The following texts articles and tubes refer to upcoming
RESONANT BODY WORKSHOP in Berlin Jan 18 & 19.
Register with Ana Kavalis: akasugu@gmail.com
Read about this on FB
https://www.facebook.com/events/2311143572509152/
Submitted for your perusal. Item A
The picture below.
Imagine if you will, the innermost world of
the child, before issuing from the mother. The first sounds.
While the heart is the earliest organ
(the earliest "noise-floor"), the skin would be the first sense organ
(but why not the heart! the heart! -- too romantic, I guess --
but the ear comes a bit later, forming around the 22nd day of the embryo's development,
& does seem to share affinities with the form of the womb,
like the little girl in the ear of Rilke's Orpheus Sonnets -- and in acupressure and acupuncture
theories -- the places we can trace around the ear should be connected with meridians linked to other
organs & systems of the body -- so that this is the outset for my idea that a new kind of hearing with the whole of the body just might be-- not only possibly true to form -- but also perhaps can evolve to be so and improve sensitivity and circulation of Qi, Chi, call it what you like
Item B
regarding the phenomenology of perception from within the 18th century --
this very curious, majestic, baffling poem which seems to be either about Nature or the Mind turns out often to be about both and yet cannot exist without continual transitions through the space/time continuum of human perception -- rather than being a poem about romantic absorption into nature it seems in fact more about the intangibility of nature itself
N.B. don't be frightened of, the text, is not homework, just poetic background, a statement about the nature of listening as synaethesia & proprioception -- read and find the words that resonate with your own body and mind --
I
The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—
Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters—with a sound but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume,
In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.
II
Thus thou, Ravine of Arve—dark, deep Ravine—
Thou many-colour'd, many-voiced vale,
Over whose pines, and crags, and caverns sail
Fast cloud-shadows and sunbeams: awful scene,
Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down
From the ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne,
Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame
Of lightning through the tempest;—thou dost lie,
Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging,
Children of elder time, in whose devotion
The chainless winds still come and ever came
To drink their odours, and their mighty swinging
To hear—an old and solemn harmony;
Thine earthly rainbows stretch'd across the sweep
Of the aethereal waterfall, whose veil
Robes some unsculptur'd image; the strange sleep
Which when the voices of the desert fail
Wraps all in its own deep eternity;
Thy caverns echoing to the Arve's commotion,
A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame;
Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion,
Thou art the path of that unresting sound—
Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee
I seem as in a trance sublime and strange
To muse on my own separate fantasy,
My own, my human mind, which passively
Now renders and receives fast influencings,
Holding an unremitting interchange
With the clear universe of things around;
One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings
Now float above thy darkness, and now rest
Where that or thou art no unbidden guest,
In the still cave of the witch Poesy,
Seeking among the shadows that pass by
Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee,
Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast
From which they fled recalls them, thou art there!
III
Some say that gleams of a remoter world
Visit the soul in sleep, that death is slumber,
And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber
Of those who wake and live.—I look on high;
Has some unknown omnipotence unfurl'd
The veil of life and death? or do I lie
In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep
Spread far around and inaccessibly
Its circles? For the very spirit fails,
Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep
That vanishes among the viewless gales!
Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,
Mont Blanc appears—still, snowy, and serene;
Its subject mountains their unearthly forms
Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between
Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,
Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread
And wind among the accumulated steeps;
A desert peopled by the storms alone,
Save when the eagle brings some hunter's bone,
And the wolf tracks her there—how hideously
Its shapes are heap'd around! rude, bare, and high,
Ghastly, and scarr'd, and riven.—Is this the scene
Where the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young
Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea
Of fire envelop once this silent snow?
None can reply—all seems eternal now.
The wilderness has a mysterious tongue
Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,
So solemn, so serene, that man may be,
But for such faith, with Nature reconcil'd;
Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal
Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood
By all, but which the wise, and great, and good
Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.
IV
The fields, the lakes, the forests, and the streams,
Ocean, and all the living things that dwell
Within the daedal earth; lightning, and rain,
Earthquake, and fiery flood, and hurricane,
The torpor of the year when feeble dreams
Visit the hidden buds, or dreamless sleep
Holds every future leaf and flower; the bound
With which from that detested trance they leap;
The works and ways of man, their death and birth,
And that of him and all that his may be;
All things that move and breathe with toil and sound
Are born and die; revolve, subside, and swell.
Power dwells apart in its tranquillity,
Remote, serene, and inaccessible:
And this, the naked countenance of earth,
On which I gaze, even these primeval mountains
Teach the adverting mind. The glaciers creep
Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains,
Slow rolling on; there, many a precipice
Frost and the Sun in scorn of mortal power
Have pil'd: dome, pyramid, and pinnacle,
A city of death, distinct with many a tower
And wall impregnable of beaming ice.
Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin
Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky
Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing
Its destin'd path, or in the mangled soil
Branchless and shatter'd stand; the rocks, drawn down
From yon remotest waste, have overthrown
The limits of the dead and living world,
Never to be reclaim'd. The dwelling-place
Of insects, beasts, and birds, becomes its spoil;
Their food and their retreat for ever gone,
So much of life and joy is lost. The race
Of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling
Vanish, like smoke before the tempest's stream,
And their place is not known. Below, vast caves
Shine in the rushing torrents' restless gleam,
Which from those secret chasms in tumult welling
Meet in the vale, and one majestic River,
The breath and blood of distant lands, for ever
Rolls its loud waters to the ocean-waves,
Breathes its swift vapours to the circling air.
V
Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:—the power is there,
The still and solemn power of many sights,
And many sounds, and much of life and death.
In the calm darkness of the moonless nights,
In the lone glare of day, the snows descend
Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there,
Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun,
Or the star-beams dart through them. Winds contend
Silently there, and heap the snow with breath
Rapid and strong, but silently! Its home
The voiceless lightning in these solitudes
Keeps innocently, and like vapour broods
Over the snow. The secret Strength of things
Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome
Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!
And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human mind's imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy?
Item C
The Sound versus Noise Conundrum
Shunryu Suzuki Roshi famously creates an infinitely collapsable binary (see video link) when he declares that noise is more objective and sound is a mixture. Sound which comes out of our practic is both subjective and objective. Sound in this sense is participatory. And yet, what can be said about sound about which we are unconscious, do not hear? We will perform a series of listening and feedback experiments which demonstrate how this border is constantly shifting. Sounds become noise and noise becomes sound. Sound art and noise art work in this zone of perpetual re-definition and indefinite mappings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHNyCAJXUXE
Item D
The Underground Scene on the Global Scale
I am not a fan of corporate news networks but let's consider this as a study in the mystery of listening and locating the sources of vibrations unknown
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/09/world/seismic-hum-volcano-scn-trnd/index.html?fbclid=IwAR2VO36kekwTu3n19uQrR2SUN1Y25B_FkA5hKnJFwuXtA5sk4it3Noq1Gy4
This page will continue to be updated as we near the workskop in Berlin....
THE RESONANT BODY WORKSHOP
https://www.facebook.com/events/2311143572509152/
Register via Ana Kavalis: akasugu@gmail.com
