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Jan. 12th, 2009 09:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zalenaI've been feeling very quiet lately, even as I've continued to encounter my daily portions of 'luck.' My father and I are speaking. Aunt Donna finally checked in. My book review isn't due for another week. My auctions sold on ebay. Tiny things, but right now they are the luminous spots in quiet days.
I've also gotten quite attached to my RSS feed. I've given up on Orwell's diaries because all he ever seems to write about is dead donkeys and how many eggs were laid on a particular day. It's 1938, the eve of WWII, and all he writes about is barnyard animals. Somehow his subsequent work about farm animals and fascism seems not just inevitable, but about the only way he could go on the subject.
Instead, I'm reading the diary of HDT, great American mystic and loser, just a few lines every day to describe something beautiful he's seen outdoors. Such as this, from January 6th, 1958 (post-Walden, just a few years before his death of TB):
I was feeling very cheap, nevertheless, reduced to make the most of dry dogwood berries. Very little evidence of God or man did I see just then, and life not as rich and inviting an enterprise as it should be, when my attention was caught by a snowflake on my coat-sleeve. It was one of those perfect, crystalline, star-shaped ones, six-rayed, like a flat wheel with six spokes, only the spokes were perfect little pine trees in shape, arranged around a central spangle. This little object, which, with many of its fellows, rested unmelting on my coat, so perfect and beautiful, reminded me that Nature had not lost her pristine vigor yet, and why should man lose heart?
I read my beloved professor, who is lately interested in tuning systems:
It occurred to me that all “Western” sounds have been geared to the equal-temperament pianoforte since its invention in the Romantic period. It always used to bug me when I did violin exams that the examiner was usually a pianist, and thus habituated to equal temperament. The violin has no frets, so intuitively you're going to play intervals in something like just intonation, because it feels right. So I often got bad marks for playing “flat,” which is what a just intonation third sounds like to an equal-temperament ear.
Equal temperament makes available a brownish, beige version of all the keys, and it makes the keys roughly resonant with one another. This means you can create lots of different narratives, through modulation (key changes). This helps Romantic (and post-Romantic) music because you can tell a story with lots of twists and turns, climaxes and anticlimaxes, and yet always be sure you're navigating around a fairly consistent brown world. All neuroses have something in common I guess.
With just intonation you can't do narrative, because the keys are radically different—there's no brown world anymore, no general background against which the sounds make sense. So you're stuck with pure beginning—which I call aperture—the feeling of “is this the beginning?” or “have we started yet?” Aperture, openness.
(BTW it's fascinating to me, from the ecological criticism point of view, that narratives depend upon a consistent world. Think of The Lord of the Rings. That mysterious yet complete world, totally realized, like the Wagnerian “total work of art,” with its languages and histories and depths built in. It's the perfect product of Romantic nationalism. There's a bit of a discussion of it in the second chapter of Ecology without Nature. Bilbo Baggins sings “The road goes ever on and on.” There's this Romantic sense that at the edge of your front door, there's a road, and the road could lead anywhere into who knows what. But with just intonation there's no road. Just the front door.)
I read Roger Ebert, who reflects on his life as he faces his death, beautiful, elegiac posts about his favorite places around the world, or favorite things he's left behind, or why he loves his life so much.. Sometimes I feel like we missed out on something while he was busy reviewing all those movies: his prose, which just keeps expanding. He thinks it's gotten better since he hasn't been able to talk.
I read Chet Raymo's Science Musing, which recently featured an excerpt from an anthology called, Prayers at 3 AM edited by Phil Cousineau:
In the bardic schools of ancient Ireland, the young poets-in-training, having been set in the evening a theme for composition, retired each one to his private cell, a cell furnished with nothing more than a bed and perhaps a peg on which to hang a cloak, and -- most importantly -- without windows, there to compose the requisite rhymes, taking care to observe the designated rules as to syllables, quartans, concord, correspondence, termination, and union, in total darkness, throughout the remainder of the night and all the next day, undistracted by the least ray of the sun, until the following evening at the appointed time when a light was brought in and the poem written down. An eighteenth-century account of the bardic schools by the Marquis of Claricarde asserts that the discipline of darkness was imposed so that the young poets might avoid the "Distractions which Light and the variety of Objects represented thereby commonly occasions," and in darkness "more fully focus the Faculties of the Soul" upon the subject at hand. From the Marquis' language one might suppose that the soul has a light of its own, that it glows with a self-luminosity, like the owls of the Blackwater Valley, and that the soul's crepuscular light is drowned out by the light of day. Certainly poets, like mystics, have traditionally been creatures of the night. The world of daylight is a world of impenetrable surfaces, resplendent, metallic, adamantine. In starlight, surfaces are transparent, like the flesh of a hand held to a bright light, and the soul sees into objects and beyond. But there is a danger that the soul will leak away like water into loose soil, or be dispersed like breath in wind. Could that be why the poets of the bardic schools shut themselves up in total darkness to compose their verses, without the light of a single star? The light of one star is enough to prick night's dark skin, and the enclosing sphere of the sky goes pop like a balloon, and we fall out of ourselves, upward toward Vega, at twelve miles per second, into Infinity.
And I feel so incredibly lucky that I get to look at things like this everyday, and infinitely more, if I so wish. And now I'm going to cook myself a tasty brunch, pack up more ebay auctions, and get ready for work. It snowed last night and I overslept.
I've also gotten quite attached to my RSS feed. I've given up on Orwell's diaries because all he ever seems to write about is dead donkeys and how many eggs were laid on a particular day. It's 1938, the eve of WWII, and all he writes about is barnyard animals. Somehow his subsequent work about farm animals and fascism seems not just inevitable, but about the only way he could go on the subject.
Instead, I'm reading the diary of HDT, great American mystic and loser, just a few lines every day to describe something beautiful he's seen outdoors. Such as this, from January 6th, 1958 (post-Walden, just a few years before his death of TB):
I was feeling very cheap, nevertheless, reduced to make the most of dry dogwood berries. Very little evidence of God or man did I see just then, and life not as rich and inviting an enterprise as it should be, when my attention was caught by a snowflake on my coat-sleeve. It was one of those perfect, crystalline, star-shaped ones, six-rayed, like a flat wheel with six spokes, only the spokes were perfect little pine trees in shape, arranged around a central spangle. This little object, which, with many of its fellows, rested unmelting on my coat, so perfect and beautiful, reminded me that Nature had not lost her pristine vigor yet, and why should man lose heart?
I read my beloved professor, who is lately interested in tuning systems:
It occurred to me that all “Western” sounds have been geared to the equal-temperament pianoforte since its invention in the Romantic period. It always used to bug me when I did violin exams that the examiner was usually a pianist, and thus habituated to equal temperament. The violin has no frets, so intuitively you're going to play intervals in something like just intonation, because it feels right. So I often got bad marks for playing “flat,” which is what a just intonation third sounds like to an equal-temperament ear.
Equal temperament makes available a brownish, beige version of all the keys, and it makes the keys roughly resonant with one another. This means you can create lots of different narratives, through modulation (key changes). This helps Romantic (and post-Romantic) music because you can tell a story with lots of twists and turns, climaxes and anticlimaxes, and yet always be sure you're navigating around a fairly consistent brown world. All neuroses have something in common I guess.
With just intonation you can't do narrative, because the keys are radically different—there's no brown world anymore, no general background against which the sounds make sense. So you're stuck with pure beginning—which I call aperture—the feeling of “is this the beginning?” or “have we started yet?” Aperture, openness.
(BTW it's fascinating to me, from the ecological criticism point of view, that narratives depend upon a consistent world. Think of The Lord of the Rings. That mysterious yet complete world, totally realized, like the Wagnerian “total work of art,” with its languages and histories and depths built in. It's the perfect product of Romantic nationalism. There's a bit of a discussion of it in the second chapter of Ecology without Nature. Bilbo Baggins sings “The road goes ever on and on.” There's this Romantic sense that at the edge of your front door, there's a road, and the road could lead anywhere into who knows what. But with just intonation there's no road. Just the front door.)
I read Roger Ebert, who reflects on his life as he faces his death, beautiful, elegiac posts about his favorite places around the world, or favorite things he's left behind, or why he loves his life so much.. Sometimes I feel like we missed out on something while he was busy reviewing all those movies: his prose, which just keeps expanding. He thinks it's gotten better since he hasn't been able to talk.
I read Chet Raymo's Science Musing, which recently featured an excerpt from an anthology called, Prayers at 3 AM edited by Phil Cousineau:
In the bardic schools of ancient Ireland, the young poets-in-training, having been set in the evening a theme for composition, retired each one to his private cell, a cell furnished with nothing more than a bed and perhaps a peg on which to hang a cloak, and -- most importantly -- without windows, there to compose the requisite rhymes, taking care to observe the designated rules as to syllables, quartans, concord, correspondence, termination, and union, in total darkness, throughout the remainder of the night and all the next day, undistracted by the least ray of the sun, until the following evening at the appointed time when a light was brought in and the poem written down. An eighteenth-century account of the bardic schools by the Marquis of Claricarde asserts that the discipline of darkness was imposed so that the young poets might avoid the "Distractions which Light and the variety of Objects represented thereby commonly occasions," and in darkness "more fully focus the Faculties of the Soul" upon the subject at hand. From the Marquis' language one might suppose that the soul has a light of its own, that it glows with a self-luminosity, like the owls of the Blackwater Valley, and that the soul's crepuscular light is drowned out by the light of day. Certainly poets, like mystics, have traditionally been creatures of the night. The world of daylight is a world of impenetrable surfaces, resplendent, metallic, adamantine. In starlight, surfaces are transparent, like the flesh of a hand held to a bright light, and the soul sees into objects and beyond. But there is a danger that the soul will leak away like water into loose soil, or be dispersed like breath in wind. Could that be why the poets of the bardic schools shut themselves up in total darkness to compose their verses, without the light of a single star? The light of one star is enough to prick night's dark skin, and the enclosing sphere of the sky goes pop like a balloon, and we fall out of ourselves, upward toward Vega, at twelve miles per second, into Infinity.
And I feel so incredibly lucky that I get to look at things like this everyday, and infinitely more, if I so wish. And now I'm going to cook myself a tasty brunch, pack up more ebay auctions, and get ready for work. It snowed last night and I overslept.
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no subject
Date: 2009-01-13 03:04 am (UTC)I'm glad you are finding luck. Thank you for sharing.