Perhaps there it has never been about a point of arrival nor departure from a place, but rather a question of attunement, and specifically one of tone. To disentangle attunement from tone is a gigantic task; arguably one of the sites where the distinction between philosophy and poetry comes nearest only to depart and open their differences without ever vacating their aspiration in music, as David Monro makes clear in The modes of Ancient Greek Music (1894). Why does tone matter, and can it be defined? We know a tone when we hear it, almost as if the singing of a bird, and yet it is not just a matter of frequency or intensity, since it gathers fundamental language in the elemental. The tone is the internal cut or pause in expression, but this does not say much, does it? 

Wallace Stevens once offered a definition of tone, of poetic tone, as the “perfection emerging from the known” in the poem “On the Way to the Bus”: “A way of pronouncing the word inside of one’s tongue under the wintry trees of the terrace” [1]. We can take this to be a metaphoric definition of the vocative and that would be a sound definition. And yet, it remains insufficient in respect to tone, since the tone is not just the mere articulatory phonetics, but an internal arrangement; what Steveson refers as “the word inside’s one tongue under the wintry tree”. It is a formulation that delivers a landscape as a third space that is neither in language nor in the world. 

Hence, speaking more or less is of little help; in our present day it has become evident that machines are replacing the art of speaking and communicating at an unprecedented pace. It has become evident that the ultimate revolution is the revolution of the autonomization of language, something that Stevens was also aware in the postwar years. In fact, if “tone” means anything for Stevens it is precisely what bears witness to the experiment of language that mirrors that of life. An experience that was shrinking, becoming a sort of “pastime proper for Nero’s children’s children” [2]. Wallace Stevens could not have imagined the fact that today heads of families and pedagogues are minor Neros feeding future generations a pseudolanguage that can no longer be the covenant for any opening to an experiment. Much like Stevens we have been fully aware that the erosion of language at the end of metaphysical dispensation entails the loss of tone. And the loss of tone entails the erasure of the distance between language and our dispensation or tonality.  Our epoch is not only too violent to be “congenial to the experiment of language”,  but is completely barbaric in its annihilation of distances. This is Stevens in 1948: 

“Our present experience of life is too violent to be conditional to experiment in either sense. This is also the consideration that the present time succeeds as a time of experiment. Theoretically a period of attempts at a world revolution should destroy or endanger all stationary poetic subjects and words and be favorable in the highest degree to the recording of fresh experience. But the vivification of reality has not yet occurred in spite of the excitement. Only the excitement has occurred” [3]. 

The excitement around world revolutions – and perhaps today it is already occurring with the centrality of revolts – has confused everything and has dried up the possibility of the experiment in tone, which is the path available for a “fresh conception of the world” (these are Stevens’ terms). Because the world is only possible through an “overall tone”, nourished by tonality; it is the only thing that matters, as Cézanne once remarked [4]. Pity those that have lost the musical transcendence of the tone, and are left only to hear the rustle of politics and the high pitch of language. 

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Notes 

1. Wallace Stevens. “On the Way to the Bus”, in Collected Poetry & Prose (The Library of America, 1997), 472.

2. Wallace Stevens. “The State of American Writing, 1948: Seven Questions”, in Collected Poetry & Prose (The Library of America, 1997), 823.

3. Ibid., 823-824.

4. Kurt Badt. The Art of Cézanne (University of California Press, 1965), 42.