Au dessus de la pensée (2022) by Andrew Waggoner | Caroline Stinson & Ieva Jokubaviciute

World Premiere performance
January 2022, Nelson Music Room, Duke University
Au dessus de la pensée was composed in the fall of 2022 as both study and companion-piece for a set of songs based on the work of Marguerite Porete, one of the foundational mystics of French literature. Her sole surviving text, the astonishing Le Miroir des âmes simples et anéanties (The Mirror of Simple Souls or, more exactly, Simple and Annihilated Souls), charts the soul’s path through dissolution of the ego to ground-of-being and perfect union with godhead, free of opposition and desire, free of self, a kind of Christian Nirvana achievable during one’s physical lifetime, without reference to any authority other than the soul’s own innate drive towards transcendence. Needless to say this caught the attention of the authorities: Marguerite was much discussed, celebrated, debated, questioned, and finally burned at the stake in 1310. Clearly this was the only form of annihilation the Church was willing to afford her. In the Miroir she writes of the process of transformation as one of profound, concentrated meditation, taking place both within and au dessus de la pensée, above and outside of thought, a pre-conscious force of will that eventually destroys the will itself. A piece of music is, of course, the sound of the will writ large; a composer purporting to kill the ego generally ends up smothering everyone with it, the very act reeking of the need to announce and take creative ownership of it. So no such claims here. I was interested, though, in how Marguerite’s revelation seems to light up the musical act, capturing something of its essential nature: consciousness in the service of the unconscious; a level of transcendence attainable through the action of physical bodies; not the destruction of the ego but the temporary lifting of it, the communion of souls engaged in a shared meditation au dessus de la pensée. The piece hovers between states of action and stasis, eventually finding a steady-state between the two. The concluding section is a litany that both luxuriates in stillness and yet also seems to point to Marguerite’s eventual, awful fate. She suffered for the beauty and audacity of her work, as a theologian, as an artist, as a woman. In our time potentially so do we all.
Andrew Waggoner