Learning my scales (Gesture, Part 2)
“An alien harmony...”
Beyond the window
Flesh and rock and hunger
Loose in the night sky
Hardened into soil
—from “Eclogue” by George Oppen
Carving
Noguchi brought music out of stone.
Obsidian: He sands it into smooth, glassy arrowheads; hews it into pale, chalky slabs; tears it into sharp, kelp-ish forms; cuts it into cellophane wrinkles. An alien harmony of notes ranging from rugged earth to crystalline, heavenly sheen.
Basalt: The most common volcanic rock on Earth, Mars, and Venus, formed from the rapid cooling of fast-flowing lava. He cuts into ancient, frozen time, revealing its skin, like an elephant’s trunk, and its curves, like a human nose.
Noguchi’s forms play at the seams of change—even his fountains. Notice how the water shoots from the jet stream and pushes up against the well’s surface; watch it wrinkle as it approaches the edge, repelled inward by the stubborn tension of its surface; see it bulge, then break like the white of an egg, spill over the edge, sliding over a smooth surface, now a rough one…
Descending
Looking into the Grand Canyon with my dad, we marvel at the size of the interior, carved by flowing water. What we’re seeing isn’t just the greatness of space, it’s the greatness of time.
What a crazy, inadmissible thought this must have been to the first people to lay eyes on this land. Self-evident to them that the world was carved by a single hand into its present shape. Or—which is another way of saying the same thing—that things are as they have always been.
Perhaps, in a way, they are.
Wintering
The beauty of snow may be that it covers everything in one gesture. It falls over the entire surface of the earth, cuts an axis between sky and ground. It lands in the center, where we tread through our lives.
Magic
Walking down a dark dirt road in a small Peruvian town, I can’t help but feel fear. The dogs that wander these roads are generally passive, but you never know. I startle when a cat rushes across my path, leaving a small trail of dust—then I watch it scurry under a gap in the wooden fence, entering an abandoned lot overgrown with weeds.
I linger there. Nothing moves as I stare at the fence. Slowly, my world fills with a sense of magic, a possibility of wonder, far after the cat disappears into its solitary life. ✤
Here’s Pat playing at the seams, letting the guitar ring, with tons of open strings and harmonics. The bottom strings of his baritone guitar are tuned down an octave, widening the range of sound.