SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound
C.G. Bell Symbolic History SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 1. Nature: The Perceptive Field Part I 1) Sunrise on the Lacanha River, Chiapas, Mexico (CGB) Sound: Various frogs, superimposed; Sounds of the Night, Houghton Mifflin Where to begin with what rounds on itself, a skein of endless complex — as if Heraclitus' metaballon anapauetai, "hurled about it draws to rest," were crisscrossed, augmented and diminished, within and without, interfused, like water glints, like the cries of frogs. But that is to have begun already, with uncertainty, the amorphous swim of a tropic stream — Thales, "all things come from water." (end frog cries) 2) Human Embryo, 6.5 weeks, Photographed by L. Nilsson, Time-Life Reproduc- tion, from April 30, 1965 Sound: Heartbeat of CGB — stand-in for embryonic pulse Goethe's homunculus in the wide sea. And what other source do we find, if we grope systematic thought to its pre-child or pre-historic origins; organic body to Harvey's embryonic pulse (fade heart); 3) Orion Nebula, U.S. Naval Observatory suns and worlds to the turbulence of galactic foam — that chaos which seems in Genesis either God's first work, or the primal dark on which his spirit moves. 4) Monet, 1914-18, Water Lilies, Sunset, detail; Orangerie, Paris Music: Debussy, 1903-5, La Mer, near end of second movement, Columbia MS 6077 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 1 C.G. Bell Symbolic History In art, that all-beginning may have waited for the end: the dream-erotic meltings of Mallarmé's "Faun," "on the air drowsy with tufted slumbers," Rimbaud's "le Poème/ De la Mer, infusé d'astres, et lactescent," that "sea, infused with stars, and lactescent," to which Debussy gave tone-color; in painting what swirls through this post-Impressionist Monet, symbolist Redon, the Fauves, to the whirlpool abstracts of Kandinsky's Jugendstil.
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