two field recording fragments from rilke...

lofty god of distant harmonies
i sense you everywhere deep in every
thing
upon the gently patterned slope the
trees
stand silent as when they first heard
you sing
---
.......... of the brown

.......... of the sonorous
dried-up earth of the forest
drums the flight of the faun
---

two fragments (i am assuming left unused) from rilke's duino elegies........

when seismographs hide under the stairs confronted by morphine...

"the poet is like a seismograph that vibrates from every quake, even if it is thousands of miles away. it's not that he thinks incessantly of all things in the world. but they think of him. they are in him, and thus do they rule over him. even his dull hours, his depressions, his confusions are impersonal states; they are like the spasms of the seismograph, and a deep enough gaze could read more mysterious things in them than in his poems...

strangely he lives in the house of time, beneath the staircase, where everyone must pass by and no one pays attention... there he dwells and sees and hears his wife and brothers and children as they go up and down the stairs, speaking of him as a man who has disappeared, or even as a dead man, mourning over him. but it is forbidden for him to reveal himself, and so he lives unknown beneath the staircase of his own house...

[the poet] is unable to pass by any thing, however inconspicuous. that there is something like morphine in the world, and that there was ever something like athens or rome or carthage, that there have been human markets and that there are human markets, the existence of asia and tahiti, of ultraviolet rays and the skeletons of prehistoric animals, this handful of facts and the myriad of such facts from all orders of things are somehow always there for him, waiting for him somewhere in the dark, and he must reckon with them."

3 quotes by hugo von hofmannsthal from a lecture entitled 'the poet and the present time', published in 1907 and quoted in philippe alain michaud's abby warburg and the image in motion.

the first quote has me thinking a lot about artists as seismographs, and certainly there have been many, but outside of visual artists i instantly thought aboutedward leon scott's phonoautograph, as well as rilke's essay primal sound, which i've quoted here many times. the second quote i thought was simply beautiful in this idea of the poet's invisibility, and remarkably will, over at journey around my skull, just posted something about victor hugo, and there is an incredible bit about hugo sitting at a dinner table, seeming very much like the poet under the stairs. the third quote would obviously be attractive to one who has gathered so many of the things i share with you here...

and the old gent in the cabinet photo above? no idea who he is, but he certainly looks as if he's spent quite a bit of his own life as a seismograph, hiding under staircases, and reckoning with things in the dark... and the beautiful minimalist architecture as sculpture he is sitting within is somewhat magical in a broken pathetic human kind of way...

rukin in any other language...

a pretty scary RPPC from the uk circa 1920, of two dolls or puppets on a stage, with some incredibly beautiful fabric letters behind them.

i tried a google search for 'rukin' and got only a slew of last names, a dictionary search yielded nothing; and my usual favorite, running it through google translate's 23 different languages and still every time it comes up 'rukin'... a word that only means what it sounds.

so here some text by rilke about dolls, that seems somehow to capture how unsettling dolls and puppets can be...

"so in the end we really destroyed you, doll-soul, when we thought we were cultivating you in our dolls. it must have been the larvae who were eating you from within; and this explains too why the dolls were so fat and why they could not be given more food.

now this new timid generation escapes and flutters through our dark sensibility. looking at these, one might describe them as tiny sighs, so faint that our ears are not attuned to hear them. they swarm and fade at the uttermost limit of our vision. for their only concern is to dwindle away. sexless like our childhood dolls themselves, they experience no decline in their permanent sensuality, into which nothing flows and from which nothing escapes. it is as if they yearned for a beautiful flame, to throw themselves into it like moths (and then the momentary reek of their burning would fill us with limitless unfamiliar sensations). thinking these thoughts and raising our eyes, we stand almost unnerved as we contemplate their waxen nature."

r.m. rilke, dolls, from: essays on dolls, penguin, 1994

a different view...

george nelson writes about discovering "the new subscape" by rolling off the couch to pick up a fallen magazine and noticing how different chairs look when one is lying on the floor looking up at them instead of standing or sitting and looking down. nelson provides his own dictionary definition for the term as: "view of the furnishings of an interior, ranging upwards from the floor to the height of a chair seat or at most the underside of a table...the lowest zone within a room, averaging thirteen inches in depth and never more than twenty-eight inches..."

nelson goes on to talk about this first moment as a kind of epiphany, for as a furniture designer (and architect, writer, teacher, industrial designer, etc.) he had never thought much about the view of a chair from the ground up. he continues, "the subscape unfolds its manifold wonders in a zone of nearly total invisibility... i stared about me bemused by the view as a visitor from mars... (from) a region of whose existence i had almost been totally unaware..."

eventually he goes back into the zone with his camera to photograph what he sees, and discusses "the value in the shock that comes with seeing familiar objects from a strange point of view... is still one of the most potent and least-used tools in the design process". he then compares the subscape view to skyscrapers, connecting the aesthetics of current (1950) furniture design to current architecture, and suggests that this lower interior subscape as an aesthetic equivalent to the designed upper exterior landscape.

many years ago, when i first discovered nelson's work of the 40's and 50's; i was immediately attracted to his furniture designs; but as i eventually discovered his writings, i found them quite inspiring. nelson not only approached design with a set of ethics that involved curiosity and experimentation; but his way of looking at the world seemed very much connected to rilke's ideas regarding "inconsiderable things".

rilke says: "if you have this love of inconsiderable things and seek quite simply, as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory for you, not in your intellect, perhaps, which lags marveling behind, but in your inmost consciousness, waking and cognizance."

by simply lying on the floor to see the underside of tables and chairs, one begins to see the old as the new, and the ordinary as the extraordinary. the familiar becomes the unfamiliar, and something seemingly empty is suddenly full of potential and inspiration. clearly, the designer had the perception of the poet.

for years i've made recordings in architectural spaces by closing my eyes and letting the sounds suggest movements of my hands holding a pencil or ink on paper. experiencing architecture with ears, sends one inside of a different kind of subscape, an inscape perhaps; and similarly suggests the potential of a different view. at one point i used a nelson designed bubble lamp to generate a soundwork, plucking and rubbing its surface and interior like an instrument, for a work titled "a subscape of resonance".

perhaps, like view, there is are also different ways with objects, and beyond normal use, there is a kind of "sub-use". as one may see things from different angles, one might also handle things in unintended ways, toward unintended uses - a new use disconnected from intentions, towards a new way of seeing, hearing, or holding. there is much poetry to be found in quiet anarchy...

look at the flowers...

Look at the flowers, so faithful to what
is earthly,

to whom we lend fate from the very
border of fate.

and if they are sad about how they
must wither and die,

perhaps it is our vocation to be their
regret.

All things want to fly, only we are
weighed down by desire,

caught in ourselves and enthralled with
our heaviness.

oh what consuming, negative teachers
we are

for them, while eternal childhood fills
them with grace.

If someone were to fall into intimate
slumber, and slept

deeply with Things - : how easily he
would come

to a different day, out of the mutual
depth,

Or perhaps he would stay there; and
they would blossom and praise

their newest convert, who now is like
one of them,

all those silent companions in the wind
of the meadows.

words: r.m.rilke, sonnets to orpheus
image:cyanotype RPPC, 1910