure 48 dominated by whole tones, opens up into a Bb major scale and a final harmonious resolution in D minor. The left hand of the piano then takes over the first line of the same melody in B, but with a tritone in place of a perfect fifth. This tritone signals a return to discord, and indeed it is two measures later that the cello echoes most decisively its opening agonized leaps (measures 57-60). This is roughly the midpoint of the song.
An order slowly emerges. From measure 77 to the end, the piece more or less settles into the key of Em. Though discordant notes persist, from this point on they are always dissonant with reference to this base key of Em. The cello takes up a long, lyrical melody in Em without accidentals (for 5 measures, it is simply pentatonic), and when the cello interrupts its melody with agonized scratchy notes in 96-102, its leaps this time resolve harmoniously. The cello offers another lyrical melody (104-112), to which the piano responds with another simple E minor melody reminiscent of the cello’s in 77-93. Nevertheless, having established a kind of order, the ending remains ambiguous. The piano slowly walks up an E minor scale, ending on an open fifth (E – B). The cello leaps once more through open intervals (no tritones or half-steps). Its last note, however, is a plaintive C, ill at ease with the piano’s implied E minor. The cello’s final note fades away, wavering and scratching, until finally disappearing. This C is ambiguous because, although it is plainly dissonant with the piano’s B, it remains comfortably within the E minor framework of the song’s closing section. Though not resolved, dissonance is located and ordered.
III.
The progression of Zehavi’s piece suggests that Psalm 42 may also be read as a struggle to wrestle order out of the self’s discord. To clarify this, we need to linger for a moment with the notions of harmony and discord, musical terms which I have applied liberally as metaphors of the self. (Much of what I say here is cognate with and has benefited from Rashkover’s discussion of repetition, rhythm, and life.) Harmony and discord, as elemental musical relations, presuppose both difference and time. They presuppose difference because both are necessarily relations between different notes; identical notes can be neither harmonious nor discordant.1 They presuppose time because notes are necessarily temporal phenomena: notes must endure over time to be heard. More fundamentally, the aural qualities of notes and other sounds depend upon the vibration of air at particular frequencies. Though our ear apprehends a note as a unity, a note is actually the self-repetition of a wave over time and, thus, the regular repetition of a temporal event. Pitch being rooted in rhythmic repetition, one might say that rhythm is more fundamental to music than pitch.
Harmonious notes are those whose frequencies are proportional. The most elemental harmonies (the octave and the fifth) are built on the simplest proportions (1/2 and 2/3, respectively). A high C is a wave that repeats itself twice as often as a middle C one octave below; a G repeats itself three times for every two repetitions of the C below it. They harmonize because their different movements in time are in sync with one another, fitting together like the interlocking rhythms of a drum beat. Harmonious notes mutually support one another as they move through shared airspace. Dissonant notes, by contrast, stand in no simple proportion to one another. In the half-step and the tritone above all, the elemental relations of dissonance, the notes are not related by any simple fraction. Their sound waves periodically collide and come into conflict, as if fighting for the same airspace, tending toward the dissolution of both waves. Our ear registers proportional (rhythmic) vibrations as harmony, disproportional vibrations as discord.
All of this can help us to reflect on the forms of anguish suffered by the psalmist. Let us begin with the implication that he suffers bodily violence. Violence, the possibility of one person striking another, depends upon the basic physical fact that solid bodies cannot occupy the same space. When two solid bodies collide, one or the other must give way or be broken. The linearity of destructive violence is a radical form of discord, since by destroying its victim, violence seeks to remove the possibility of its own repetition. By contrast, the harmonious movement of bodies is only possible in some kind of circular repetition of movement, where both bodies occupy the same space at different times, as with two planets orbiting one another, or two partners dancing. 2 In both cases, by introducing frequency and rhythm, a harmonious interrelation of bodies becomes possible. Insofar as the self has a body, its self-repetition is subject to the linear threat of radical discord represented by violence — ultimately, the threat of death. The recurring screeching sounds of the cello in Zehavi’s piece, not even dissonance but simply unpleasant noise, are potent musical icons of violence. Seidel rightly notes that the cello here sounds ‘uncannily like a human voice,’ imitating the cry of a violated human being expressing pain by making a painful sound painful.
But it is the self’s character as a temporal unity that makes it so apt for musical expression. If the self is like a piece of music, its unity is not that of an underlying substance (Hebrew nefesh is not the substantial Platonic soul), but of repeating patterns in time. The self is the elusive unity of a complex living process that includes both repeated and unique events in consciousness. The temporality of the self makes harmony and discord possible for it and rhythm, as Rashkover implies: “Rhythm is therefore an expression of life’s perpetual effort to persist.”). By his use of elemental harmonies and dissonances, Zehavi thus powerfully evokes a self shattered nearly into pieces, “as with a crushing in my bones.”
But since discord itself presupposes a repetition, it does not give rise to a zero-sum game the way linear collision of solid bodies does, even though discord may in the end lead to destruction. Discord depends on its temporal persistence, and so it holds open the possibility of change, of wrestling some kind of harmony out of the chaos. Discord is also a relation of two incompatible repetitions, and so it does not in itself determine which of the two repeating patterns will prove decisive. The suffering of the present may prove an aberration; it may be changed. Discord leaves room for hope. It may even become productive, generating, as it does for the psalmist, desire, a new courses of action, and above all, prayer. Zehavi’s piece, I believe, offers a picture of this struggle for harmony, and thus a kind of recourse for the elemental crying with which the piece begins. He clearly does not envision the possibility that the soul’s churning can simply be overcome, the self and its relations to others and God neatly wrapped into a simple chordal triad. But his piece does slowly carve out a determinate space – his E minor – a background of sense against which the cries of the second half of the song become both meaningful (because they appear against the background of a kind of regularity) and more manageable. The plaintive final note of the cello is no less painful than those with which the cello begins, but it is no longer alone, and it borrows order from the piano’s harmony.
The final order of Zehavi’s piece is too partial to represent the deliverance for which the psalmist prays. What order does Zehavi suggest is possible, then, before the time of deliverance, in the time of the psalmist determined by discord and divine absence? Perhaps this background of order against which discord becomes manageable and meaningful is the order created by the psalm itself. Since discord threatens the self’s repetition of itself, a mitigating order must also be a mode of repetition. In this light, the quasi-liturgical repetition of the refrain, “Why so downcast, my soul, why disquieted within me? Have hope in God; I will yet praise Him, my ever-present help, my God,” in verses 6 and 12 (and in 43:5) take on a particular significance. Even the psalm’s unique words are presumably to be repeated in prayer, since this is a liturgical and scriptural text. The repetition of the psalm helps create patterns in the self against which discord may be interpreted and in light of which discord may become productive, without being denied or ultimately resolved. The final refrain of the psalm testifies to the possible productivity of discord: discord gives rise to questions (“Why so downcast?”) and imperatives (“Have hope in God”), but both questions and imperatives require a response and, thus, portend a future.
Notes
1. There is an important qualification to this. We rarely if ever hear a single pure tone (which has the flat quality of a computer’s beep). If a voice or an instrument sounds e.g. a C, it actually activates many other proportional frequencies, its ‘overtones.’ A trained ear can sometimes hear a G, an E, a Bb, ringing above that C. The particular constellation of these overtones is what determines the distinctive character of the sound that a given instrument produces. The identity of a note like ‘C’ is non-exclusive: even considered in isolation, one note can and does include within itself many other different notes in a rich and complex harmony.↩
2. The sine wave shape of sound is related to circular movement: one point on a rolling wheel viewed from the side will trace a sine-wave.↩
PDF Version
October 9, 2013 / / 0 Comments
Editor
Jacob Goodson
Associate Editor
Simeon Zahl
Managing Editor
Ashley Tate
Founding Editor
Peter Ochs
Responses to Oded Zehavi’s “Psalm 42”
Introduction
Randi L. Rashkover, George Mason University
Repetition and Divine Indifference in Psalm 42
Randi Rashkover, George Mason University
Discord in Psalm 42
Mark Randall James, The University of Virginia
Inhuman Sounds in “Psalm 42”
Kevin Seidel, Eastern Mennonite University
Reflections on the Psalms
Psalmic Recitation as a Performance of Memory and Hope in Jewish and Christian Prayer
Emma O’Donnell, Boston College
The Psalms of Vengeance: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Theological Interpretation of the Psalms
Jacob L. Goodson, Southwestern College
Book Reviews
Mark Ryan, The Politics of Practical Reason: Why Theological Ethics Must Change Your Life
Jacob L. Goodson, Southwestern College
Daniel Weiss, Paradox and the Prophets: Hermann Cohen and the Indirect Communication of Religion
Mark Randall James, University of Virginia
August 29, 2013 / / 0 Comments
General Editor:
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Mark Randall James
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Editorial Advisory Board
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