Chapter 41: Strength by Constraint
STRENGTH BY CONSTRAINT
BECAUSE you have heard me talk so much about this necessity of restraint in order to have freedom, you sent me this quotation from Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music. It translates the truth I have been talking about into a musician’s language:
It is into this field that I shall sink my roots, fully convinced that combinations which have at their disposal twelve sounds in each octave and all possible rhythmic varieties promise me riches that all the activity of human genius will never exhaust. . . .
I have no use for a theoretic freedom. Let me have something finite, definite —matter that can lend itself to my operation only insofar as it is commensurate with my possibilities. . . .
In art, as in everything else, one can build only upon a resisting foundation: whatever constantly gives way to pressure, constantly renders movement impossible. . . .
My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint, diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit.
“It is evident,” writes Baudelaire, “that rhetorics and prosodies are not arbitrarily invented tyrannies, but a collection of rules demanded by the very organization of the spiritual being, and never have prosodies and rhetorics kept originality from fully manifesting itself. The contrary, that is to say, that they have aided the flowering of originality, would be infinitely more true.”[16]
The love of a man and a woman gains immeasurably in power when placed under the divine restraint we have been talking about. A river flowing through a chasm, walled in by high rock, moves with a rush of concentrated strength which dissipates the moment it reaches the flat plain.
And if rhetorics and prosodies are not arbitrarily invented tyrannies but “a collection of rules demanded by the very organization of the spiritual being,” may we not without difficulty also believe that the restraints placed on Christian marriage answer to the organization of that same spiritual being? That they will never keep originality and personality from manifesting themselves? And that the fullest freedom will be obtained because of what look, to the unspiritual mind, like obstacles?
“For the commandment is a lamp, and the teaching a light, and the reproofs of discipline are the way of life.”