Once, back in the early 70s, while listening to a Beethoven symphony in the park, I said to myself fancifully, “Suppose being alive biologically is only one way of being alive, and this communicating presence in the park is another way.” I felt that what it was like to be Beethoven was somehow contained in the music, as though the music were a transmutation, a phase transition (like water becoming ice), of Beethoven’s sensibility. His choices, his preferences, fill the ears at every moment of the work. It seems that something essential to the reality of the man Beethoven is in the organization of sound as he willed that organization to be.

It’s as though the artist, writer, etc., deposits himself in the things that he makes: the work becomes infused with its maker, who has willed the choices that comprise the work. That is, in each step of the evolution of a work, the maker decides what stays, what goes, what lives, what dies. Every detail exists at his dispensation, and thus the final configuration of the work comprises a record (a geology of details) of his choices, and therefore of his consciousness, the tip of the “biological” iceberg that is the self.

(from 8/05/05)