The house in which I live is haunted by the noise of dripping water.
Always, day and night, summer and winter, something is dripping
somewhere. For many months an unquiet cistern kept up within its iron
bosom a long, hollow-toned soliloquy. Now it is mute; but a new and more
formidable drip has come into existence. From the very summit of the
house a little spout—the overflow, no doubt, of some unknown receptacle
under the roof—lets fall a succession of drops that is almost a
continuous stream. Down it falls, this all but stream, a sheer forty or
fifty feet on to the stones of the basement steps, thence to dribble
ignominiously away into some appointed drain. The cataracts blow their
trumpets from the steep; but my lesser waterfalls play a subtler, I had
almost said a more “modern” music. Lying awake at nights, I listen with
a mixture of pleasure and irritation to its curious cadences.
The musical range of a dripping tap is about half an octave. But within
the bounds of this major fourth, drops can play the most surprising and
varied melodies. You will hear them climbing laboriously up small
degrees of sound, only to descend at a single leap to the bottom. More
often they wander unaccountably about in varying intervals, familiar or
disconcertingly odd. And with the varying pitch the time also varies,
but within narrower limits. For the laws of hydrostatics, or whatever
other science claims authority over drops, do not allow the dribblings
much licence either to pause or to quicken the pace of their falling. It
is an odd sort of music. One listens to it as one lies in bed, slipping
gradually into sleep, with a curious, uneasy emotion.
Drip drop, drip drap drep drop. So it goes on, this watery melody, for
ever without an end. Inconclusive, inconsequent, formless, it is always
on the point of deviating into sense and form. Every now and then you
will hear a complete phrase of rounded melody. And then—drip drop,
di-drep, di-drap—the old inconsequence sets in once more. But suppose
there were some significance in it! It is that which troubles my drowsy
mind as I listen at night. Perhaps for those who have ears to hear, this
endless dribbling is as pregnant with thought and emotion, as
significant as a piece of Bach. Drip drop, di-drap, di-drep. So little
would suffice to turn the incoherence into meaning. The music of the
drops is the symbol and type of the whole universe; it is for ever, as
it were, asymptotic to sense, infinitely close to significance, but
never touching it. Never, unless the human mind comes and pulls it
forcibly over the dividing space. If I could understand this wandering
music, if I could detect in it a sequence, if I could force it to some
conclusion—the diapason closing full in God, in mind, I hardly care
what, so long as it closes in something definite—then, I feel, I should
understand the whole incomprehensible machine, from the gaps between the
stars to the policy of the Allies. And growing drowsier and drowsier, I
listen to the ceaseless tune, the hollow soliloquy in the cistern, the
sharp metallic rapping of the drops that fall from the roof upon the
stones below; and surely I begin to discover a meaning, surely I detect
a trace of thought, surely the phrases follow one another with art,
leading on inevitably to some prodigious conclusion. Almost I have it,
almost, almost.... Then, I suppose, I fall definitely to sleep. For the
next thing I am aware of is that the sunlight is streaming in. It is
morning, and the water is still dripping as irritatingly and
persistently as ever.
Sometimes the incoherence of the drop music is too much to be borne. The
listener insists that the asymptote shall somehow touch the line of
sense. He forces the drops to say something. He demands of them that
they shall play, shall we say, “God Save the King,” or the Hymn to Joy
from the Ninth Symphony, or _Voi che Sapete_. The drops obey
reluctantly; they play what you desire, but with more than the
ineptitude of the child at the piano. Still they play it somehow. But
this is an extremely dangerous method of laying the haunting ghost whose
voice is the drip of water. For once you have given the drops something
to sing or say, they will go on singing and saying it for ever. Sleep
becomes impossible, and at the two or three hundredth repetition of
_Madelon_ or even of an air from _Figaro_ the mind begins to totter
towards insanity.
Drops, ticking clocks, machinery, everything that throbs or clicks or
hums or hammers, can be made, with a little perseverance, to say
something. In my childhood, I remember, I was told that trains said, “To
Lancashire, to Lancashire, to fetch a pocket handkercher”—and _da capo_
ad infinitum. They can also repeat, if desired, that useful piece of
information: “To stop the train, pull down the chain.” But it is very
hard to persuade them to add the menacing corollary: “Penalty for
improper use Five Pounds.” Still, with careful tutoring I have succeeded
in teaching a train to repeat even that unrhythmical phrase.
Dadaist literature always reminds me a little of my falling drops.
Confronted by it, I feel the same uncomfortable emotion as is begotten
in me by the inconsequent music of water. Suppose, after all, that this
apparently accidental sequence of words should contain the secret of art
and life and the universe! It may; who knows? And here am I, left out in
the cold of total incomprehension; and I pore over this literature and
regard it upside down in the hope of discovering that secret. But
somehow I cannot induce the words to take on any meaning whatever. Drip
drop, di-drap, di-drep—Tzara and Picabia let fall their words and I am
baffled. But I can see that there are great possibilities in this type
of literature. For the tired journalist it is ideal, since it is not he,
but the reader who has to do all the work. All he need do is to lean
back in his chair and allow the words to dribble out through the nozzle
of his fountain pen. Drip, drop....