ABSTRACT
Nature. Make it a small, not a capital N, and nature applies to almost everything that is nameable. Take off both capital N and small n, and what remains is an ature-fragment whose music and meaning change radically with the substitution of a single opening consonant. M, for example: mature. Or, as in French: mature, rature, sature. Now delete the r, and the sound, incomplete, would have to remain suspended, na-tu…, unable to carry through its musical term. For a sign to unsettle itself and to break lose from its fixed representations, duration is made audible, space between syllables is spelled out, and time, deferred. Delete, replace, return, then let be. The r in nature is the grey zone between sound and sense. To leave both the n and the r in, therefore, is not to revert to nature in its ‘original’, non-dismembered state, but rather, to listen again carefully, critically, ec-static-ally, to its musical intervals.
