Vermeer’s work attracts us because we feel drawn into the point of the intimacy where an event is secretly building towards its own definition or disclosure. His contemplative attention is able to imagine and compose a scene which becomes cumulatively deeper, the deeper you gaze into it. These are scenes of carefully selected and distilled presence. Vermeer is a master at suggesting the quiet depths that dwell behind appearance. He evokes them as they are about to stir towards the surface. The masterly stillness is achieved through his uncanny ability to render such depths of emotion with refined transparency. His simplicity is mystery rendered lyrical. In a loud and garish neon time, the quietude of his work draws our eyes into a subtle rhythm of gazing where we might come to glimpse the structures of quiet depths. His reticence is more vocal than any statement or description. Each scene is created with a grace of proportion and sureness of measure. We are shown just enough to imagine everything else. In Vermeer all the secrets are held inside the weight of stillness.
5
T
HE
J
OY OF
S
HAPES
T
HAT
D
ANCE
Sound and gesture are contemporary, identical and
indistinguishable . . . Linked to its own past, the gesture fills up
with music and becomes rounded, like the universe . . . The
beauty of gesture renders time visible.
CATHERINE DAVID
STILLNESS IS THE CANVAS AGAINST WHICH MOVEMENT CAN become beautiful. We can only appreciate movement against the background of stillness. Were everything kinetic, we could not know what movement is. As sound is sistered to silence, movement is sistered to stillness.
B
REAKING
S
TILLNESS
:
T
HE
R
IVER AS
I
DEAL
S
EQUENCE
.
IT IS LOVELY TO SIT ON THE RIM OF A RISING VALLEY AND WATCH along its depth-line the grace of a river’s journey. The long flow of its water traverses each field at the same time but with an ever new continuity. The river unfolds equally all along the one line of its one journey. From source to sea it is one flow; nowhere does it pile up. Nowhere does the water break to leave an empty space. From source to sea, it is one unbroken song of flow – ever changing yet always one. The grace of a river is a reminder of how nature seeks elegance and achieves immense beauty of cohesion and balance. A river blends music of movement with an enduring and accompanying depth of stillness. Again its journey is always out of silence, and this silence dwells deep in the river too. If only our lives could achieve, or indeed allow, such grace and elegance. If we could but find a rhythm of being which could balance a contemplative grace, a poetry of motion and an accompanying stillness and silence, our pilgrimage through this world would flow in beauty through the most ragged and forsaken heartlands of confusion and dishevelment. It would continue to hold a clear flow-line between the memory and depth of the earth and the eternal fluency of the ocean and never lose the passion of flowing towards the ever new promise of the future.
A river somehow illuminates the beauty of time. In a river, past, present and future coalesce in the one passionate flowing. A river is continuous flow of future. Though it flows through landscape, it never divides space into ‘sooner’ or ‘later’, ‘before’ or ‘after’. The river is a miracle of presence. Each place it flows through is the place it is. The river holds its elegance regardless of the places it flows through. Though a river maintains a line of direction, it somehow turns still, fixed space into the embrace of a flowing circle of presence. It gives itself to the urgency of becoming but never at the cost of disowning its origin. It engages the world while belonging always secretly within its memory and still strives forward into the endless flow of emerging possibility. In the sublime and unnoticed artfulness of its presence, the wisdom of a river has much to teach us.
T
HE
R
ESTLESS
B
EAUTY OF THE
O
CEAN
I was born by the sea . . . my first idea of movement of the dance,
certainly came from the rhythm of the waves . . .
ISADORA DUNCAN
THE WORDS ‘SEA’ AND ‘OCEAN’ ARE TOO SMALL TO IMAGE SUCH wild divinity. The ocean is beyond language. The flow of the ocean presents a most beautiful dance. She is eternally restless and delights the eye most with the structured rhythm of waves. The seashore is a fascinating threshold. With sublime elegance, the ocean approaches and embraces the landscape and each wave has a unique grace and rhythm. The grandeur of ocean movement is consistently enthralling yet there is consolation and consistency in the faithfulness of the ocean. Water stirs something very deep and ancient in the human heart. It satisfies us in a more intimate way than the other elements. Our eyes and hearts follow its rhythm as if the flow of water were the mirror where time becomes obliquely visible. The image of water can hold such longing. The faraway force of the moon that draws the tides to dance is a vivid metaphor for the passionate kinship of the elements that stirs across infinite distance.
The ocean often puts on a display of beauty that is charged with danger. When the ocean becomes angry the fury of its charge against the cliffs makes powerful drama. It fills the heart with awe and makes us understand how the ancient Greeks could believe that the ocean was the God Poseidon. To watch the Atlantic pummel into the cliffs at Dun Aonghusa on the Aran Islands is incredibly exciting. Within a wave, tons of water blast into the cliff and rise into the sky in white fury as though some caged force has broken free in the depths and wants revenge on the silence and impassive stillness of the watching island. Yet, even in its wildest passion, the ocean still holds dignity; it builds in every form of wave. The ocean surface is incessantly restless with every conceivable crest and blister of water. Yet the ocean maintains poise. However and wherever it throws itself, it never falls outside of itself. It can spread and scatter every which way, yet it is always held within the shelter of the one rhythm.
Unlike the land, which is fixed in one place, the sea manifests freedom: she is the primal dance, a dance that has always moved to its own music. The wild divinity of the ocean infuses the shore with ancient sound. Who can tell what secrets she searches from the shoreline? What news she whispers to the shore in the gossip of urgent wavelets? This is a primal conversation. The place where absolute change rushes against still permanence, where the urgency of Becoming confronts the stillness of Being, where restless desire meets the silence and serenity of stone. Beyond human seeing and knowing, the meeting of ocean and shoreline must be one of the places where the earth almost breaks through to word.
The ocean remains faithful to the land, it always returns. As Keats wrote: ‘It keeps eternal Whisperings around/ Desolate shores . . .’ When the tide goes out, the seashore is exposed, its eroded stone pockmarked and chewed by tide. Between tides this line of fragmented shore seems vulnerable as though exposed in an arrested posture from which it cannot stir. It is reminiscent of edge-lines in your life where fluency abandons you. In such times of emotional devastation, the woundedness and fragmentation stand out, naked and exposed. The natural ease of rhythm seizes up. Each gesture, thought and action has to be deliberately willed. Everything becomes extremely difficult. What you would have accomplished without the slightest thought now becomes an action that seems impossible. Yet hope whispers that the tide always returns. Transfiguration graces you gradually. You stood exposed and atrophied, unable to move in the grip of pain; even the ground was naked and broken beneath you. Now gradually fluency returns. You recover your spontaneity and new buoyancy raises you up and your heart is again relieved and glad as when the ocean returns along the shoreline and everything becomes subsumed in the play and dance of young waves.