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

Only the Birds Live There Now...

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.

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

A Telegraph Harp....

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.

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

There is No Parting or Bare Interstice....

Fig. 715 - A field of faint nebulae. Between each pair of white lines on the original plate from which this picture is reproduced, can be detected a faint smudge - all that can be seen of galaxies at the extreme limit of our observation. (L. Rudaux, Larousse, 1949)

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Fig. 544 - A Beach Photographed At Low Tide By The Light Of The Night Sky (L. Rudaux, Larousse, 1949)

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Stars

Float from the borders of the main.

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Above
The vast of heaven stung with brilliant stars.

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The million sorts of unaccounted motes

There is no parting or bare interstice
Where the stint compass of a skylark's wings
Would not put out some tiny golden centre.

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Stars waving their indivisible rays.

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A star most spiritual, principal, preeminint
Of all the golden press.

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Or ever the early stirrings of the skylark
Might cover the neighbor downs with a span of singing...

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~ Text: Gerard Manley Hopkins, fragments on stars, from the journals, September to December 1864

A Rift in the Clearing...

Apparent extension of the fields on Sunday. Born of two causes: absence of sounds and absence of visible objects. Noise that comes from a single place makes the places around it seem deserted. When it comes from several, it makes even the intervals seem populated. It is to the mind, to the soul even more than to the eye, that the countryside seems extended, immense, uninhabited.

The silence of the fields. How everything hushes imperceptibly with the fall of night. How everything seems to be gathered up: men and animals, by the work of unanimous silence; plants and all things that move, for the wind falls when evening comes near, and the air holds only a single, frail breath. It is from this immobility of all things, and because the remaining light is reflected more during these tranquil hours by the earth and its rocks than by the trees and plants, that the hills and fields seem to lift up the earth and stand in wonder.

Fogs that dust the trees.

~ Joseph Joubert, excerpts from The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, 1783-1824

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The Notebooks, as they were written over the course of an entire lifetime and as they have been restored to us - emerging from this hazard, this pressure of life - are passionate reading, carrying us along in their hazardous movement towards an end that is only revealed at rare moments, in the brief rift of a clearing.

The word does not negate, but consents, and if it sometimes appears to be conspiring with nothingness, this "nothingness," says Joubert, is none other than "the invisible plentitude of the world," evidence of which is brought to light by speech, an emptiness that does not show itself but is a luminous presence, a fissure through which invisibility blossoms.

~ Maurice Blanchot on the writings of Joseph Joubert

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{Film stills from Visionary Landscapes: The Films of Nina Danino}