Hanging in the Sky

[For information about this image, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

This is the Dream

This is the dream we carry through the world
that something fantastic will happen
that it has to happen
that time will open by itself
that doors shall open by themselves
that the heart will find itself open
that mountain springs will jump up
that the dream will open by itself
that we one early morning
will slip into a harbor
that we have never known.

(Olav H. Hauge, translated by Robert Bly and Robert Hedin, from The Dream We Carry: Selected and Last Poems)

…and:

Wonder begins with the element of surprise. The now almost obsolete word “wonderstruck” suggests that wonder breaks into consciousness with a dramatic suddenness that produces amazement or astonishment. Because of the suddenness with which it appears, wonder reduces us momentarily to silence. We associate gaping, breathlessness, bewilderment, and even stupor with wonder, because it jolts us out of the world of common sense in which our language is at home. The language and categories we customarily use to deal with experience are inadequate to the encounter, and hence we are initially immobilized and dumbfounded. We are silent before some new dimension of meaning which is being revealed.

(Sam Keen, from Apology for Wonder)

…and (italicized portion):

You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually begins at the earth. We walk through it, yell into it, rake leaves, wash the dog, and drive cars in it. We breathe it deep within us. With every breath, we inhale millions of molecules of sky, heat them briefly, and then exhale them back into the world. At this moment, you are breathing some of the same molecules once breathed by Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, Anne Bradstreet, or Colette. Inhale deeply. Think of The Tempest. Air works the bellows of our lungs, and it powers our cells. We say “light as air,” but there is nothing lightweight about our atmosphere, which weighs 5,000 trillion tons. Only a clench as stubborn as gravity’s could hold it to the earth; otherwise it would simply float away and seep into the cornerless expanse of space.

(Diane Ackerman, from A Natural History of the Senses)

Not from whiskey river:

Entrance

Whoever you are: step out of doors tonight,
Out of the room that lets you feel secure.
Infinity is open to your sight.
Whoever you are.
With eyes that have forgotten how to see
From viewing things already too well-known,
Lift up into the dark a huge, black tree
And put it in the heavens: tall, alone.
And you have made the world and all you see.
It ripens like the words still in your mouth.
And when at last you comprehend its truth,
Then close your eyes and gently set it free.

(Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Dana Gioia)

…and:

In Chandler Country

California night. The Devil’s wind,
the Santa Ana, blows in from the east,
raging through the canyon like a drunk
screaming in a bar.
The air tastes like
a stubbed-out cigarette. But why complain?
The weather’s fine as long as you don’t breathe.
Just lean back on the sweat-stained furniture,
lights turned out, windows shut against the storm,
and count your blessings.
Another sleepless night,
when every wrinkle in the bedsheet scratches
like a dry razor on a sunburned cheek,
when every ten-year whiskey tastes like sand,
and quiet women in the kitchen run
their fingers on the edges of a knife
and eye their husbands’ necks. I wish them luck.

Tonight it seems that if I took the coins
out of my pocket and tossed them in the air
they’d stay a moment glistening like a net
slowly falling through dark water.
I remember
the headlights of the cars parked on the beach,
the narrow beams dissolving on the dark
surface of the lake, voices arguing
about the forms, the crackling radio,
the sheeted body lying on the sand,
the trawling net still damp beside it. No,
she wasn’t beautiful — but at that age
when youth itself becomes a kind of beauty —
“Taking good care of your clients, Marlowe?”

Relentlessly the wind blows on. Next door
catching a scent, the dogs begin to howl.
Lean, furious, ray-eyed from the storm,
packs of coyotes come down from the hills
where there is nothing left to hunt.

(Dana Gioia, from Daily Horoscope)

A charming notion proposed by “scientists” centuries ago was that of the luminiferous æther: a ubiquitous but invisible substance, not quite air and not quite liquid and lighter than both, which bore particles of light on their journeys through the atmosphere, through vessels and bodies of water, across the heavens.

Alas, there is no luminiferous æther. Which doesn’t mean that the notion of an æther doesn’t live on — an æther for the transmission of some sense. Sound, say.

That seems to have fueled the original name of the ætherphone, a sort of electronic instrument. Nowadays, it’s more commonly known as the Theremin, after its inventor Leon (or Lev) Theremin. From a wonderful article at the Tux Deluxe site:

Like the virtual air guitar, the aetherphone was a thing of magic and wonder, an instrument that was played without physical contact between the musician and the instrument, the electrical expression of constructivism, the art movement of the revolution. The aetherphone was patented in 1921, and was first demonstrated later that year at the 8th annual All-Russia Electrical Engineering Conference. In 1924, the invention is said to have been presented to Lenin — as a potential burglar alarm.

Basically, you’ve got two motion-detecting antennae, a vertical rod and a horizontal loop. You move your hands closer to or farther away from the antennae to produce eerie, warbling musical notes. For obvious reasons, Theremins most commonly appear on the soundtracks of science-fiction films. But I wanted to find a Theremin-rendered song which nearly every reader of RAMH would instantly recognize, and here’s where I landed: “White Christmas,” performed by a Swedish, umm… a Swedish Thereminist, I guess, named Pekkanini:

By including this here and now, I in no way want you to think I approve of public Christmas-music performances before the US Thanksgiving holiday.

__________________________

About the image which opens this post: although this seems to be a posed/trick photograph — okay, it almost surely is — it depicts something real, or real-ish anyhow. From an article in Romania Business Insider, where I found the photo:

Sky Touring & Events will open the first sky restaurant in Bucharest this month, the company has announced without naming the location of the restaurant. The sky restaurant concept consists of a platform which hosts the restaurant table and which is raised 50 meters above ground. The Dinner in the Sky concept can host up to 22 people and three members of the staff.

(For the metrically challenged, 50 meters translates to a little more than under 160 feet, i.e., somewhere between 15 and 20 stories. Twenty-two people, however, remain twenty-two people under any system of measurement.)

Here’s a real picture of a real dinner/meeting in the sky:

The company behind this also promotes “Showbizz in the Sky” (a pianist, for example, hanging in air alongside the dinner table) and “Marriage in the Sky” (for couples whose love knows no bounds, including the meteorological sort).

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