Norman O. Brown offers a brief account of a verbum infans: “the infant or ineffable word, is speech and silence reconciled” (257) and this may be worth pondering in relation to John Cage’s notorious definition of poetry: “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry.” Underlying Cage’s definition is not only the poet’s insight that silence is the scream on the most effective side of the dictionary, but also the ethical implications of raw orality. I believe we have an urgent need for an alliance between creativity and philosophy for the sake of ethics. This is an old call from Kant through Kierkegaard to Emmanuel Levinas. If not unethical, writing nonetheless evades the fundamental ethical encounter, which is not a self-addressed categorical imperative as Kant would have us believe, but the exposed encounter of two faces. The link here is that of ethics onto immediacy and immediacy to the infancy of encounter. Lyotard describes that infancy as a “welcome extended to the marvel that (something) is happening, the respect for the event” (Harvey and Schehr: 49). In his Hérésies artistiques Mallarmé too approximates this condition when faced with the mysterious unreadability of musical notation – an unreadability that he elevates to the poetic desideratum:

Opening Mozart, Beethoven, or Wagner at will, looking over the first page of their work with an indifferent eye, we are overtaken by a religious astonishment at the sight of those macabre processions and severe, chaste, unknown signs. And we close up the missal, virgin of any profane thought. I have often asked why this necessary trait has been refused to a single art, the greatest…. I am speaking of poetry (qtd. in Lacoue-Labarthe: 43).

This infancy arrived at through encounter unfolds of necessity another matter – the infancy of ethics itself.