Waterfalls (II)
For water falls. Releasing sound reflecting
light. Drawing in our attention, our interest (but what is our interest?). Our curiousity (but we already know what a waterfall is…). Our
need to see what we can only hear; our need to see close-up what we can only
glimpse thought the trees, or see (or hear) from a distance. Both sight and
sound tell of its presence. Sight through a flashing of silver: sound through a
continuous rumbling. Sight through the configuration of light on a ground:
sound through the background bass note over which all else is heard…
Sight through the
golden-silver light glancing off blue water falling; silver light dancing on
white foam as the falling water no longer reflects the blue of sky or the
direct beams of the sun, but now is scattered into a myriad, tiny points of
light, life-span of an instant. Shorter lived than even the lightening whose
flash whitens the night sky, or forked, plunges to earth, divided streams
flowing down from the sky to the earth below, a waterfall in the sky, heaven’s
gift to the waiting earth below.
So too the waterfall. For
it is the light reflected that pulls at the eye; as with all water, it is not
the light that we see by, that we see things by, but the direct reflection of
light itself that conceals what water is… the unadulterated light of the
heavens, pure - and not some admixture of light and thing that reveals surface,
shape and texture. The dancing of light on water is not ‘watered-down’ but
passed on, its shining fragments relayed to our waiting eyes. Water is a
special case that reminds us that when we see, what we see is only the surface
of things… But is not this condition of seeing not true of all objects, of all
vision, or of all sight? Why does the falling of water, the sight of the
waterfall, so enthrall? How is its reflection so different from the still
surface of ponds and lakes that reflect every detail of the clouds in the sky,
or the rippled surface of a river’s flow, blurring the reflection of the
opposite bank and confusing land and sky, or the vast cup of the sea, viewed
from the shore, presenting an every-changing mosaic of the heavens spread out
on the skin of its impenetrable face, a veneer that stretches, never still, to
the horizon, where water finally meets the sky…? For the waterfall is the
special case of our experience of water, an concentrated experience where we
are blinded by the shards and slivers of silver and gold that fall from the sun
and dance for us on the surface of falling water, an enchantment of effect that
renders the cause invisible, a transparency now clothed to the utmost,
concealed to the utmost, behind a shield even less substantial - a flashing
shield of light. But our means to see this light, to experience it as a part of
the world (in order not to be literally blinded by the sight of the sun,
pleasing and useful in effect only as long as we do not face it directly… do
not stare at the cause…).
(But what is our interest?)
What draws, what desire is it that pulls us to the waterfall, to visit
waterfalls, to visit… to stare?
(…and the waterfall under
the light of the full moon, another kind of whitened silver, present in the
contrast of the still silver of landscape, and the moving, living quick-silver
of the falling water… gift of the moon -at which we may stare- a vision of
night, curtesy of our night vision, a vision in black and white, bestowing an
addiction made evident in the history of ink wash, charcoal and chalk, the
pencil sketch, the etching… and photography…)
(But what is our interest?)
What draws, what desire is it that pulls us to the waterfall, to visit
waterfalls – to fix them in a landscape, to reconstruct them in our gardens?
(What is our interest).
What do we gain…?
An event in space in time,
a special event, worthy of visiting, viewing, a sacred event… But not a ritual.
Our approach, our visit, our time and money spent on the visit, this the
ritual, the event, rather, is an advent… A marked event; marked out from the
rest, of Nature, of the World. Marked out by its motion and light and sound,
and marked out by us, marked out as worthy, deserving, rewarding… of passing
time, of approaching and staring… And marked out too like a quotation, a thing
from elsewhere, as if from elsewhere, whose event is its difference to the
rest, like a quotation, a citation, but from where… from which place of images,
which place of sound, from which book of the world… from which world…
Perhaps a ritual symbol. A
mark of, or preparation for, something else (as the trip of journey or
pilgrimage, is a ritual preparation for the witnessing of the event). In this
sense also a ritual period, of period of ritual… Or again, an arrival. The
arrival itself of the prepared for event; a coming into presence, (for not an
ordinary arrival) of the awaited event; the advent. (But what is it a portent
of, a sign for, a symbol in the place of… what?) What is it that has arrived,
has made its presence felt…? Issuing a call, visual and aural. Proclaiming its
being. Entering the world with a play of light and a persistent voice?
(…all this too makes for
genius loci, the spirit of the place, the urge to personification…)
An avent…
space/time focused. Like a fire on a dark night, or again, scattered, like rain
at night under an street lamp. Like a pool of ice under a white moon, or a
polished jewel or a cut-glass diamond on a velvet cushion – just so, a diamond.
A transparency: which, multi-faceted, renders itself opaque; a coat borrowed
from the luminous, a disguise taken from the world of mirrors. For it reflects
light… yes, like everything else, but no, not like everything else… like
nothing else… For it reflects light like nothing else - a difference suggesting
a different order of things.
A contrast made from a
contrast.
And what a strange
contrast, the sight and the sound… Functioning as opposites… The sight; a
flashing focal point, imitated in warnings or attraction seeking signs. A
figure on a ground, a motion on a background that draws the eyes, centers a
landscape, completes a scene, proves the cue for form, the centre-point
of a frame, the centre to the margin of other
features… The sound; a pitiless roar, or an idiot humming, a savage pounding or
ever-present purr at the edge of our hearing: either way a background,
everywhere in the background, a consistent and continuing insistence, the
temporal background of all else we hear… the aural backdrop to other sounds.
The default sound of a landscape; the music of place…
One, the product of falling
light and its glancing-off water, the other, of falling water and its impact on
rock. Light waves and sound waves, different media entailing different orders
of perception. Different, even opposite, in function, in manifestation, in role
relative to other phenomena in the same order of perceptual experience. Each an Other. So far apart, incomparable, incommensurable: yet
together in complementary relation, producing a combined meaning, a unified
message or understanding… A unification of the original event, of the cause of
the divided orders of perception, a reunification of reality within ourselves…
A marriage of planes. A
matching of orders of perception. A conjoining of media.
A reconstruction, human, of
the original event. Now original as human, its advent in our mind, our culture,
our spirit… No longer just a matter of matter: but a matter of mind. Already
with loaded with values the original never had…
The event and our Advent.
Together triggering a near
irrefusable curiousity, an irresistible desire to
approach (in the case of size tempered by sublime fear – some things are best
viewed from a distance).
A question: Are all
relationships of sight and sound, interesting ones, that is, like this:
spectacle or spectral, ‘in-your-face’ or evanescent; are they all like this?
Figure/ground reversed. The eye drawing and the ear filling. Sight and sound in
contradiction, in contrast, in complementary relation? Whence our fondness for
this particular relation for sight and sound? A fact of physics or a fact of
human nature (much the same thing), of a fact of culture…? Phenomena of Nature,
gift of our physiology and psychology, or of our accumulated historical
learning… our habitude? For other ‘spectacles’ feature short-lived sound
patterns, sudden, arresting, deafening or a shorter, if intense, period of
events or an event which overwhelms the background rendering it marginal. If we
were to enter a waterfall, approach too closely a vast wall of falling water,
it may have this later effect, but this would be to approach dangerously close;
normally we would rest content with a view that consummated our expectation,
our experience of the event as advent, and so redeemed the sacrificial
expenditure incurred by our visit.
Again, the proximity of the
Sublime means that, of its two features, magnification and awe, or size and
fear, the latter as caused by the threat posed by the former, come to the fore.
The delicious or profound or awe-inspiring sensation, remains so only whilst
the element of danger is held at a distance… (in this lies the secret of most
entertainment and much of Romanticism).
So acting as a kind of
reminder of, or rather, a tamed… safely apprehended form of… the sun and its
power, our dependence on light, and, philosophically, the gift of being and
time, and a reminder that being is becoming… and this includes ourselves, self
as a kind of gerund, the ‘-ing’ or ‘present
continuous’ of things, existentially speaking, the eternal becoming of the
Eternal Present…
The fall of experience.
A water fall.
*
Copyright Peter Nesteruk, 2018