The Mother
Agenda
Volume 5
April 4, 1964
You gave me two recordings of Wanda Landowska and I have listened to them. In one of them, there's a passage which is a pure marvel.1
Isn't it!
It doesn't last long – it's like crystal.
Yes, exactly! I found it extraordinary.
It's so beautiful! I've never heard anything so pure.
Pure, yes, absolutely pure!
That's a divine means of expression. It's really a divine manifestation on earth....
Yes, very pure – and simple.
I have always wondered why I wasn't born a musician....
You must have been a musician.
It's really a regret in my life not to be a musician. Writing is NEVER “it.” But capturing a note like that one...
Oh, mon petit, yesterday or the day before, I heard something... I don't exactly know what it is – it isn't music, I mean it isn't the notation of some musical instrument: it's the notation of a vibration of... I can't say, I didn't understand.2 But in it... At first, you feel exactly as if you had entered a madhouse: it's completely incoherent, disjointed, and everything is unexpected because there is no logic – absolutely nothing mental. So you go from one sound to another, without any transition, and your first impression is exactly like... it's madness. But if you listen, now and then there's a sound, which isn't the sound of a musical instrument... absolutely wonderful! But it lasts one second. You would like it to continue – pfft! gone. And now and then there is a voice, quite like the human voice, you can almost hear words, there seem to be words – which made me think that the sound of our voice has its origin elsewhere (below or above, I don't know; where those vibrations come from I cannot say). And after a while, I saw that something in the being [Mother's being] was... I can't say “interested,” it was something that enjoyed it, that didn't exactly have a “pleasant” sensation, but almost felt a need for the unforeseen, an unforeseen beyond all that we can imagine: disjointed, no logic, no sense, nothing. It SOUNDS like chaos, but all of a sudden I felt it wasn't chaos, it responded to another law. And when it came towards the end, I really wanted it to go on for a long time.
At first, you start laughing, you make fun of it, you giggle as if you were faced with something absolutely farcical. But now and then, oh!... And you've hardly had the time to appreciate it when it's already gone – a marvel. A marvel: a sound the like of which I have never heard, which no instrument can produce.
You go through all kinds of states, but curiously enough, I discovered in the being, somewhere in the consciousness, a sort of joy or intense interest in the absolutely unexpected – the unexpected, which to the mentality is unspeakably farcical.
Interesting.
1 It is the transcription, by W. Landowska, of a “popular Polish song.”
2 It was electronic music.