Baroque Resonance
artist book: 35 images and text
A bell – a book
I had been awakened by the sound of a very large bell. This Korean temple bell is, according to Buddhist tradition, sounded twice a day to communicate a message of affinity with land animals and an offering of hope to desolate souls across this world and beyond - all the way to hell. As I bloomed into consciousness to the sound of the bell and its opalescent clarity - all manner of blue and turquoise hues were present to my mind in response to its reverberations. This extravagance of colour made more sense to me when I realised that I had been sleeping in the afternoon and the sun was shining right outside my window. I had fallen asleep, on the floor, while reading a book in the fervent heat. A book I found difficult but wanted very much to be in sympathy with: The Collected Poetry of John Donne. My attraction to Donne has its origin in a curious ambivalence I feel about his position as an author. On one hand, his writing carries the resonance of ages - a deep rumble that has travelled towards me from a great distance - and is traveling still. On the other hand, his clear and lucent voice can feel like someone standing close to me, a charming friend who is open about intimate particulars of his inner life in an effort to understand them through the act of sharing. A rich and sonorous thrum mingled with the quiet wonder of private modulations.
Two books
The Korean temple bell´s anatomy generates two separate vibrations of contrasting timbres that carry the sound further and make it appear to resonate longer than the ringing of other bells. These binary undulations of the bell and the twofold presence of John Donne in my view, as a deep rumble and tender clarity, brought to mind Walter Benjamin ́s image of the constellation, a simultaneous appearance of past and present impressions that pass through a single event into the future. Mindful of the fact that Benjamin was himself rather promiscuous with the term and applied it to different dimensions of his own thought - I began to consider the possibility that my stay in the temple had left me more responsive to such confluences of impressions, not least because I kept confusing, in my recollection, two books that I had incidentally not brought with me for the stay with the Buddhist monks. One of the books, a short travel journal by Robert Louis Stevenson, The Sea Fogs, documents his sojourn in the Napa Valley of California for the purpose of convalescence. The other book, Solaris by Stanislaw Lem, tells of a journey to another planet. One unusual travel journal and one book of fiction that I had read in the past year and kept returning to without fully discerning which book I was recalling on each occasion.
With more than half a century between their publication, Lem and Stevenson appear to describe the same material field in these books. A material field whose contours are determined by the plasticity of the mind. The protagonists of each book stands by a window and surveys the surrounding landscape. The descriptions that emerge in each case overlap in the most curious manner and explain my difficulty to determine which book I was remembering in the temple. I was, as it happens, remembering them both.
In both of these books, an otherworldly landscape is described with a sense of urgency as each protagonist labours to understand what he is seeing. In Lem´s text, elements decay and are swept up simultaneously in an act of ceaseless creation on the surface of a foreign planet. Decay and creation are one and the same thing, the whole scale of an entropy gradient traversed in one permeating resonance. Lem ́s protagonist searches for an explanation to what he is witnessing: illness, hallucinations, madness but at last he is forced to consider the fact that it is all real. In the other book, Stevenson is the protagonist of his own story. He is gravely ill but knows that what he is witnessing outside his window is real. He surrenders to the experience and allows it to shape his thoughts in lively correspondence between what is seen and how it is accounted for. My mind had confused these two books and brought forth a strange latticework of these texts. And since the books give themselves up to this creative mis-remembering and confusion I resolved to explore this potential in an ancient form of poetic appropriation known as Cento in which both texts are harvested for lines to generate a third text. Fifty-two whole paragraphs or lines are cut-out and reproduced in correct sequence with original punctuation. A vague narrative is conveyed in which particular aspects of the original texts are given prominence under the power of correlations that already exists between these books.
The hallucinating camera
Alert and reflective thought, enhanced perception or hallucination can all reveal to its subject a perfectly natural but latent movement in a world that is usually perceived as static. A relentless movement that flows with constancy through solid bodies and gives corporeality to airy substances that flow in tune with them. The figure and the ground in space - all participating in the same flux. It may be subtle like a texture that dissolves and floats off from every surface or more pronounced like the whole world has become submerged in an incandescent liquid - its ripples fused with colour. The very large constantly finds its echo in the very small and this mingling of forms is repeated in the other direction with great fluidity. Lem and Stevenson frame an account of this experience to some degree in their work of fiction and non-fiction respectively. However, another author has given words and concepts to these intuitions that shed some light on the role of perception in these encounters, Paul Valery writes:
Everything moves by gradations, imaginarily. Here in this room, and because I concentrate on this one thought, the objects about me are as active as the flame of the lamp. The armchair decays in its place, the table asserts itself so fast that it is motionless, and the curtains flow endlessly away. The result is an infinite complexity. To regain control of ourselves in the midst of the moving bodies, the circulation of their contours, the jumble of knots, the paths, the falls, the whirlpools, the confusion of velocities, we must have recourse to our grand capacity for deliberately forgetting—and without destroying the acquired idea, we introduce a generalized concept, that of the orders of magnitude.
It is thanks to the hierarchy of the senses and the varying duration of our perceptions that we can oppose to this chaos of palpitations and substitutions a world of solid masses and identifiable objects. There are only two things we perceive directly: persistence and averages.
In my work, I propose that we refrain from this deliberate forgetting that is meant to sustain our faculties and instead allow the whole warp and weft of reality to sing in our bones unmediated. The text that is generated through the Cento treatment of Stevenson ́s and Lem ́s texts suggests that this is quite possible and has already been accomplished to a large extent in their writing. I wanted to show that this is also possible in photography. In accordance with the insistent doubling that runs through the project, I proceeded to work in layers of two: one photograph to substitute Stevenson ́s non-fiction and one handmade-watercolour filter in place of Lem ́s imaginative science fiction. The images that are generated when the photograph and the handmade filter merge are made in response to the text, an attempt to render in photography what Stevenson and Lem have done in writing and for which Valery articulated his principle of persistence and averages. The forty-eight resulting images emerge in baroque splendour of defiant excess in line with the texts that are saturated with an overload of the sensorial order. The nature of hallucination is not the cheerless moderation of good taste but a gluttony of colour and fractals. Yet again, this manifestation is constituted of two different dimensions that prolong and intensify the event: the abundant strangeness of the experience and a contrasting sense of recognition - a familiarity with some ancient chaos to which we are always returning.
A bell
When my stay in the Korean temple came to its termination, I was presented with an opportunity to ring a Buddhist temple bell myself. I took hold of the bell hammer and placed my feet firmly on the ground to secure enough momentum for the blow. The movement travelled from the earth - through my body holding the ropes and to the bell as I made contact with its body. The sound dispersed with familiar clarity towards the horizon. But standing in such close proximity to the bell I then became aware of different hues to its spectrum that continued to linger around us, more sombre burgundy and cinnabar tones in contrast to the initial blue and turquoise impressions I had on waking up with the poetry of John Donne in my lap. All these colours appeared to me in unequivocal correspondence with the colours of the structure holding the bell in its place. The temples’ architecture employs a limited number of colours that all bring their symbolic connotations but on this occasion it was their harmony with the sound of the bell that impressed me. The high notes of blue and turquoise are carried by deeper red and yellow hues of the ochre family, both in the structure of the bell house and the sound of the bell itself. And I gathered at last that it is because they are of the same material.