Experiencing Satie...
/Experiencing Satie: A Page From My Diary
December 29, 2024
Between Christmas and New Year’s Eve I return to Satie’s music to understand my short Parisian stay and what happened in front of that flaming stove two days after André Breton had written the Surrealist Manifesto— An unexpected moment of serenity: he contemplates at a gigantic doll in the display window of his preferred café. “Where did it come from?” he addresses the cloud that has occupied the place, spreading in peculiar redness. The doll smiles at him. He smiles back. Now she inhabits his depths, and he explodes with loving joy.
- I wrote these lines before I read that Guillaume Apollinaire coined the word “Surrealism” just to describe Satie’s music. Perhaps this is the most important glimpse of telepathy that has occurred to me in the last few years.
November 22, 2025
There is something mysterious that connects Satie’s music with the scene of a cat curled up and sleeping. To be more precise, this is especially true of Gnossiennes 3 and 4 and their riddling dimension, which calmly portends some event on the mythical level.
Satie never once fails to transport you to Paris—not Paris that you know by senses, but that which you know by mythical intuition. Paris is a myth; the more you explain it, the more it is corrupted and becomes a religion for the Public. Yet you know her, as an event, within a solitude that shuts out none but the Public.
Back to the cats: they are dispersed around the room, sleeping with a particular rhythmicity that unfolds alongside the musical act, as though these rhythms accompany the growth of an interior plant whose life obeys no season. Where is the poeticality in this constant return to the image of a mental plant?
No, no, I do mean an interior plant: it grows under my roof before the snow outside and before the sun while she is trying to submerge us. Here it is on the table or on the windowsill, exteriorly conspicuous, very certain in its physical extension. You ponder: the cat teaches you how to be a plant; an animal teaches you, you human, how to be a plant. What kind of universe are you living in?! Correct your sentence, however: an animal teaches you, you as a human, influenced by a purple or dark-green melody, how to be a plant.
You are standing in front of a display window watching a ruby.
You are before a space adorned with darkness, contemplating a labyrinth of inscriptions on luxurious wood.
You wonder how miniatures of rainforests breathe louder than real rainforests.
Are you doing this, or is it Satie — manipulating classical music and maneuvering the grammar that lets things be themselves, not otherwise?
By Fadi Abu-Deeb
From: Syria
Website: https://fadiabudeeb.substack.com/