Beauty, Burning: The Condition of Music
In the condition of music, beauty is not beautiful. It has the necessary instability of a flickering and the urgency of a burning in some terrible wind-tortured place, perhaps a garden. Writing here appears in a state of ardent desire and desire is a way of knowing which summons and burns. Entangled with other voices and atmospheres, it does not hold them in descriptions as words continue to flee, each of them an ever-transforming psychic bundle. Form is an arrangement in flux, each quotation a cicada, rubbing, buzzing, repeating, until ad nauseam becomes ad noiseam, relentless repeated buzz which is unsong, which is music.
Where does this word, music, heard in reading, begin and end, beauty? Where does this word, unsong, begin and end, beauty?
Beauty, burning is.
Daniela Cascella is an Italian-British writer and editor. Writing in English as a second language, writing as a stranger in a language, she is drawn toward unstable and uncomfortable forms of writing-as-sounding, and toward the transmissions and interferences of knowledge across cultures. She is the author of five books in English that articulate an approach to writing she calls chimeric: monstrous, composite, many-voiced, driven by yearning: Chimeras: A Deranged Essay, An Imaginary Conversation, A Transcelation (Sublunary Editions, 2022), Nothing As We Need It (Punctum Books / Risking Education, 2022), Singed. Muted Voice-Transmissions, After The Fire (Equus Press, 2017), F.M.R.L. Footnotes, Mirages, Refrains and Leftovers of Writing Sound (Zer0 Books, 2015) and En Ab me: Listening, Reading, Writing. An Archival Fiction (Zer0 Books, 2012).
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