According to Pickstock, Augustine’s musical ontology is not a mere subordination of space to time, or a univocal “Dionysian flow”: “just as important as the priority of time, for Augustine, is the insistence on articulation into distinct musical units or phrases, the very move which allows a stress upon the simultaneity of harmony, whether in memory or in the actuality of performed polyphony.”
This double stress on temporality and harmony is enabled by centrality of silence, of the caesura between note and note, phrase and phrase. Division between phrases by the “nothingness” of a point or a silence is “the transcendental precondition for the possibility, not of spatial totalisation but of spatial relationship which is to a degree simultaneous.” Thus, Augustine does not propose a temporal flow “over against” articulations, but insists that time is only “constituted as flow by the series of articulations mediated by a silence which allows them also to sound together.” Thus, he can say that salvationof every creature consists in being in proper place and time.
Both necessary for reality to be what Augustine says it is, a “cosmic poem.”
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