Question: Hi, I'm working in the New Jersey office. I had a conversation earlier, about where we come from--

LaRouche:  Where who comes from?

Question: That's the thing, yeah! [general laughter] There's some debate on that kind of question among certain people! "Where does he come from?" But, then I was thinking, about thinking, you know. What is thought? Is it a creative form? Are there forms of thought, like, maybe, when I have a conception of something, it's not in the form of language. I'm not thinking in a thought--well, I don't know if the thought is the idea; or, if the thought is the communication through the language of the thought that is produced--so....

LaRouche: Well, that's not such a big problem. It's a big challenge, but it's not formally a big problem. The problem is, that society today is so full of all these assumptions, which people are taught to believe or induced to believe, that what they ought to recognize at first-hand is blocked by the secretion of all of these assumptions.

You're talking about speaking, as communicating. Talk about music, as a form of communication: What's the purpose of it? The purpose is communication. What do you mean by communication? Well, let's take human communication. You have two levels of communication: You have animal communication among human beings--you know, "pass the salt," for example; that's animal communication. Then you have human communication, which involves ideas: That is, ideas which exist--they're real; or they're conjecturably, possibly real, but their existence lies outside the domain of sense perception, and they can be known to sense perception, only as shadows, cast by reality upon sense perception.

So therefore, you're trying to express a relationship, between a sense-perceptual frame of reference, and an idea. And the function of language is to communicate the idea, by the way you refer to the sense-perceptual reference.

Now, what you do, is a sense of irony. For example, let's take the simple case of stage: You have the use by Shakespeare of the soliloquy. You have the actors on stage; they're acting. They're acting out a part. They're within a context, which is a play. Then you have the soliloquy, which is performed by the actor, who turns from his role inside the play, the context--he turns toward the audience, and he delivers a commentary upon what is going on in the play, or something relevant to it, to the audience.

So, you see the principle of communication is thus illustrated. It's the relationship between the physical referent and an idea, which is totally offstage, from a sensual standpoint. So therefore, the question of speech, the question of music, is how to deliver ideas, whose existence is, in a sense, offstage, by means of the way in which you use the stage. So, speech, and music in its literal form, are a stage. Painting, in its literal form, is a stage. The function of Classical composition, whether speech, or drama, or poetry, or painting, is to present ideas, which exist offstage, off the stage of sense perception, and the language which pertains to sense perception.

This involves irony. One of the aids in speaking, as in singing, for the use of irony, has to do with musicality. The bel canto trained singing voice, that is, a voice, which has been trained to sing, and to speak, in the Florentine bel canto mode, is expressing a natural, physiological potentiality of the human speaking-singing apparatus. And there is no difference, between the speaking and singing apparatus, in terms of this characteristic.

Now, this gives not only the simple--it gives you register shifts; it gives you difference in registration; it gives you differences in coloration, and all devices of color. And every device that exists in music, in song, exists in speech. Ancient Classical poetry is an example of this: Ancient Classical poetry is based essentially upon the use of what is other wise known, in modern times, as the "Florentine bel canto principle," principle of speech, to sing poetry. And the Classical poetry is used in that form. The remarkable thing about Classical poetry, as we've looked at some of these things, with the aid of some experts in India, on the question of the ancient Vedic Sanskrit poems, is that, some of these poems, for example, contain precise astronomical information. Some of this astronomical information, calendar information, is embedded in this poetry.

The people who have transmitted this poetry by oral tradition, in the lack of a written communication, are able to transmit this over many successive generations with great fidelity--that is, with a minimal amount of error. And the convergence of all the people who repeat these little hymns, is such that, the culture replicates the hymns. In many cases, the person who is reciting Sanskrit, or Vedic, chanters, do not know the language in which they're reciting. But, nonetheless, they're able to communicate these hymns, with relatively great fidelity. And thus, the poetic form, as a Classical poetic, as known to the Vedic or Sanskrit, is thus shown to be a medium of communication, in its own right, which is much more reliable than what we would call "prose speech utterance" today.

And thus, the use of musicality, in speech, as in singing, is an essential part of the process of communicating ideas. The significance of this shows in irony. Not only metaphor, as such, but irony more generally. You convey a meaning, by a matter of intonation, in such a way, that you convey different levels of irony. The idea, which is always a tension between the sense-perceptual reference, and the idea which exists beyond sense-perceptual reference, is like the actor speaking offstage; also, at another moment, speaking onstage. And therefore, the distinction between the two, enables the human being to communicate ideas offstage--that is, relevant to ideas which exist in the domain beyond sense perception, but are using a language, which on its obvious function, is designed essentially to communicate references to sense perception.

Sometimes, "pass the salt" can be a statement, which is a poetic idea. Sometimes, it's just saying, "pass the salt." [applause]

-30-