Spell- Patti Smith

“This whole discussion firmly maintains that, whereas lyric poetry depends utterly on the spirit of music, music itself, in its absolute sovereignty, has no need at all of images and concepts but merely tolerates them as accompaniment. Lyric poetry can say nothing that was not already contained, in a condition of the most enormous generality and universal validity, within the music which forced the lyric poet to speak in images. For this reason it is impossible for language to exhaust the meaning of the music’s world-symbolism, because music refers symbolically to the original contradiction and original pain at the heart of the primordial unity, and thus symbolizes a sphere which lies above and beyond all appearance. In relation to that primal being every phenomenon is merely a likeness, which is why language, as the organ and symbol of phenomena, can never, under any circumstances, externalize the innermost depths of music; whenever language attempts to imitate music it only touches the outer surface of music, whereas the deepest meaning of music, for all the eloquence of lyric poetry, can never be brought even one step closer to us” (36.)

I chose this quote because I do not wholeheartedly agree with it. I see this point as a discriminatory attitude towards music and art in general. The instrumentation in this song in very minimal; the lyric poetry is the revelatory element. Patti Smith’s Spell possesses the criteria for Dionysiac music; it is transcendent, enthralling, non-representative, and objective. While I agree that music does not necessarily need lyrics or poetry, it as the potential to do so much more so than to merely tolerate it. Music’s dynamism is not restricted to a particular form, and Nietzsche’s attempt to categorize it in such an exclusive way seems unnecessary and excusatory. Here, the lyrics indicate the lifting of the “veil of maya” to reveal the “most blissful satisfaction of primordial unity” (18).