Among the Radiant Constellation...

Unidentified Festival of Song and Light after dusk

Festival of Song and Light, Central Park, New York, 1916

...

Images of tableaux for sound, light screens, lanterns, and song designed by Claude Bragdon and found in Crystal and Arabesque by Jonathan Massey.

Hoping you also glimpsed the brilliant lights in the sky during the small hours this morning ... those luminescent dust particles visible during the Leonids meteor shower each year on the 17th of November.

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We are all of us participants in a world of concrete music, geometry and number ... a world of sounds, forms, motions, colors, so mathematically related and coordinated that our bodies, equally with the farthest star, vibrate to the music of the spheres.

~ Claude Bragdon

This Earth Between...

... solitary and elemental, unsullied and remote, visited and possessed by the outer sea

...

The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach. I have heard them all, and of the three elemental voices, that of ocean is the most awesome, beautiful, and varied. For it is a mistake to talk of the monotone of ocean or of the monotonous nature of its sound ... Every mood of the wind, every change in the day's weather, every phase of the tide - all these have subtle sea musics all their own ... the continuousness of it, sound of endless charging, endless incoming and gathering, endless fulfillment and dissolution...

Above the tumult, like birds, fly wisps of watery noise, splashes and counter splashes, whispers, and seethings...

The seas are the heart's blood of the earth. Plucked up and kneaded by the sun and the moon, the tides are systole and diastole of the earth's veins ... Consider the marvel of what we see. Somewhere in ocean, perhaps a thousand miles and more from this beach, the pulse beat of earth liberates a vibration, an ocean wave. Is the original force circular, I wonder? and do ocean waves ring out from the creative beat as they do on a quiet surface broken by a stone? Are there, perhaps, ocean circles so great and so intricate that they are unperceived?

Text ~ Excerpts from Henry Beston's The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod, originally published in 1928, in which he devotes an entire chapter to the sounds of the Great Beach

Images ~ Film stills from the storm scene at Slea Head, Ireland, in Ryan's Daughter, directed by David lean and photographed by Freddie Young. Lean and Young had to wait a year at Slea Head on the Dingle Peninsula before a great storm appeared.

When Words Become Thresholds ...

... and The Secret History of the Dividing Line

The Enjoyment of Reading, Lost and Found (2001): book as strata

The Enjoyment of Reading, Lost and Found: circles of confusion

The Enjoyment of Reading, Lost and Found: sonnet by Michael Drayton

The Great Art of Knowing (2004): William Byrd bookplate

Moxon's Mechanick Exercises (1999): bible pages

Secret History of the Dividing Line (2002): film splices as landscapes

Secret History of the Dividing Line: film splices as landscapes

Like a moving panorama [the library] has passed from before many eyes, and is now slowly flitting from before my own.

~ George MacDonald, Lillith

--

Stills from David Gatten's beautiful cycle of films, The Secret History of the Dividing Line: A True Account in Nine Parts, inspired by William Byrd's (1674-1744) library and writings. A gentle and enduring glance at both visible traces of demarcation in the forms of cartographical dividing lines, 16mm cement splices, and shadows of text lifted from their very foundation, as well as the less visible traces of demarcation that exist in translation, invisible fissures, lovers parting, sudden breaches, and unseen boundaries...

--

{All images from Scott MacDonald's, "Gentle Iconoclast: An Interview with David Gatten," in Film Quarterly, Winter 2007, Vol. 61.}

As On Unheard Wings the Kestral Hangs...

...

Silent friend of many distances, feel

how your breath is still increasing space.

~ Rilke

Film stills from Kes directed by Kenneth Loach, 1969

Space, and Us, Accomplices...

... that we would learn to not always part.

{Larger}

...

If by chance you believe in the value of sounds
You should surely shiver
At the very name of sea.

*

Sea on the edge of nothingness,
Mingling with nothingness,

Better to perceive the sky,
The shore, the rocks,

Better to receive them.

*

The girl who came
Would also be the sea,
The sea amidst the earth.

*

~ Text fragments from Guillevic's epic poem Carnac, re-published by Bloodaxe, 1999, translated by John Montague

~ Image by William Dyce, Pegwell Bay, Kent - A Recollection of October 5th, 1858. {Donati's comet streaks lightly across the sky. It's brilliant appearance in the British skies in the autumn of 1858 would be the last for another 2100 years.}

Small Pale Messages from the World...

..

Stills from Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly; photographed by Sven Nykvist; beautiful sound and music by Bach, birds, whispers, water, and foghorns.

Slowly night comes.

Moths settle down on the pane:

small pale messages from the world.

{Title of post and poem from Robert Bly's translation of Tranströmer in Three Swedish Poets, Seventies Press, 1970}

Sidereal Visitment…

Galileo’s sunspot drawings, published in Istoria e Dimostrazioni Intorno Alle Macchie Solari e Loro Accidenti Rome, 1612

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A trace is the apparition of a distance, however close that which it evokes may be. Whereas the aura is the apparition of a nearness, however far away that which left it behind may be.

~ Walter Benjamin, a fragment from the Arcades Project

Écoutants antérieurs ...

Henry Peach Robinson, Seashore and Clouds, albumen print, 1870

Gustave Le Gray, Seashore, Lighthouse, Clouds, Le Havre, albumen print, 1856

Gustave Le Gray, Seashore and Clouds, Sete, albumen print 1857

Carlo Baldessare Simelli, Clouds with Dome, Rome, albumen print, 1860

Adolphe Braun, Gorner Glacier, albumen print, 1863

Gustav Jaegermayer, Pasterze Glacier, albumen print, 1863

Gustav Jaegermayer, Crystal glacier, albumen print, 1863

Gustav Jaegermayer, Pasterze Glacier, albumen print 1863

...

Everything we hear is an echo. Anyone can tell that echoes move forward and backward in time, in rings. But not everyone realizes that, as a result, silence becomes harder and harder for us to grasp - though in itself it is unchanged - because of the echoes pouring through us out of the past...

~ W.S. Merwin, Houses and Travelers

In the august sense, to hear is always already to have heard: to take one's place in the assembly of prior listeners {écoutants antérieurs} and thus permit them once again to be present in this enduring hearing {dans l'entente persévérante}.

~ Blanchot

And that which happened before, but hardly was felt, is manifest only now ...

~ Holderlin, Sämtliche Werke

The Great Tangle...

Fishing for Shells, c. 1853, salted paper print

...

There will be a hiatus in Wool posts in the coming many months as I hope to start work on a small press (tentatively called Suspiracle) and try to finish an album inspired, at least in part, by the Inchape, or Bell Rock off the coast of Scotland and east of the Firth of Tay, and the legend of the Inchape Bell which was once fastened to the rock by an abbot from Arbroath and later sunk to the bottom of the ocean amidst the sound of birds, sea-tangle, cries and whispers from ships...

...

The lighthouse builder, Robert Stevenson, describes the Inchape:

As the tide goes down, the higher reaches of the rock are seen to be clothed by Conferva rupestris as by a sward of grass; upon the more exposed edges, where the currents are most swift and the breach of the sea heaviest, Baderlock or Henware flourishes; and the great Tangle grows at the depth of several fathoms with luxuriance. Before man arrived, and introduced into the silence of the sea the smoke and clangour of a blacksmith's shop, it was a favourite resting-place of seals and such...

...

Transparency Involved with That of the Dream …

... and the music of crystals.

Das Mineralreich in Bildern, J.C. Kurr, 1858

...

And, he, his own transparency involved with that of the dream, contained in the dream and containing the dream, he lifted himself in the enormous effort required of him and with a final piercing through of the dream’s border, with a final shattering of every sort of image and every sort of revelation, with a last shattering of memory, the dream grew beyond itself, he growing with it […] and it became the law which caused the crystal to grow, the law of music, stated in the crystal, stated through music, but over and above that, expressing the music of the crystal.

~ Hermann Broch, The Death of Virgil, 1945

…

What the spiritual eye sees inwardly in the world of thought and mind, it sees outwardly in the world of crystals.

~ Friedrich Froebel

Gleaming Beyond Words, Mingled and Indecipherable...

...

You go on, and once again it seems to you that

The moon's river has widened on the trees.

A life, perhaps, is stirring, in the mirror...

But no, branches and stars are mingling now,

As mingle paths and dreams. Night is a stone

That, gleaming, blocks the flow of the river

I dream that I am going out into the snowy night.

I dream that I am carrying

With me, far, outside, there is no turning back,

The mirror from the upstairs bedroom, the mirror from

Summers past, the boat at whose prow

We, simple, pushed forward, questioning,

Deep in the sleep of summers that were brief, as life is.

In those days

It was through the sky gleaming in the mirror's waters

That the magi of our sleep, as they withdrew,

Would spread out their treasures in the darkened room.

~ Yves Bonnefoy

Mes secrets sont vergers....

... My secrets are ice orchards

Frederic Crowley, daguerreotype, 1854

...

In this cindered place / snow drifts and a passage is formed / beneath the now light-bearing hills / beneath the Orchard. / Here, you find icy stems and earth / mixed and silent where they touch. / Here, suspended and slow / you see in glances that fall with your breath / fall to the ground and rest against the silence where they touch. / Snow transpierced by your glances / and fragile blue cloth / the color trembles and darts like a thrush. / To slip, now, here, from this land-while / in hovering sound above ...

~

Where it Will Condense and Flow Over the Images...

Carpentry Plate, circa 1798

It was by chance, yes, truly by chance, in the summer of 1963, that we came into a part of Haute-Provence in the south of France which was, and still is, rather deserted, and which seems cut off from the world [...] silence eveywhere ... and the mystery of the most fundamental and unembellished architectural forms, certainly, but more still the stirring of a shadow on words engraved in stone, or the distant sound of cattle-bells. We wanted to live here, and we went everywhere in search of a house, and then a few days later, at the end of a road that wasn't on the map, that didn't even seem to fit in with what we knew at the time about the general structure of the places around there, there was a tremendous storm, rain that suddenly became a deluge and into which we had nevertheless to throw ourselves: and in the midst of the black mass of water, long walls suddenly appeared, with low, vaulted doors, that disappeared on all sides beneath the heavy downpour. We went in. It was almost night inside, and we visited a labyrinth of rooms without understanding what they were […] We wandered there amid the clamoring of birds we had disturbed and the sounds of the wind against the tiles that were coming apart […] There was more of the real here than anywhere else, more immanence in the light on the angle of the walls or in the water from new storms, but there were also a thousand forms of impossibility and so there was also more dreaming. And the year came when we had to shut the place up, give it back to the silence of before. Only the birds live there now; they come in and out of one or two broken windows with loud cries. Except for the shadows that memory delegates through dreams to the places it loves.

~ Yves Bonnefoy on Valsaintes (a house he thought of as a borderland)

Carpentry plate, circa 1798 (joints and borders)

...

But here I am now
Standing outside the house; everything is motionless
Since it is only a dream. And so I go on, leaving,
It hardly matters where, against a wall, beneath the stars,
This mirror, our life. And may night’s dew
Condense and flow, over the images.

~ Bonnefoy

She Who Scatters Stars....

... quietly, quietly, quietly, as in a dream.

Desert Plant Black Reverse, 1965, Lithograph

Plane Tree, 1965, Lithograph

Untitled, 1970s, Ink on paper

Desert Flower, ca. 1975, Inks on Paper

Untitled, 1980s, Ink on Paper

...

{All images by Ruth Asawa from the Tamarind Institute Lithography Workshop in Contours in the Air}

...

{ Title excerpted from "She Who Scatters Stars" by Nicolai Gumilev ... You come to me, sometimes, quietly, quietly, quietly, like in a dream }  

A Telegraph Harp....

...vibrated in the lattice-work and the wood was filled with music

...

Sept. 3

As I went under the new telegraph wire, I heard it vibrating like a harp high overhead. It was as the sound of a far-off glorious life, a supernal life, which came down to us, and vibrated in the lattice-work of this life of ours.

Sept. 22

Yesterday and today the stronger winds of autumn have begun to blow, and the telegraph harp has sounded loudly. I heard it especially in the Deep Cut this afternoon, the tone varying with the tension of different parts of the wire. The sound proceeds from near the posts, where the vibration is apparently more rapid. I put my ear to one of the posts, and it seemed to me as if every pore of the wood was filled with music, labored with the strain - as if every fibre was affected and being seasoned or timed, rearranged according to a new and more harmonious law. Every swell and change or inflection of tone pervaded and seemed to proceed from the wood, the divine tree or wood, as if its very substance was transmuted. What recipe for preserving wood, perchance - to keep it from rotting - to fill its pores with music!

Sept. 23

The telegraph harp sounds strongly today, in the midst of the rain. I put my ear to the trees and I hear it working terribly within, and anon it swells into a clear tone, which seems to concentrate in the core of the tree, for all the sound seems to proceed from the wood. It is as if you had entered some world-famous cathedral, resounding to some vast organ. The fibres of all things have their tension, and are strained like the strings of a lyre. I feel the very ground tremble under my feet as I stand near the post. This wire vibrates with great power, as if it would strain and rend the wood.


~ Henry David Thoreau, A Telegraph Harp [1851], Journals

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{Photographs by T.B. Lightowler, wood, wire, wind, light, trees, and sound}