Landscapes, Perceived

[Image: a view of the Preseli Hills in north Pembrokeshire, West Wales. See the note below
for more information.]

From whiskey river:

Landscape and Soul

Though we should not speak about the soul,
that is, about things we don’t know,
I’m sure mine sleeps the day long,
waiting to be jolted, even jilted awake,
preferably by joy, but sadness also comes
by surprise, and the soul sings its songs.

And because no one landscape compels me,
except the one that’s always out of reach
(toward which, nightly, I go), I find myself
conjuring Breugel-like peasants cavorting
under a Magritte-like sky — a landscape
the soul, if fully awake, could love as its own.

But the soul is rumored to desire a room,
a chamber, really, in some far away outpost
of the heart. Landscape can be lonely and cold.
Be sweet to me, world.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

…and (additional text italicized):

You have consented to time and it is winter. The country seems bigger, for you can see through the bare trees. There are times when the woods is absolutely still and quiet. The house holds warmth. A wet snow comes in the night and covers the ground and clings to the trees, making the whole world white. For a while in the morning the world is perfect and beautiful. You think you will never forget.

You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was. But you can’t remember it the way it was. To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it right as it is happening. It can return only by surprise. Speaking of these things tells you that there are no words for them that are equal to them or that can restore them to your mind.

And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence.

But you have a life too that you remember. It stays with you. You have lived a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present, and your memories of it, remember now, are of a different life in a different world and time. When you remember the past, you are not remembering it as it was. You are remembering it as it is. It is a vision or a dream, present with you in the present, alive with you in the only time you are alive.

(Wendell Berry, from Hannah Coulter [source])

Not from whiskey river:

The garden plot is close on the right rear of the house. It is about the shape and about two thirds the size of a tennis court, and is caught within palings against the hunger and damage of animals. These palings are thin slats of split pine about three and a half feet tall and an inch and a half wide, wired together vertically, about their width apart from each other. The erratic grain and cleavage of this pine have given each of them a different welter and rippling streaming of surface and pattern structure; the weather has made this all as it were a muted silver and silk, exquisitely sensitive to light; and these slats closely approximate yet seldom perfect their perpendiculars; so that when the sun is on them, and with the segments of garden between each of them, there is here such a virtuosity as might be watched by sleepless days on end merely for the variety and distinction of their beauty, without thought or any relevant room for thinking, and without possibility of absorbing all that is there to be seen. Outside, the frowsy weeds stand halfway up these walls: inside, the planting is concentrated to the utmost possible, in green and pink-veined wax and velvet butter beans, and in rank tomatoes, hung low, burst against the ground, in hairy buds of okra, all these sprung heavy with weeds and smothered in textured shades of their leaves, blown like nearly exploding balloons in the full spread of the summer, each in its shape and nature, so that the whole of this space is one blowsy bristling pool and splendor of worm- and insect-embroidered plants and the savage odors of their special lusts that sting the face in gathering, nuzzling the paling as the bars of a zoo: waist-deep to wade in, so twined and spired and reached among each other that the paths between rows are discernible only like steps confounded in snow: a paling gate, nearest the kitchen, is bound shut against their bursting with a piece of wire.

(James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men [source])

…and:

Blizzard

After midnight the blizzard howls itself out,
the wind sleeps, a tired lover.
Before bed, I think of you
and play the Meistersinger quintet
over and over, singing
along on all the parts,
dancing though the house
like a polar bear who thinks
it has joined the ballet.
You are in my arms, dancing too;
whirling from room to room;
frost crusted on the window
begins to glow like lit up faces.
My five fingers, now on fire
like these five voices singing,
imagine touching the skin
over your shoulders

(Bill Holm [source])

“The Meistersinger quintet”? I had no idea what that was. (Insert sounds — surprise! — of a lot of banging around the Internet’s file cabinets.) This turns out to be a number in Act III, Scene 4, of Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Called “Selig, wie die Sonne meines Glückes lacht” (“As blissfully as the sun of my happiness laughs”), it celebrates the working out of various dilemmas among five of the opera’s principal characters. (You can find a translation of the libretto here.)

Alas, I’m a stubborn philistine regarding opera. So instead of all the soaring voices, I offer you pianist Daniel Blumenthal, playing a “paraphrase” of the quintet as transcribed by the nineteenth-century conductor and composer Hans von Bülow. This, I can live with. :)

[Below, click Play button to begin Quintet from Der Meistersinger. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 7:28 long.]

________________________

About the image: The Preseli Hills in Wales have a remarkable connection to Stonehenge, over 250 miles away: the monument’s inner ring consists of so-called “bluestones,” brought there either by human agency or by glaciers (pick your theory)… from the Preseli Hills.

Which presents a question (if the stones arrived with human help): why these stones, from this inconvenient place?

To answer it, researchers are investigating the properties not only of the stones themselves, but of the Hills they came from. They’re considering not just the physical, visual landscape, but the auditory one:

…what would have been Stone Age sounds on Preseli? Well, first of all, of course, natural locational sounds — wind, rain, birdsong. For our whole audio-visual mapping operation, we are trying to direct our cameras and our audio-recording devices toward elemental, timeless perceptions in this ancient area to see if sensory data can help illuminate what made this tract of land, and the bluestones, so special to prehistoric peoples.

The researchers’ site lets you hear some of these sounds for yourself: the wind in the trees, the pinging of the “ringing rocks” (lithophones) when struck with a tool, the echoes of handclaps. It’s a little eerie.

[back to top]