Rhythm

Form and Dispossession

Vincent Barletta

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780226685908
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

More than the persistent beat of a song or the structural frame of poetry, rhythm is a deeply imbedded force that drives our world and is also a central component of the condition of human existence. It's the pulse of the body, a power that orders matter, a strange and natural force that flows through us. Virginia Woolf describes it as a "wave in the mind" that carries us, something we can no more escape than we could stop our hearts from beating.Vincent Barletta explores rhythm through three historical moments, each addressing it as a phenomenon that transcends poetry, aesthetics, and even temporality. He reveals rhythm to be a power that holds us in place, dispossesses us, and shapes the foundations of our world. In these moments, Barletta encounters rhythm as a primordial and physical binding force that establishes order and form in the ancient world, as the anatomy of lived experience in early modern Europe, and as a subject of aesthetic and ethical questioning in the twentieth century.A wide-ranging book covering a period spanning two millennia and texts from over ten languages, Rhythm will expand the conversation around this complex and powerful phenomenon.

1

Rivers Stopped or Flowing Backward

During the first half of the seventh century BCE, the Greek mercenary and poet Archilochus (ca. 712–648 BCE) composed the earliest known account of rhythm. It appears in a poetic fragment in which the poet, self-fashioned as a soldier, exhorts his spirit (thumós) to take account of the force that rhythm exerts over him:

θυμέ, θύμ᾽ ἀμηχάνοισι κήδεσιν κυκώμενε,

ἀνάδυ, δυσμενῶν δ᾽ ἀλέξευ προσβαλὼν ἐναντίον

στέρνον ἐνδόκοισιν, ἐχθρῶν πλησίον κατασταθεὶς

ἀσφαλέως: καὶ μήτε νικῶν ἀμφάδην ἀγάλλεο

μήτε νικηθεὶς ἐν οἴκῳ καταπεσὼν ὀδύρεο:

ἀλλὰ χαρτοῖσίν τε χαῖρε καὶ κακαῖσιν ἀσχάλα

μὴ λίην: γίγνωσκε δ᾽ οἷος ῥυσμὸς ἀνθρώπους ἔχει.(Edmonds 1931, 2:130)

Spirit, spirit—unsettled and helpless in your sufferings,

your enemies come at you; and yet face them and ward them off;

fortify your breast, meet them in close and

remain steadfast; and should you prevail, don’t celebrate openly,

or if defeated, don’t collapse in your house to wail and lament;

rather, rejoice for what is good and grieve for what is not,

but not too much: come to recognize the rhythm that holds us all.

Encoded within these seven verses is an immediately apparent concern with praxis and moderation—what one should do, what one should not do, and how one is to react to victories and defeats. Beyond this general preoccupation with ethics, however, the fragment likewise contains a direct call to decisive action, a command to “come to recognize or discern” that is also, somewhat paradoxically, an appeal to accept dispossession and the limits of human power.

The fragment begins with an apostrophic summoning of the poet’s soul: “Spirit, spirit” (θυμέ, θύμ᾽). There is an intensely performative, almost incantatory aspect to this opening, a trochaic invocation directly followed by a statement on the condition of the poet’s spirit that is at once phatic (from the perspective of the imagined conversation between the poet and his spirit) and descriptive (from the perspective of the audience/reader): “unsettled and helpless in your sufferings” (ἀμηχάνοισι κήδεσιν κυκώμενε). Considered as a whole, the verse first invokes the poet’s spirit before moving on to offer it empathy and provide a window into its difficult situation: at the end of its powers, troubled by a host of sorrows and (at the start of the second line) beset by enemies. What occupies the majority of the second verse, all of the third, and the first part of the fourth is a call for the spirit to stand up to its enemies, to “meet them in close” and fight to the best of its abilities: “δυσμενῶν δ᾽ ἀλέξευ προσβαλὼν ἐναντίον / στέρνον ἐνδόκοισιν, ἐχθρῶν πλησίον κατασταθεὶς / ἀσφαλέως.” (and yet face them and ward them off; / fortify your breast, meet them in close and / remain steadfast). The rest of the fragment, up to the final phrase, deals explicitly with how one is to respond to victory or defeat. In an elegantly phrased line, Archilochus calls on his spirit to deal with good and bad in a measured way and to avoid extremes: “ἀλλὰ χαρτοῖσίν τε χαῖρε καὶ κακαῖσιν ἀσχάλα / μὴ λίην” (rather, rejoice for what is good and grieve for what is not, / but not too much).

It is at the very end of the fragment that Archilochus mentions rhythm (ruthmós, or, in the Ionian dialect in which he writes, rusmós). Urging his spirit to “γίγνωσκε δ᾽ οἷος ῥυσμὸς ἀνθρώπους ἔχει” (come to recognize the rhythm that holds us all), Archilochus presents rhythm as a force that not only limits or constrains all humans (this generality expressed through the accusative plural of ánthrôpos) but one that also gives us form and meaning, pushing us always toward a mean between two forces. What this call in the final phrase also achieves is the central paradox of the poetic fragment itself; namely, that the transitive act of coming to recognize rhythm with which Archilochus begins finds itself immediately checked and directed back upon the speaker and his audience. We are called on to know, but what it is that we are to know is precisely the limits of our own powers with respect to and because of rhythm: it holds us and keeps us in check (an idea expressed through the verb éxô). As in the first verse, Archilochus places his spirit at the end of its powers (amêxanos), although now not because of the threat of external enemies but rather because of rhythm’s a priori hold upon it. Focusing on the relation between these two lines, one encounters a kind of circularity to the fragment: it is, sensu stricto, a call to act; however, the action for which it calls ends with the recognition of the absolute limits of human action, of rhythm’s inescapable, centripetal power.

In speaking of rhythm as he does, Archilochus is not urging his spirit (and, by extension, his audience) simply to come to a realization of the external accidents and phenomena that create the horizon of one’s conscious possibilities or experience; that is, the fragment is not primarily concerned with ethics in a normative or conventional sense. At a much more immediate, even preconscious level, Archilochus is speaking of a universal force that he believes somehow always already holds us and even bends us in specific ways. Rhythm for Archilochus is thus not fortune, nor is it impacted by fortune (understood broadly). It serves, rather, as a force that grasps us and gives us form even before experience; or to put it in more direct terms, it is form, both constituting us and holding us in check.

The idea of rhythm as form seems to have little to do with a time-based conception of rhythm. There is no body in movement or a drumbeat here; rather, it seems to speak to a condition of being, a gravitational force that holds us all suspended. Is this what Archilochus means? To begin to answer this question, it is useful to turn to the clearest articulation of this notion of rhythm, which would emerge in the fifth century BCE through pre-Socratic atomist philosophy.

For atomists such as Democritus, who largely incorporated the thought of Leucippus into his own philosophical system (a system to which modern readers have access in large measure through extensive citation by Aristotle), all matter is composed of eternal and uncaused atoms (the adjective átomos means “uncut” or “indivisible” in classical Greek) that swerve around one another within infinite, empty space owing to their differing sizes and weights. Moving as they do, some atoms inevitably crash into one another, while others fit together temporarily as larger assemblages. These assemblages, achieved through perpetual movement (or “flow”) and the commensurability of their constituent atoms, make up for Democritus not only all the matter of our physical world, but also our bodies, our souls, and our very thoughts. Charles Joseph Singer briefly explains the implications of this line of atomist thinking:

The qualities that we distinguish in things are produced by movement or rearrangement of [ . . . ] atoms. As everything is made up of these unchangeable and eternal atoms, it follows that coming into being and passing away are but a seeming, an appearance produced by the rearrangement of the atoms. The beings that you and I think we are, are but temporary aggregations of atoms that will soon separate to enter into the substance of other beings. And yet, in ages of time, perhaps, we shall be re-formed, when it may so fall out that our atoms come together again. Thus history may repeat herself endlessly. (1941, 15)

Singer speaks of “coming into being” and “passing away” as forms of “seeming” according to atomist thought, although one should not read this as something akin to the later baroque concern with essence and appearances or even to Plato’s allegory of the cave (Republic 514a–20a; Plato 1982c), according to which there exists some fundamental reality (e.g., the Kingdom of God or Plato’s nonspatial and atemporal realm of Forms) beyond the material world and human perception. For the atomists, there is in fact no ultimate reality beyond that of uncreated atoms and the space of non-being through which they move; the entire universe is for them thus shaped by the fundamental contingency that characterizes the assemblage of atoms that make up matter (always only temporarily), from the largest planet to the smallest, most insignificant thing. In this, the emphasis is placed squarely on space rather than time.

How did the atomists speak of atomic assemblages? More to the point, what is the term that they consistently employ to describe the form that matter takes within this contingent and fluid framework of coming together and pulling apart? The answer, as Émile Benveniste points out, is rhythm (ruthmós):

Et c’est bien au sens de “forme” que Démocrite se sert toujours de ruthmós. Il avait écrit un traité Περὶ τῶν διαφερόντων ῥυσμῶν, ce qui signifie “sur la variété de forme (des atomes).” Sa doctrine enseignait que l’eau et l’air ῥυθμῷ διαφέρειν, sont différents par la forme que prennent leurs atomes constitutifs. Une autre citation de Démocrite montre que’il appliquait aussi ruthmós à la “forme” des institutions: οὐδεμία μηχανὴ τῷ νῦν καθεστῶτι ῥυθμῷ μὴ οὐκ ἀδικεῖν τοὺς ἄρχοντας, “il n’y a pas moyen d’empêcher que, dans la forme (de constitution) actuelle, les gouvernants ne commettent d’injustice.” C’est du même sens que procèdent les verbes ῥυσμῶ, μεταρρυσμῶ, μεταρρυθμίζῶ, “former” ou “transformer,” au physique ou au moral: άνοήμονες ῥυσμοῦνται τοῖς τῆς τύχης κέρδεσιν, οἱ δὲ τῶν τοιῶνδε δαήμονες τοῖς τῆς σοφίης, “les sots se forment par les gains du hasard, mais ceux qui savent (ce que valent) ces gains, par ceux de la sagesse”; ὴ διδαχὴ μεταρυσμοῖ τὸν ἄνθρωπον, “l’enseignement transforme l’homme”; ἀνάγκη [ . . . ] τὰ σχήματα μεταρρυθμίζεσθαι, “il faut bien que les skhêmata changent de forme (pour passer de l’anguleux au rond).” Démocrite emploie aussi l’adjectif ἐπιρρύσμιος; dont le sens peut maintenant être rectifié; ni “courant, qui se répand” (Bailly) ni “adventitious” (Liddell-Scott), mais “doté d’une forme”; ἐτεῆ οὐδὲν ἴσμεν περὶ οὐδενος, ἀλλ’ ἐπιρρυσμίη ἑκάστοισιν ἡ δόξις, “nous ne savons rien authentiquement sur rien, mais chacun donne une forme à sa croyance” (= à défaut de science sur rien, chacun se fabrique une opinion sur tout). (1966b, 329–30)

And it is indeed in the sense of “form” that Democritus always presents ῥυθμός. He wrote a treatise Περὶ τῶν διαφερόντων ῥυσμῶν, which means “on the variety of form (of atoms).” His doctrine taught that water and air ῥυθμῷ διαφέρειν, that is, they differ from one other due to the form that their constituent atoms take. Another citation from Democritus shows that he also used ῥυθμός to describe the “form” of institutions: οὐδεμία μηχανὴ τῷ νῦν καθεστῶτι ῥυθμῷ μὴ οὐκ ἀδικεῖν τοὺς ἄρχοντας, “there is no way, given the form of the present constitution, to prevent rulers from committing injustices.” The verbs ῥυσμῶ, μεταρρυσμῶ, μεταρρυθμίζῶ, “to form” or “to transform” in the physical or moral sense, work in the same way: άνοήμονες ῥυσμοῦνται τοῖς τῆς τύχης κέρδεσιν, οἱ δὲ τῶν τοιῶνδε δαήμονες τοῖς τῆς σοφίης, “fools are formed by the gains of chance, while those who know (and value) these gains [are formed] by wisdom”; ὴ διδαχὴ μεταρυσμοῖ τὸν ἄνθρωπον, “teaching transforms a person”; ἀνάγκη [ . . . ] τὰ σχήματα μεταρρυθμίζεσθαι, “it is indeed necessary for the shapes to change form (in order to go from angular to round).” Democritus also uses the adjective ἐπιρρύσμιος, whose meaning can now be corrected; it is not “courant, qui se répand” (Bailly) or “adventitious” (Liddell-Scott), but “having a form”: ἐτεῆ οὐδὲν ἴσμεν περὶ οὐδενος, ἀλλ’ ἐπιρρυσμίη ἑκάστοισιν ἡ δόξις, “we have no genuine knowledge of anything, but everyone gives a form to his or her belief” (= lacking knowledge of anything, everyone nonetheless forms an opinion on everything). (1971, 282–83)

According to Democritus, ruthmós can refer both to the contingent form of matter in a universe of eternal and uncaused flow as well to the generic principle of form taken by phenomena in the social world—institutions, organizations, and even human attitudes and comportment. For the atomists, as Pierre Sauvanet argues, ruthmós is thus nothing short of “the instantaneous schema of the world’s underlying structure, achieved through the incessant combination of material atoms” (1999, 44).1 As such, ruthmós constitutes for them a theorization of form as an always provisional achievement within a world characterized by constant movement and interaction (even at the atomic leve...