They Have Struck Up A Varied Hymn....

the same note, the same word, the same leaf…


Plants at night.

The exhalation of carbon dioxide in the making of chlorophyll, like a sigh of satisfaction that would last hours, as when the deepest note of string instruments, the most relaxed possible, vibrates at the limit of music, with pure sound, and silence.

...

~ Text and title: Francis Ponge, from “Fauna & Flora” in Things, 1936-37

In Lieblicher Bläue....

... Essere de Nulla

… In lovely blueness
In lovely blue

the steeple blossoms with its metal roof...

Around which drift swallow cries
… the crying of swallows hovers

around which lies most loving blue.
… most moving blueness surrounds it.

Take the stairs down from the belfry…
… come down beneath the bell

The windows the bells ring through are as gates to beauty.
… bells ringing are like gates in beauty.

They resemble the forest trees.
…trees of the wood.

Yet so simple, these images, so very holy, one fears to describe them...

Would I like to be a comet? I think so…

They are swift as birds
… For they possess the swiftness of birds

they flower
… they blossom

With fire …

This is the work of the sun
… The beautiful sun does that

It leads young men along their course, charmed by rays like roses...
… with the allurements of its beams as though with roses.

...

~ Text: Lines from Hölderlin's fragment In Lovely Blue, two separate translations placed side by side.

~ Images: Passage de Venus devant le Soleil, Divers and Study of a Horse, Leonardo da Vinci

~ Note on Leonardo's Study of a Horse:

“Leonardo sought to represent substances that scarcely have a material form, such as shadows, clouds, vapor, or hair; he studied liminality, which he called the ‘termine’ or the ‘essere de nulla’: something made of nothingness, as in the boundary between a wave and air, or the mixing of water with other water.”

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.