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.

The Wound at the Edge of the Heart...

I see well what limits my gaze; and it is precisely there, against those high insurmountable walls, that I like to get lost…

To give a name to this joy would be to mislay it … These are approximations because the mystery remains whole …


Writing. By tiny brushstrokes, tiny hard brushstrokes. Brevity, from the heart…



Shadows that arise and lie down as evening comes on, lengthening shadows that cross the hills and that I watch until they disappear, with a final leap, beyond the last ridge where I know that they will continue to break up and fade yet where also, it seems to me, inexplicably, a kind of speech gathers them together...



The wound at the edge of the heart, the tireless night cricket, and the sculpting of the sky amid the crackling of the solar grass are all nourished by the same hope…



Only the black and white magpie flies across the landscape as if it did not exist. The magpie becomes engraving, writing. It has absorbed the landscape…

…

~ Text: Poem fragments from Pierre-Albert Jourdan

~ Images: from Eleanor Mikus: Shadows of the Real.

~ Sounds that remind me of Pierre-Albert Jourdan’s poetry:

Kulning (Swedish Herding Calls) * John Cage (Litany for the Whale, Postcards from Heaven, In a Landscape) * Gyorgy Kurtag (Message to Frances-Marie: The Answered Unanswered Question) * Valentin Silvestrov (The Messenger) * Frederico Mompou (Charmes) * Alexander Knaifel (Amicta Sole (Clothed with the Sun)) * Alfred Schnittke (Voices of Nature / Collected Songs Where Every Verse is Filled with Grief in the Complete String Quartets) * Franz Biber (Passacaglia, with Maya Homburger, Barry Guy, and Pierre Favre) * The Dowland Project (Lachrimae Tristes, Amantis, and Verae) * Thomas Preston (Uppon la, mi, re (Frans Bruggen)) * Arvo Pärt (Pari Intervalo, Manuel Zurria on flute) * Gavin Bryars (Sub Rosa) * Henryk Górecki (Kleines Requiem für eine Polka) * Ingram Marshall (Fog Tropes) * Charles Ives (The Unanswered Question - quiet parts especially) *

…

Understand that the other shore does not need you

But let us live for a single moment the truth of this branch.

At the far end of this waiting there is a sort of draft of air that sweeps all this waiting away

A Falling Down Carelessly That Forms the Heavens…

That relentless self-condensing of a music continually seeking to evaporate. Consummator of the world: as that which falls down in the rain over the earth and upon the waters, falling down carelessly, falling haphazard – rises again out of all things, more invisible, and joyous in its law, and ascends and floats and forms the heavens: so the ascent of our precipitations rose out of you and domed the world about with music…

...

~ Text: Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurid Brigge

~ Images: Emmet Gowin - Conner Pass, Ireland; Magdalena, New Mexico; Toutle River Valley

A Domain of Movements...

Charles Emile Jacque, Paysage, 1848

The swifts turn in the heights of air,
yet higher unseen stars are turning.

So we live in a domain of movements
and distances; so the heart
goes from tree to bird, from bird to distant stars,
from the star to its love…

~ Fragment from Jaccottet’s Seedtime that was never included in the only English translation.

The Tree of Dreams Murmurs as it Sleeps...

Then we become little by little this foliage
That endlessly whispers and perhaps travels
With our sleep which it takes in and leads right
To where roots plunge, the very depths,
Where the top of small branches wanders under the wind.
We sleep, the tree keeps watch, it listens to the words
The dark tree of dreams murmurs as it sleeps.

...

~ Text: From “The Second Room” in Return to Calm, poems by Jaques Réda

~ Image: Pommier, Atget, 1922 (thank you m. swiezynski)

Rustles Hid Themselves in Shadows...

In a blinded window

suddenly

the tunnel of dawn along the staircase

appeared in all its definition

like footsteps hastening through sunny leaves

and everything fell suspended and silent.

Rustles hid themselves,

the birds swallowed their voices,

the sun motionlessly spread its rays

and sunbeams rustled in the eyes.

As in this fallen silent world

...

~ Text: Excerpt from a poem written by an anonymous Russian poet in an asylum in the 1970s

~ Images: Andrei Tarkovsky, stills from The Mirror

The Silence Makes Majesty...

Vilhelm Hammershøi: The Poetry of Silence, 2008

His work is long and slow

~ Rilke on Hammershoi

Vast and Silvery-White...

I ran barefoot to the window. The sky was swept lengthwise by gusts of wind. Vast and silvery-white, it was cut into lines of energy tensed to breaking point, into awesome furrows like strata of tin and lead. Divided into magnetic fields and trembling with discharges, it was full of concealed electricity. The diagrams of the gale were traced on it which, itself unseen and elusive, loaded the landscape with its power.

...

~ Text: Bruno Schulz, "The Gale" Street of Crocodiles

~ Image: Untitled, Tarrl Lightowler, 2008

Upon Silent Bridges, and Dreaming....

A Dream of Snow-Covered Bridges

As we stand the snow falls thicker.

Your sleeve turns white.

My sleeve turns white.

They move between us like

snow-covered bridges.

But snow-covered bridges are frozen.

In here is living warmth.

Your arm is warm beneath the snow, and

a welcome weight on mine.

It snows and snows

upon silent bridges.

Bridges unknown to all.

...

~ Text: Chapter 12 in The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas

~ Image: Isle of Staffa, Inner Hebrides, Scotland, Thomas Joshua Cooper, from the beautiful Dreaming the Gokstadt

Transparency, or the Elsewhere of Here...

Thresholds appear often in her work – as do walls, windows, doors, gardens, paths, colors (especially gold), and ‘transparency.’ ‘At the heart of the stone,’ she writes, ‘reposes transparency.’ […] An image involves holding one’s breath and being ‘without thickness,’ so as to squeeze into a sort of initiatory passageway. ‘In in-betweenness,’ she explains, ‘the world is real.’

~ Text from “Dwell in Slowness, Explore the Elsewhere of Here,” an essay on the poet Heather Dohollau

…

And a bird goes from here

To the invisible

Without breaking the thread

Of time’s trembling

A Prayer for things

Traversing transparent hands

With edge intact

And a curve so perfect

That the body hollows into breath

~ Poem fragments from Dohollau's "A Grave for W.B." and “Hercules Seghers”

~ Images from the Robert N. Dennis Collection of stereoscopic views at NYPL

The Bride of Space...

A week must elapse from the day of her birth before she will quit the hive; she will then perform her first "cleansing flight," and absorb the air into her trachae, which, filling, expand her body, and proclaim her the bride of space. Thereupon she returns to the hive, and waits yet one week more; and then, with her sisters born the same day as herself, she will for the first time set forth to visit the flowers. A special emotion now will lay hold of her; one that French apiarists term "soleil d'artifice," but which might more rightly perhaps be called the "sun of disquiet." For it is evident that the bees are afraid, that these daughters of the crowd, of secluded darkness, shrink from the vault of blue, from the infinite loneliness of the light; and their joy is halting, and woven of terror. They cross the threshold and pause; they depart, they return, twenty times. They hover aloft in the air, their head persistently turned to the home; they describe great soaring circles that suddenly sink beneath the weight of regret; and their thirteen thousand eyes will question, reflect, and retain the trees and the fountain, the gate and the walls, the neighboring windows and houses, till at last the aerial course whereon their return shall glide have become as indelibly stamped in their memory as though it were marked in space by two lines of steel.

~ Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee, 1901

Sleepcornice....

Dream of the "merveilleux" - observing the moon in the sky - (pale blue) it descended + seemed to be of silver, seamed (like a bell) - it hovered in one spot above the ground by a matter of feet...

Dream remembered - the sublime ones

too elusive [...] large slices of snow...

...

~ Text: from Joseph Cornell's Dream Journals

~ A post for Pascal who traced his dreams on parchment and sewed them into the lining of his doublet

As Something Unspeakably Gentle...

He found a twig and pricked an answer in an empty space on the brown surface. He didn't use ordinary letters; it was meant for the woodcock, so he wrote in the same way as the birds.

...

~ Text: Tarjei Vesaas, The Birds, 1957

~ Images: Starlings by Richard Barnes

~ Note: At home in wet thickets, moist woodlands, and alder swales; most often observed tracing lines in crepuscular courtship flight; the woodcock departs on rounded wings that make a quiet twittering sound

The Silence of the Heavens....

Over him the heavenly dome, full of quiet, shining stars, hung boundlessly. From the zenith to the horizon the still-dim Milky Way stretched its double strand. Night, fresh and quiet, almost unstirring, enveloped the earth. The white towers and golden domes of the church gleamed in the sapphire sky. The luxuriant autumn flowers in the flowerbeds near the house had fallen asleep until morning. The silence of the earth seemed to merge with the silence of the heavens, the mystery of the earth touched the mystery of the stars...

...

~ Text: Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 1879-1880

The Sunbeams Like a Silvery Web...

Like a dusky dream. Huge masses of light gushing at times from the valleys like a golden river, then clouds again, hanging on the highest peak, then climbing down the forest slowly into the valley or sinking and rising in the sunbeams like a flying silvery web; not a sound, no movement, no birds, nothing but the wailing of the wind, sometimes near, sometimes far...

...

~ Text: Georg Büchner, Lenz, 1839

~ Image: "Complete Solar Halo" from the Larousse Encyclopedia by Lucien Rudaux, 1959

A Landscape of Vespers....

As a tiny carillon, these drops of water...

Then suddenly, unexpectedly, you become aware of hearing the repeated trickle of drops of water, and it is not clear for the moment whether you saw them as well, or whether it was enough to hear them to imagine you had seen them, crystalline, cold and merry, minute, numerous, limpid, on the surface of the soft dark moss: a kind of carillon, minute and purposeful, its bells dispersed at various levels of the rock, ringing in no apparent order, merry yet hidden, speaking on the earth’s surface; and you are compelled to stop, to be silent if you happen to be speaking; but not to the point where you would go down on your knees. Quite simply, you fall silent, and perhaps you smile as you do at those memories that light up in the darkness of the mind – sometimes.



And shadows of sheep, more in the manner of ghosts...

In other parts, the meadows utter speech even more remote and marvelous: it comes from kinds of enclosures where a solitary poplar stands guard and a few mulberry trees form rounded shapes, and where I can still see ten or so sheep silhouetted in a group against the light before darkness falls. What is it that creates such perfect harmony between these few animals, the tall grass and the oil of evening? What is the meaning of the huddled group over there in the distance, silent and almost motionless? They are docile beasts, domesticated even (but more in the manner of ghosts than of cats and dogs), essentially very distant themselves, docile, almost eternal, almost absent, friends of the bare earth, of the dust and the stones – as if the only ram they really followed were the moon. Old like the stones, themselves wooly rocks

[…]

sheepfold vespers in these hidden corners of the countryside; the lesson once recited and understood, the candleflame is snuffed and the gentle shaft of sleep driven deep in the heart of things.

~ Philippe Jaccottet, from Landscapes with Absent Figures

...

Some bell and sheep sounds...

* Bells & Winter Festivals of Greek Macedonia * The bell sounds in Bela Tarr's Satantango by Mihaly Vig * Jean-Luc Herelle's Sounds of Nature: Pastoral Bells * Eric La Casa, Fonderie Paccard * Federico Mompou, Musica Callada played by Herbert Henck (inspired by his grandfather's bell foundry) * Lorenzo Ghielmi, Tintinnabulum: Organ Works by Arvo Part and the Music of the 16th Century and the Sound of Bells * Bells of Russian-Orthodox Churches * John Tavener, The Last Sleep of the Virgin * And this beautiful bell tone recorded by the lovely gossamer found here...

My Hand Outstretched to The Winged Distance and Sightless Measure

Images from Still Light: Film Notes and Plates by Robert Beavers (1971, Il Torchio). One of the most treasured editions in our library. Jonas Mekas wrote the introduction and he quotes Gregory Markopoulos, who describes the films of Robert Beavers as being composed of "the language of diamonds." 

In reading about Beavers's process, and the shadows that find form in his films, I was immediately struck by his devotion to the act of reading, and the translation of that experience to the cinematic reckoning. Both involve a form of projection. 

Leonardo, Rilke, Ruskin. Texts and textiles, sound and light, architecture and silence, restraint and extravagance. They are all there. Sunrise to sunset. 

And the first line of text on the first page of notes reads: "Show the travel of space which is the projection of film."

*Title of this post is what Beavers has named a series of films he made between 1967 and 1970.

They Saw Tiny Blue Fogs in the Shadows….

Then these children of the open air […] betook themselves to the field-path; and as they went there moved onward with them, around the shadow of each one’s head, a circle of opalized light, formed by the moon’s rays upon the glistening sheet of dew. Each pedestrian could see no halo but his or her own, which never deserted the head-shadow […] but adhered to it, and persistently beautified it; till the erratic motions seemed an inherent part of the irradiation, and the fumes of their breathing a component of the night’s mist…

.

They were never out of the sound of some purling weir, whose buzz accompanied their own murmuring, while the beams of the sun, almost as horizontal as the mead itself, formed a pollen of radiance over the landscape. They saw tiny blue fogs in the shadows of trees and hedges…

.

Her affection for him […] it enveloped her as a photosphere, irradiated her into forgetfulness of her past sorrows, keeping back the gloomy spectres that would persist in their attempts to touch her […] A spiritual forgetfulness co-existed with an intellectual remembrance. She walked in brightness, but she knew that in the background those shapes of darkness were always spread. They might be receding, or they might be approaching, one or the other, a little every day...

.

It was the heavy clay land of Blackmoor Vale, and a part of the Vale to which turnpike-roads had never penetrated. Superstitions linger longest on these heavy soils. Having once been forest, at this shadowy time it seemed to assert something of its old character, the far and the near being blended, and every tree and tall hedge making the most of its presence…

.

* Some landscapes from Hardy’s Tess. Irradiation and shadows, forgetfulness and remembrance, presence and absence.

* Images from Way Down East, 1920, D.W. Griffith.

Like Hearing a Whisper and a Rustling....

In the space between the curtains and the blind a dark greenness gushed forth; thin bands of the white froth of morning seeped in between the slats. This might have been my last waking impression or a suspended dream vision. Then I was awakened by something drawing near; sounds were coming closer. Once, twice I sensed it in my sleep. Then they sat perched on the roof of the building next door and leaped into the air like dolphins. I could just as well have said, like balls of fire at a fireworks display, for the impression of fireworks lingered; in falling, they exploded softly against the windowpanes and sank to the earth like great silver stars […] It is very difficult to describe, but when I think back, it is as though something had turned me inside out; I was no longer a solid, but rather a something sunken in upon itself. And the air was not empty, but of a consistency unknown to the daylight senses, a blackness I could see through, a blackness I could feel through, and of which I too was made. Time pulsed in quick little fever spasms. Why should something not happen now that normally never happens? – It’s a nightingale singing outside! – I said half aloud to myself…

But it’s a bit like hearing a whisper and a rustling outside, without being able to distinguish between the two!

...

~ Text: Robert Musil, "The Blackbird" in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, Archipelago

~ Images by William Henry Fox Talbot

All the Sounds Seemed to Be Sleeping....

All the sounds seemed to be sleeping, or afraid to ring out. Early in the morning or late in the evening, the slow exhalations of foghorns could be heard, exchanging warning signals off in the distance and announcing the presence of boats. They sounded like the plaintive cries of helpless animals. Yes, fog was present in abundance. And then, now and again, there would be yet another beautiful day. And there were days, truly autumnal days, neither beautiful nor desolate, neither particularly agreeable nor particularly gloomy, days that were neither sunny nor dark but rather remained consistently light and dark from morning to dusk, so that four in the afternoon presented just the same vision of the world as eleven in the morning, everything was quiet and pale gold and faintly mournful, the colors withdrew into themselves as if dreaming worried dreams.

...

~ Text: from The Assistant by Robert Walser

Souls Hung Like Cocoons in These Threads and Rays....

The piano was hammering glinting note heads into a wall of air. Although the origin of this process was entirely real, the walls of the room soon disappeared, and there arose in their place golden partitions of music, that mysterious space in which self and world, perception and feeling, inside and outside, plunge into one another in the most indefinable way, while the space itself consists entirely of sensation, certainty, precision, a whole hierarchy of ordered detail of glory. It was to these sensual details that the threads of feeling were fastened, spun from the billowing haze of their souls, and this haze was mirrored in the precision of these walls of sound and appeared clear to itself. The two players’ souls hung like cocoons in these threads and rays…

...

~ Text: Robert Musil, from “Clarisse and her Demons” in The Man Without Qualities

~ Image: Film still from an early Frank Borzage silent 

Extinguished Angels...

Yet still by birds’ dark flight the visionary Is touched, and by blue flowers’ holiness, 
And the near-by silence ponders forgotten things,
extinguished angels.

Below in the vale the old bells and sombre hamlets rest.

...

Text: fragments from Selected Poems: Georg Trakl

Born from Ether....

A music of the spirit, a pure art, removing us far away from the deafening turmoil of life to lead us to the silent kingdom of conceptual shadows.


~ Karl Kostlin describing a string quartet, 1850


A more secret world / in rich silence / born from ether / in the eternal silent light / emerging into air and light


~ Luigi Nono, notes to performers, taken from Holderlin

...

Some sounds that remind...

Max Richter (The Blue Notebooks / Memoryhouse) * Gavin Bryars (The Sinking of the Titanic) * Bernhard Gunter (Crossing the River (Night Music)) * Sylvian Chaveau (Un Autre Decembre) * Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson (Ship) * Keith Berry (The Golden Boat) * Colleen (les ondes silencieuses) * Thomas Koner (Zyklop) * Steve Roden (one stone and arcs and ears) * ákos garai (Til Ødslig Horisont) * Nurse with Wound (Salt Marie Celeste) * Richard Skelton (all the Landings recordings) *

A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment...

As I recover it in recalling my child-wrought memories, it is no complete building; it is all broken up inside me; here a room, there a room, and here a piece of hallway that does not connect these two rooms but is preserved, as a fragment, by itself. In this way it is all dispersed within me – the rooms, the stairways that descend with such ceremonious deliberation, and other narrow, spiral stairs in the obscurity of which one moved as blood does in the veins; the tower rooms, the high-hung balconies, the unexpected galleries onto which one was thrust out through a little door – all that is still in me and will never cease to be in me. It is as though the picture of this house had fallen into me from an infinite height and had shattered against my very ground.

~Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

And that house was a magnet, an absolute magnet, and it grew because it had my mother’s love in it. It’s odd, because the daughter who takes most after my mother, Maisie, her house is the same, it draws people. Some houses do.

~ Terence Davies in an interview with Paul Farley and images all from Distant Voices, Still Lives, BFI, 2006

Towers of Birdcalls...

Come and go and come again,
come and stay, a house,
a house of mist, stands before the forest,
roofs of smoke,
towers of birdcalls,
birch-branches secure the door at evening.


...

~ Images: Larousse Encyclopedia of Astronomy by Lucien Rudaux, circa 1959.


~ Text: Poems by Johannes Bobrowski, translated by the Meads, Shadow Lands, New Directions, 1984.

To be Wrecked in Seas Like These....

Johann Schroeter, Selentopographische fragment, 1791

I’ve always loved this lonesome hill
And this hedge that hides
The entire horizon, almost, from sight.
But sitting here in a daydream, I picture
The boundless spaces away out there, silences
Deeper than human silence, an unfathomable hush
In which my heart is hardly a beat
From fear. And hearing the wind
Rush rustling through these bushes,
I pit its speech against infinite silence –
And a notion of eternity floats to my mind,
And the dead seasons, and the season
Beating here and now, and the sound of it. So,
In this immensity of my thoughts all drown;
And it’s easeful to be wrecked in seas like these.

~ Infinitive, Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837)

Starry Silence....

And the trees and the night
Don't move anymore
Except from nests

~ Giuseppe Ungaretti

.

Something simple, minute, and obscure, wholly good
and not puffed up at all, something almost atomic — a
grain of wheat, a thread of wool, a crystal of clean salt...

~ C. E. Montague

...

~ Image: Gisele Celan-Lestrange