One Toss of the Dice

by R. Howard Bloch

  In the mode of Mallarmé’s alliance of the shape of words with their meaning and of Apollinaire’s calligrammes, Satie wrote concrete visual music in which the arrangement of notes on a musical score corresponds not so much to the sound, but to the visual appearance of the page of sheet music. In the collection Sports et Divertissements, written in 1914, the composer reproduced, in the graphic layout of “La Balançoire,” the leisurely back-and-forth motion of a seesaw or swing. In the thirty-six sixteenth notes that descend from treble clef high F sharp to low D in line three of “Le Water-chute,” Satie imitated the cascade of a waterfall. The humorous piece was composed without a key signature or bass notations, techniques akin to Mallarmé’s and Apollinaire’s lack of punctuation in poetry. Satie warned the listener: “If you have solid nerves, you will not be too sick. It will be like falling off a scaffolding. You will see how curious it is. Watch out! Don’t change color. I feel uncomfortable. That proves that you needed to be amused.” A similar series of rising sixteenth notes in line four of “Le Golfe” is the unmistakable visual sign of the swing of a golf club. A certain buoyant constancy in the treble clef on top of the regular rise and fall of eighth notes in the bass clef of the first line of “Le Bain de Mer” reproduces visually the lapping of waves and the sensation of swimming in the sea, which was reinforced by a doodle in Satie’s own hand of wavy water at the very beginning of this short composition.

  Erik Satie, “Le Water-chute”

  Harvard University, Houghton Library, Typ 915.14.7700.

  As in the time simultaneity of Apollinaire’s “Zone,” cubism and futurism in painting, and Cendrar and Delaunay’s “Prose of the Trans-Siberian,” Satie’s musical rhythms were part of the legacy of “One Toss of the Dice.” The syncopated cadences, beat and offbeat, of his ragtime music-hall numbers resonate with the Mallarméan syntax insofar as they produced the sensation of being both in the moment and slightly beyond the moment. The iconic work of ragtime, Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,” was published in 1899. Satie encountered the rhythms of ragtime sometime after John Philip Sousa’s visit to the International Exposition of 1900, and especially after he listened to recordings of Jelly Roll Morton brought back to France by the Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet in 1916. The cakewalk figured prominently in Satie’s ballet Parade, performed at the Théâtre de Châtelet a year later.

  Parade featured the insertion, amid musical strains, of the actual sounds of revolver shots, a siren, a Morse code ticker, a typewriter, an airplane propeller, a lottery wheel, and what Satie called “squish puddles” (flaques sonores), made by striking a cymbal with sponge-tipped sticks. As zany as they may seem, such antics were the logical end points of Mallarmé’s conscious alignment in “One Toss of the Dice” of the shape of things and their artistic representation, which, in Satie’s ballet, have become one and the same.

  The poet, playwright, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau recognized that Satie’s “acoustical illusions” were introduced “in the same spirit as the cubist painters used optical illusion.”13 The cubist integration of everyday objects to their works—newspaper, sheet music, matchbook covers, chair caning, and stamps, textures of marble, or cloth—reached an extreme in the readymades of the Dadaists in Zurich and Paris, beginning in 1914. Without even the frame of music or painting, Marcel Duchamp, who withdrew from traditional painting after 1913, transformed everyday objects—a bicycle wheel, a urinal, a bottle rack, a check to his dentist, a Monte Carlo bank bond—into freestanding works of art. Duchamp’s insight—that art can be made by changing the context of ordinary things—would culminate in the pop art of the middle of the twentieth century, in Andy Warhol’s reproductions of common commodities like Campbell’s tomato juice or Brillo boxes, or his carrying of a portable recorder with him wherever he went (his “wife,”as he delicately referred to it), in order to tape everything he or anyone around him said. All are part of the evolution that began with “One Toss of the Dice” to align the shape of artistic expression with its meaning.

  “One Toss of the Dice” inspired Satie’s minimalist musical compositions, where traditional theme and variation were replaced by “circular melodic motion” that obscures progression. And Satie’s “furniture” or white music, in turn, anticipated the trance music of the 1980s. In his late twenties, Satie had become involved briefly with Susanne Valadon, a former tightrope walker, painter, and model for Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec, as well as the mother of Maurice Utrillo. Bitter over their breakup, he composed “Vexation,” thirteen bars of music to be repeated 840 times, with the warning: “It would be advisable to prepare oneself in advance, in the most profound silence, by a period of serious immobility.” John Cage’s Pocket Theatre Relay Team performed “Vexation” in New York in September 1963. The eleven participating pianists remained seriously immobile at the piano for eighteen hours and forty minutes, after which one of the six remaining members of the audience shouted, “Encore!”14

  The most compelling English successor to “One Toss of the Dice” was T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Eliot initially had been wary of what he referred to as Mallarmé’s “mossiness.” Yet by the early 1920s, he recognized that “every battle” the French poet “fought with syntax represents the effort to transmute lead into gold, ordinary language into poetry.” In 1926, Eliot wrote an essay in French on Poe and Mallarmé in which he praised the latter’s “discovery of new objects for new emotions,” expressed in a syntax so complex that “it prevents the reader from swallowing the phrase or verse in a single blow [d’un seul coup],” which may, in fact, be a direct reference to Un Coup de dés. The American-born poet admired Mallarmé’s ability to transform the “accidental into the real” via an “incantation . . . which relies on the primitive power of the Word.”15

  In The Waste Land, Eliot transforms the “accidental into the real” by inserting quotidian sounds and conversations that are part of daily life in London. Some are imitated from nature: the nightingale’s “ ‘Jug Jug’ to dirty ears,” “Twit twit twit / Jug jug jug jug jug jug / So rudely forc’d / Tereu” or the cock’s crow, “Co co rico co co rico.” Others are banal dialogues, overheard or imagined: “My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad / Stay with me. Speak to me / Why do you never speak? Speak / What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? / I never know what you are thinking. Think.” Still others belong to cries heard on the street or tavern talk, as in the famous monologue interspersed with notice of the closing pub that reproduces the diverse typography of Mallarmé’s masterwork: “When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said / I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself / HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME / Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart.”16

  Eliot produced in The Waste Land effects of time simultaneity analogous to those of Mallarmé in “One Toss of the Dice.” Current perceptions of the city are mixed with personal memories of a recent and more distant past, both blended with the collective history of an entire civilization. Yet, unlike “One Toss of the Dice,” in which a rudderless boat, after rocking wildly, managed to right itself, and a disorienting universe was finally tethered to the North Star, The Waste Land manifests a world so thoroughly unmoored as to offer only a minimal sign of life and no hope of catching one’s bearing:

  What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

  Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

  You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

  A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

  And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

  And the dry stone no sound of water.17

  Where the collapse of time for Mallarmé—the creation of the sensation of an eternal present—was a means to secular salvation, time for Eliot was not redemptive, but a sign of disenchantment with the world. He no longer identified with the great Platonic tradition that nourished Mallarmé’s belief in the insuperable but divine relation between words and ideas. In the two epigraphs that preceded the “Burnt Norton” section of the Four Q
uartets, Eliot reached beyond Plato to Heraclitus, whose cryptic affirmations of the hidden harmonies of nature only confirmed for him a sense of his own alienation (“Although logos is common to all, most people live as if they had a wisdom of their own”) and paralysis (“The way upward and the way downward are the same”). “One Toss of the Dice” may be challenging to understand, but, as Mallarmé repeatedly affirmed, the things we do not understand, the “mystery in letters,” is the guarantee of poetry’s power to heal the broken relation between consciousness and the world.

  In his articulation of time simultaneity in “One Toss of the Dice,” Mallarmé participated in the evolution of elemental ideas about time and space since Descartes and Newton. The poet’s great intuition about the relation of a unique event to the infinite possibility of all such events anticipated in its own artistic way the coming into being of quantum physics in the first half of the twentieth century.

  In the very year following the publication of “One Toss of the Dice,” the mathematician Henri Poincaré, cousin of Raymond Poincaré, the minister of public education who had signed the paper authorizing Mallarmé’s retirement, psychologized Newton’s absolute, theological time by making all time into a construct, a social convention. For H. Poincaré, there was no direct intuition of simultaneity, nor was it possible to assess the relative length of two durations. “If we think we have this intuition,” the great mathematician wrote, “this is an illusion.” The rules for measuring time were not necessary, and could be discarded without compromising the laws of physics, mechanics, or astronomy. We choose these rules, Poincaré concluded, not because they are true, but because they are convenient.18

  Poincaré’s dematerializing of space and time was only a prelude to that of Albert Einstein, who, having completed his studies at the Zurich Polytechnic Institute, took a job in 1902 as technical expert class three in the Bern Patent Office.19 There, he examined applications for patents on a variety of inventions, among which were numerous devices for coordinating clocks in local schools, railway stations, and businesses. Einstein’s life in Bern resembled that of Mallarmé in superficial ways. Both were domestically situated with wife and children, both worked for the state in essentially bureaucratic jobs, and both maintained informal evening gatherings for the purpose of enriching intellectual life. Tuesdays chez Mallarmé found a Swiss, scientific, Jewish equivalent in the Olympia Academy, created by Einstein, the mathematician Conrad Habicht, and the philosopher Maurice Solovine. Along with the mechanical engineer Michele Besso, the mathematician Marcel Grossman, and Einstein’s wife, Mileva Mari´c, they met regularly in the Einstein apartment on the second floor of Kramgasse No. 49 to discuss philosophy and physics. But the author of what may be the world’s most difficult poem and the author of the world’s most famous equation resembled each other in some ways that are not so superficial. They expressed similar fundamental ideas about the source of poetic and scientific genius, about time and space, about simultaneity, about the intersection of particular things and abstract concepts, and, finally, about the mystery underlying all such relations.

  It is unlikely that Einstein, however well versed he was in literature and philosophy, read Mallarmé’s epic work. How is it, then, that what is arguably the scientist’s most famous sentence about nonscientific matters takes up the terms of “One Toss Of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance”? Einstein wrote to his friend Max Born in December 1926, “The quantum mechanics is very imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the ‘old one.’ I, at any case, am convinced that He is not playing at dice.”20

  Mallarmé and Einstein were each concerned with the thought process writ large, and with the nature of poetic and scientific inspiration. The French poet was obsessed with how images formed in the mind are translated into words, how an idea such as chance (which remained pristine and unified as long as it was only an idea) might be expressed in words, which, by their particular material quality, make the concept seem less whole, satisfying, or necessary. Einstein, too, attributed an independence of “the miracle of thinking” from language. In his account, shared with psychologist Max Wertheimer, of how he came to the theory of relativity, the scientist distinguished between concepts and words. “These thoughts did not come in any verbal formulation. I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterward.”21

  Einstein was acutely aware of the identity of poetic and scientific inspiration. In the 1930s, after Einstein had resettled in the United States, he invited the French poet and diplomat Saint-John Perse to Princeton University, where he asked him, “How does the idea of a poem come?” The poet spoke of the role played by intuition and imagination. “It’s the same for the man of science,” Einstein responded with delight. “It is a sudden illumination, almost a rapture. Later, to be sure, intelligence analyzes and experiments confirm or invalidate the intuition. But initially there is a great forward leap of the imagination.”22

  Both Mallarmé and Einstein were convinced of the primordial role of intuition in artistic and scientific creation. The poet relied upon flickers and sparks in “One Toss of the Dice” to reproduce the effects of what he defined as “the aspect of things, which perpetually lives but dies every moment.” The scientist claimed that his greatest insights came as a result of sudden intuitive flashes. The first occurred just before the astonishing months in the spring and summer of 1905 during which he wrote the five papers in and around “The Special Theory of Relativity.” “I’m going to give it up,” Einstein is reported to have lamented to his friend and coworker Michele Besso, whom he had run into on the street. As they discussed it, however, “I suddenly understood the key to the problem.” When Einstein saw Besso the next day, he declared without greeting him, “Thank you. I’ve completely solved the problem.”23 What he had understood was that “an analysis of the concept of time was my solution. Time cannot be absolutely defined, and there is an inseparable relation between time and signal velocity.” Five weeks after this “eureka” moment, Einstein completed his paper “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” which formed the basis of the special theory of relativity.

  The scientist, whose extraordinarily abstract and mathematical thought often emerged from concrete examples, began his founding article with a visual problem with significance for understanding “One Toss of the Dice”: “It is known that Maxwell’s ­electrodynamics—as usually understood at the present time—when applied to moving bodies, leads to asymmetries which do not appear to be inherent in the phenomena. Take, for example, the reciprocal electrodynamic action of a magnet and a conductor.”24 Einstein noted that it was generally assumed that, in a field where each moves relative to the other, the effect is different when the conductor moves relative to the magnet from when the magnet moves relative to the conductor. Yet, he had come to understand, the effects in both cases were the same. It not only made no difference which moves relative to the other, but there was no such thing as a body in motion or a body at rest. Extended to the cosmos, a conceptual state of absolute rest implicit in the Newtonian worldview, Einstein’s insight meant that there was no way of determining whether an object orbiting around the earth moves or the earth moves, as long as each was in motion relative to the other.

  The disparate syntactic zones of “One Toss of the Dice” unfold independently of each other in a way thoroughly analogous to Einstein’s discovery. It is impossible to tell whether the spinal core sentence “ONE TOSS OF THE DICE NEVER . . . WILL ABOLISH . . . CHANCE” or the intervening words that make up the rest of the poem takes priority, one over the other. They move, in other words, relative to each other, as in the case of Einstein’s magnet and conductor, or earth and orbiting object. There is a great logical leap, of course, and more than eight chronological years, between the poem of 1897 and the first relativity of 1905. Yet Mallarmé’s poem brings to the imagination of the reader discrete
verbal clusters, and subclusters, circling one another in such a way as to open new possibilities of meaning, new mental structures that—on a different level and in a different cultural medium—open vistas to Einstein’s thinking about the relativity of moving bodies.

  The one physical law that remained invariable for Einstein, like Mallarmé’s North Star at the end of “One Toss of the Dice,” was the speed of light, which was central to the theory of relativity. He attempted to reconcile theories of light as a series of discrete quanta or particles with theories of light as a continuous electromagnetic wave.25 The ultimate effect of Einstein’s synthesis of the particle and wave theory of light, along with his banishment of fixed coordinates of time and space, was the elimination of the ether, a nebulous undetectable substance that was supposed to reside between the solid masses which make up our world, as well as to be the fluid through which electromagnetic effects and light were transmitted. “According to this theory,” Einstein wrote in an explanation of relativity for the general public, “there is no such thing as a ‘specially favored’ (unique) coordinate system to occasion the introduction of the ‘aether-idea,’ and hence there can be no aether-drift, nor any experiment with which to demonstrate it.”26 Einstein’s elimination of the ether—reckoned by Newton, in the eighteenth century, and by James Clerk Maxwell and Hendrik Lorentz, in the nineteenth, to reside in the interstices of matter—coincided with Mallarmé’s own definition of the novelty of “One Toss of the Dice”: the introduction of space between the words on the page. “The whole of ” the poem “without novelty except for the spacing of the text. The ‘blanks,’ in effect, assume importance because they strike the reader first” (see p. 163).

  Einstein influenced, among other things, cubist painting, whose overlapping visual planes necessitate the simultaneous perception of a single object from multiple points of view; the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire and T. S. Eliot, with its fractious spatial displacements; and the novels of Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka, for whom time became elastic, detached from any notion of regular chronological sequence. James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf also practiced powerfully the technique of time compression. Woolf condensed several lifetimes into a single day in Mrs Dalloway (1925), and Faulkner did the same in The Sound and the Fury (1929). Joyce played all kinds of tricks with time in Ulysses (1922), squeezing as he did Odysseus’s twenty years of travel into sixteen hours in the life of Leopold Bloom. In an epic smearing of time calculations, Joyce’s unheroic hero tries to determine when he last weighed himself, scrambling methods for the calculation of time: “the twelfth day of May of the bissextile year one thousand nine hundred and four of the Christian era (jewish era five thousand six hundred and sixtyfour, mohammedan era one thousand three hundred and twentytwo), golden number 5, epact 13, solar cycle 9, dominical letters C B, Roman indication 2, Julian period 6617, MXMIV.”27