Late at night: reading this very interesting dissertation on phenomenological time and Busoni – the prisms of time, a mysterious way of seeing and thinking time and hierarchy that de-hierarchicalizes everything... it is like Ballard's illuminated man in The Crystal World:
“... when my recovery is complete I shall return… with one of the scientific expeditions passing through here. It should not be too difficult to arrange my escape and then I shall return to the solitary church in that enchanted world, where by day fantastic birds fly through the petrified forest and jeweled crocodiles glitter like heraldic salamanders on the banks of the crystalline rivers, and where by night the illuminated man races among the trees, his arms like golden cartwheels and his head like a spectral crown.”
It can be disturbing, and wonderful, to dig deeply, in an almost Castalian way, into what one knows and thinks – and there are so many pieces of music, of art, that respond so well to this particular way of thinking. And I know them so well: there is almost a sense of vertigo – that time period with Stravinsky in it, with Hofmannsthal, Wolpe, Antheil, with a Paris, a Vienna on the verge of something amazing and intricate – something that was wiped away when, instead, the world wars became important.
Perhaps, when one is unafraid of the distant and possible conclusions of any thought, this is where one should be going. If I were a better artist, scholar, scientist, I might have ended up living there.
Facets....
Comments