merely being

one day i was out walking through my neighbourhood - a typical suburban neighbourhood in many ways - nice lawns, nice cars, fairly big houses, and interspersed between the gotta have this, gotta do that humdrum live wonderfully nice people. truly nice people who don’t entirely fit the mold of suburban dwellers. i rounded a corner and noticed something lying in the rain gutter at the side of the road. i bent down and picked it up and it was a cone. from what kind of tree? ha! well i’d automatically;;y say a pine tree but there are several varieties i expect and i love nature but i don’t know all of its names. so i took the cone home, cleaned it - it had a little bit of what looked to be a white mouldy substance on some of its “petals” (what are those things really called anyway?) which i picked off, and then for whatever reason i stuck it in the middle of my dining table in a water bottle that still had a little water in it. serendipitously i decided to take a picture of it from above and the image here is the result. this is one of my all time fave pictures that i have taken. i love the shine of the scales (see i just went and looked it up on the net) and i love the blue glow which i can’t figure out as the bottle was clear, the water was clear . . .who knows?
as i write this, i am listening to david sylvian’s “when loud weather buffeted naoshima”. the ensemble for this is a powerful who’s who of deconstructed sound - christian fennesz, akira rabelais, arve henriksen, clive bell, and of course david sylvian. as i listen to this piece of music - this is my second listen - i notice more detail and more emotional referents. it’s also more visual this time around. the first time i was alternately shocked and then comforted by the wide range of sonic textures. i am also reflecting right now on how brave david sylvian is to release music like this given his other work which is largely in the commercial end of highly creative music. to be honest, this disc is at times very lovely and at times difficult listening - not something i could play or share with anyone i know. it’s a collage of bits and pieces of found sound and has a sort of flow but one that i impose on it myself. i have tried to connect the title to the conglomeration of sounds thinking that perhaps there’s some sort of meteorological connection to the snippets and shards of electronics, voice, and bits and pieces. it’s interesting to me that i feel compelled to have to ground or connect something that’s about sound to something with a purpose or a narrative. to contextualize it. i would have loved to be there for the planning, the creation and assembly of the various elements, and especially for the gathering of the musicians when the piece was finally played as a whole. but then i think that about a lot of what enters my life - anything that is created: furniture, food products, art, music.
it’s something that i think is missing in any created work - the “product” or object, sits at the juncture of the hourglass beginning with its inception and “ending” with its being watched or listened to by someone else. the person - viewer or audient or consumer - has no real sense of the richness of decision making, the internal and external discourse that underpinned the negotiations behind the decision making, the many corners turned that revealed nothing and then the one corner turned revealing something lying there that when placed in the right context suddenly becomes infinitely more beautiful through happenstance more than design. and of course it’s entirely possible that the creator of the piece had no real sense of the whys and wherefores of the process in the same way as i have n o real sense of why i took a photograph of a pinecone sitting in a plastic water bottle. it just works and adds some beauty or grace or even a quality of presence implicit in its merely being.