A piano has many beautiful, shiny, black and white keys. The job of each key
is to produce the same note every time.
No key is made to understand or to care about the music the whole piano produces.
The only thing the key knows how to do is, when pressed, to (a) remain sensible to the finger pressing on it and (b) accordingly move the hammer that will hit a specific string so that the string’s ephemeral note may be produced. This is the key’s only mission, and its entire world.
In contrast, the music the entire piano gives birth to is an inconceivably complicated amalgam of many things.
Moreover, this music is always born out of an exceptionally complex intention of some pianist – an intention uniting like a thread the worlds of many independent keys into a common goal.
However, it has to be noted that this music exists only on a large scale, on which many variables are interacting: how the notes produced are forming structure and rhythm, how they resonate, what kind of aesthetics they follow.
The goal of the music born of a piano has to do with how all of these elements are finally combined on the larger scale on which this music exists.
On this larger scale, the music coming out of a piano cannot see the much smaller scale
where the life of an isolated key unfolds, in the same way as when I see my hand moving, I cannot see what the joints, nerves, tendons, muscles, and blood vessels are doing.
Though the music cannot exist without the key, it cannot (and has absolutely no need to) describe the individual, detailed mechanisms by means of which any key, under the vigorous or tender touch of a finger, is able to move the hammer that hits a certain string.
Conversely, for the key to produce a sound it is not necessary that it should have in mind any intention to play any kind of music.
Music is not the key’s goal.
The key does not even know what music is.
Its purpose, as we have said, is summed up in producing a beautiful, round, full note as best it can.
In short, its life does not have the same language and the same meanings as the life of piano music.
However, music is not something morally “better” or on a “higher” level than the sound produced by a key.
Complex music produced by the notes of numerous keys and a single note produced by a single key, are two different worlds.
Each has its own purpose and beauty without their necessarily needing to explain themselves to each other.
Actually, when we speak of a note produced by a single piano key in relation to the music produced by the whole piano, we speak of different levels of complexity – of different levels of organizing things.
However:
[a] the more complex levels are not morally “better” than any levels that are lower (in terms of complexity),
[b] such highly complex levels are not able to explain and comprehend the subtle mechanisms determining what happens “down there”,
[c] these “upper” complex floors do not constitute any kind of “ultimate reason” for the existence of the “lower” less complex ones.
Now, let’s please reread all of this, correlating a key’s note to a relationship motivated mainly by powerful sexual desire,
and the music to a relationship that has managed to include love.
Just as happens with a single key, so desire for the Other’s body does not necessarily have to serve some goal on any higher level, in order to give birth to rounded and beautiful moments.
That is to say, sexual desire does not necessarily have to serve love.
And just as happens with music, the complex experience of love cannot (and does not care to) describe the detailed mechanisms through which our bodies, when trembling with sexual desire, are able to resonate with the echoes of this whole world.
the book NOTES FOR YOU is a literary – existential
approach to three bewitching phenomena of human existence: eros, love, sexual desire.
Eros, love, sexual desire:
three autonomous clusters of needs, which although they overlap, cannot substitute for each other – when I drink water, however much I drink I cannot satisfy my hunger. Maybe this is one of the reasons for which, in our days, there are so many myths and misconceptions about our relationships.
NOTES FOR YOU – [notebook A]
INFO: [110 pages] [17,5Χ22 cm]
1st ed. in English, ISBN 978-618-83861-2-9
[in 100 numbered and signed copies]
ERGASTIRI ENTIPOU publications, 2018
This 1st edition is to be distributed exclusively
in Greece or delivered in other countries only by order to the author:
+30-2310-262872 +30-6977-210469 [email protected]
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Video in the first person about the coral idea
and the features of this book
A NON-VERBAL video with images from the
book and music from my compositions
“BEATRICE” & “ONAR”
