Sound Dust and Silence....

Then, reassured, with the doors and shutters closed, he set out on his usual twilight walk, even though the heavy drizzle, common in late autumn, did not stop, fine rain, falling vertically, weaving moisture, sewing down the air, setting the smooth surface of the canals abristle with needles, capturing and transfixing the soul, like a bird, in the interminable meshes of a watery net ...

the bells seemed to scatter the air with sound dust...

... their unseen black censers, giving off a kind of smoke of sound

An enclosed room, peace within, a couple in accord, sufficient unto themselves, silence, peaceful tranquility. Their eyes, like nocturnal moths, have forgotten everything - the dark corners, the cold windows, the rain outside, and, in the winter, the bells sounding out the death of the hours - to flutter round the confined circle of the lamp ...

... the voice of beginnings ... a voice like a crystal glass ringing in an ever-widening, swirling nimbus of sound in which the man is caught up, yields and lets himself go.

Countless bells, never tiring. As he lapsed into melancholy again, he had started going out at dusk once more, wandering aimlessly along the quais...

The rain was coming faster, winding off its threads, tangling its web, the meshes narrower and narrower, an impalpable and moist net in which Hugues felt himself ...

He possessed what one might call a 'sense of resemblance', an extra sense, frail and sickly, which linked things to each other by a thousand tenuous threads, relating trees to the Virgin Mary, creating a spiritual telegraphy between his soul and the grief-stricken towers of Bruges.

And the waters themselves, despite all the reflections - patches of blue sky, tiles on the roofs, snowy swans sailing along, green poplars and the banks - coalesce in paths of colourless silence.

...

~ Text: Georges Rodenbach's Bruges-la-Morte, 1892

~ Images: Old Cigarette cards {Belles Vues de Belgique}

~ Thank you to Steve Roden for initially inspiring me to read Bruges-la-Morte through his work with the text. You can read more about those pieces by Steve here, here, and here.