diapason

The first thing I learned about diapason is that it’s a stop.

The second thing I learned is that it doesn’t stop.

Somewhere after that I learned how to pronounce it.

About that last thing first: dia as in dialogue or diagram (not as in diagonal, though that is also the same dia etymologically); pason with a stressed “long a” and with the s as either [s] or [z] – so “pay son” or “pays ’n.” So, in full, like “die a-pacin’,” or the same with a [z] for the [s].

The dia is from the Greek διὰ ‘through’ and the pason is from πασῶν ‘all’; it’s short for ἡ διὰ πασῶν χορδῶν συμφωνία, hē dia pasōn chordōn symphōnia, ‘the concord through all the notes of the scale’. Originally in English we used it to mean an octave – not all the notes in an octave, but just the interval of an octave, say middle C and high C. But then it came to mean all the notes – the whole gamut – and then the whole range of a voice or an instrument and then, just, you know, everything, but in harmony. The nonstop harmony of the spheres, even. The eternal cycle of life and death and rebirth: be born, live, die and pass on, and then the next octave of existence…

And in the middle of all that it also came to be a name for the main range of organ pipes: in a pipe organ, with all its different kinds of pipes, the diapason is the set of pipes that sound like organ pipes (as opposed to emulating flutes, strings, or reeds), extending over the whole range of notes, from the one-foot pitch to the 32-foot pitch. So on a pipe organ console, in the English-speaking world, there will be one or more stops labelled Diapason. Which is where I first saw it – not on an actual church pipe organ but on a home organ.

I am put in mind of diapason once again as I’m listening to In Search of the Lost Chord, the 1968 album by The Moody Blues. I’m playing it because I’ve been editing an academic book on psychedelic drugs, which reminded me of this classic album, which I first heard in my childhood; my vinyl copy was stamped with our home address circa 1970 by my dad, from whose library I souvenired it and who himself received it from another family member. As I type this, “Legend of a Mind” with its refrain “Timothy Leary!” is playing, but it’s Graeme Edge’s spoken poem “The Word” that I have most in mind:

Two notes of the chord, that’s our full scope
But to reach the chord is our life’s hope
And to name the chord is important to some
So they give it a word, and the word is ōm

And what a swell chord it is. This celestial choir has often been presented as available only through organ-ized religion, full stop, but the psychonautical spirit of The Moody Blues seeks an unlimited direct encounter with the diapason of the mind, of the soul, of all humanity: the whole human race, all walks of life, with one accord, to follow the road before us one foot after another and die a-pacing – and then, unstoppable, continue on ōm.