[Video: “Surface Tension,” an improvisation by pianist Eve Egoyan with artist David Rokeby. For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]
From whiskey river (from which I could have quoted everything this week):
We inhabit a deeply imagined world that exists alongside the real physical world. Even the crudest utterance, or the simplest, contains the fundamental poetry by which we live. This mind fabric, woven of images and illusions, shields us. In a sense, or rather, in all senses, it’s a shock absorber. As harsh as life seems to us now, it would feel even worse — hopelessly, irredeemably harsh — if we didn’t veil it, order it, relate familiar things, create mental cushions. One of the most surprising facts about human beings is that we seem to require a poetic version of life. It’s not just that some of us enjoy reading or writing poetically, or that many people wax poetic in emotional situations, but that all human beings of all ages in all cultures all over the world automatically tell their story in a poetic way, using the elemental poetry concealed in everyday language to solve problems, communicate desires and needs, even talk to themselves. When people invent new words, they do so playfully, metaphorically — computers have viruses, one can surf the internet, a naive person is clueless. In time, people forget the etymology or choose to disregard it. We dine at chic restaurants from porcelain dinner plates without realizing that when the smooth, glistening porcelain was invented in France a long time ago, someone with a sense of humor thought it looked as smooth as the vulva of a pig, which is indeed what porcelain means. When we stand by our scruples, we don’t think of our feet, but the word comes from the Latin scrupulus, a tiny stone that was the smallest unit of weight. Thus a scrupulous person is so sensitive he’s irritated by the smallest stone in his shoe. For the most part, we are all unwitting poets.
(Diane Ackerman [source])
…and (italicized portion):
The Greatest Grandeur
(excerpt)But it is the dark emptiness contained
in every next moment that seems to me
the most singularly glorious gift,
that void which one is free to fill
with processions of men bearing burning
cedar knots or with parades of blue horses,
belled and ribboned and stepping sideways,
with tumbling white-faced mimes or companies
of black-robed choristers; to fill simply
with hammered silver teapots or kiln-dried
crockery, tangerine and almond custards,
polonaises, polkas, whittling sticks, wailing
walls; that space large enough to hold all
invented blasphemies and pieties, 10,000
definitions of god and more, never fully
filled, never.
(Pattiann Rogers [source])
…and:
And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people.
(Zadie Smith [source])
Not from whiskey river:
White Stork
Ciconia ciconia
Such jazzy arrhythmia,
the white storks’
Plosive and gorgeous leave-takings suggest
Oracular utterance where the blurred
Danube disperses its silts.
Then the red-
Billed, red-legged creatures begin to spiral,
To float among thermals like the souls, wrote
Pythagoras, praising the expansive
Grandeur of black-tipped wings, of dead poets.
Most Eastern cultures would not allow them
To be struck, not with slung stone or arrow
Or, later, lead bullet—
birds who have learned,
While living, to keep their songs to themselves,
Who return to nests used for centuries,
Nests built on rooftops, haystacks, telegraph
Poles, on wooden wagon wheels placed on cold
Chimneys by peasants who hoped to draw down
Upon plague-struck villages such winged luck.If the body in its failure remains
A nest, if the soul chooses to return…Yet not one stork has been born in Britain
Since 1416, the last nest renounced
When Julian of Norwich, anchoress,
Having exhausted all revelations,
Took earthly dispensation, that final
Stork assuring, even while vanishing,
“Sin is behovely, but all shall be well.”
(Michael Waters [source])
…and:
In his study, The Medieval Imagination, French historian Jacques Le Goff distinguishes between the “miraculous” and the “marvelous” (or mirabilis) as conceived in the Middle Ages. The “miraculous” involved supernatural intercessions from God. Miracles came from outside of the phenomenal world, issuing from the spiritual beyond, from an eminent, transcendent realm. The “marvelous” was left over from an earlier era, from a pre-Christian, pagan/Celtic imagination. Marvels were unexplainable wonders. Marvels were not merely strange, for strangeness can give way to explanation through reflection. Marvels remained amazing. However, they were not technically “super-natural” for they stemmed from a world view that did not fracture existence into the physical and the spiritual. Marvels were real, objective, and immanent within phenomenal experience—they just did their wonderful thing apart from and unconcerned with human understanding. If the world is a collection of things, there are the things that you recognize and know, and marvels are not above and beyond these, they are the things in between…
Eve Egoyan goes out to play in the marvelous but we are not relegated to passive admiration. This music invites us to go out and play in the marvelous as well.
(Martin Arnold [source])
About the video: David Rokeby’s Web site adds some details:
[source]Eve’s performance at the keyboard of a disklavier (an acoustic piano with a computer interface) is transformed and interpreted by a computer into live visual images projected onto a screen rising from the body of the piano. The visuals respond to a variety of performance parameters including dynamics, pitch, the harmonic relation between pitches, the use of the sustain pedal, and the duration of individual notes. Much of the visual material is based on simulations of natural processes such as the swarming behaviours of insects, the trajectories of planets or the rippling of water when a pebble hits the surface… In one movement, each note played on the piano contributes to the construction of a three-dimensional tower. In another, Eve draws out the trajectories of falling snowflakes, manipulating the live processing of a pre-recorded video. Yet another charts the harmonic relationships between the notes that Eve is playing. The performance itself is a loosely structured audio-visual improvisation in 5 movements. The improvisation is shaped partly by Eve’s response to the system’s visual response to her playing. All visual activity on the screen is directly responsive to Eve.
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