when the other gorky paints stillness and silence

there were clouds everywhere now, and the rafts looked as though they had stopped floating and were standing motionless in that concentrated black water, crushed down by heavy, dark-gray mounds of clouds that, falling from the sky, had obstructed the path. the river looked like a bottomless pit, girded on all sides by hills reaching up to the sky and cloaked in a close shroud of mist. it was oppressively quiet all around and the water, as though waiting for something, splashed gently against the rafts. a lot of sorrow and a sort of shy questioning could be detected in that plaintive sound, the only audible one in the night and the one that made the stillness even more marked.

...

two voices tore the silence of the night, rousing and shaking it, now blending into one dense note as rich as the sound of a big brass tuba, now rising to a falsetto, and they floated in the air, faded and died away. the silence again succeeded.

two paragraphs from maxim gorky's story "on the rafts".

when one hears that which is scarcely the echo of an echo...

"and here:

watch from the crackling mattress how the stars, through the roof, though strong, are yet so tired.

the night has dried.

...

outside, from near, there is a new sound. it happens every night, and it is most sorrowful. it is the voice of a blond, fat, and craven rooster, a creature half-frightened of his own wives; and in this poor voice of his, lugubrious, almost surreptitious, he is making a statement he so misbelieves that it is rather a question that expects no answer save the utter scorn and denial of silence; and it gets none: but serves only to remind one of the noises of the night, which perhaps have not at any time ceased.

they have perhaps at no time ceased, but that will never be surely known, they are, after a while, so easily lost: and one hears them once again with a quiet sort of surprise, that only slowly becomes the realization, or near certainty, that they have been there awhile:

they are still there, they still convey to one no merely intimate vicinity, but the whole blind earth dispread: they chainlike stream like water violins, a straight and upward rain extracted from the world: yet they are i this hour so profoundly retired upon themselves, they are scarcely the echo of an echo, music's remembrance in a dying dream, lashed through with weltering whippoorwill, the mourner and genius of great summer night: and even that weeping bird now twice has faltered, and on blurred bark-hued flight has taken his song more deeply among the groves..."

james agee, from "let us now praise famous men"

when on this plane...

"the silence had for me the force of eternal life; for on the plane of eternity without beginning and without end there is no such thing as speech."

sedegh hedayat, the blind owl

on sound and distances...

"looking at photographs of streets published by the newspaper that showed crowds blown up by volleys of gunfire into something that looked like the star-studded nucleus of a comet or a cloud of sawdust, one could only decipher the molecular tension of an unknown species, but there was no structure for further reading: it was like a silent image of an explosion so far away that its sound waves hadn't yet reached us."

"having left the noise of paris behind, we now traveled across these noble, pristine forests standing guard against the encroachment of city life like a curtain of initiatory silence, behind which the ear, listening half heartedly, already expected to hear another noise."

julien gracq, king cephetua

l'infinito...

This lonely hill has always
Been dear to me, and this thicket
Which shuts out most of the final
Horizon from view. I sit here,
and gaze, and imagine
The interminable spaces
That stretch away, beyond my mind,
Their uncanny silences,
Their profound calms; and my heart
is almost overwhelmed with dread.
And when the wind drones in the
Branches, I compare its sound
with that infinite silence;
And i think of eternity,
And the dead past, and the living
Present, and the sound of it;
And my thought drowns in immensity;
And shipwreck is sweet in such sea.

giacomo leopardi, translated by kenneth rexroth

silence... wind... mystery...

three gaping holes of emptiness by e. gomringer, from concrete poetry, an international anthology, london, 1967

i could see silences...

"mallarme' finally showed me how the words were arranged on the page. it seemed to me that i was looking at the form and pattern of a thought, placed for the first time in finite space. here space itself truly spoke, dreamed, and gave birth to temporal forms. expectancy, doubt, concentration, all were visible things. with my own eye, i could see silences that had assumed shapes. inappreciable instants became clearly visible; the fraction of a second during which an idea flashes into being and dies away; atoms of time that serve as the germs of infinite consequences lasting through psychological centuries - at last these appeared as beings, each surrounded by palpable emptiness...

we have a record in his own hand of what he planned to do; he was trying to employ thought nakedly and fix its pattern. he dreamed of a mental instrument designed to express the things of the intellect and the abstract imagination."

paul vale'ry, in reference to stephen mallarme's un coup de de's, in the book stripped bare, 1973.(image, 1904 self portrait by e. munch)

when fragments of silence look like paintings...

the black and white microscope images are of damage to some reel to reel tape from a 1962 scotch brand tape ad. i was originally attracted to the images as a visible reprentation of those moments when a tape is damaged in small areas so that the sound disappears for a second or two - silence or erasure as an addition rather than a subtraction.

when i used to have dozens of coverless cassettes in various states of decay on the floor of my car, audio dropout was part of every tape i listened to.

during the walk from my studio to the house to scan the images, they started to remind me of the forms and texture of one of my favorite painters, jean fautrier (moca currently has two incredible gems of his up right now for anyone in the los angeles area). the interesting thing is that these 'head paintings' are mostly titled head of a hostage, and while i haven't read up on them very much (something i tend to sidestep if i love something on a gut level so as not to destroy it's magic...), there is a kind of interesting connection between the idea of hostages and violence, and a damaged tape that loses its voice, leaving gaping holes of silence in the areas it has been scarred.

perhaps both are a little troubling as well as a little beautiful.

eyes closed, open a book, place your finger on a page, open your eyes...

"silence, musical by an effect of resonance. the last syllable of the last word or the last noise like a held note."

from robert bresson, notes on cinematography

like bresson's films, this two sentence entry in what might be my all time favorite book, has almost nothing unnecessary. so many of the words carry their own weight:
silence
musical
resonance
syllable
word
noise
held
note...

the rest, when pieced together reads rather nicely as well:
by an effect of
the last
of the last
or the last
like a
...

philadelphia stories...

when hands speak...

silent: place palmar surface of tips of fingers of right hand over lips, and usually incline the head slightly to front.
from the indian sign language, w.p. clark, 1884

silence: the index finger is laid across the lips, as if to keep them shut.
from supplemento al dizionario italiano, bruno munari, 1963
(photo also from munari)

some silences...

she was indeed like the fairy of silence, and only now did i realize that even yesterday... in all that music and the milling crowd, etelka had walked in on an island of silence, had floated in the purified atmosphere of silence, as if a few steps from her everything had gone quiet, and her big velvety eyes had muffled the noise of the soul as velvet curtains muffle sound.
mihaly babits, "the nightmare"

for part of the night cornelius stayed there, holding the bars on his window and listening, his five senses concentrated into one - or rather two since he was watching as he listened.
alexandre dumas, "the black tulip"

whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.
wittgenstein, "tractus"