Imaginary

Fictional Narratives

In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss . . . Then God said, "Let the earth bring forth vegetation: every kind of plant that bears seed and every kind of fruit tree on earth that bears fruit with its seed in it." [The Bible, Genesis 1:1-2, 11.]

Poetry

Once when I saw a cripple
Gasping slowly his last days with the white plague,
Looking from hollow eyes, calling for air,
Desperately gesturing with wasted hands
In the dark and dust of a house down in a slum,
I said to myself I would rather have been a tall sunflower
Living in a country garden
Lifting a golden-brown face to the summer,
Rain-washed and dew-misted,
Mixed with the poppies and ranking hollyhocks,
And wonderingly watching night after night
The clear silent processionals of stars.
[Carl Sandburg, "Cripple," from "Chicago Poems" (1916).]

• -

With music strong I come, with my cornets and my drums,
I play not marches for accepted victors only,
I play marches for conquer'd and slain persons.
Have you heard that it was good to gain the day?
I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.
I beat and pound for the dead,
I blow through my embouchures my loudest and gayest for them.
Vivas to those who have fail'd!
And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea!
And to those themselves who sank in the sea!
And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes!
And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known!
[Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Book III, # 18 (1855).]

Other poems:

• Seamus Heaney, “Death of a Naturalist”

Music: Composers, artists, and major works

Several contemporary composers have given us music that sounds like the stirrings of life itself. Most notable, perhaps, is Morton Feldman's String Quartet No. 2 (1983) (approx. 3.5-6 hours), a minimalist composition that evokes the stirrings of life in a single cell. The work progresses by minute variation, as early life must have done, considering that life did not evolve past the single-celled stage for 500 million years, and complex multi-cellular life took another 2.5 billion years to emerge. This is a long period of time to cover in a single work of music but you may not feel that way if you listen to this String Quartet all at once. “Like the long pieces that preceded it, Feldman's String Quartet II consists of repeated patterns, which usually surface at a certain point in the composition without preparation, are maintained over a given period, and then abruptly abort to possibly return later.” “One of Feldman's agendas was to turn time into space: to make time feel not like a line, but like a landscape that the listener has dropped into. The pieces hardly begin and don't seem to end. He uses only a few themes, but as he repeats a phrase or motif, he alters it by changing the time signature or the dynamics in subtle but discernable ways. Rather than repetitive, the simplest elements become engrossing.” If you have the time, it is a rewarding experience – a grand meditation on where we came from. If not, you can get the idea from practically anywhere in the performance. We have recorded performances by Vogler Quartett in 1999, Ives Ensemble in 2003 and FLUX Quartet in 2016. A 2002 performance by FLUX Quartet is available on CD.

 Other composers have taken up this and related themes, perhaps some intentionally and others not:

• James Romig, The Complexity of Distance (2020) (approx. 57’): “Like a vast expanse of ocean or desert, the music presents what might initially seem to be a bleak and repetitive landscape, but closer observation reveals constant variation in the flow of musical events, diverse intersections of harmonies, and a fragile world of micro-activity in the complex timbres that resonate within the guitar’s distortion and sustain.” “For Scheidt (the performer), the chord takes on several meanings: the physical (a moment of rest); the spiritual (like the OM syllable in a Buddhist mantra); the psychological (its cyclic recurrence becoming hypnotic); a defiant 'assertion of intention.'”
•   Robert Simpson, Symphony No. 6 (1977) (approx. 33’): Simpson dedicated the symphony to gynecologist Ian Craft, who had suggested that the emergence of a new form of life from a cell could be paralleled in symphonic form.
•   Aaron Jay Kernis, Symphony in Waves (1989) (approx. 41’): “I think about waves of sound in addition to those of wind and water. Each movement uses some aspect of wave motion: swells and troughs of dynamics, densities, and instrumental color: the ‘sounds’ of light broken into flickering bits by water’s action.”
•   Kalevi Aho, Sympony No. 7, "Insect Symphony" (1988) (approx. 44-46’) – insects are more complex than one-celled organisms but still are quite primitive, a quality that you can hear in this work. “This is a remarkable large-scale symphony with so much diversity of style that it could serve as an illustration of twentieth-century postmodern styles.”
•   John Luther Adams, Everything That Rises (2017) (approx. 56’): the composer writes: “Time floats and the lines spin out, always rising, in acoustically perfect intervals that grow progressively smaller as they spiral upward…until the music dissolves into the soft noise of the bows, sighing.”
•   John Luther Adams, Clusters on a Quadrilateral Grid (1997) (approx. 35’): “In some ways, this music exists beyond judgment, which I think is very much Adams’s intention. One simply has to accept the different sounds as they appear and disappear. They are evocative and mysterious, but also plainspoken; there’s no mystical obfuscation here.”
•   John Adams, Common Tones in Simple Time (1999) (approx. 21’): “Part of the piece’s charm lies in the fact that underneath the fast surface movement lies a very slow harmonic movement. . . . The music also concerns itself with registers, both very high and very low. Bass sound is witheld from the entire first part of the piece, making its appearance, when it finally arrives, a genuinely surprising and gratifying event.” [Adams]
•   Tan Dun, Dew-Fall-Drops (2000) (approx. 7-8’): “did you see the sound? hear the shape catch the wind can you write it on the sky? the tree wants to rest but the wind never stops”. [Dun]
•   Christian Wolff, Burdocks (1971) (approx. 24’), after the plant. “. . . there's a quality of melancholy, the violin keening in its lower registers over a tremulous piano in the third movement. It concludes rather giddily with an off-kilter almost-jig, bringing this fine disc to a quirky close. Burdocks is a good glimpse into Wolff's world and, especially given the sensitivity of the readings, is a fine entryway into his work.”
•   Wolff, Trio II (1961) (approx. 16’), similar to Feldman’s String Quartet No 2, for piano, bass and percussion.
•   Wolff, Trio IX (2018) (approx. 31’)
•   Luigi Nono, La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura (The Future Utopian Nostalgic Remoteness) (1989) (approx. 47-61’), evokes “the past reflected in the present (nostalgica) brings about a creative utopia (utopica), the desire for what is known becomes a vehicle for what will be possible (futura) through the medium of distance.”
•   Scott Wollschleger, String Quartet No. 2, “White Wall” (2014) (approx. 19-20’): Wollschleger says that this quartet “represented a break in my own work, or in myself, or in my approach to art, where I wanted to see how you could start from nothing, and pull from within itself something. . . . If you were to drain music from itself, what would be left over?”
•   Wollschleger, Brontal Symmetry, for piano trio (2015) (approx. 13-15’): “Each sound object is revealed and then slowly taken away while new ideas are introduced.”
•   Rebecca Saunders, “Dust” (2018) (approx. 25-31’): “The fallible physical body behind the sound, feeling the weight of sound, exploring the essence of a timbre, seeking the grit and noise within.”
•   Saunders, “Flesh” (2018) (approx. 7’): “Each change in the direction of the bellows is closely controlled: the opening of the bellows is accompanied with a fast and regular rhythmic changing of the chin registers, and the closing of the bellows then with the voice.”
•   Michael Pisaro-Liu, Radiolarians (see also here) (2018) (approx. 53-65’), is a set of minimalist pieces inspired by drawings of German biologist Ernest Haeckel, who focused on microscopic sea creatures.
•   Henryk Górecki, Genesis: Elementi, Op 19, No 1 (1962) (approx. 13’), “is a gritty and unforgiving exploration of pure sound and sonority. The strings are treated to a huge variety of effects and techniques including tremolandi, glissandi, bridge bowing and de-tuning. This approach creates an ever changing and fluctuating timbral journey . . .”

 Albums:

•   Jiha Park, “The Gleam” (2022) (50’), is a musical exposition on sunlight, a precursor of life. “She distils light into sound, from the first flicker of morning on the horizon in ‘At Dawn’ all the way to the moment when full darkness falls again in ‘Nightfall Dancer,’ capturing the essence of it in notes and silence.”
•   Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, “Liquid Turns” (2022) (66’): works by Ülo Krigul evoking water, a source of life. The electronics were produced from “a field recording of a frozen river and recordings of melting ice and freezing water made with a special microphone”.
•   John Luther Adams, SILA: The Breath of the World (2013) (approx. 60-65’), is a musical allegory for parts of the body forming the whole. “On a macro level, Sila can also be described as an intelligent entity all its own — a living, breathing organism that takes on the collective intent of its performers, and its composer, to transcend the forces of nature and become, in a sense, a 'breath of the world.'” “In Inuit tradition the spirit that animates all things is Sila, the breath of the world. Sila is the wind and the weather, the forces of nature. But it’s also something more. Sila is intelligence. It’s consciousness.”

Music: songs and other short pieces

• Third Coast Percussion, "Double Helix"

Visual Arts

• Diego Rivera, The Hands of Nature Offering Water (1951)
• Georgia O'Keeffe, Flower of Life II
• Gustav Klimt, The Tree of Life (1909)
• Vincent van Gogh, Mulberry Tree (1889)

Salvador Dali, In principiodeus creavit (1964)

 

• Devi, Hindu goddess of life
• Shakti, Hindu goddess of primal energy

Film and Stage