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Cornugaya Directory 05
Page 08
A piece of music, again, without any words at all, or a song with
words that have nothing in the world to do with the ideas which it
is nevertheless made to convey, is often very effectual language.
Much lying, and all irony depends on tampering with covenanted
symbols, and making those that are usually associated with one set
of ideas convey by a sleight of mind others of a different nature.
That is why irony is intolerably fatiguing unless very sparingly
used. Take the song which Blondel sang under the window of King
Richard's prison. There was not one syllable in it to say that
Blondel was there, and was going to help the king to get out of
prison. It was about some silly love affair, but it was a letter
all the same, and the king made language of what would otherwise
have been no language, by guessing the meaning, that is to say by
perceiving that he was expected to enter then and there into a new
covenant as to the meaning of the symbols that were presented to
him, understanding what this covenant was to be, and acquiescing in
it.
Not particular as to the matter of secrecy, the bird is not particular
as to material, so that it be of the nature of strings or threads. A
lady friend once told me that while working by an open window, one of
these birds approached during her momentary absence, and, seizing a
skein of some kind of thread or yarn, made off with it to its
half-finished nest. But the perverse yarn caught fast in the branches,
and, in the bird's efforts to extricate it, got hopelessly tangled.
She tugged away at it all day, but was finally obliged to content
herself with a few detached portions. The fluttering strings were an
eye-sore to her ever after, and passing and repassing, she would give
them a spiteful jerk, as much as to say, "There is that confounded
yarn that gave me so much trouble."
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