As On Unheard Wings...

Silent friend of many distances, feel

how your breath is still increasing space.

...

~ Text: Ranier Maria Rilke

~ Image: Film still from The White Owl, 1922, from the Secrets of Nature film series

Small Pale Messages from the World...

Slowly night comes.

Moths settle down on the pane:

small pale messages from the world.

...

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

~ Title of post from Tranströmer in Three Swedish Poets, Seventies Press, 1970

Sidereal…

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.

...

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

~ Text: Walter Benjamin, fragment from the Arcades Project

Écoutants antérieurs ...

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

But You, Holy Song ...

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

but you, holy song,

and poor sailor seeking the familiar,

look to the stars,

seacoasts,

the black forest whispers,

the gently gazing mountains,

the crystal-ice, and snow.

...

Friedrich Holderlin, fragment from Hymns and Songs

The Great Tangle...

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...

...

~ Image: Fishing for Shells, c. 1853, salted paper print

~ Text: Robert Stevenson, the lighthouse builder, describes the Inchape in Scotland

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.

...

~ 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.

...

~ 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)

...

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

...

Stars

Float from the borders of the main.

.

Above
The vast of heaven stung with brilliant stars.

.

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.

.

Stars waving their indivisible rays.

.

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

.

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

...

~ 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

...

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

...

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

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.

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