Once again the lyre comes first. The bow comes second. Ulysses’ bow is like a kithara. The archer is like a citharede. The vibration of the bowstring sings a song of death. If Apollo is the quintessential archer, his bow is musical.
The bow is death from afar: inexplicable death.
More precisely: death as invisible as voice. Vocal cords, lyre string, bowstring are a single string: entrails or nerves of a dead animal that emit the invisible sound that kills from afar. The bowstring is the first song: the song which Homer says is “like the voice of a swallow.” Strings of stringed instruments are strings-of-the-death-lyre.
The lyre and the cithara are ancient bows that fire songs at the god (arrows at the animal). The metaphor Homer uses in the Odyssey is harder to understand than the one he presents in the Iliad, but it is perhaps indexicaclass="underline" it purports that the bow is derived from the lyre. Apollo is still the archer hero. It is not certain that the bow was invented before stringed instruments.
Sound, language are heard and not touched or seen. When song touches, 1. it transfixes, 2. it kills.
Gods are not seen but heard: in thunder, in torrents, in clouds, in the sea. They are like voices. The bow is endowed with a form of speech, in distance, invisibility, and air. The voice is initially that of the string that vibrates before the instrument is divided and arranged into music, hunting and war.
The prey that falls is to the sound of the bowstring what lightning is to the sound of thunder.
The Rigveda says that the bow carries death in the taut string that sings like mothers carry their sons in their womb.
A language.
First, a promontory. Then, a problem.
The tenth hymn of the Rigveda defines humans as being those who, unknowingly, have hearing as their ground.
Human societies have their language as their habitat. They are not sheltered by seas, caves, mountain peaks, or deep forests but by the voice they exchange among themselves and its strange accents. And all acts of trade and rites are performed inside this acoustic marvel, invisible and without distance, which everyone obeys.
What allows humans to hear and understand one another can hear and understand in turn.
Thus archers become Vac, Logos, Verbum.
When Greek words became Roman, when Latin words became French, their meaning changed more than the face of the sailors and the traders who brought them. Than the face of the legionnaires who shouted them. Faces of the court of Augustus, of the court of Charlemagne, those surrounding Madame de Maintenon nestling in her damask niche, those that Madame Juliette Récamier receives in her salon on Rue Basse-du-Rempart. Words changed. The beards and the ruffs a bit as well. But one can imagine the same faces.
Eternal sexes.
The same gaze upon nothing, at the bottom of which desire throws off the same terrible glare, and which the ever constant progression of aging similarly torments, the fear of suffering’s intolerable passivity, the unverbalizable certainty of death in its moan and in its cry, in its last breath.
I see the same faces. I sense the identical, inadequate, frightened, comical naked bodies through the cloth that covers them. But I hear accents and words that I have trouble grasping.
I ceaselessly devote all my attention to the sounds that I have trouble grasping.
Tréō and terrere. Trémō and tremere.
Lips that tremble from cold in winter. Consul Marcus Tullius Cicero’s trementia labra. Words themselves tremble when the lips that pronounce them tremble. The little doll of hot breath itself trembles in the cold of winter.
Lips, words, and senses. Sexes and faces. Breaths and souls.
Lips that stammer in sobs.
Lips that quiver when we hold back the tears — or when we read at the birth of reading.
Earthquakes and the ruins they protect, hiding them under themselves, in order to wait, like witnesses, nineteen millennia for a cave to open up.
Tremulare in Latin does not yet carry the markedly sexual sense of a jolt: it is the flame that flickers in the oil of the grease lamp.
Soft-boiled eggs. Tremula ova.
Catillus’s javelin in Virgil vibrates like a harmonious string.
Herminius dies.
Never did Horatius Cocles’ companion wear a helmet or dress in armor.
He fights naked. The mane of a “wild beast” falls from his head onto his shoulders. Wounds do not frighten him. He offers all of his body to the blows that rain down and that run through. Catillus’s javelin, vibrating (tremit), buries itself between his broad shoulders. The pain (dolor) doubles him over. A black blood (ater cruor) streams everywhere. Everyone celebrates the funeral. Everyone seeks a beautiful death (pulchram mortem) through the lips of his wound.
Beautiful sound is tied to beautiful death.
Hasta per armos acta tremit. A vibrating javelin, buried between the shoulders.
Every sound is a minuscule terror. Tremit. It vibrates.
In Tunisia, at the beginning of the fourth century, near Souk Ahras, in Thubursicum Numidarum, the grammarian Nonius Marcellus inventoried all Roman words in twelve books. He entitled the work Compendiosa Doctrina per Litteras and he dedicated it to his son. In a column in volumen V, Nonius registered the word terrificatio. Nonius Marcellus is the only one to recognize this word. It is not attested in any of the ancient texts that have been preserved. He explains its meaning: scarecrow.9
Music is an acoustic scarecrow. Such is birdsong for birds.
A terrificatio.
Terrification in Rome, or in Thubursicum: after the bow, a crude dummy with a human shape, dyed red and placed in grain fields.
It is an acoustic and tintinnabulating bogeyman. Scarecrow in classical Latin is formido. Whence the French formidable, which means dreadful.10 The formido was made out of a simple string (linea) on which tufts of feathers (pinnae) dyed in blood were fastened here and there. It is the ancient Roman hunting method par excellence: the beaters move the scarecrows covered in red feathers, the slaves raise the torches, the dogs accompany them, barking and seeking to fill the pursued monstrum with panic, forcing the wild boars deep into the forest, howling and pushing them toward the hunters holding spears, in short tunics, bare hands and faces, leaning firmly on their right foot in front of the nets.